Tim Parks - Goodness

‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked, almost gasped. It was as though she’d been living in a different world.

‘I’ve always believed in discussing everything,’ I said. ‘It’s you who always refuses to talk openly. I wanted you to see how dire things had got. I wanted you to understand.’

She shook her head fiercely from side to side, sat down, stood up, turned round, fidgeting her hands. She even laughed. And she began to tell me how weird I was, how I had simply sucked up my mother’s mad piety, my Grandfather’s coarseness, my sister’s naivety, my aunt’s dumbness too. I should listen to myself. Boy, oh boy, should I listen. I was a bundle of contradictions. I was crazy. How could I announce I was going to go and have it off with somebody else and then try and defend myself. She got angry. When I wouldn’t reply, she suddenly quietened down and said flatly:

‘So it’s the end.’

We were in the living room and I remember we both kept moving rather awkwardly about, not wanting to face each other. When she turned her back to look out of the window I saw her shoulders were trembling and this filled me with tenderness.

I said what did she expect me to do, the way she’d been treating me these past months? Really, what did she expect?

Shirley was silent.

‘I don’t love her,’ I said. ‘I just feel I have to have some fun. I’m living in a tomb here.’

She burst into tears. But this time my teeth were already gritted. I stood firm. She said if only I’d leave her and our bloody ‘relationship’ alone for five minutes, perhaps everything would buck up.

She stopped speaking and cried, still facing the big, rather clumsily double-glazed window where dusk was drawing the last colour from brown brick houses opposite. (Houses, houses and more houses. Everywhere people living together. How do they do it?) Then in a surprisingly sweet voice she said: ‘Anyway, if you think I’ve changed since we met, what about you?’

‘What about me? I haven’t changed at all.’

‘You were so fresh,’ she said. ‘You were so young. So urgent.’

‘No one wants our marriage to work more than me,’ I said.

‘So don’t go and sleep with this other woman. You said you didn’t love her. I could understand if you’d fallen in love with someone, but otherwise, what’s the point?’ Then trying to change the tone of the conversation, she said: ‘If it’s fun you want, we can go and play crazy golf, for heaven’s sake.’ Because we had done this recently and really enjoyed ourselves, an empty Saturday afternoon in Friern Park.

‘I’ve decided,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have told you. I wanted to be honest. I wanted to have this sorted out.’

Very quickly then, looking round her and picking up a few things, she went to the door and ran down the stairs. Her heels could be heard scratching like struck matches on the cement. From the window I watched her opening the garage door, her skirt lifting up the back of her slender calves as she stood on tip-toe a moment. She disappeared inside, then after a couple of false starts reversed out in her usual jerky way, clipping the kerb as she backed round. At the end of the close, indicating left, she turned right and was gone.

For the first time in some years, as the car accelerated away, I cried myself. Perhaps she was right. It was the end. Though I very much hoped not. Later I prepared myself a couple of scrambled eggs, reflecting that I’d have to set the alarm earlier than usual in case I had to go to work by bus. Shirley had presumably gone to her mother’s new and unnecessarily sumptuous flat in Ealing (the money that would have bought us our own place) and might well spend the night there, leaving me earless. I phoned a few times, but only got the engaged signal. Now I was getting used to it a little, I didn’t feel so unhappy with the new situation. At least there were signs of life, an explosion of drama after what had seemed a life sentence of static friction.

And the following evening, after bowling (yes, bowling!), then dinner, then Rosemary’s place, the advantages of my strategy became all too apparent. I had nothing to gain from not pursuing my goal to the limit now. So there was no hesitation. At my bright and chattering best — I felt seventeen again, but with the advantage of years of experience — around midnight I got Ros (as she asked me to call her) onto a rather Bohemian mattress on the floor (surrounded by mugs, wine-glasses and discarded clothes) and despite my delirious excitement at this new and so different body performed not at all badly I thought.

I returned on Sunday evening to find a note which read as follows:

George, please, this is a nightmare. George, we can’t let our marriage end this way. We can’t. I know it is partly my own fault, but I can’t help it if I’ve been feeling depressed. I didn’t tell you, but I have been to the doctor about it and to a psychoanalyst, you got me so worried that I might be mentally ill in some way, but both of them told me there was nothing wrong with me. There’s a point at which unhappiness is just unhappiness in the end, frustration just frustration. George, I know that when we were younger, at university, with Jill and Greg, when career and work and all the foreign trips we were going to make seemed so important, I said I didn’t want children. I said I was worried about nuclear war and so on and concerned about what sort of society our generation’s kids would grow up in. Silly things to say really. Now I just know that I want children, my own children. I know that that is the way for fulfilment for me; honestly, I’m just not interested in a career of any kind. I appreciate that you can’t possibly understand this physically , I mean the way I feel it in myself. How could you, being a man? But can’t you accept it as a lover and husband and friend? Okay, I take your point that I promised. But it was an ignorant promise, it was like promising not to eat before you know what hunger means. Can’t you see? You’ve become so hard, George. Why not soften up, please? Come on, be my bright handsome, hard-done-by, will-make-good little Methodist again, then let’s forget the whole thing and head off on that holiday together.

All my love. Still!!!!

SHIRLEY.

It was nine o’clock. I phoned at once. She arrived forty minutes later. From the tone of that letter and then her broken voice on the phone, I had imagined her bedraggled: jeans, a sweater, tennis shoes, tear-streaked cheeks, little-girlish. I had imagined we would cry together and both plead mea culpa, then laugh and think how crazy we’d been. That was what I expected, and at least partly very much wanted. Instead she was carefully made-up, her lips were glistening and she was wearing a new twenties-style cylinder dress that frocked out just above slim knees, her feet pointing carefully in sharp white high heels, likewise new. There was something glassy and brittle and untouchable about it all, but stylish too; it suited her shape, her thin face and round wide eyes. She embraced me.

‘Shirley!’ I sighed. I get these waves of emotion sometimes. I just want to be very sentimental and have everything settled and happy.

But the embrace was brief. She sat down and crossed her legs, leaned forward, enunciating very correctly, as if at an interview or addressing a mixed race audience. She said: ‘I’ll stay, or rather you’ll stay as long as you give up the idea of other women. Otherwise you’ll have to go.’

Looking back, and considering my mood on seeing her walk into the flat at once so vulnerable and stylish, I’m sure this is a concession she could easily have wrung out of me, had she only had the sense to approach the matter differently, that is seductively, kindly, with comprehension. But the idea of going straight back into conflict and being simply bulldozered into concession was simply not on. It was thus with a wisdom that surprised me, worthy of my mother I thought, that I said: ‘Shirley, honestly, there are so many things wrong with our relationship, the only hope we’ve got is to live together happily for a while. Then maybe we can make concessions. I mean, it’s a long process. You have to work for it.’