I wanted to function in and around his breakfast. I wanted to feel panic and weight. There was the usual thing about his smell, and where I wanted that. (I felt his body hard against me. His eyes opened so slowly, I thought he was in pain. ‘Oh Sylvia,’ his breath was a whisper, a promise against my skin. The green flame of his eye licked my mouth, my neck, my breast.) But I’m sounding cold again. The architect’s smell would have spiralled out from me to fill uncountable cubic feet. I loved him.
Not sleeping with the architect helped my marriage quite a bit. I discovered all kinds of corners in my husband, and little gardens in his head. I was immensely aware of how valuable he was as a human being, the presence he held in a room, the goodness with which he had given me his life, his salary and his company car. I was grateful for the fact that he still kissed for hours, as though the cycle of our sex lives was not complete. (Sex with my architect would have been horribly frank, nothing to say and nothing to hide.)
My husband came in to breakfast one morning, and his hands were shaking. He said ‘Look what I have done.’ He was holding a letter that he had picked up in the hall. ‘I tore it up,’ he said. ‘It was for you, I’m sorry.’ He was very bewildered.
If it was wartime, we could have clung to each other and burnt the furniture, we could have deceived the enemy with underground tunnels and built bombs out of sugar. As it was, I rode the buses and he worked and we loved each other well enough.
The idea of the house grew into our marriage. I don’t know who suggested it in the end, but I rang Paul and said ‘Aidan wants you to think about some plans. We want to build. Yes at last. Isn’t it exciting?’ and my voice echoed down the phone.
I needed this house to contain, to live in his love. It would be difficult of course. There would be a lot of meetings with the door ajar, talking about damp-courses. The arguments over where the walls should be would mean too much. I would listen to the architect’s big mind and his big heart and look at his shoes. His voice would ache and retract. The green flame of his eye would lick me quite a bit. All the same, I would not fling my life into his life and say that he owed me something (which he did; which he knew), calls for responsibility being impolite these days, even with parents who gave birth and bled and all the rest. Besides, all he owed me was a fuck and whatever that implied. I had not slept with the architect seventeen times, incidentally.
I chose the site, a green field as near to a cliff as I could find — something for the house to jump off. We would take risks. From the front it would look like a cottage, but the back would fall downhill, with returns and surprises inside.
Of course he was good at his job. The place rose like an exhalation. The foundations were dug, the bones set, and a skin of brick grew around the rest. It was wired and plastered and plumbed. Much like myself, the first time I slept with the architect.
It was in the finished house. We were walking the empty shell, making plans to fill it in. I was joking most of the time. There would be no banisters on the stairs. The downstairs toilet, I said, should be in Weimar Brown and Gun Metal Grey, with a huge lever set in the floor for the flush. The bathroom proper would have an inside membrane of glass filled with water and fish. The master bedroom would be a deep electric blue, with ‘LOVE’ like a neon sign hung over the door. Trompe-l’æil for the dining room, even though it was no longer the rage, forests and animals, built out of food. I would coat the study walls with dark brown leather and put a cow grazing on the ceiling.
‘It’s just a house, Sylvia,’ he said. ‘Quite a nice house, but a house all the same,’ as he led me through the flexible, proportioned spaces that he made for me. It was all as familiar to me as my dreams: the kitchen, where we did not make love, with wires and tubes waiting in the walls; the dining room, where he did not eat me; the reception room where he did not receive me, the bedrooms where he did not bed me.
I should tell you who made the first move and what was said. I should say how I sat down on the stairs and how his big, hesitant heart cracked under the strain.
So we did it on the first landing and it was frank, comprehensive, remarkably exciting and sad. I thought the house might fall down around our ears, but it stayed where it was.
* * *
The payment of debts is never happy. All he owed me was a fuck and whatever that implied, which in this case is a child. I loved the architect and the architect loved me. You think that makes a difference.
In my childhood book of saints there were pictures of people standing with ploughshares at their feet, cathedrals in their hands. This is the church that St Catherine built. If I painted myself now there would be a round hazy space where my stomach is, and a cathedral inside. This baby is a gothic masterpiece. I can feel the arches rising up under my ribs, the glorious and complicated space.
I can feel it reaching into the chambers of my heart, and my blood runs to it like children into school. We have the same thoughts.
Women used to kill their children all the time: it was one of the reasons for setting up the welfare state — this ‘unnatural act’. As if money were nature and could set it all to rights. Money is not nature. I have plenty of money.
I don’t want anything so bland as an abortion. Killing something inside you is not the same, we do that all the time. Don’t be shocked. These are just words I am speaking. Perhaps I will love it instead. Perhaps I will never find out what is inside and what is outside and what is mine.
We had Paul over for the celebration dinner in our new house, with its avocado bathroom, the bedroom of bluebell white, the buttercup kitchen, the apple-green dining room, and the blue, blue, blue-for-a-boy nursery, with clouds on the wall. I was a beautiful hostess, dewy with pregnancy, surrounded and filled by the men I love. Aidan is a new man. The house, the child, would have saved our marriage, if it needed saving. ‘Let it come down,’ I say, but the house is inside my head, as well as around it, and so are the cracks in the wall.
MEN AND ANGELS
The watchmaker and his wife live in a small town in Holland and his eyesight is failing.
He is the inventor of the device which is called after him, namely ‘Huygens’ Endless Chain’, a system that allows the clock to keep ticking while it is being wound. It is not perfect, it does not work if the clock is striking. Even so Huygens is proud of his invention because in clocks all over Europe there is one small part that bears his name.
Two pulleys are looped by a continuous chain, on which are hung a large and a small weight. The clock is wound by pulling on the small weight, which causes the large weight to rise. Over the hours, the slow pull of its descent makes the clock tick.
The small weight is sometimes replaced by a ring, after the fact that when Huygens was building the original model, his impatience caused him to borrow his wife’s wedding ring to hang on the chain. The ring provided a perfect balance, and Huygens left it where it was. He placed the whole mechanism under a glass bell and put it on the mantelpiece, where his wife could see the ring slowly rise with the passing of the hours, and fall again when the clock was wound.
Despite the poetry of the ring’s motion, and despite the patent which kept them all in food and clothes, Huygens’ wife could not rid herself of the shame she felt for her bare hands. She sent the maid on errands that were more suited to the woman of the house, and became autocratic in the face of the girl’s growing pride. Her dress became more sombre and matronly, and she carried a bunch of keys at her belt.