She poured more coffee. “Gilbert, why can’t you say such complimentary things to me all the time?”
“Because, my dearest, I sit at my desk creating other lives, which leaves me with no strength to break my own and gain enough self-knowledge to collect my genuine thoughts concerning you. But I know I have a lot to make up for — you see, I’m truly contrite — so let me tell you about an awful dream I had last night. When I woke this morning I felt as if I had just come back from the battlefront. I was in a truly pitiable state.”
She came from the table to hold my hand. “What was it, darling? I’m so sorry. Do tell me.”
“Can I sit on your knee?” She didn’t know how close she was to a slap she hadn’t experienced since the last one, but her intuition had become somewhat sharper during the years we had been together.
“Tell me the dream first,” she said.
“I was driving up the motorway with my latest novel in a cardboard box on the seat beside me, feeling so happy it was finished at last. I could get some money from my publisher then take my darling Mabel to Frinton-on-Sea for a well deserved fortnight’s holiday. She’d be all dressed up in her nurse’s uniform and admiral’s hat, pushing me up and down the front in a bathchair with a typewriter on the tartan blanket covering my knees. Oh yes, I saw it all so clearly, because I’d have a lollipop in my mouth. But paradise was not to be, unless for you my love when I was killed — because while mulling on the romantic Frinton escapade, on my way up the motorway (or was it on the way down?) a car passed so close it struck mine and, as I swerved, my car broke into a hundred pieces. Sheets of my novel flew up and down the tarmac, and as I ran over the barrier and across the fast lane to retrieve what pages I could, stupidly trying to put them back into numerical order, an enormous black lorry came towards me, all lights lit and klaxons screaming. I felt the fear and panic of certain death while life’s great force was in me as strongly as ever. My whole life was starting to unroll, a scenario so dreadful that I woke up in a wash of scalding tears. I thought of coming into your room, but didn’t want to disturb your sweet and innocent dreams, so while trying to get back to sleep I consoled myself with the idea that novelists live in a dream world anyway.” I stopped. “Don’t cry, darling.” She was nowhere near it, but gave me a quick kiss and went into the kitchen to make my breakfast.
The marmalade was sweet but otherwise tasteless, butter like axle grease, and her favourite Miracle Bread stuck to my gums, all flavour gone in any case at her having made me talk so much. I couldn’t stop, in case she thought I didn’t love her, when I didn’t know whether I loved her or not, but how can you love a woman if you love her? Only when you feel hatred can you sense it coming through, and when the hatred stops you love her till you think you don’t again.
She was trying to leave me. If only she would. If only she was as determined to do it as her expression led me to believe. It would solve everything. “Life with you is so romantic,” I said. “It’s positively gothic, since it can only end in death, like all genuinely romantic associations. Life is an ongoing Glass Bead game, don’t you think?” I felt like one of the poor bloody infantry, since ninety per cent of my time was spent waiting for her to wipe the smile of eternal grief off her face so that I could go over the top in the sex war and pull her into bed.
She passed a piece of buttered toast. “I don’t know what my life is all about, Gilbert. I’m so continuously disturbed living it with you. But I do know that I’m not a person of routine, and never have been. It’s only you who force me to be so.”
“Recriminations coming up? Big guns being wheeled out? Carpet bombing about to commence? If you’re going to leave me why bother? Or do you want to sow the Carthage of my soul with salt before you do? If so, don’t try. It’s been done a dozen times already. As for Dido pining for Aeneas, I expect she found another paramour in hell, or so the great poet said. You’re making me throw away priceless words on you when they could be gainfully employed in my novel. Darling, you must have known from the beginning that I was a blighted spirit, and that you’d have to take me as we found each other.”
The threat of her leaving me didn’t worry me, because she usually announced it at the time of the full moon. “The basis of all complaint,” I said, “is lack of energy. You sit down too much. You don’t work enough. You should go out more. Walk around London. Notice people living on the street who are much worse off than yourself.” I drew her affectionately onto my knees, which I knew she liked — though it almost cracked them. “Please don’t leave me.”
“You give me no alternative,” she said with warm and cloying breath.
Her accusation deserved a sudden parting of my legs so that she would drop through and do herself an injury that could only be cured by six months in traction. Oh how she would adore the sight of me smiling towards her along the garbage strewn National Health ward with flowers in one hand and sour grapes in the other, my overcoat open so that she couldn’t miss the lipstick down my flies. But I kissed her, a sign of genuine affection I hoped would be enjoyed.
“I’ll never know how I got into your clutches,” she said.
“Don’t you remember? I do. How could I forget, loving you as I always have? No two people ever got together in such an outlandish fashion. You can’t have forgotten that you won me in a raffle? My girlfriend of the time wanted to leave me, I can’t think why. But she still loved me, and didn’t want me to feel too bereft when she went, so she stood outside Harrod’s with tears streaming down her face, selling tickets at a pound a time, and you in your admirably feckless way bought one. Maybe you’d had a sherry too many that morning, but I’ll treasure your impulse till my dying day, and never forget that wonderful instant when the bell rang and you stood in the doorway with your satin bloomers in one hand and the winning ticket in the other, your lovely blue eyes so much a-glitter I thought you were over the top with benzedrine. From that moment I was convinced that all writers should be raffled off every seven years, and women writers too, bless ’em, so why don’t you get a book of tickets and stand outside Knightsbridge tube station selling them? It’s the least you can do, if you’re going to leave me.”
Energy was rushing back at the notion. “You wouldn’t like to leave me, with tears of anguish pouring down my cheeks, would you? Even you can’t hate me that much. Another raffle is the only solution to our predicament. You could have a placard hanging from your bosom saying ‘Win a well known novelist. Tickets a pound each, or six for five pounds.’ A lovely young idealistic girl might win. Failing that, you could make the prize one of having tea served by a famous novelist, tickets four for a pound. I could seduce at least one girl a day.”
“I’m sure you could,” she jeered. “In my more sober moments I see you as a Machiavellian phallus. I know all about your japes since we began living together.”
I brought out my last line of defence: “I’m capable of living life to the full, but have to give everything to my art,” which was the sort of babble she didn’t like to hear, and the stiffening of her posterior muscles on my knee told me I had gone too far, which was never far enough, because it was always too close to where I had started. I had expected laughter, but after a second well-placed kiss she stood aside, which was just as well because my knees were going dead.