No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (31 page)

He looked across at the old man whose hands were folded now, as though deliberately, as an act of refusal, in his lap. Was Frank pleading? Maybe not pleading, but asking certainly. Seeking. Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out, Mel had ordered. He was halfway there. He’d got the fuck out. But how to shut the fuck up?

Seek and ye shall find.

Well, Father? Well?

‘Next year,’ Father Lawrence said, but this time without recourse to his cyst, ‘I’m hoping I will be well enough to make it to Italy. I haven’t been to Rome for twenty years, could be more. And there have been many changes

He has no appetite for it, Frank thought. He has no gift for
abstraction and no flair for solace. He has the face of a philosopher but the imagination of a commuter. But he felt he owed it to Brother Cyprian at least to give it one last go. ‘So how do you quieten the roar of
your
passions?’ he asked. Keeping it simple now, keeping it short. ‘What do
you
do when jealousy or anger smites your heart?’

‘Oh, you have to see how silly that is, and try to think of something else.’

Frank waited. Was that it? Silly! Had they been sitting there discussing
silliness
for an hour?

Yes, that was it. The old man turned his face to the window, looked out into the vegetable garden where Gordon, all tears, was pulling down an unwanted woodshed. Then he consulted the alarm clock by Frank’s bed. Time to be going.

Frank rose and thanked him. ‘It’s most kind of you,’ he said. ‘I’m most grateful to you. I’ll think about what you have said to me.’

But he knew what he was going to think. He was going to think that he had more spirituality in his dick …

… and he didn’t want to be thinking about his dick.

It’s enough to make him miss Mel. He can’t find anybody to be serious with.

‘Day by day remind yourself,’ Benedict advised, ‘that you are going to die.’ No sign that the monks have taken any heed of that. They laugh uproariously and eat like pigs. And the wisest and oldest one among them is planning his next overseas trip. Only Frank has death daily in his eyes.

And of course Gordon. Though Gordon, strictly speaking, doesn’t count. Benedict’s words are not intended to drive you to suicide. Day by day remind yourself is an injunction to morbid longevity, whereas Gordon is increasingly looking to Frank like a man meaning to end it all. ‘So there it is,’ he
says one morning in the guests’ kitchen. Apropos nothing in particular. So there it is. Frank sees a subtly fatalistic progression here from Gordon’s usual ‘Yes indeed’. So there it is. So there it was. It’ll be over for him before the day’s out, Frank thinks. They’ll find him face down in the stream. But the following morning Frank runs into him in the kitchen early, buttering toast and loading it with marmalade. ‘Lovely day,’ Frank says. ‘Yes indeed,’ Gordon replies. So
he
isn’t really serious either.

As for the other retreatants, those Frank cannot avoid speaking to are here only because yoga and meditation and marriage counselling have failed. Next week they’ll be Hare Krishnas. ‘I’ve just been reading a book about losing yourself through drugs, the way Mexicans do,’ one of them says to him, as they’re feeling their way back from vespers in the dark. ‘By someone called Audrey Huxley.’

‘I think I know a book a bit like that,’ Frank says. ‘Except that the one I know is by
Aldous
Huxley.’

‘That’s her. That’s the one. Good book.’

And sitting reading quietly in the common room later that same afternoon, waiting to enter the hush of compline, he is accosted by a precociously grey grasshopper of a man with glacial green eyes and two sets of pupils, one not quite aligned behind the other, who has a desire to talk to him about himself. ‘I’ve succumbed to most things in life,’ he tells Frank. ‘Women, alcohol, meat, drugs. But they’re wrong. I’ve always known they were wrong, but now I know
why
they’re wrong …’

He waits for Frank to ask him to put flesh upon that why, but Frank has been here too long to ask anyone anything.

‘And I’ll tell you why,’ the man says at last. ‘Because it’s in the Book. Whatever you need is in that Book. My name’s Fletcher, by the way, what’s yours? OK – it’s out there,
Frank. It’s waiting for you to find it. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and ye shall enter.’

‘Aha,’ Frank says. He knows all about seeking and knocking.

‘You might not think it to look at me,’ Fletcher continues, ‘but I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been entertainments manager on the QE2. I’ve flown Concorde. I’ve climbed the pyramids. I’ve dived off the cliffs at Acapulco. I’ve walked along the Chinese Wall. I’ve roller-skated on Venice beach. And I can still do all these things. But I know I’ve got to decide now between a life with love or a life without love. I’ve got to come down on one side or another. That’s why I’m here.’

Aha, Frank thinks. His wife’s sent him.

‘I know another good book on that subject,’ Frank says, getting up to go to prayers. ‘It’s by Audrey Huxley.’

They aren’t serious. They aren’t fit to fasten a real recluse’s sandals. They don’t acknowledge they’re dirt. They don’t day by day remind themselves they’ve had it. They’re all five more years men. They’ve all got the gimmies.

Frank doesn’t want anyone to give him anything. It’s good simply to be alive, watching the year die. Sitting in the cold, in a world without women, losing himself in plainsong. He knows he can’t stay with the monks forever. But whether he’ll get his own place up here in the dark, or go on a monastery crawl, six weeks here, two months there, he hasn’t yet decided. In the meantime, depletion grows on him. One wash basin, one narrow wardrobe, one single bed (and not a thought of the pity of it, oh the pity of it Iago, he and his dick going begging on a mattress, night after night), one electric socket, a single kitchen chair for his portable television and laptop computer – how much else does a man need?

He’s come full circle, from the first grand hotel room he
slept in as a boy, marvelling at the teeming future that disclosed itself in every empty lavender-scented drawer, to this last lowly nutshell with its intimations only of the grave.

He’s so battened down that even his adversary the tempter doesn’t call on him any more. He’s safe from grandiosity – no one reads his column in this place, no one recognises him. He’s safe from the past – no ghosts of runny girls crook their fingers to him in the cloisters. No one sculpts his likeness in cappuccino froth. He’s an impregnable fortress. He’s so close to the ground no wind can blow him over.

And then Mel writes to him.

Once a week he’s been going into town to fax his copy and collect his mail. Mel is still sending him whatever comes through her letterbox that isn’t addressed solely to her. The bills and the takeaway pizza menus and the washing-powder samples all stuffed into a brown padded bag and addressed in love-me-not handwriting to Ritz, Poste Restante, Inverness, Scotland. She is in possession of no other information about his whereabouts. The monastery is his secret. He’s damned if he’s going to give her the satisfaction of thinking that he’s finally taken her advice. Isn’t this what she’s always wanted him to be – a fucking monk?

So what makes her write suddenly? What makes her enliven the usual anonymous litter with a personal enclosure, the briefest of notes on her Melissa Paul, pornographer, notepaper, but a note nonetheless –
If you think you can be quiet now, you can come home – ?

Does she know, or is it an inspired guess?

Has her new lover dumped her? Have they all?

And how can she be so sure that this scrap of insolent presumption is all it will take to get him to renounce every vow, kiss goodbye to compline and come charging down the motorway at a hundred miles an hour with his pancreas
pumping poisons and his stomach plastered across the dashboard like seaweed on a rock?

Don’t make us laugh, Frank.

S
O WHAT’S THE
drill? Does he ring the bell or does he let himself in with his key?

You can come home, she wrote.
Home.
That entitles him to use his key, surely. But he’s been a monk for the past however many months. A guest in the house of God, not a homeowner. He doesn’t know whether he any longer has what it takes just to let himself in. Besides, his hands are shaking. He doubts if he could fit the key into the keyhole. Nerves? No. Yes. And the long drive. And the palsy of old age. His hands have been in the world for fifty years – of course they’re shaking.

He rings.

There is no answer.

There are lights on in the house. She could be in the back garden. It’s a chilly evening, but that wouldn’t deter her. She likes the cold and the dark. She likes sitting out under the stars in one of his cardigans. Submitting to the moon’s magnetic pull. If the moon could draw her colon out and clean it, she’d let it.

The garden was always the place she fled to escape him. He watched her sometimes, after they had fought, sitting out there as though she meant never to come inside again,
sorrowful and lonely, her back turned on him and on the house, her gaze fixed on nothing. No matter what he had said to her, no matter what she had said to him, the sight of her absorbed into nature, wheeled around like an icy star herself, always broke his heart.

How many times had he gone out to her, to say he was sorry, to see if he could pluck her from the planetary pull, coax her back into the human world, the only world he comprehended. But it always fell out the same way. ‘What now?’ she would say, oppressed by the long shadow he cast, even in the dark.

‘I thought you might want to talk.’

‘Talk! What’s the matter with you? Are you mad? Are you completely mad? Aren’t you getting enough trouble?’

And she would get up, leave the garden, leave him standing there with the hand he meant to soothe her with still raised. Another crime on his conscience. That he had ruined her garden for her as well. Ruptured her union with the flower fairies.

But while it’s up there, what about that raised hand … ? Had he never been tempted, once in a while, to bring it down upon his lover’s refusing neck? Of course he had. There may always have been a monk in him, but he was never a saint. After the heartbreak the hatred. Like everybody else. Love and murderousness – in their early days, of course, these were never in serious conflict. You fucked, you loved, you killed. At one and the same time. This is what fucking’s for. The reconciliation of opposites. Tearing with rough strife, thorough the iron gates of life. But once you’re not fucking every hour that God sends, you’re at the mercy of the violent contrarieties again.

Will there be any tearing tonight?

Unlikely. He cannot say what’s in her but there’s no violence in him tonight. He’s been driving since dawn, or
what would have been dawn in a place more accessible to light. He rose with the buzzer, attended his last vigils and was packed and on the road before six. He was glad to be going and sad to be glad. Nothing stuck. Everything hung by a thread. One good gust of wind and it would all be gone. Hence the success of the rule of St Benedict. Expect nothing. Just day by day remind yourself you’re going to die. Holding on to the wheel of his Saab in the early cold, Frank bled for the poor transient motorway humanity he sped past. The lumpen lorry drivers with their cargoes of crap, pulling out and pulling in, winking and flashing their lives away. The salesmen on the phone, the chauffeurs in their caps, the kids with their faces full of steel, wired up to their sound systems like the dying on a drip. Even the idiot crap-watchers of the summer, still queuing for all-day breakfasts and scratch-cards in the service stations. Back in their winter clothes, shut down for the season, they took hold again on his pity. You can grieve for people so long as they don’t show you their bodies. You can grieve for their immortal souls.

He rings again.

Still there is no answer. This time he tries the door with his key. It opens. Home. He steps inside, knowing she will not be hiding under the stairs, waiting to fling her arms around him, waiting to be swept off her feet and swung around by Daddy, as women who have love in their hearts do on the box with the silver smirk.

He sniffs the hallway. Shaming, but that’s what he does. He sniffs the house for newer, nicer, younger man. Then he notices a large packet on the hall table, a bulging brown envelope, not unlike those she’s been using to send him bills and washing powder samples. Except that this envelope isn’t addressed to Ritz, Poste Restante, Inverness, Scotland. This envelope is addressed to Aphrodite Press, Ladbroke Crescent, London W10. So this is why she’s allowed him back; not
because she’s polished off a lover, but because she’s polished off a book. He isn’t sure whether he’s relieved. What’s worse, being in competition with the rest of your sex, or being in competition with literature?

He feels excluded, either way. Something has been happening in this house – his house, his
home
– that couldn’t have been happening with him in it. And just in case the significance of that should be lost on him, the door to his study is closed. Not ajar, not pushed to, but shut tight.

He opens it, gently. His study! He’d forgotten all about his study. Its winking red and green lights, its digitised allknowingness, like the cabin of a jumbo jet. Seeing it again, listening to it crackle and purr with pleasure at his return – at least someone has missed him – he cannot imagine how he ever survived without it. He counts his electric sockets. Fancy that. Already he is rehearsing the argument for having more. And once upon a time, in another life, he got by with only one.

He goes to his window, and yes, there she is, just as he thought, just as he remembers her, sitting in the garden with her back to the house, not quite looking up at the sky, and because of the blackness of the clothes she is wearing – always black, interminably black – not fully distinguishable from the night. He watches her in silence for a while. She doesn’t move. But he knows that she is aware he is there, at his window, having gone to his machines before he went to her, playing back the messages on his answerphone, all three-and-a-half months of them.