I stared at him.
I said slowly, ‘It’s the same with me. Yes.’ And for the first time I thought this might be the truth.
There were words I’d come here to say. They began with ‘Mark, what happened between us …’ and went on I knew not where. A declaration? A rejection? I had hoped that he would at least provide an answer for me. To explain what had happened between us, to explain myself to me.
I had been stupid, had put too much weight on something that would carry no weight at all. For him, it had been a silly game. He had, as he said, simply wanted to know; and he had known and that was the end of that. And what had he known? That for one moment, one late-night last-day-of-Oxford insanity, I had wanted him. It meant nothing more than that. I felt suddenly, joyfully, relieved. Perhaps I need never think of any of it again.
It was the past; a dream. Here we were, in the present, two happily partnered men, old friends from university, catching up on news. It was as wholesome as Nicola’s family picnics, as simple as Enid Blyton, as natural as a walk in the country.
After a few moments, Mark said, ‘Come on, mate. My flat’s only ten minutes away. Let me show you it.’
He edged his hand along the tabletop and nudged my knuckles with his. It was the first time he had touched me in two years.
‘All right,’ I said.
Even if he hadn’t told me so already, I would have known at once that Mark’s flat was ‘one of the family’s places’. It consisted of five large rooms above a bookshop in Islington, along with a kitchen and bathroom. It had that same air of expensive shabbiness that Mark’s house in Oxford had possessed. The rooms were linked together by archways and doorless doorframes off a hallway — it was impossible to say which was bedroom, which living room, which dining room or study. An enormous oak table with eight legs was in the same room as the divan bed with curled velvet-covered bolsters at each end. In another room, the walls were covered with bookshelves, up to the ceiling, with three chaise longues tucked under the wall-mounted shelves; the books were antique hardbacks. A third room was half stacked with paintings. Throughout, the atmosphere was heavy with the smell of those French cigarettes Mark liked, and cloisonné saucers full of butts were strewn through the rooms. The place looked as if a rake of the 1890s had shut up his home as the century ended and Mark had moved in 100 years later, smoked a large number of cigar ettes but otherwise left everything untouched.
‘Nicola says she’s going to smarten the place up,’ he remarked, throwing his coat down on to a pile of washing.
‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘What does she want to do with it?’
Mark grinned. ‘Burn it to the ground, I think. She anticipates I might do that by myself anyway. But —’ he waved a hand at the bookshelves, the window with its view of an Islington side street — ‘we’re not likely to spend much time in London anyway, so maybe I’ll keep it as a piedà-terre. We’ve bought a bigger place in Dorset, near her parents.’
Ah yes. The money. The relentless, unstoppable tide of money. The money that made all things possible and thus left nothing to be simply desirable.
‘And my mother’s letting me have one of her places in Italy,’ he continued. ‘San Ceterino. Nice to have a winter getaway. Although Nicola says we mustn’t spend Christmas there. They believe in family Christmases.’ He threw himself on to an overstuffed chaise longue next to the window. ‘Oh, how marvellous to have a family Christmas!’
I sat on a chair near to the window and looked out at the red-painted restaurant across the way. Inside couples, families, single people were eating or chatting to each other. Mark was still talking, something about how Nicola had a plan to ‘get rid of all the silly books’, but I wasn’t listening. I had become entranced, as occasionally happens to me, by the idea of other people’s lives. Each one of those people in that restaurant had their own life. There, a father wiping sauce off his small daughter’s chin. There, a woman with short steel-grey hair, eating alone. There, a couple chatting, waiting for their food.
I found myself wondering how it would be to have these people’s lives instead of my own, to go back to their homes, let myself in with their keys, understand all the objects they owned. What faint traces keep us harnessed to our own lives, unable to wander off and inhabit the lives of others.
Mark said, ‘Don’t you think so, James?’
I said, ‘What?’
‘Don’t you think that we should just all get married to each other?’
I stared at him.
‘I mean, you get married to Jess, obviously, and Franny can marry Simon, Emmanuella can marry Franny’s older brother — what’s his name? — Miles. He’s tall and blond. And I’ll marry Nicola. And we should all live together in a big house in, let’s say, Tuscany. Or Provence. Or Oxford.’
He stretched out on the chaise longue, showing a slice of hairless stomach as he did so.
‘Don’t you think so, James? I mean, really, don’t you think so? We should all be together. It’s so silly that we’re not. Together, all the time. I could do it. I’ll buy a house, a huge one so we can all have separate kitchens and living rooms: you and me and Franny and Jess and Emmanuella and Simon. All together like in Oxford.’
‘We can’t, Mark. That’s just not the way things work.’
He sat up, cross-legged.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but why not? Doesn’t everyone want this? To stay together with their university friends forever? For things to stay just as they were at college?’
‘Well, perhaps,’ I said. It was like talking to a child. ‘But it can’t be like that, can it? We have to go out, get jobs, make a living.’
‘Oh, a living. I can take care of all of that. Really, I can. It’s no problem.’
I sighed. ‘I know you can, Mark. But we don’t want you to.’
‘I don’t see why. I mean, I’m marrying Nicola now and so it’s OK for me to pay for things for her. Why can’t I just pay for things for all of us? Why can’t I, sort of, marry all of you? You don’t have to stop doing things. You don’t even need to be there all the time. Franny can write her books on economics, and Simon can live there when he’s not travelling around the world, and Jess can play her music and you can, oh, I don’t know, just lie around all day in a pair of swimming trunks.’
He smiled his wolfish grin and I thought again with surprise, oh, it can be like this, then. We can talk like this and it needn’t mean anything at all.
And Mark is so persuasive; his vision for a moment seemed reasonable to me. We could live like children forever: in freedom and unknowing, dependent on the good graces of others. Even Mark’s dependence was absolute, for his money had come to him as a gift and if he were ever to reach the bottom of it, he would have no way to replace it. Isn’t this the paradise that the religious always imagine themselves to be in? Dependent forever on the beneficence of Almighty God and forever grateful for His bounty?
He yawned, suddenly, as cats do — a yawn that looked as though it might dislocate his jaw.
‘Sorry,’ he said, stifling another yawn, ‘I’m awfully tired. I’ve been driving back and forth to Dorset a lot and it’s making me sleepy.’