Enduring Love (8 page)

By our bedside in the dark, the phone remained silent. I’d unplugged it many hours before.

There was
a time this century when ships, white oceangoing liners such as luxuriously plowed the Atlantic swell between London and New York, became the inspiration for a form of domestic architecture. In the twenties something resembling the
Queen Mary
ran aground in Maida Vale, and all that remains now is the bridge, our apartment building. It gleams a peeling white among the plane trees. Its corners are rounded; there are portholes in the lavatories and lighting the shallow spirals of the stairwells. The steel-framed windows are low and oblong, strengthened against the squalls of urban life. The floors are oak parquet and could accommodate any number of jazzy quick-stepping couples.

The two apartments on the top have the advantage of several skylights and one and half twists of an iron staircase that leads onto a flat roof. Our neighbors, a successful architect and his boyfriend, who keeps house, have made a fantasy garden in their portion, with clematis severely wound round poles and austere spiky leaves poking between
large smooth stones collected from a riverbed and retained, Japanese style, in open black wooden boxes.

In the frenetic month after moving in, Clarissa and I exhausted our small reserve of decorating and nesting energies on the apartment itself, so there’s nothing on our side of the roof apart from a plastic table and four plastic chairs, bolted down in case of high winds. Here you can sit among the TV aerials and dishes, the roofing pitch underfoot wrinkled and dusty like an elephant’s hide, and look toward the greenery of Hyde Park and hear the tranquillizing thunder of West London’s traffic. From the other side of the table you have the best possible view of our neighbors’ shrine to orderly growth, and beyond, the dusky roofs of the infinite northward suburbs. This was where I sat the following morning at seven. I had left Clarissa sleeping and brought with me my coffee, the paper, and my pages from the night before.

But instead of reading myself or others, I thought about John Logan and how we had killed him. Yesterday the events of the day before had dimmed. This morning the blustery sunshine illumined and animated the whole tableau. I could feel the rope in my hands again as I examined the welts. I made calculations. If Gadd had stayed in the basket with his grandson, and if the rest of us had hung on, and if we assumed an average weight of a hundred and sixty pounds each, then surely eight hundred pounds would have kept us close to the ground. If the first person had not let go, then surely the rest of us would have stayed in place. And who was this first person? Not me. Not me. I even said the words aloud. I remembered a plumeting mass and the sudden upward jerk of the balloon. But I could not tell whether this mass was in front of me or to my left or right. If I knew the position, I would know the person.

Could this person be blamed? As I drank my coffee, the rush
hour below began its slow crescendo. It was hard to think this through. Phrases, well worn and counterweighted, occurred to me, resolving nothing. On the one hand, the first pebble in an avalanche, and on the other, the breaking of ranks. The cause, but not the morally responsible agent. The scales tipping, from altruism to self-interest. Was it panic, or rational calculation? Had we killed him really, or simply refused to die with him? But if we had been with him, stayed with him, no one would have died.

Another question was whether I should visit Mrs. Logan and tell her what happened. She deserved to know from a witness that her husband was a hero. I saw us sitting face to face on wooden stools. She was draped in black, in pantomime widow’s weeds, and we were in a prison cell with a high-barred window. Her two children stood close by her side, clinging to her knees, refusing to meet my eye. My cell, my guilt? The image came to me from a half-forgotten painting in the late Victorian narrative style, in the idiom of “And when did you last see your father?” Narrative—my gut tightened at the word. What balls I had written the night before. How was it possible to tell Mrs. Logan of her husband’s sacrifice without drawing her attention to our own cowardice? Or was it his folly? He was the hero, and it was the weak who had sent him to his death. Or we were the survivors and he was the miscalculating dolt.

I was so lost in this that I did not notice Clarissa until she sat down on the other side of the table. She smiled and mouthed a kiss. She warmed her hands around a coffee mug.

“Are you thinking about it?”

I nodded. Before her kindness and our love got the better of me, I had to tell her. “Do you remember, the day it happened, just as we were falling asleep the phone rang?”

“Mmm. Wrong number.”

“It was that guy with the ponytail. You know, the one who wanted me to pray. Jed Parry.”

She frowned. “Why didn’t you say? What did he want?”

I didn’t pause. “He said he loved me.”

For a fraction of time the world froze as she took this in. Then she laughed. Easily, merrily.

“Joe! You didn’t tell me. You were embarrassed? You clot!”

“It was just one more thing. And then I felt bad about not telling you, so it got harder. And then I didn’t want to interrupt last night.”

“What did he say? Just ‘I love you,’ like that?”

“Yeah. He said, ‘I feel it too. I love you …’ ”

Clarissa put her hand over her mouth, little-girl style. I hadn’t expected delight. “A secret gay love affair with a Jesus freak! I can’t wait to tell your science friends.”

“All right, all right.” But I felt lightened to have her teasing me.

“There’s more, though.”

“You’re getting married.”

“Listen. Yesterday he was following me.”

“My God. He’s got it bad.”

I knew I had to prise her from this levity, for all the comfort it gave. “Clarissa, it’s scary.” I told her about the presence in the library and how I had run out into the square. She interrupted me.

“But you didn’t actually see him in the library.”

“I saw his shoe as he went out the door. White trainers with red laces. It had to be him.”

“But you didn’t see his face.”

“Clarissa, it was him!”

“Don’t get angry with me, Joe. You didn’t see his face, and he wasn’t in the square.”

“No. He’d gone.”

She was looking at me in a new way now and was moving through the conversation with the caution of a bomb disposal expert. “Let me get this straight. You had this idea you were being followed even before you saw his shoe?”

“It was just a feeling, a bad feeling. It wasn’t until I was in the library with time to think about it that I realized how it was getting to me.”

“And then you saw him.”

“Yeah. His shoe.”

She glanced at her watch and took a pull from her mug. She was going to be late for work.

“You should go,” I said. “We can talk this evening.”

She nodded, but she did not rise. “I don’t really understand what’s upsetting you. Some poor fellow has a crush on you and is trailing you about. Come on, it’s a joke, Joe! It’s a funny story you’ll be telling your friends. At worst it’s a nuisance. You mustn’t let it get to you.”

I felt a childish pang of sorrow when she got to her feet. I liked what she was saying. I wanted to hear it again in different ways. She came round to my side of the table and kissed me on the head. “You’re working too hard. Go easy on yourself. And remember that I love you. I
love
you.” We kissed again, deeply.

I followed her downstairs and watched as she prepared to leave. Perhaps it was the worried smile she gave me as she bustled past to pack her briefcase, perhaps it was the solicitous way she told me she would be back at seven and would phone me during the day, but standing there on the polished dance-floor parquet I felt like a mental patient at the end of visiting hours.
Don’t leave me here with my mind
, I thought.
Get them to let me out
. She put on her coat, opened the front door, and was about to speak to me, but the words never left
her. She had remembered a book she needed. While she was fetching it, I lingered by the door. I knew what I wanted to say, and perhaps there was still time. This wasn’t “some poor fellow.” It was a man bound to me, like the farm laborers, by an experience, and by a shared responsibility for, or at the very least a shared involvement in, another man’s death. This was also a man who wanted me to pray with him. Perhaps he felt insulted. Perhaps he was some kind of vengeful fanatic.

Clarissa was back with her book, stuffing it into her briefcase while she held some papers between her teeth. She was halfway out the door. When I started to say my piece, she set the case down to free her hands and mouth. “I can’t, Joe, I can’t. I’m already late. It’s a lecture.” She hesitated, agonizing. Then she said, “Go on, tell it to me quick.” Just then the phone rang, and I was relieved. I had thought she was giving a supervision, not a lecture, and letting her off the hook would have wasted even more of her time.

“I’ll get it, you go,” I said cheerily. “I’ll tell you this evening.”

She blew me a kiss and was gone. I heard her footsteps on the stairs as I reached the phone. “Joe?” said the voice. “It’s Jed.”

It was perverse of me to be surprised and, for a moment, speechless. He had phoned the day before, after all, and he was on my lips, on my mind. On my mind to such an extent that I had forgotten that he was also out there, a physical entity capable of operating the phone system.

He had paused after his name; now he spoke into my silence. “You phoned me.” We all had last number recall. The telephone was not what it was. Pitiless ingenuity was making it needlingly personal.

“What do you want?” Even as I said the words, I wanted them back. I did not want to know what he wanted, or rather, I did not want to be told. It was not really a question anyway, more a gesture of hostility. So too was “And who gave you my number?”

Parry sounded pleased. “That’s quite a story, Joe. I went to the—”

“I don’t want your story. I don’t want you phoning me.” I almost said, “Or following me,” but something held me back.

“We need to talk.”

“I don’t.”

I heard Parry’s intake of breath. “I think you do. At least, I think you need to listen.”

“I’m going to hang up. If I hear from you again, I’m calling the police.”

The phrase sounded fatuous, the sort of meaningless thing people say, like “I’ll sue the bastards.” I knew the local station. They were hard pressed down there, and they had their priorities. This was the sort of thing the citizenry was supposed to sort out for itself.

Parry spoke immediately into my threat. His voice was pitched higher and his words came faster. He had to get this out before I cut him off. “Look, I’m making you a promise. Just see me this once, just once and hear me out and you’ll never have to hear from me again. That’s a promise, a solemn promise.”

Solemn. More like panicky. I calculated: perhaps I should see him, let him see me and let him understand that I was distinct from the creature of his fantasy world. Let him speak. The alternative was more of this. Perhaps I could muster a little detached curiosity. When this story was closed, it would be important to know something about Parry. Otherwise he would remain as much a projection of mine as I was of his. It crossed my mind to make him bring down his god to underwrite his solemn promise. But I did not want to provoke him.

I said, “Where are you?”

He hesitated. “I can come to you.”

“No. Tell me where you are.”

“I’m in the phone box at the end of your road?”

He said it, he asked it, without shame. I was shocked, but determined to conceal it. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be along.” I hung up, put on my coat, took my keys, and left the apartment. It was a comfort to discover that Clarissa’s scent, Diorissimo, still hung in the air on the stairs, all the way down.

Outside our
apartment building, running straight on rising ground, was an avenue of plane trees just coming into leaf. As soon as I stepped out onto the pavement I saw Parry standing under a tree at the corner, a hundred yards away. When he saw me he took his hands out of his pockets, folded his arms, then let them droop. He began to come toward me, changed his mind, and went back to his tree. I walked toward him slowly and felt my anxiety dropping away.

As I went closer Parry retreated further under his tree, leaned back against its trunk, and tried to look nonchalant by hooking a thumb into his trouser pocket. In fact he looked abject. He appeared smaller, all knobs and bones, no longer the sleek Indian brave, despite the ponytail. He wouldn’t meet my eye as I came up, or rather his eyes made a nervous pass across my face and then turned down. As I put out my hand, I was feeling quite relieved. Clarissa was right: he was a harmless fellow with a strange notion, a nuisance at most, hardly the threat I had made him out to be. He looked a sorry sight now, cringing under the fresh plane leaves. It was the accident and the
afterwaves of shock that had distorted my understanding. I had translated farce into indefinable menace. His hand, when it shook mine, exerted no pressure. I spoke to him firmly, but with a little kindness too. He was just about young enough to be my son. “You’d better tell me what this is all about.”

He said, “There’s a coffee place …” and he nodded in the direction of the Edgware Road.

“We’ll be fine right here,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time.”

The wind had got up again and seemed sharpened by the thin sunlight. I drew my coat around me and tightened its belt, and as I did so I glanced at Parry’s shoes. No trainers today. Soft brown leather shoes, handmade perhaps. I went and leaned against a nearby wall and folded my arms.

Parry came away from the tree and stood in front of me, staring at his feet. “I’d rather we went inside,” he said, with a hint of a whine.

I said nothing and waited. He sighed and looked down the street to where I lived, and then his gaze tracked a passing car. He looked up at the piles of towering cumulus, and he examined the nails of his right hand, but he could not look at me. When he spoke at last, I think his sight line was on a crack in the pavement.