Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

That first night, the misunderstanding about the bread crock aside, I found him a wise and sympathetic companion. It felt like a long time since I’d been able to unburden myself to someone and after two glasses of wine, I began telling him all about Leonora’s departure. He listened silently as I fumbled to find the words to tap my unspoken grief. For a man whose religious faith was so deeply held, he was surprisingly undoctrinaire in his responses.

‘These are the burthens of life, Dr Slopen. There is no fortune so large, or wit so keen, or sagacity so provident, that it can obtrude itself between us and the sharp pangs of loss. I know it is of small comfort to know that others have and will suffer just as you do; nevertheless, it is the truth. Furthermore, I am confident that the passage of time will bring the possibility of a close and more cordial connection with your children, Lucius and …?’

‘Sarah.’

‘… and Sarah.’ His voice echoed mine with a gratifying finality. ‘ Lucius .’ He rolled the word around on his tongue. ‘A very fine name. Its root is lux . While not strictly Christian, by its reference to light it connotes the blessings of our Saviour. And as for this rascal, Gaspard, what is one to make of such a fellow?’

‘In fairness to Caspar, I think he really loves my wife and he’s able to offer a kind of security and romance that disappeared from our life a long time ago,’ I said, preferring to sound magnanimous than dwell on the darkness I really felt. ‘Presumably, he could have taken up with any number of floozies in their twenties, but he’s chosen to take on a woman in her forties with children. That’s a big commitment.’

‘Commitment, sirrah? I’ll have the fellow committed; aye, and hanged after! I may very well like another man’s hat or coat, but does that give me title to it? I think you will find he is one of these restless, covetous men who looks enviously on what he has not got. I fear for your wife when his eye lights — as it will — upon a new interest.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I’m not so sure.’

Seeing that talking about Leonora was making me gloomy, he tactfully withdrew and went up to his tiny bedroom. Later, I heard the bed creaking as he moved around on it.

I’d got into the habit of rising late after Leonora moved out. Coming to slowly in that big bed, prolonging the moment before I had to confront the adjusted facts of my newly solitary life seemed like the only real pleasure that was left to me. But the following morning, a Monday, the phone rang before seven. It was Leonora. ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Are you awake? I waited as long as I could.’

‘I am now,’ I said.

‘Thank God for that.’ I heard her sigh. The relief in her voice was audible.

My heart leaped. For a second, it seemed as though she was beside me in the half-dark of the bedroom, the glow of her warm yeasty skin against mine. And there was a recognition in some part of my soul that this was inevitable, this was what I’d been waiting for: my wife to return to me. ‘I’ve missed you too,’ I said.

‘I can’t get into all that now, Nicholas,’ she said, in a much more familiar tone of icy impatience. ‘Lucius has lost his passport. He says he left it in the drawers of the Blido.’

Leonora knew all our flat-pack Swedish furniture by name. This one, the Blido, like a parodic microcosm of the Procedure itself, reconstituted for me a particular rainy afternoon on the Purley Way and two hours’ exasperated fumbling with wooden dowels and Allen keys.

‘Can you see if it’s there? We’re supposed to be on a train to Paris at three.’

I hauled myself out of the bed and padded down the corridor to Lucius’s room.

Forgetting Jack was inside, I went in without knocking. The sight of him asleep stopped me in my tracks. He had pulled the window open in the night and broken the handle. The roller blind was flapping in the wind. With each gust, a wedge of sunlight briefly illuminated his sleeping face. His head looked grey and monumental against the pillow. His breath came in a deep, stertorous rumble.

‘Any sign?’

Leonora’s voice surprised me. For a moment, I had been unaware that I had the handset clapped to my ear.

‘Just a second,’ I said.

‘Why are you whispering?’

I told her I’d call her back.

Jack was stirring. My intrusion had wakened him. The lids of his right eye parted with reptilian precision. ‘Who art thou?’ he asked in a hollow, terrified voice.

There was only a handful of occasions during our acquaintance when he used this particular archaism. It was always when some emotion overwhelmed him: sometimes a natural human warmth, sometimes anger. At this moment, it was fear.

‘It’s me. Nicholas. Dr Slopen.’

‘And this place?’

‘My home.’

‘Very well,’ he said, in a voice that suggested its opposite.

I apologised for waking him and explained that I needed to fetch something. His hands gripped the top edge of the duvet and his eyes followed me across the room as I went over to Lucius’s desk. Its drawers were filled with a number of plastic tubs containing Warhammer paraphernalia. It is, frankly, a kind of progress that Lucius felt able to leave this stuff behind when he moved out. I understood the pleasure he took in it, but I always hoped he’d grow up to be more like Leonora with her talent for sociability and live connection than me, with my bookish solipsism and dead companions.

A sandalwood box in one of the lower drawers held Lucius’s passport. I took it out and flipped to the identification page: there was my son, in a scrawny and epicene phase of his early adolescence. In the same box were some cigarette papers, a packet of dried-up rolling tobacco and some condoms. It seemed less like evidence of a secret life than a collection of talismans, an offering to the gods of manhood. I remembered myself at his age, and my own desperate impatience to become an adult. Oh my poor fatherless boy. Momentarily, I was overwhelmed.

‘Sir, I observe that you are melancholy.’ The voice was resonant and gruff from sleep, but not without compassion. ‘Will you tell me the reason for it?’

‘I’m just having difficulty getting used to this new reality.’

From the sparkle in Jack’s beady eyes, I judged that I had told him something of interest. ‘Alas, you are become like me, Dr Slopen,’ he said, ‘a gloomy gazer on a world to which you have little relation.’

‘My son needs this,’ I said, wiping my eyes. ‘I’m sorry for disturbing you.’

He watched me in silence as I left the room.

*

Leonora and I agreed to meet in town so that I could hand over the passport. She said she was giving a recital in Paris and wanted to bring the kids. I pressed her for more details. She was reluctant to tell me anything else.

‘What about Caspar?’

‘What about him?’ She sounded defensive. One of the tacit conventions of our new relationship was that we never mentioned Caspar’s name.

‘Is he coming?’

‘What do you want to know, Nicholas? Is he coming to Paris? Yes he is.’

‘No,’ I said, suddenly conscious of a volcanic pressure in my chest. ‘What I want to know is, is he coming inside you?’ By the time I’d finished the sentence, I barely recognised the voice as my own. The white heat of sexual jealousy overwhelmed me. I felt — and I say it with no sense of hyperbole — that I was possessed by a demon.

There was a silence at the other end of the line. Just then, I heard an extraordinary noise coming from Lucius’s bedroom. It was a bestial sound, a roar of pain and bewilderment, like something from a trapped animal. I told Leonora that I had to go.