‘Trudy, Claude, Elodie, I might be brief, I might not. Who cares? I want to say this. When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It’s the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light. Almost ten years ago, on the Dalmatian coast, in a cheap hotel without sight of the Adriatic, in a room an eighth the size of this, in a bed barely three feet across, Trudy and I tumbled into love, into ecstasy and trust, joy and peace without horizon, without time, beyond words. We turned our backs on the world to invent and build our own. We thrilled each other with pretended violence, and we cosseted and babied each other too, gave each other nicknames, had a private language. We were beyond embarrassment. We gave and received and permitted everything. We were heroic. We believed we stood on a summit no one else, not in life, not in all poetry, had ever climbed. Our love was so fine and grand, it seemed to us a universal principle. It was a system of ethics, a means of relating to others that was so fundamental that the world had overlooked it somehow. When we lay on the narrow bed face to face, looked deep into each other’s eyes and talked, we brought our selves into being. She took my hands and kissed them and for the first time in my life I wasn’t ashamed of them. Our families, which we described to each other in detail, at last made sense to us. We loved them urgently, despite all the difficulties of the past. Same with our best, most important friends. We could redeem everyone we knew. Our love was for the good of the world. Trudy and I had never talked or listened with such attention. Our lovemaking was an extension of our talking, our talking of our lovemaking.
‘When that week was over and we came back and set up together here in my house, the love went on, months then years. It seemed that nothing could ever get in its way. So before I go any further, I’m raising my glass to that love. May it never be denied, forgotten, distorted or rejected as illusion. To our love. It happened. It was true.’
I hear a shuffle and murmur of reluctant accord and, closer by, I hear my mother swallow hard before she pretends to drink the toast. I think she’s taken against ‘my house’.
‘Now,’ my father continues, lowering his voice, as though entering a funeral parlour, ‘that love has run its course. It never collapsed into mere routine or a hedge against old age. It died quickly, tragically, as love on a grand scale must. The curtain’s come down. It’s over, and I’m glad. Trudy’s glad. Everyone who knows us is glad and relieved. We trusted each other, now we don’t. We loved each other, now I detest her as much as she detests me. Trudy, my sweet, I can hardly stand the sight of you. There have been times when I could have strangled you. I’ve had dreams, happy dreams, in which I see my thumbs tightening against your carotid arteries. I know you feel the same about me. But that’s no cause for regret. Let’s rejoice instead. These are just the dark feelings we need to set ourselves free, to be reborn into new life and new love. Elodie and I have found that love and we are bound by it for the rest of our lives.’
‘Wait,’ Elodie says. I think she fears my father’s taste for indiscretion.
But he won’t take an interruption. ‘Trudy and Claude, I’m happy for you. You came together at the perfect moment. No one will deny it, you truly deserve each other.’
This is a curse, though my father sounds impenetrably sincere. To be tied to a man as vapid but sexually vigorous as Claude is a complex fate. His brother knows it. But shush. He’s still talking.
‘There are arrangements to make. There’ll be arguments and stress. But the overall scheme is simple, and for that we’re blessed. Claude, you have your nice big place in Primrose Hill, and Trudy, you can move there. I’ll be moving some stuff back in here tomorrow. As soon as you’ve gone and the decorators have done their work, Elodie will move in with me. I suggest we don’t see each other for a year or so, and then think again. The divorce should be straightforward. The important thing to remember at all times is to be rational and civil and to remember how lucky we are to have found love again. OK? Good. No, no, don’t get up. We’ll see ourselves out. Trudy, if you’re here, I’ll see you tomorrow around ten. I won’t stay long – I’ve got to get straight up to St Albans. And by the way, I’ve found my key.’
There’s the sound of a chair as Elodie stands. ‘Wait, I mean, may I say something now?’
My father is genial and firm. ‘Not remotely appropriate.’
‘But—’
‘C’mon. Time to go. Thanks for the wine.’
A moment of throat-clearing, then their footsteps recede across the kitchen and up the stairs.
My mother and her lover sit in silence as we listen to them go. We hear the front door close upstairs with a punctuating, final sound. A full stop. Trudy and Claude are stunned. I’m in turmoil. What was I in my father’s peroration? Dead. Head-first in a burial mound within his hated ex-wife’s gut. Not even a mention, not in an aside, not even dismissed as an irrelevance. A year ‘or so’ must pass before my saviour sees me. He paid tribute to honest memory and he forgot me. In a rush towards his own rebirth, he discarded mine. Fathers and sons. I heard it once and won’t forget. What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
Try this. He moved to Shoreditch to sample a tryst with Elodie. He vacated the Terrace so Claude could move in and give John good cause to throw Trudy out. The anxious visits, the earnest poetry, even the lost key were feints, lulling her into greater security with Claude, drawing them together.
Claude is pouring more wine. In the circumstances it’s a comfort, how he reaches with dull precision for his most vacuous thought.
‘Fancy that.’
Trudy doesn’t speak for half a minute. When she does, her words are slurred but her resolve is clear.
‘I want him dead. And it has to be tomorrow.’
EIGHT
OUTSIDE THESE WARM, living walls an icy tale slides towards its hideous conclusion. The midsummer clouds are thick, there’s no moon, not the faintest breeze. But my mother and uncle are talking up a winter storm. The cork is drawn from one more bottle, then, too soon, another. I’m washed far downstream of drunkenness, my senses blur their words but I hear in them the form of my ruin. Shadow figures on a bloody screen are arguing in hopeless struggle with their fate. The voices rise and fall. When they don’t accuse or wrangle, they conspire. What’s said hangs in the air, like a Beijing smog.
It will end badly, and the house feels the ruin too. In high summer, the February gale twists and breaks the icicles hanging from the gutters, scours the unpointed brickwork of the gable ends, rips the slates – those blank slates – from the pitching roofs. This chill works its fingers past the rotted putty of the unwashed panes, it backs up through the kitchen drains. I’m shivering in here. But it won’t end, the bad will be endless, until ending badly will seem a blessing. Nothing will be forgotten, nothing flushed away. Foul matter lingers in unseen bends beyond the plumber’s reach, it hangs in the wardrobes with Trudy’s winter coats. This too solid stench feeds the timid mice behind the skirting and swells them to rats. We hear their gnawing and mutinous curses, but no one is surprised. At intervals, my mother and I retire so she may squat and copiously piss and groan. Against my skull I feel her bladder shrink, and I’m relieved. Back to the table, to more scheming and long harangues. It was my uncle cursing, not the rats. That gnawing was my mother at the salted nuts. Incessantly, she eats for me.
In here, I dream of my entitlement – security, weightless peace, no tasks, no crime or guilt. I’m thinking about what should have been mine in my confinement. Two opposing notions haunt me. I heard about them in a podcast my mother left running while talking on the phone. We were on the couch in my father’s library, windows wide open to another sultry midday. Boredom, said this Monsieur Barthes, is not far from bliss; one regards boredom from the shores of pleasure. Exactly so. The condition of the modern foetus. Just think: nothing to do but be and grow, where growing is hardly a conscious act. The joy of pure existence, the tedium of undifferentiated days. Extended bliss is boredom of the existential kind. This confinement shouldn’t be a prison. In here I’m owed the privilege and luxury of solitude. I speak as an innocent, but I conjure an orgasm prolonged into eternity – there’s boredom for you, in the realm of the sublime.
This was my patrimony, until my mother wished my father dead. Now I live inside a story and fret about its outcome. Where’s boredom or bliss in that?
My uncle rises from the kitchen table, lurches towards the wall to turn off the lights and reveal the dawn. If he’d been my father, he might have recited an aubade. But now there’s only a practical concern – it’s time for bed. What deliverance, that they’re too drunk for sex. Trudy stands, together we sway. If I could be upright for one minute I’d feel less sick. How I miss my spacious days of ocean-tumbling.