Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

‘I hope you’re getting paid in full-size money,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry, I have a good feeling about this one but I can’t do an estimate until we go to Amsterdam and I see what the job entails.’

So Giles and Peggy Sue went to Amsterdam. He took photographs, made sketches and notes, and came home rather pleased with himself. ‘I’ll get fifteen thousand for the house with nothing in it,’ he said. ‘That’s not bad, is it? I’ll do a separate estimate for the furnishings, the decorations, and the figures when I’ve finished the house.’

‘What about your expenses so far — air fare, hotel, and the rest of it?’ When he was feeling expansive he tended to brush details aside.

‘I’ll put the travel expenses on the invoice for the starting payment of five thousand pounds. I get five thousand more at the halfway point and the balance when the house is finished.’ I could hear the pride in his voice; I was touched by it and happy for him but the size and complexity of the project made me anxious.

‘You get the first five thousand before you start the work,’ I said, ‘right?’ It was difficult for me to believe that someone called Peggy Sue was going to pay Giles any part of fifteen thousand pounds.

‘Yes, I’m actually going to get five thousand pounds before I do anything. I am now on a par with roofers and builders and other guys who drive around in white vans with ladders on top.’

‘When are you invoicing her?’

‘As soon as I get proper business stationery.’ So that was the first part of the job and it took two weeks and a couple of hundred pounds which resulted in reams of costly laid A4 headed The Small World of Giles Varley . A little twee, I thought. Maybe even unlucky.

The invoice did at length go out, the cheque came in; Giles went to Moss & Co in Hammersmith for the oak and walnut and got started. From then on he spent most of his time in his workshop. He intended to do the base with the barley-twist legs first; for this he needed complete accuracy in his calculations for the lathe work and he hadn’t much time for conversation.

I went down there every now and then to see how it was going; I liked the smells of paint and glue remaining from the last doll’s house and the smell of new wood from this one; I liked the work-bench with its vice and its jumble of tools and wood scraps and the green-shaded light bulb that made an island of warmth where he worked. Until now the basement had been a cosy place for me to visit but the atmosphere had changed and I could feel that this project was weighing heavily on Giles. ‘There’s a lot more to this one than there’s been to the others you’ve done,’ I said.

‘You think it’s too much for me?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I lied. ‘It’s just that you don’t seem to be having fun with it the way you did with the others.’

‘Work can’t always be fun — it’s only a doll’s house but we’re talking museum quality here.’ He had in his right hand a jointed folding rule, boxwood with brass hinges and pivot. It was marked in inches and centimetres; when the four parts of it were folded together it was nine inches long, and it opened out to a yard. The markings on it were clear and sharp; it was a device of exactitude, a reassuring thing to hold in the hand. He had been tapping his thigh with it as we talked.

It was obvious that he didn’t want me watching him and I began to understand that he knew very well that he’d taken on too much; whether he’d done it to challenge himself or defeat himself I didn’t know, but he wasn’t the Giles I was used to and a distance grew between us.

The work seemed to require more meetings in Bristol than I’d have thought necessary and — inevitably, I suppose — I found a note in a pair of trousers I was taking to the cleaner’s and there it was: fidelity was one more thing Giles had failed in. Love does not exclude arithmetic; I’d invested a lot of time and hard work in Giles and this was my return. Not good enough.

Giles swore that he’d got into Peggy Sue’s knickers under duress, that he was afraid of losing the commission if he didn’t let her have her way with him. His adultery had made me angry but his defence made me embarrassed for him, which was worse. What I resented most was the violation of my privacy: this woman had come into my life, she’d had the use of my husband, and although as far as I knew she hadn’t been in the house I imagined her in our bedroom going through my underthings.

I relegated Giles to the guest room but I didn’t ask him to leave; I hadn’t ever defined a point at which it was no longer worthwhile to continue with him, so we continued. I carried on with the cooking and we had our meals together although with less conversation than before. It was a strange time for me because Giles’s unfaithfulness bothered me less than the thought that he might not finish the doll’s house with all its people and pots and pans and the rest of it. He kept out of my way as much as possible; when I was home I’d hear him down in the workshop and I wondered how the doll’s house was coming along; he no longer talked about it.

Then the basement went quiet and he didn’t turn up for dinner. I went down to the workshop to see what was what; he’d done the base of the cabinet with the barley-twist legs and he’d measured and cut the wood for the house and that was all. He left a note on the work-bench under his folding rule; all it said was:

Goodbye from the one-inch to one-foot man.

I stood there with the rule in my right hand, tapping the palm of my left. Nine inches; I opened it out to thirty-six inches and folded it up again.

The next thing was a call from Peggy Sue telling me that he was dead at her place in Bristol and there weren’t going to be any more payments because he hadn’t finished the job. That was seven years ago. I was more shocked than grief-stricken — not only had he left the job unfinished, he himself was unfinished and there was a great deal of work still to be done on him. Shortly after that, of course, the aloneness that had been growing inside me stepped out, stood in front of me, and said, ‘Here I am.’

I see now that when Giles was alive I didn’t really know what he was to me; now I do. The Yeats poem comes to mind with the lines about the mountain grass retaining the form where the mountain hare has lain; in the shape of Giles’s absence I see what his presence was to me: there was love, there was romance, there was passion but the main thing about Giles was that he was like a house that has potential but needs a lot of work. That excited me at the beginning, less as time went on.

I was sorry he hadn’t at least finished the doll’s house. When I think about him now I wish I could have done better with him; I wish he could have done better with himself too. But I guess life is what you wish you’d done better with.

Still, for good or ill, life goes on. There’s nothing to be done about the past; today is all there is to work with.

At Covent Garden things were middling along — as always I went around to see what was on offer before setting up but I made no brilliant acquisitions and nothing much happened when I was ready for customers. In the road between the Jubilee and Apple Markets the pigeons were routinely inspecting the cobbles in the presence of a sweeper and his cart. From Peter’s snack bar came the aroma of frying bacon. The Punch-and-Judy man who performs between the tube station and the Apple Market probably hadn’t set up yet; Punch and his wife and the baby, the crocodile and Jack Ketch and the Devil would be lying silent in their bag, waiting to erupt into violent life.

As the place filled up with tourists the buskers in the Apple Market were belting out the overture to Carmen which seemed to promise a lot of action but it wasn’t happening where I was. As I made little adjustments to the display on my table I found myself, not for the first time, shaking my head over the business of buying and selling bits of other people’s lives. All around me were objects clamorous with silent voices: grandfather clocks with pendulums grown dull; rusted crampons; medals with faded ribbons; postcards of piers long since fallen into the sea; sightless stereopticons; dolls and toy soldiers owned by children now old or dead; and jewels no longer warm with the life of their wearers. Minute by minute the market was filling up with the gabble of voices and thronging of footsteps of people hungry for those morsels of other lives, eager to wake the silent voices of objects long unused and feel the touch of garments and jewellery long unworn.