The work seemed to require more meetings in Bristol than I’d have thought necessary and — inevitably, I suppose — I found a note in a pair of trousers I was taking to the cleaner’s and there it was: fidelity was one more thing Giles had failed in. Love does not exclude arithmetic; I’d invested a lot of time and hard work in Giles and this was my return. Not good enough.
Giles swore that he’d got into Peggy Sue’s knickers under duress, that he was afraid of losing the commission if he didn’t let her have her way with him. His adultery had made me angry but his defence made me embarrassed for him, which was worse. What I resented most was the violation of my privacy: this woman had come into my life, she’d had the use of my husband, and although as far as I knew she hadn’t been in the house I imagined her in our bedroom going through my underthings.
I relegated Giles to the guest room but I didn’t ask him to leave; I hadn’t ever defined a point at which it was no longer worthwhile to continue with him, so we continued. I carried on with the cooking and we had our meals together although with less conversation than before. It was a strange time for me because Giles’s unfaithfulness bothered me less than the thought that he might not finish the doll’s house with all its people and pots and pans and the rest of it. He kept out of my way as much as possible; when I was home I’d hear him down in the workshop and I wondered how the doll’s house was coming along; he no longer talked about it.
Then the basement went quiet and he didn’t turn up for dinner. I went down to the workshop to see what was what; he’d done the base of the cabinet with the barley-twist legs and he’d measured and cut the wood for the house and that was all. He left a note on the work-bench under his folding rule; all it said was:
Goodbye from the one-inch to one-foot man.
I stood there with the rule in my right hand, tapping the palm of my left. Nine inches; I opened it out to thirty-six inches and folded it up again.
The next thing was a call from Peggy Sue telling me that he was dead at her place in Bristol and there weren’t going to be any more payments because he hadn’t finished the job. That was seven years ago. I was more shocked than grief-stricken — not only had he left the job unfinished, he himself was unfinished and there was a great deal of work still to be done on him. Shortly after that, of course, the aloneness that had been growing inside me stepped out, stood in front of me, and said, ‘Here I am.’
I see now that when Giles was alive I didn’t really know what he was to me; now I do. The Yeats poem comes to mind with the lines about the mountain grass retaining the form where the mountain hare has lain; in the shape of Giles’s absence I see what his presence was to me: there was love, there was romance, there was passion but the main thing about Giles was that he was like a house that has potential but needs a lot of work. That excited me at the beginning, less as time went on.
I was sorry he hadn’t at least finished the doll’s house. When I think about him now I wish I could have done better with him; I wish he could have done better with himself too. But I guess life is what you wish you’d done better with.
Still, for good or ill, life goes on. There’s nothing to be done about the past; today is all there is to work with.
At Covent Garden things were middling along — as always I went around to see what was on offer before setting up but I made no brilliant acquisitions and nothing much happened when I was ready for customers. In the road between the Jubilee and Apple Markets the pigeons were routinely inspecting the cobbles in the presence of a sweeper and his cart. From Peter’s snack bar came the aroma of frying bacon. The Punch-and-Judy man who performs between the tube station and the Apple Market probably hadn’t set up yet; Punch and his wife and the baby, the crocodile and Jack Ketch and the Devil would be lying silent in their bag, waiting to erupt into violent life.
As the place filled up with tourists the buskers in the Apple Market were belting out the overture to Carmen which seemed to promise a lot of action but it wasn’t happening where I was. As I made little adjustments to the display on my table I found myself, not for the first time, shaking my head over the business of buying and selling bits of other people’s lives. All around me were objects clamorous with silent voices: grandfather clocks with pendulums grown dull; rusted crampons; medals with faded ribbons; postcards of piers long since fallen into the sea; sightless stereopticons; dolls and toy soldiers owned by children now old or dead; and jewels no longer warm with the life of their wearers. Minute by minute the market was filling up with the gabble of voices and thronging of footsteps of people hungry for those morsels of other lives, eager to wake the silent voices of objects long unused and feel the touch of garments and jewellery long unworn.
The morning started out cool but quickly got hot and the heat seemed to make the punters haggle worse than usual; they’d pick up a necklace priced at fifteen pounds that had cost me ten, offer five, and be outraged when I held out for fifteen. Alison and Linda at the table next to mine were having the same kind of day.
I’d taken off my jacket and cardigan and was standing there in a sleeveless top when there appeared in front of me the man I’d seen at the V & A. ‘You!’ I said.
He was wearing a blue T-shirt and he pushed back the sleeve to show me the bat tattoo on his left shoulder. I felt a little flush of irritation when I saw it. ‘Am I supposed to applaud?’ I said.
‘You’ve got one too,’ he said, pointing to my exposed left shoulder.
‘I’ve had this about seven years now,’ I said. I suppose I needed to make the point that I wasn’t nouveau tattoo.
He nodded acknowledgement of my seniority. ‘Can I ask what made you do it?’
‘You can ask.’
‘Sorry.’ He seemed about to say more, then decided not to.
I felt bad about discouraging him when he wanted to talk. ‘What brings you here today?’ I said.
‘I come here every now and then — I’m always cruising for something that will turn out to be something I’ve been looking for without knowing it.’
‘See anything here this time?’
‘Not so far.’
‘What do you do?’ It seemed impolite not to show some minimal interest.
He looked away for a moment, then back at me, gave a little cough, and said, ‘I’m a woodcarver.’
‘Can you make a living doing that?’ In the Jubilee Market we talk very openly about the facts of life.
‘I designed a successful toy a while back and money kept coming in from that for a long time. Lately I’ve been doing private commissions.’
‘I’ve never met a toy designer before. What kind of toy?’
‘A crash-dummy in a radio-controlled crash-test car. The car springs back into shape after it’s been crumpled and you can put it and the dummy back together and do the crash again.’
‘What in the world gave you that idea?’
‘My father was in the crash-dummy business.’ He was examining a silver bangle in the shape of a snake. ‘You have nice things here. Have you been doing this long?’
‘Fourteen years.’ As I said that a gypsy-looking woman picked up a garnet necklace, fixed me with a hard stare, and said very aggressively, ‘How much?’
‘Fifteen,’ I said.
She expelled her breath scornfully and shook her head. ‘Best price?’
‘Fifteen.’ I didn’t like her manner.
I noticed then that my new acquaintance was holding the arm of a small dark man who looked as if he might be the woman’s partner. ‘He was walking away with this,’ he said, holding up an opal ring ticketed at fifty pounds.
‘You’re crazy,’ said the man. ‘I just had it in my hand while I was looking at something at the other end of the table.’ He tried unsuccessfully to pull away.