‘What are you doing here?’ Chick said when he saw us and then looked at his watch and said, ‘Shite — that’s never the time, is it?’ then looked heavenward and mumbled an apology for his language. He made a hasty sign of the cross and rushed out of the church.
Surprised by the haste of his departure, we were rather slow to follow and by the time we got outside Bob and Professor Cousins had been decanted from the Cortina which was already pulling away from the kerb and nosing its way bullishly into the traffic. The dog’s sleepy face appeared in the back window. I almost expected it to raise a paw in farewell but instead it gave an enormous yawn, exposing surprisingly wolfish teeth.
‘I’m off,’ Bob said, and was gone before I had time to say I would go with him.
‘Me too,’ Terri said, hastily setting off in the direction of the Cortina and its canine hostage to fortune.
Professor Cousins and I hung around on the pavement like people who’d been unexpectedly thrown out of a party and were wondering what to do next.
‘Well, I suppose that’s the end of the excitement for today,’ Professor Cousins said, rather dolefully.
I accompanied him back to the university. I watched him walking up the path to the Tower, his back stooped and his legs bowed. He seemed too fragile and ancient to battle the biting winds that howled perpetually around the base of the Tower. He struggled to open the big doors of the building until a janitor finally took pity on him and yanked them open for him.
I trudged home, an icy interstellar wind at my back and a shadow on my shoulder all the way. (‘We know we are sought,’ Archie told me, ‘and expect to be found,’ which I thought sounded quite biblical but Olivia said it was from Dangling Man by Saul Bellow.)
Chez Bob
I FOUGHT MY WAY INTO THE FLAT IN PATON’S LANE. THE hallway was currently being blocked by a variety of objects — four tyres from a 1957 Riley 1.5 saloon, which was all that was left of Bob’s disastrous attempt at car ownership (a long story that does not need telling); an art deco standard lamp that we had never got to work, and a stuffed King Emperor penguin that Bob had been unable to resist bidding for at the Ward Road auction rooms but which had been relegated to the hall because of the strange scent it gave off of death and badly digested fish.
Despite my best efforts the flat remained a filthy place, smelling of curry powder and incense with a strange undertone of asafoetida. Bob never dusted or tidied (‘Why fight entropy?’) and rubbish of all kinds seemed to be attracted to him as if he was some kind of living dustbin.
An important part of my leaving-Bob daydream was the place I would live in without him — an uncluttered white space full of nothing but me. And perhaps a coffee table. And a bowl of perfect green apples. Joni Mitchell on the stereo. A white rug.
For all of this time I had been expecting Bob to change, change into somebody more energetic, more interesting — into someone else, in fact. It had dawned on me, only very slowly, that this was never going to happen. In the beginning I had liked Bob because he was Bob (although heaven knows why); now I was beginning to dislike him for the same reason. I was living with someone whose hobby was playing air guitar and who sincerely thought he was going to be a Time Lord when he grew up.
‘Hey,’ Bob said when he saw me. He was wearing a tank-top knitted by his mother for the larger version of Bob that she kindly held in her mind’s eye, and straight jeans which I had turned into massive flares for him by inserting pieces of old flannelette sheeting the colour of Germolene.
He was sprawled on the floor, watching the innocent little girl on the test card with a touching devotion. The rays from television sets were vital to Bob’s continued existence on this planet, in the way that oxygen is for other people. He claimed that the three-day week was having an adverse effect on his metabolism. Bob had bought his small black-and-white portable set with the proceeds from his one and only summer job — counting trees in Camperdown for the parks department. Bob didn’t actually count the trees individually but looked at ‘a whole bunch’ of them and calculated how many there were, as in, ‘That looks like about twenty trees.’ As you can imagine, he usually got it completely wrong.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Bob asked.
‘With you, don’t you remember?’
‘No.’ Bob was eating the remains of a two-day-old biryani from the Lahore on the Perth Road. The chicken in the biryani bore a worrying anatomical resemblance to cat. Bob’s idea of a balanced diet left something to be desired. When I first met him he lived off fish suppers from The Deep Sea, the occasional tin of dog food (‘Why not?’) and jars of cold baby food, the latter a particularly sensible way of eating in Bob’s opinion — no cooking, no washing-up, no thought at all beyond whether to have ‘Lamb and Vegetables’ or ‘Pears and Custard’. Or both. It was wasted on babies, Bob said, and his only complaint was that Heinz didn’t do fish and chips in toddler-sized jars.
I spent some time weaning him onto more regular student meals — sausage and chips, egg and beans, mince and anything and fish pie — the latter a concept that Bob found particularly bizarre for some reason and he kept repeating, ‘Wow, fish pie,’ until I had to ask him to stop. I took him shopping in Betty White’s on the High Street once and he couldn’t get over the idea that a shop could sell both fish and vegetables — ‘That’s not . . . natural,’ he said. Although not as unnatural, in Bob’s opinion, as fish farms.
What if I didn’t leave Bob? What if our slouch towards commitment ended at the altar? What would it be like if I occupied the wife-shaped space next to Bob? My life as a wife. In a Barratt’s starter-home, with an avocado bathroom and a three-piece suite in leather. If we ever had a child (a curious idea) I thought we should call it Inertia. Although our occasional dull missionary encounters didn’t seem passionate enough to produce anything as real and lasting as a child, even one called Inertia, and Bob (more likely to consult Mr Spock than Dr Spock) wasn’t fit to be in charge of a push-and-pull lawnmower let alone a baby in a pram.
I did so hope that Bob was a dress rehearsal, a kind of mock-relationship, like a mock-exam, to prepare me for the real thing, because if I tried to imagine Bob in a grown-up life I could only visualize him slumped on the leather sofa, watching Jackanory with a huge joint in his hand.
‘Somebody just phoned for you,’ he said, spilling grains of cold yellow rice onto the carpet.
‘Who?’
‘Dunno. Some woman.’
‘My mother?’
‘Don’t think so.’
Of course not, what was I thinking, Nora didn’t have a phone. Nora didn’t even have electricity.
‘She sounded . . . weird,’ Bob said.
‘Weird? You mean weird accent?’
‘Quite correct, Captain.’
No-one ever phoned me. The only reason we had a phone was because it was paid for by Bob’s father and mother — Bob Senior and Sylvia — so that Sylvia could remind Bob to have a wash occasionally and not eat Angel Delight at breakfast.
Although you would never think it to look at him, Bob had a more than adequate family back in Essex, a fact that he usually denied because they were such models of suburban decorum. I found Bob’s family — Bob Senior, his mother Sylvia and his sister Cherry and a buxom black Labrador called Sadie — strangely charismatic; they lived the kind of banal, tediously quotidian lives that I’d always longed for — eating roast chicken, changing sheets, going for boring Sunday outings in the family car, treading on fitted wool carpets, taking holidays in Spain, entertaining from a full drinks cabinet. For me, they were the most attractive thing about Bob.