We staggered out of Magic Pete’s towards Gail’s car. I wasn’t drunk but supporting Gail was a staggering sort of business. She was like a left-over jelly at a children’s party. She decided she was coming home with me even if I had to sleep in the armchair. Mile by mile she reviewed my mistakes. I began to wish that I’d done as I first intended and kept back some of my story. There was no stopping her now. She was a three-ton truck on a slope.
‘Honey, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it.’
‘Is that what you think of me?’
‘I think you’re a crazy fool. Maybe you didn’t love her.’
This caused me to swing the wheel so violently that Gail’s gift-box collection of Tammy Wynette tapes skidded over the back and decapitated her nodding dog. Gail was sick down her blouse.
‘The trouble with you,’ she said wiping herself, ‘is that you want to live in a novel.’
‘Rubbish. I never read novels. Except Russian ones.’
‘They’re the worst. This isn’t War and Peace honey, it’s Yorkshire.’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘That’s right I am. I’m fifty-three and I’m as wild as a Welshman with a leek up his arse. Fifty-three. Old slag Gail. What right has she to poke her nose into your shining armour? That’s what you’re thinking isn’t it honey? I may not look much like a messenger from the gods but your girl isn’t the only one who’s got wings. I’ve got a pair of my own under here.’ (She patted her armpits.) ‘I’ve flown about a bit and picked up a few things and I’ll give one of them to you for nothing. You don’t run out on the woman you love. Especially you don’t when you think it’s for her own good.’ She hiccuped violently and covered her skirt with half-digested clams. I gave her my handkerchief. Finally she said, ‘You’d better go and find her.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Who said?’
‘I said. I gave my word. Even if I am wrong it’s too late now. Would you want to see me if I’d left you in the lurch with a man you despise?’
‘Yes,’ said Gail and passed out.
The following morning I caught the train to London. The heat through the carriage window made me sleepy and I slid into a light doze where Louise’s voice came to me as if under water. She was under water. We were in Oxford and she was swimming in the river, green on the sheen of her, pearl sheen of her body. We had lain down on the grass sun-scorched, grass turning hay, grass brittle on the baked clay, spear grass marking us in red weals. The sky was blue as in blue-eyed boy, not a wink of cloud, steady gaze, what a smile. A pre-war sky. Before the first world war there were days and days like this; long English meadows, insect hum, innocence and blue sky. Farm workers pitching the hay, women in waist aprons carrying pitchers of lemonade. Summers were hot, winters were snowy. It’s a pretty story.
Now here am I making up my own memories of good times. When we were together the weather was better, the days were longer. Even the rain was warm. That’s right, isn’t it? Do you remember when … I can see Louise sitting cross-legged under the plum tree in the Oxford garden. The plums have the look of asps’ heads in her hair. Her hair is still drying from the river, curling up round the plums. Against her copper hair the green leaves look like tarnish. My Lady of the Verdigris. Louise is one of the few women who might still be beautiful if she went mouldy.
On that day she was asking me whether I would be true to her and I replied, ‘With all my heart.’ Had I been true to her?
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth’s unknown altho’ his highth be taken.
When I was young I loved this sonnet. I thought a wandering bark was a young dog, rather as in Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
I have been a wandering bark of unknown worth but I thought I was a safe ship for Louise. Then I threw her overboard.
‘Will you be true to me?’
‘With all my heart.’
I took her hand and put it underneath my T-shirt. She took my nipple and squeezed it between finger and thumb.
‘And with all your flesh?’
‘You’re hurting me Louise.’
Passion is not well bred. Her fingers bit their spot. She would have bound me to her with ropes and had us lie face to face unable to move but move on each other, unable to feel but feel each other. She would have deprived us of all senses bar the sense of touch and smell. In a blind, deaf and dumb world we could conclude our passion infinitely. To end would be to begin again. Only she, only me. She was jealous but so was I. She was brute with love but so was I. We were patient enough to count the hairs on each other’s heads, too impatient to get undressed. Neither of us had the upper hand, we wore matching wounds. She was my twin and I lost her. Skin is waterproof but my skin was not waterproof against Louise. She flooded me and she has not drained away. I am still wading through her, she beats upon my doors and threatens my innermost safety. I have no gondola at the gate and the tide is still rising. Swim for it, don’t be afraid. I am afraid. Is this her revenge?
‘I will never let you go.’
I went straight to my flat. I didn’t expect to find Louise there and yet there were signs of her occupation, some clothes, books, the coffee she liked. Sniffing the coffee told me that she hadn’t been there for some time, the beans had gone stale and she would never permit that. I picked up a sweater of hers and buried my face in it. Very faintly, her perfume.
I was strangely elated to be in my own home. Why are human beings so contradictory? This was the site of sorrow and separation, a place of mourning, but with the sun coming through the windows and the garden full of roses I felt hopeful again. We had been happy here too and some of that happiness had soaked the walls and patterned the furniture.
I decided to dust. I’ve found before that ceaseless menial work calms the rat-cage of the mind. I had to stop worrying and speculating for long enough to make a sensible plan. I needed peace and peace was not a quality I had come to know.
It was while I was scrubbing away the last of Miss Havisham that I found some letters to Louise from the hospital where she had gone for a second opinion. The letters were of the mind that since Louise was still asymptomatic no treatment should be considered. There was some swelling of the lymphatic nodes but this had remained stable for six months. The consultant advised regular checks and a normal life. The three letters were dated after I had left. There was also a very impressive document from Elgin reminding Louise that he had been studying her case for two years and that in his humble opinion (‘May I remind you Louise that it is I and not Mr Rand who is best qualified to make decisions in this uncertain field’) she needed treatment. The address of his Swiss clinic was on the letterhead.
I telephoned. The receptionist didn’t want to talk to me. There were no patients at the clinic. No, I couldn’t speak to Mr Rosenthal.
I began to wonder if the receptionist was one of Inge’s.
‘May I speak to Mrs Rosenthal?’ (how I hated having to say that).
‘Mrs Rosenthal is not here any longer.’
‘Then may I speak to the doctor?’
‘Mr Rosenthal’ (she underlined my faux pas) ‘is not here either.’
‘Do you expect him?’
She couldn’t say. I slammed down the phone and sat on the floor.
All right. Nothing else for it. Louise’s mother.
Louise’s mother and grandmother lived together in Chelsea. They considered themselves to be Australian aristocracy, that is, they were descended from convicts. They had a small mews house from whose upper floors they could see the Buckingham Palace flagpole. Grandmot
her spent all of her time on the upper floors, noting when and when not, the Queen was in residence. Occasionally she broke off to spill food down her front. She had a steady hand but she liked to spill. It made work for her daughter. Louise was rather fond of her grandmother. With a little twist to Dickens, she called her The Aged Pea, peas were what grandmother spilled the most. Her only comment on Louise’s separation from Elgin had been ‘Get the money.’
Mother was more complicated and in a very unaristocratic fashion worried about what people would say. When I announced myself at the entryphone she refused to let me in.
‘I don’t know where she is and it’s no business of yours.’
‘Mrs Fox, please open the door, please.’
There was silence. An Englishman’s home is his castle, but an Australian’s mews house is fair game. I banged on the door with both fists and shouted Mrs Fox’s name as loudly as I could. Immediately opposite, two coiffured heads popped into the window like Punch and Judy in their box. The front door flew open. It wasn’t Mrs Fox but The Aged Pea herself.
‘Think you’re on a kangaroo shoot or somethin’?’
‘I’m looking for Louise.’
‘Don’t you come through these doors.’ Mrs Fox appeared.
‘Kitty, if we don’t let this digger in, neighbours’ll think we got either the bugs or the bailiffs.’ The Pea eyed me suspiciously. ‘You have the look of a thing from the Disinfectant Department.’
‘Mother, we don’t have a Disinfectant Department in England.’
‘We don’t? That explains a whole lot of smells.’
‘Please, Mrs Fox, I won’t be long.’
Reluctantly Mrs Fox stood back and I stepped on to the mat.
When there was a centimetre gap between me and the door, Mrs Fox shut it and barred my further passage. I could feel the plastic letter-box cover on my spine. ‘Get it over with then.’
‘I’m looking for Louise. When did you last see her?’
‘Ho ho,’ said the Pea banging her stick. ‘Don’t play the Waltzing Matilda with me. What do you care? You walked out on her, now get lost.’
Mrs Fox said, ‘I’m glad you’re having nothing more to do with my daughter. You broke up her marriage.’
‘I’ve no quarrel with that,’ said Grandma.
‘Mother, will you be quiet? Elgin is a great man.’
‘Since when? You always said he was a little rat.’
‘I did not say he was a little rat. I said he was rather small and that unfortunately he had the look of a, well, I said a …’
‘Rat!’ screamed the Pea banging her stick on the door just by my head. She should have been a knife thrower in the circus.
‘Mrs Fox. I made a mistake. I should never have left Louise. I thought it was for her own good. I thought Elgin could make her well. I want to find her and take care of her.’
‘It’s too late,’ said Mrs Fox. ‘She told me she never wanted to see you again.’
‘She’s had a worse time than a toad on a runway,’ said the Pea.
‘Mother, go and sit down, you’re getting tired,’ said Mrs Fox supporting herself on the banister rail. ‘I can deal with this.’
‘Prettiest thing this side of Brisbane and look how she’s been treated. You know, Louise is the spitting image of myself when younger. I had quite a figure then.’
It was hard to imagine Pea having any figure. She was like a child’s drawing of a snowman, just two circles plonked one on top of the other. For the first time I noticed her hair: it was serpentine in its rising twists, a living moving mass that escaped from its tight bands just as Louise’s did. Louise had told me that Pea had been the undisputed Beauty Queen of Western Australia. She had had over one hundred proposals of marriage in the 1920s from bankers, prospectors, city men who unrolled maps of the new Australia they were going to build and said, ‘Sweet darling all this is yours when you are mine.’ Pea had married a sheep farmer and had six children. Her nearest neighbour had been a day’s ride away. I saw her suddenly, dress to the floor, hands on her hips, the dirt track disappearing into the flat of the horizon. Nothing but flat and the bar of the sky measuring the distance. Miss Helen Louise, a burning bush in the dry land.
‘What you starin’ at digger?’
I shook my head. ‘Mrs Fox, have you any idea where Louise has gone?’
‘I know she’s not in London, that’s all. She may be abroad.’
‘Got a packet out of the doctor. She left him as lean as a woodlouse in a plastics factory. Heh heh heh.’
‘Mother, will you stop it?’ Mrs Fox turned to me, ‘I think you’d better leave now. I can’t help you.’
Mrs Fox opened the door as her neighbours closed theirs.
‘What did I tell you all?’ said Pea. ‘We’re in disrepute.’
She turned in disgust and pegged down the hall on her stick.
‘You know, don’t you, that Elgin was to be in the civil list this year? Louise cost him that.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘A happy marriage has nothing to do with it.’
‘Then why wasn’t he?’ She slammed the door and I heard her crying in the hall. Was it for her lost connection with the great and the good or was it for her daughter?
Evening. Couples out on the sweating streets hand in hand. From an upper window a reggae band with a long way to go. Restaurants were pushing the alfresco style, but a wicker chair on a dirty street with the buses grinding by isn’t Venice. I watched the litter blow among the pizzas and raffia carafes. A vulpine waiter fixed his dicky bow in the cashier’s mirror, slapped her bottom, put a peppermint on his red tongue and swaggered over to a group of under-age girls drinking Campari and soda. ‘Would madams like a something to a eat?’
I caught the first bus regardless of its destination. What did it matter since I was no nearer to Louise? The city was suppurating. The bus driver wouldn’t open the doors while the bus was moving. The air in there smelt of burger and chips. There was a fat woman in a sleeveless nylon frock sitting with her legs apart fanning herself with her shoe. Her make-up had slipped into ledges of grime.
‘OPEN THE DOORS FUCKFACE,’ she shouted.
‘Fuck off,’ said the driver without looking round. ‘Can’t you read the notice? Can’t you read?’
The notice said DO NOT DISTRACT DRIVER WHILE BUS IS IN MOTION. We were stock still in a traffic jam at the time.
As the temperature mounted the man in front of me resorted to his mobile phone. Like all mobile phone users he had nothing urgent to say, he simply wanted to say it. He looked at us all to see if we were looking at him. When he finally said, ‘Goo nye then my mate Kev,’ I asked him very politely if I might borrow it for a moment and offered him a pound coin. He was reluctant to separate himself from such an essential part of his machismo but he agreed to punch in the number for me and hold the phone to my ear. After it had rung pointlessly a few times he said, ‘That’s out then,’ pocketed my pound and hung his treasure back round his neck on a bulldog chain. There had been no answer at Louise’s house. I decided to go and see for myself.
I found a cab to take me through the thick heat of the dying day and we turned into the square at the same moment as Elgin’s BMW pulled up at the kerb. He got out and opened the passenger door for a woman. She was a little business suit number, serious make-up and the sort of hairdo that looks on tempests and is never shaken. She had a small travel bag, Elgin a suitcase, they were laughing together. He kissed her and fumbled for his keys.
‘You gettin’ out or not?’ asked my driver.
I was trying to control myself. On the doorstep breathing deeply I rang the bell. Keep calm Keep calm Keep calm.
The hot date answered the door. I smiled brightly and walked around her into the wide hall. Elgin had his back to me.
‘Darling …’ she began.
‘Hello Elgin.’
He spun round. I didn’t think people did that in real life, only in kooky crime thrillers. Elgin moved like Fred Astair
e and placed himself between me and the hot date. I don’t know why.
‘Go and make some tea, darling, will you,’ he said and off she went.
‘Do you have to pay her to be so obedient or is it love?’
‘I told you never to come here again.’
‘You told me a great many things I should have ignored. Where’s Louise?’
For a split second Elgin looked genuinely surprised. He thought I should know. I looked at the hall. There was a new table with curved legs, a hideous thing in maple inlaid with brass strips. No doubt it had come from the kind of shop where there are no prices but it had its price painted all over it. It was the sort of hall table interior designers buy for Arab clients. Next to it was a radiator. Louise hadn’t been here for some time.
‘Let me show you out,’ said Elgin.
I grabbed him by his tie and jammed him against the door. I’ve never had any boxing lessons so I had to fight on instinct and cram his windpipe into his larynx. It seemed to work. Unfortunately he couldn’t speak. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s happened, are you?’ Pull the tie a bit tighter and watch his eyes pop out.
The hot date came tripping back up the stairs with two mugs. Two mugs. How rude. She stopped dead still like a ham actor then screamed, ‘LET GO OF MY FIANCE.’ I was so shocked I did. Elgin punched me in the stomach and winded me against the wall. I slipped on to the floor honking like a seal. Elgin kicked me in the shins but I didn’t feel that until later. All I could see were his shiny shoes and her patent leather peep-toes. I threw up. While I was crouched over the black and white diamond tiles of the marble floor like an extra in a Vermeer, Elgin said as pompously as a half-strangled man can, ‘That’s right, Louise and I are divorced.’ I was still coughing up egg and tomato sandwich but I struggled to my feet with the grace of an old wino, wiped my hand across my mouth and dragged its stippled backside down Elgin’s blazer.
‘God you’re disgusting,’ said the hot date. ‘God.’
‘Would you like me to tell you a bedtime story?’ I asked her. ‘All about Elgin and his wife Louise? Oh and about me too?’