The Ends of Our Tethers (5 page)

Despite meeting number 3 through friends of 2, 3's closest friends were very different, being female hospital workers who called themselves The Coven, meeting at least once a week in a public lounge bar and once a fortnight for a party at one of their homes. Most had a husband or male partner who abandoned his home when The Coven convened there. Number 3, weather permitting, held barbecues in her garden, at which times I stayed tactfully indoors. Sometimes one of The Coven strolled in and we chatted. I gathered they preferred me to her previous lover, a doctor who had treated her “rather badly”. They also seemed to think me a handy man to have around a house: which made what happened later more surprising.

Housework became the main source of tension between us. It was I who bought the foodstuffs, washed and dried dishes and
put them away with the cutlery and cooking utensils so I naturally began arranging the kitchen cupboards and shelves as neatly as possible, throwing out old jars of spices and condiments on the verge of decay, replacing cracked insanitary crockery with clean, modern things. Instead of being pleased she accused me of trying to erase her. She said the same when I ironed her clothes, folded and put them neatly away.

“NOBODY irons clothes nowadays,” she yelled, “NOBODY! Chuck them in the airing cupboard like I've always done.”

She probably regarded home as a refuge from her highly regulated hospital life. I worked hard and unsuccessfully to stop my cleanliness and order offending her. I could do no kitchen work when she was home because what she called my “virtuous clattering” enraged her.

One day she returned from work frowning thoughtfully and when I asked why said shortly, “Nothing,” and when I asked again the following night said, “Just a pain, it doesn't matter.”

Strange that a trained nurse belonged to that large class of people who dread
referring their illness to a doctor! Luckily she worked in a hospital. A phone call one day told me she had collapsed and was being operated upon for appendicitis with acute peritonitis. I saw her that evening when she had recovered consciousness and acquired an astonishingly young, fresh, new-born look. I sat silently holding her hand, feeling closer to her than I had felt since our first night together. A month passed before she was fit for home and I visited her at least once a day, would have done so twice every day but her bedside during visiting hours was often crowded with hospital friends so she told me to come in the evenings only.

“What present,” I asked myself, “can I give her when she returns home? Of course! A new kitchen.”

The renovation carried out by her cheap, quick friend had annoyed me by its awkward shelving, badly hung doors and an old cupboard space walled off with plywood. I imagined many kinds of rot, fungus and insect life burgeoning in there. “Nobody who has been ill,” I told myself, “should return to a home with such a probable source of infection in it.”

So I had the kitchen completely renovated, expensively and well, with the most modern and easily cleaned equipment, all electric instead of gas. I did not tell her this in hospital, perhaps fooling myself with the notion that she would enjoy the sight of it more when she got home, but of course she at once saw the new kitchen for what it was: a present to me, not her.

“Yes,” she said, with a cold little smile, “you've erased me totally now.”

I blustered a lot of explanations and apologies then ended by saying that, alas, what had been done could not be undone. She disagreed, saying she could undo it by shifting to a house she could feel at home in – the house of a friend.
This house
was now only legally hers, so she would sell it and if I was the buyer she would subtract the cost of my new kitchen from a surveyor's estimate. I begged her to come to bed with me and talk the matter over next day. She made a phone call, packed some clothing and moved that night to the home of the friend. (I later learned he was the doctor who had been her previous lover.) Her last words to me, or the last words I remember were, “This hasn't been my home since you brought in that bloody
machine so you're welcome to it. At a price.”

She meant the purchase price of course, with the addition of her complete absence. Did this leave me desolate? Yes. Yes, with a mean little core of satisfaction that for the first time since leaving my parents I would possess a house that was wholly mine. But lying now in the dark with Tilda gently snoring less than two yards from me I started weeping tears I had never shed when number 3 left the house, and when number 2 told me to go to my new woman, and when number 1 said she was divorcing me for another man. I lay weeping for my whole past and could not stop for I suddenly saw what I had never before suspected: that I had lost three splendid women because I had been constantly mean and ungenerous, cold and calculating. Even my lovemaking, I suspected, had not been much more generous than my many acts of solitary masturbation between the marriages. I wept harder than ever. I crawled off the sofa, switched on a lamp and knelt on the floor beside the bed. Tilda stopped snoring, opened her eyes and stared at me.

“Please, Tilda,” I said between sobs, “please just let me hold your hand for a while.”

Her alarmed look gave way to puzzlement. She withdrew a hand from under the bedclothes and offered it almost shyly. I took it between mine, being careful not to press very hard, then her eyes opened wider as if she was only now clearly seeing me and she muttered, “Don't go away. Always be there.”

Then I saw that she needed me, would
need nobody
but
me while our lives lasted.
With great thankfulness and great
contentment, holding her hand,
I fell asleep on the floor
beside our bed.

W
AKENING HE TURNED HIS head and saw she was still reading. After a moment he said,

“About that e-mail you sent.”

“I never sent you an e-mail,” she said, eyes still on the book.

“Not before today, perhaps, but this afternoon you e-mailed me and said —”

“I repeat,” she interrupted, looking hard at him, “I have never sent you or anyone else an e-mail in my life.”

“But you did send one to the office this afternoon. I remember it perfectly – the heading stating it was from you to me and everyone else in the firm. Why did you have to tell
them
? You must have sent it from a friend's computer or one in the public library.” “You're still drunk.”

“If you mean I was drunk when we came to bed you are wrong. We had only one bottle of wine with the evening meal and I drank only one more glass of it than you. I'm glad you're sorry you sent that message but you'll never persuade me you didn't.”

“You're hallucinating. What am I supposed to have said?”

“That you want to leave me. Five words –
I
want to leave you
– just that.” She stared at him, shut the book and said bitterly, “Oh, very clever. Cruel, but clever.” “Do you want to leave me?”

“Yes, but I never told you so. I've never told anyone that – they think ours is such a
solid
marriage. You must have noticed it's a farce and this is your bloody cunning way of blaming me for something I never said and was never going to say.”

“Blethers!” he cried, “I am
never
cunning,
never
cruel. I remember these words coming up very clear and distinct on the computer screen:
I want to leave you
.”

“Then why didn't you mention it when you came home? Why didn't you mention it over dinner? Are you going to pretend you were brooding over it before we came to bed?” He thought hard for a while then said,
“You're right. I must have dreamed it before I woke a moment ago.”

“I'm glad you've sobered up,” she said and resumed reading.

After a while he said, “But you want to leave me.”

She sighed and said nothing.

“When will you do it?”

“I don't suppose I'll ever do it,” she murmured, still appearing to read, “I haven't the courage to live alone. You're an alcoholic bore but not violent and I'm too old to find anyone better.”

“I'm glad!” he said loudly. “I don't want you ever to leave because I love you. My life will be a misery if you leave me.”

“Then you're luckier than I am. Go back to sleep.”

He turned away from her and tried to sleep. About half an hour later he heard her shut the book and switch off the bedside lamp. He got up and went to a room next door where he had hidden a bottle of whisky for this sort of emergency.

A
BIG TELEVISION COMPANY regularly broadcast a news programme informing the viewers of bad deeds: not the bad deeds of corporations who might withdraw advertising revenues, or the bad deeds of big businessmen and government officials who could afford to bring strong libel actions, but the exploitive practices of small private landlords, tradesmen and moneylenders. This did some social good and entertained viewers, who were also encouraged to help the programme by supplying it with evidence of scandalous instances.

So one day the broadcasters heard of a man who liked horses but had become so poor that the few he owned were badly fed and stabled. The broadcasters tried to contact the horses' owner but he hid from them. They besieged his house with a camera crew until he emerged and was filmed fleeing from an interviewer who ran after him shouting unanswered questions. This was broadcast along with distant views of the horses, the faces and voices of concerned neighbours, the comments of a qualified animal doctor. The owner was subsequently charged with cruelty to animals by the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was found guilty and jailed for several months as he could not afford to pay a fine. The horses were humanely killed because nobody else wanted them.

Which of the following cared most for the
horses?

Who gained most by these events?

Who lost most by these events?