Our Tragic Universe (36 page)

‘You’d end up being completely compassionate,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t be able to judge someone once you understood them and their motivations. You’d
become
them, like Rowan said, and so it would be like judging yourself.’

‘And then you would have merged with God,’ Conrad said.

The only song that Bob, Rowan and I all knew was ‘Hey Joe’, so Rowan and I played the chords on Bob’s ‘spare’ acoustic guitars while Bob did the bassline. Libby was going to sing but didn’t know the words, so I somehow managed to do it, even with Rowan watching me the whole time. Mark had left shortly after dinner with a ‘bad stomach’. After Conrad and Sacha went we all drank a bottle of Lebanese wine Bob had brought from the shop and insisted on decanting, slowly, through a muslin cloth. Libby’s eyes grew redder, and her face paler, until she
eventually fell asleep on the sofa. Bob didn’t seem to notice; he wanted to show us this riff and then that riff, and I sat there with my heart beating fast as I looked at Rowan. Our eyes met again. And again. His eyes seemed to be asking me a question, but I wasn’t sure what it was. It wasn’t quite ‘Can I kiss you again?’; it was more complicated than that, but I didn’t know how.

At about half past midnight I called B down from where she’d been sleeping in the spare room. I couldn’t drive in my drunken state, so I put her lead on and arranged to pick up my car in the morning. Rowan, who was still fiddling around on one of Bob’s acoustic guitars, glanced at me and then said, ‘I should make a move as well.’ We said our goodbyes and left together.

‘Which way are you going?’ I said, although I knew.

‘Towards the castle,’ he said. ‘But I’ll walk you home. It’s late.’

‘You don’t need to.’

‘I want to.’

We set off down the Embankment with B wagging her tail. She stopped and sniffed the first bench. I stopped too, but Rowan carried on. He realised we’d stopped and came back.

‘I’m afraid my dog goes a bit slowly,’ I said. ‘She has to sniff everything.’

‘It must be very interesting for her along here. Lots of smells.’ He leaned down and rubbed her head. He did it for slightly too long, and I suddenly wondered if he was thinking about touching me as much as I was thinking about touching him.

‘Yeah. I think it is,’ I said.

The night was foggy and starless and gulls wailed somewhere out at sea.

‘Meg …’ Rowan stopped rubbing B’s head, stood up and touched my arm. Then he quickly took his hand away.

We both turned towards the river. Then I looked at him. If we kissed again, what would happen next? We couldn’t sleep together. Despite my fantasy, he was too old: too old for there to be any future in it. And I was attached, and he was attached, and the world didn’t work like that. Still, I was drunk and I knew if he kissed me I would kiss him back.

He dropped his eyes and cleared his throat. ‘Lise left me,’ he said.

‘Oh, God,’ I said. ‘When?’

‘Well, she’s back now.’ He shivered. ‘It was a couple of days ago.’

‘She’s back? She left you and then came back?’

‘She had a change of heart. She wants us to go to couples counselling.’

‘And you?’

He did up the zip on his jacket. ‘I want a quiet life.’

‘Do you? Most people don’t.’

I thought of Libby, and how she never wanted her quiet life with Bob. And me. Perhaps I had always wanted a quiet life, which was why, after making a lot of noise and running away with Christopher, I hadn’t immediately run away again to London, where Vi had offered me a room for as long as I wanted. The first few days we’d spent in Devon Christopher had been entirely silent. But I’d thought he’d get over it, get over the trauma of falling out with Becca and betraying Drew. But he never did, not really. How could I become happy with Christopher? This had been the defining question of the last seven years. There had to be a way. We were both young, and
he was still attractive, objectively, even though he’d started having the same effect on me as the sofa, or the frying pan, or the remote control. Why had I been thinking about this man, the man in front of me, who suddenly looked as thin and vulnerable as a small tree in a hurricane? Why was I still thinking about kissing him again, when there was no point to it, no sense in it?

‘Don’t they?’ Rowan said. ‘I thought they did. When you get to my age …’

‘Does that matter? Does age matter?’

‘I turned sixty last week. I think it matters. I’ll never be young again. And I don’t want to be on my own knocking around in some bachelor flat, probably drinking too much and never seeing anyone.’

B was pulling, not wanting to stay still. There was no traffic around, so I unclipped her lead. After looking at me once to check it was OK, she trotted over and sniffed each leg of a bench one by one. Then she looked over again to see what I would do next. I walked on slowly, and Rowan followed. She walked behind us, sniffing and glancing, and sniffing and glancing.

‘Rowan,’ I said, as he fell into step beside me, ‘why are you telling me this?’

‘I thought you’d understand. I thought – maybe hoped – you’d understand that I need a friend. I don’t know many people around here who aren’t Lise’s friends, or Lise’s family. She doesn’t want anyone to know. I thought maybe I could trust you. I know you’re half my age, and …’

‘I’m almost forty,’ I said. ‘Well, in a couple of years. I’m not half your age.’

‘I’m old enough to be your father.’

‘Yes, but you’re not my father.’

He sighed. ‘Well, that’s why I invited you for lunch. I wished I hadn’t sent that email, but you can’t get emails back. I didn’t want you to think I was some sleazy old man making another clumsy pass at you. I just desperately wanted to talk to someone who might understand. But it was probably selfish of me. I wasn’t surprised that you didn’t reply, especially after what happened between us, and all I can say is that I’m so sorry.’

The wind whipped down the river, and B wagged her tail and moved on to the next bench.

‘I did reply,’ I said.

‘You did?’

‘Yes, earlier today.’

‘Oh. I only check my email at work. What did you say?’

‘I said I’d love to have lunch with you. So now maybe you think I’m sleazy.’ I laughed, although I wasn’t finding any of this very funny. ‘God – so when I asked you for lunch on the ferry you must have thought I was some sleazy young woman making an even more clumsy pass at you?’ I said. ‘No. Don’t answer that. Why would I think you were a sleazy old man? I can’t imagine anyone less like a sleazy old man. That’s so stupid.’

He shrugged sadly. ‘Sorry you think I’m stupid.’

‘Hey – I think it in a nice way,’ I said. ‘And just for the record, I wasn’t asking you on a date on the ferry. I’ve got this thing I want to show you. A ship in a bottle that I found. I’ve been meaning to ask you for ages if you’d have a look at it for me and tell me where it might have come from. Maybe if I bring it you could have a look? I sort of want to use it in my novel, but I don’t know anything about it.’

‘Of course. You know we’ve got the William H. Dawe
collection of ships in bottles on loan at the Maritime Centre at the moment? You can come and look at those if you’d like to, unless you’ve already seen them in the Dartmouth Museum.’

‘I’d love to see them. Promise me you won’t tell me how they get in there, though?’

‘What – how the ships get into the bottles?’

I nodded. ‘I’ve never known, and I’ve never wanted to know either.’

‘OK.’ He looked over at the Higher Ferry crossing the river. ‘Where’s your partner? I meant to ask.’

‘Christopher? Oh, we had a big row this morning.’

‘Serious?’

‘Oh, probably not in the end.’ I sighed. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, you can talk to me about that as well if you want to. I’d like to do something in return.’

‘As well as showing me ships in bottles.’

He smiled. ‘That won’t take long. There’s one in a light bulb that you might like.’

I bit my lip. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to help you that much. I’m not exactly very wise.’

‘Yes you are.’

‘Not about relationships.’

‘You can’t be as bad as me. According to Lise I haven’t got the first clue.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll try.’ My eyes were filling with tears. We walked along in silence for a while. We walked past the Boat Float, which looked like a dirty sink with its plug pulled out and its edges all scummy. Then we walked past the Royal Avenue Gardens and the public toilets.

‘Would Wednesday be all right?’ Rowan said.

‘Sorry?’

‘For lunch. Wednesday at one o’clock at Lucky’s?’

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Great. Look, I’ll be all right from here. You go home.’

‘Are you sure?’ He looked at his watch.

‘Yes,’ I said, shrugging.

And he went.

The house felt empty as soon as I walked in. Where was Christopher? It was too late to call anywhere he might be, not that I would. I ran over our row this morning. He’d told me to fuck off, which was new. I’d refused to have sex with him, which had never happened before. But I had money now, and a future, and I was going to write my novel while Christopher worked on restoring that castle and maybe did a part-time course. Perhaps we could eventually move away from Dartmouth. I’d probably need to finish my novel first, though. There the plan faltered. Even if I could ever finish my novel, Christopher would refuse to read it. He wouldn’t even want to come to the launch party. If he did he’d just moan about pretentious people all the way there and all the way back and complain about trees being cut down for books. He’d deliberately wear something unflattering and combine this with his turquoise espadrilles. His Brighton drug-dealer voice would come back and he’d spend the whole night saying ‘Yes, mate’ and ‘No, mate’, with a wide-eyed look, taking the piss out of everyone I liked and sniggering into the beard he would inevitably grow for the occasion. He’d tell people he’d been to the University of Life, and if the
publisher put us up in a hotel Christopher would make loud jokes about the other guests and insist on scoring a gram of cocaine because for him that was ‘living the high life’.

It was almost two in the morning, but I wasn’t at all tired. B didn’t seem to be either. Whenever we got home after more than a few hours away, she liked to do all her favourite activities as if on fast-forward: she’d already rolled on her old chew and dropped her tennis ball down the stairs. I’d given her a handful of biscuits and she’d eaten a few of those. She’d been in her bed upstairs, in her bed downstairs, on the armchair and around the room chasing her tail. I needed something to read, so I went upstairs and got the book on dog psychology from my pile, then I checked the front door was properly locked and sat down on the sofa. I listened for scratching, but there wasn’t any.

The book’s introduction summarised various experiments that showed dogs were as intelligent as children. Most recently, a group of scientists had replicated the classic ‘forehead’ experiment, normally used to assess the analytical capabilities of children. In the original experiment, a child is shown how to switch a light on. The demonstrator does it two different ways. The first way is to use her forehead, but with her hands clearly visible. The second way is also to use her forehead, but this time with her hands under a shawl, and obviously not free. When the demonstrator uses her forehead even though her hands are available, the child does the same. But when the demonstrator’s hands are constrained, the child, clearly working out that the demonstrator would have used her hands if she could, uses its hands. In the dog version, a demonstrator dog pulled a lever sometimes with his paw, and sometimes with his paw but with a ball in his mouth. The study found that dogs reason in the
same way as the children in the previous test. A dog would rather use its mouth than a paw to pull a lever, and when the demonstrator dog used his paw ‘because’ he had a ball in his mouth, the dog subject would use its mouth. But when there was no ball, no obvious reason to use a paw rather than a mouth, the dog subject assumed the demonstrator knew better and copied his actions exactly. There were some sweet pictures of dogs pulling levers.

B was now on the sofa next to me.