And he’d added the address of a Mayfair PO box he’d rented, the box number given as that of an apartment to add obfuscation. The whole effort had amounted to thirty-three words in the end, which one wouldn’t have thought would be the equivalent of high explosive.
Not that it detonated right away. He had been careful. His first trial ran out across Ohio through classified ads in a number of affiliated papers.
I believed that I was picking Ohio at random: far enough away, English-speaking and yet offering variations … On reflection, I was remembering a bungled Ohio execution — lethal injection. For some reason it stayed in my mind: a Department of Rehabilitation and Correction taking almost half an hour to chemically asphyxiate a man. Thirty minutes of smothering to death.
The name of one’s department either outlines your agenda and ethos, or acts as a permanent reproach. My department has changed its name three times since I joined it. This bespeaks unease, if not confusion, if not a prolonged divergence of intentions from reality. This bespeaks an oncoming tumble.
Despite its associations with Distasteful Death, Ohio had still been a reasonable choice for his pilot study. And there was no cause for alarm if — or rather when — correspondents seemed unsuitable. He had replied to them politely, pleading lack of capacity, the emotional requirements of the task, fatigue, and had then ignored any subsequent communications. That worked. That worked 100 per cent of the time.
It all worked.
Because Jon did get replies. There were people — women, he believed they were women — who still wanted delay to be part of a conversation, who wanted to hold paper held by other fingers first, who wanted more than packets of data firing intangibly about in a blizzard of sales pitches and perversions and gossip and cruelty and largely imbecilic surveillance and planned indiscretions.
Jon provided each woman with twelve letters, unique artefacts, unrepeatable — seen only by him and by her. That old-fashioned kind of security. That old-fashioned kind of anonymity.
And it all granted him the baffling realisation that, for some, England was a land expected to supply delicacy and style, gentlemanly ardour. Crisp sheets and clean cuffs and the movements of cloth against cloth against skin, gracious, permitting, trusted and fragile.
And old-fashioned. Old school.
That I specialise so easily in being an anachronism could start making me feel decrepit.
Bizarre. It’s all bizarre.
I’m not even English. I pass. It’s easy to pass.
But I wrote letters for each stranger and hoped to catch her at the brink of foreplay so that I could be there, too. Or somewhere like it. Permanently arrested passion in Zanesville and Akron — and twice in Columbus and once in South Euclid.
And much the same for me — in London.
So terribly unwise.
He’d settled on those five women. He’d tried his best.
And I nearly gave up before I unleashed the whole mess. It took me three weeks to hammer out the opening attempt. So much stored-away softness that I thought I’d have on tap, I thought I’d finally be able … but I wasn’t.
My dear, my dearest, my darling, sweetheart. Love’s words are the weariest, nothing but stale.
One woman asked me to call her Slim and requested descriptions of holidays we hadn’t taken, and never would, near English landmarks. She helped, because she wasn’t demanding or off colour. She presented herself as real to me and was generous and therefore made my letters real enough to work.
Always the women.
I invented a trip for us that involved a high tea more perfect than ever there has been, the scone-laden event taking place within a stone’s throw — not that one should — of Windsor Castle. And then there was stroking her cheek on the train while mild green acres licked our windows, showed no blemish — trees straight out of Constable with broad shade and dozing sheep, a lake not so blue as her eyes.
Eye colour is important. They don’t have to send a photo — and if they do I only have their word for it that the picture is of them. They can be who they like for me, without me. But eye colour, there’s something true about that, whether they’re lying or not. Mentioning it means we can face each other and earnestly enquire.
Which I thought was a good and necessary thing when I began.
I think Woman 4 was elderly. She called herself Nora and posted me a black-and-white baby photo of a small blurred form with a quizzical bonnet thing on its head. And a list of outdated movie stars she’d admired. I enjoyed her. I pretended that her husband had died in the war — or a war — and that she was used to and deserving of a romance she could hold on paper. Love letters to tie with a ribbon and keep. I ignored the signals under her replies that she was married to someone retired and angry who was an ugliness in her house.
Once he’d overcome his stage fright, Jon had sent twelve letters each, in pretty much exactly twelve weeks, to five experimental subjects and nothing untoward had happened.
I was listed under Trades and Services.
The box had filled with long and narrow envelopes of the American type. He had winnowed. He had decided. Then he had written. And then he had checked the box rather keenly for replies, anticipating requests for this, that and no other. And he found them. Along with later modifications required from his content and style, which he did respond to within reason. There were also — he should have guessed — mirroring offers of regard and deliveries of tenderness. It was faking, but beautiful faking — certainly faking on his part — all unburdened by concerns for any future.
Inked out between two countries, he was faking satisfactory affection.
By the end of the eighth or ninth week of that initial trial, there was what he might have termed an easing between his shoulders and across his chest and a growing sensation of usefulness. And when his hands touched his wife — muzzy under the quilt at late hours — when he touched her … when he touched Valerie, something about him must have changed, because she let him, he was allowed. A kiss or a caress in passing while they used their separate bathroom sinks — were busy with preparing — this didn’t become commonplace, but it also didn’t inevitably emerge as a failed apology on his part, or the start of an argument.
A sign that you’re over, a couple’s inability to use the same bathroom sink. One could see it in the plumber’s face as he fitted the side-by-sides.
And Valerie would reach for Jon. She would glance at him and pause and be puzzled. ‘Have you changed from that dreadful barber?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise. But he was a dreadful barber.’
Jon had his hair cut by a slightly secretive gentleman from Guanxian, now resident in Marylebone. The man did a good job and was incredibly cheap. Valerie had liked the idea of Mr Lam’s reclusive habits — they ensured his exclusivity — but she had been repelled by his inadequate charges.
‘I don’t know why you ever used him.’ She had been spooning at the marmalade, but had stopped, which was unfortunate because he wanted it. Her undecided hand, the clotted spoon, they put things stickily in limbo.
Jon had adjusted his glasses in the way that one does when one would prefer the world to be more bearable, ‘I wasn’t … What? I wasn’t apologising, I was saying sorry because I didn’t hear you.’