One Day
Шрифт:
But it’s true they get on very well, everyone says so, and Maddy is kind and sensible and attractive, long and slim, and a little awkward. She has ambitions to be a painter, and Dexter thinks she is good; small canvases hang in the caf'e, and are sold occasionally. She is also ten years younger than he is — he imagines Emma rolling her eyes at this — but she is wise and smart and has been through her own share of unhappiness: an early divorce, various unhappy relationships. She is quiet, self-contained and thoughtful and has a melancholy air about her, which suits him at present. She is also compassionate and fiercely loyal; it was Maddy who saved the business during the time when he was drinking the profits and not turning up, and he is grateful to her for this. Jasmine likes her. They get on well enough, for the moment at least.
It’s a pleasant Saturday evening and he walks on alone through residential back streets until he reaches the flat, the basement and ground floor of a red-brick mansion block not too far from Hampstead Heath. The flat retains the smell and the wallpaper of the elderly couple who lived there before, and he has only unpacked a few essentials: the TV and DVD, the stereo. It’s a frumpy kind of place, at the moment anyway, with its dado rails and appalling bathroom and its many other small rooms, but Sylvie insists that it has great potential, once they’ve knocked the walls through and sanded the floors. There’s a great room for when Jasmine comes to stay, and a garden too. A garden. For a while he joked about paving it over, but has now decided that he is going to learn to garden, and has bought a book on the subject. Somewhere deep in his consciousness he has become aware of the concept of the shed. Soon, it will be golf and pyjamas in bed.
Once inside and past the boxes that clutter the hall, he takes a shower then goes into the kitchen and orders Thai food to be delivered. In the living room he lies on the sofa and begins to compile a mental list of the things he must do before he can begin his task.
For a small, diverse circle of people, a previously innocuous date has taken on a melancholy weight, and there are certain calls that must now be made. He starts with Sue and Jim, Emma’s parents in Leeds. The conversation is pleasant and straightforward enough and he tells them about the business, how Jasmine is getting on at school, repeating the conversation twice for both the mother and the father. ‘Well, that’s all the news really,’ he tells Sue. ‘Just to say, you know, thinking of you today, and hope you’re alright.’
‘You too, Dexter. Look after yourself, won’t you?’ she says, her voice unsteady, then hangs up. Dexter continues to work through the list, speaking to his sister, his father, his ex-wife, his daughter. The conversations are brief, ostentatiously lighthearted and don’t mention the significance of the day, but the subtext is always the same: ‘I’m fine.’ He phones Tilly Killick, but she is mawkish and over-emotional: ‘But how are you reallysweetheart? I mean, really? Are you by yourself? Are you okayby yourself? Do you want us to come over?’ Irritated, he reassures her, then ends the call as quickly and politely as he can. He calls Ian Whitehead in Taunton, but he’s putting the kids to bed, the little sods, and it’s not a good time. Ian promises he’ll call back in the week and maybe even come down and see him sometime, and Dexter says that it’s a great idea in full know ledge that it will never happen. There’s a general sense, as in all the calls, that the worst of the storm has passed. Dexter will probably never speak to Ian Whitehead again and this is fine too, for both of them.
He eats supper with the television on, hopping channels and restricting himself to the solitary beer that came free with the delivery. But there’s something saddening about eating alone, hunched over on the sofa in this strange house and for the first time that day he feels a rush of despair and loneliness. These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath. He exhales slowly through his fingers, then rushes into the kitchen and throws dirty plates into the sink with a clatter. He has a sudden overwhelming need to drink, and to keep on drinking. He finds his phone.
‘What’s up?’ says Maddy, concern in her voice.
‘Just a little panic that’s all.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come up?’
‘I’m fine now.’
‘I can get a taxi? I can be with you in—’
‘No, really. I’d rather be alone.’ He finds that the sound of her voice is enough to calm him, and he reassures her once more then says goodnight. When he is sure that there is no conceivable reason for anyone to call him back, he turns the phone off, draws the blinds, goes upstairs and begins.
The spare bedroom contains nothing but a mattress, an open suitcase and seven or eight cardboard boxes, two of which are labelled ‘Emma 1’ and ‘Emma 2’ in her own handwriting in thick black marker pen. The last of Emma’s possessions from his flat, the boxes contain notebooks, letters, wallets of photographs, and he carries them down to the living room and spends the rest of the evening unpacking them, sorting the meaningless ephemera — ancient bank statements, receipts, old take-away menus, all of which he stuffs into a black bin-liner — from the stuff he will send to her parents, and the items he would like to keep for himself.
The process takes some time, but is carried out in an entirely dry-eyed, pragmatic way, and he stops only occasionally. He avoids reading the journals and notebooks with their scraps of youthful poetry and plays. It seems unfair — he imagines Emma wincing over his shoulder or scrambling to knock them from his hand — and instead he concentrates on the letters and photographs.
The way the material has been packed means that he works through it in reverse chronological order, digging back through the strata, starting with their years together as a couple, back through the Nineties and eventually, at the bottom of box 2, into the Eighties. First there are dummy covers from the ‘Julie Criscoll’ novels, correspondence with her editor Marsha, press cuttings. The next layer reveals postcards and photos of Paris, including a snap of the famous Jean-Pierre Dusollier, dark-skinned and very handsome, the one that got away. In an envelope with Metro tickets, folded menus, a rental agreement in French, he stumbles on something that’s so startling and affecting that he almost drops it on the floor.
It’s a Polaroid, taken in Paris during that summer, of Emma lying naked on a bed, legs crossed at the ankle, her arms stretched languidly above her head. The photo was taken on a drunken, amorous evening after watching Titanicin French on a black and white TV, and even though he found the photograph beautiful, she had snatched it from him and insisted that she would destroy it. The fact that she kept the Polaroid and secreted it away should please him, suggesting as it does that Emma liked the photo more than she let on. But it also slams him up against her absence once more, and he has to take a moment to catch his breath. He places the Polaroid back in the envelope and sits in silence to gather himself. The ice creaks beneath him.
He continues. From the late Nineties he finds an assortment of birth announcements, wedding invitations and orders of service, an over-sized farewell card from the staff and pupils of Cromwell Road Comprehensive School and, stuffed in the same envelope, a series of letters from someone called Phil which are so sexually fixated and pleading that he quickly folds them up and stuffs them back into the envelope. There are flyers from Ian’s comedy-improv nights and some tedious paperwork from solicitors concerning the purchase of the flat in E17. He finds a selection of witless picture postcards that he sent while travelling in the early Nineties — ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Dublin ROCKS’. He is reminded of the letters he got in return, wonderful little packets of pale blue air-mail paper that he re-reads occasionally, and is embarrassed afresh by his callow twenty-four-year-old self: ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!!’. There’s a copy of the photostat programme of ‘Cruel Cargo — a play for young people by Emma Morley and Gary Cheadle’ and then old essays, dissertations on ‘Donne’s Women’ and ‘Eliot and Fascism’, a pile of postcard reproductions marked with the tiny holes from the pin-boards of student houses. He finds a cardboard tube and in it, rolled up tight, Emma’s graduation certificate, untouched, he imagines, for nearly twenty years. He verifies this by looking at the date — 14 July 1988. Eighteen years ago yesterday.