This much James has inferred from his own observations and the barbed comments of his landlady. Rob doesn’t say much to the Bay locals, though he did wax philosophical yesterday evening, leaning on his BMW, watching Hugo labour up James’ steep stairs with a pile of beloved books and toys. ‘Life, man — it happens to you.’
Rob is not back when he promised, so James takes the boy to the chippie. The weather has brightened and they carry their warm, greasy bundles up a flight of steps and along a path to a bench contemplating the village from the south. A ray of sun catches the red roofs tumbling down towards the sea.
‘This is the fish and chips bench,’ says the boy.
‘It is.’ The boy stares out at the cloud-scuffed horizon.
‘James?’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’
‘No. When I was a baby, I cried so much that my parents called it a day. Have you?’
‘Actually, I had a sister. But Mummy said that God wanted her to live in Heaven.’ The boy folds a chip into his small mouth and chews it, frowning. ‘Daddy said that means she came out dead.’ James finds he has no words to answer this abridged family tragedy. ‘Daddy says life goes on,’ the boy adds, with his mouth still full. ‘Mummy says that’s wrong, and she says Daddy’s a callous. But life does go on, doesn’t it?’
James’ sense of adult authority has drained away in the presence of this sorrowful, big-headed boy. It’s not a child but a little man, a philosopher, whose minuscule bottom is perched on the front plank of the bench, feet swinging.
‘Well,’ he replies, ‘I suppose it does and it doesn’t.’
11. Unspoken meaning
‘This is a backward step, but hardly perceptible.’
Dan Mock considers himself a feminist. In other words, he doesn’t just believe in equality of the sexes, but also that society — even the most enlightened, liberal society — isn’t quite there yet. Of all the campaigns Natalie helps to design, the ones for girls’ education and women’s rights strike him as the most laudable. He rates the empowerment of women in western and other cultures as their greatest achievement of the past century.
In spite of this, sex in the Mock marriage is not a cat-and-cat game, or a mouse-and-mouse game: it’s a cat-and-mouse game, and Dan is nearly always the cat. Today, a Sunday, is day six since they last had sex. Dan is counting, Natalie is not: that’s the difference between them.
Natalie swam a kilometre this morning, which both demonstrated her substantial recovery from the accident and denied Dan his habitual stratagem of pouncing as she comes out of the shower (a moment, he reasons, that might just supply the requisite combination of relaxation and invigoration — though a woman armed with hairdryer and straighteners is no pushover). This coming week he’s working the night shift at the synchrotron — his seniority ensures this happens rarely, but he has to show willing — so their paths will rarely intersect in the bedroom. Six plus another five equals eleven. Dan has factored this in. Natalie, apparently, has not.
In Natalie’s world, sex seems to occupy a place beside going for a walk by the river. Something to consider when more pressing tasks are out of the way; enjoyable, once it gets going; afterwards she might say, ‘We should do that more often.’ But peripheral. Dan envies her this absolute freedom from the sex curse. He suspects, however, that in its place in her mind are mostly mundane concerns — a mental grocery list, what to wear tomorrow, whose birthday is coming up. Is the demon crouching in his own mind better or worse than these?
Their marriage has brought Dan oscillating phases of satiety and gnawing hunger. During the sexual droughts his mind fixates on foolish, repetitive fantasies, destined to be swept away by the glorious saving fuck, which, when it finally arrives, offers richer, subtler pleasures that the demon had completely overlooked. For a few days or weeks of plenty, sex is not an obsession. Then the cycle begins again.
Like any quantum physicist, he thinks in distributions and not generalisations: there are outliers as well as averages. But he guesses most marriages are in more or less the same boat as the Mocks — the quantities of desire not merely dissimilar but plotted on different axes. Man’s anxiety about Woman’s sexual indifference is, after all, almost as entrenched in human culture as His paranoia about Her ungovernable lust. The poor woman can’t win, it seems.
‘Shall we get an early night?’ Dan suggests lightly, after dinner.
‘I promised Mum I’d give her a call.’
He presses his lips together and nods, stoically. These calls tend to be long. ‘Okay. Come up soon, though.’
How would Natalie tell her side of the sex story? After ten years together, Dan isn’t sure. Presumably, she feels mildly pestered (though on rare, unforeseen occasions she’s gone at him so hard he thought he’d suffer an injury). When he asks, she says defensively that yes, of course it’s important to her. That’s about it. The defining characteristic of sexual desire is its appalling selfishness: the dark heart of any marriage.
Mike Vickers commutes by car, cab, bus or tube as the whim takes him. On cool summer mornings he likes to walk to work through Hyde Park. He doesn’t do bicycles. Today, the Friday morning after the office Christmas party, he stumbles onto a bus. It stops in traffic near Edgware Road tube station, next to a roadside sculpture of a window cleaner holding a short ladder and looking up at a ten-storey building — symbolising resolve in adversity, Mike supposes, or work that’s never done, or following ambitious dreams. What’s his ten-storey building — his noble aim? He doesn’t have one. The bus moves on, passes a gap between buildings: a soft strike of sunlight on his eyes knocks down the lids — a touch of the divine. The world is full of blessings, and what is his response? To invent nothing, inspire nothing, contribute nothing. Whatever else James accused him of. It doesn’t need to be factually correct — it feels true enough.
He misses his stop, and as the bus trundles onward down baubled Oxford Street and Regent Street, he watches the grotesque theatre of shop workers preparing their windows for the day ahead — smoothing, straightening, dusting, tip-toeing reverently around plastic idols in their glass tanks. Nothing important, nothing good, nothing true.
Mike begins his descent from the top deck just as the driver accelerates into the Regent Street bend. He lets his body swing wildly into the gaping stairwell and imagines himself flying through trees on a liana. Then he stumbles out onto the chill grey pavement, and it’s over. All for one pound thirty.
The plastic women are far too skinny in the waist and legs, but have fabulous breasts.
Natalie Mock was thirty-one today. She and Dan hosted a little Christmassy party. They were expecting about ten guests, but only five showed. People have lots on at this time of year, and Reading is just a little too far from London — such a pain to get home. Rachel and Mark are dependable, but Mike was a no-show (payback for them missing his bash last month?), as was Dan’s flighty sister, Laura.
It was a nice evening, though. Natalie jostles unopened bottles of wine into a cupboard and consolidates unfinished plates of nibbles. She made a quiche that nobody touched. ‘Oh well,’ is how she verbalises a crushing, disproportionate pang of sadness. She carries back upstairs the first of two chairs that nobody sat on. This would normally be Dan’s job, but he went straight from the party to his last night shift. He’s been looking exhausted. Last weekend at the shopping centre he seemed to be limping but said it was nothing, and this evening he couldn’t pull the cork from a bottle of wine. Have to feed him up, go for some winter walks.