The piles of paper multiplied after Red Gold. Each draft was the hardest work of my life, and I couldn’t yet bear to throw them away, any more than I threw away my fan letters or the invitations to open supermarkets which lay in the study in dusty sacks.
The cleaning women, naturally, never stayed, and I had no talent for housework. Chris got home much too tired, and of course his mother never taught him how to do it, any more than I taught Chris’s son.
‘I wish we could live in a hotel,’ I said. ‘We could almost afford it. We could afford it. It would leave more time for the important things.’
‘I wish we didn’t live in London. I wish we didn’t live in England.’
‘Of course, there’s your job. We have to stay here.’
It wasn’t strictly true. After Red Gold and Gold Cards we had enough money to keep us comfortably till we died. But neither of us quite believed in that money. It had come too easy, and we were too used to Christopher being the breadwinner.
Then fate pushed us hard in the right direction. Chris’s mother died, which was a pity in a way since she was vague and amiable and very fond of me, and didn’t expect me to be a housewife. She was suddenly dead of a heart attack, and the house was left to Chris. It turned out she hadn’t been totally vague. The farm had twenty unused acres, and just before she died she’d got planning permission to build an ‘exclusive’ modern estate… the land sold for over two million. Now no one could deny that we were rich.
Chris was bored with his job, in any case. The more promotions he got the less creative he felt. He no longer went out on stories, no longer wrote scripts, no longer made programmes. Instead he advised about other people’s programmes; he sat in endless meetings talking about nothing, took decisions about ‘balance’ and ‘political judgement’ and hated himself for knowing the rules. He had watched his contemporaries get older and sadder and told himself it wasn’t happening to him, until one day he couldn’t pretend any more.
I remember the day we decided. He had come home early, which wasn’t like him. The kids weren’t even back from school, and I was dozing on the sofa in the drawing-room when I heard his feet on the stairs. I asked him if he was all right, but he didn’t say anything, he wouldn’t sit down. Then without warning he was saying what mattered.
‘You once said you married me because I was honest…’
‘— Two liars in one family would be too much.’
‘— Listen to me Alex, this is important. I haven’t been honest for years and years. Everything is trimming, playing by the book. I can’t go on like this till I die. I’m fifty-two, I’ve only got thirty years left…’
I hated to hear him talk like that. I went and put my arms round him, but he wouldn’t be deflected, he wouldn’t even look at me. Normally he liked to look at me. Light from the side made him lined but handsome as he started at the sea-green velvet of a chair over which his son’s pajamas straggled mournfully, thin and twisted as a long-drowned corpse. Everyday chaos, everyday mess…
‘I wish we were in Venice,’ I said.
‘We have to get out,’ Chris said. ‘I mean it.’
I was a little frightened, for surely he was happy… surely he had been happy with me? Happier than I was, surely? I hadn’t noticed that he had grown desperate.
We talked about the pros and cons. There were our friends. It’s not easy to make new friends. Mary and Matthew were our best friends. True, she was dull (Chris didn’t agree), but terribly kind, a wonderful listener, and ‘far from stupid’, Chris said. And Matthew was witty, and adored me. Probably still does, if he hasn’t died.
But friends aren’t enough to keep you at home. They improve your life, they don’t live it for you. That day Chris was perfectly certain what he wanted. ‘I loathe living here. The kids don’t need us. They can’t stand us. Let’s go on holiday and never come back.’
It was partly bravado, of course. Chris didn’t mean it, about never coming back. It isn’t so easy to lose the past. When he thought of the children, he vacillated, and asked the company to take him back. I wasn’t having it, I said I would leave him… I was already making our travel plans, I was already enjoying a foretaste of freedom. I admit I pressed him, for his own good. I knew better than he did what he wanted.
Terry Fraser rang up drunk one day and tried to tell me that Chris was going through the male menopause, and when I said it was none of his business he said I had always been a ballbreaker, and I told him to fuck off and dry out.
Chris resigned again, this time for good. I was happy again; we were happy again. But I think the question of how long we were going for was fudged, between us and the children. Not in my mind, though. I knew this was it. I had decided to say goodbye to little England.
When Chris promised the kids we would be back in September I didn’t say anything. Nor did they. They didn’t seem to mind, at first.
We went away that summer. I can’t recall exactly how many years ago. A mist came up between us and home, a mist came up between us and the children…
I thought about them over the years. Even before they pursued us, I thought about them. I’m not as hard-hearted as people say. I thought about Isaac’s awful degree and whether what happened was all our fault.
And I thought about the other folks back home. I think about them sometimes still. Mary and Matthew, our friends. I try to visualise Matt twenty years older. He made me laugh, which is wonderful. I think I missed him at first, I’m beginning to forget. And now perhaps he is dying — dead.
I remember good old Mary. I suppose by now her hair is quite grey. I wonder what they thought about us, and if they forgave us for what we did, since a lot of the problems fell on them. She has gone on writing over the years, affectionate letters in that mouse-grey hand.
I wonder if I’ll ever see her again…
The pisco makes me melancholy.
I want to be touched, I want to be fucked.
— Toledo was every human shade, an encyclopaedia of flesh colours. The city was on a hill. From the opposite hill where our parador stood you could look across the whole sweep of it. At siesta time there was no one about, just rose and fawn, peach and pink, tawny gold and dun and brown, a vanished painter’s dream of flesh. The doors and windows were little dark eyelets, but we knew no one to ask us in.
— So we were free, of course. Chris said ‘That’s what freedom is.’ Knowing nobody, not being known.
I wasn’t sure, I think I wanted something else, I’ve always wanted everything…
We first went to Toledo in ‘92, an early summer of glorious heat. I saw Stuart sitting in a cafe with his son. He was beautiful. I wanted him. After that I made sure we went back every year.
(My head starts to ache. It wasn’t my fault. My heart was always true as steel. The swords of Toledo are remarkable, thread-thin steel which can bend full circle.)
Outside in the dark the cicadas go crazy, breeding like locusts in the savage heat. Rats and insects are happy now, coming into their own in the twenty-first century… Toledo seems so long ago.
A warm breeze blew between the parador and the opposite hill where the city stood. I think of that breeze with longing here where the heat is three times as intense and for days and weeks not a breath of wind and I’ve nothing in the world to do but wait, in the sticky bloody heat, cooped up with a boy I no longer love…