Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

Rosa put down her suitcase in the corner. There was a long mirror and a hat stand. There were some books on the windowsill. Sons and Lovers, Rosa noted. The complete works of Wordsworth. John le Carré. Some P.G. Wodehouse. They were educated but not showy. They didn’t stack up piles of Kant and Kierkegaard. There were fresh flowers in a vase on the bedside table, beautiful red and white flowers, she had no idea what they were. It was too much for Rosa. Feeling suddenly ashamed, she said, ‘Judy. I shouldn’t have come. You’re so busy with the children. And you put flowers in a vase. It’s so kind of you. But I really shouldn’t stay.’

Judy paused and turned, as if this was the frank admission she had been waiting for. She was stern and definite. Her face was puce, but her hands were steady. ‘Rosa. I won’t hear anything of the sort. You’re to stay as long as you like. I think it’s just dreadful, what’s happened. You have my utmost sympathy. I don’t know what happened between you and Liam, but I know there are always two sides to such things.’

‘Sometimes three sides,’ said Rosa. ‘When you’re in a triangle.’ She smiled, hoping by that to lighten the mood, but Judy was like a policeman, holding up her hand. ‘Rosa, I don’t want to get into it,’ she said. That was slightly bemusing, but it hardly mattered. ‘It’s wonderful to have you here’ — and Rosa murmured something in response. ‘Come on, let’s go to dinner,’ said Judy. And she turned them both around and sailed them back along the corridors, past the portraits of Judy and Will painted by Will and the watercolours by an unknown hand, the latches making solid, comfortable sounds as they opened the doors. In the bright living room, where the fire was crackling and candles had been lit, Will had a fistful of plates and on the table stood a casserole dish.

They patched an evening together. By the sheer force of Judy and Will’s goodness, they found some phrases and turned them out. Rosa was quite consumed by the strain of it, pawing at her food, striving to stay away from the truth. Judy and Will talked in a rich slew of adjectives — words like delightful, gorgeous, beautiful, special, wonderful and extraordinary. Rosa founded the repetition uplifting. It was like watching someone carefully remaking the universe, spilling shafts of light across the shadows, turning grey to yellow and black to gold. Rosa, lacking necessary words, tried out ‘lovely’ a dozen times, but couldn’t quite get her tongue around it. It wasn’t that Judy and Will lacked imaginative range, thought Rosa. It was just that the place repeated certain qualities. As in the city Rosa found her brain consumed by recurring thoughts of grime and grey and surprising beauty and moments of being and litter and menace and noise and insistent bass-beat and wide-eyed crackhead and insalubrious shanty town and sprawling chaos, so they talked about the fells and the silence and the freshness of the air and the beauty of the view and how much it revived them. Then they were bawdy for a while, and Judy told tales of cracked nipples, and the slow recovery of her body from childbirth, and how tired she was because Leila and Eliza never slept, and Will smiled at his wife, and kissed her hand. There was an established pattern. Judy emanated a worthiness that made Rosa feel still more acutely the isolation of her self-centredness, her overdeveloped ego. Her fear of subsuming her own desires and impulses. Her ambitions, unfounded as they were. Her lack of realism! Her squeamishness and moral cowardice. Her committed procrastination. Rosa thought that friendship was a curious thing. She really had little in common with Will and Judy. Yet they listened to her, committed themselves to a tumbling series of questions. In response, she really bored on. Stimulated by food and wine, she was mighty, boring and terrible. They raised their eyebrows and diagnosed her. Clearly a nervous breakdown, said Will. Not surprising in the circumstances.

‘I think I merely opened the doors of perception,’ said Rosa. That was after a jar or so of wine. Doors of perception! The words only came with drunkenness. Otherwise it was quite impossible to say them. They made her think of Blake with his naked tea parties, visions of souls dancing in trees, the rest. Jim Morrison in a kaftan with a chiselled chest. ‘Everything was obscured before. I wasn’t looking carefully at things. Without the death — you know — my mother, death death, I would have lived on for a few more years, quite content, in a dream. You understand.’

‘Rosa, you were under too much strain. You know, the death of a parent, it’s very hard. And your relationship was ending. There was a lot going on for you. And people are busy, they don’t have time,’ said Judy. ‘You should have come to see us sooner. Grace and Liam, we saw them not so long ago, when was it? They came to stay, it must have been a few weeks ago. Liam is a good person, Rosa, you mustn’t forget that. And Grace is very compelling. We understand their attraction.’

‘Oh, he is good, yes, of course,’ said Rosa. This made her angry, but she kept feeding herself wine.

‘Really, he is a fragile man,’ said Judy.

‘I’ve never thought of him like that,’ said Rosa. ‘But I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.’

‘Of course it’s hard to say — but we understand some of what he’s been saying. What they’ve both been saying,’ said Judy.

‘You know, you were both at fault. Or rather, perhaps, there’s no one to blame. The relationship had clearly decayed,’ said Will. ‘That’s not to say his timing was sensitive.’

‘Decayed?’

‘They say you were depressive, overbearing, self-obsessed,’ said Will. He was so naturally congenial that he smiled as he said it.

‘Not really depressive, not then. But the others, of course,’ said Rosa. ‘I would have to confess to the others.’

‘Liam says you were wild for a long time, and he was too afraid to end it,’ said Judy. ‘He says you tired him, he couldn’t keep supporting you emotionally, and eventually he couldn’t cope. He felt he was only an emotional crutch to you, nothing more.’

‘No doubt I said a lot of foolish things.’

‘Perhaps you’re being too hard on them. Your relationship has clearly declined, you’re angry and frustrated, you explain to Grace how demoralised you are, how much you want to get out, and you tell her over and over and Liam is there — and of course Liam is attractive, intelligent — who would blame her?’ said Judy. ‘I mean, you can blame her, but can you be sure you wouldn’t have done the same?’

‘I don’t know what I would have done,’ said Rosa. ‘I haven’t been in a similar situation. I can’t possibly guess.’

‘They were in love. It sounds like a grand passion! And that’s hard to resist,’ said Judy, and Rosa detected a trace of autobiography in her voice.

‘Grace says you hit her once at a party, a few weeks back,’ said Will. ‘She had a cut eye. I remember that — it was still bruised when they came here.’ He was looking carefully at her now, monitoring her response. Did they think she was putting on a front? Did they assume she was about to lose control, release a screaming fit, a violent outburst? She had raged, of course, but internally, to the walls of Jess’s living room, to the self-assembly furniture. She had never really raged to anyone. Perhaps occasionally she had emitted something, but it was mere metonym. Anything she expressed was more like a personal code.

‘My jacket hit her, when I put it on to leave. I was in a hurry, I wanted to leave so she would stop talking to me,’ said Rosa. ‘I think that must be what she means. I seem to remember the zip caught her. I was being clumsy; I was desperate to get out of the room. She was hounding me at a party. You know she can be sanctimonious.’