Byron Easy (23 page)

Leo concluded the discussion in her slightly patronising, singsong voice, ‘Maybe it’s too early to think about little ones at the moment.’ She patted Mandy s exposed shoulder. ‘You hold on to your figure, dear.’ This elicited a sharp look from Mandy. She would get her own back one day.

‘Anyway, it’s late. Tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve,’ I said, brightly.

Mandy frowned. I was getting to learn that she really was a great sufferer; a theatrical, Olympian sufferer. ‘Yeah, and I’ve got a migraine coming on.’

New Year’s Eve was our last full day in Spain. The flight was booked for the following afternoon. The migraine that Mandy had threatened us all with did indeed appear in the morning. Well, it was always hard to tell with Mandy whether she was swinging the lead for England. Would she take medication for an ailment she didn’t have? It wasn’t beyond her. One thing was for certain, when she did become ill—usually when she found herself slipping from centre-stage—she got the attention right back again. Lunchtime saw me affixing a cold compress to her fermenting forehead in the darkened room, then running from chemist to chemist to score the horse-pill preventatives that she claimed were the only remedy. She was sick several times; both Leo and Montse fussing around the locked toilet door, wondering if they should call the doctor out. By five o’clock, with the prospect of a good party, her condition magically began to alleviate. The plan had been to see in the New Year with Leo and Montse—including the ritual of the twelve grapes, one on each stroke of the clock—then make a rapid exit and find some young people after so many days of being cooped up with the fogeys.

As the bewitching hour approached, announced by a dapper Spanish newsreader, we all stood and toasted the future, cava foaming in tall champagne flutes, the sad silver Christmas tree throwing artificial reflections around the room. For no good reason I suddenly wondered what Bea was doing—in that exact moment. They had an hour still to go in England, but maybe she wasn’t in England. Who was she with? Was she happy? Just before the wedding I had returned to my Camden flat to pick up the mail. In among the wadge of demands for money and technicolour junk mail was, to my heart-racing surprise, a card from Bea. She said she was back in Hamford: she wondered how I was, how my writing was going. Very sweet, very considerate. Reading between the lines wasn’t difficult. One could fall between those lines. Drown in that deep water. After much thought, I sent her a card back, telling her I had married Mandy. I knew that may hurt her. The unnatural haste, the fact that I had a wife named Mandy. But I would rather she heard it from me. I felt a sudden twinge, a heart-surge of love, guilt, self-hatred; standing there with my glass raised like a fool, the twelve grapes ready in my sweaty palm.

After the chimes, we took a rattling cab down to the seafront, where we proceeded to get enthusiastically drunk. The youth of Tarragona screamed past on their mopeds; primary colours flashing in an unrestrained fiesta, horns tooting. In the small hours we walked onto the beach. The night was still pitch, the tide out, with breakers foaming in the very dim distance. A layer of fog hung in a ghostly wreath out at sea, with faint harbour sounds emanating from the gloom. A horn groaned low and long. There had been a tension between me and Mandy all day. We immediately found ourselves in an escalating argument; over what, I can’t remember. All I do remember was that it was vicious, both of us too drunk to care what we were saying, hurling abuse at each other as the waves moaned their eternal sound a quarter of a mile down the level beach. Then I turned around and she was gone. She had deserted me, in the middle of a strange Spanish town, me with no lingo and no pesetas to get back. The argument had been over something very petty. In Barcelona, I recalled us having coffee and
turrones
together, talking and laughing, when I accidentally dropped a sugar cube into my cup, splashing her cashmere scarf. Her eyes had flashed venom. ‘You clumsy idiot,’ she had spat. I was astonished at how quickly she could switch. From zero to one hundred within seconds. Apologies had been useless. I was sorely wounded by this, for deep childhood reasons—I couldn’t stand discordant scenes over food, it made me heartsick, shaky, inconsolable. I felt the same hurt, desertion, woundedness, walking along the sea-wall, not knowing where I was heading, and on my honeymoon too. After an hour a cab sidled up and stopped, its amber light revolving like a squad car. Mandy’s voice called from the window, her face in deep shadow. She said, ‘Are you coming or what?’

During the silent drive back to the flat, on the first day of the new year, I could still feel the powerful wind of the beach on my face; still smell the raw, female emanations of the sea. In my ears was the sound of the black breakers crashing onto the pebbled shore, mixed with the terrible things we had said. The sound of the waves put me sharply in mind of Arnold again and his metaphysical miseries. What a change—from Barcelona to this in a matter of days. How brief is the joy, I thought. The poet spoke truly when he said you have to catch it as it flies.

And now we are flying. Or at least it appears that way. Over a viaduct that has suddenly split the Hertfordshire fields. The exhilaration of height! I can see car headlamps down below, finding their way through distant fields; dipping, disappearing. The pattern made by the streets explicit at last. Can’t make out much, as there is a horizontal drizzle on the train’s window—brushed on with a witch’s broomstick. This view always looks magnificent in full daylight, an unexpected lift as your express tears through the commuter towns. Now the diminished light allows only a fragmentary glimpse. My eyes strain to focus in the miasma-gloom. One hundred feet down is a mini-roundabout, a dot at the centre of a village, its sparse streetlamps Victorian and comforting, the tiny cars gently braking in opposing directions, their Christmas beams bright in the dusk. We must be somewhere near Welwyn Garden City—still javelining our way northwards. In the distance, beyond the glut of jammed car parks and office-space-to-let, there is a cluster of newly built homes advertising their promise of soul-death. This is where your life’s journey ends, they seem to proclaim: under the brown-tiled roof, next to the too-new fences, the unspoilt mica-macadam driveways, the fitted bathrooms and kitchens that must annihilate the spirit just to enter them.

The ground is rising to meet us, just as the runway does when the plane releases its undercarriage. Soon we will be back on the level track, sunk in its valley of rising banks and impenetrable trees … Catch these moments while you can—that seemed to be the dispensation of my honeymoon. And here I am on the rumbling, streaking train, suffering like a fool for not doing so; for expecting longevity. But that’s what you get for surrounding yourself with unscrupulous, coercive, flagrant, equivocal,
no-good
people. Actors who take advantage of the sincere, the meek. Was I always so meek? So Easy? In comparison to Mandy, yes. The proverbial town just wasn’t big enough for her and anyone else. She was a glossy, brash, rambunctious character, and I was her whipping boy. Strange how we both went along with the pretence that I was her husband. Most of the time I felt I was the target of her vengeance, of past scores that hadn’t been settled. How could I have missed this in her? Just one good look at her would have told me that she was an individual bent on revenge. Revenge on her father; on boyfriends who didn’t let her have her own way; on men in general. The awful memory of the night-beach in Tarragona has forced a prickly sweat to my forehead. After that debacle, as I remember, things only got worse. From time to time I was put in mind of St Jerome’s
Adversus Jovinianum
: ‘For three things the earth trembles: if a servant becomes a king; if a fool is filled with bread; if a hateful woman has a good husband.’

Along the corridor of the carriage I can see that people have settled in for the journey. There is a conflation of smells: rich camembert from feet that have slipped the protective harbour of their shoes; the laundered odour of Michelle and Robin opposite, now once again deep in their chick-lit, their lad-lit. Then the musty brush of an old lady as she waddles past towards the smoked-glass partitions, requiring a held breath. There is also the milky waft of a child a couple of seats down. Earlier, the peace had been shattered by his high-pitched shrieks: ‘Aiieeowh!’ followed by ‘Aaargghgoogle!’ culminating in a stark request, ‘Mummy, I need a poo!’ Now I can see that he is sleeping, the mother and son slumped in a touching pieta, her hand gently stroking his hair. How I could use that touch! Did I ever receive such a touch from my mother? Is that tenderness deep within me now: redemptive, stored; like a nest-egg of transmitted love?

I take out my notebook.
Where did all that childhood love evaporate to? Where is the slanting expanse of May? The canopied trees, the joyous light and snowstorming blossom? …
No, poetry won’t help me now. Keep it rational …
I have come to the conclusion that the more one looks objectively at people, the more unattractive they become. Everyone is implicated in time, everyone corrupted. Their faults pile up; even outright dangerous characteristics not noticed before. We should check people more thoroughly beforehand. Like stones dropped in a clear stream, we must watch the ripples widen then gradually disappear, until that deceptive clarity returns. This is how we should sound out others around us. But people rarely give us this opportunity. The real information is concealed. More often than not, the current flows in one direction between two lovers. It’s always one soul seeking, the other retreating. One reality imposing, the other hiding. Only rarely does another’s soul appear to fly and be separate from its cage of flesh—like a butterfly. A white summer butterfly. This is what we look for. What we wait for … I am overexcited and exhausted at the same time. Pulverised by the past; always on the verge of some mental collapse. Why would I think my mother, or indeed anybody, would want to see me in this state? I should get off at the next station and hitchhike back to London. I am not good company. My spirit is heavy and drags everyone around me down—like a rock in a stream. Full of strong existential pain, mental upheaval; wiped-out; soul-sick; suicidal; brimming with high-pressure anxiety and childish torments; metaphysically troubled; unable to read, write, sit, think or make a phone call. No, I’m no use to anyone … And at the same time we are all wrestling with futures, trying to bend others to our will; trying to free ourselves from others simultaneously. And why this ever-present tang of degradation! A shitty odour of belittlement, introduced by the actors one gets tangled up with: people who think they’ve got your measure, got you all worked out, down to a T. This is what degrades human dignity, because, to them, you are static and not kinetic. And this is wrong. A human being always has an unstable definition, is always amorphous, protean. A butterfly.

Why am I soiling my mind with this ugliness? I must think of the lives of the artists, the poets, the scribblers … Chaucer in his room on the London Wall, writing his masterpieces after a hard day’s graft at the customs office; Herbert and his evenings of music in Salisbury; Shakespeare and Jonson swilling Southwark nights away; Dickens chained to his desk, dreaming novels in his head on his daily walk; Marvell overhearing the dialogue between his soul and body; Wordsworth contemplating Newton’s statue at Cambridge, his own mind moving through strange seas of thought alone; Dante standing in the fuming street and reading for hours; Eliot scribbling after a long day at Lloyds; Larkin tossing off a piece of genius after his evening wank; Thackeray with his beady eye on the patrons of his cigar-smoky club; Sidney taking out his notebook while on a hunt; Hart Crane under the glittering Brooklyn Bridge; Yeats in his tower by moonlight, his mind moving like a long-legged fly on the stream …
No, this will not do either. I let the pen settle on the page. I must return mentally to Mandy, to the life we tried to have together. The home we tried to build.

The return flight from Tarragona revealed a London shivering under a full blanket of January fog. The change in temperature was the first thing that hit us. From the genial fragrant breezes of the Mediterranean to the rigorous, nipping cold of England. Swirls of icy hail were tornadoing across the tarmac as we made our way to the luggage belts. And I never did get used to flying. For Mandy there was nothing more straightforward. She had chastised me as I trembled in the cramped airline seat: ‘You and your death-obsession. You should have someone close to you die, then you’d know what it was all about.’ She wasn’t far wrong on both counts. It was an obsession, and it was nearly all theoretical. Air travel, I decided, puts you uncomfortably face to face with your own mortality, usually at a time when you least need it. On your honeymoon, for example. The cringing fatalist always imagines that something very bad will succeed something very good, as if the world ever ran on such easily demarcated lines. And for people as morbid as me, death was an ever-present thought on a plane, startlingly juxtaposed with the streamlined comforts of the cabin, the crisp hostesses and in-flight tray (even that, for me, resonated with the convict’s last meal).

I suppose it was the totality of the carnage that terrified me. Each body would be subjected to what surgeons gravely term ‘massive trauma’. In a car, there was always the chance that you could walk away from the smoking upturned wreck, but with a plane, if anything went wrong, that was it. A comprehensive snuffing out of every soul on board was what one could look forward to. But, strikingly, most air passengers didn’t seem concerned about this possibility. Had they all made terms with death before they boarded the plane? Had they all commended their souls to the everlasting? Had they all revised their wills and prepared their visas for a possible afterlife between check-in and duty-free? I often thought about what those last moments would be like, as all aboard knew they were certainly done for. There would be a crude reappearance of certain atavistic traits, an animal panic that would be horrible to behold in the final seconds before impact. Maybe people would claw the window frames or jump from the exits, like cattle entering an abattoir; a futile, blazing-eyed survival instinct taking over. People would foul themselves. Would say inadmissible, heartbreaking things to the strangers next to them. Would pray out loud. Would perform Hail Marys up to the last split-second. No, I wouldn’t want that tableau to be the last thing I witnessed on this earth.