Four New Words for Love (19 page)

‘Hello?’

‘Vanessa?’ If it’s her he doesn’t recognise this formal phone voice.

‘Christopher?’ The tone has instantly changed. Somehow she’s managed to infuse a three-syllable question with a note of hope. He stares, aggrieved, at the wall separating him
from Gina. One word and he feels he’s already raised her expectations wildly beyond his capacity to meet them.

‘I was just wondering if perhaps you’d like to meet me for coffee. I believe it’s my turn to buy.’

‘I... I... When?’

‘Well, my time’s not taken up. It’s you who runs a business.’

‘Tomorrow? Or is that too soon?’ She is speaking uncharacteristically fast.

‘No. That’s fine with me. Does three o’clock in the same place suit?’

‘Yes. That would be ideal. I look forward to seeing you then.’ Her voice has slowed. She’s almost formal. He guesses this is deliberate, exhaling between clauses to try and
modify the sound of eagerness. She puts the phone down, sealing the bargain before it can be revoked.

He arrives the next afternoon at two fifty-five. He hasn’t mentioned anything to Gina. Vanessa is already there. Gina is sitting across from her, her long apron bunched in her lap. They
appear to be talking effortlessly. At his entrance they both look up. Gina walks towards him and gently touches his shoulder.

‘You kept this quiet.’ She is talking into his lapel. Behind his back she waves away the duty waitress. As he takes a seat Gina returns with two cups of coffee, puts them down and
discreetly returns behind the counter. He’s trying to work out what to say as his spoon revolves and revolves in a small frothy whirlpool of compulsive stirring. Vanessa helps him out.

‘Thank you for inviting me.’

‘What on earth do women find to talk to one another about? You two have hardly met yet you looked thick as thieves. In a nice way, I mean.’

‘The obvious answer would be to say we were talking about you. But we weren’t.’

‘Sometimes I wish I understood women more.’

‘Do you?’

He thinks for a moment. What would it be like? Understanding things that aren’t manifestly obvious. Not facts. He’s probably forgotten more of those than many will ever know, but
feelings. He imagines being helplessly receptive to the cacophony of other people’s feelings, the clamour of silent wants.

‘No. Not really.’

She touches his sleeve and smiles at him. He smiles back.

Perhaps this is going to be all right.

* * *

Christmas is accelerating towards them. He finds himself anticipating its arrival in a way he hasn’t since childhood.

‘Where are all your decorations?’

He shows her a small box in the garage that yields a paltry synthetic tree.

‘Marjory didn’t go in much for Christmas.’

‘You don’t say.’

Her response at each revelation of his married life is becoming harder, as her dislike for his dead wife grows.

‘She thought a real tree caused a mess.’

‘A real mess, with a real smell. Marjory didn’t go in much for anything that didn’t suit her, did she?’

‘I don’t suppose so.’

He comes home one evening to a neon reindeer in the front garden, encouraged by a flashing Santa. Deborah and Oscar will take it in the spirit it’s intended, but it will apoplex some of
the other neighbours. Marjory would have died. That’s probably why she did it. He goes in. She has been to Woolworths. The hall is a tacky grotto. A real tree dominates the front room.

‘Good – isn’t it?’ She is animated over dinner. He is quiet.

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing. All this,’ waving towards the hall and the tinsel she has hung above the pictures, ‘do you believe it?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘I think it does.’ He remembers midnight mass with his mother; her squeeze of his hand on the stroke of the hour; the candles, the uplit faces, the hymns, the goodwill on the steps
afterwards, bathed in a flowing out of grace from the lighted church behind; greetings in the cold air to the same people, somehow renewed in the mystery. ‘Either it’s just a bunch of
ornaments and over spending adding up to nothing, or they’re the garland round the real reason: “The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor”.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A poem describing the scene in the stable.’

‘Oh
that
.’

Yes, he thinks,
that
, and everything it implies. And he has wanted to believe it ever since he didn’t, a birth that tilted the world.

‘I don’t think it does matter. And I don’t think it’s all just ornaments and overeating. Even if there was no stable and even no baby, where’s the harm if it makes
people a bit nicer to one another for a couple of days? There’s the rest of the year for folk to be complete bastards. Think of all those coins dropped in all those boxes just because
it’s Christmas.’

And he thinks in a way she’s right, the same way he’s not wrong. And this Christmas he has her.

‘And it’s a time for families’ he concedes, colossally hitting the wrong note. He’s thinking of separated people given a reason not to drift further from one another, but
she has interpreted this in some way that twists her mouth again as she frowns at her food. He has a sense of telescoping, seeing his predicament from afar, last experienced when confronted with
another casual revelation of Marjory’s smallness. They are an old man and a young woman of slender acquaintance in a suburban kitchen, one light in the hundreds of thousands in the humming
conurbation. He is the last of his line. Since the death of his mother this is the nearest thing he has experienced to a family, and it’s not real. He has conjured this because he wanted it,
perhaps at some level even still needed it. His casual remark has distressed her and he doesn’t know how to make amends, because he realises how little he knows her.

‘There’s fruit salad,’ she says, listlessly.

On Christmas morning he wakes to a vacant silence. The dog lies across his legs wearing a sparkling collar that wasn’t there when he followed Christopher to bed. He taps her door to no
reply. The delicatessen is closed. The folded scarf on the hall table has a premonitory weight. Her house keys fall from its folds. The kitchen is clinically clean, with none of the aftermath of
last night’s meal. There are precise written instructions concerning the half-prepared Christmas dinner, but no note about anything else. He takes the dog out, scrambles some eggs, sits in
front of the television and regards the wrapped presents beneath the tree. The dog makes intermittent trips to the hall and back, looking for her. Deborah comes through around lunch time with
presents.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think to buy for you.’

‘Gina did. She delivered them yesterday. Where is she?’

‘She’s gone back to Scotland... I think.’

Deborah absorbs this, pauses in the delivery of her next question and decides not to ask. ‘I’ll leave the presents beneath the tree, shall I?’

‘Yes. If you don’t mind. I’m not opening my stuff just yet.’

‘We’re eating in two hours. There’s tons.’

‘There’s tons here too. She left me instructions.’

‘The offer’s there. There’s no need to be on your own.’

‘Thank you.’ She kisses him.

But he is on his own. He sets the oven and times the steps as indicated. She’s been meticulous in her instructions but hasn’t halved the quantities. A single ironic cracker has been
left out. He leaves the television at a low murmur, to give the illusion of human communion. The meal is joyless. He takes the dog out again after dark and mimes a hearty greeting to the boys next
door as they wave to him from the front room. Jacob holds up a glass of beer and beckons him in. Christopher points to the dog and in the direction of the common, and walks off before the
invitation can be repeated from the front hall. He returns from the opposite direction to avoid their hospitality and stumbles over the darkened reindeer.

He cracks some nuts for the sound of the detonation and then decides he doesn’t want them. At the sound of the front door his heart stutters. A series of contradictory thoughts shuttle
back and forth at a speed that outpaces his physical reactions. Why would she ring if she has a key? She doesn’t – it was in the scarf. She’s returned? Was she ever away? Was this
an excursion? He yanks open the door to find Vanessa in the same pose as the barbecue evening, with the same crepe-wrapped bottle and a present under her arm.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. No, please, please.’ He waves her in with a magnanimity he doesn’t feel. The dog looks at her and is disappointed. She walks into the kitchen and surveys the remains
of his meal, the solitary cracker. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think to get you a present.’

‘Gina did. She handed it in yesterday.’

‘That was thoughtful.’

‘Where is she anyway?’ This obviously isn’t the time for exchanging presents. She puts hers on the floor and nudges it with her foot towards the skirting.

‘I don’t know. She didn’t say. Her thoughtfulness seems to have been all used up seeing to presents.’ It’s uncharacteristically peevish. She sits, still in her
coat, looking at him intently. ‘Excuse me for forgetting my manners. Have you eaten?’

‘Yes. But I’ll have a glass of wine.’

He pours them both a glass and sits opposite her. ‘Would you like me to take your coat?’

She shrugs it off and leaves it hanging on the back of the chair, arms trailing. She’s about to ask if he has called the police when she realises the absurdity of it. And say what? A girl
he has been looking after and about whom he knows next to nothing may or may not have decided to leave. She wonders if he appreciates how uncomfortable the attention focused on his relationship
with Gina would make him. She is fairly sure that since Gina came to stay here he has become more of a cause celeb among their little tribe than she imagines she is. She also knows the decency of
his intentions have shielded him from knowing any of this. Even at this age he’s still reluctant to believe that other people can be otherwise motivated. Considering the length of time he was
exposed to Marjory she thinks this makes him either a fool or a hopeless idealist. His look of baffled concern makes him strangely childlike. Her feeling flows towards him like lava.

‘Are you going to go and look for her?’

‘She hasn’t been away for long enough yet.’

‘If it gets to the time when she has been, will you look?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you want me to come?’

‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t expect so. I wouldn’t drag you traipsing all round the place because I’m disappointed in someone’s behaviour.’

‘When people say ‘If there’s anything I can do’ they don’t mean literally
anything.
They mean if there’s anything I can do within reason given the
extent of our friendship.’

‘I know. I’ve got cards from Marjory’s churchy stalwarts to prove it. Or at least I had.’

‘If there’s anything I can do. If you go and you want me to go, I will. If it will help lessen it, I’ll share a disappointment. If you need me to look after the dog then say
so.’ She finishes the wine with a glug, stands, slides her arms back into the coat sleeves and shrugs the coat back on. ‘If you need to look, and you want to do it on your own,
I’ll be here when you get back. Stay where you are. I can see myself out.’

By eight o’clock he is in his pyjamas, still poring over her cavalier departure, wondering why she had set so little store in what had come to matter to him. By nine o’clock he is
angry at her for having disrupted the equilibrium it took him so long to establish, for avoiding the ordeal of a proper goodbye. At the very least she owed him that. He had not taken her for a
coward. At the dog’s insistent scratching he lets it into the back garden. The kitchen light reflects from the shrouded dome of the barbecue, glistening blackly in the pattering drizzle. The
dog completes a futile round of the shrubbery, looking for her, until Christopher summons him indoors. Despite the day’s inactivity the turbulence has exhausted him. He climbs the stairs
leaving the dishes behind.

He wakes with a profound sense of worry. His dreams have been a catalogue of destitute scenarios. He knows so little about her, how can he be sure her motives were selfish? There may be some
compulsion he doesn’t know about. She may have been forced back to something sinister. She didn’t say she wasn’t coming back because she didn’t say anything.

The shop is open tomorrow. Should he phone to see if she gave notice to quit or go on holiday? What’s the point? He believes that she cares more for him than the job, and if she’d
leave him without notice why would she tell the shop? She still has a coat on the hall stand. There is a greyness to everything that can’t be attributed just yet to the return of dust. She
has taken the colour with her. He stands outside her room and, ridiculously, knocks. He pushes the door open and stands on the threshold, peering in, as if hoping to divine something from the
arrangement of the furniture.

It’s tidy and doesn’t show any signs of impulsive departure. There are clothes still hanging in the closet, but he doesn’t know if this is a good sign or not: whatever
she’s taken with her is more than she arrived with. She’s obviously used to travelling light. On her bedside is a book of Yeats’ poems, taken from the shelves downstairs that she
brought up here following his reference to the stable. Various of his other books litter other surfaces. She has pored over these over the months, when he has mentioned something she knew nothing
about. Whatever haunts her, there is more than one hunger there. He didn’t know his words carried this weight.

He hesitates at her bedside bureau. But he has come this far. It yields nothing unexpected. There is no money, which, he decides, is not a good sign. The chest of drawers has a rationale he can
understand: socks and balled up tights in the bottom drawer, the others working their way up the body. The middle drawer has a confusion of pastel bras and flimsy things that pass for pants. He
closes this quickly and looks over his shoulder, as if expecting to be caught. The top drawer contains jumpers, various tops and the acrylic scarf he derided. He picks this up with a static
crackle. Beneath is a shoe box. He looks at this, blinking for a few seconds, sensing something portentous. He takes it to the bed and sits down, staring at it for a silent minute. This is a
further intrusion, but he’s already seen her underwear drawer. It may only be receipts.