Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

On their table was a flower standing in a slender vase. There were photos on the walls, patched pictures of forgotten celebrities. The place was subdued, a little seedy, but the pasta was edible, caked in cream. They were both labouring over their plates. When they were no longer hungry, they fought half-heartedly about a crisis Liam was having at work. Liam was fighting a rearguard action against Rosa’s insistence, her pointed questions. She was asking him to try harder. ‘Go back and renegotiate,’ she was saying. ‘Tell them you won’t take it. Threaten to walk out.’

‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I just don’t do things that way.’

‘Well, you have to. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. They’ll ignore you. The reason they treat you this way is because you never stand up for yourself. In this, you’re hopeless.’

‘Hopeless?’ He looked hurt.

‘Only in this. In this you are spineless. What would be so wrong about saying what you think?’

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ he said.

‘Well, what does that mean?’

It was ironic, how ambitious she had been for him. She jostled at him; she hardly ever praised him. That was her fault. Those evenings when she picked at him, explained what he was doing wrong, standing on the pedestal of her so-called career, she had slowly forced him into action. Liam was tortoise-brained, he liked to move to the slowest available timescale, but eventually she made him resolute. Bedding Grace was a coup de théâtre. Perhaps it was an act of revenge. That evening, she recalled, they had passed some hours discussing his latest small failure. Rosa was steely and certain of herself. At the end of the beating he picked up the bill. It didn’t help to pity him. Still, the hours they had passed discussing his job! Tearing him apart, mostly. Why did she care so much? She had been too engaged with it all; she had been too frantic. Evening after evening they had debated their small lives, writ them large together. And though she saw her enthusiasm — her concern for these elements — as incomprehensible, quite inscrutable from her present state, it remained strange to her that it should be impossible to return to these evenings, that she would never sit again in a small Italian restaurant with Liam. At the time it had seemed ongoing, each evening part of a limitless series. Her relationship with Liam, because it had endured for so long, allowed her to develop an illusion that they — alone of everyone — might transcend the absolutes of space and time. Because they returned daily to the same point — the two of them, waking in bed together, in their familiar bedroom with the same sounds for each morning — it seemed as if this pattern would recur for ever, an eternal recurrence. Eventually she found this stifling, but for years it allowed her to evade reality, delude herself about the incessant passage of days. Because of this she had failed to notice many signs. In the last months they stopped eating out. It was all too pursed and formal. In public they were uneasy, suddenly aware of themselves, of the lies they were spinning.

There were days when she wondered if she had been profligate. If she had been idle, and inert, sluggish in love and then in saving herself. Perhaps she should have fought for him, challenged Grace to a duel. And that wasn’t such a bad idea, she thought. She would have liked the chance to blast a shot at Grace. Pistols out. The foes, cold-blooded and unspeaking each took four steps. The clock of destiny chimed, and the poet, without a sound, dropped his pistol onto the earth. Better to be Lensky, or Pushkin, blasted and shot to shreds, than no one at all. She always liked the absolute insanity of the duel, the loss of a sense of proportion inherent to the ritual. Grace would have tried to talk her way out of it. Laconically, she would have said, ‘Essentially, Rosa you are succumbing to an atavistic — and unfeminine — urge for violence. Why? Why suppress centuries of progress, because you are feeling upset?’ — but Rosa would have her pistol cocked already.

Sitting in the present, a cold wind swirling at the windows, Rosa wrote: tat tvam asi. In another we recognise our true being. She screwed up the piece of paper and held it in her hand. Bodhi , or something like, the pure beauty of the bed, the origin of the world. The love grotto! The enchantment of the heart, a moment of perfect suspension, above the clashing forces of desire and loathing, a moment of beauty. Love as a casting off of the bonds of the ego. Supplying an instant of perfection, ecstasy in beholding the object of this pure and selfless love! A condition remote from the sneering final stages of her relationship with Liam, it had to be acknowledged. Yet for a few years, Liam was your god. Now she heard the thrum of the rain. A sudden storm had begun. The sash windows rattled and she heard the softened sounds of tyres on the road. The clouds swirled. Later there might be thunder, she thought. Later there might be thunder, she wrote, and tore up the paper and threw the pieces into the toilet.

She felt sick, but that was because she had drunk too much tea. It was clear she had to get away, out of her head. Out of the city which had a dark cloud hanging above it, apprehension, fear perhaps. She perceived that the flat was small and the house was whirling in space. We are all , thought Rosa, speeding through space, a velocity too wild to contemplate. Of course her surroundings were significant, but they changed so quickly. Time’s winged whatsit, flapping at her back. These feuds, wars, everything spinning in emptiness. And Rosa as her own fleeting vantage point. Changing all the time, even as she tried to think of herself as the still centre. Even Whitchurch was spinning, turning swift circles. She could move as slowly as she liked, and she couldn’t change a thing. The earth wobbles on its axis and turns through the days and wanders round the sun. Everything is speed and light, and will be until the galaxy becomes static and dark. The Vedas talked of a pattern of dreams. Brahma dreamt of a serpent on a river, and on the serpent’s back was a tree, and each leaf of the tree was a dreamer, dreaming their own dream. Every few thousand years Brahma would awake, and a flower would appear from his navel and drift downstream. Or something like that. Definitely a flower and a navel involved. She remembered a song her grandfather had sung her when she was a child. Row row row the boat gently down the stream, Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream. It was a neat little Heraclitan ditty, and he had sung it as a lullaby. Hardly consoling, she thought. Even worse, life is but a dream of a dream, said the Vedas, a dreamer dreaming of others dreaming, more perplexing still. Indra’s net. You were netted at birth, confined and quite entangled. She didn’t trust much, except experience, her own small sense of things. In this she called herself Jamesian, though really she knew little of William James. Any number of labels would fit this feeling, she was sure. And her experience, though she perceived it as her own, her unique perspective on the world, was most likely collective; it seemed unlikely she was privy to any secrets.

Wiping her hands, she walked to the bathroom. Clean the bathroom! she thought. She ran the tap, and watched the water whirl into the plughole. She touched the plastic of the shower curtain and saw light sliding down it. The universe was riddled with impossible elements, she thought, absurd symmetries. It was curious to her that she was presented daily with irrefutable evidence, these traces of vastness, a galaxy of stars and lights spiralling into infinity, unknown space. Faced with the moon and the stars, now visible in the rising dusk, she was briefly aware of the absurdity of considering anything at all. Reality became a meaningless piece of fabric, tugged around this cluster of humans, as they waited on their fertile rock. And yet people lived with passion, conviction. Even though they saw the stars and accepted the passage of millions of years, antiquity stamped on the surface of the planet. They lived and died for manufactured causes. She understood almost nothing of the materials of her universe. She knew of gases and solar flares, of intense variations in the brightness of the sun. When she thought of the sun she thought in lists of words, of gamma rays and optical emissions. She understood that the sun was a collective term, that the light she saw derived from the photosphere, where gaseous layers became transparent. She dimly apprehended that the sun’s corona, alone, burned at a temperature greater than one million degrees Kelvin, she had once been told. That was the sort of fact she couldn’t process at all. They might as well tell her the earth was shaped like a dinner plate and floated on a pool of eternal water. She had her five senses, concerned as they were with basic survival, and her brain was busy with the functions of her body and something she had been taught to refer to as thought. Then she had this intimation of something else — a knowledge that if she only could — if she only could! — she would break away, break out of bondage, and stand free of it all, transcend it somehow, find the World Will, sink into the Geist, whatever the hell it was that she was trying to unearth — and when she read Schopenhauer she thought it was that, but she was impressionable and another book would cast her thoughts in a different light, shade them in differently. She had all of this to struggle with, and instead she thought about Grace and Liam! It was a travesty, when she could be trying to understand the sun.