The white marble fireplace is streaked in grey veins and here rest two shining violins. Not just for effect, it seems. They lie as if recently put down, as if the air hums still with their interrupted music. They’re taking up too much of his attention. People do daft things with interior décor. They make features of all sorts, and expect you to admire them.
He is surlier as the night goes on. That fragility has gone out of him. The slow evening, the company, the emptied bottles on the carpet, all of it has first pulled him together and then put him out of sorts.
Peggy and Iris have withdrawn to the kitchen for a little while; the drink has dissolved their reserve and they are raiding the absent Simmonds’ pantry. Richard has nodded his assent to them and he still sits across from Mark, watching his mood darken.
Mark is barely aware of his presence. Yet, when he stares at the French windows that lead to the patio and its herb garden, he laughs aloud and says, “I like your conservatory effect.”
Richard smiles and sips his drink, unsure.
Mark doesn’t believe in the inner man. If he did, he certainly wouldn’t want one. It’s like those razor-blade adverts where they sing about not wanting to hide the man inside. Who’s that supposed to be, exactly? Mark would laugh if he didn’t suspect it all leads to something sinister. ‘The man inside’ sounds rough, chest-beating. It makes Mark feel uncomfortable. He succumbed to life with Sam only because she seemed to understand. Despite everything, she seemed to understand. Although she looked the sort to want a big, strapping, sexist bastard, she settled for Mark. She has never—not even in their worst times—demanded the presence of Mark’s man inside. Never has he felt obliged to fabricate such a thing.
Then what does he believe in?
He believes that we all have pasts. He can’t quite see himself with an interior world of essences and memories, arrayed in neat little bottles on shelves. Somehow Mark can’t think of himself as a human minibar, the sum of what he is, jiggling and chinking inside.
Hearing the slow tick of the clocks, Richard’s occasional impatient sighs, Peggy’s and Iris’s distant giggling, he now thinks that his past is rather figured out upon him. When he thinks of his history, he is a silhouette-Mark and his past is a Mark-shaped continuum dwindling back to a still point: his beginning as a plain full stop. The point of no return, and he could return to it when he liked. He could stare within and pore over that point of innocent origin.
But people do. They believe they carry within themselves simple, smiling children, untouched by experience. They fondly think they can regress. Mark scowls. He decided that they think this way only because they can afford to. Just as they can afford to leave violins lying about for ornament and effect.
Peggy and Iris return with biscuits, bread and cheese, and set them out on the carpet, laughing still over some private joke. They have been drinking and eating since their arrival here. The pair of them fell in love with this house straight away. Simmonds took one look at the new guests, told them that supper was simmering on the hob, and fled into the night. They sat down to a perfect Bolognese in the stony kitchen and the atmosphere warmed up.
“Look at me,” Richard says now. He wants to start the talking up again and draws their attention by plucking at his stained white shirt. “If I went walking in the Antarctic, I’d still come back covered in tomato sauce.”
Peggy pours him more whisky and they laugh. Having appropriated the house, Iris commandeers the discreetly hidden hi-fi and puts Billie Holiday on. So at ease is she that she has shed some of her layers of jumpers and cardigans. Yet she is wearing her blue wedding hat again, holding it down with one hand as she dances alone, on the spot.
Mark finds he has been staring at Richard, who is now deep in conversation with Peggy and grateful for it. Across the room drift fragments of their exchange and Mark stares into his glass, trying to block it out, knowing he will get cross if he listens in too much. He hears ‘drama school’, ‘college’ and ‘father’, before he manages to distance himself enough. Richard has a veneer of capability, shiny as his expensive leather jacket. He appears to think that the world is there for him to move through unimpeded. Look at how he took control of their day today. He derailed them entirely and forced them into having a good time.
He succeeded, too. The disasters of this morning now seem like half a lifetime ago. Richard had sorted them out. No wonder he gets on so well with Peggy. It’s the same assurance that Iris has and it’s all down to class. It is a veneer and yet Mark knows that Richard will believe in this man inside. Just as Iris believes in her own man or woman or God know what she keeps locked up within.
When Mark thinks about Richard’s body, he thinks of cool, white flesh, well-fed middle-class flesh, softened with talcum powder. It makes Mark feel scrawny. All that whiteness, with muscles he has no pressing need for.
One moment he is looking at Richard, his profile in the lamplight, that startling white at the start of his collar bone, seen at the loose neck of his T-shirt. The easy way he sits slumped back, one leg folded beneath him, even the shape, the fold of the crotch of his jeans. Then Mark bites back with another thought, troubled and cold, about who still has the luxury to put their pasts
