Who had her period. Mistresses, one feels, shouldn’t have periods. We kissed and sat and talked. She was saying (again!) how amusing my grandfather had been with all his navy stories and little jokes and she kept asking, rather pointedly I thought, about my family and job. When I tried to get away after an hour or so, she protested, she wanted me to stay the night all the same, period or no period, so that I finally had to explain what experience now tells me I should either have got out in the open at the very beginning or just forever and forever denied: that I was married (but that my wife and I didn’t get on and were thinking of divorcing, etc. etc.). Rosemary told me to put on my jacket, pick up my flowers and my bag and get the hell out at once. Just get out. Which, after only a second or so’s lightning quick thinking, I decided to do.
I drove home and gave the flowers, fortunately still in their wrapping paper, to Shirley, which did have some cheering effect. But it was a day of incredible blunders. For, embracing me to thank me for the flowers, she sniffed the perfume an earlier embrace with Rosemary had left. (Women are so sharp with perfumes, whereas to be honest I can barely tell one from the other, they all smell of sex to me.)
I confessed at once. As I said, I was determined to be honest if nothing else. This time she didn’t cry but was extremely cool and collected.
‘So out you go.’
She went into the bedroom and started piling my stuff into suitcases. I refused to take any notice and sat down in front of some programme on geriatric care, which again had me wondering whether it wasn’t time to dislodge Grandfather and sell Gorst Road.
‘Out,’ Shirley reappeared. ‘Your bags are in the hall.’
‘Where to?’ I said.
‘Wherever you like.’
‘Shirley,’ I said. ‘Come on, we’ve been through all this. Please be reasonable. Anyway, if I go, how are you going to pay the rent, now you haven’t even got a job? Then we’re supposed to be on the ferry Saturday morning at ten.’
‘Out.’
She sat down, leggily cross-legged on the floor and started to stare at me, while I continued to watch the television. She stared and stared, having me feel the full pressure of a gaze I refused to return. Then she had just opened her mouth to speak when the doorbell rang and it was Mark and Sylvia with their usual bottles of beer. And for once they were warmly welcomed, by both of us, as if by prior agreement. Oh hello, old mate, great to see you! Great!’
For a couple of hours we sparkled, we talked about the old woman downstairs who had taken to moving her furniture about in the middle of the night, the guy in the next block who put a blanket over his Maxi even in summer, about the three hundred Sri Lankans moving in at number five; Shirley rustled up some very attractive cheese and salad snacks on hot rolls; it was all perfectly charming, and even after they left nothing particularly unpleasant was said. Just that the following evening I had barely clattered through the door, before Shirley was barring the passageway announcing she’d found a room for me, in Southgate.
‘Out,’ she said. She put two freshly cut Yale keys on the top of the sideboard. ‘17 Ollerton Road. You can find it in the A-Z. The first month’s rent’s paid. Now go.’
I didn’t think. Without a word, grim-faced, grabbing destiny by the scruff of the neck, and mainly just to show her I didn’t give a damn, I picked up the suitcases, picked up the keys, which had the address and various other bureaucratic jottings attached to them on a luggage tag, and bumped downstairs. At least I got the car this time.
The room was what you might expect, one of London’s endless makeshifts, a grand old Victorian house, now eight separate bedsits. My predecessor, I saw from the bells on the door, had been called Ms Deborah Samberuts. Well. I climbed to the third floor and found a single divan, chest of drawers, wash-basin, wardrobe, etc., all perfectly clean and irretrievably shabby. The pull-down blinds were broken. The walls were grey. A Picasso poster had been mended with Sellotape some long brown time ago and there was the dense smell of aerosol air freshener engaged in unequal combat with years of tobacco smoke stale in a tufty carpet. I looked round, smoked a cigarette myself to sort out the pong, then left my suitcases and went out to find a pub and eat something.
I think perhaps for three or four hours then I really believed that this was it, that we had separated, that I was going to live in this squalid room for a month or two before finding something more suitable and generally starting a new happier, healthier, or at least less stressful life, preferably as near as possible to the office, Greenford perhaps or Perivale. Rent a flat, fill it with appliances, pick up a really good car on the never never, I quite liked the look of the new Audi 80.
I closed the door and set out. The evening air had a cool but summery smell walking down to the main road; I interpreted it as a smell of freedom. The pub was full of young people who, from the volume of their conversation, the haze of smoke and maze of glasses around them, obviously shared my belief that life was for friends and fun. At one point there was a flurry of back-slapping and shouts. I sat on my own and watched animated faces, the shifting and posture of bodies, attractive and otherwise, and I must say I took a sort of quiet, determined pleasure, watching these people drink and talk.
However, towards midnight, alone in Ms Samberuts’s room, when it came to unpacking what Shirley had put in those suitcases, finding toothpaste and pyjamas, a half-full bottle of Milk of Magnesia, my athlete’s foot powder, I don’t know why but I was simply overwhelmed by a great flood of emotion. I bit the pillow and wept. Physically I felt thoroughly sick, with a strain about my throat, tight chest, aching muscles. I beat my fists against the mattress and roared.
One wonders now about these explosive, these absolutely debilitating emotions: a fully-grown man lying in a shabby suburban room moaning. One wonders if somehow they mightn’t have been controlled, tranquillised, fended off. For looking back, here was an escape route I would have done well to have taken. For Shirley’s sake too. For everybody’s. The irony being that I often wonder if these tumultuous feelings of regret, of sentiment, gusting through me like storm winds the way they do, aren’t perhaps after all the best part of George Crawley, the nearest he comes to love. And equally frequently I will catch myself wondering if Hilary isn’t my destiny somehow, if my present dilemma, which arose out of that crisis, isn’t precisely the decision I was born to make.
I don’t know. The superstitious mentality dies hard of course. In any event, I wept on the bed in this rented room, tried to sleep, couldn’t, then did, and promptly had one of the truly atrocious nightmares I would later have to learn to get used to.
Mutilation is my forte with nightmares. It begins as a suffocating sense of horror, concentrated about clenched jaw and tight Adam’s apple. Then all at once I’ll be aware that, for example, my hand is missing. There is just the wrist dripping blood, perhaps the bone protruding, ragged flesh. Following which we plunge into hectic, gorily visual oneiric narrative as I feverishly wrap the stump in a blanket, in toilet paper, and start searching for the lost hand, wondering if it can’t perhaps be saved, re-attached, my mind actually flicking at tremendous speed through all the sensational stuff one reads in papers about surgeons working all night to put some child’s arm back on — always a child’s. And in my dream, strangely, I am both a child and an adult, as if I had lost this hand years ago, yet the wound is still bloody and fresh.
I search. Gorst Road. Always Gorst Road. Sometimes it’s my hand I’m after, sometimes my foot or leg, sometimes my dick, or even my head. Like some horrible ghost, I hunt through room after room, turning over settee cushions, opening drawers, the way in waking life I frequently look for keys I’ve mislaid, pens, papers, tickets. But the missing part is never found, just as the accident that caused it is never explained. And perhaps as I search I don’t really want to find it, thinking how gory it will be when I do, remembering a book I read once where somebody digs his murdered child’s head from a shallow grave, the eyes full of mud. Or on other occasions the search will turn up not the missing part of me at all, but Grandfather, gross and bloated in his armchair, or Aunt Mavis of all people, on her back, nightdress pulled up over a thick white belly, face hideously giggling in death.