My Life as a Man (25 page)

‘They’re making love?’

‘Call it that,’ she said. ‘Let that be enough. Please.’

It was too dark under the trees to see her face.

If I allowed myself to be drawn forward, though I knew in my heart that one day he would kill her and that day would be the end of him, it was because I had a vision of her white face at table,
eyes fixed on him with the gaze of a hypnotist, and could not tell which of them dreamed the nightmare in which they lived.

The first few strokes, desperate to hurry, I tried too hard. I smacked the surface and scooped so awkwardly I fell backwards. After that, I found some rhythm and we began to cut through the
water. Even when we went into the mist, I kept up the same pace, concentrating on the dip and pull until, not slowly but suddenly, the oars became like leaden weights that I could hardly lift.

‘Is it much further?’ Her face was only a shape of whiteness. The words might have been spoken by the mist itself.

With a groan I bent forwards, staring at my hands. They were locked into claws, the backs beaded with blood where I had pushed aside branches under the fallen tree after we had drawn one another
past the pool, its surface dark and shiny as the lid of a coffin. Resolved to get through and find the line of rocks to cross the stream, I hadn’t felt the stabbing of the thorns as they dug
into me.

‘It wasn’t this far,’ I said.

‘But it’s hard to tell, when we can’t see.’

‘We should be at the other side.’

‘There’s nothing to guide you.’

‘I could be rowing down the loch. Or in circles.’

I heard panic rise like floodwater, scummed and swirling, under my words. I had lost us. I could do nothing right. I would steer back at last to a bank where a naked woman and a man waited for
us, the man with a knife in his hand.

‘It’s not your fault,’ the mist voice said.

In response, I lifted the oars again and the sound of them striking the water was answered. From somewhere ahead of us, an engine coughed into life.

It was a lorry pulled into a passing place on the single-lane road. The driver had been wakened by the cold and started the engine to warm the cabin. He gave us a lift all the way to Aberdeen,
and didn’t ask any questions, being more interested in his life than ours. The parliament in London, apparently, had just passed a law that would make separation for seven years grounds for a
divorce. The question was, would it apply in Scotland, which had its own legal system? He and his wife had been parted for three years. ‘Only four to go,’ he explained more than once.
He wouldn’t take any money and in the depot in Aberdeen found another lorry for us. That was how we got as far as Manchester. That driver took money from Eileen, and she had only enough left
in her purse to pay for one room for a night in the cheapest boarding house we could find. In the room, she put down the small case from August’s bedroom. Once we’d found it,
she’d shown no interest in the contents and I decided discussing what we should do could wait till morning.

A faint smell of stale smoke hung in the air. A cigarette stub sat in a tin ashtray on the night table by the bed. Apart from the bed, there was a single chair by the window, a wardrobe, a
folding canvas stand to take a case, a hanging bulb with a brown shade, and in a corner a lamp which flickered and went out when we tried it. It was a double bed.

She began to take her clothes off and I pulled my shirt over my head. We hadn’t kissed or touched one another. We undressed standing on either side of the bed, and when I was stripped I
stood and watched as she became naked. I saw the hair between her legs and the weight of her breasts, the way they were big and hung down a little. She knelt on the bed, and leaning on it with one
hand reached and took hold of me. I felt her hand close round me and by some miracle I didn’t explode. She lay on her back and drew me on top of her. When I felt myself go in, I cried,
‘I’m in, oh, I’m in!’ and she tightened on me and then it happened. I tensed when I heard her laughing, and then I realised she was laughing not at me but with me, and what
was between us was sealed and sealed for ever. And then she came over on top of me.

It was like passing out the way I went to sleep, but when I woke up she was still there. I eased my arm out from under her and got up and put out the light. Even when I’d done that, the
room wasn’t really dark for there was a lamp in the corridor kept on all night, perhaps in case anyone sneaked off without paying, and light leaked in under the door.

From the bed, her voice whispered, ‘Would they have killed us?’

‘Oh, I think so,’ I said.

I got back in and she turned towards me and I put my hand between her legs and she opened up and that was the second time. The second time she started to move, suddenly heaving her body up,
lifting me, grinding against me. She shook and groaned and even when she stopped I went on, back and forward, and she came again and this time I did, too. This time I didn’t go to sleep. I
wasn’t sure whether she was awake. She didn’t say anything. I wanted to see her face, but it was tucked against my shoulder. I lay in the dark and listened to her breathing, and at some
point I must have fallen asleep for she wasn’t beside me. I sat up in a panic, and an indrawn breath made me see her, in the chair near the window.

I got out of bed and pulled up the blinds. It was early. A little sun glowed like a cinder through a bolster of clouds bunched over the slate roofs of the buildings.

‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘It isn’t cold.’

‘Why did you get up?’ And when she didn’t answer, ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘It isn’t interesting.’

‘Tell me.’

‘You asked me why I married. Do you remember? If I was so happy as a nurse, you said, so glad to be free of my father. I waited for you to ask me if it was because Bernard was rich.’
I made an inarticulate noise mixing protest and apology. ‘It’s true those last months on my own were the happiest of my life. The week before our wedding I went to Bernard’s house
to tell him I didn’t want to go through with it. He said to me, “You don’t know what you want.” He didn’t raise his voice, but for the first time – wasn’t
I a fool? – I understood how terrible it would be for him, in front of all his friends – he had so much pride. I can’t remember what I said. I was trying to say how sorry I was
for him. I think it was my pity that made him rape me. At first I tried to stop him, but he went on. He went on until I didn’t want to stop him. At one point as I climaxed, I cried out, and
he said, “Quietly! My father’s upstairs.” After that, I didn’t try to resist marrying any more. All night I didn’t want to stop him.’

Not finding words, I held her in the circle of my arms. Enfolding her, I made a bargain with myself that I would do everything I could to stop her going to the police. What justice could there
be in anything that might separate us? One of the Morton brothers a murderer, the other a rapist: the world was better off without them. August and Beate were their own punishment. The police might
not believe us. I had all the arguments. Yet even then, bending into the mingled scent of our lovemaking to kiss her, I knew that every bargain has its price.

In a dry tone almost of disbelief she whispered, ‘And now he’s dead. What are we going to do?’

‘Live,’ I said.

When we went out in the morning, I didn’t check the number or the name of the street, for it was just a cheap boarding house lost in an anonymous wilderness of red brick in one or another
suburb of the city we stopped in for a night on our way to London.

It wasn’t true that we never quarrelled, yet I think of our worst quarrel as happiness, since I was with her. Apart from our first time together, Eileen used a diaphragm – a Dutch
cap, they called it then – when we made love. Maybe she felt I was too young for the responsibility of children; maybe, at first, she imagined I might leave if she were pregnant. Afterwards,
when she stopped, I used condoms until one day she asked me why. I told her that the doctor said it would be dangerous if she had a baby. ‘At my age?’ she wondered bitterly.
That’s how it was at that time. In later years I couldn’t bear to hear of those mothers of forty or more, even mothers of fifty! And when she told me, “I’d risk dying for
your child,” it was too late – it never happened.

I’d been nodding wherever it seemed appropriate as the cardiologist talked, but now I realised he’d fallen silent and was looking at me. ‘You’re taking this very
calmly,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you understand what I’m saying?’

My mother was dead. My father had died long ago. My wife was dead. I had met her in the middle of the last century. It was just before the British had herded the Kikuyu together, when
men’s mouths were filled with mud and some were beaten to death in a camp called Hola. Were preparations undertaken that year, contracts made, bribes taken? What did it matter? After the Nazi
death camps, all of us knew that Europe of the high culture was a continent of torturers. That was the dirty secret of the dull Fifties and all the decades that followed. What did it matter? The
sickness was in the air and it travelled to all the continents of the world so that it seemed colour and creed no longer mattered since they were only excuses for what united men, their need to
hurt one another. What did it matter? After beating away unnoticed all my life, my heart had turned traitor. In the republic of the body, it had grown restless. It was a presence now, a dull space,
a hollowness or a tremor that left me feeling squeamish.

It seemed that I had come to a destination out of the corner of my eye as it were, for when I got up at three in the morning, after lying awake for hours, I found not one but three unopened
containers of opiates in the medicine cabinet. I shaved, avoiding my eyes in the mirror, dressed more carefully than usual, and took the pills down to the kitchen.

I had them piled high in front of a bottle of whisky and the first glass poured when I thought that someone would have to find me. I shrank from the idea of a neighbour alarmed by a smell; a
workman coming on me by accident. I would write a letter to the police, I decided, and go out now and post it. Deep in thought, the chime of the doorbell startled me to my feet. I peered cautiously
through the glass of the front door, and made out a shape darker than the night behind it. For an instant I believed it was the police, and was as bewildered as if I were already dead.

I was astonished to find my neighbour on the step. He had been with one of the banks, working on acquisitions, but had already retired when we took the house next to them. He was fully dressed,
with his coat on, and carrying a plastic shopping bag.

‘Walter?’ I asked, as if testing an improbability.

‘I saw your kitchen light was on. Can I come in?’

I stepped aside but then, as he headed down the corridor, remembered the pills and whisky and directed him into the front room. Unlike the kitchen, the front of the house faced north and the
leather of the armchair felt cold as we settled on either side of the empty hearth.

We were neighbours, not friends. We chatted across the garden fence in summer. ‘I flew all over Europe on business. Enjoyed every minute of it. I won’t tell you I don’t miss
it. I feel I could still do it, but nowadays it’s all about what age you are. And it wasn’t all business. What people don’t know doesn’t hurt them, and I wouldn’t have
hurt Jean for the world, but when you’re far from home, eh? You know what they say: on your deathbed, it’s not the women you’ve slept with you’ll regret, it’s the ones
you haven’t!’ How many times I’d heard Walter on that refrain, like a continuous loop. It alternated with an interest in maps and military campaigns, fuelled, it seemed, by
nostalgia for national service. When I told him I’d missed out on those delights because of flat feet, I’d gone down in his estimation.

That was Walter, thick glasses, round belly, white hair, soldier and Casanova. Eileen had liked Jean, who had welcomed us when we moved in and died the following year of cancer of the stomach.
That was something we had now in common, being widowers, but this was only the second time Walter had been in my front room.

His previous visit had been a strange one, too. ‘I don’t know if you’ll even feel like voting. Your wife not long taken from you, but life goes on, I found that.’
I’d had a strong temptation to take him by the neck and throw him over the doorstep, but had brought him in here instead; welcoming him as a voice to break the silence. ‘I’ve
never done this before, Harry, going round the doors like this. It’s a new party – just a small one, but it’ll grow, I shouldn’t be surprised, and I think you’re
exactly the kind of man it’ll appeal to.’ As he rhymed off policies on education, health and fishing, it made a kind of sense, though all slightly askew, like politics conducted through
the looking glass. ‘And then there’s the constitution. What we’re going to do is get rid of the MEPs and reduce the number of MPs from seventy-two to fifty-six. And they’ll
do both jobs, Holyrood and Westminster. That way, you see, we’ll be able to get rid of the new parliament building and all the MSPs as well, and there’ll be no problem about reserved
powers.’ At that point, I’d started to laugh; but he, it seemed, was perfectly serious and he’d left a leaflet as proof.