Love, Etc. Read online

  So you see, I also have hard feelings. You are very naïve about us, the old people.

  13

  SOFA LEGS

  Oliver Stuart has a Theory, and I leave you to reflect for a few jocund nano-seconds on the inapt conjoining—the miscegenation—of the first and fourth words of this sentence.

  Stuart believes that farm animals should be allowed to go for walkies and sleep in the best b-and-b accommodation. Fino by me. Stuart believes that vegetables shouldn’t be as bulgy with drugs as a Tour de France cyclist. Amontillado by me. Stuart believes that the noble orbs of the downy veal calf should not be afflicted, during their terminal blink at this sad world of ours, by the peripheral awareness of a lumpenslaughterer wielding a chainsaw. Oloroso by me.

  Stuart, lulled by the popular applause such virtuous sentiments provoke, allows himself to speculate further. An English-man equipped with a theory, oh dear: it’s like wearing a tweed suit at Cap d’Agde. Don’t do it, Stuart! ‘But no, they will not; they must still / Wrest their neighbour to their will.’ So Stuart, in six-ply Jaeger from hoof to plume, dog-paddles among the nudists with the following proposition clenched between his canines: that humankind itself should become organic; that cityfolk may claim kinship with the stressful porker; that we must snort the pure and addictive air far away from those dread acronyms of pollution he thrills to scare us with; that we should crop the fruits of the hedgerow and o’ercome the supper-time bunny with simple bow and arrow, then trip an Arcadian measure on the humectant moss as in a sentimental vision by Claude Le Lorrain.

  In other words, he wants the human race to become hunter-gatherers again! But the whole point, O Stuartus Rusticus, is that this is the very state we have spent so many millennia fleeing. Nomads aren’t nomads because they like being nomads, but because they have no choice. And now that our modern age has given them the choice, see what they nobly prefer: the off-road vehicle, the automatic rifle, telly and a bottle of hooch. Just like us! And one further point is that if we were to display in some instructional diorama representative samples of organic versus industrially-farmed man, which of the two might be the most plausibly represented by my newly slimline chum? So his theory, apart from being demonstrably absurd, is, to use a less technical phrase, a bit fucking rich coming from him.

  Stuart It’s not that I expect gratitude. It’s just that I think contempt is out of order.

  So I told him.

  He came into my office for his money. It would be easier for Joan, who’s my assistant, to pay him, as she’s in charge of wages; but for some reason Oliver insists on coming to me direct. Well, that’s fine. He also says things like, ‘Come for my wedge Mr Boss-Man, sir,’ which are meant either to be funny or to be how the other drivers talk. Which they don’t, of course: normal people put their heads round Joan’s door and say, ‘Is this a good time?’ or ‘Am I a bit early?’ But that’s fine too.

  It’s a bit less fine that Oliver likes to throw himself down in a chair and chew the cud while I have a business to run.

  It’s a bit less fine that there’s a large dent in the nearside front wing of Oliver’s van, which he didn’t report because he claims not to know how it got there.

  It’s a bit less fine that Oliver likes to leave my door open so that Joan can hear him treat me with what he probably thinks of as familiarity, but which might strike an outsider as something else. He isn’t popular around the office, by the way. That’s why I’ve started sending him on longer trips.

  So he sat there, with the van keys hooked over his thumb and dangling into his palm. Then he started counting his money very slowly, as if I was the most untrustworthy employer in London. Finally, he looked up and said, ‘No deductions for putting up Gill’s shelves, eh?’ And he gave me a stupid wink.

  Perhaps I mentioned that I’ve been doing a bit of DIY round at their house. Well, how else would it get done?

  I got up and shut the door. Then I went and stood behind my desk. ‘Look, Oliver, can we just agree, work’s work, OK?’

  I said it quite reasonably and reached for the phone. As I was dialling, his arm came across the desk and cut off the line. ‘Work’s work, is it?’ he said in his silly, sneering voice, and then began some stupid rant about whether a is always a and couldn’t it sometimes be b. You know the sort of thing. Pure wankery dressed up as philosophy. And all the time he was clenching and unclenching his fist over the keys, and I think it was this that finally made me lose my patience somewhat.

  ‘Look, Oliver, I’ve work to do, so—’

  ‘So just fuck off, eh?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the long and the short of it, just fuck off, OK?’

  He stood up, facing me, still closing and opening his right hand—keys, no keys, keys, no keys—like some cheap magician on the telly. At the same time, he looked as if he was trying to be menacing, which made it worse. Sillier, too. I wasn’t in the least afraid. But I was extremely cross.

  ‘You’re not in the middle of a French village now,’ I said.

  Well, that took the wind from his sails. Collapse of stout party indeed. He got all white and sweaty. ‘She told you,’ he said. ‘She told you. The—’

  I wasn’t going to have him insulting Gillian, so I jumped in first. ‘She didn’t tell me. I was there.’

  ‘Oh yes, you and who else?’ which apart from being a stupid question made him sound as if he was back in the playground at school.

  ‘No-one else. Just me. I saw it all. Now fuck off, Oliver.’

  Oliver Impossible not to cop, de temps en temps, the crucial verity that the accumulated wisdom of the ages and the masses, whether expressed in the form of the bum-numbing folk tale, the preposterously anthropomorphic animal fable, or the mercifully brief cracker motto, is, not to put too fine a point on it, generally a few candles short of a bedside light. Rub two clichés together and you could not ignite an idée reçue. Bind a dozen anthologisable apothegms into a faggot and you would not get much kindling.

  Concentrate, Ollie, concentrate. To the present instance, please.

  Well, if you insist. The present instance expressing itself in a most peculiar if popular moral injunction, namely: don’t shoot the messenger. Why the eff-you-see-kay not is what I say. That’s what messengers are for. And don’t give me that line about it not being the messenger’s fault. It is his fault: he spoilt your day, why shouldn’t he pay for it? Besides, messengers are two a penny. If they weren’t, they’d be generals or politicians.

  Did she know? That, we have to assert, is the question of questions. I admit that, ten years ago, I laid public hands on the fair Gillian, not a hair of whose head has since been touched. The circumstances, you will recall, were most provoking. She had been most provoking, for a goodly time—she, whose technique of crowd control (there being such a tumult of characters making up the unified field you know by the simple name of Oliver) is usually so subtle. Gillian is a devotee of the softly-softly approach to domestic policing. On this occasion not; and on this occasion, prodded and bodkined and poniarded as never before or since, I struck her. Handing over hectares of moral high ground, apart from anything else. And Stuart was watching, from some crepuscular inglenook or rancid wankpit whose location he failed to reveal to me.

  That question again: did she know? We hear the echo of each other’s laughter, do we not? It is true that the scientific odds against human life developing in the universe, against the necessary conjunction of quasars and pulsars and Johnny Quarks and amoebic spunk or whatever—my physics has always been a bit approximate—is several billion trillion to one (my mathematics too, for that matter). But your savvy local bookmaker would probably offer you about the same odds against Stuart managing to locate himself in a distant Languedocian village, hitherto unknown to him, at the very precise moment in the history of the aforesaid universe when Ollie was being goaded into his sole and much regretted act of domestic violence.

  So she planned it. And she planned it all for him. She acted out that lie, and all its prepara
tions, and she’s let me live with it ever since.

  Truth will out, old bean, eh? Aha, I hear you yelp, Ollie at the point of crisis falls back on just the very accumulated wisdom of the populace he affects to despise. Well, wrong again, fartface. The point is, as historians, philosophers, brute politicians and everyone else with a head halfway screwed on concurs, truth mostly does not out. It mostly ins, until the day it is interred in our bones. That’s the grim norm. But in the present very rare instance, and drawing no wider conclusions from it, truth did indeed . . .

  The See-You-En-Tee.

  Gillian Stuart’s been putting up shelves. Marie really seems to have taken to him. When he uses the drill she puts her hands over her ears and squeals. Stuart gets her to hand him screws and rawlplugs and things, and puts them in the corners of his mouth if he’s got his hands full. He turns round to her, four screws between his lips, and she smiles back at him.

  Mme Wyatt I dialled the house. Sophie answered.

  ‘Hello, Grand’mère,’ she said. ‘Do you want to speak to Stuart?’

  ‘Why should I want to speak to Stuart?’ I ask.

  ‘He’s putting up shelves.’

  I know she is only a child, but even so I did not think it was the most logical answer I have ever heard. Perhaps it is the result of the English education. A French child will certainly understand the significance of the word why.

  ‘Sophie, I have all the shelves I need.’ Well, they will never understand logic unless someone demonstrates it to them, will they?

  There was a silence. I could hear that she was trying to think for herself. ‘Mummy’s out and Daddy’s digging up carrots in Lincolnshire.’

  ‘Tell your mother to call me when she returns.’

  Really. You English.

  Stuart I suddenly saw what they meant about wallpaper. Not the actual wallpaper—in fact, the last tenants painted all over the top of it, so that the whole place is white except for the yellow bits of Sellotape where they took their posters down.

  No, I was in the kitchen making supper—nothing complicated, just a mushroom risotto (I’ve got this chap who goes out to Epping Forest at dawn and we have what he finds in the shops by mid-morning). Sophie was doing her homework at the table, Marie was ‘helping’ as we like to call it, and I was just ladling in some more stock when out of the corner of my eye I saw the leg of the sofa. Actually, ‘leg’ is a bit of an exaggeration. ‘Foot’ isn’t quite right either. It’s more a sort of wooden sphere, really, which would probably have taken a castor originally, but—

  What? Oh, Gill was up in the studio. She’s been very pressed with a commission they wanted back sooner than they’d said.

  —and of course it had been secondhand when we bought it. Our first sofa, which I used to call a settee until corrected. Not that I minded—being corrected, I mean. Gill made new covers for it, a jolly yellow fabric I remember. Now it’s dark blue, and even more battered, and there are kids’ things all over it, but the foot or whatever you bloody well want to call it is still there, just there in the corner of my eye . . .

  What? Oh, Oliver was up in Lincolnshire still. Carrots, cabbages, things he can’t go wrong with. What do I do about Oliver? Send him to Morocco for some lemons?

  We used to watch television together on it.

  ‘Ticky,’ says Marie, and my attention is drawn back.

  ‘Thank you, Marie,’ I say, ‘that was very helpful.’ It was sticking and needed a good stir and scrape.

  We used to watch television together on it. When we were first married. Not that we were anything except ‘first’ married, when you look at it in the cold light of day. We had a television which was such an antique it didn’t have remote control. And we had a rule that whoever wanted to change channel—as long as the other one agreed—had to get up and punch the button. I’d just get up and reach across and do it. But Gill would sort of flow off the sofa, onto her front, and lie there reaching up to the box’s controls. She wore grey stone-washed 501s with trainers and green socks. I don’t mean she only had green socks, just that she always did in my memory. Normally, when she’d changed the channel, she’d go into reverse gear, backwards on her knees and then up onto the sofa again. But sometimes, just occasionally, she’d lie there looking up at the screen, and then turn and glance back at me from the floor, with the light from the television playing on her face . . . That’s one of the ways I’ve always remembered her.

  ‘Ticky,’ says Marie.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Very ticky.’

  The phone number. That’s another thing. It’s just a collection of digits, after all. And it’s acquired an 020 8–prefix since we lived here. But those last seven numbers, they’re still the same, exactly the same. Who’d have thought it? That a set of numbers can cause pain. Such pain. Every time.

  Terri My friends who live on the bay have a trap for catching their own crabs. They bait it with fish heads and sling it into the water on a rope from the little pier at the end of their yard. They pulled it up to show me. There were these half-dozen crabs in it, all this incredible silky-blue color. And someone asked: how can you tell if they’re male or female? Someone else made a joke as you’d expect, but Bill said, ‘These are all male.’ Females have pink claws, apparently. Someone said: hey, blue for a boy and pink for a girl, but I was intrigued.

  ‘Why are there only males in the trap?’ I ask.

  ‘That’s normal,’ Bill tells me. ‘The females are too smart to get caught.’

  We all laugh, but as my friend Marcelle says: remind you of something?

  Oliver A thought, a veritable thought, which came to me as I was plodding south to Stamford with my cornucopia of carrots and my booty of brassica.

  You’ve noticed—how can you not have?—that Stuart has become a swank. No, worse—because even less convincing—a positive swell. The suits which bespeak of bespoke, the BMW, the exercise programme, the fascistic haircut, the opinions on matters social, political and economic, the blithe assumption that he represents the norm, the Croesal disbursement of moidores and doubloons—the fucking money, in other words, and all that flows from it. The fucking money.

  My question is merely this: does our impresario imagine he is staging The Revenge of the Tortoise? That end-of-the-pier playlet, The Parable of the Outdistanced One? Is that why he primps and preens and swanks and swells? Because he thinks that he has in some way won? If so, let me tell you—and him—this: I have in my time investigated the voluminous myth-kitty which our spavined species has assembled down the millennia for its comfort and edification, and I have a word of advice for those who cannot reach the end of the day’s winding path without a toke of myth. My counsel is this and thus: dream on. The pig did not fly; the stone rebounded from the helmet of Goliath, who promptly ate David for breakfast; the fox easily acquired the grapes by cutting down the vine with a power saw; and Jesus resideth not with his Father.

  As I swooped down the sliproad to mingle with the credulous on the motorway, I decided to idle away the dull furlongs with literary genre. Are you sitting comfortably?

  Realism: Hare runs faster than Tortoise. Much faster. And is smarter. Therefore wins. By a long way. OK?

  Sentimental Romanticism: Complacent Hare snoozes by side of road while morally worthy Tortoise trundles past to winning line.

  Surrealism (or Advertising): Tortoise, equipped with rollerblades, neat black-leather backpack and shades, glides effortlessly ahead while outpaced leveret cacks his scut.

  The Collected Letters: Dear Furry, Why don’t you ‘hare’ on ahead and wait for me by the hedge? I’ll be there as soon as I can slip away. You don’t think they’re on to us, do you? Your own ‘Shelley.’

  PC Kids’ Story (written by ex-hippie): Hare and Tortoise, having seen through the social and political structures which incite public displays of competitiveness, abandon their race and live peacefully in a yurt, refusing all media requests for interviews.

  Limerick: There was an old Tortoise called Stu / W
ho concurred with what limericks do / Which is comfort and coddle / The plain-thinking noddle / Of the stupidest beasts in the zoo.

  Post-modernism: I, the author, made up this story. It’s a mere construct. The Hare and the Tortoise don’t actually ‘exist,’ you realise that, I hope?

  And so on. Now can you see what’s wrong with our impresario’s cockle-warming mythette, The Revenge of the Tortoise? What’s wrong is this: it never happens. The world, being constructed as it is, will not allow it. Realism is our given, our only mode, triste truth as it might be to some.

  14

  LOVE, ETC.

  Gillian Each morning, as the girls set off for school, I kiss them and say, ‘I love you.’ I say it because it’s true, because they should hear it and know it. I also say it for its magical powers, for its ability to ward off the world.

  When did I last say it to Oliver? I can’t remember. After a few years, we got into the habit of dropping the ‘I’. One of us would say, ‘Love you,’ and the other would say, ‘Love you too.’ There’s nothing shocking about that, nothing out of the ordinary, but one day I caught myself wondering if it wasn’t significant. As if you weren’t taking responsibility for the feeling any more. As if it had become somehow more general, less focused.

  Well, I suppose that’s the answer, isn’t it? It’s my children who bring out the ‘I’ in the ‘I love you.’ Do ‘I’ still love Oliver? Yes, ‘I’ think so, ‘I’ suppose so. You could say I’m managing love.

  You organise a marriage, you protect your children, you manage love, you run your life. And sometimes you stop and wonder if that’s true at all. Do you run your life, or does your life run you?

  Stuart I’ve come to some conclusions in my time. I’m a grown-up person, I’ve been an adult longer than I’ve been a child and an adolescent. I’ve looked at the world. My conclusions may not be blindingly original, but they’re still mine.