Jim Crace - Being Dead

He sat and watched Celice while she dressed. Her husband could be as guileless and transparent as a sheet of glass, and twice as grubby. She did her best not to seem too negative. She even, just to please him, just in case, put on the summer jacket and the T-shirt he had said suited her. He liked the drama of the black on white. He said the same about the printed page. Yet she was pleased.

But by the time they reached the bay, at his insistence, she was too hot — who wasn’t hot that day? — and still too disconsolate after their visit to the wreckage of the study house to have much appetite for sex. The hour they had spent on the shore below the dunes, hunting but not finding sprayhoppers, had hardly been as nostalgic or romantic as he’d hoped. No kissing with the tide around their knees. No sopping clothes or mouths. No urgency. No blowing wet into her palm. She needed first to eat her picnic lunch and rest before she’d even let him touch her. Then she might relent. Although she doubted it. Times change.

She suggested — half teasing him and half hoping that her choice of an open picnic spot might help to thwart his lovemaking until they were back home, behind locked doors — that they sit on rocks, looking out across the sea at Baritone Bay, watching seajacks and skimmers while they, the humans and the birds, ate lunch. Then they could go hunting in the running tide for sprayhoppers again, the most elusive of insects nowadays, it would seem. That ought to be their entertainment for the day. That ought to be enough.

‘I’d forgotten how strange it was out here,’ she said, climbing up, despite the rheumatism in her shoulders and her wrists, on to a shelf of heated rocks with sweeping views both out to sea and along the coast. She lifted the straps of her sacados over her head, wincing at the stiffness and discomfort, and took out the foil-wrapped sandwiches and the fruit, the cheese, the flask, the knife. ‘Let’s eat.’

Joseph shook his head. ‘It’s windy there.’

‘There’s hardly any wind.’

‘Come on, not there. I’ll find a place.’

He should have said, I’ll find the place because, as Celice knew full well, only fifty paces or so into the dunes behind them, rock free and with no ocean views, was the grassy spot where, all those years before, they’d first had sex. That time she’d been the schemer and he uncertain and reluctant. This time, so far, her tables had been turned. She wasn’t sure whether Joseph’s torturing desire to put the clocks back to the seventies and to repeat that first encounter, was flattering or manipulative or merely thoughtless. Was this romantic or annoying? She’d allow him the benefit of the doubt, if she must. She’d not be sorry if the moment passed.

‘I’ll wait here. You find it first,’ she said.

‘Find what?’

‘You know exactly what. Out of the wind. Go on. You get your way. I’ll wait.’

Celice removed her shoes, shook out the sand and placed them, upside down, next to the sacados. She ate her sandwiches while she waited for her husband to return. She liked to be alone when she was eating. She’d always preferred her meals to be more contemplative than social; her lunch-breaks at the university, at the comer table with her back against the room, her rest-day breakfasts out on their deck when Joseph was at work, the suppers taken up to bed. These once had been an opportunity, as well, to smoke without her husband’s purse-faced disapproval, though Celice had not had a cigarette now for seventeen weeks. Her breakfast cough, the smell, the propaganda, and unrelenting memories of Festa, had finally warned her off tobacco, though she’d only been a dilettante smoker anyway, one pack of Dortmundas a week at most. Those days when she’d enjoyed a cigarette, a drink and conversation, with her elbows on a table late at night, were long gone. She hardly recognized the girl she’d been. So much of her had disappeared. The blackness of her hair. The hollow underchin. Her muscle tone. Her libido. An appetite for trains and hotel rooms. Dunes shift. She could only half regret the way she’d been, how carelessly available she must have seemed when she’d met Joseph at the end of that strange year of sex and fire.

Those early times with Joseph had been difficult. Not loving him. Monogamy of love was something she was suited to. But physical monogamy was hard. How often she’d been tempted to reach out through the bars. These days, though, she was indifferent most of the time to making love with anyone. She would not welcome the attentions of backbone pianists or room service. Her greatest fantasy was a night of unbroken sleep. The massages she cherished now were for her rheumatism and for migraines. They should placate her, not provoke. She wasn’t in her twenties any more; the easy pleasures of the flesh were much reduced by wear, tear and repetition. Her shoulders hurt. Her body was more tender than it used to be, and less productive. Besides, her Joseph was a conquest she’d already made and didn’t need to make again. At least, not frequently. She didn’t have to worry about losing him to someone else. She was, he always said at times like this, ‘the only one’. He was her what? Her fifth, sixth lover, and her last.

Was it exactly six or was it more? She spread the fingers of one hand and counted them. Her blessed rosary. The boy when she was seventeen. That’s one. Her little finger. She held him snugly in her other hand. She couldn’t even recall his name. He had black hair, the use of his father’s car and absolutely no idea how girls were made or how to park. Then there was Mr Room Service, the maestro of the spine. Followed by her year of pickups, none of whom had made love to her more than twice. She blushed even to think how she’d behaved, the risks she’d taken for so little in return. A young professor from the city college whose wife, he claimed, had left him (but only for the afternoon). She’d drawn blood on his neck. A waiter, who’d come back to her rooms one evening after he had served — and undercharged — her on the terrace of the Floridel. He’d been a very handsome man but not especially bright or passionate. And then — her thumb — the student she had startled in the empty study room one day. How reckless and courageous she had been. He hadn’t wanted to make love to her. Someone will interrupt, he said. But she’d insisted. She’d only had to nudge his trouser front and he was hers. She was in charge of him for at least two minutes. That was one minute more than her command of number six, her little finger once again, a German tourist who was drunk (though beautiful). The last — he lived across the hall, the slipper man — had survived with her a month. He loved the cinema. Five times a week. But not the bed.

That’s seven, not counting Joseph. Joseph did not count. For when Celice recalled her adventures, Joseph was not on the list. Husbands are not adventures. Nor are they pickups to be enjoyed and then discarded. They are the custom of the house. They are the formula.

The truth is that mature Celice would rather have her cigarettes returned and, yes, some undemanded tenderness in the shape of books, opera CDs and house plants, than her old appetites. Lust had abandoned her; she had despaired of it — and there were times when irritation was the only passion that she felt. She was provoked not by her husband’s melting voice these days — although occasionally he tried to win her back with an old song — nor by his hand across her neck, but by his radio, the clutter that he left in every comer of the house, his acid hypochondria, his toiletries, his unselfconscious repetition of the facts.

Perhaps that’s why, although the day-long prospect of making love again to Joseph in the dunes had not much stimulated her so far, the five minutes that she’d spent, while he was absent, resuscitating her seven other men had already aroused her so much more. She closed both fists and unbent, erected, one finger at a time, rehearsing once again their kisses and their liberties. How giddy it had been to give herself to virtual strangers, to snatch some passion in the afternoon, to lie out naked on a hotel bed with Room Service attending to her spine and with, of course, a pack of Dortmundas open on the table top. Deep satisfaction was at hand when she was young. She only had to lift an arm and reach. The lips, the finger and the cigarette. How giddy it would be again — a little late in life, too late for him, alas — to be desired, just once, by someone other than her husband. There was, had been, a man. She did not want to put a name and face to him, her concert-going colleague at the university, so recently removed. But that had been her harmless fantasy for years. He could have been her number eight.