Glass (12 page)

‘Any tips?' I prompted.

‘I can only tell you of the fallacies of this concept, love,' he said. ‘I have fallen into its pit before. 1958 was the year. But that was in another country, and besides, she is most likely dead now. Of course, to love is to give oneself up to the act of loving. One must love when one is compelled to love. It does not respond to reason. We are drawn to the qualities of the present hedonist, the spontaneous, the impulsive, the rash and the irresponsible. But the qualities we need are precisely the opposite: the Lutheran, the future planning, the impulse control, the responsible, the caring and nurturing. So it is that many cultures divided the role of wife and mistress, and is it fair to expect such disparate qualities in a single social role? Are we not so often unhappy because we define the cause of happiness as a thing beyond our grasping? A friend, a lover, a mother for my children? No, it is fallacious to presume such a hybrid exists. If I ever thought I had met her, I was wrong. Man's tragedy is to think that he has, in the face of all human history – the rational, happily arranged marriages, the miserable, impulsive elopements – become the first to utter the word love in reference to a woman who will be careful with his heart. For …'

The momentum of his speech dropped, like a sailboat suddenly becalmed. He looked lost, for the moment, in another country and another time.

‘All good points,' I said slowly. ‘Fingers crossed for this date tonight, though, eh?'

‘Yes,' he murmured. ‘We must continue to act as if these grand narratives have not collapsed.'

‘So I thought I might take a shower.'

‘Of course. You must.'

I wondered if that was a veiled insult. Under the circumstances, I let it slide.

I had recently discovered that a turtle called Archimedes lived in the bath, so I had to watch my ankles. I considered getting down into the tub, as I prefer baths, but I thought that it might nip at my exposed parts, and the water was cold regardless.

On the way to Lieve's, I stopped off at a little wine shop. A little man with a devil goatee stood filing his nails at the rough wooden counter.

‘Good evening,' he said over his glasses.

‘Hi. Can you recommend a good bottle of wine?' I asked.

‘I wouldn't be much good at my job if I couldn't. Red or white?'

‘You choose.'

‘We have a wonderful Echézeaux. A very solid, fruity red, deriving from the excellent Domaine Romanée-Conti.'

He showed me the bottle. It wasn't far off £100.

‘Have you got anything around the eight- or nine-pound mark?'

There was a pause. One eyebrow floated up towards his hairline. ‘Cooking wine, sir?'

‘No, I'm going to attempt to drink it.'

‘Of course you are.'

‘And could you put it in one of those nice boxes behind the counter. It's a gift.'

He broke into a smile. ‘She's a lucky lady, whoever she is.'

‘Have you ever heard of Tycho Brahe?' Lieve asked me over a lovely bit of venison.

‘I can't say that I have.'

‘Why is that?' she asked.

‘Because I haven't.'

She put down her fork. ‘He was an astronomer, the best of his generation,' she said proudly. ‘Recently I've been dogged by the six of cups in my Tarot and I've been trying out past life regression to see how it all fits. And I had a breakthrough just before your message on Thursday: I
was
Tycho Brahe. In a past life.'

This was something of a dilemma. Delusional people made me nervous. But, in my limited experience – and by experience, I mean watching MTV – there was a remarkable overlap between women I found sexy and women I found crazy. Though the two traits have apparently very little in common, perhaps some small part of me believes that a woman would have to have poor judgment in order to justify having sex with me. It makes the whole fantasy more plausible.

I looked up the Wikipedia entry. ‘Tycho kept an elk with him that got drunk at a party and fell down the stairs and died,' I read from my phone. ‘He also enlisted the services of a clairvoyant dwarf called Jepp.'

She leant back in her chair as if to say, ‘Case closed.' It did amaze me how independent her beliefs were from their natural parents, evidence.

We had finished our meal. I smiled at her. She was really, properly weird. What if I was too, and that was why she liked me? She bit off a tiny bit of skin on her lip and ran a finger down the hairline on her neck. Slowly, I reached across and took her hand, which seemed like the thing to do. She leant across the table towards me, and I leant out to meet her, but the table was too wide, and we couldn't reach. Her eyes were laughing, now, as I pushed my pouffe out behind me and it fell over and I walked on my knees round the table and she knelt to receive me. I pecked her softly on the lips. She put her hands on my ribs. She kissed me on the lips, harder, and pressed her bosom into my chest.

She took me by the hand and led me up the stairs to her bedroom, where we lay down side by side on the covers and I let my hand stray down towards her hip. She had her hand under my T-shirt, now, and held me close, her head resting on my other arm. We were still kissing, our eyes closed, but all I could feel was her hand trailing down my side, my stomach, my navel, to the top of my jeans.

‘Shouldn't we get a—' I began breathlessly.

‘It's fine.'

‘But what if—'

‘I said it's fine. I'm on the pill.'

She unhooked my button with élan and I was in an ecstasy, our tops went over our heads, we were skin upon skin, kissing and stroking, and it was forgotten.

I tried to get her to try some different positions, but she remained stubbornly on her back with a cushion underneath her pelvis.
⁴⁶
I didn't give it much thought. Not to be too crude about it, my mind was on other things.

Afterwards I traced my fingers along her side, languid, looking at the shape of the eyeliner she'd painted on, which was very slightly different on each eye. She kissed me on the nose.

‘I'm going to fetch a glass of water. Do you want anything?' she asked, getting up.

‘Um … Do you have any sparkling?'

‘You sound like my ex-husband.'

‘Come again?'

She came back through with a glass of tap water. ‘I said, you sound like my ex-husband.'

‘Your ex-husband..?'

‘John. Blades.'

‘No. Really?'

‘Yes, really.'

‘John Blades who I work for?'

‘Yes,' she said.

‘Oh dear. That's not good.' She shook her head, sitting back down next to me in silence. ‘Dare I ask what happened?' I asked eventually.

‘Well, what do you want to know?'

I thought about that.

‘I suppose I want to know the reason why you loved him, and the reason you stopped loving him, if that's not too much to ask.'

‘God, well. I'll try. I don't know if the reasons will make sense to anyone else.'

I made a gesture for her to go on.

‘He was very … Traditional. He would open doors for me. He insisted on paying for everything. He punched men who looked at me a certain way. I told him off for that but it made me feel … Everything he ever did came easily, but it didn't make him lazy. He had worked his way up from nothing and I loved him for that.

‘We wanted a family. We both did. But we found it hard to conceive. He wouldn't go to a doctor to see what we could do. He was too proud to have his sperm checked. And so it took us years of trying, but it happened, I got pregnant, and we were so happy for that. It was perhaps the first time the world hadn't relented to the force of his will, and somehow that made it so much more beautiful when it finally did happen. He bought us this house, and I sat on a chair holding my belly and watching as he lifted everything in himself. He was so stubborn, he couldn't just watch while the removal men did their job, he always had to be involved, always had a better way to do things.

‘Then at six months I had a miscarriage. I remember feeling heavy, thinking my waters must have broken because the baby had grown so big inside me. But I looked down and there was only blood.

‘When they took me to hospital, I already knew the baby was dead. I could feel it sinking in me like a lead weight. The doctors told me I had to give birth to it anyway, that they would induce me and I would give birth to this dead thing, this object. So that's what I did, and I went through the senseless pain, and felt the loss of it, which was worse. The little body was taken away like refuse.

‘The doctors explained that it was just a terrible accident. There was nothing to prevent me from conceiving again. But John … The moment he walked into the room and looked at me, I could see that he hated me. He thought I had killed it.

‘We never really recovered from that. We couldn't touch each other. He claimed that he understood and that he didn't blame me, but I truly felt that he would rather I had died, and the baby lived.

‘I looked for reasons elsewhere. I discovered there was a whole world, the spiritual world, and it could explain everything. There is a reason for everything, you just have to know how to read the signs. It wasn't my fault. Do you see? The stars, they …'

She broke off, wincing to trap the tears in.

‘It's okay,' I said. ‘It's okay.'

I took her hand.

‘So he left,' she said. ‘He didn't even pick up half his stuff, it's all in boxes upstairs. He didn't return my calls. We never saw eye to eye on everything, but to pretend I didn't exist, it was just too much. So I decided to confront him. It took me all of five minutes to find out where he was making his next press call. I thought Portsmouth would draw a nice big crowd, so I could tell the world what he was really like, humiliate him on his own PR campaign. I stood waiting on the viewing platform, and he appeared, and I couldn't. Seeing him again, the prospect of causing a scene seemed so undignified. I didn't want anyone to remember me that way. And he sees everything in black and white, once he turns on a person … He just makes these snap judgments of people, all the time. I know it will sound rueful, however I say it, but I'm glad it's over. Now that I've given up trying to make it work, I have finally let myself see how vile he can be.'

She smiled at me and squeezed my hand.

‘Well, if we were married, I would certainly treat you better than that,' I said.

‘But we're not married, Günter.'

‘No, we're not. Quite right. But if we were—'

‘Do you have intentions to marry me, Günter? Is that what you're saying?'

‘No! I don't … I mean, that's not what I was—'

‘Why not?'

‘Look,' I said, holding my palms out in a gesture of futility, as one might during a bear attack,
⁴⁷
‘I have to admit that I'm not very good at talking to women. I sort of just say things to fill the gaps and often I don't know what—'

‘Günter,' she said, with a finger to her lips. ‘It was a joke. I was joking.'

‘Right, okay. I mean, I know. Obviously that last part was a joke. But generally.'

I had made a tiny tear into our vacuum of intimacy, and now the silence was rushing in to fill it. She got up.

‘Look, I'm sorry but I should probably get an early night. I have a client coming round early in the morning.'

‘A client?' I asked.

‘Were you listening when I told you what I did?'

‘Oh – Oh! Yes. Sorry. Of course. Tarot, and uh …'

We were already in the corridor. I left quietly, walking out through the sodium-lit streets, the air muggy enough to carry smells of cooking and popcorn far from people's houses. So I was having sex with Blades' ex-wife. It would be best he didn't know about that. Ideally, I wouldn't know about that. So those were his boxes up in the study. And that was his whiteboard with the web of strange words on it. I tried to remember what had been written on it. It had looked like something out of
A Beautiful Mind
, but written by someone more paranoid and less clever. Now I'd have to go back to work with him, and pretend that everything was normal. I hated keeping secrets, particularly because I was so bad at it.

Back in my bedroom, I flicked through my emails. I had one from Max asking when I was coming back to Salisbury. That was one thing that I didn't understand about Max: when I spoke to him, he scowled back at me as if he resented my very presence. And yet, far from being glad to see the back of me, he seemed to want to stay in contact now more than ever. I'd had a couple of texts from him during my course, which I'd ignored. I would to go back to Salisbury soon anyway.

I emailed Max back:
I'm trying to make some money to help Dad pay his mortgage. I'll be home soon to check he hasn't died in your care.
I knew full well that he wouldn't be giving Dad any money or helping out around the house. Sometimes I wondered whether he was even self-aware enough to see the meaning in my reproaches.

I came out of my room to find the Steppenwolf rolling sushi on a space he'd cleared on the tabletop.

‘It is nearly Saturday,' he growled amicably. ‘I am preparing for my exile.'

I watched him for a while, first laying down the seaweed on his bamboo mat, then adding splodges of rice, patting them down, adding lengthwise cucumber and tuna, then rolling it carefully, like a giant cigar.

‘I wonder what will happen first,' he said, baring his teeth in an honest smile. ‘My mercury poisoning, or the extinction of fish?'

‘It is hard to be good,' I said, half to myself. Then, ‘You know how you're writing a guide to life?'

‘I do know.'

‘Is there anything in there about hate? Why people hate other people? That sort of thing?'

He huffed nostalgically. ‘Oh yes. A great deal. Hate is a tremendously complex emotion. I explore hate in three sections of the Work. First, “Pulling Up The Ladder and the Perception of Finite Resource”. Second, “The Loneliness of Misunderstanding”. Third, “Spiting the Better Self: William Wilson,
The Double
and the Salieri of
Amadeus
”. I will show you these chapters.'