The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (50 page)

‘Me too.’

‘I could work from home tomorrow. I could make some time tomorrow afternoon.’

‘What’s tomorrow? Tuesday.’ He shuts his eyes, mentally scanning his timetable. ‘I’ve got a gap between two-fifteen and three.’

‘That’s enough, isn’t it?’

He opens his eyes and there she is, smiling at him.

‘Yes. It’s enough.’

56

Break something.

Ah, those iconoclasts. They thought they were breaking images, but they were breaking patterns. Not the great pattern, not the framework that sustains daily life, that would be more than iconoclasm, that would be revolution. We’re talking small ruptures in the fabric of habit. But through these rips comes new air, bearing new smells.

Window down in the car. Sussex on a May evening, the hawthorn in scented bloom. A land saturated with new life. Darkness coming, but it’s never fully dark, even when there’s no moon. The one true darkness is in death, which is coming too, but not yet, not yet. The poplars on the corner have such a respectable way of standing there, as if there was never a time when they did not mark the junction of the lanes, and yet they too were once seeds, were once shoots.

Anything is possible once you learn to endure disappointment. Hopes are dashed, plans miscarry, but next May the leaves will unfold once more, each year’s leaves are a new creation, a reprise of joy. And how many more Mays will I live to see? Forty if I’m lucky. A finite number, inexorably ticking down to zero.

Let Laura be alive when I get home. Let Jack and Carrie be alive. Let all be well.

Laura is in the kitchen when she hears Henry’s car pull up outside. She hears his footsteps on the gravel, his key in the lock. The rattle of the closing door, the clunk of his bag onto the hall table. Then silence.

In this time, she knows, she sees without seeing, he bends down and unlaces his shoes. He eases them off, pushes them under the hall bench, finds his slippers, shuffles his feet into their home embrace. He loves to get out of his shoes at the end of the day. He wears leather heel-less slippers, she buys them for him, they make a soft flop-clack sound as he walks.

Flop-clack, flop-clack. His face in the doorway.

‘Carrie still up?’

She gives him a nod and off he goes up the stairs. She can’t speak because she’s overwhelmed by the realization of how well she knows him. She knows him even in his silences.

Carrie is in bed, curtains drawn, her light not yet out. She tells Henry of the latest turn in her turbulent relationship with Naomi Truscott.

‘She wasn’t there in the lunch queue and no one had seen her and I was really hungry so I went on into lunch, I did wait, I waited lots, but she didn’t come. What was I supposed to do? Miss lunch? How was I to know she was looking for her clarinet? But she got so stressy as if I’d deliberately abandoned her or something.’

Henry sits on the side of her bed, nodding gravely. He’s watching her hands, seeing how perfect they are, how pale the skin, though she does bite her finger-nails. He remembers her when she was born, a quick birth, much quicker than Jack. The way she gazed at him, almost suspiciously. ‘That one’s nobody’s fool,’ the midwife said. My little girl. My girl.

Only the bedside reading lamp is on, throwing a pool of soft light onto the crumpled pink flowers of the duvet.

‘Maybe she’s frightened you’ll make best friends with one of the others.’

‘Well I won’t. Except if she carries on like this then I will. Tessa says she’s a retard.’

The cruellest truth: we only give our love to those who have no need of it. But later the need grows. Or another kind of love. A historical love, love with a history.

‘Maybe you’ve outgrown each other. Maybe it’s time for new friends.’

‘Oh, Daddy I couldn’t. We’ve been best friends for ever.’

This offer and her rejection of it brings to an end her inner agitation as effectively as if she had talked it over with Naomi herself. The unfairness of Naomi’s accusations against her neutralized by her own generosity.

‘Do you want me to tuck you up now?’

She nods and puts away her book.

‘Tuesday tomorrow. I like Tuesdays. Tuesday’s a good day.’

He leans down to kiss her.

‘Love you, darling.’

By the door he looks back and sees her fuzzy head framed by the white pillow in the pool of lamplight. The lamp stays on until Laura comes up for the final phase of the night-time ritual.

Descending the stairs he recalls a time when for him too different days had different colours, different tastes. Monday always the worst. Monday the return of struggle and dread. And yet today is a Monday.

‘She’s ready for you,’ he tells Laura.

Jack is in the living room watching a television programme about spiders. Henry watches with him in silence for a few moments. He is shown a close-up of a funnel-web spider’s fangs oozing venom.

‘One bite and you’re dead,’ says Jack. ‘But they only live in Australia.’

‘How was Toby Clore today?’

‘Toby’s okay.’

The crisis has passed. The extraordinary immediacy of life to a child. The wave of terror rises and falls and is forgotten. There’s something he’s been meaning to ask Jack for days. What is it?

‘Oh, yes.’ Pausing in the living room doorway as he leaves the room. ‘That composition you wrote at school about a dream. Was it really a dream you had?’

‘I think so. Probably.’

‘About walking on walls. Clouds below.’

‘Don’t really remember.’

‘You didn’t ever fall? In your dream.’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘So was it a happy dream?’

‘Don’t really remember.’

Henry goes on to the kitchen, swept by his own thoughts. He’s thinking of the unimaginable otherness of other people. We each live in our own world, and our worlds collide, but all we get is a little dented. A little bruised. These bruises our only chance of understanding those who are not ourselves. The precious ache of understanding.

He pours himself a glass of red wine. Laura comes down from kissing Carrie goodnight.

‘Drink?’ he says.

‘Definitely.’

He pours more wine and considers how much to tell her of his day. Not all: she can never know it all. There are limits to intimacy. But he feels the need to narrow the gap. Every day the gap widens, and every evening, no, not every evening, but most evenings, they bridge it anew.

‘I had a talk with Aidan Massey today. A real talk.’

‘That’s a first.’

Laura moves back and forth between the table and the stove, making dinner.

‘His father was a greetings card salesman.’

She turns and reads his expression.

‘You’ve stopped minding.’

As quickly as that. Must be my tone of voice.

‘As a matter of fact I walked out today. But then I walked back.’

It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. He grins.

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ says Laura, ‘you can walk out any time you like. You know that.’

‘Maybe tomorrow.’

‘Ah, the famous tomorrow.’

‘I just thought, what the hell. I like the people.’

And the money, and the status, and the somewhere to go where demands are made, and coming home tired at the end of the day. Not the end result after all, but the doing of the thing.

‘That’s what I miss most,’ says Laura. ‘The people.’

‘You could go back.’

‘I don’t know if they’d even have me back.’

‘Or somewhere else. If that’s what you want.’

He’s thinking how beautiful she is. Just like when he saw her by the lake at Glyndebourne.
Dove sono
. Where are they now, the happy moments?

‘If that’s what I want,’ she says. She stops doing what she’s doing and looks at him in the way she looks when she’s thinking. ‘I’m not sure it really matters what any of us want.’

Then her face smoothes out and she gives a laugh, laughing at herself.

‘Stupid thing to say.’

Henry understands. It’s not stupid at all.

‘No, you’re right.’ Then he adds, ‘Just don’t die, please. Ever.’

‘All right. I won’t.’

Now as good a time as any. Make a joke of it.

‘I need your money.’

‘Our money. The family’s money.’ This her way of making him believe he’s not a beggar. ‘You want me to have a word with Daddy?’

‘The funds are a bit on the low side.’

She puts down what she’s doing and goes to where he sits, in the kitchen’s only armchair. She drops down on her knees so that her face is on a level with his. She takes his hands in hers.

‘If you want, we’ll sell the house. I don’t care. I really don’t. It’s just that Daddy’s got so much and he loves to help us and I think, why not? But you hate it, don’t you?’

‘No. I don’t hate it. I have a bit of a struggle from time to time, that’s all.’

‘I don’t want money to make you sad, Henry.’

‘You’d rather we were poor but happy.’ Teasing her.

‘Any day.’

She kisses his hands. It strikes him that she’s more overtly affectionate than usual.

‘What have I done to deserve this?’

‘Nothing special,’ she says. ‘Sometimes I think I take you for granted. But I don’t really.’

She leans forward and kisses his lips. Then she gets up and goes back to making dinner.

‘It’s all just pride,’ he says. ‘Stupid male pride. I’m getting better about it.’

There’s the true modern idolatry: the worship of the self. The pursuit of self-fulfilment. Each of us makes our own idol in our own image.

‘You have been a bit down lately,’ she says, her back turned.

‘Yes.’

‘Anything I’m doing?’

‘No. Just life. Growing older.’

He watches his wife with love and gratitude. Feels her soft kiss still lingering on his lips.

‘I want you to be happy, Laura.’

‘How happy?’ she says.

There it is. Two words: the simple impossible question. How happy am I supposed to be? When am I entitled to complain and ask for more? Absurd to expect perfection, but how far short are we to allow ourselves to fall?

Where’s your fucking ambition, Henry?

‘That is the question, isn’t it?’

‘I went for a walk on the Downs with Nick Crocker,’ she says. She’s ladling risotto from the pan onto dinner plates.

‘Is he still around?’

‘Not any more.’

‘What’s he doing with his life these days?’

‘He sells works of art. He seems to be doing very well. Cotman, Turner, big-ticket stuff. Come and eat.’

As they eat, Laura tells him about Nick Crocker.

‘He came up with this tremendous rant about the countryside. He thinks we’re all living fake lives in a fake landscape and the real countryside has gone for ever.’

‘He’s probably right.’

‘No, he isn’t right. My life isn’t fake. I’m building a home and raising my children and making as much sense of my life as I can. What’s fake about that?’

‘I just meant about the countryside changing.’

‘The countryside’s always changing. You’re the historian.’

‘Of course.’

‘I bet the first thing Iron Age man said when Bronze Age man came along was, There goes the countryside.’

Henry grins. He likes that.

‘What right has Nick to sneer at us?’ Laura speaks with the energy of anger. ‘Maybe we’re not farmers, but we’re people, aren’t we? It’s just sentimentalism. I refuse to be told I’m not real.’

The real thing, for ever out of reach. But somehow it doesn’t matter any more. Watching his wife across the table, her familiar beautiful face animated as she speaks, he thinks: of course she’s real. And I’m real. Maybe we’re not living the life we meant to live when we were young, but who’s to say we were right back then? No one gets it all. Accidents happen.

So Laura was in love with Nick when she was young. The story’s no secret. She gave him her whole heart, it proved too burdensome a gift, he dropped it and it broke. Ever since, she has had many parts of her broken heart to give: some to him, some to Jack, some to Carrie, and so on. Is that a diminution of love or an enrichment?

‘So he’s gone now, is he?’

‘Back to California.’

‘Do you ever wonder what it would have been like if you and Nick had stayed together?’

She doesn’t answer for a moment.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It’s been strange seeing him again after all these years. I’m trying to be honest. The odd thing is, he hasn’t changed. And he should have changed. I’ve changed. But somehow he’s got himself stuck. And that’s just really sad.’

Neither of them speaks for a moment. Then,

‘I read your letter,’ Henry says. ‘The one you wrote to him, years ago.’