Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

‘Yes,’ he said, his voice muffled.

‘Andreas, hi, it’s Rosa,’ she said.

‘Rosa, dear girl, it’s the middle of the night.’

‘I’m very sorry. Very sorry indeed. I forgot the time,’ said Rosa. And he was right, she saw it on the clock, 2 a.m. blinking a reproach at her.

‘Well, tomorrow. Talk then. I have to rehearse all day. Evening. Speak evening.’

He was friendly, but exhausted. He could hardly speak. Fundamentally, he was asleep.

‘OK, speak to you then,’ she said.

‘OK,’ he said, and she thought of him dropping the phone and reclining again. He would be asleep in a second, and she counted him down, thinking of him drifting into sleep, falling, and now, Andreas was unconscious, she thought. Then she kicked the phone cord out of the socket, went to her room and whined herself to sleep.

*

She was woken by the buzzer. It jolted her into consciousness. She waited for Jess to take it, thinking she should stay as still and quiet as possible. She sat hunched on the bed, her chin on her knees, then the buzzer disturbed her again. There was no sign of Jess as she walked through the living room and found the intercom in the half-light. She pressed the button.

‘Delivery for Rosa Lane,’ said a voice. It was so unexpected that she didn’t know what to do. She paused before she answered. A delivery? A book from her father? There was a danger it might be. A guide to being. Something benign and essentially unhelpful. Another of his articles, stapled in a neat folder? Or something else, some sort of punitive measure? A summons from Sharkbreath! Perhaps it was today she would be set upon by Sharkbreath’s gang, toad-faces the lot of them. Still, she pushed a button and heard the door click open. She saw the messenger’s head vanish inside. Then there were footsteps on the stairs, and after a while he hammered on the door. My God, she thought. And she felt entirely resigned, really they could take her, she didn’t care any more. It’s all become quite too much, she thought. Existentially, she had become supine. Besides she was half-asleep and her face was stiff from all her sterling efforts of the night before. She found a jumper on the sideboard and put it on. Then she switched on the light. Opening the door she was surprised to see a courier, wearing leathers. He had a slim envelope in his hand, which he held towards her.

‘What is it?’ she said.

Of course he didn’t know. ‘You’ll find out when you read it,’ he said, with a friendly nod of his head. You’ll find out later, all of it, she thought. Then he went away and she heard him thumping down the stairs.

Uncertainly, she opened the envelope. There was a piece of paper, a note in Liam’s writing. Written in haste, it said: Dear Rosa, Here it is, and that really has to be all. Sorry, and love as ever, Liam. And there was a cheque for five hundred pounds. That made her sit down suddenly on Jess’s sofa. For a while she held the cheque and couldn’t understand it at all. She kept looking at the cheque, then looking again at the note. She read love as ever again and found it was an odd thing to write. Really he had stopped loving her long ago. But he was sentimental. The cheque proved that. She hadn’t turned to look at him as she walked away, but something in that final scene made him rush for his wallet. It was his guilty conscience that made him sign, or perhaps he was paying her off, bribing her not to cause any more trouble. It was for Grace’s health; he saw it as an investment. Money was nothing, for that sort of thing. He wanted to cleanse himself, enter the holy state of matrimony absolved of his sins! He signed it in a hurry and sent it over, because he was late. While he was tying his cravat he asked his best man — who was that? Lorne? Or some friend of his from school? — to phone the courier. ‘Bit of trouble at work,’ he said, lying into his top hat. Well, it was characteristic. He wanted her tidied up, the swine. Still, he didn’t want to pay what she had asked, and he couldn’t resist a self-righteous flourish. That really has to be all. Who said so? Liam, and no doubt Grace too, if she knew about it. Both of them so reasonable, they thought, gatekeepers of the rational world. That made her angry for a while, and she thought of a dozen ways to spite him. She screwed up the cheque — but not too much — and threw it on the floor. She stood and walked to the tap, drank down a pitcher of water, dribbled most of it out because her lip was swollen and her tooth ached, said, ‘The cunning cunt’, and then she sat down on the sofa again. Then she bowed her head suddenly because she thought it might be compassion. She read Sorry, and love as ever. Sorry for what? Sorry it wasn’t more? Sorry for everything? Sorry that she had made such a fool of herself, one last time? Of course things had been bad between them. She had loved him, and now the old sense of him came coursing over her; she was quite aware of Liam as she had known him and longed for him daily, and this made her want to cry out. She understood that things had become bitter. He was so closely associated with it all, her lost mother, the blankness that descended and a lot of accompanying mental debris. She had focused it on him, weighted him down with it. They had both been imperfect, hopeless. She couldn’t know for certain. Then she thought if it was so easy for him to do it now, why had he waited so long, why had he forced her to produce a haphazard entreaty? Once she had emerged, humiliated herself, he scrawled a cheque. The note was scribbled, too; she knew his writing well enough. He had been in a frantic hurry. For a moment she thought of the heroic gesture; she had a full-bodied, fleshed-out vision of herself marching to the church, tearing the cheque up on the steps, throwing it in with the confetti, then she picked up the cheque, smoothed it out and put it in her bag.

Indifference is the thing, she thought. It hardly mattered what she had done to get this money. It was hers, and she had achieved it. It was a scabrous small triumph, and it wasn’t enough, but it was hers all the same. Liam is sorry, she thought, and then she thought, Sorry for what? Then she shook her head. As if it mattered what he was sorry for! As if it mattered at all, as he wrote the words, hardly thinking about what he was writing, and ran out of the door in his morning suit. She stood in Jess’s living room, in a valedictory mood. Now it came to it, she thought she was sad to go. She had always liked the steady drift of the familiar. As she picked up her clothes she found an interwoven pattern of coffee stains on the carpet in her bedroom. That was a further shame. Now she dressed quickly. She cleaned her teeth, checking herself in the steamed-up mirror. Her eyes were baggy and she had looked better. But that would change, she thought. She wrote: Dear Jess. Thanks again for your hospitality. I took a lettuce leaf and a bit of tea, for which my apologies. In general I have committed several crimes which will weigh against me in the final reckoning. Recently I bled liberally into your shoes. I twice used your shampoo. I ate your chocolate yesterday and I drank a glass of your orange juice. Really, I ripped through your cupboards like a locust. Yours, Rosa. Then she smiled and ripped up the note. She wrote: Jess, thanks very much indeed. Now I’ve really gone. Send me any further bills — I’ll email details. Vade in pace, Rosa. She was propelled by an urge to escape. She felt them all around her, the ambiguous hordes, bank tellers and all the rest, offering maxims, telling her what to do. She simply had to shake them off. She packed her bag — her clothes and boots and her couple of books and all her unassembled papers — in an instant, and walked through the flat. She tidied the hall, and pulled on her coat. She picked up her bag, and walked out into the daylight. She posted the keys back through the letterbox, and heard them clink onto the mat. Then she started moving along Ladbroke Grove, breathing in the fumes of the morning, dragging her bag behind her. The Westway was full of cars and the clouds were scudding above her. She raised her head to watch the cars and clouds.