Rowan deals with me well, always has — lets me come here and rant. He was always a good teacher, because he’s interested in learning — in every sense. He listens, does Rowan — even to me. Not that I’m offering him anything real, or worth hearing.
Rowan spoke to his tea glass, softly, ‘Being angry with no one you can find … No one you can reach …’ Then he looked into the garden’s little pool. ‘Wouldn’t that, in the end, make you ill …’ Rowan’s face took noticeable care to remain disinterested while he said this.
Yes, naturally it would. It does. But I want to be angry. I want to be it and feel it. I do. I have to — what’s the alternative? If I’m not angry then I’m only scared — that’s all that’s left, beyond the hating.
I have mislived the whole of my life.
‘Yes, thank you, I’ll have more tea. In case of apocalypse, take tea.’
Jon did offer his glass and Rowan poured for him — civilised — it was excellent, gentle tea, made with fresh sage from the garden, from the raised bed just over there.
An Arabian garden in Bishopsgate.
There were joyfully coloured tiles and alcoves and squared flower beds laid out like a prayer with a pool at the centre. The heart is a pool which has to be cleansed. It had been built here for Filya: a present to court her, before she moved in, said yes and got married and did the customary stuff — except that with Rowan and Filya it wasn’t customary. They and their garden along with them were — one had to use the term — enchanting.
Jon could remember when the finished courtyard had been revealed — Filya crying and setting her hands over her face while a small knot of people suddenly felt superfluous, because they had been invited to a garden-christening party and it had turned without warning into a public proposal and unashamed sentiment and a slender woman being momentarily quite annoyed about having to consent and kiss and so forth before an assembled multitude. But mainly there was happiness. There had been a great deal of happiness.
Filya, who was Rowan’s first wife.
His only wife. And it doesn’t seem acceptable to be in Bishopsgate, in the world, when she is not. She would have been about the place, there would have been a knowledge, a sense of her presence, immanent. She’d have left me with Rowan to chat between ourselves, but then joined us for the later evening.
Not in that silly, sexist way — not a toxic, enforced withdrawal from men’s business … It was just that she liked to cook. After work, it relaxed her. She was a neurologist. She saw awful things happen to people, happen to their minds, their private selves, and had greater than average reasons for wanting to create things and hand over health and … Food’s good, isn’t it? It makes you able to go on. And I would have an appetite when I was with them both. So we might have eaten dowjic in a while, maybe, or lamb kibbeh, pilaf, lots of small dishes. Home-made and expressing affection. And first there would have been sweet peeled almonds in the garden to assist our conversation, and dried apricots the colour of muscovado sugar, perfumed flavour they had, and fresh dates. And we would have sat in the peace by the little fountain and heard her being efficient with knives and equipment and I would have smelled the heat, the spices, the domesticity, the content. Beneath everything would always be the flavour of content.
Happy households, they have an identical scent. There are variations in the top notes, but the underlying sweetmustysexydrowsy taste that colours your inward breaths is always the same. And without Filya that’s gone.
It was her absence, in part, the lack of everything she’d added to reality, which had put Jon in such a vile mood.
And I don’t like to see Rowan hurt and he is now permanently damaged, marked. That’s what happens when you really have someone who’s for you and they love you and they aren’t simply this closed loop in human form: your source of pain and your justification for withdrawing and the increased pain they inflict that calls for your attention and the guard you have to keep to fend them off — round and round.
Because it’s not that I didn’t understand how a couple falls apart. I did see what we couldn’t help doing, Valerie and I — we weren’t a disaster because we were insufficiently well informed … Just as we weren’t, in some ways, cruel.
We were simply beyond help.
I do not personally believe in help.
It was beautiful with Rowan and Filya, though — they conjured belief, produced it.
And then a younger wife who should have outlived her husband gets killed by an unforeseeable aortic dissection. Because everything ends.
She managed just fine being a Kurd and a Sufi and born in Iran and then moving to Gaza when she was a kid … Gaza, of all places … So many things didn’t kill her and then she was over. Stopped.
I can’t imagine what I would have done: having to be the man who woke beside her that morning and who knew she was in pain and that it was bad and dark and that nothing I could do was fixing it.
She told Rowan it was like a tearing in her chest. She suspected the cause and was frightened, more than sufficiently well informed. She said goodbye a lot, which was a mercy for later but not at the time. She insisted on saying goodbye. Hands over her face and crying and momentarily furious.
Is what I was told.
And I could not have borne it.
The ambulance taking however long they take now … Nice people when they arrived, Rowan said, and efficient … And too late.
It wouldn’t have made any difference if they’d been parked up ready outside — the situation was unsurvivable. Nobody’s fault — unless we involve God, believe that He claimed her. Her blood was just flooding away, and the damage impossible to repair — sewing nothing on to nothing being impossible.
We don’t discuss it, but that is what’s in the garden instead of Filya — an impossibility.
Jon had crossed his legs, drawn both hands through his hair and bent forwards, hinged himself so that his head was nearly against his own knees. He was doing this more and more often and was sure it must look ungainly and as if he were, to a degree, overwhelmed or else collapsing. ‘The whole city will have been cleansed soon: one huge play park for the upper-middle-and-above classes. And where will they get their tradesmen then? Or their servants? Dear me. One will have to bus one’s staff in from Surrey, Kent. Dorset. Take their passports and make ’em live in …’
‘Jon, is this what you wanted to tell me?’
Of course not. Why the fuck would I care about this? Why the fuck? Why the fuck be nauseous — again and as usual nauseous and should I see a doctor? I get sick. I feel sick too often.
I feel sick when I walk across Eaton Square — been doing that for decades — and see the new pavement furniture, these men who are dressed as butlers and who have to stand about outside the houses. As if there are not enough ways to spend the so much, so much, too much money available to the householders within, or elsewhere but potentially within, and therefore personnel must be made visible and shown to be under-occupied: whole human beings on call in case a bag needs lifting when anybody steps out from a cab, or a door is found closed and so has to be opened.
They are mainly there for doors, I suppose — the fake butlers — they’re doormen who can’t look like doormen for fear that passers-by would mistake one’s house for a hotel. And for fear of passers-by in general.