Repeat It Today With Tears (11 page)

‘I don’t know, probably not.’

‘Look, you try and slide out to your room. I’ll see if I can persuade this lot to call it a night.’

‘Thomas,’ Ron called loudly, ‘don’t you go chatting up that right little raver over there, you know your mum wouldn’t like it.’ Then he protruded his lips into a pout and bent one hand over at the wrist in a gesture which was supposed to indicate effeminacy.

‘Go on,’ said Tommy to me.

I managed to leave the gathering without attracting comment. In my room I put my pillow at the foot of the bed so that I could sleep by the open window and let the fresh night air lift the smoke smell out of my hair. Before I settled I made myself review in my head the component parts of the kidneys, lungs, heart and inner ear. Then, only when I was sure that I could repeat each feature without faltering, I allowed myself to think of Jack. How I had learned that when I was above him, even by the minutest of movements I could affect him. I was fascinated to see myself causing these changes in his man’s face, watching
for it to tighten and grimace and for him to beseech me, on and on, until he had convulsed out all he had into me and his expression became smoothed again and he smiled for me. I believed then that it was all the power that I should ever need.

Next day, in the long, hushed examination hall, I made a good job of the biology paper. I took far more care with diagrams and drawings now that I had sat for hours on the bed watching Jack at work. I saw him conjure small and meticulous acts of magic as he made a story appear upon the blank white page. His infinite patience and the steady, absorbed breathing intensified the quiet of the room, as did the stillness of the cat, sitting sentinel at his side. I thought that one day he would make a picture of himself at the table with the cat and in that picture he made he would be working upon the picture of himself, at the table with the cat.

On the way to Chelsea the bus stopped at Battersea Garage to change drivers. I looked over the road at the dark prison yard walls of the Morgan Crucibles factory on the riverside. The widower father of a girl in my class had worked there but in the Christmas term he had died. The girl Joanne said that it was because of him being widowed, that he could not bear her mother being gone and so he had just given up, he had died of a broken heart. I found it most affecting; I told my mother but she said that it was impossible. ‘Nonsense, there’s no such thing as dying of a broken heart.’

In bed that night my father made a remark that was supposed to be flippant and light-hearted but it filled me with such panic and terror that I thought I should lose my mind. It happened because I had perfected ways of touching him with such gentleness that when I began it he could hardly tell that my fingers were there at all. His body would incline to me as though by tropism but I would make him wait and keep my touchings as
soft as breath. This prolongation could cause him to cry out in sounds that were quite primeval. If I had heard them anywhere else, merely as a bystander, I think I would probably have been afraid. Then, as he gave in and I had the warm stuff running out between my fingers I would kiss him as if our mouths were glued together. Afterwards he made the remark that so terrified me. He said, ‘Sometimes, with you, I think I must have died and gone to Heaven.’

Perhaps I was overwrought from the exams. I sat up in the bed and the terror and alarm that seized me prevented me from breathing properly. My mother had told me that he was dead and for years I had believed it to be so. Then I had got him back. Now that he himself spoke of it, and it was presented to me again, I could see only the colour red, the inside eyelid colour and the ambulance blanket scarlet. And I could hear in my head some alarming discordant sound which was like blood rush mixed with the bells of ambulances. I tried over and over again to catch my breath in but it would not go over the top. Also I must have begged him incessantly, ‘Don’t say that, please don’t say that. He is not dead, he is not dead.’ Because I begged him so many times the plea took up the rhythm of a prayer that is repeated in decades but the panic between the lines felt like falling down many flights of stairs. Jack stayed very calm. He held my head tight between his two hands so that he was pressing on the bone of the skull and he tried to make me look at him but I could not, for fear, in case it was only his ghost that spoke to me.

‘It’s all right, Susie, listen to me, it’s all right. It was just a foolish thing I said, that’s all. Nothing more, nothing worse than that. Come on now, be still.’

He had switched on the desk lamp and for a long time I sat staring at the same patch of the wall. My hand was still sticky but now the stuff was gone cold. The salt from my tears was
stinging my cheeks as if they would chap straight away. In my chest I felt a pain like a stitch after running. ‘I can’t breathe.’

‘Yes, you can, just take it easy.’

‘No, I can’t, I can’t breathe properly.’

‘I tell you what, we’ll go out and get some fresh air. Come on, I’ll help you to dress.’

Down in the street the cat materialised out of the shadows of the basement railings. Jack pushed him gently inside the hall. ‘Don’t you go waking Eunice now,’ he said.

In the night some of the colours of the spectrum were missing from the street scene. Jack held my hand and we walked towards Albert Bridge. Oakley Street was quiet and empty; only one taxi passed us, its hire sign turned off. At the building site where they had demolished the Pier Hotel the watchman’s lamps glowed red. The bridge was empty and still, a film of dew on its black road surface. For months it had been closed to all traffic for repairs. We passed the wooden notice board that warned troops to break step. We stopped halfway across. Jack leant with his back against the parapet and enclosed me within his arms, now and then lifting strands of my hair so that the cool river night touched my face. ‘So, are you steadier now?’

I nodded and leant forward upon his chest.

‘Sometimes, with all the things we do, I forget… how very young you still are… my fault, stupid of me.’

I stood and looked from the bridge, up towards the City and across to darkened Cheyne Walk. Along the deserted embankment ran the impish silhouette of a man; perhaps he was a thief. On the other side the park was locked in by gates, beneath our feet the Thames’ unhurried tide. The moon was two-thirds full and there were some stars and an aeroplane crossing. I was comforted that what I could see from within my father’s arms was the whole world.

Later, sensing that he must be chilled and weary, I reached up for his face and kissed him. The skin of his cheek and his lips was cold and dry. To warm his hands I took them inside the clothes which he had only recently helped me to fasten. He said to me, ‘It will be all right, you know. I won’t let anything bad happen, little one, I promise.’

‘We could go back to the room now, if you like.’

‘Yes, let’s do that. And do you know what, I have some very questionable Spanish brandy in the cupboard under the sink. I shall put some in hot milk with brown sugar and I shall insist upon you drinking it all up. You will sleep like a top, best beloved.’

O

In the room Jack was semi-prone in the armchair. ‘Oh hallo, sweetness, I was going to put on some music but I couldn’t find the bloody thing… ’

One hand hung over the chair arm, wearing a record sleeve like a huge glove. I went to sit on the bed, waiting to see what would happen next.

‘God,’ he said, ‘God, I so badly want to come over there and jump on you but I don’t think my dick would work.’

I observed that his hair was dishevelled, sticking out in tufts at the back of his head. Also, intoxication seemed to have softened the lines of his gaunt face; this was oddly in accord with his next remark: ‘Drink is a great thing. Drink is a great thing because it blurs the sharp edges… ’

He closed his eyes briefly and his face looked quite young and defenceless, as his parents must once have seen it. I inspected my bare legs to see how much the sun had caught them. I had tried to acquire a tan in the Clapham County garden while revising for my exam. It had been Greek Literature in Translation,
Herodotus and
The Odyssey
. I turned my calves, Jack opened his eyes.

‘Do you know why I’m so pissed, actually?’

‘Because you’ve had a lot to drink.’

‘Hah! Miss Answer-me-back, clever… but no, no actually, it’s because I saw my wife today. Before, or after she went to Bentall’s which is, as we all know, Kingston’s most finest department store…’

Beside him on the painting desk was an opened bottle of red wine; the label read Sans Chi Chi. He poured some into a glass already half full.

‘Mind your sketches,’ I warned him.

‘No, no, you’re all right, we’re all right, there, that’s it.’

He drank some then held it out towards me, ‘Share this one, sweetness, don’t mind, do you… I can’t find another glass. What’s yours is mine, mine is yours, all yours, for ever and ever… ’

There was a thrill through me at this phrase, albeit so slurred.

‘She said something that made me think, made me drink.’ He laughed miserably at the word play.

‘What?’

‘It was the do… end of term staff party thing, we’re all there, standing round bitching and sniping and passing this filthy stuff… sans souci… sans chi chi… I don’t bloody know. Then the Pat Pell woman starts on about someone’s doing this with somebody… who’s having affairs with who else’s spouse… then they all chip in… this that… at it like knives. Then Olive, my wife, do you know what she says… ?’

‘No, what?’

‘She says, oh well, Jack and I, we don’t worry about that sort of thing anymore, do we, Jack. We’ve done with all that between the sheets lark… ha ha bloody ha. Rather read a good book
nowadays. Too old, she says, past it… she says that I am past it… no one’s going to want me, she says… ’ He looked towards me to focus on my reaction but one of his eyes was semi-closed. ‘Christ, I think I’ll start smoking again.’

‘No, don’t do that.’

‘Don’t you want me to?’

‘No.’

‘All right then, I won’t. But it’s a fact, according to bloody Olive, no woman could ever possibly find me attractive any more… ever again. And yet here, here I am, in this room, old and worn out as I may be, and, but I’m with you… you, you who are the most beautiful girl in the world bar none and I am king of the world, king of the bloody world when I bury myself inside you… but you… you won’t want me… won’t want me, not at all, not on your bloody life… ’ There was the flicker of an expression across his face which might have prefaced tears or laughing of the uneasy, self contempt kind.

I decided it was the time to do the thing that Julian and I had discussed weeks before. I thought that if I really found it distasteful I could, until it was over, think about the essay I had written in that morning’s exam.

I got up and went across to Jack’s chair. I took the wine glass from him and set it out of harm’s way. Then I dropped to my knees in front of him.

‘What… ’ he began.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. I watched my fingers at their task. I drew down the heavy brass zip on his cord trousers. I felt for the opening in his underwear. I hesitated for a moment and thought of how that morning I had written that for all the terrible things he does, Homer still manages to make us feel pity for Polyphemus. Then I bowed my head and hid my face and my father wound strands of my hair around his hands like ropes.

When it was over he said, ‘Let us lie down together. I want you beside me. I want to hold you.’

I helped him across the little stretch of lino to the bed, his legs were still unsteady. I was holding his arm as if he were old and infirm and I was guiding him across a hospital ward. We lay side by side on the narrow bed and the sounds of people out in the summer evening floated up through the open window. Jack said that I was a miracle and that he had never done anything to deserve me. He dozed and I watched him with such love that through my skin I absorbed the presence of him – his smell and the sound of his breathing and his warmth and the air that he breathed out – like green wood does. Later on he opened his eyes and said, ‘Come away with me. Let’s go away, you and I, let’s run away and live in France.’

‘All right.’

‘You would too, wouldn’t you, just like that.’

‘Yes.’

‘My dear, sweet, girl, it’s all so very simple to you, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said a second time, for it was. Even now, at the distance of all those years, it appears just so. All absolutes are simple.

On an evening in August I knew that I was going to be ill again. Jack had gone away early.

‘There’s a gallery thing, part of the festival. I have an exhibition so I have to talk to people and be nice. I can’t get out of it… you know I would if I could. I’ll leave as soon as I decently can… ’

The Chelsea Potter had tables out on the pavement in Radnor Walk. The ground was stained with the stickiness of spilt drinks. Julian was anticipating without enthusiasm the water sports holiday for which he would depart next morning. He now had
a girlfriend in Putney; they had had sex on the night that they met. Although only a fortnight had passed, Julian was already blasé, or at least he pretended to be so. He had met Jill, the Putney girl, on a bus returning from Knightsbridge. Having finally summoned courage to approach the Estée Lauder counter in Harvey Nichols, he was told that the object of his desire no longer worked there. She had successfully applied for the coveted company post in Nassau.

‘It was a real downer, but then I just got on this bus and met Jill.’

I wanted to make him talk and laugh and be amusing to take my mind off the horrible feeling beginning in my throat. The same feverishness that hurried on the infection also hastened my anxieties, which tripped and stumbled one over another. If I became ill with tonsillitis I would have to stay at home, in bed. I would not be able to see my father. I would not be able to tell him why or to telephone from the flat. He would think I had gone and was not coming back or he might seek me out among the quiet lobbies of Prince of Wales Drive. If he did think that I had gone he would believe that I had left him for good, as he had once told me that I would. He would think that the time had come for me to take up that permission that he had tried so carefully and so fairly to offer me when we began. He would believe what Olive had told him about no longer being desirable; he would be convinced that she must be right because once he had relied upon her so much and I would not be there to show him otherwise and prove her wrong. He would start drinking again and he would not be able to work. I must not let it happen. I tried to sound very bright, with Julian. ‘So, what is it like then, is it how you thought it would be?’