Byron Easy (48 page)

It was in the Regent that I rendezvoused with Nick one evening at the beginning of summer.

‘I suppose she thinks it’s all a result of her impeccable business acumen,’ said Nick, his fringe undulating as he blew froth from the top of his pint.

‘Of course she does. I’m just a passenger as far as she’s concerned.’

I surveyed the clientele of the Prince Regent with my usual nosediving spirits. Frazzled navvies, ketchup-faced fantasists and retired prostitutes were the order of the day. The pasty passengers of life. All seemed too inert to even visit the bar. Instead, the mutton-chopped landlord would bring a pint of their usual to their tables at half-hourly intervals, keeping score on a chalkboard. There was even one middle-aged character who would leave the pub to take urgent calls on his mobile every ten minutes. Nick and I were convinced he was merely talking to himself. As he smiled and gesticulated on the street beyond our window, we were unable to imagine he had any friends whatsoever, let alone one who possessed a mobile.

‘You know Antonia’s prepared to forgive and forget,’ said Nick suddenly.

I was surprised by this. ‘What about the other day at the stall? She walked on by like Queen Victoria.’

Nick hesitated to reply. He was still too sensitive about what he had overheard that day himself, and recognised my complicity in it. My answer didn’t show enough contrition. ‘Well an apology has to come from Mandy, does it not?’

‘Christ, you know how difficult that is to obtain. She still hasn’t forgiven her mother for dying in a car crash.’

‘That was hardly her mother’s fault,’ stated Nick axiomatically, with his clear-eyed look that sometimes surfaced from beneath his veneer of languid cool.

‘Exactly. Neither is it Antonia’s fault that she’s got big …’

‘Say it,’ said Nick, amused, ‘I don’t mind.’

‘Big tits. It’s just petty jealousy and bitchery. I mean, they used to be best friends. All I heard when we met was how wonderful Antonia was.’

‘Yes, strange how the weather can change direction,’ mused Nick. Despite the tension between us, I knew we were both enjoying the freeing novelty of being in a pub without the wives or girlfriends. It was good to feel the warmth of heterosexual brotherhood; of unimpeded lechery, of mutual grievances aired—the high emotions of manhood, all the higher for being repressed most of the time.

I said, ‘You know, I’m really sorry.’

‘Why is it—’ started Nick, with a tone of measured philosophical inquiry, ‘that everyone but Mandy apologises for her actions? What makes her so special?’

He had me there. For a long time I thought this was the tradeoff one endured when one married a beauty. Different rules seemed to apply. And this latitude was constructed not by the women themselves, but largely by men. These giraffe-pinned Amazons could throw as many public tantrums as they wished, could insult waiters and bellboys, even their husband’s own mother and still get away with it as long as they looked a million dollars from morning till night. Ah, the pride and the pain of being shackled to the most desirable object the world has to offer: a desirable woman. And the unspoken truth, understood by both dutiful husband and preening wife alike, is that, if you cannot put up with this, there is a queue ten deep who will. As Henry Miller drolly commented, he’d never seen a pretty girl starve. Lionised from an early age, these beauties usually have an unrealistic expectation of how they will be treated in later life. They expect adoring looks, opened doors, capes thrown over puddles, a husband with a painstakingly maintained musculature and bank balance who will present them with a gift for every day of the week; a gift for getting up in the morning. And lo and behold, when they grow up, they find this is indeed the treatment the world offers them. Now, just imagine what all that does to the ego! How different are the expectations of the plain wife, embarrassingly grateful not to have been left on the shelf, willing to accept the crumbs from the beauty’s banquet. Yes, beauties operate by different rules. They make you glow with pride just to be seen on their arm for an evening, but know how quickly they can turn that pride to agonised jealousy with a deferment of their gaze to another suitor. The strongest man is but a mouse in their claws. As one battle-hardened Venetian exclaimed, O curse of marriage that we call these delicate creatures ours!

‘I can’t answer that, Nick,’ I said after long deliberation. ‘Sometimes she scares me. I’ve never encountered someone with so much anger and spite before. A woman impudent and mannish grown. It’s taken a while to know how to handle it.’

‘And can you handle it?’ enquired Nick, raising an eyebrow. He seemed distracted, like there was something terribly important, pertinent to mine and Mandy’s relationship, that he wanted to get off his chest.

‘Do you want an honest answer?’

‘Of course,’ said Nick, glancing up to the wall-mounted TV in the corner of the pub. Manchester United were heading out of the tunnel. His eyes lit up. Usually Nick wasn’t impressed by anything, and I disliked this in him. People who don’t have any enthusiasms, who are universally unimpressed, are usually without talent themselves. Only football ruffled his quiff, filled him with an admiration for human endeavour. I waved a hand in front of his face to get his attention. His unusually sensitive eyes found mine. ‘No,’ I answered. ‘No, I can’t handle it. Not this time.’

A chirpy, clucky Yorkshire accent interrupts Nick’s response in the Prince Regent.

‘Hello, I’m Clare Thompson, your team leader for the day … for the passengers that have just joined us at Grantham, I should inform you that smoking facilities for standard-class passengers are provided in coach H, which is situated to the rear of the train. Smoking is not permitted in any other area of the GNER service …’

Nick’s face, his popstar’s lips as they speak his debilitating reply, begin to fade before my eyes. What he said, the importunate plea for me to get divorced while there was still time, will have to wait. I must again engage with the tedious present. Big-boned, ruddy northern lads are hauling hockey bags down the aisle. The train begins to pick up speed. My, my, we are moving fast. I didn’t even realise we had stopped. We have shed a few passengers though. The denim octogenarian hobbled off, with an unusual vigour for the size of his suitcases. A girl with an intelligent continental mouth did indeed disembark. Robin and Michelle are dozing in front of me, their heads heart-stirringly making contact at the temples. Outside, I can see Dales-stone in tightly packed walls running alongside the galloping train. The winter light is fading. The winter light appears to live in my heart. The sky is a grey shroud. I can see a churchyard with sodden copper leaves heaped up under the stricken trees. A gold legend on the church spire’s clock reads ‘Redeem the Time’.

I suddenly apprehend, with a peculiar intensity, that I am on the scrapheap of future romantic involvement—florid-cheeked, broke and exhausted, a hot date with my mother the only thing on the horizon. I feel bitter and weak, with all hope of a coherent future diminishing into the darkness, like the disappearing lights of Grantham seen from the wind-stripped countryside. The body prepares itself for separation from a loved one, like a death. The body does what it has to do, takes care of itself—seems to know the drill. Certainly, the body’s job is to keep up with the soul, and to stop looking so old all the time.

The major problem, I ruminate, sitting here wanting another fag, is that I never notice anything but my own inner workings, my sad mechanism. I walk through the world rapt with a kind of over-attention, but it is all self-focused. I miss things, even when I think I am taking them in. In London, for instance, I walk out into the streets, onto pressure-cooker tube trains, along pavements alive with heterogeneous flicker, but it all seems dreamt in retrospect. When I arrive home and close the door to my tiny room in the shared flat, I think, did I do all that? Was I really there? Me, among all that clamouring, vital, arbitrary, ever-exfoliating life? My real attention was elsewhere. It was on myself—inward-facing, an endless communion with the soul and its daily fluctuations, its general health and position. Whole weeks fly by when it seems I was involved in the world and its transactions only to find that I was really elsewhere. The essential part of myself was surveying
itself.
It was never engaged in the larger public life. This was not its primary occupation. I had been soul-watching. Just recently, when standing before the mirror in the lime-shaded bathroom, I have seen the eyes of Rembrandt’s later portraits in my own: foolish, bankrupt, sick of it all; the pleading vulnerability of a child, housed under the fatigued lids of a fifty-year-old man. Facing this mirror—usually on those off-guard moments after a shower when one catches ones reflection, surprised that the physiognomy belongs to the mind that is surveying it—I think, is this face
mine?
Where do these eyes lead to? Do they lead to me? Are they the mirror of the soul, or are they a phenomenon we shouldn’t be concerned with, cursed as we are with consciousness? Why are we fascinated by this Cartesian split, this always-spellbinding duality? This dialogue between soul and body? Because both parties seem mutually inhibiting. Stopped there, arrested before the glass, puckered and hacked about in the steel light of morning or the warm perishing glow of dusk, I can hear Echo’s voice receding into the forest. Except there are no tears to distort my vision. The moment is always too candid, too raw, too full of unanswered questions (about the past, about destinations we may never reach). But the moment always seems to announce:
this
is the destination, or at least one of them. Here you are again, in front of the mirror, trying to connect the centre that speaks and flies and sings with the astounding, familiar contraption of flesh and cartilage; the skull that will look just like a million others when we eventually thin out. Usually, I cannot help noticing how the body hasn’t managed to keep pace with the soul it houses; how the years have altered the visage, the bestial visor. How the veins in my cheeks have splintered and split, finally lying there dead under the surface of the skin; two clown-like port wine stains, a Santa Claus patina on skin no longer supple and clear. Or how the hair has abdicated its tenure on my scalp, leaving a surface on which it is impossible to imagine that anything living had ever been present. The body decays, but the soul seems to remain ageless, birthday-less. There are no anniversaries for the soul. So why this valetudinarian ache? Possibly, it is the tension, the disparity, between the static inner and the kinetic outer, as the body undergoes its predictable somatic cycle, that makes us feel old. Often during these mirror moments, I remember the skull in my grandfather’s studio: leering, ineradicable, dead. And I am convinced that the owner of that skull (whose skin it once covered to make his face) also stood before a mirror and asked the same questions, and also returned to his room, towel around his shoulders, water in his ears, without any satisfactory answers.

I decide a cigarette is a very good idea indeed, and make to get up, bracing myself for my addict’s trek to the smoking car. Then I notice a poem in my notebook, staring up at me from the facing page where it fell open. Blimey. I had forgotten even writing it. But not the feelings that forced me to pick up the quill. Scribbled one night in the last week of my marriage, the final few days in the marital home, it was suggested by seeing a lonely item of fruit in the wicker basket in our kitchen during one of my nocturnal vigils. It was entitled (with Hardyesque simplicity, I thought),’The Orange’:

The single orange in the basket,

Now overripe in full decay,

Is like a teardrop in a casket:

Swollen, yet not dissolved away.

Of life and fruit we know two things:

The first, that both run out of time;

And second—this one really stings:

For certain words there is no rhyme.

Metaphysical,
n’est ce pas?
Or maybe more firmly in the Cockney School of rhyming. Well, those closing lines never caused me any satisfaction. The fact that certain words have no rhyme is a condition only of life, or language, not of fruit. If the ballad form had permitted me to write ‘for certain
citrus rutaceae
there is no rhyme’ as well, then that would have made all the difference. Ho hum. And I think you can guess what the orange, you know, symbolised.

A cigarette has to be in order.

I ease myself up on feet that have gone to sleep. Steady … my legs feel like phantom limbs. Though it is almost completely dark outside, I can just make out the long reach of a canal with its surprising swans disappearing into the dusk. The crisp filaments of the trees seem impossibly delicate, austere. In the bleak midwinter, indeed. How I long for spring, for Proserpine’s return to earth after the squalor of Pluto’s captivity.

Meanwhile, back on Mandy’s farm … Things were going from bad to unendurable. After a summer cleaning up on the market she changed her mind about the Cuba jaunt. Instead, she spent the money on clothes and going out. None of it made her happy. Nothing ever did. She also became hysterically aggressive. It didn’t take much to set Mandy off. There was a long list of pet hates that could precipitate these incendiary, ungovernable assaults. They sound like the comical preamble to a joke about a superannuated pedant, but the results of these phenomena were anything but comical. They included, among many other prosaic things, the sound of anyone chomping gum in the vicinity; her sugary tea being insufficiently stirred; cigarette ash on a carpet; foreign accents (Yorkshire, Scots, Yank, Aussie); my buying magazines or newspapers; my getting drunk; anyone chewing their food audibly (especially children); anyone who reeked of the pub; the shower curtain not being pulled across properly; the pans completed before the plates when washing up; anyone overweight, or with a fat behind, and girls and other women of all ages and ethnicities.

In fact, Mandy’s obsession with weight and food increased and diversified as she got older. Not technically anorexic, she had a curious regime. I began to realise that she maintained her coltish figure by wasting exactly half of every meal. This, I believe, was a habitual dieting practice inherited from Ramona. Time after time, I would watch her approaching the halfway mark of a dinner, then see her contemplate putting the fork down. ‘You have it,’ she would say, with a tint of disgust, as if the food had been cursed, then scrape the remaining half onto my plate. ‘But you’re still hungry,’ I would protest, ‘I know you are.’ She would ignore this accusation and slope off for a cigarette, restlessly peckish, but unable to ignore her own stringencies.