‘Darling, I wanted to call and … This is so that you can know I’m sorry.’
Tinted glass, ungenerous windows — they’re a kind of wilful blindness — the usual menu of sharp-muzzled toys: Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Porsche, Audi, Ferrari, I don’t care, I wouldn’t know …
I do know I’m in favour of comfort.
I truly am.
He was leaving a message, calling out to a phone which was possibly turned off and possibly broken and possibly lost and possibly owned by someone who would not currently make him welcome.
I am not a bad man.
‘I just … I know it’s late and … I hope you’re OK. I hope you’re resting. I didn’t mean to …’
I never mean anything — trained not to and now I can’t help it. Or something like that.
‘Becky, look, I’m sorry I had to run and I did want very much to ring before you went to sleep, but I’ve missed you … obviously … I am glad if you are asleep. That’s good. Do rest. And I am thinking of you and wishing you well and I will call you in the morning, not too early and maybe we’ll … It’s a Saturday, that’s a day off.’ He felt this swing of pressure, this lighting of pain in his face. ‘And you’re right, I do need to … retire. That’s the thing. Retiring. Leaving. But I …’ His words coming out childish, foolish, selfish …
All the things that I am.
‘Night night, darling, or good morning, or hello. I love you. I do. I do.’ This last was a dash at sounding functional, being useful. It left him clammy and the sound of it seemed to pull out through the height of him, as if he was being unthreaded, unstitched in some terrible way.
I am not a bad man, but I can do bad things. A good man may quite easily do bad things.
And a bewilderment slapped at him, as if he were eight again and back in Society Street and trying to understand why his Christmas wasn’t being a Christmas and why his father was out in the garden, sitting on a lawn that was silver with frost in the light from the living-room window and why Dad was staring out at some kind of unseeable something and why his mother was in the kitchen and cooking pancakes and using up all of the flour and all of the milk and why this was happening in the absolute dark of the night. It turned the dark into a new place he had never heard of, a box you were dragged up into where time stopped and stared and hated you and made you little.
I love her.
And Jon was, of course, by now crying and people spoke of tears as a relief, but they were mistaken.
Being accurate — because I am accurate — I would state that if I tell someone I love that I can’t do, or be, or want, or offer anything with regard to them … To their love … Not anything, not love, not anything … If I do that on a day when I particularly should be there for them … And I do that, not in person, or by speaking to her, but by throwing out this scrap, an underhanded bloody text, this piece of electrical cowardice … If I have told her something and been electrical and unkind and without warning … Then after that she will be permanently disappointed in me. She won’t want to contest my decision, or get back in touch. And I would agree with her — she ought to have no more to do with me, because …
Around Jon, his current box of night was apparently being shaken. Whenever he glanced out through the cab window, the glitter of headlamps phantomed and jarred. It wasn’t just that his eyes were wet — there was something not right about Kensington High Street, there was something fundamentally unnatural happening underneath the fabric of things.
She has sweet hands, hands that are … And the way she … When she’s stood against me and her head has been rested at my chest and my arms go round her, right round with room to spare, round this little person, I can hold her all up tight and it makes her happy. It makes her happier.
And I wake in my bed the following morning and I don’t exactly want her, but I am aware of … I do need, would prefer if she were there and also I can’t breathe.
I want her, but I cannot breathe.
I want her.
I want her, but the thing is that I do also, I really do need peace.
And what if they find me, catch me, fire me, throw me to the journos, charge me and bang me up in some horrible suicide factory of a jail — out of those, which would be the best option?
There is no good option.
What if somebody finds me somewhere, no longer breathing and naked and folded up tight in an airline holdall and suddenly somebody else is making statements to the police and is some kind of expert about how I always did like to take these horrible, self-harming, sexual risks.
And what if she drinks? I believe that she hasn’t drunk and isn’t drinking, but I might be wrong and she might be dangerous and crazy and she might be dry now but she might start drinking at any time and I bloody well can’t deal with that.
And what if she’s the sweetest human being I’ve ever met and not anything that I deserve?
And what if the men in the authoritative suits might go out and get her — the blokes with the little earpieces who talk into their sleeves, the ones with those Special Branch faces that tell you they understand how the world’s really worked and perhaps they are right and there’s no shelter or sympathy anywhere and why would I let her be at risk of that?
And what if I hurt her, which I already have? What if I hurt her, which I wouldn’t forgive in anyone and I don’t forgive in me? What if I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near her?
His head ground itself into a sicker and sicker ache.
I am a good man, but I do bad things.
And I didn’t tell her goodbye and that I’m sorry because I want her to be safe — it was just because I can’t … I can’t … I’m a man who can’t … I never really could … Valerie — yes, she was dreadful, but I picked her precisely because she’d be dreadful. I chose someone who would manage to be with me, but also not — someone who would therefore not terribly mind the way I am.
And it was proper for him to cry now and to continue crying. He could weep all the way along Coldharbour Lane until he reached the Junction, paid off the cab and then unlocked his door on the sanction he had imposed — to be there and not there and this failed little man and to know it.
I am Jon Sigurdsson.
I love Rebecca Sigurdsson.
I love Margaret Williams of Telegraph Hill.
I love Meg Williams.
I love Meg.
These are the best things I do, but I can’t do them.
Beyond him, London was gleaming and offering its ways to pass the time and Jon faced the city and felt it shudder — was sure that he felt it shudder — as if it might break.
23:02
THE WAITRESS SET down a full glass, a tall glass, a cold glass, and where the air touched it there was misting at first and then beading and then the downward roll of fat, condensed water drops. Meg looked at it and decided that it was kind because it wept like a living thing.
She sat by herself which was the old habit, and here was this drink and here was Meg with it, here because she was thirsty.