All the Hopeful Lovers (21 page)

The noble Henry Willis organ is sighing and murmuring, its reverberant notes floating out into the great space of the chapel; rising past the rose window of trumpeting angels to the high carved roof. A student at the keyboard, perhaps. Someone too respectful to unleash the mighty roar that so offended the preacher Charles Spurgeon. ‘The only sound of praise God cares to hear is the human voice,’ Spurgeon thundered in his much-admired human voice, and was hissed by the congregation for his pains. That must have been a famous day.

Roddy Dalgliesh sits at the end of a pew at the back of the Union Chapel, which is just a few streets from his home. He’s taken to dropping in here, not for the services or the concerts, but for the quietness. He needs space to think, and the Union Chapel is a grand space.

For prayer too, perhaps. Roddy is reluctant to call what passes through his mind by the name of prayer because he has no clear notion of a recipient of his prayer. He has left unbelief behind, but has not yet arrived at belief. This is what is so hard to explain to others. He is embarked on a great adventure.

Keep thyself as a stranger and a pilgrim upon the earth.

Roddy finds these words profoundly moving. They move him emotionally, but also physically, too. They make him want to move. They make him want to disburden himself and pass as lightly as a bird or a cloud over the landscape. He wants to cut all ties, to shed all responsibilities, to float free. Impossible, of course. But when the longing struck him, when he stopped, literally, in his tracks – he was walking down Ludgate Hill at the time, heading for the tube station – he knew that something he had been resisting for most of his life could be resisted no more. This life is not all there is. This world is not all there is.

Not an intellectual capitulation. There’s no theory to it. Just a sudden acceptance. His response, standing there on Ludgate Hill as the home-going crowds brushed past his motionless figure, was to say to himself: Of course. Once he had let go of his petty insistence that there be answers, which is after all no more than one of the many forms of vanity – for why should he, or anyone, understand such immense mysteries? – once he had humbled himself, it became easy to surrender. The act of surrender an act of trust, like falling into water. Like falling in love.

Just stop fighting. Just release the controls. Just let go.

From that moment on, everything changed for Roddy. Everything is still changing. Here in the Union Chapel where Dr Henry Allon preached to Gladstone and Asquith, in this great octagonal space designed so that ‘every person could see and hear the preacher without conscious effort’, as Dr Allon demanded of the architect, here Roddy can let his eager mind roam free, chasing the chords of the mighty organ.

So much now looks so different. The injustices of the world, great and small; the apparent futility of human activity; the anxieties that grate on us and make us fretful even in the midst of security and plenty; all can now take their place in an utterly changed landscape. Down in the valley the mist seems to have no end, but from the mountaintop it’s no more than a puddle in the land. There is more, more, so much more. Maybe heaven. Maybe eternity. Maybe God.

These are all human approximations, attempts with the limited tools at our command to name and categorize what can’t be named and categorized. So why argue about it? Every culture finds its own forms, its own rituals, with which to grasp what is beyond our grasp and imagine what is beyond our imagining. All that matters in the end is humility of the intellect. Do not presume to know.

Once you know that you don’t know, everything changes. The absurdity of so much of our lives ceases to be a puzzle. Of course we’re ridiculous. Of course we make fools of ourselves. Why wouldn’t we? We are fools. We know so little. But not any the less loveable for all that.

Roddy is filled with a joyful compassion. Once this would have been called the milk of human kindness; now only a term used for comic effect. How can he speak of this to Diana? She’ll think he’s turned into a simpleton. The tone of speech of the modern educated person is narrow in its range: critical, ironical, not to be deceived. No room for wonder. Little room for joy. All the thoughts that are now sweeping through him have a low status in Diana’s world. They’re fables for peasants and children. The opium of the masses. She has no language with which to take seriously the presence of God.

Soon now he will have to leave this place and return home, where Diana waits for his much-delayed explanation. She supposes he is currently out for a reflective walk. He has not told her of his habit of dropping in to the Union Chapel.

One of the stained-glass windows features Dr Henry Allon himself, who was minister here for forty-eight years, to the day of his death. Did Dr Henry Allon ever come to a stop on Ludgate Hill and feel himself lifted up as if by the wings of angels?

Angels, now. I have gone simple-minded.

By two wings a man is lifted up from things earthly, namely by Simplicity and Purity.

That’s Thomas à Kempis, one of the devotional writers Roddy has begun to read. But he keeps the book hidden at home.

‘We’re going to have this out now, Roddy,’ says Diana. ‘It’s gone on long enough. If you’re having a breakdown I need to know.’

They’re sitting facing each other in the kitchen of their Islington house, later that evening. Roddy reaches across and takes her hand in his. This is how he’s resolved to proceed. First, make true contact.

Diana, not understanding this, is merely irritated.

‘Stop pawing me. What did you say to Laura? She says you’re having a philosophical crisis. I’ve no idea what that means.’

Roddy has planned his next step, too. He won’t tell Diana the way he told Laura, inching his way bit by bit towards the awkward truth. He’s not been talking to Diana because he knows talking will be no use. He still thinks so. Therefore his task is not to explain but to inform. No lead-in is possible, no softening up. Just tell it as it is.

‘I’m looking for God,’ he says.

She stares at him.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Roddy.’

‘I’m looking for God.’

He’s ready to go on saying it as often as necessary, until she hears him.

‘You can’t be.’

‘I’m looking for God.’

‘Yes, yes, you’ve said that already. But it doesn’t mean anything, Roddy. How can you look for God? Where do you think he is? In a cave in Palestine?’

‘No. I don’t think God’s in a cave in Palestine. Though it’s possible, I suppose. I won’t rule it out.’

‘You’re having a breakdown, aren’t you? Is it because of work?’

‘No.’

‘Is it me?’

‘No.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘I’m not having a breakdown, Diana. I’m looking for God.’

Diana pulls a face Roddy knows well: impatient, disappointed, a little hurt. ‘I think that is so unfair of you. What am I supposed to do while you’re looking for God? Stay home and cook your dinner?’

‘You can come too.’

‘I will not! You may be off your rocker, but I’m not. How many people know about this?’

‘Laura. That’s all.’

‘She’ll have told Henry. Oh, Lord. Look here, Roddy. You’re to keep quiet about this. You’re to start talking again, like a normal human being, and you’re not to let it get in the way of your work. Do you understand me? I’m serious about this. If you must go looking for God, then do it somewhere where no one can see. Why are you grinning at me like an ape?’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s not a joke, Roddy. I think I’m being amazingly reasonable under the circumstances. Most other wives would have you straight off to the funny farm.’

‘Thank you. I’m grateful for your forbearance.’

She stares at him suspiciously. A new thought has struck her. ‘What happens if you find God?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You’re not going to become a vicar, are you? Because if you are, I want a divorce. I will not be a vicar’s wife.’

‘No. I’m not going to become a vicar.’

‘Well, then. Just try to keep it under control.’

After this Roddy does his best to talk in the old way, but it’s not the same. It’s as if both of them are playing a part. He knows Diana feels betrayed, but what can he do? Things have changed.

He thinks from time to time of Laura, and the way she looked at him the other evening, just before she had to hurry away to catch her train. He’s sure that Laura understands, in a way that Diana never will. Diana has always said he has a soft spot for Laura.

If I was married to Laura, how different it would all be. She might even come with me on my journey. That would be true companionship. But it’s not to be.

Keep thyself as a stranger and a pilgrim upon the earth.

It’s just gone eight-thirty on Monday morning. The patient, already fully anaesthetized, is moved with a pat slide from bed to operating table. Fergus, the anaesthetist, checks the patient’s position, adjusts the height and tilt of the table. Harriet, the theatre nurse, preps the patient, exposing the operating site, cleaning the skin with Betadine solution.

Now in what is so fittingly called a theatre the surgeon makes his entrance. Tom Redknapp, costumed in scrub suit and gown, takes the stage, ready for a performance he has given many times before. No curtain to rise, no audience to applaud, but there is a spotlight on his rubber-clad hands, and in due course there’ll be gratitude to spare from the principal beneficiary of his skills. Her name is Lyn Goodall, thirty-two years old, an actress. The augmentation of her breasts is designed to augment her career.

‘They don’t say it, not right out,’ she explained, ‘but for a lot of parts it’s no cleavage, no thanks. I go up for the wench parts, and wenches have to show tit.’

An attractive woman, with a humorous view of her dilemma that hides something more, something sadder. She stood in Tom’s office, naked to the waist, her hands pushing up beneath her breasts.

‘See? Uplift does nothing if there’s nothing to lift up.’

No cleavages in Shakespeare’s day, not real ones at least, all the parts were played by boys. Nowadays it’s expected, a bonus for the male patrons of classic theatre, a flash of culturally-approved flesh. Like all those ballets in the nineteenth century designed to let men stare at women’s legs. And all those artistically painted nudes on academy walls. The world fuelled by male desire, but when we talk of it we can only tut or snigger.

The sterile towels are clipped into place round the operating site.

‘Happy your end?’ says the surgeon.

‘Good to go,’ says Fergus.

Tom takes a fine paintbrush, dips it in methylene blue dye, and with a steady hand draws the incision marks beneath both breasts. He will cut just above the crease line, an opening of six centimetres.

‘How was your weekend, Harriet?’

‘Very quiet. Simon’s got himself a new tractor. Well, I say new.’

‘You’re a tractor widow, Harriet.’

‘It gives him something to do.’

Fergus fiddles with his iPod, which is plugged into the theatre’s speakers. The mellow sound of Miles Davis fills the sterilized air.

‘Right. Knife, please.’

So long as he works his mind is clear and he’s at peace. The intense focus of the operating theatre frees him from himself and the complications of his life. Here is something he can do well – or rather, taking away the value judgement, the implied praise, something he can do as it should be done. There’s a rightness about certain procedures that is demonstrated by the outcome: the freedom from infection, the almost-invisible scar. Tom makes no great claims for what he does, he sees himself as akin to
Harriet’s husband who restores vintage tractors. The work brings a satisfaction in the doing of it that has no relation to the value of the end product. Simon sells the tractors on when they’re working again, shiny with new paintwork, but the price he gets doesn’t begin to cover the hours he’s devoted to the restoration.

Tom has no idea what his own work is worth. For this operation, one hour in the theatre, his patient is paying £4,000, but that money buys not only his services. There’s Fergus and Harriet, and the running costs of the theatre, and the hospital bed, and the after-care, and the wider overheads of the clinic: receptionists, nurses, cleaners, accountants, marketing team.

Meg has asked to see him.

He dreads the meeting and is ashamed of himself for dreading it. So many fears. Suddenly his life is beset by fears. Belinda seems to have more or less stopped speaking to him.

Clearly he’s to blame. And yet, in the privileged sanctuary of his own thoughts, he feels himself to be innocent. Innocent both in the sense that he has not committed a crime, and in the other sense, that he is without evil intent.

One man can love more than one woman. That’s how men are made. Why turn it into a crime? Why assume that what’s given to one must be taken from another? Why this obsession with all-or-nothing? Whose big idea was it that the act of copulation is the closing of a lock, that once joined two lovers become bound together in a legal union that can’t be undone? The fuck itself, the fuck alone, has become the declaration of fidelity. What’s that all about? There are a million levels of intimacy, and here they are, reduced to two: you’re friends, or you’re lovers. If you don’t fuck, you’re friends. If you do fuck, you’re lovers. And lovers get to have rights over each other. You get the right to be outraged, wounded, betrayed if your lover fucks anyone else.

But there are fucks and fucks, right? There’s the spur-of-the-moment fuck that means nothing, except that the opportunity came up and you both thought it might be fun. There’s the nameless fuck, with a call girl in a hotel room. There’s the holiday fuck, which neither of you wants to bring home.

Or am I missing something fundamental here? Is the act of sex for a woman simply too intimate and vulnerable ever to be spur-of-the-moment or nameless? Is it always and of its nature possessive? Like a ticket-operated turnstile, you can go in but you can’t come out. Sex as a one-way street. If that’s the way it is, God help us all. Us all men, that is.

Belinda crying in bed. No, I never wanted to hurt her.

A flash of memory. They’re side by side on the sofa in the living room of her flat by Battersea Bridge. They’re kissing, his hands moving over her body, not undressing her but wanting to be closer. Then she’s leaning away from him, crossing her arms over her head, pulling up her blouse, slipping off her bra, so that he can see and touch her beautiful breasts. With the excitement comes a surge of gratitude for this gift of nakedness. He remembers how he kissed her breasts.

There it is. Gratitude. Of her own free will she gives; he, grateful, receives. The obligation is on his side. The repayment comes in fidelity, and now he has broken the bargain. How can he ever say to her how much he has longed for a reciprocal gratitude?

He wants to be wanted.

Meg wants me.

Is she pretty? Is she young? Is she sexy?

Don’t ask about her, ask about me. Am I pretty? Am I young? Am I sexy?

Yes, I know, the very idea is comical. There you have it. But I never meant to hurt you, Belinda. I love you. I don’t want you to leave me. I’m sorry. I should have been more grateful. But it’s done now.

*

Later. He calls Meg in her office, suggests she comes over to his consulting room. He tells Michelle he doesn’t want to be disturbed, without offering any explanation because none is necessary. Meg will sit where his patients sit when they have consultations on surgery. Not the most appropriate setting for the words that must be exchanged between them, but where else are they to go? All public places expose them to the view of colleagues. Meg’s flat, the arena of their private life, would be a cruel setting for this last encounter.

What demeanour is proper to these circumstances? Tom finds himself so bewildered by his role as bad boy that he hardly knows which way to turn. Should he be sad and calm? Should he be distressed and incoherent? Should he be passionate? People say, as if it were obvious, just be yourself. But he has many selves.

As he sits at his desk waiting for Meg to come, failing to work on his backlog of case reports, he asks himself a simple question: what do I want?

I want to keep my wife and my home and my family. Therefore Meg and I have to stop seeing each other. At the same time I want to go on seeing Meg. So knowing what you want achieves precisely nothing.

Meg comes. Closes the door behind her.

‘Is it all right me coming here?’

‘Yes, it’s all right,’ he says. ‘It’s somewhere where we can talk.’

She looks white, defeated. She sits in the chair facing him and hangs her head. Her physical presence shocks him. He wants to reach out and touch her, hold her in his arms. He wants her to be so close to him that no words are necessary. But she sits on the far side of his desk, and he finds it hard to look at her.

‘I suppose we should never have got into this in the first place,’ he says.

As he speaks he realizes he’s saying, I didn’t do this on my own. You’re responsible too. Is that unfair? They share the guilt but somehow she gets a bigger slice of the pain.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I suppose not.’

Her voice dull and far away.

‘Belinda’s in quite a state. I’m sorry about telling you over the phone. I just felt I had no choice.’

‘No.’

‘It’s not what I want, Meg. But there’s no point in me saying that.’

‘Yes. There is.’ She looks up at him now, and he sees in her eyes that she doesn’t understand how he’s taking all this, and wants to understand. ‘I want you to say all of it.’

‘I’ve got no secrets from you, Meg.’

‘No. But we’ve never really talked.’

‘I suppose we haven’t.’

‘It didn’t matter before. But I need to know now.’

For a long moment he doesn’t speak. He’s feeling a panic impulse to shut this conversation down. Again, he feels shock. What am I so afraid of?

‘Look,’ he says. ‘I don’t see that there’s any point in agonizing over it. We have to stop seeing each other. I don’t want that, you don’t want that, but that’s how it is. What else is there to say?’

‘It would help me,’ she says. She speaks humbly, not making demands, appealing to his pity, which makes him restless.

‘We’ve always known it couldn’t go on for ever,’ he says.

Back into the first person plural. We did this as consenting adults.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I know it has to stop now. But there’s something I have to ask you. I’m not trying to get anything out of you, Tom. I just need to know for my own sake. When you came to me in my flat, who were you coming to see?’

Tom allows himself to look puzzled. He’s not puzzled, he’s in flight. Running scared. He understands at once what she’s asking him, but he has no idea how to answer.

‘Well, you,’ he says. ‘Who else?’

‘So it was me?’

‘Yes,’ he says, acting as if this is self-evident. ‘Of course it was you.’

‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘I think it could have been anyone. Anyone who was willing to give you what you wanted.’

His heart pounding. Always the same. The man wants, the woman grants. Not you too, Meg,

‘I thought you wanted it too,’ he says.

‘Yes. I did. I do.’

‘Then why are you saying all this?’

‘I just need to know it was me you came for. That it couldn’t have been just anyone.’

‘It was you, Meg.’

She gazes at him, imploring him.

‘Can you say more?’

‘What more is there to say?’

Run. Get away. What more can he offer her? Love? This thing that women distinguish from sex, the sticky residue that’s left over when you take sex out of the equation. The thing that lasts, where everyone knows sex is fleeting. But love and sex can’t be separated like this, they’re both somewhere in the seething mess along with vanity and habit and dread and self-doubt. Even on its own no one knows what love is. Is it the flush of infatuation? Is it the confession of desperate need? Or a heightened form of friendship? Take away sex and love is either an anxious longing or a deep-rooted familiarity. Add sex and it’s much the same, with the occasional spasm of intimacy. Whatever it is, for all the propaganda for the coupled state, it’s a private affair. None of us really knows what it means to be loved. We know only that we do deals with others to mitigate our loneliness. You act like my existence has some value, and I’ll do the same for you. Let’s live in a state of mutual deception.

Meg says, Was it me? Could it have been anyone? What can I say? Yes, it could have been anyone, but it wasn’t anyone. It was you. Hold on to that. It was the real you I came to in your flat, not some figment of my imagination. Please don’t ask for any more meaning than that. Who we meet, who we love, it’s all accident. But once the accident has happened it becomes individual. Don’t read life backwards, keep going forwards. I could have been anyone too, Meg. But I turned out to be me.

‘I don’t know what I want you to say, really,’ says Meg. ‘I feel so miserable. I know that’s not fair. We never made any promises. It had to stop one day. I do know all that. But when I think I may never see you again, at least not in that way, I get this frightening feeling that we never really knew each other at all. Like we’ve been strangers all along.’

‘How can you say that?’ says Tom.

‘Don’t you feel it?’

‘Not at all. I’ve felt closer to you than almost anyone in my life.’

‘Really?’

‘Why do you doubt it?’

‘Isn’t that just sex?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s just sex. Which is just the intensest way I know how to live.’

‘But you can have sex with anybody.’

‘Then why do I do it with you?’

‘That’s what I’m asking you, Tom. Why me?’

Because I thought you wanted to have sex with me. But this is the one answer he can’t give.