Twenty-Two
The first time I met Danny was at a party, although as a rule I never meet anyone at a party except for people whom I already know. It was at that mellow, sozzled stage of the evening when most of the guests have gone and the hosts are carrying glasses into the kitchen or emptying overflowing ashtrays, and the remaining guests are entirely comfortable, and the music is sweet and slow. The pressure to perform has dropped away, and you no longer have to be bright or have to smile, and you know the evening is at an end and suddenly you want it to go on a little longer. And Danny crossed the room, his eyes on me. I remember hoping that he wasn’t stupid, as if someone so handsome couldn’t be intelligent too, as if life is divided up fairly like that. Before he addressed a single word to me, I knew we’d have an affair. He told me his name and asked me mine; told me he was an unsuccessful actor and a quite successful carpenter, and I said I was a doctor. Then he said quite simply he’d like to see me again and I replied that I’d like that too. And then when I got back to my flat, and after I’d paid the babysitter and kicked off my shoes and looked in on a sleeping Elsie, I’d listened to the messages on my answering machine, and there was his voice, asking me to dinner the next day. He must have rung me as soon as I’d left the party.
The point is, Danny doesn’t play games. He comes and he goes, and sometimes I don’t hear from him for days or even know where he is. But he’s always been straightforward with me; we quarrel and then we make up, we shout and then we apologize. He’s not devious. He wouldn’t keep away in order to teach me a lesson. He wouldn’t fail to telephone just to keep me waiting for him, just to make me suffer.
For days, I waited for Danny to call me, I checked my machine whenever I came in. I checked that Elsie hadn’t knocked the receiver off its hook. When the telephone rang I’d feel as nervous as a teenager, would wait for its second or third ring before picking it up, but it was never Danny. At night I’d stay up long after Finn went to bed, because I thought he’d walk in through the door, quite casual, as if he’d never been away. I’d wake up in the dark and think he was there, my body alert with hope. I slept like a feather, fluttering into consciousness at any noise – a car on the distant road, wind in the trees, the unnerving hoot of an owl in the dark. There was never any reply when I called his flat, and he never left his own machine on. After nearly a week I called his best friend, Ronan, and asked him as casually as I could if he’d seen Danny recently.
‘Had another row, Sam?’ he’d said, cheerfully. Then, ‘No, I haven’t seen Dan. I thought he was with you.’
I thanked him and was about to put the phone down when Ronan added, ‘While we’re talking about Dan, though, I’ve been worried by him lately. Is he OK?’
‘Why? What do you mean?’
‘It’s just that he’s been a bit, well, gloomy. Brooding. Know what I mean?’
‘Mummy?’
‘Yes, my love.’
‘When’s Danny coming again?’
‘I’m not sure, Elsie. He’s busy. Why, do you miss him?’
‘He promised to take me to a puppet show, and I want to show him how I can do cartwheels now.’
‘When he comes, he’ll be so proud of your cartwheels. Come here and give me a hug, a bear-hug.’
‘Ow, you’re hurting me, Mummy. You shouldn’t hold on so tight. I’m only little.’
‘Sam.’
‘Mmmmm.’
‘Is Danny coming again soon?’
‘I don’t know. For God’s sake, Finn, don’t you go on about Danny as well. He’ll come when he bloody feels like it, I suppose.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes, of course. Oh fuck, I’m going for a walk.’
‘Do you want me to…’
‘Alone.’
‘Sam, your father and I wondered if you and Elsie and Danny would like to come over for the day next Sunday. We thought, well, that it was time we made the effort to get to know your young man better.’
‘Mum, we’d love to, that’s really nice of you, I appreciate it – but can I get back to you about it? Now’s not a good time.’
‘Oh’ – a familiar huffy tone of injured pride that gave me an unfamiliar, unwelcome rush of homesickness – ‘all right then, dear.’
Not a good time.
?
I went around the supermarket like a fury, my head hurting after a long depressing morning spent interviewing secretaries in the hospital. Frozen peas. Bubble bath with a cartoon character I don’t recognize on the bottle. Fish fingers. Pasta in three colours. Tea-bags. Digestive biscuits and jammy dodgers. Fuck Danny, fuck him fuck him fuck him. Garlic bread. Sunflower spread. Sliced brown bread. Peanut butter. I wanted him back, I wanted him, and what should I do oh what should I do? Wings of chicken, oriental-style. Crisp green apples, all the way from the Cape, but that was O K nowadays. Three cartons of soup, lentil and spinach and curried parsnip, suitable for the microwave. Vanilla ice-cream. Pecan pie, heat from frozen. Belgian beer. I should never have moved to the country and I should never have taken in Finn. Cheddar cheese, mozzarella cheese. Cat food in rabbit and chicken and salmon flavours and the fat face of a purring mog on the tin. Crisps. Nuts. Television dinner: serves one.
The door was locked when I arrived home. I let myself in and called upstairs for Finn, but there was nobody there. So I unloaded all the shopping, pushed food into the already crowded freezer, filled up the kettle, turned on the radio, turned it off again. Then I took a deep breath and went in to my study to check the answering machine. Its little green eye wasn’t blinking: no one had rung me at all.
But there was an envelope on my desk and it had my name on it. And – I put my hand on the wood of the desktop for a moment – the handwriting was Danny’s. He’d been here, come in while I was out and left a note so he wouldn’t have to say it to me. I picked up the envelope and turned it over, held it for a moment. There were two sheets of paper. The top one was his. The paper was grubby and smeared. There were few words, obviously written in haste, without care, but they were unmistakably his.
That was it. His apparent attempt at self-justification had fizzled, and he hadn’t bothered even to complete it. My breath rose and fell in my chest. The desk was grainy under my hand. I put Danny’s letter carefully down. My hands were trembling. Then I looked at the sheet of paper beneath, a forest of blue loops and underlinings.
I folded Danny’s pitiful scrawl and Finn’s letter back in the envelope and put it where it had been. Danny and Finn, Danny and Finn. I took the photograph of Danny, back to the camera and head turned towards it, caught unawares, and put it neatly in the drawer of my desk. I ran into Finn’s room. The bed was made, a towel neatly folded on the bed. I clattered down the stairs. One of Finn’s jackets, the navy-blue one, was missing. Was it some crazy joke that I wasn’t getting the point of? No. They had gone. I said it aloud as if it was the only way I could take in what had happened: ‘They’ve run away. Finn.’ I made myself say it. ‘Danny.’ I looked at my watch. In two hours Elsie would be back. The memory of her little body wrapped around Finn’s slim one, of her pale grave face tilted up
