Morag Joss: The Night Following

And you’ll look away. You’ll dread that anyone might overhear and think something in you encouraged the likes of me to babble to you in this manner, in a hurrying voice and staring straight at your eyes, using the sincere and zealous hand gestures of a person who expects to be disbelieved or motioned to shut up before her story is finished.

I don’t blame you. I’ll watch you walk away just as I might have been about to ask if you knew where the nearest police station is, or if there is a telephone nearby, or a hospital. I know I’m unsettling. Maybe it’s because I know something you don’t, though it secures me no advantage. It’s only the knowledge that some other knowledge eludes me. It’s nothing more than an awareness of questions that the happenstance of some lives and not others-mine, say, and not yours-poses for some people and not for others.

Such as, where do I pick up the story of a life that should be over, but isn’t? If events have halted a life’s narrative as utterly as death itself, how do I go on as if I believed in mere continuation, never mind solace and amends? You won’t know. So I won’t detain you by saying, Oh, excuse me! Could you help? I’m afraid something has happened.

I won’t call after you to tell you how weary I am, I’ll settle back and wait out another day. To pass the time, from somewhere in my baggage I’ll bring out bundles of thumbed papers secured under rubber bands and I’ll fret over ordering and reordering them, rereading this or that grubby old letter as if it might contain something new. And I’ll sink into wondering again, asking myself the same questions and finding them still unanswerable.

27 Cardigan Avenue

living room

8th May

Dear Ruth

Were the flowers satisfactory? I just got white ones, you know I’m no good with colours. Were they the right thing?

Writing this isn’t my idea it’s Carole’s. You don’t know Carole.

Well can’t think of anything else for now.

Arthur

Did it begin that morning? If it did, could I have known? Suppose that morning the butter had been purple and the sparrows blue and flying backwards, was I too preoccupied with writing my shopping list (eggs, raspberries) to notice? If clouds had arranged themselves over the garden spelling out a warning in big vapoury letters and loomed through the window , might I have been turning away at that precise moment and failed to see? I go on wishing that if what happened was fated to happen I could have been given a second’s notice, just long enough to take a step out of its path. But that would amount to its not having been fated after all, and I would probably have missed such a warning, anyway. I had been unattuned to signs for so long.

Because of course it began long before the condom wrapper in the glove compartment. I must have missed those signs, the slight, prosaic symptoms of near-comic, midlife adultery: an unexplained and distant air of satisfaction, some extra fastidiousness about hair and fingernails, a renewed determination to lose some weight. Did he take longer to answer when I spoke to him? How many times did he look at me and wish he were with her, or slip away to ring her in a small, timed absence? I missed the little signs, but maybe I missed huge and laughably obvious ones, too. Maybe he had been living in a state of priapic delirium right under my nose but I had stopped seeing anything at all when I looked at him.

So the day began small. It was a Thursday in late April and set to be the same day again, the one I lived over and over, small and ordinary as I liked all days to be, though this one was to have one of those small and ordinary variations. We were switching cars. Jeremy was taking mine to be serviced and leaving me his so that I should not be inconvenienced. He would leave my Renault at the garage in Salisbury, walk to the hospital, and pick the car up at the end of the day. Small and ordinary arrangements had been made. Small, ordinary, and half-joking warnings not to scratch his precious Saab convertible were given and taken, after which we exchanged a small and ordinary good-bye.

No, that’s not it, either. Too innocuous a beginning-my car being due its service-to be truly a beginning. Nor is a Thursday in April very much to the point, although it was, as would be said later, a proper spring day: sharp and blustery, one of those boisterous, unpredictable mornings randomly bright and dark when cold sweeps of cloud pass and clear across the sun, a day when your eyes water in the wind and you wish the weather neither warmer nor cooler, just less sudden.

I drove to the supermarket. I knew Jeremy’s gym bag and rackets would be in the boot so I didn’t bother to open it; it was too small to be much use even empty. I unloaded as fast as I could and filled the floor on the passenger side with bags. I wanted to get on; often I ran into someone I knew and I didn’t especially want to, out of slight embarrassment, perhaps. The Saab was bright yellow. Without telling me, Jeremy had sold the Volvo and cashed some bonds and bought it on his fifty-fifth birthday. I hadn’t said anything at the time. I considered my not taking much notice of what Jeremy did to be one of my virtues and anyway, smug people often are naturally indulgent. He said he’d always been bored by estate cars and I would still have my little Renault if that was the issue. A sign.

I placed the last bag with the fragile things in it on the passenger seat, walked around to the other side, and got in. I had started the engine and put the car in gear before I noticed a dark liquid pooling in a corner of the bag and a shocking red ooze escaping from it onto the seat. I snatched the bag up and at once the split in the bottom of it yawned open. The raspberries and a box of eggs already disintegrating in raspberry juice dropped out and broke into the puddle that was forming in the hollow of the dove grey suede upholstery. The raspberry carton, minus the lid, tumbled out along with more juice. The bag was still swinging from my hand. Then the second carton of raspberries and the lid of the first flipped through the shreds of plastic and landed on top. That’s why I was looking for a tissue.

Still in living room

9th May

Settee, 4.15 am

Dear Ruth

A few came to the house afterwards. What’s-her-name Marsden from across the road and your group got it organized. Sandwiches, etc. It passed off all right. I stuck leftovers in freezer. Do egg sandwiches freeze?

Arthur

PS Funny to think you don’t know Carole, you know everyone.

Ifished in the glove compartment for something to mop up the eggs and raspberries. No tissue. My fingers landed on the empty little foil wrapper torn halfway across the letters DU and REX.

I don’t like surprises, but my natural propensity is always to avoid making a scene. So I didn’t burst into tears or sink my head onto the steering wheel or even swear. I wasn’t angry. What happened was not the result of anger. Nor was I quite shocked. I was overwhelmed, if anything, by detachment. As if caught in a freak rush of air, I felt all at once swept off my feet and placed somewhere cooler, elevated, and separate. Of course I hadn’t really moved and I sat there for maybe only two or three minutes, but I felt my breathing ease and my heart lighten with every beat. As time ticked by, I watched my life, or my idea of it at least, shift and re-form; I saw the old encumbered sense of who I was and all the ponderous certainties of the piled-up, married years lift and blow away from me. Maybe they never had been so certain after all, or of much use. I gave them one last audit as they flew past, disintegrating as they went: engaged at twenty to Jeremy (ten years older, anaesthetist, dependable). No children, history of miscarriages, cause unclear. No career worth mentioning, some dabbling once as agent for a catalogue selling artists’ supplies, a little voluntary work in galleries. Inclined to be fanciful, if not highly strung. These days she paints, in watercolours of course and with enthusiastic mediocrity, the same butterflies and flowers and landscapes painted by all unconvincing, wishywashy women; she sets great store on capturing the curve of wings and petals, the gleam of weak skies and pools of shallow water.