Collected Stories (34 page)

He had got up and headed towards Natasha with determination, but the soft focus of the light mist and the alternate caresses of autumn heat and chill put him in an unexpectedly sensual mood. This renewed love of existence was like a low erotic charge. He came regularly to this park with his wife and baby and if, today, they were not with him, he could mark their absence by considering how meagre things were without them. At night, when he joined his woman in bed – she wore blue pyjamas, and his son, thrashing in his cot at the end of the room, a blue-striped, short-sleeved babygro, resembling an Edwardian bathing costume – he knew, at last, that there was nowhere else he would prefer to be.

What he wanted was to have a surreptitious look at Natasha, but he thought she had spotted him. It would be undignified to dodge about.

With his eyes fixed on her, he strode out of the bushes and across the tarmac apron in front of the café, weaving in and out of the tables where dogs, children on bicycles and adults with trays were crowded together, irritable waitresses tripping through. Natasha glanced up and started on the work of taking him in. She even rose, and stood on tiptoe. If he was looking to see how she had aged, she was doing the same to him.

She kissed him on the cheek. ‘You’ve cut your hair.’

‘I’ve gone grey, haven’t I?’ he said. ‘Or was I grey before?’

Before he could draw back, her fingers were in his hair.

‘Behind the ear, there used to be a few white hairs,’ she said. ‘Now – there’s a black one. Why don’t you dye it?’

He noticed her hair was still what they called ‘rock ’n’ roll black’.

He said, ‘Why would I bother?’

She laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re no longer vain. Look at you in your shiny dark blue raincoat. How much did those shoes cost?’

‘I have a son now, Natty.’

‘I know that, Daddio,’ she said. She tapped her big silver ring on the table, given to her as a teenager by a Hell’s Angel boyfriend.

‘You like fatherhood?’

He looked away at the tables piled with the Sunday papers, plates and cups, and children’s toys. He heard the names of expensive schools, like a saint’s roll-call. He remembered, as a child, his parents urging him to be polite, and wished for the time when good manners protected you from the excesses of intimacy, when honesty was not romanticised.

He said, ‘My boy’s a fleshy thing. There’s plenty of him to kiss. I don’t think we’ve ever seen his neck. But he has a bubbly mouth and a beard of saliva. I bring him here in his white hat – when he cries he goes red and looks like an outraged chef.’

‘Is that why you made me come all this way? I couldn’t find this bloody place.’

He said, ‘I thought it would amuse you to know … In May 1966 the Beatles made promotional films here, for “Rain” and “Paperback Writer”.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘That’s it?’

‘Well, yes.’

He and Natasha had liked pop of the sixties and seventies; in her flat they had lain on oriental cushions drinking mint tea, among other exotic interests, playing and discussing records.

Before he met her, he had been a pop journalist for several years, writing about fashion, music and the laboured politics that accompanied them. Then he became almost respectable, as the arts correspondent for an old-fashioned daily broadsheet. On this paper it amused the journalists to think of him as young, contradictory and promiscuous. He was hired to be contrary and outrageous.

In fact, at night, he was working to show them how tangled he was. Not telling anyone, he wrote, with urgent persistence, an uninhibited memoir of his father. The book spoke of his own childhood terrors, as well as his father’s vanity and tenderness. The last chapter was concerned with what men, and fathers, could become, having been released, as women were two decades earlier, from some of their conventional expectations. Before publication, he was afraid of being mocked; it was an honest book, an earnest one, even.

The memoir was acclaimed and won awards. It was said that men hadn’t exposed themselves in such a way before. He gave up journalism to write a novel about young men working on a pop magazine, which was made into a popular film. He lived in San Francisco and New York, taught ‘creative writing’, and rewrote unmade movies. He had got out. He was envied; he even envied himself. People spoke about him, as he had talked of pop stars, once. He met Natasha and things went awry.

She said, ‘You still listen to all that?’

‘How many times can you hear “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”? And the new stuff means nothing to me.’

She said, ‘All those symphonies and concertos sound the same.’

‘At least they can play,’ he said.

‘The musicians are only reading the notes. It’s not music, it’s map-reading.’

‘How many of us can do that? It’s better that people don’t foist their original attempts on the public. Don’t forget for years I went to gigs every night. It’s funny, I couldn’t wait to get home and play something quiet by the Isley Brothers.’

He laughed and waved at a man. ‘How was your holiday?’ someone called. ‘And the builders?’

‘These people recognise you,’ she said. ‘I suppose they are the sort to read. Insomnia would be their only problem.’

He laughed and put his face up to the sun. ‘They know me as the man with the only infant in the park who wears a leather jacket.’

She let him sit, but they were both waiting.

She leaned forward. ‘After trying to avoid me, what made you want to see me today?’

‘Lolly – you spoke to her on the phone – has gone to look at a place we’ve bought in Wiltshire.’

‘You’ve joined the aristocracy?’

‘Not a wet-dog-and-bad-pictures country house. A London house in a field. For the first time in ages I had a spare afternoon.’ He said, ‘What is it you want?’

‘It wasn’t to bother you, though it must have seemed like that.’ She looked at him with concentration and sincerity. ‘Do you want a fag?’

‘I’ve given up.’

She lit her cigarette and said, ‘I don’t want to be eradicated from your life – cancelled, wiped out.’

He sighed. ‘I was thinking the other day that I would never like my parents again, not in the way I did. There are no real reasons for anything, we just fall in and out of love with things – thank God.’

‘I would accept that, if you hadn’t written about me.’

‘Did I?’

‘In your second novel, published two and a half years ago.’ She looked at him but he said nothing. ‘Nick, I believed, at the time we were seeing one another – two years before – we were living some kind of life together in privacy.’

‘Living together?’

‘You slept at my place, and me at yours. Didn’t we see each other every day? Didn’t we think about one another quite a lot?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We did do that.’

She said, ‘Nick, you used my sexual stuff. What I like up my cunt.’

He lowered his voice. ‘The Croatian version of the book has come out. It has been translated into ten languages. Who’s going to recognise your hairy flaps or my broth of a stomach and withered buttocks?’

‘I do. Isn’t that enough?’

‘Who says it’s your cunt? Sometimes a cunt –’

She rubbed her face with her hand. ‘Don’t start. The cunt in the book is called ME – Middle England. Those who enter it, of whom there seem to be an unnecessary number, and pretty grotesque they are too, are known as Middle Englanders. We –’

‘It was always my joke.’

‘Our joke.’

‘All right.’

‘I thought it would stop disturbing me. But it didn’t go away. I feel abused by you, Nick.’

‘That wouldn’t be the origin of that feeling.’

‘No, as you pointed out in the book, when my father was away lecturing, my mother did unwelcome things to me.’

He said, ‘Most of the women I’ve met have been sexually abused. If some women are afraid of men, or hate them, isn’t it going to start there?’

She wasn’t listening. She had plenty to say; he let her continue.

She said, ‘When I saw you the first time I was impressed. Writers are supposed to feel and know. They’re wise, with enough honesty, bravery and conscience for us all. Now I’m upset that you saw me as you did. Upset you wrote it down. Would you say anything, expose anyone, provided it served your purpose? If you only believe in your own advantage you would have to agree that that is a miserable place to have ended up.’ She picked up her cigarettes and threw them down. ‘Why didn’t you make the woman strong?’

‘Who is strong? Hitler? Florence Nightingale? Thatcher? She wishes to be strong, impervious to human perplexity. Wouldn’t that be more accurate?’

He tried to look at her evenly. She had never come at him like this. She had been confused and tolerant and afraid of losing him. They had parted suddenly, abruptly. But for over a year they had spoken on the phone several times a day, and seen one another in the most excessive situations. He had often wondered why they had not been able to continue; he had even considered seeing her again, if she wanted to. They had got along.

If Natasha was clumsy and felt that her elbows protruded; if she walked with her feet turned out, despite having tried to correct this during her childhood, she brought this to his attention. If she was quick and well read, whatever she knew was inadequate. There was always a spot, blemish, new line, sagging eyelid or patch of dry skin on her cheek which it was impossible for her not to draw attention to. She lacked confidence, to say the least, but had attacks of impassioned self-belief, gaiety and determination which she later condemned. After laughing loudly she clapped her hand over her open mouth. But she wouldn’t be suppressed; when she had a fear or phobia, she made a note of it, and fought. Perhaps when she was in her fifties she would reach a cooler equilibrium.

As he looked, her outline seemed to blur. It wasn’t only that past and present were merging to form a new picture of her, it was that a third person was sitting with them. This had happened before. Natasha had seemed to place between them another woman, a fiction, who resembled Natasha but was her denial and her Platonic ideal. This Natasha, the pop star, was cool, certain, smart. Photographed in a different light, in better clothes, good at ballet, cooking and conversation, this figure dragged Natasha along to better things, while undermining and mocking her. They had both fallen in love with this desirable prevailing woman who haunted them as a living presence, but would never let them possess her. Compared with her, Natasha could only fail. They had had to find others – strangers – to witness and worship the ideal Natasha; and, when the illusion failed, like a cinema projector breaking down, they had to get rid of them.

‘You wrote a bit,’ he said. ‘You know how diverse and complex the sources of inspiration are.’

‘I still write,’ she said. ‘Despite your laughing at me.’

‘It was justice you were interested in, and how to live. Literature makes no recommendations. It’s not a guidebook but you did learn that the imagination lifts something up and takes it somewhere else, altering it as it flies. The original idea is only an excuse.’

She pretended to choke. ‘The magic carpet of your imagination didn’t fly you very far, baby. Why did you take parts of me and put them in a book? Nick, you were savage about me. I’ve asked people about this.’

‘They agree with you?’ She nodded. He said, ‘What are you doing these days?’

‘I finished my training. Now I work as a therapist. I have credit card debts up to here. They took the car. Once you start sinking you really go fast. You couldn’t –’ She shook her head. ‘No, no. I’m not going to degrade myself.’

‘Not more than you usually like to,’ he said.

‘No. That’s right. Hey. Look.’

She threw her cigarette down and pushed up her sleeve. Drawing a breath, she pushed. There was an appreciable swelling. ‘I’ve been going to the gym.’

He wondered if she required him to squeeze the muscle. ‘Popeye’s been eating her spinach,’ he said.

‘It makes me feel good,’ she said.

‘That’s all that matters.’

‘I’ve got into young men.’

‘Good.’

He noticed that her ears were pierced in several places. Perhaps she had violated herself all over. It would be like going to bed with a cactus. He wouldn’t mention it. The less he said, the sooner it would be over. He saw he was only there to listen. However, something came to him.

‘My mind hasn’t entirely gone,’ he said. ‘But these days I do pick up a book and have no memory of what I read yesterday. However, I was labouring through a seven-hundred-page biography of someone I liked. It bulged with facts. Almost the only part I found irresistible was the subject’s sciatica and slipped disc – you know how it is at our age. In the end I had no idea what the man might be like. Everything personal and human was missing. Then I thought: where else could you get the complexity and detail of inner motion except in fiction? It’s the closest we can get to how we are inside.’

She looked away. ‘I’ve never had a vocation.’

‘Why don’t you go to Spain?’

‘What? Vocation, I said.’

‘Why does a vocation matter?’

‘I want to find something to be good at. One of my patients is a skinhead, sexually abused by his mother and sister. I don’t think he can even read his own tattoos. It is not me he’s hating and sapping as he sits there saying “cunt, cunt, cunt”. Why am I compelled to help this bastard? Nick, you’re omnipotent and self-sufficient in that little room with your special pens that no one’s allowed to touch, the coffee that only you can make, music where you can reach it, postcards of famous paintings pinned in front of you. Is it the same?’

‘Exactly.’

‘You were always retreating to that womb or hiding place. What made me cross was how you placed the madness outside yourself – in me, the half-addicted, promiscuous, self-devouring crazy girl. Isn’t that misogyny?’

He looked startled. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘You made yourself, Nick, you see, before things got … a little mad. You weren’t privileged, like some of those show-off scribblers. I remember you sitting with your favourite novels, underlining sentences. The lists of words pinned up by your shaving mirror – words to learn, words to use. You’d write out the same sentence again and again, in different ways. I can’t imagine a woman being so methodical and will-driven. You want to be highly considered. Only I wish you hadn’t taken a sneaky and spiteful revenge against me.’