‘Pelléas and Mélisande?’
‘Er – Debussy or Schoenberg?’
‘That’s my girl,’ he said. ‘Debussy.’
‘Yes.’
‘OK then,’ he said.
‘Clothes?’ I wondered.
‘No,’ he said. And looked at me.
‘Fuck sake,’ I said.
‘Oh come on,’ he said. ‘I’m not married any more. Hardly, anyway.’ So his capacity for entirely inappropriate jokes was intact within his distress.
‘Certainly not,’ I said – a phrase of his. God, I’d already picked it up.
The following week I came back from work to find him in the kitchen with all kinds of fancy mushrooms, talking quickly about a risotto he wanted to make for me. I wasn’t hungry but I let him make it. The chopping and the smells soothed him. Garlic and warm olive oil, the crunch of salt, the chicken bones boiling up into broth, the dim musk of the bay leaf, the warmth. I left him to it; and went to read.
He brought me a glass of wine. White, smoky, just cold enough.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’m not going to have one. Like you asked.’
When I smelt burning I went into the kitchen.
‘I’ve fucked it up,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and get an Indian.’ He left – swiftly, windily, before I could take in the situation. I turned off the flame under the pan, and went back to my book. It was nice to read without him coming in for a chat, ignoring the fact I was actually doing something.
I read two chapters. Three. Peace and quiet. Lovely.
It doesn’t take that long to get a curry.
Even as I thought ‘Should I worry?’ I realised that yes, of course I should.
He didn’t come back that night.
He was nocturnal. He could be at any one of a dozen regular haunts. Many of them I had haunted with him, in days gone by. Was I meant to go out and trawl them, asking barmen whether he’d been in, finding him and dragging him out by his ear, demanding that he get in the house and eat his supper, like some fishwife?
Or ring hospitals?
Or police stations?
I couldn’t sleep, overslept the next day, was late to work (I was writing a book about the cultural history of the human heart), rang my landline every hour. He didn’t answer my phone anyway. One of his little acts of respect – unnecessary, often unhelpful, but somehow sweet. One of the many ways in which he gave what he wanted to give, not what you wanted to be given. He didn’t answer any phone, basically. He felt powerless not knowing who was there, and what they might want.
The following evening, when I came in, he was smoking a cigarette in the back yard, staring through the kitchen door at a pan of risotto.
‘What time do you call this?’ he cried, throwing down the cigarette. ‘Dinner’s ready. Sorry about the slight delay. You just need to stir it and add the parmesan.’ He was stone sober, pale, clean. He looked exceptionally Northern, like a piece of granite. ‘Get the plates,’ he said.
Seeing that he was all right, I was angry.
‘A word,’ I said. ‘Where were you? While you’re staying here, don’t walk out and just stay out overnight. And don’t throw your fag ends in my garden. And don’t tell me what to do.’
‘That’s about twenty-five words,’ he said.
‘Is that the important bit of what I just said? Or a fatuous diversion? I’m leading a normal life here. Courtesy, and kindness.’
‘Normal,’ he said.
‘I know you’re quite a peculiar person,’ I said. ‘That’s fine. You can be peculiar. But don’t be rude and don’t be unkind.’
‘Unkind!’
‘I was worried about you. When you didn’t come back. You don’t drink if you stay here. You don’t stay here if you drink. Simple choice.’
He grunted.
‘And no, I’m not making your risotto for you.’
‘It’s not for me. It’s for you.’
Left to myself, I’d have had four apples for dinner, and no washing up.
‘It’s for both of us,’ he said.
He’s trying to help, I thought.
The risotto was delicious.
It was me who cleared up.
He had a bath. He called me in; standing with the towel round his waist, wet hair pushed back, shaving, the bathroom half flooded. He’d aged. The snakey young torso had metamorphosed into a bit of an egg on legs. He was oblivious to the decline.
‘You know that bit I never reach under my chin and it always pisses you off,’ he said – a memory from many years ago, which staggered me. ‘You do it,’ he said. ‘Do it the way you like it. Oh, whoops, unfortunate double entendre,’ he said. ‘Sorry, darling.’
Later he said, ‘Let me sleep in your bed tonight at least.’
‘No no no,’ I said.
‘But I’m so sad and lonely,’ he said.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, ‘just shut up, would you.’
He rather fixatedly bought a white suit, and lived in the back room for a few months. He was booked to start a home detox the day he got the divorce papers. I watched him carefully, delicately, wondering.
Often when I think about how things might have been, I search in a kind of orgy of ungratifiable hindsight for the many occasions when I could have said, ‘Don’t do that. Come with me instead.’ I was thinking of saying it now. But before he was strong enough to be told it, towards the end of that summer, he headed off with Anna who I’d met in Peru, a fine woman, and one who wasn’t saying, ‘You can stay here if you’re sober and you’re serious about recovery.’ And that became another year.
When Anna lost patience with him, he rolled up again from time to time, the white suit forgotten, the T-shirts grubby again. Antipodean Cath, another ex-girlfriend (or old girlfriend – what’s the precise difference here? An ex-girlfriend is someone you were meant to be faithful to and broke up with; an old girlfriend is someone you used to sleep with on an informal arrangement, and may yet do so again, who knows?) had given him tickets to something at the Albert Hall – Carmen, I think. Did I want to go? Sure. Afterwards we went to a Lebanese cafe on Gloucester Road. On the way there I tripped on a kerb in my heels while we were getting into a taxi and he made some cheap crack to the driver about me being drunk.
I hadn’t been drunk since 1992. I had a vision of a headline about something terrible happening to a child, and the subhead saying ‘The Mother Was Drunk’, and that I could not abide. God I was angry.
At the Lebanese place we sat in the window. I can see him now, ordering imam bayildi and some huge kebab, arguing. In the end he seemed to understand that for me being so drunk you fall over is shameful and undignified, and that though I liked drinking I was not and never would be a woman who fell down drunk in the street, and, also, he was an absolute hypocrite to throw that at me, and try to make a fool of me to the cab driver. In other words, I was well up on my high horse, and after a while I had stirred myself into such a tottering tower of outrage that I was able to say: ‘The point is, actually, that you have to not drink.’
He said, ‘Christ, why does everyone keep saying this?’
I said, ‘Because it’s true.’
He