Cupid's Dart (7 page)

'Tell me about your other women,' she whispered.

'Well, there was my brief dalliance, lovely neglected word, dalliance, with a florist from Littlehampton.'

'But the affair never blossomed.'

'Don't laugh at me. No, Ange, do. Yes, do laugh at me. I want you to laugh at me. I need to be laughed at.'

'Any more, Casanova?'

'Well, Rachel, of course, and doesn't that "of course" tell you everything? Rachel was a radiologist from Reading. I think the alliteration attracted me as much as anything.'

'But you weren't on the same wavelength.'

'How did you know?'

'It was a joke. Radio, wavelength – and you can't say "Yes, I recognise that as a joke", because you didn't.'

'It
was
a joke. Our relationship. Except it wasn't funny. We drifted into going out and neither of us had the willpower to end it or the knowledge of how to end it. Rachel hadn't got a sexy bone in her body. There were kisses, fumblings. Neither of us wanted to go any further and neither of us would admit it. It was a nightmare.'

She remained silent. I was really enjoying getting things off my chest in that dark womb of a room, in the middle of that extraordinary night. There are few things more enjoyable than to have a good listener, and I was able to talk about myself with a fluency that perhaps I had never before achieved.

'Anyway, after Rachel, I seemed to decide that I was, if not a natural celibate, at least a natural bachelor. I like college life, the enclosed world of the institution, my book-lined study, Madeira in the senior common room, the cloistered calm broken only by the distant rumble of donnish rivalries. I couldn't see myself helping with the washing up, and emptying the teapot over the lupins, and telling the kiddies all about Tommy the Tortoise. In the modern phrase, or probably the phrase isn't modern at all by the time I got to know about it, it isn't my scene.'

I paused. She didn't reply. I could tell from her breathing that I didn't have a good listener after all. She was fast asleep again.

In the morning, over breakfast in the hotel's inelegant, self-service restaurant, I told her how much I had enjoyed her company. She didn't say that she had enjoyed my company, but she didn't say that she hadn't. My main feeling actually was of awe for her appetite. She ate eggs, bacon, sausages, fried bread, hash browns, baked beans, tomatoes, and mushrooms, and she was so slim.

I found even my meagre repast of muesli and fruit salad hard to swallow, so nervous was I of the question that would have to be asked, even though I dreaded the answer. I tried to make it sound like a casual enquiry of no great importance to me, but my nervousness revealed to me, and probably to her, that it was already more vital than I would have believed possible.

'Shall we do it again some time?'

'We didn't do it this time.'

I frowned.

'Sorry. I'm crude, Alan. I'm an Essex girl.'

'You know what I meant. Shall we meet again? I'd like to.'

'Why?'

'Does there have to be a reason?'

'I thought giving reasons was what your philosophy was all about.'

'Fair enough. Yes, there is a reason. I like you. I'm attracted to you, however unlikely that may seem when I left all my clothes on. I've enjoyed being with you. I want to see you again. You liven me up. I believe you can make me happy. Are those enough reasons for you?'

She took a forkful of hash brown and baked beans and spoke through them, which I didn't like. I might have to speak to her about that one day.

'Tell you what,' she said. 'I'd like to see you in your natural surroundings. In your college. That'd be a laugh.'

That I hadn't expected. That I hadn't wanted to do. I wanted to keep her entirely secret, meet her only on neutral territory. She didn't want that. She wouldn't accept that. She had outmanoeuvred me. I admired that.

We arranged for her to come to Oxford on the following Tuesday.

I felt so happy as my train slid slowly out of Paddington Station,
I wanted to tell the whole carriage that I had spent the night with a delightful
young woman, but by the time we passed the massive cooling towers of Didcot
my euphoria had gone. I was returning to reality. I would spend the afternoon
with an old woman whom nobody could describe as delightful. It was my day
for visiting my mother.

My mother's room was on the first floor. It wasn't small, but it was too full of furniture. She had brought with her two armchairs and a coffee table. Their elegance served only to emphasise the cheapness of the institutional bed, the rickety dining table, the two hard chairs, the shabby wardrobe, the bulky commode. She always used the commode now, saying that she could no longer get to the lavatory, but I think the real reason was that she had a horror of lavatory seats: you could catch things off them. She was high on the list for a room with a lavatory. Only two residents needed to die, so it wouldn't be long – but it wouldn't surprise me if, after complaining about her room for nine years, she would refuse to move from it. She had always been stubborn, and in old age she had become contrary.

It was stifling in the room, and there was just a faint lingering smell from her earlier use of the commode.

'Hello, Mother.'

Peck on the cheek. No warmth. It would be better to skip it, really, but we can't. We are locked into the gesture.

I had never loved my mother. Did I dare I tell Ange that? Would she think me a monster? I had never loved my mother because she had never given me a chance to love her, because she had never loved me.

I lifted the cake from the carrier bag.

I always took her a cake. Cakes were her weakness. In the past I had occasionally taken flowers, but she had always found fault: 'You know I don't like irises'; 'You shouldn't bring anything blue, Alan. This room can't take blue.' Cakes were safer. There are very few blue cakes.

'I've brought you a cake, Mother. Coffee cream.'

'Thank you. Very nice, though I prefer chocolate.'

Even cake is not entirely safe.

'How are you?'

Once I had made a big mistake. I had said, 'How are we?' and she had said, 'Oh, not you as well. I am not half-witted, Alan. I do not have to be pluralised. Your father would hate to hear you say that.'

My father had been dead for twelve years at the time.

'Oh, mustn't grumble,' she said. 'I'll get no visitors if I grumble, will I? Not that I get many anyway.'

'You get me.'

'Occasionally.'

'Mother, I come every week.'

Every week for the nine long years in which she has been in the home, clinging on to a life that she no longer enjoys.

'I should hope so. You know I can't go out.'

Mother is full of bitterness. She is angry with the God she has worshipped all her life for not sparing her from old age. She is angry with the University for not having a select home for the elderly relatives of dons. She is angry with my father for dying. She is angry with me for delivering to her only the meagre harvest that she has sown.

'Margaret comes once a month.'

'It's very kind of her, but I'm so relieved when she's gone. She
will
bend over very close to me to emphasise things, and she has very bad breath. I suppose it's cruel of me to say that, but if I can't speak the truth when I'm eighty-seven, when can I?'

After a brief pause, I moved on to safer ground.

'So what did you have for lunch?'

That is about as near as we get to intellectual curiosity in our conversations.

'We had pork.'

'Oh, very nice.'

Contrast that with my saying 'We'll see if it is' when the waiter said, 'Very good, sir.' I was not, when I was at the home, the Alan I was in L'Escargot Bleu. I was not really Alan at all when I was with my mother. I was a shadow. If I could have sent a hologram of me, I would have, and she wouldn't have noticed.

'Well, it wasn't too bad, I suppose, but the apple sauce tasted synthetic.'

I found it interesting that my mother used the word 'synthetic'. Little did she know that Kant, my hero, the author of
Critique of Pure Reason
, which I regarded as the best work on philosophy ever written, had created a very famous phrase, and one that had great importance in the development of what can loosely be called modern philosophy – synthetic a priori knowledge. The process of synthesis was a vital element in linguistic and moral philosophy – in fact, I was trying to suggest, in my book, that it had to be a German who invented that phrase, because Germans were the most thorough people on earth. Enough of that. My point is that the process of synthesising, the putting together of separate parts to form a complex whole, is by definition complex, and is a very advanced process in the world of thought. Then it came into the world of chemistry and of materials. We learnt to talk of clothes made of synthetic material. This material was created by experts and for good reasons. It was held to be superior to the simple natural materials. It used knowledge in order to make improvements. However, the word began to mean 'unreal', 'unnatural', 'artificial'. A word associated with high intellectual activity had gradually become pejorative, hence my mother's use of it to describe her apple sauce.

Why did I write that passage? To show you just how little of the real me was presented to my mother, how vast was the distance between us as we sat so close together in that stale hothouse. I said none of this to her. All I said was 'And to follow?'

'What?'

'What did you have to follow? After the pork?'

She looked at me strangely.

'Alan, that was several minutes ago. You haven't spoken for several minutes. Are you all right?'

'Of course I'm all right, Mother. I was thinking.'

'Oh. That.'

I think my mother believed that philosophy was a childish aberration that I would eventually grow out of, like a passion for horses in young girls. I don't think she considered that I was fifty-five. The only fact that mattered about my age was that I was thirty-two years younger than she was. I didn't think she really believed that she was eighty-seven. That was why she told me so often that she was.

'I know I can't be much fun for you but if you take the trouble to come you might at least say something occasionally.'

'Sorry, Mother. I'm a bit tired.'

A mistake. A tactical error.

'Why? Didn't you sleep well?'

I couldn't tell her that I had spent most of the night talking to a 24-year-old darts groupie in a cheap hotel room in London. Everything that happened in my life became just one more piece of evasion. The more I saw my mother, the greater was the gap between us. The more I saw Ange, the greater the chasm would become.

There weren't many questions I could dredge up when visiting my mother, so I had to be careful not to waste even one of them. With any luck 'What did you have to follow?' might yield a couple of minutes of peace while she described the inadequacy of her pudding, so I asked again now, 'So what did you have to follow?'

'Oh, apple tart and ice cream. I know I'm old-fashioned, but I think it's very common to serve ice cream with apple tart. It should be cream.'

The day my mother didn't find fault with something would be the day she died.

I hated her use of the word 'common'. I made the mistake of telling her so on one occasion, and after that she used it more frequently.

I told her about my trip to Manchester. I told her that my lecture had gone down well and that it had attracted quite a large audience. It was true, but in the face of her lack of response it came out sounding like boasting.

'I thought of stopping off in London, but I decided not to. I hate London,' I lied. I didn't enjoy telling lies and as I told this whopper I sighed – another tactical mistake.

'I know these visits are painful to you, but you needn't make it so obvious,' said my mother. 'I can't help being dull. I can't help being eighty-seven. I didn't ask to be eighty-seven. I didn't ask to sit here alone all week.'

I couldn't let this go.

'Mother,' I said through gritted teeth. 'You wouldn't be alone all day if you took your meals downstairs with the others.'

'I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear to watch that Purkiss woman using her knife and fork wrongly.'

'Mrs Purkiss has dementia, Mother.'

'She used her knife and fork wrongly before she had dementia.'

Mrs Purkiss's real crime, in my mother's eyes, was not her dementia but her living in Cowley. Mrs Purkiss was lower class.

So my mother took her meals on her own, and sat on her own, except for a smelly hour with her friend Margaret once a month, and two hours with me week after week after week after week after week.

At last I felt that I had been there long enough. A quick peck, and out I walked into the glorious fresh air of a wonderful world that contained Oxford, and Gallows Corner, and Ange.

Would she come next Tuesday? I realised that I had escaped
from the tense atmosphere in my mother's room to face six whole days of even
greater tension.

She came. I met her at Oxford Station. Her hair had been done all spiky, she was wearing jeans and that awful Townsend Tissues T-shirt. She wasn't going to get a drink at the Randolph and we wouldn't be going down the road for dinner at Le Manoir aux Quatre Saisons.

We had a quick kiss, a bit gauche on her part as well as mine, but I had the impression that she was really pleased to see me.

There was quite a long wait for the taxi, and I was worried that somebody I knew would see her, but when I didn't see anybody I knew I was disappointed. How ridiculous.

The taxi driver was Eastern European, and I could see that he was disgruntled because the journey was so short.

'I'm not going to be dropped in Chipping Camden just so that you can get rich,' I said.

As we entered Paternoster Quad, which is one of the most beautiful quads in all Oxford, she said, 'Blimey. Is this your gaff?' and linked her arm through mine. I felt quite proud, also very embarrassed and rather annoyed at being manipulated. For years I had felt no emotions at all. Now I was being swamped with contradictory ones.

We passed a group of students whom I didn't know, but they must have known who I was, and they couldn't hide their astonishment. One of the older dons, Damien Finch, tried to keep the astonishment out of his famed mellifluous voice as he said 'Good evening, Alan. Isn't the light stunning?' He paused in his stride, forcing me to say, 'Damien, I don't think you've met Ange Bedwell, have you?'

'No indeed, I have not had that pleasure,' he twinkled. 'How do you do?'

'Hiya,' said Ange.

I led her up the stone staircase to my rooms on the second floor, and opened the heavy oak door. I was immediately conscious of the smell, a mixture of dust and books and age and socks and celibacy. Two sides of the room were lined with bookshelves. A large table was piled with books and papers. There were more papers on an antique desk. There was a window seat under which yet more books were stowed. Two leather armchairs and an occasional table formed the tiny bit of the room that was for social purposes.

'Bleedin' 'ell,' she said. 'All them books.'

'I've got lots more that there isn't room for. Sherry?'

'I'd rather a beer.'

'Beer. Yes, of course. I got some in.'

I found her a beer. As I poured it I said, 'You got time off work, then?'

'Up to me, innit? I'm a temp.'

I nodded, as if to suggest that I knew what a temp was, but it wasn't easy to fool this girl.

'You don't know what a temp is, do you?'

'Not exactly, no.'

'You don't know nothink, do you?'

'It's beginning to look that way. Me and Socrates.'

'A temp's someone who's booked through an agency and works for a firm temporarily. That means I can take days off when I want to. I do a bit as a barmaid down the Black Bull as well, when that old bag who hates me isn't doing the lunches. I can't get over all these books. Tax dodge, are they?'

'They're my most treasured possessions. They're my life. Do you read books at all?'

'Funnily enough, I do. I like a good read. On trains, etcetera . . . red books.'