The Kindness (10 page)

Once it was hers, at a price that meant Julian would have to find another script to write quick, Mr Pym’s greenhouse became the hub of Arbour, the specialist indoor horticultural business Julia was starting with her friend Freda. Freda paid for the van on which Julia painted the company name within garlands of fruiting vine, and they got their business cards printed.

Poor plants! He didn’t know how Julia and Freda could stand it. From where he wrote in his alcove he could see them through the window as they loaded their van one way with pots of glossy clipped box and lollipop trees, open-throated clumps of lilies and branches of orchids swarming with blooms. The return barrows were filled only with sadness, as broken-limbed specimens made it back home from the City, some scattering leaves dry as raffia.

And the flat! By the time Julia had finished with it, entering any room of Cromwell Gardens was to be dazzled by sorbet: every wall was rag-rolled and glazed intense squashed-fruit colours. She made friends with a local upholsterer, rescuing unlikely furniture from dusty shops in Archway. In the sitting room cup-shaped chairs of pale-green velvet and a long table with carved and gilded edges, lamps with shades of painted silk, a plum-coloured sofa on brass lion’s feet. Opium den or strip club, he thought. But in a good way. The central light hung from a moulding the shape and colour of a pomegranate and the plane trees along the street threw their patterns across the walls during the bright summers.

There’s something contradictory, he thinks now, about Julia’s desire for sumptuous opulence in the home. She clothed herself as though to disappear in a crowd. She covered herself up in mannish shirts, stone-coloured trousers rolled up at the ankle, crewneck jumpers in muted shades. Her shoes were either brown loafers or plimsolls. Lipstick was worn only as some sort of special favour to him and somewhere on the journey between Burnt Oak and Cromwell Gardens Julia’s flimsy dresses had simply floated away.

She had wasted no time in getting to the paint shop. He enjoyed how animated she became, flying through the aisles with colour charts, plonking the tins on the counter, him just nodding away, lost in rapture. Sparks flew about her. It was all written in the stars, he was sure. The night before they’d wrestled each other within the flat’s white expanse, rolling on the polished boards like excited children. Their first night there, a few boxes of belongings scattered about. Michael had sent a case of champagne so they sat in their bath towels on acres of floorboards, Julia’s hair damp from the joyously deep claw-footed roll-top. The flames of their first fire made shadows dance around the walls. Clinking the tumblers they’d hastily unpacked, they toasted everything they could think of. They had the central heating pumping; the shivering cold of Burnt Oak would be forgotten in one night. No more typing in fingerless gloves, the sputtering of the cooker’s gas rings inadequate against the December frosts. At Cromwell Gardens he still wrote in the kitchen, but at a desk in an alcove, his viewing screen set up on a stand beside him.

He had a book and a script on the go; Julia was happy to do most of the painting. They toasted their canine benefactors Geddon and Mrs Pericles and the soon-to-be box-office smash that was
Fletch le Bone
. She lay with her head in his lap while he worked his fingers through her drying hair and asked her to marry him, as he so often did. She shook her head, and laughed, confounding and contrary, sitting up and saying what she always said: ‘But don’t ever stop asking me . . .’ kneeling to kiss the end of his nose. ‘I love it so much when you do, and if I marry you you’ll stop asking . . .’ nuzzling him so he had to kiss her back.

‘To not being married,’ she said, clinking her glass to his.

‘To Michael, for all his good advice,’ he said and as Julia raised her tumbler, her towel started to slip and he reached out and tugged it away.

‘To us,’ he said, touching the rim of his glass to her nipple.

Later, with the fire dying and their mattress unrolled in the centre of the room, they whispered to each other about the son or daughter whose little room waited across the hall. Streetlamps projected falling snow on to the white sheets they’d tied at the window, shadow flakes swarming, her lips to his ear.

He was doubtful the next morning as he eased off the first lid with a screwdriver, staring at the bright-pink paint and glancing up to see if she was still certain. Julia nodded, a blue scarf knotted around her head to cover her hair, exposing the precise planes of her face, light catching the bud of her chewed bottom lip, very Vermeer, he thought.

She spent weeks on the ornate cornices, her crazy whim, paints spread on to the board that she used as a palette and artist’s brushes stuck through her hair. She coloured and glazed, purple grapes, sunkissed peaches, every leaf and curl of vine, standing perilously on a plank suspended between two stepladders. She found it meditative, she said, and he massaged her neck when it grew sore. She played her old Bowie CDs – to which she knew all the words – and after supper, while she was singing away with her paintbrushes and
Hunky Dory
, he settled at the kitchen table and into the vernacular of his latest canine alter ego, a glass of wine by his side and from the greenhouse the scent of flowering citrus.

There were velvet curtains at Cromwell Gardens, hung from high and pooling at the floor. In their bedroom a dark mulberry, almost black at night, but richly red with the sun shining through. Every morning a rubied awakening: Julia naked beside him, shaking the night from her hair, the pink light catching her shoulders as the sheets fell away . . .

They played rounds of Perudo, which Julia won more often than him, though, unlike him, she did not apply mathematical principles to the fall of the dice. Their life settled into a pattern of tea breaks where he read bits of his scripts to her, Julia and Freda in and out in the van, potted trees and plants filling the greenhouse, takeaways and fry-ups, shared baths when they scrubbed the day away from each other with flannels, Julia’s soaped body slippery as a mermaid.

Such happy sheets at Cromwell Gardens! Going at it like, what was it Karl had said? Oh yes . . . prairie voles. Julia with her thermometer and ovulation charts, their bedroom the colour of a womb. Stockings, lace, the kitchen table, the garden fence. Elegant proportions, tall windows, Julia leaning out across the sill wearing nothing but that jumper of hers, his eyes drawn to the rosy moon beneath the lavender wool ribbing, candles making a monster of his shadow, a noisy brass bed.

Not long after they moved in, Karl came from Rotterdam to see them, his jacket creased from the flight, comedy eyebrows chevroning high.

Julian plays it back through his mind. Julia perched on her plank across the room and Karl shielding his eyes with his hands, pretending he had to put on his sunglasses to save him from the brightness of the paint. He brought with him from Holland a pair of identical twins in matching tight T-shirts who spoke in stereo. All of it making Julia scowl.

‘Anki and Hendrika.’ They were tiny as dolls and Julian had to stoop to shake their hands. How would he be able to tell them apart?

Karl calling to Julia, gesturing: ‘It’s a palace,’ attempting to win back her favour, walking to the ladder to grab her hands, ‘Jump?’ And Julia pausing to lay down her palette, cleaning the brush with a cloth before poking it through her hair. ‘Come on then, one two three . . .’ Karl said and she grasped his hands so he could swing her to the ground.

The twins perched like bookends beside Karl on the plum sofa. He had put on weight, in fact, Julian noticed the middle button of his shirt had come undone or, knowing his friend’s high-minded disregard for his appearance, was probably missing. He went to the kitchen to open wine. Julia came to fetch glasses and to hiss at him that it was hardly worth bothering to remember the names of any of Karl’s girls, he had so many different ones. ‘He’s rubbing your nose in it,’ she said.

Wine poured, Julian asked Karl about his latest research project. Karl was on the brink of a significant breakthrough. But then, wasn’t he always? The twins, he said, were working with him in Rotterdam and they looked up and nodded, then tilted their heads beneath his chin and continued their own conversation. Karl looked from one to the other in mock dismay. ‘As babies they sucked each other’s thumbs, you know.’ They stopped their conversation and smiled.

‘Sweet,’ said Julian.

‘They graduated from Rotterdam together and Pfizer gave them both a job in my department, lucky me!’ Karl lowered his voice and leant closer to Julian’s ear: ‘And, yes, since I can tell you are dying to know, they do sleep every night in the same bed.’

The twins faux-punished him with sharp admonishments and synchronised pinches to his thighs, then carried on starting and finishing each other’s sentences. ‘Double Dutch,’ Karl said with a smirk as Julia called from the kitchen that they should all sit down at the table.

The dog gives Julian’s hand a lick. They share the remains of the Cheddar and he strokes its muzzle. He stares at the apple trees, at the hammock hanging forlorn and sodden and thinks: perhaps this is all there is. From now on this will be my life, remembering instead of living.

His fingers worry at a dark splodge in the fabric of the window-seat. It’s a little rough there, like a cat’s tongue. Mira’s ice-cream. He was proved right almost as soon as they moved in. Purple velvet was not a sensible choice. But then, when was Julia ever sensible?

Michael’s netsuke monkey has grown warm as a little hand in his. He returns it to the top of the bookcase. He has searched all the bookshelves in the house. Mira’s picture books have been carefully removed. But here his and Julia’s books remain side by side, haphazardly. Only Julia’s plant books have been taken. These paperbacks that are so obviously hers – green-spined Viragos, du Mauriers, Jeanette Winterson, Bridget Jones, for fuck’s sake – he hurls them, pages flying, into a cardboard box that he keeps by the porch. It is filling with a steady tide of her things. When it’s full he plans to tape it up and send it to her.

Nine

Now he’s edited Julia out, there’s a reassuring order to the books in this, his own bookcase. Marvell, Milton, Ricks, Spenser, Virgil, Yeats. Volumes that have been investigated rather than read, spines ridged like geriatric fingernails. Faded covers remind him of the earnest student he was before he set eyes on Julia. He scans the shelves: the pleasing uniformity of Everyman editions, the Bible, Homer and Stanley Fish, his entire reading list packed into tea chests when they fled Mrs Briggs’s with nothing but his unfinished degree, Julia’s marital debts and his mother’s wailing disappointment to accompany them to Burnt Oak.

Several of the cloth bindings have become freckled from stray grains of tea, some a little buckled. Bulging between its covers, the pages of
Paradise Lost
are swelled by his scribblings, taped-in scraps of paper, its spine broken in several places. When he pulls it from the shelf his notes stick out their tatty tongues every few pages, some flutter to the floor, his writing smaller and neater then than he could ever manage now, the computer to thank for that. This is the first copy of
Paradise Lost
he ever owned, given to him by his old friend Peace Convoy Raph, with Rubens’s
Adam and Eve
, gloriously naked and unashamed, on the cover.

It was from a lecture on
Paradise Lost
that he came back to his digs to the news that Julia was pregnant. He was already making headway on his dissertation; they’d known each other only a matter of weeks. The timing couldn’t have been worse and yet he remembers nothing but elation from the moment she cast her softly spoken spell of three words. He was gripped by a fierce sense of possession that had nothing to do with the baby now forming inside her. She’d done the test while he was at the lecture –
‘Milton’s attitude to divorce in light of his attitude to the birth of Eve’
– though even before Julia shared her news he already had many more immediate problems than
Literature, Culture and Crisis 1631–71
.

His shifts at the Crown were being cut now the summer was truly over and though this gave him back time for the mounting piles of reading, it deprived them of money they needed. Julia’s wages from her job at Geldings Antiques disappeared at source, thanks to various HP and loans that Chris had set up in her name throughout their marriage and was punitively not honouring. She was left paying for his fridge, washing machine and TV, and his van and the new roof on the cottage he’d so prudently left in his mother’s name. Debt was hard to divorce. Julian was cursing the mad impulse that made him splurge on the mirror in Geldings just weeks before. Soon he would be reduced to eyeing up the Co-op’s bins where he knew some students went to stock up on food past its sell-by date. They barely had money for the gas meter, so kept warm in bed. Ah, yes, bed.

That morning he had left his room steeped in the smell of her. Downstairs Mrs Briggs waylaid him, brandishing a Hoover. ‘I’m sick of turning a blind eye,’ she said. ‘That maniac beating at my front door.’ Julian mumbled, took his time tucking the bottom of his trouser leg into his yellow sock. She steadied herself on his shoulder for emphasis, forcing him to look up. Her globular thyroid eyes seemed to wobble, threatening to fall like eggs from their sockets. ‘I can’t have men turning up here at all times of the day and night using that sort of language,’ she said. ‘I won’t have this sort of thing going on beneath my roof.’

Only when Julian agreed to look for somewhere else did she remove her hand from his shoulder and, turning her toad’s face away, she shuffled off in her slippers, dragging the Hoover behind her like a sacrifice.