“What do you want for lunch?”
“Paste sandwiches, and sausage rolls”—he had already acquired a London accent—“and, Dad, can we have jelly — the kind they have at birthday parties?”
It delighted me that I could make him happy by being with him and offering him these simple things.
I said, “I missed you when I was away.”
“But you’re home now,” he said, encouraging me.
“And I’m not going away again.”
“That’s good, because we have to go for our walks and sail my new boat.”
I had bought him a toy sailboat that we floated on the pond at Crystal Palace. It was a large muddy park, with gardens, and great stretches to run about in. The pond was in a glade, and we always brought stale bread for the ducks. After these outings, which left Jack with a pink nose and cold hands, we took the 73 bus back to Catford.
We watched television — the children’s programs, Blue Peter, Crackerjack, and Doctor Who. I thought there was nothing better in the world than to sit with my small warm son on my lap, watching these simple-minded programs. His laughter made me hold him tighter. Why had I ever gone away?
All morning, when he was at school, I longed to see him. If for some reason I had to go out I rushed back to be with him. And he never disappointed me — he was always eager to see me.
The weekends seemed blissful — the bliss of a routine — shopping at the supermarket in Sydenham on Saturday morning, then home for lunch, and doing odd jobs in the afternoon. Jenny always made dinner on Saturday night. We seldom went out. We talked of going skiing — some year, for sure, when Jack was older. The best part of Saturday was going to bed early and making love. On Sundays we drove into the Kent countryside or went to a museum. I carried the boy on my shoulder.
I never asked what was coming. This was what I wanted — a happy home. The anxieties I had felt in travel were in the past. In returning home I became the person I really was. Travel was another life I had left behind.
Jenny said, “How’s your book coming along?”
A book had been my whole reason for that ordeal. I had not started it, but I said, “Fine.”
“What do you do all day?”
“I write, I play with Jack, I smoke, I watch children’s programs on television.”
“Do you have a deadline for the book?”
“Sort of,” I said. “The contract says ‘spring ’74.’ ”
“That’s soon,” she said. “Three or four months. You don’t seem worried!”
The trip had almost broken me; so what would a book do? My secret was that there was no book — none that I cared to write. For the moment, I wanted nothing more than this — the little family in the little house in a corner of a dark city. I was safe.
“What happens if you don’t deliver on time?” Jenny asked. “Do the publishers get their money back?”
“I spent it,” I said. “But even so, I think I’ll get extra time.”
And I thought: What if she knew the truth — that I had not done anything, that the book was a fiction, that in an average day with his crayons Jack wrote more than I did?
She said, “It’s lucky for you I’ve got a good job.”
It was true. I also felt secure because she was working, and she was proud to be working. Her conception of labor was that it liberated you. I believed that she had it slightly wrong — that her work liberated me and gave me time. And now it seemed there was a coherence to my life. There was also a completeness. I suspected that she knew I wasn’t working. Perhaps she was proud of being the breadwinner. I did not dispute it. For about a month after I returned I was happy and had no other life.
And then it ended. We were at Crystal Palace Park, late one afternoon towards the end of January. It was a cold day, and darkening — the sky against my eyebrows. But I was keeping a promise to Jack. I had the sailboat under my arm as we entered the park by the great brick gateway.
As we walked towards the pond, Jack tugged my hand and said, “I want to see the dinosaurs.”
I thought he was confusing this place with Hyde Park. The Natural History Museum and its dinosaurs were near there.
“There’s no museum here,” I said.
“Not the museum — the dinosaurs.”
“Do you mean the zoo?”
“No! Not the zoo — the dinosaurs!”
“Listen, Jack, there aren’t any dinosaurs here.”
“Yes!”
It was terrible to hear him insist. He then began to sob in frustration, and ran ahead of me, along a path, towards a garden I had never seen before. And there in the garden was a large greeny-bronze stegosaurus (it said so on a sign) with a long tail and horns, seeming to claw its way past a rhododendron. In the twilight it looked half alive, like a creature that came out at night.
“There,” Jack was saying. His face was white. “I told you!”
He was a lovely boy, but he had the crowing pedantry of most bright children; he was infuriated by contradiction. And he showed me more dinosaurs in the shadowy garden. I was touched, because the creatures were five times his size.
My next question simply slipped out in a kind of admiring way.
“How did you know about these things?”
“I came here with Mummy’s friend.”
I struggled to say, “Is Mummy’s friend a woman or a man?”
He answered promptly and all at once I was freezing.
Jack had said, “What are you looking at, Dad?”
I said, “Nothing,” and meant it.
He had seen a change in me that instant. I talked to him glumly, trying to decide what I should do next. I could not think. My mind was a blank. I had no plan.
The next day I took up my notebooks and began to reread them closely, and all the sadness and difficulty of my long trip came back to me. I felt sorry for myself, because I had been right in Siberia: my suspicions were confirmed. I had been fooled. I felt I was back in Siberia, and it was then that I remembered the entire telephone conversation, and all of it upset me.
The thought that I had suppressed then, and that I allowed myself to consider now, was that my call had been a great surprise to Jenny. It had been six in the morning. I never wanted this to be true, because it had been my gloomiest and most tormenting suspicion, but while we had spoken on the phone she was with someone else. He was lying on my side of the bed, waiting for her.
Perhaps it had not awakened them, but only interrupted them.
Let it ring.
No, it might be him.
So what?
He’d wonder where I was. Let me up, darling.
That was why she had been worse than noncommittal; she had been cold.
Who was it?
It was him. Don’t worry. He’s in Siberia.
Now I had a secret, and it was like an illness. My habit of concealment was so highly developed I was able to accommodate it. But it was painful — hiding it, living with it. The secrecy re-created the double life that I had once been used to. But it was not simple, and it was not the game I had invented as a teenager. I was thirty-two. I knew that a double life is not an alternating existence of first one then the other, like an actor changing clothes. It is both lives being felt and led simultaneously.