Fullalove (11 page)

Amid all the noise of the city, there is an echo, an experience of quietness which is almost African in quality. ‘Even,’ I want to say. ‘Even, stand up. Don’t cry. Forgive me.’ But it is barely dawn yet where Even is living, in a quiet subdivision near a lake. The woman glances back at me sleepily, trustingly, when she feels my hand on her neck and hears the sound of my wife’s name.

Like many people of my age, I can remember as a boy squinting in through the window of the pub used most often by my parents – a popular local called The Duchess of Sunderland, in their case – trying to piece them together from the morselated images made by the ground and intricately engraved glass. I’d stand on the low sandstone windowsill with my eye close up against the refracting bulb of a thistle or the distorting leg of a fleur-de-lys, trying to locate them and piece them together in the promiscuous press of bodies in the bar. It is always winter, and there is always a fire whose fire colour divides and bleeds into the pattern incised into the window like molten metal running in troughs; and there is an excited hubbub in which I try to hear things that I’m not supposed to hear, but don’t know what. I suppose I imagined forbidden things taking place in there: furtive gropings, banned substances being palmed, life-threatening infidelities – the dirty doings I read about weekly in the
News
of
the
Screws
that they thought they had hidden out of harm’s way, and that I guiltily tugged my todger to when I was sure I was at home on my own.

The world beyond the glass represented, from my child’s perpective, a kind of deep-sea space in which they had the opportunity to immerse themselves – a luminous, beneficent, dense element – and in which I would immerse
my
self, when the time came. The barriered elsewhere of another world.

Since I came into my inheritance it is the pell-mell, workaday world that has taken on a dreamy aspect, observed, as I so often observe it, from the bibulous, business side of the frosted glass. In the last few years a new rhythm – a pendulum pattern – has imposed itself on the frantic comings and goings of the daytime pavement traffic. Outside certain pubs at a certain time of the day
now you will see men in suits ambulating backwards and forwards, metronomically up and down, talking into wafers of angled plastic and maintaining the even pace of the big-cat enclosure or the prison yard. They never trespass beyond the physical boundary of the pub, or stray more than a foot or two from the windows, and are as much a part of the street life as Simon-the-pieman or the rag-suited newsmonger or the little flower girl with her tray of violets were in days of yore. They have become a modern, lulling presence: dark, unfocused figures, between drinks, jawboning about product-flow and component compatibility and profit centres, and intent on giving the impression that they are anywhere other than where they are, which is thirty seconds from the next chugalug (nobody is fooled). And always, in the background, the subliminal bloom of London’s red buses, fogged below the advertising streamer, clear above it, like old-fashioned doctor’s pick-me-ups, settled in the bottle.

The Cinq-Mars is one of many London pubs famous for its Dylan Thomas connection. There is nothing to commemorate the fact that Dylan drank here (it is well off the tourist route). But it was the Dylan link that gave me the excuse to make it the kicking-off point on one of my first dates with Even.

Even was a striking, even eccentric, dresser in those days. She bought most of her clothes at street-markets or charity shops, and wore her hair plaited or coiled in braids around her ears. She wore jet necklaces, amber ear-rings, fishnet stockings, Utility dresses, plum-coloured lipstick and ankle socks. She smoked slim panatellas and could hold her drink. It was my idea to start off at The Cinq-Mars and spend the rest of the night doing a Dylan Thomas pub-crawl, in character, as Caitlin and Dylan. (We had fallen gratefully on the Thomases as a conversational gambit the first time we went out together. Even told me that Caitlin had been a dancer with the Tiller Girls at the Palladium, and later with the
Folies
Bergère
in Paris, facts which I didn’t know, and was pleased to learn.)

I wore a loud Viyella shirt and a Donegal-tweed tie for the occasion. Even turned up in a demob great-coat and a ratty fox
fur with two road-crash heads and two pairs of tortured button eyes. She had a light ale and we stood at the crowded bar at The Cinq-Mars, which was a pub still popular then with the working man. ‘The heavy scents of the masses,’ I said, lacking all conviction, quoting I’m-not-sure-who, but not Dylan Thomas. ‘With their disturbing messages of the intimate life.’

‘Which March-the-fifth do you think it is?’ Even asked after a while. ‘The name of this pub,’ she said, when it was clear I had no idea what she was talking about. Nobody who went there on a regular basis used the French pronunciation. Everybody always referred to it as The
Sink
-Mars
,
and it irritated me that she didn’t know. I had always thought of the planet anyway, not the month. It had been a favourite watering-hole of Burgess and Maclean and their crowd in the early fifties, around the same time the Thomases were regulars. I considered telling Even this, but I involuntarily did something else instead. I lifted the flap on the pocket of the coat she was wearing, and tipped the two inches of beer sitting in my glass straight in. ‘That wasn’t supposed to happen yet,’ she protested. ‘We were supposed to build up to the bad behaviour part. The fisticuffs, the public spats. But’ – here she took the fluff and sodden bus tickets and wet rubbish from her pocket and rammed it down my shirt – ‘if that’s how you want to play it, it’s fine with me.’

We continued on to The Uncommercial Traveller (ice projectiles, Chinese burns, upsetting several other people’s drinks), and then The Frozen Deep, where, both of us well on the way to being properly
in
drink
now, the aggression took a serious turn. I got her in a half-Nelson until she begged to be let go; she ground a lighted panatella into the back of my hand, leaving an ash-rimmed glutinous crater. In a deserted garden square between The Frozen Deep and The Billy Bigelow we completed the process we had embarked on, and started hitting out at each other with an intention to really hurt. After a few minutes of this, Even took to her heels in the rain in tears, her foxes skinny and bedraggled, and I went and had another drink.

After the wedding (a quiet affair at Caxton Hall, although her
father, the rag-worm and maggot millionaire, had pushed for a big production), we spent a week in a wooden birdwatchers’ hut on a tidal marsh in Norfolk, reading by candlelight at night, watching the contents of the chemical toilet bobbing perkily outside the door in the mornings.

Even lost the taste for drink when she was pregnant with Tristan. She never went back to smoking after Jennifer was born. By the mid-seventies, in step with the magazines who employed her, she was experimenting with ‘good’ carbohydrate-based meals – cereals, wholegrain rice, lentils – and soya-based meat substitute. By 1978, when I moved out, she was a wild-eyed, carotin-coloured, card-carrying convert. She’d lie in bed at nights boning up on passive smoking and hydrogenated fats and retin-A, her corded neck, her rope-veined hands, her swarthy chest pulsing out their admonishments.

The house was full of yoghurt, filtered water, and people flossing. ‘But Daddy you can’t
eat
that,’ Jennifer would wail when she saw me sitting down to my ‘empty’ calories (usually Frosties and a ketchup-topped bacon sandwich) in the mornings. I tried to explain that I
liked
the taste of diesel oil after it had been whipped up into a huge lump and pumped into doner kebabs and cheese slices and tangy snacks with flashes offering the chance to win a VW Golf Cabriolet and happy cartoon characters on their packets (my passport to the twiglet zone). Got actual pangs for the taste of Wonderloaf with its industrial yeast, treated flour, negative air and carcinogenically refined white sugar (unrivalled at soaking up the alcohol still sloshing round the system from the night before).

And I wasn’t
just
being perverse. I knew the stuff I was cramming into my body was crap, but I also knew there was something seductive and pleasure-giving about it that had to do with resolving the distance you feel between the way you understand the external world and your emotional response to it. I was also convinced that in some ways it was a class issue (part of the reason I felt like a put-upon minority in my own home). Both my parents might have reamed out their systems with E-numbers
and saturated fats and carbohydrates, but at least they didn’t spend their last years (I told Even) looking as if they’d just been given barbed-wire enemas. It seemed that the stringier Even had got, the more solemn she had become. ‘Food’s a very political area,’ she’d explode at me. ‘You don’t seem to realise. Take a lot of cheap shit, make it look palatable and taste palatable, and people make fortunes. They have to keep selling this shit that people like you think is delicious to keep making money from it. There’s not much money in selling a parsnip.’

‘Do you know what you’re turning into?’ I’d snap back at her. ‘You’re turning into the sort of woman they seal the water glasses and toilet seats in hotels for. Mizz Crab-Apple, 1977.’ And so on.

Even had a theory, from which she wouldn’t be budged, that my breakdown was virtually one hundred per cent diet-related. And while she had me as a passive victim, I submitted to her regime of gin-seng and royal jelly and vitamin and mineral supplements. But, as I recovered, we reverted to our former positions, and bumped along, agreeing to disagree.

We had been separated for more than two years when Even met Glen Leithauser at some trade show or food industry convention, and within weeks (even now I’m hazy on the exact timetable – it might even have been within days) of meeting him decided to up-stumps and begin a completely new life in America. She took it as given that Tristan, then ten, and Jennifer, aged eight, would be going with her. I was in no position to argue, and in any case had always regarded myself as the big baby in the family; all three of them had always been there to pick up after and wipe and boost and coddle, to parent me. I loved them in a bred-in-the-bone, sentimental sense, but I didn’t
know
them any more than I knew the people whose lives I crashed or greased my way into most weeks of the year, whatever I might have preferred to believe. I only listened when I was being paid to listen and had my antennae twitching for something that would stand up as a strong lead. During the rest of my existence I was on auto-pilot, part man, part machine: RoboHack.

Even organised a brief hello-and-goodbye dinner in a restaurant for the three of us – me, Glen Leithauser, and herself. (It was in fact the first and, so far, the only time I met the man under whose roof my children were to spend those all-important formative years.) I wish there was some gross indiscretion to own up to; I wish I could claim that something bloody-minded and eternally shaming occurred, some brainwarp or rush of blood to the head, a sociopathic lunge, an attempt to skewer Leithauser with the fish knife (on special occasions – of which this apparently counted as one – Leithauser allowed himself fish). In fact it was all as chummy as hell, and it was ‘Glen’ and ‘Norman’ almost before we’d been treated to a recital of the specials of the day.

Leithauser was a pioneer in the field of organically grown fruit and vegetables – peaches, red field tomatoes, tomatillos, eggplants, squash blossoms. Four years earlier he had been selling tomatoes from a garden he had cultivated in a place outside Buffalo to a few restaurants in up-state New York. By the time he met Even in 1981, he was piloting a twin-engined Cessna turboprop and enjoying a reputation as Mister Juicy Organic Tomato of the Eastern Seaboard states.

He was a collegiate lunk with fine brushcut hair and aviator glasses with an irritating luminescent lemon-yellow tint and a certain born-again something about him. He projected the righteous aura, the baritone coolness of the NASA space-age heroes of the sixties, when he would have been only slightly younger than Grissom, Glenn, Shepard and co. In his Shetland sweater and his khakis and his white, just-out-of-the-box New Balance tennis shoes, he could have come fresh from dunkin’ a few balls in the basketball backboard attached to the garage of his ranch-style split-level. Even had had her hair cut in a new, neat asymmetrical style, shingled at the back, and the pair of them could have already been running for one of the cushier offices in the State.

For safety’s sake, we kept the conversation on sap beetles and ground rot and the line in state-of-the-art, value-added organic
gourmet dishes Leithauser was about to start selling into supermarkets all across America. I was able to chip in a few nuggets about Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart and the then Richest Man in America, who I’d just read a profile of in a magazine.

‘Oh yeah, great guy for in-the-trenches retailing and, above all, marketing. The man who revolutionised the show with down-home values,’ Glen Leithauser said, quoting the article, so far as I remembered it, word for word. ‘The guy who I’d really like to meet though is this guy,’ he said, indicating the restaurant muzak, which was then playing a Van Morrison track. ‘I’d get really a heck of a kick out of going up to Van Morrison and addressing him by his real name, which is Ivan.
Ivan.
Can you believe that?’

‘Oh Norman has met all kinds of celebrities,’ Even said, with a look I had come to recognise over the years. To avert the next question, which is always Who is the most interesting person you have ever interviewed?, I jumped in and switched the conversation to the wine. It was a big thick bruiser of a Barolo, and I had it all to myself. They were drinking non-carbonated water without lemon. (A good-cop/bad-cop, third-degree interrogation of the waiter had eventually established that, yes, there was preservative wax on the lemon rind.)

Leithauser paid with the platinum card, then folded and filed the bill conscientiously away in his wallet. Some City boys, in striped shirts and felt braces, were having a boisterous time at another table, swigging champagne, skimming bread rolls at one another.

It was 1981, the summer of the riots. The summer my wife and children crated their belongings and moved out of my life. They have kept sporadically in touch. They send me pictures. Jennifer is studying mathematical physics at Boston University. Tristan graduated
summa
cum
laude
in merchandising, marketing and public relations arts and seems set to inherit what I’m sure he now regards as the family business. ‘It’s all about moving the merch off the shelves,’ he wrote on the last postcard I got from him. On the front was a colour picture of one of the new store
format A&Ps that cater to an upscale consumer base and which Tristan believes represent the future of niche-marketed premium organic perishables.