Tomorrow (14 page)

23

ODDLY, I SEE MYSELF
now sleeping, alone, in the Hôtel Gustave, rue de Grenelle, Paris, where I truly did sleep and truly by myself, at the beginning of that eventful year,
1978.
Not knowing then, of course, how eventful it would be and certainly not knowing that in a few months’ time I would have pretended to have slept again in that same Paris hotel, while in fact I’d slept much nearer home and not by myself. If you’re going to tell a lie, give it some dose of veracity.

And even when I slept with our vet, Alan Fraser, in Sussex in May, I thought about myself in Paris just four months before in January, but as if I might have been thinking of some other woman, some innocent me of long ago. It should have been the other way round, perhaps, I should have been innocent in spring, devious in winter. January and May: it’s a proverbial motif, a not so uncommon subject for the painters of the past. As you know only too well, since among our Rutherford Road collection is a small depiction of just that personified theme by the Venetian artist Vareschi.
Gennaio e Maggio.
Vareschi, by any art-historical rating, can’t claim to be much more than a very minor old master, but his work commands a price and it’s a measure of something that we possess one at all.

There he sits, anyway, January, that is, scrawny and grey-bearded, contemplating an almost naked and extremely nubile May in some verdant enclave which could be the corner of an orchard or a fanciful wood. Fruit, in any case, of an indeterminate but vaguely testicular kind, hangs among the foliage—it seems to be autumn as well as those other months of the year—and there are some roses with particularly pointed thorns.

You may have wondered, in your strangely dainty way, how such a thing could have its place in our house, or ever have been put into a gilt frame at all. It’s a dirty old man, isn’t it, eyeing up young flesh? Except, of course, it’s “art,” which justifies all kinds of things, and it’s pricey, it’s that business of your mum’s. And, incidentally—though what do you care, at sixteen?—it’s a perennial and much-visited allegory, it’s the whole sad tale of existence. The ageing male, his virile powers in decline, goes looking for some vision of lost youth. He picks up a young girl and takes her off to a hotel. For some curious, perennial reason, the young girl frequently obliges. January’s also, if Vareschi makes no allusion to it, the double-headed, the two-faced one. The whole thing often involves cheating on a wife.

Hardly at all the situation of Alan Fraser and me: him at forty-one and divorced, and me at thirty-two and married.

But I thought about that woman of only that preceding January as if I might have been thinking of someone half my age.

The weather had been true January weather, cold and still and sparkling, the kind of winter weather that can make the stone of Paris radiate. I’d found time, then, to walk, not broodily but simply contentedly, by the icy Seine, the water and the white walls of the
quais
dazzling, my ears pinched by the air. And I’d wished Mike was with me, our vapour-breaths mingling. Was there any glad moment of my life he shouldn’t share? All the same, I’d inhaled the strange pleasure of a separation that was hardly a separation at all—just a Wednesday night in Paris—and was almost over now anyway.

It would have been the same sort of morning in London perhaps, I thought, the same light teasing the charcoal grey of Bloomsbury and touching the windows of Mike’s cramped attic-office, up among the gnarled and mottled branches of the plane trees that fill the centre of Ormond Square.

Now we have our own place in France.

It was just a week before your dad’s birthday, and I’d even just bought him his present, in an antiques shop in the rue Bonaparte. It was one of those little brass calendar devices which you put on a desk, with a rotatable display of the day, the date and month: a particularly finely shaped and engineered example, elegantly scrolled and chased, with a pen-rest combined and with the pleasing distinction that the dates were, of course, in French. I saw myself, before I wrapped it, setting it to that all-important date for your father (and for me): “
le 20 Janvier
.”

Now it sits on his desk in that study-cum-office, the black numbers and letters on the white enamel regularly turned. And if you’ve ever wondered: well, I bought it in Paris in January,
1978.
Not such an inexpensive whim for me then. Now we can buy a Vareschi. I saw it in the shop window just as the shop was opening, went in and didn’t hesitate. An electric fire blazed away while I counted out my francs. As I stood in that crystalline air on the Pont des Arts, taking in the classic view, my purchase waited for me, to be collected after my stroll, on my way back to my hotel. Then I’d check out and fly home to Mike.

Will he remember to turn on the date tomorrow? Or will he want it to stay always at yesterday? “
Le 16 Juin 1995.
”

There are points in our lives which, if we don’t know it at the time, we look back on later and see ourselves as if suspended, poised on some mysterious fulcrum. What did I not have then to be thankful for? All of Paris scintillating before me. I simply didn’t know what that year would bring, or take away, or what other hotel rooms I’d see, as well as that one at the Gustave, even before the year was half through. One by Lake Windermere, one in Venice. One, in between, at the Gifford Park. And that one in Paris, in a manner of speaking, twice.

An experiment. A practical, empirical (but top-secret) stage in our ongoing debate and, as it turned out, the decisive one. Your mother’s just playing with you? She was really just up for it with this veterinary surgeon with his hands on her pussy cat? She really just felt, at thirty-two—not exactly young and foolish, though she’s forty-nine now—like acting as if she was nineteen again at Sussex and screwing around? Here was another one to try. I don’t think so.

What you don’t have you can’t lose. But then again, it’s at least partly true that you don’t really know what you have until you lose it, or risk doing so. You don’t know the real things until you’ve sampled the false. At some point as the years gather, it’s bound to come over us perhaps: the perverse and crazy, but oddly almost prudent wish to put the whole fabric of what we possess to the test.

Excuses? I just went to bed with this Alan. Alan! And Fraser, you may have been thinking, is a Scottish name. I let him pick me up in his Peugeot and carry me off to spend a Friday night in a country hotel. I had my reasons, but where did
he
think it might lead: just one night? It was just such a previous exercise, it turned out, that had landed him in divorce. He made the mistake (the serious mistake, I think) of telling me. It wasn’t calculated to make me feel good. A little weekend escapade, he said, which shouldn’t have been any more, but he’d tumbled further, so it seemed, and then, when it was too late, this other woman (unnamed) had ditched him. Punished at both ends, and at one of them by the upset of his whole domestic apple cart.

What was I supposed to say? “There, there?” Or “Tough?” Or even “The cow!?” And now, of course, with me, he was risking nothing, having already lost the lot.

I could be risking everything I had.

I think what people often want from these midlife episodes (and note how I speak from vast experience) is a rather unexciting thing: comparison. They haven’t known it for a while, it’s been one of the rules that they forgo it, but is it, anyway (and this is the real persuasion), such an outrageous thing? They want the reassurance, the instruction or perhaps the sheer surprise of comparison. Life cuts you off from comparison. It might have been someone else, not Mike. I might never have met Mike. Poor me! And if not Mike, then it would have been someone else. Nothing’s written in the stars.

But I, of course, had my quite specific and highly specialised reason to know what it was like, while still having a husband, to jump into bed with another man. Did he appreciate that he was a “test case?” Perhaps he did—after those conversations in his surgery, all that scurrilous talk of insemination. It might even have been a sort of card he played, an unusual but opportune seduction technique. And I was “seduced.”

And he was a verifiable and practised father, if not the most shining example of paternity: two teenage kids. Just two cats now, apparently. What, incidentally, had he done with
them,
while we stole away to Sussex (Paris)? Just left them to fend for themselves?

Mike, back in Herne Hill, would have fixed himself a supper for one on a tray in front of the telly, then slept ignorantly alone—that is, if we don’t count a still fragile Otis curled up on a corner of the duvet. But then, at this time, the very same proposition would have been going through Mike’s head too: this primitive obstacle, this crude, unscientific bugbear to be overcome, that his wife, that Paula would have to do it, if not exactly at close-range or in hands-on fashion, with another man.

Oh lord. It rained that night too, though it had begun as a fine May day and finished with a balmy, hazy evening. Dinner in the “Akenhurst Room,” candlelit and oakpanelled, while the first drops began to patter, apologetically, on the terrace outside. He just wanted female company, a woman to share his bed? It had been a while, perhaps, and he’d had to go, or felt he had to, to this considerable trouble and expense. It was rather touching. I should have been flattered. I’d become special to him? He saw me as some replacement Mrs. Fraser? He was falling in love with me? God forbid.

I listened to more snippets from his troubled family life, and considered what I might tell him of mine: my late father’s divorces, for example, his three hapless marriages. And incidentally, he was a High Court judge. Switching subjects completely, I might have mentioned that Mike, whom by now, of course, Alan had met, used to work, before he worked on
The Living World,
on snails. Yes, snails. Perhaps Mike had mentioned them himself. But then if he had, surely Alan wouldn’t have chosen them (another serious mistake)—to eat.
Escargots
: they were on the Gifford’s distinctly Gallic menu, and Alan, as some Englishmen will, as a point almost of honour and bravado, went for them. Should I have said something?

To your dad and me, who’ll eat most things, they’ve always been strictly taboo.

And—thinking of things French—I thought, later that night, about that woman, in January, in Paris, where I was supposed to be right then. “That girl” I nearly called her. And the fact is I wanted to reach out protectively to her, standing there on that bridge in the wonderful cold light and perfectly happy as she was, to pull her collar up and tuck her scarf a little more snugly round her chin.

But hold on, you’ll be wondering: I had time to
think,
to contemplate, to conjure up such tender images, on this adventurous and plainly adulterous night, when thinking was hardly high on the agenda?

Yes, I had plenty. Without going into other details, my night with Alan Fraser ended up a little like now. I mean, absolutely not like now in one main respect, but in other respects, like it. It was even raining. The banal truth is that he fell asleep on me, and I stayed awake. There was dinner talk, there was preamble, there was even, I’m sure, during the thing itself, some gasping sex talk—but there was precious little pillow talk. I slept with him, I slept with our vet. I did all the things that that can mean. But, being strictly accurate, he slept with me before I slept with him, and I lay awake for a long while before I slept at all.

Perhaps I simply “satisfied” him. That’s not to claim credit. He simply crashed, sated, as men quite often ungraciously do (“men”: hark at me) into unconsciousness. He was the vet, but I put him to sleep. Not much pillow talk? Scarcely any, really—if I’d even wanted it.

I just lay awake, not particularly wishing to sleep, or even feeling ignored. Not even, I’ll be honest, assailed by feelings of guilt and remorse. Just thinking steadily to myself, as if I actually needed this sleeping stranger at my side to set my thoughts in motion.

Not unlike now. It’s an old and perennial situation, perhaps. You have it all to come, Kate. A woman does her best to be a lover, then, before she knows it, she becomes a mother, a sleeping charge beside her. But, of course, Mike here’s not a stranger. And when I was lying there beside Alan Fraser, I was thinking mainly of your father. It’s what I mean by comparison.

Oh how I love your father.

The room was on a first-floor corner, one of the best in the hotel. It actually had a four-poster bed. He’d forked out for the five-star Gifford Park and I’d been too polite or too amenable, if those are the right words, to protest. How much would it have cost him—just to fall asleep? I had the feeling that the place might have had some previous sentimental significance for him and I didn’t want to probe. And I was certainly too tactful or too compliant to broach its unsettling significance for me. Not so much the place itself (though now it has just such a significance), but the location. Did it have to be
Sussex,
and not so very far from the ancestral domains of the Hooks?

You see my dilemma? What am I to say, with barely a week now to go? “Cancel it?” Or, more preposterously: “Could it be some
other
hotel?” I have my excuse and my get-out, of course:
you.
You and my perfectly appropriate mother’s instinct. How can we possibly even consider our anniversary, even if it is our twenty-fifth, at such a time as this? How can we just go off so soon and leave our bruised and shaken nestlings all by themselves?

Have I brought you now fully up to speed?

And yet I can see all your dad’s reasons, all his needs and urgent contingency planning. It even makes sense: time for you to be alone, to think and talk it through. You’re
not
helpless babies. And it is our twenty-fifth. I can see how the Sussex thing works now:
our
territory. Only six miles or so from Birle and at least, for him, there’ll be
that
umbilical going off in that direction. And—with that direction in mind—what will Grannie Helen think if we don’t do something special for our special anniversary?