And then Harry (the poisoned) Chalice ambled along and sat on the corner of my desk.
Was I happy? he felt moved to know. Had the divorce been a difficult time? No, really, he wanted to know — had I minimised its ill effects? Had anything conceivably to do with him created a sexual compulsive, a fantasist traitor, freak? (He didn’t quite voice the thought, but one could see it passing.) Did I feel a period of leave might be of assistance?
Humiliating, naturally, that our chat should be semi-public. Unpleasant to be thumbed through in one’s own — and only real, as it were — home.
I told him that, yes, I was happy, or at least not unhappy. I told him the divorce had been … had been a divorce. It was simple in the legal and practical sense: I got to leave Val and Val got everything else.
I had been the one to call and tell Becky I was separating from her mother and she said, during one of my pauses, ‘I’m glad.’ And I had to resist pointing out that my daughter doing this made me feel I had wasted two decades and more of my time.
Not that I’d told Chalice this.
I also didn’t raise the fact that Becky being there at the far end of my phone and inadvertently insulting me had nonetheless reassured. Her existence meant not a breath of my marriage hadn’t been worthwhile, hadn’t led to something lovely. But the combination of elements — slight irritation and tenderness — was confusing and made my voice strained. She had thought for a moment that I was crying. She was mistaken.
Chalice hadn’t much to raise about the letters per se.
The official position on courting was that if it didn’t bring a department into disrepute, or endanger the defence of the realm and so forth, then my conduct was acceptable, if odd. It would be oppressive and unjust if one’s sexual behaviour were constantly under scrutiny — there were guidelines about privacy and inclusion … Chalice flicked out the little suggestion that, nonetheless, my access to promotion would now cease. But everything about me already meant that I’d stalled. And being stalled makes me happy. Which is taken as a very bad sign, too.
(I’m still great in a crisis. That’s agreed, that’s axiomatic. I excel — as long as its somebody else’s crisis.)
Should my multiple courtships transform into multiple liaisons, then my situation would be reassessed — Chalice said. I would be revisited and supported — as if I were a sickly aunt.
I assured him there would be no multiplicity. It was clearly very easy for him to believe me.
There he was on the corner of my desk, swinging one leg, one Church’s loafer, cutting the air back and forth, as if this was fun, relaxing fun. There he was having both a word and fun. He wanted me to see how he was expertly grilling a professionally efficient and yet privately worthless man and enjoying the process immensely.
Or I may have been projecting my own low opinion of myself on to a superior. He did seem to share it, though. His mouth did seem both unavoidably amused and contemptuous. He was being deliberately, lightly, shaming.
Harry Chalice having a word.
Not having a word anywhere quite private enough to be respectful and you know the way with lack of privacy …
The word was good and the word was passed and the word was elaborated upon and the word then roamed about.
So I am known for women.
And I didn’t go on leave when it was offered.
What would I do without work?
And I did keep courting.
What would I do without doing what I do? What would I do?
This was allowed.
But, yes, since then I have been known for women.
Always the women.
But it’s not that.
A man runs out of White Horse Street and turns left into Piccadilly. The day is fine, although autumnal, and his overcoat is open, showing a suit with its jacket also unbuttoned and then a pale shirt, a disordered tie. His coat-tails lash about with his own motion, as does his scarf. He is in his late fifties, perhaps early sixties, and yet there is something much younger in the way he pelts, something of a boy he may never have been. He is dressed appropriately for Mayfair in tailored shades of quiet blue, but his recklessness attracts attention as he rushes and dodges in amongst pedestrians and then across the first two lanes of traffic between him and an entrance to Green Park. As he paces and frets on the central reservation, clearly anxious to proceed, it is possible to see how happy he is, visibly happy: the bunching of one hand in the other and the sweeps of fingers through his hair, the apparent welcoming of excess energy in his limbs. Something about him approaches dancing.
The man, then, wasn’t running because he was in flight. It seems more likely that he ran because he had become somehow uncontainable. He may no longer know where to put himself and so he is hurrying into the nowhere which is motion.
His scarf, in a dark, quiet pattern, perhaps silk, lifts with a breeze and he allows this, apparently enjoys this when it touches his face. A couple, perhaps tourists, join him in his uneasy waiting and he stoops to tell them something emphatic. Whatever he says is perhaps not unpleasant, but does elicit a type of shock. The pair flinch very slightly.
At his first opportunity, the man darts into the road, barely clearing a cab, and is over, out of danger, back on the pavement and then sprinting into the park, faster and faster.
The tourists watch him as he goes.
Behind him, the street has settled again and resumed its customary state — the Ritz is still the Ritz, the traffic is still the traffic, the gaudy arcades are still gaudy arcades.
By this time the man is deep in the park, a wild form dashing over the tired October grass. The shape of him seems largely joyful.
12:28
SPANIELS MADE NO sense. They were intended to withstand things: ponds and horrible weather and the noise of guns and battering out across moorland and into undergrowth; and they had to scare bodies into flight and then bring them back dead, gripped in their mouths, and you’d think this would make them insensitive and hardy. Not so. They were soppy. Generations of county types and aristocrats had bred legions of canine neurotics: slaves who were deliriously happy to be slaves, codependents who were delighted just to touch you, pieces of outdoor equipment that forgot every command in jovial frenzies of sensuality, who craved the scent of decomposition and also blankets and affection and — when it was arranged, or they could sneak it — sex and sex and sex.
Gun dogs told you a lot about the ruling classes.
As she walked, Meg was being followed — padpadpadpadpad — by Hector, an older springer spaniel to whom bad things had happened and who was therefore even more than naturally clingy with anyone who was halfway decent to him, averagely gentle. Meg was heading to the ladies’ bathroom at her place of work — Gartcosh Farm Home.
Gartcosh Farm Home was nowhere near Gartcosh and it was not in any real way a farm. It was a home to the animals it defended, but did not wish to be. Its aim was to send all its residents back out into safe keeping in the wider world.
Meg was, this morning, choosing to ignore the wider world. She was additionally trying to ignore her body while it resented its earlier loss of dignity.