VI
E lise’s bedtime routine was intimately known to him: the yawns, the cleanser, the glass of water she only rarely touched, the pillow she liked to drag under her cheek, her alarm clock set inexorably for the following morning. One new detail was the glasses she had begun to need to read with. These gave Paul mixed feelings: on the one hand, a chill from the middle age into which she advanced always just a little ahead of him; on the other, a frisson of affection, making him think of a character in one of those mid-period Bergman movies, women struggling to take possession of themselves, their past and sexuality. Was that what Elise was doing? She kept a pile of modern novels by her bed that he rarely looked into; they seemed to him pretty much interchangeable – what people called ‘women’s fiction’. The trouble with cohabitation seemed to be that you were gripped in some struggle for vindication so convoluted that you couldn’t afford to imagine things impartially from the other one’s centre.
She would abandon reading with a little sigh, smiling apologetically, but giving out a hum of sensuous submission as she slipped under into sleep, leaving him high and dry, beached in her wake. It was too hot these nights to wrap himself around her from behind; her breasts, if he put his hand on them, seemed scalding; she brushed him away without even waking properly, murmuring a protest. Curled with his back to her at the other edge of the bed, he’d taken to trying to get to sleep by going round and round in his mind the rooms of his childhood home, remembering their obscure corners, which had once seemed banal in their ultra-familiarity and now held the deepest mystery for him. There was no one else to remember them. He inventoried drawers and cupboards: the hairgrips and elastic bands and dust, the crumbling bath cubes, books half full of Green Shield savings stamps. Pins and needles were stuck into shiny paper in a folded card shaped as a flower basket. An old cut-throat razor, with a bone handle, hung around for years after his father had taken to using an electric one. The house itself was gone now, he’d looked for it on Google Earth and, although most of the road still stood, there was a gap where they must have demolished four or five of those mean houses, built shoddily of compressed ash only sixty years ago, as the answer to Birmingham’s inner-city slum problem. He had hated the place, but the discovery of its non-existence was a blow, as if he’d been cheated of something.
One night he woke, groaning loudly, out of a nightmare that his mother was dying in hospital, alone, strapped to her sheet in a bed like a metal cot with bars, twitching in violent convulsions, tubes and monitors bristling all over her body. His groaning woke Elise too.
– It won’t have been like that, she reassured him, putting her arms around him, cradling him. – They know how to do it, how to ease them out with morphine, making them as comfortable as they can. When Dad was dying the nurses knew just how to prop him up, moisten his lips and hold his hand and speak to him. They know these things.
He didn’t believe her, but he was grateful and hungry for her comforting, which turned into love-making, affectionate and familiar. Into that, taking Paul by surprise, came images of the Polish girl: her air of tough disdain, the mole on her cheek, her sloe-dark eyes, young breasts under her tight T-shirt. He imagined the girl carried away in sexual excitement, breaking out in pleading exclamations in her language that he couldn’t understand: it was a rough, slightly degrading scene, as if he was punishing her, or proving something. It had not even occurred to him, all the time he was in Anna’s real presence, that anything like this was at work in him, saving itself for later. The middle-aged cliche shamed him, his fantasising about one of his own daughter’s friends, probably not much older than Pia was herself. He tried to conjure up instead the girl from the past, the one he’d seemed to see from Gerald’s window – but she eluded him, her features were blurred.
Paul sat to watch nature programmes with the girls in the little cubbyhole where they kept the television, a room without a window between the hallway and the kitchen; they curled up together on an old broken-backed sofa. If Joni wasn’t interested in the programme she stretched herself along the top of the sofa back, biting her comfort blanket and scuffing with her stretched-up foot along the wall, kicking at the edge of a poster for a Lucian Freud exhibition. Becky was driven to distraction by her sister’s insouciance; they would fight after she had been patient for long ages, rolling over one another, squealing and hissing and pinching. Separating them, Paul felt their heat, intense and intimate as cubs in a den.
Some of these programmes distressed him, with their casually apocalyptic language. He wanted to protect the girls from hearing that all the beauty of the world was spoiling, its precious places being built over or cut down, its animal life poisoned with pollution. The girls seemed sanguine enough, taking it all in. Perhaps they were hardened through over-exposure; but perhaps a terrible nihilism was being implanted in them, to lie in wait for when they were adult and would understand how to despair. Paul could remember learning in a geography lesson at school about the layered living of the equatorial forest – his imagination had soared at the idea of animals that spent their entire lives in its canopy, never needing to come down to ground level. He had not wanted particularly to travel to the forest and see for himself; the knowledge that it existed was like a reserve in his spirit, a guarantee that spacious beauty existed somewhere.
– I shouldn’t worry about it, Elise said. – They seem to cope all right. Isn’t education the best hope for change? This generation ought to grow up passionate environmentalists. The programmes try not to be gloomy, but they have to tell the truth to the children, don’t they? You couldn’t want to deceive them that everything was all right.
– I’m afraid it makes them helpless. You need such complex contexts, to grapple with the information they’re getting.
– Do you? It seems straightforward enough to me. Thank goodness things aren’t all left up to the people who understand the complex contexts. If it was up to them, perhaps nothing would ever get done.
Gerald often ate with them in the evenings. Elise didn’t mind having him there as long as it wasn’t a dinner party. In fact she fussed over him, cooking the things he said he liked, teasing him about how he didn’t look after himself properly. Paul had told her about the Scotch eggs and hummus. – Do you ever clean anything? she asked. – Gerald, have you ever cleaned your lavatory? The girls were gloating and giggling, enjoying the game. Gerald said he had bought some toilet cleanser once, and sometimes squirted it in. Wasn’t that what he was supposed to do? Paul was sure he was exaggerating, playing along with their joke; he didn’t remember the toilet being so very bad. Gerald told them he had a theory, that after a certain point the rooms never got any dirtier: they didn’t get cleaner, but they didn’t get any worse.
Elise pretended to be appalled. – Won’t you let me come round and clean up for you? It will only take a couple of hours. I won’t touch any of your precious books, I promise.
It was a joke, but Paul saw with surprise that she half-meant it, too. She didn’t care about the cleaning, but she was intrigued by the idea of Gerald’s flat, where she’d never been, and she wanted to get a look inside it. Joni wrapped her skinny arms around Gerald’s knees, wheedling. – We want to come, we want to come to your smelly flat!
Gerald said he would love to invite her over for tea, he’d get in cake and crumpets specially. – As long as you’re not afraid of the spiders.
– Spiders? No… Joni was hesitant. – Are they big ones?
– How about bats?
– He hasn’t! Becky squealed delightedly, not certain.
– Or cockroaches?
He convinced them that he lived with a menagerie of animals, confessing to Paul and Elise later that the cockroaches were for real. After dinner he helped Elise water the vegetables: he was strong as an ox, could easily carry two full watering cans. Paul thought of him when he was a boy, baling out hay from the back of a tractor trailer in winter, or trimming the overgrowth of their sheep’s feet with a paring knife. He had told Paul he used to think up the solutions to maths problems while he worked. To save water, Elise had fixed up a barrel that collected waste from the kitchen sink and the bathroom, to reuse on the garden; after a few trips with the cans, Gerald put in a hose running from the water butt to the vegetable patch. She was delighted with him. They all three sat out with chinking glasses of gin and tonic in the late sunshine, when the chores were done and Becky and Joni were feeding the goats.
– Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Gerald? Elise asked.
– It’s probably the cockroaches.
– No, seriously. Although I don’t suppose the cockroaches help. What happened to Katherine? She was nice.
