Exposure (61 page)

Chastened and spiritually ashamed as ever, he had spoken firmly to Rosalind about the grave dangers of their attempting to be parents yet. They had followed the advice to the letter. They had not even tried for a baby until Rosalind was twenty-eight, when he could afford the nannies and prams and cashmere shawls that Rosalind herself had been given. Alistair had made certain that all the mystical charms that would bring happiness and order were in place.

He knew that his young wife had found it painful to see all her friends give birth before her. She was made a godmother twice and he wondered now if he had ever acknowledged the humility with which she undertook this role. He remembered how she had spent long evenings embroidering smocking dresses for Laura and Harriet, her two goddaughters. She must have minded so much!

Rosalind's pleasure in her unusually clever husband had always been apparent to him but, as she cradled her friend Camilla's son, Rory, Alistair thought he could hear her thoughts roam: a husband with enormous potential was very nice, but even a dull insurance broker had his appeal if he could give you a life to adore. Alistair would pat the baby's head awkwardly, and then he would wander off and talk to the men.

Why
had
they listened to her parents? Or, rather, why had
he,
because Rosalind had in fact listened to him? He recalled, with horror, how frequently she had hinted to him that she wouldn't mind doing
absolutely everything
for a baby herself, that in fact she would
love
to and that she would be more than happy to use Camilla's hand-me-downs rather than buy expensive new Babygros and so on. But he, knowing better, had shaken off this romantic folly. He had merely placed an empty kiss on her forehead like a full stop and gone back up to his desk. He had treated her as if she was a child swearing to care for a guinea-pig—if only she could have one for Christmas.

How patronizing he had been to Rosalind! It was no wonder that her resentment had been physical at times. His own kisses had become a subtle form of violence—she got a little blow to her cheek or forehead or mouth if ever she seemed to be on the verge of questioning his methods. It was no great surprise that she had learnt to close her eyelids, avoiding him, even as they made love. He had insulted her in many ways.

Over the years, he had begun to view the loneliness of his own body as 'normal'. So there was, after all, he told himself, no transportation in the act of sex, no mystical communion. Afterwards, he loped clumsily from the bed to the bathroom on feet of clay. And, of course, he saw other couples settle into filial indifference to each other's presence; he noted affable shoulder squeezes batted off in irritation. From these observations he derived a mixture of reassurance and heart-freeze.

But neither feeling persisted because there was always an important discrepancy when it came to himself and Rosalind: their attraction to one another remained far stronger than their sex life might have suggested. She walked quietly past him in the hallway and he caught that light, lemonish scent of hers and felt weak - as weak as he had when he helped her into the punt at his college ball. He saw the hips, the waist still slim and smooth beneath her dressing-gown, and his mouth watered quite automatically—just as it did for the taste of raspberries and cream or a good single malt, or venison in a pungent, red-wine sauce. And if her hair brushed his cheek when she reached past him for her toothbrush, he could find his eyes closing as if to contain the sensation.

One could not entirely confuse the body—no matter how scrambled the mind.

These moments did not occur all the time, of course—habit and schedules and the practicalities of caring for children saw to that. But they did happen
sometimes
and when they did he could only draw the conclusion that his attraction to her was timeless, intact beneath the landslide of life, and that this was greatly to be envied.

But Alistair had never known what to do with any of his blessings. His self-consciousness spoilt everything. He thought of catching her wrist, of shouting her name after her down the hall, but every gesture seemed contrived or embarrassing in some way and he rejected it.

And yet when his friends began to be unfaithful to their wives, he knew he would always be the odd one out. He was unable to add his part to the wicked titillation they afforded one another at their men-only suppers. The others shared their descriptions of trysts with nubile secretaries or plump au-pair girls the way boys at boarding-school pass round dirty pictures. But he could only remain silent. It was soon thought that he 'disapproved' and the stories were censored around him.

The truth was, he didn't understand. He genuinely didn't desire other women because Rosalind was the woman he had always wanted and that was why she was his wife.

This last assertion caused him to laugh now—with deep bitterness. If this charmingly monogamous notion was the truth, then what had happened recently—on that night at the Ridgeley Hotel?

Strange as it was, though, he hadn't particularly lusted after Karen. Of course, she had possessed her textbook sex appeal, and her attraction to him, though blatantly Freudian in origin, had still been flattering to a man in his sixties. But he had not made love to her as he had made love to the young Rosalind. And this was not merely a subtle distinction between making love and having sex, but the more brutal one between making love and masturbation. In fact, what he had done in that huge white bed, with the weird images flickering on the screen beside them, had not even amounted to masturbation. The primary thrill had not even been sexual.

He felt perplexed and scared by the mystery of himself. What had he been doing—after almost forty years of fidelity—having sex with an unknown girl, with a witness in a trial he was prosecuting? A girl who had inspired only the bare minimum of physical reaction?

Suddenly he remembered something Rosalind's cousin Philip had shown him, during his last weeks. Poor Philip had gone through a repentant, pious stage, languishing in his four-poster, surrounded by lilies and peonies. His frail, shaking hands and yellowish skin had been at such painful odds with the vibrancy of the flowers and all the hand-painted cards. And it was awful to see how even against all the colour in the room, against the good wishes so superstitiously accumulated, cirrhosis of the liver still won hands down.

After a life of constant activity, whether it was sex or eating or dancing or travel—and, sadly, it was
always
drinking—Philip had taken to reading and meditating a great deal. He began to read the Bible, which, at the time, Alistair had found wildly hypocritical. Philip had always spoken of his Catholic upbringing with nothing but vitriol (it had been the subject of all his most wicked and brilliant jokes) and his promiscuous, homosexual lifestyle had seemed no less of a refutation.

Hypocrisy had always been, in Alistair's mind, profoundly irritating as a split infinitive. But in this case he was unnerved - even emotionally disturbed - by it. Philip was a bright, possibly even brilliant, man and there he was, contradicting himself at the essential moment. Why?

Alistair left this unsaid, of course, because it was hardly the time for intellectual debate, and Philip died at last with no idea that he had lodged a thorn in the mind of his finicky old chum, Al.

Alistair gazed out of the train window at the light rain falling on the glass, at the trees pulsing by. Of course, he could see now what had got him so worked up about Philip's change in reading habits. It had not been a fixation with logical consistency (and had this ever
really
been his concern? Had it not always been a preoccupation with honesty, rather than with that mere surface detail, clarity?). The sight of Philip's Bible had contained the terrifying idea that the past might lie in wait, intact, despite the beatings it had taken.

Had he always been quite so transparent?

It had been a passage in St Augustine's
Confessions
that Philip held out to him with such difficult passion in his eyes. Augustine described the pleasure he had taken as a boy in stealing pears unripe pears, which were inedible anyway, only to toss them away. He confessed to God, 'I loved my own undoing. I loved my error—not that for which I erred, but the error itself.'

Alistair had read it, politely acknowledged the beauty of the passage and put down the book as quickly as he could. Thankfully, Philip's boyfriend Jake had arrived at that point with yet more flowers and a load of photographs of friends unknown to Alistair and there had been an excuse to leave. As he left, Philip was humming a tune and it had seemed so peculiar and undignified to do this after being so solemn that Alistair attributed it to alcoholic dementia.

But, of course, he had merely misunderstood. Over his St Augustine, Philip was humming Frank Sinatra's 'My Way'. Alistair's sense of the sacred had never incorporated resigned laughter before. He smiled and shook his head. Dear old Philip, he thought.

But it was a mystery, really. Why would anyone steal unripe pears, or, as Alistair had, a custard tart from Ivy's kitchen only to thrust it into a coat pocket where it was bound to be covered in fluff and spoilt? St Augustine had tossed away the pears; Alistair had thrown the custard tart to a dog on the way up the cliff path. Much later, he had deposited almost forty years of fidelity with a girl in a hotel room, before going home to his wife. He repeated St Augustine's words to himself: 'I loved my own undoing ... not that for which I erred, but the error itself.'

At once, Alistair felt conscious that he had arrived somewhere dramatic—just like the cliff top, only internal—and that again there was no sense of occasion. Perhaps, he thought, we are all silently at odds with the life we have chosen. Perhaps these moments of wilful immorality really were, in a terrible and violent way, necessary. They were not righteous in any sense (no, they could not be compared to leaping up in court to object!), they were simply destructive. But how else might we recognize and even bear a kind of witness to the sacrifices we make in attempting to be a consistent personality? Consistency is, after all, a constant creative effort and Alistair had made so many sacrifices for this end.

But it was outrageous to compare in any way the disposal of nearly forty years of fidelity to the toss and thud of unripe pears!
Still, the comparison enclosed an important truth; and it seemed there was rarely anything fair or dignified that went under that name. Pears or fidelity—to destroy the value of either involved the same show of power. Loving your own undoing was actually a form of self-expression; it was a desire to expose the crude self behind the artifice of belief, even if it meant losing everything.

And if this loss should happen to prove that our beliefs and ambitions were all artificial, he thought, then it is important to remember they are not therefore worthless. They are natural, just as a spider's web is natural. And they are amazing in the same way. Just as one might pause in a garden to watch the sun making seed pearls of the dew on an intricate pattern of silk, so the structure of our lives is worthy of contemplation.

Alistair put his hand into his overnight bag to check his mother's ornaments. He had taken three—two china boxes and a porcelain shepherdess; each one was wrapped carefully in an item of his clothing. What fierce judgement he had inflicted on a lonely and frightened woman. Perhaps she had really loved Geoff. Who knew? Either way, if she had taken what joy she could from her questionable admirers, from her sunny jaunts with their ordinary treats, her occasional bit of pleasure from a male guest, who was he to blame her? These ornaments, with their kitsch sentimentality, contained a life of unrealized passion.

How was it that he had continued to judge her so harshly as he grew older and gained perspective, as he told his own lies? Had he not noticed how much England had changed? In the 1940s, an unmarried woman with a child had no choice but to be 'a widow' so far as the enquiring stranger was concerned. It was a testament to her local popularity that this polite fiction had been maintained. But there had, of course, been no question of anyone wanting to marry her.

And so, much later, she had brought her son a little toy car on the palm of her hand when all he wanted was his father. But could he be sure that this had not devastated her, too? Could he truly be certain that her increasingly frequent drunkenness, her fearful insecurity about his reading books she couldn't understand, about his going away to Oxford, had not been born of a deep guilt that she was powerless to resolve? After all, she had been right to think that his books and his place at Oxford would teach him how to abandon her.

The very least he could do was put her ornaments on his mantelpiece. At once he knew that his inability to do this was intimately connected with a lifetime of erotic disappointment.

 

He arrived back a little before ten. Luke's bedroom curtains were closed and Alistair hoped his son was still resting peacefully after their late telephone conversation. The house smelt of toast and of furniture polish and he could hear the dishwasher running in the kitchen. These were the sounds and smells of domestic peace and contentment. But the essential element was missing.

He wanted Rosalind desperately. He wondered where she was, but he remained standing in the hallway as if he was not at liberty to walk around the house. And then he saw, unobtrusively tucked in by the umbrella stand, the leather holdall that he had given her last Christmas. It was open, and inside it he saw neatly folded clothes.

It was as if, in one moment, his hopes fell away and showed him just how important they had been. It seemed they had literally supported his body. There was a little chair in the hall, which nobody ever used, and he sank down on to it and pushed his hands through his hair.

So, he had left it too late. Rosalind was leaving him and he had no right to be surprised.

Just a few moments later she came out of the kitchen, dropping something into her handbag and clicking it shut.