Tim Parks - Goodness

‘Oh, so for now we just kiss and make up,’ she said. ‘Is that it?’

‘But isn’t that what you said in your letter?’

‘As long as you promise,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going to be treated like a doormat.’

I stood up. Somehow I felt as if I was acting, very aware of my position in the room, of what I was doing with my body, my hands. It all seemed very unreal. Not an unpleasant feeling, but a shade disturbing. I gave the wall a soft punch. I said look, look, if what she was really trying to tell me was that she wanted children and a happy traditional family, then simply to play it extremely slowly, extremely sweetly, and I might give in, probably would in fact, yes, most men did in the end, didn’t they, but for the moment I was afraid that a baby would simply bind us together all the more, precisely when there were very clear signs that perhaps we weren’t really suited to each other. Wait just a few months, I said. Hang on.

Would Shirley notice if the sun rose in the west? One wonders. Certainly on this occasion she didn’t appear to appreciate what a massive change of position and principle I had just offered, what a major climb down this was.

She lit a cigarette. ‘Unless you promise not to go to this other woman again, then you’re going to have to get out of this flat and go and live on your own.’

‘Shirley,’ I said, ‘we’re both tired, we’re overwrought. Now let’s just go to bed and sleep on it. I’ve got to go to work in the morning. You’re on holiday. I’m not.’ (School had just broken up.)

She said the last thing she wanted to do right at the moment was be in the same bed with me.

‘Suit yourself.’

But in the middle of the night she must have slipped in under the covers because I woke up with a start to find her clinging to me. She was naked, which was unusual for her (she usually wears a rather unexciting blue cotton nightdress). Not crying, not saying anything, she twined herself round me. So that when I had fully woken up we made love, violently, with her on top, which again was unusual. And while this was going on I remember thinking with some euphoria, ‘We’re really living now, really living, a modern life, with passion, with intrigue!’

Exactly five days before our scheduled departure for Turkey, Shirley received a letter ‘advising’ her that due to cuts in government grants, etc. etc., her school was being obliged to reduce its staff by two and they thus regretted to inform her that she would be without a job as from the end of the summer break. For myself I couldn’t help feeling that this was rather a blessing in disguise. My first big stroke of luck. Now she would be forced to go for something more stimulating where there were real career opportunities to be had, especially since she wasn’t in a position to apply to most state schools, never having got her teacher training certificate. She could move into something like the media or marketing or business administration or product management. Which should force her to brighten up and most probably get over the baby business.

But Shirley took it all very badly. On first showing me the letter when I arrived home from work, she was frantic and it was clear that she had been crying for much of the day. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. Trying without success to comfort her, I said laughingly that for the tough intellectual cookie she had always been, she was crying rather a lot lately, wasn’t she? She went and locked herself in the bathroom. Not for the first time I experienced that acute, that lacerating awareness of having in all probability married the wrong woman.

The curious thing being that whenever I have this sensation I immediately do my utmost to repress it, I simply won’t accept it, even now, and I get into a veritable frenzy of activity in an attempt to put things right and ‘save the situation’. So now I looked around and started preparing a spaghetti alla carbonara , one of the few decent things I know how to cook, found a bottle of wine at the back of the larder, white, and stuck it in the ice-box, put a tablecloth on the table (took me a while to find where she kept them), sawed through a couple of frozen rolls and stuck them under the grill, etc. I made a feast.

When she finally emerged, I like to think lured by the smell of sizzling bacon, Shirley was thankful but still apparently inconsolable. It was the only thing that had been going well in her life, she said, her relationship with the children at school. The only thing that hadn’t turned sour. And just to lose it like this. . Everything, everything was going to pieces.

I tried to be cheerful, bustling with kitchen implements I wasn’t quite used to. ‘Think of it as a challenge,’ I said. ‘Get yourself a good job.’ But she said that was another thing, she couldn’t get herself a good job now, could she, because if she did she’d never have a child. You couldn’t take a job and then go and get pregnant in the first few months, it wasn’t serious. And she just didn’t want to leave it for a couple of years more.

I sympathised, though privately I’m thinking, Come on, buck up girl! I mean, if something like this happened to me, I know I’d bounce right back, go for it, don’t let them get you down. Where was her joie de vivre , for heaven’s sake? She was only twenty-eight. And the following day, overtaken by a sudden summer horniness urgent as thirst, and seeing as I hadn’t actually promised anything to anyone just as yet, I left the office early (thinking, after all, we’d be on holiday next week) and went over to Willesden to see Rosemary.

Who had her period. Mistresses, one feels, shouldn’t have periods. We kissed and sat and talked. She was saying (again!) how amusing my grandfather had been with all his navy stories and little jokes and she kept asking, rather pointedly I thought, about my family and job. When I tried to get away after an hour or so, she protested, she wanted me to stay the night all the same, period or no period, so that I finally had to explain what experience now tells me I should either have got out in the open at the very beginning or just forever and forever denied: that I was married (but that my wife and I didn’t get on and were thinking of divorcing, etc. etc.). Rosemary told me to put on my jacket, pick up my flowers and my bag and get the hell out at once. Just get out. Which, after only a second or so’s lightning quick thinking, I decided to do.

I drove home and gave the flowers, fortunately still in their wrapping paper, to Shirley, which did have some cheering effect. But it was a day of incredible blunders. For, embracing me to thank me for the flowers, she sniffed the perfume an earlier embrace with Rosemary had left. (Women are so sharp with perfumes, whereas to be honest I can barely tell one from the other, they all smell of sex to me.)

I confessed at once. As I said, I was determined to be honest if nothing else. This time she didn’t cry but was extremely cool and collected.

‘So out you go.’

She went into the bedroom and started piling my stuff into suitcases. I refused to take any notice and sat down in front of some programme on geriatric care, which again had me wondering whether it wasn’t time to dislodge Grandfather and sell Gorst Road.

‘Out,’ Shirley reappeared. ‘Your bags are in the hall.’

‘Where to?’ I said.

‘Wherever you like.’

‘Shirley,’ I said. ‘Come on, we’ve been through all this. Please be reasonable. Anyway, if I go, how are you going to pay the rent, now you haven’t even got a job? Then we’re supposed to be on the ferry Saturday morning at ten.’

‘Out.’

She sat down, leggily cross-legged on the floor and started to stare at me, while I continued to watch the television. She stared and stared, having me feel the full pressure of a gaze I refused to return. Then she had just opened her mouth to speak when the doorbell rang and it was Mark and Sylvia with their usual bottles of beer. And for once they were warmly welcomed, by both of us, as if by prior agreement. Oh hello, old mate, great to see you! Great!’