She wrote to Liam. Dear Liam, Please can you sell the furniture. I need my half. Or could you buy your half from me? It is quite urgent. Thanks, Rosa.
She wrote: Dear Mr Martin White, I have never written for your publication. I wrote for years for the Daily Rag. I was a mediocre but fairly successful journalist. I wondered if you might be interested in a few ideas I have. An article perhaps about graffiti and its significance, the mythic suggestiveness it contains? I promise you, there is ancient lore being spelt out on the streets, prophecies of the future. I can’t unravel them, but I can see they are there. Or, perhaps, a piece about elective destitution — an inexcusable squandering of one’s job and training, a burgeoning refusenik cultural movement? That was Rosa, she knew no others. Devastating to those who have struggled to support you. Clearly ungrateful. Prompted by something difficult to treat, apparently, some lurking sense of WHY BOTHER? I have many more ideas, and look forward to talking to you. Yours ever, Rosa Lane.
Then she wrote: Plot scenario. Rosa Lane is saved. Flights of angels sing her to her supper. She is carted away from the weariness, the fever and the fret. Ahem.
She meant Amen, but it was so long since she had written the word she had forgotten how to spell it.
‘Oh God,’ she said to the room. She tore up the piece of paper and dropped it on the floor. Then she wrote: We live in the conviction that we are masters of our lives, that life is given to us for our enjoyment. But this is obviously absurd. Surely we can be happy in the knowledge of our mortality? Surely we must be? There is no eternal substance in the universe. Even the stars are subject to flux. Even the sun must fade. If we look around we understand that mutability is the inevitable state. So why not a religion of the mutable, rather than the eternal? Worshipping the ceaseless tendency of things to alter? This is my philosophy … She tore up that as well and threw the pieces away. She whistled guiltily and thought about giving Liam a friendly call. At least then she could wish him luck and check on the furniture. It seemed odd that he would marry so soon, but there was nothing she could do and she wanted him to know that she was glad, really, ultimately she was happy he was so well. He had jumped, head first, into the consoling barrel, the malmsey marriage butt. And here she was in the great loneliness, trying to keep her nose in the air. She aimed to smile, but found she couldn’t summon it. She was confused, thinking about food and money and the death of love. She found she remembered so many small things. Things of life. The almost invisible backdrop. Years flooding past her. Only a few years ago she had been young and it seemed like there was a lot of time. Doubtless she had wasted far too many days. Of course she had always surrendered hours to the simple business of stuffing her belly. But that was inevitable. Eros agape and amor, she thought. Now she remembered an evening when she and Liam had sat together in a restaurant. She had it clear in her mind — both of them tired, in smart clothes, having come there straight from work. It seemed an age ago, an eon back, in a misty past when she was the suave owner of an array of A-lined skirts and smart jackets, and wore them elegantly, with a scarf around her neck. She tied her hair up, clipped it into a chignon. Then she and Liam looked well together, her clicking in high heels, and Liam in a sensible suit and a pastel-blue tie. Each of them with a glass, sure of themselves.
On their table was a flower standing in a slender vase. There were photos on the walls, patched pictures of forgotten celebrities. The place was subdued, a little seedy, but the pasta was edible, caked in cream. They were both labouring over their plates. When they were no longer hungry, they fought half-heartedly about a crisis Liam was having at work. Liam was fighting a rearguard action against Rosa’s insistence, her pointed questions. She was asking him to try harder. ‘Go back and renegotiate,’ she was saying. ‘Tell them you won’t take it. Threaten to walk out.’
‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I just don’t do things that way.’
‘Well, you have to. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. They’ll ignore you. The reason they treat you this way is because you never stand up for yourself. In this, you’re hopeless.’
‘Hopeless?’ He looked hurt.
‘Only in this. In this you are spineless. What would be so wrong about saying what you think?’
‘It’s more complicated than that,’ he said.
‘Well, what does that mean?’
It was ironic, how ambitious she had been for him. She jostled at him; she hardly ever praised him. That was her fault. Those evenings when she picked at him, explained what he was doing wrong, standing on the pedestal of her so-called career, she had slowly forced him into action. Liam was tortoise-brained, he liked to move to the slowest available timescale, but eventually she made him resolute. Bedding Grace was a coup de théâtre. Perhaps it was an act of revenge. That evening, she recalled, they had passed some hours discussing his latest small failure. Rosa was steely and certain of herself. At the end of the beating he picked up the bill. It didn’t help to pity him. Still, the hours they had passed discussing his job! Tearing him apart, mostly. Why did she care so much? She had been too engaged with it all; she had been too frantic. Evening after evening they had debated their small lives, writ them large together. And though she saw her enthusiasm — her concern for these elements — as incomprehensible, quite inscrutable from her present state, it remained strange to her that it should be impossible to return to these evenings, that she would never sit again in a small Italian restaurant with Liam. At the time it had seemed ongoing, each evening part of a limitless series. Her relationship with Liam, because it had endured for so long, allowed her to develop an illusion that they — alone of everyone — might transcend the absolutes of space and time. Because they returned daily to the same point — the two of them, waking in bed together, in their familiar bedroom with the same sounds for each morning — it seemed as if this pattern would recur for ever, an eternal recurrence. Eventually she found this stifling, but for years it allowed her to evade reality, delude herself about the incessant passage of days. Because of this she had failed to notice many signs. In the last months they stopped eating out. It was all too pursed and formal. In public they were uneasy, suddenly aware of themselves, of the lies they were spinning.
There were days when she wondered if she had been profligate. If she had been idle, and inert, sluggish in love and then in saving herself. Perhaps she should have fought for him, challenged Grace to a duel. And that wasn’t such a bad idea, she thought. She would have liked the chance to blast a shot at Grace. Pistols out. The foes, cold-blooded and unspeaking each took four steps. The clock of destiny chimed, and the poet, without a sound, dropped his pistol onto the earth. Better to be Lensky, or Pushkin, blasted and shot to shreds, than no one at all. She always liked the absolute insanity of the duel, the loss of a sense of proportion inherent to the ritual. Grace would have tried to talk her way out of it. Laconically, she would have said, ‘Essentially, Rosa you are succumbing to an atavistic — and unfeminine — urge for violence. Why? Why suppress centuries of progress, because you are feeling upset?’ — but Rosa would have her pistol cocked already.