Lavinia Greenlaw - An Irresponsible Age

In winter, they moved around the house like this, in a huddle, rushing from one source of heat to the next. The house was volubly falling apart. The bare stairs sagged and creaked. Few of the windows opened and some didn’t shut; all rattled. Ill-fitting doors created odd drafts and pockets of mustiness. There was a spurting growth of mould in the bathroom and the walls had begun to shed their plaster.

‘So where is this birthday party?’ Juliet asked.

‘In a bar on Lavender Hill.’

‘And you’re going in your suit?’

‘It’s what I wear.’

‘Perhaps a t-shirt? Or at least not a tie. You ought to show that you can differentiate.’

There was a firm knock on the front door. Fred leapt up and rushed into the hall but then started backing away towards the stairs. ‘Please, I better, like you said, change, could you just …’ He was gone.

Juliet brought Caroline through to the living room and shut the door.

‘It’s a very interesting colour,’ the girl tried out, looking around. Her voice was airless and emphatic. She perched on the edge of the sofa, smiling and wincing and trying to avoid the broken springs asserting themselves beneath the worn cover.

‘The sofa? Our brother Carlo, he’s training to be a pathologist, says it’s the exact tone of an exsanguinated corpse. You can tell from the seams that it was once bright pink. In full health, so to speak. So yes, it is interesting.’

‘Exsanguinated?’

‘Bled to death.’

Caroline looked so sincerely horrified that Juliet briefly felt guilty. She watched the girl push back the padded velvet band that hovered over her flat hair. Her upholstered jacket creased across her stomach and rustled as she shifted from side to side. She’s like a badly wrapped present, thought Juliet, and leaned over to shovel more coal onto the fire.

‘I meant the room. This … brown.’ Caroline leant back, trying to relax, remembered the springs and lurched forward. Her skirt caught and there was a tear of perhaps half an inch on her left hip.

Juliet explained: ‘Allie, the speedfreak who lives in the attic, painted it this colour because he thought it would help him sleep. We hate it, but our lives are a lot easier.’

Caroline looked mildly thrilled. ‘In the attic?’

‘Not now. He’s in hospital.’

‘Oh dear, an overdose?’

‘No. Blood poisoning. He gashed his leg and then he encouraged it.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Don’t feel sorry for him; they have central heating in hospital.’

There was a pause before Caroline hit on a new subject. ‘I knew someone who knew someone who slept in a room with a coal fire. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning.’

‘That old wives’ tale? Well, just to make sure, we’ve nailed polythene over the windows to keep out the cold, so the place is absolutely airless,’ snapped Juliet. Where was Fred?

Caroline rose. ‘I’m sorry to have imposed myself on you like this. You must be wanting to get on with your evening. I could wait for Fred outside –’

Juliet stood up to stop her going. She had to admit that Caroline was rather impressive after all. ‘It’s nice to meet you, and very kind of you to come and collect the boy and hugely impressive that you found us. Khyber Road isn’t in the A to Z, so we’re entirely off the map.’

Caroline looked as if she could find anyone anywhere. ‘I live nearby, actually.’ Not in the tower blocks, nor on the estate, but on the other side of Clapham Junction.

‘I live with people from work – Jane and Graham. We’re married.’

‘You’re married?’

‘Me? No, no, did I say me? No, no, I’m not married, they are. Graham and Jane. No. Them. Graham and Jane.’

Caroline’s face was scarlet, as if the fire she was staring into had suddenly produced some actual heat. Juliet watched her fiddle with the tear in her skirt, and wondered.

Fred appeared, wearing some old trousers and an untucked shirt, and they set off awkwardly into the night. Juliet wished them well but she was not hopeful. It must take a lot to make someone like Caroline blush, she thought, and she was right. Later, after Fred had walked Caroline home and Jane had taken her sleeping pill, Graham would creep into the box room they rented to Caroline for most of their mortgage payment, and it would be his finger that would find the hole in the tartan taffeta, and enlarge it.

When Barbara came back with a bottle of wine and saw Jacob sitting on the sofa as he always did, half kneeling and almost curled, she had to stop herself saying, ‘You look as if you never left’, or ‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ What pleased Jacob was knowing silence, so Barbara looked briefly struck and then got on with pouring them both a drink. Even though two people could have sat between them, she felt the shock of being close to him again. It had been three weeks since he moved out, if it could be called that.

‘What is it like then, your room?’

‘It has all I need – a table, a bed.’

‘I know, Jakes. A table, a bed, a scrap of cashmere, a drop of cognac …’

‘Oh come on, don’t be so leaden.’ Jacob’s mouth tightened at the corners as if someone had turned two screws. No one else teased him or called him by anything other than his full name.

‘Where do you wash?’

‘In the sink.’

‘I hope Tania hasn’t made the mistake of laying on hot water.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘You must be in heaven.’ Barbara still found her husband so interesting that she leaned back in order to scrutinise him more thoroughly. She knew what he was made of, parts that did not belong together and which ought not to fit: a bulky, almost square forehead, a cleft chin, a mouth unbalanced by the comparative slightness of the lower lip, a long thin nose with flared nostrils, heavy brows, and wide pale eyes that scattered light. Although he looked still, even disengaged, Jacob was continuously in the throes of process and adjustment, at a chemical level barely discernible to the eye. From moment to moment, he was a different creature.

Now, without moving or speaking, Jacob stopped being a man laying claim to a home and became nervous and rigid, a boy. To stop herself feeling sorry for him, wanting to do something for him, Barbara got up and went to run a bath.

‘Come on, Jakes.’

He would not look at her but let her raise him to his feet and steer him into the bathroom. As she reached round him to close the door, he leant back against it, pulling her towards him. They were about the same height and their bodies were the same mixture of angles and curves.

With Jacob pinned to the door, Barbara caught sight of herself in the mirror that ran along one wall, floor to ceiling. She looked clumsy, aggressive and unwelcome. ‘Christ, I feel like a man,’ she said and took a step backwards.

Jacob caught her arms with his fingertips. He turned his head away and slumped a little. Poor Jacob. Barbara pressed a hand against his jeans and felt a flick of attention. She knelt down, unbuttoned his flies and took the whole of his soft cock into her mouth. For the few moments in which nothing happened, Barbara felt the purest and most generous tenderness. She would have taken his body into her mouth entire, if she could.

Jacob made the small sound he made when he came, undressed and slipped into the water. Barbara stood in the middle of the stone floor and hitched her skirt up to her thighs before deciding to announce that she needed to pee, only she chose to say ‘piss’, ‘I really must piss’, and did so noisily, keeping her eyes fixed on his as she talked: ‘I love the light in here, how it’s so sort of steely and marine. Do you remember what you said when we first had it done? How it was like being in a bathysphere.’ She stood up and took off her clothes, at first angrily and then coquettishly. She had been undressing in front of Jacob for twenty years and wanted him to realise what that meant, and to want still to watch.