The letter. Where is it? I must have it. The letter. Somewhere in this bureau. Began and abandoned months ago after my epic day with the tart, Caterina, that stocky little girl with the split-peach arse and the leathery nipples I tweaked and pinched till they were hard as walnuts…
Aha, I’m not dead yet. A little rise on a day of gloom. But the letter. Where is it? More real than sex. I started it that day after supper. When I picked up my pen she was clear in my mind, Mary Brown, a half-smiling Madonna, but her flesh pink and solid, not at all translucent, her eyes a straight path of china blue to a safe destination near at hand… a faint shine in the dark, I can see them again, eyes which perhaps spell ‘warm’ and ‘home’.
— She always liked me, Mary.
The letter! I have it! Wonderful…
Strange, it seems to peter out at line two, I’d remembered something of an epic… But now I recall that I lost heart. It suddenly seemed rather pathetic to be writing to someone who might have forgotten my existence. A woman in her sixties, moreover. That day I was proud, with my three great feats; did a hero like me need a woman in her sixties?
Dear Mary and Matthew,
Friends! After all this time, and many sad changes…
Today I am sadder, and less great. Today I’ll finish and post the letter.
The ‘and Matthew’, of course, is just a courtesy. It’s the oval-eyed madonna that I’m writing to, with her large pale hands and nut-brown hair which now is probably silvery-grey. Even that thought isn’t unpleasant. She’ll draw it back in a queenly bun, and I’ll have to persuade her to let it down…
No no. I run ahead of myself.
… After all this time, and many sad changes, I am writing to you from Venice, without Alexandra, alas…
The terrible baldness of the words on the page. I feel my eyes prick with tears of self-pity to think how sorry Mary will be. But would she already know about all the disasters which have come upon us? They didn’t come to the funeral. I didn’t do the invitations, of course. I suppose they couldn’t have afforded to have flown to New York, in any case, just to watch a body burn. I wonder what Susy has told them…
… to say greetings, old friends, I hope all is well. I hope the floods will soon abate in London…
(don’t be pompous, it will annoy Matthew, if Matt’s still alive enough to be annoyed)
… The Italian newspapers loved your floods, it makes them feel less despair about Venice. How are…
Now I am really stuck. Their children. Alexandra would remember their names. Their children have turned out better than ours. But then, they had a better mother, and the same mother from beginning to end.
How are the children? By now perhaps there are grandchildren. I do hope so…
I am sick with envy, thinking about it. Six stout grandchildren for Matthew to dandle, parade, play football with, confess to, if that starchy bastard has anything to confess. Six fine grand-children to give him hope. And Alex and I haven’t even got one.
… though of course they must make you worry even more painfully about the future. None of us ever envisaged these times, did we, in the far-off days when we were all young.
Do you remember the fun we had with the children, on Jessica’s birthday…?
(That was it — Jessica! A freckled mouse, knock-kneed and brilliant, who went on to float an internet company and made millions before she was thirty. I shudder to think what she’s doing now.)
… Way back in the mid-‘80s, I suppose, when we went down the Thames, still a river, in those days, not a flood-plain, on a river-boat, and we took a monumental picnic (which must have been Mary’s doing!) and four bottles of champagne, and the boys were not in the best of moods but they all started dancing to the piped music, Isaac and Jessica and Susy and —
(damn — I’ll never remember it, put it in later)
… swooping round the other stodgy families in a glorious parody of Victor Sylvester, and Alexandra started dancing on her own…
— A more precise memory stays my hand. Actually the two boys weren’t dancing, they were sipping champagne, which was quite against the rules since they were only fifteen or sixteen, but Alex had given them her blessing — ‘Oh Mary, for God’s sake, it’s a birthday party!’ — and they slumped in their seats, sneering and giggling as the two girls did their spirited tango, which parodied sex and yet yearned for it. Some way down the road to intoxication the strain of sitting still and watching other people dance proved too much for Alex, and she got to her feet, slipped off her shoes and some spotted skin jacket which I hope was fake but fear was not. She began to dance like a siren, with her blowing hair and skin-tight dress and the wind off the water caressing her body, holding an empty champagne bottle, the sun very bright on its green side and her red hair whipping against her bare shoulders… every man on deck was looking at her, everyone wanted to be that bottle. The boys stopped laughing and the girls stopped dancing and I knew all the children were ashamed but I still adored her; she was mine, all mine, and I knew that Matthew wanted her too. Susy’s round flushed face, now sucking down smoked salmon with a steady, vacuuming motion, was a study of sour distaste, no longer transformed by her innocent tango. I remember something else; Mary moved over and rested her bulk on the back of the seat, just behind Susy, and started to stroke her curls very lightly, and Susy stopped eating, and leaned against her, her eyes closed so as not to see her stepmother.
I remember the end of that outing too. Jessica was in floods of tears because no one had been nice enough to her, one of the boys was sick, Mary and Matthew had a mild dispute, Alex was on tremendous form till she fell dead asleep in the taxi, and Susy said to me at bedtime ‘On my birthday, I’m going to the cinema. Me and some friends. No parents.’
… Alexandra started dancing on her own. We had such fun together, didn’t we? So many of my memories are bound up with you —
— I mean Mary, of course, but that mustn’t be apparent.
So many of my memories are bound up with you two.
Six o’clock, though the hugging fog makes it impossible to know what time it is. I’ve had the light on in here since noon. But my blood tells me it’s six o’clock, my brain requires its alcohol, a little flame, a little devil, a little treat to spur the old man on. A glass of Chianti, a dish of olives, deliciously oily — the salt, the sour — the awakening tingle of the wine, the whispered lie that I’m still young…
Three score and ten. Time to go home.
Mary, you were always so kind to Susy.
Mary was kind, full-stop. She would be kind to me, I know she would. She wouldn’t notice how old I have grown. Once she told me I was attractive; I was touched, and surprised, for a moment I wondered if she wanted me to make a pass at her, but of course it was just Mary being truthful… or maybe just Mary being kind. I wonder if she would still find me attractive? How was I looking when we last met?
And God, I remember and drop my pen, it bounces away across the marble floor and under the table, little and stupid as a dead match in all this expanse of solitude. I remember now when we last met and it makes me grind my teeth at my vanity (but before you judge me, try living alone. See if you don’t grow vain and mad).