Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

Usually, they were measured with each other. He had thanked her for dinner, a solitary foray. ‘Thanks so much. Delicious sauce.’ ‘Sainsbury’s very own,’ she said. ‘Delicious.’ ‘Mmm, I know.’ It was the sort of script that ended with a murder. Or death by mutual tedium. Someone had to crack! Now he was looking carefully at her, wiping his mouth. The dining room was untidy. They had a lava lamp in the corner, which had once seemed like the height of irony. The curtains were purple velvet and had been made by Rosa’s mother years ago, when she was a seventies queen of home-baking and floral skirts. They had hung in the living room when Rosa was a child. They made the flat look like a stage, prepared for an amateur production, a village panto or a motley farce. In recent months she had found they pained her, brought it all back, her vanished mother, the very thoughts she was trying to evade. She had thrown out a lot of things, photos and letters, but she had left the purple curtains hanging there.

The floor of the dining room was covered with newspapers they somehow never managed to throw away, and the living room was just as littered with ephemera. They had a long black leather sofa and black leather armchairs, which matched nothing else but amused them both. Really, neither of them had any sense of style. Rosa had hung some pictures on the walls, West Country landscapes from her parents’ house. The walls were white. Rosa distrusted colour and didn’t like to use it. It made for an ascetic effect. Visitors often thought they had recently moved in. But they had been there for years.

Liam was rocking back on his chair. In this bland room, wearing bland clothes, Liam was a beautiful man. It was always a shock to Rosa to see how beautiful he was. Now, after ten years, they no longer spoke about the things that concerned them. It was another sort of quietness, like the quietness Rosa found enveloping her prose. He was beautiful, but Rosa wasn’t whipping herself too hard. Rosa and Liam had certainly dropped out of the idyll. Their pocket utopia had decayed and a feeling of strain had developed between them. Familiarity made them slovenly with each other; they barely made an effort in their conversations. They gossiped in an easy way, about friends they had known for years, about their jobs. They liked to squabble about the washing up. Of course they loved each other. They had a shared past; they had been friends before they fell in love. Rosa had found Liam fascinating at the start: he was a handsome awkward man, her favourite type. Her love was a mixture of inevitable cliché and basic lust and a sense of shared sympathy and she liked his hurried way of speaking. It was easy to romanticise him, and she did for a few years, until they began to bore each other. They moved in together a few months after they began their relationship; they were inseparable, they couldn’t bear to spend a night apart. When he went away for a few days she was bereft. Later they couldn’t spend a night apart because the habit was so ingrained.

She had become insensitive and bullish, tardy in her praise. He had become obsessed with the minutiae of their living arrangements. It was impossible for her to explain it to anyone else, it sounded too much like an argument between people who have lived together for too long, but Liam picked at everything she did, an amiable, almost affectionate picking, but it vexed her all the same. It made her reluctant to decide anything for herself, the colour of a cushion, the contents of the fridge, because Liam was likely to complain, gently, mildly, but complain all the same. It all got rancid, touched with fraudulence. When he was irritated his mouth sagged at the sides. He looked like a mangled piece of fruit. And Rosa was like a nought, her mouth constantly open in self-exoneration. She spent far too much time explaining why she put the towels where she put them, or the bread where she put that, or the rest. It was bad for them both. At work, Rosa was an efficient, sensible woman, or had been until she became inefficient and completely nonsensical. But at home she was ill at ease.

‘Why do you bother?’ she had asked. ‘Why does it matter at all?’

He would seem to understand, but ten minutes later it would start again. ‘Just leave that.’ ‘Why are there crumbs on the floor?’ ‘What is this doing here?’ ‘Where is my phone?’ ‘Don’t move it again.’ ‘What is this?’

Initially she had rebelled, they had fought over trivia, and then she had compromised. She adhered to his customs, she obeyed the edicts of the kitchen, the rigid laws of the living room. Whatever she did, Liam was fussy; he developed an aversion to water, a loathing of open windows, a set of strange ideas about how you hung dishcloths. So they had piles of perfect dishrags and a committed silence about important things.

‘Do you do it because you are trying to control me, or the environment?’ she asked.

‘You are the environment,’ he replied. Beautiful Liam, so young-looking, with his muscular frame, his air of health, his smile, his ready charm. A handsome man. Women adored Liam. Men admired him. But she saw him as a nag, a man with his head in the dirt under the table.

When she had posed the question — trying to fix herself to a ritual, eager to get herself locked in to something permanent and unceasing, marriage, a romantic idea, good for morale, a ceremony, a party, her father would be pleased, fantastic, a wedding! and so on — and Liam had said no, of course they knew that was it. That precisely was it. Their own miniature Armageddon. The death of love! Completely trivial compared to the chaos around them, of course. It was hard to keep a sense of perspective. For herself she felt her miniature life was going badly. Her mother dead and burnt, and like a sap-headed coward Liam had stalled. He said he loved her, but it wasn’t quite right. He had a few things to sort out. They could discuss it in a few months, he said. The rest — on he had gone, like a nervous actor given a difficult speech. Since then, she had been idle and uncertain but really she was waiting for the end. Unable to effect it, but expectant.

On that evening — the finale — Liam looked particularly beautiful. His brown, wavy hair, curling onto his collar. His small nose, which dipped towards his firm lips. The severity of his jawbone. His wide shoulders, his almost hairless chest. His long elegant legs, his small waist, his bony ankles. His white, crooked teeth, chipped at their ends. When she saw him curved into the chair she wanted to fall to the floor and beg for forgiveness. Instead she stood and began to clear the plates away. He was still silent, intent on his glass of wine. He looked fascinating. It was only when he opened his mouth that he betrayed himself. Then he poured it out, a steady stream, placatory words, words for falling asleep to. He didn’t believe them anyway, he just poured them out. It was beauty-worship, she had diagnosed it long ago. She would hardly have loved him so long, had he not been so beautiful. Recently they had become more polite than ever. It had to be a bad sign. When Grace came round — which she had been doing constantly in recent months, as if she feared to leave them alone — she mocked them for their silences. She chain-smoked and explained that they had developed a fatal caesura. She sat there with her thin hands outstretched, refining her points.

Grace was a towering extrovert — ‘fatal caesura’ precisely the sort of showy phrase she would come up with — but she was considerate. When Rosa’s mother died she had been formidable, relentless in her kindness. Though she had never met Rosa’s mother, she said many things that even now Rosa remembered. Decent understatements, offers of help, quiet maxims. ‘Don’t ruin your life. Your mother gave her life up for you. Don’t make her sacrifice worthless.’ ‘Don’t sink. You owe it to yourself. You’ve tried so hard. And worse will come.’ Really once Rosa wrote them down, they sounded hackneyed enough, but when Grace pattered them out she thought they were the sanest things anyone had said in a long time. Yet Grace wasn’t always such a saint; she was fiercely critical and easily bored and when she found something dull she mocked it. She shifted jobs a lot: she had begun as an actress then she changed to TV production and retrained as a lawyer and most recently she had become a journalist, which was how Rosa met her. She lacked inhibitions, and she liked to talk about relationships, psychobabble much of it, but Rosa lapped it up, babbled it back and cited Grace like a friendly guru. For months, Grace had been coming round and saying, ‘You two, you two are just so fine. You want to grind each other into the ground.’ She called them pitted; their energies, apparently, were pitted against each other. ‘It’s like a World War One aerial battle,’ she said. ‘One of you has to bale out before you both crash. Someone must make the sacrifice, go down in flames.’ When she said that, she raised her eyebrows and dared them to look uncomfortable. Still they sat there and took it, because they knew she was right.