My House Is Falling Down Read online

  MY HOUSE IS FALLING DOWN

  Mary Loudon

  Contents

  Looking back,

  The time of the concert is not lost on me:

  My train is late into London.

  Angus walks me to the Tube,

  My name is not Lucy,

  Until I was nearly eleven,

  ‘My home,’

  ‘I didn’t kiss him.’

  For days after Angus,

  Night-times,

  He says we should have more sex.

  In the meantime,

  Angus is wearing his Nordic-style cardigan again,

  He drives me to the station.

  Mark says,

  Five weeks.

  There is no innocence left.

  Feverishly,

  My husband is profoundly deaf.

  ‘What are you up to right now,

  Angus opens Verity’s front door.

  Angus’s parents were returning home from supper at the house of some friends,

  Mel winds her arms around me from behind.

  One man,

  Mark comes in later and later.

  I am in a mood for disposal.

  My absences from the twins seem to me so inexcusable that in my attempts to compensate all manner of things improve.

  Time has begun to lose its meaning.

  ‘Okay.

  It’s the story of many couples,

  Di shoves aside a messy hillock of pillowcases and men’s shirts topped with a crumpled Trees of Britain tea towel,

  When the twins were about six months old I realized I was afraid of almost everything.

  My GP is away and his colleagues are fully booked.

  ‘Devon,’

  I was fascinated by Mark when I met him.

  ‘Look at me,’

  A man with a woman can dream,

  Angus doesn’t want to put any pressure on me but he does want to know whether I think things will ever be different for us,

  He doesn’t mean just a couple of days,

  The children are asleep across the back seat in a mess of old cushions and books.

  Angus is sick and I go to him.

  Mark says,

  In a sizeable chateau near the mountains,

  Angus says,

  My sense of panic at waking in the wrong place increases manifestly.

  ‘Flowers.’

  Holes everywhere.

  Di says,

  I tip the contents of my bag out on to the bed.

  He says,

  There seem suddenly to be a lot of parties.

  In the bath,

  ‘Happy end of your birthday, my darling.’

  In the hotel’s best room,

  He picks up the envelope on the bed.

  The sea is not as blue today as it was yesterday,

  There are people close by.

  In the ambulance,

  The A&E nurse is practised and swift.

  When it came to it,

  The early afternoons are the worst.

  I have not seen Angus for two months.

  In the shower,

  After a storm,

  Something I always wondered,

  We tell the girls it’s time they came out to the field for some fresh air,

  We circle the field,

  Acknowledgements

  For James

  Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for crisis.

  SENECA

  When in doubt, tell the truth.

  MARK TWAIN

  Looking back, I find it difficult to understand exactly when the relationship began but if there was a defining moment I think it was when I first made a concession for him.

  On the morning that I drove under a sullen sky to the local railway station instead of walking the children to school, a decision was made. It was the first day of term after the Christmas holidays. Rightly, my hands should have been full. Yet I left my husband to ensure that by 8.20 everybody was fed, moderately happy and out of the house – in a daily ritual that holds something approaching religious significance for me – and forsook breakfast with my family for a train that delivered me to London decently in time to eat croissants, with Angus. It was, I noticed when checking my diary, the Feast of the Epiphany. A day given over to revelation: you couldn’t make it up.

  But it could easily have been earlier. It might have been the evening I responded to an email from Angus with more than best wishes, taking my lead, I guess, from his beginning Dear You and ending A xxx. And it would be difficult convincingly to discount the numerical significance (let alone any other kind) of two hundred further emails and texts – give or take – that shot back and forth between us during the ensuing month; and those, too, after only one public encounter, during which a large pot of tea topped the drinks bill and I kept my overcoat on.

  After that, at our first private meeting (assignation? tryst? – I still don’t really know what to call it), this time at Angus’s home, we might have shared our first kiss had I not inclined my face to one side as he moved slowly towards me. He kissed my hair instead and then, with a lightness of touch I no longer associate with him but the directness that I do, he brushed the back of his right hand across my right cheek. And as he raised that hand in a diagonal across my body, in the briefest of moments I knew what was coming and yearned, as if I had an hour in which to anticipate it, for the warm skim of his curled fingers on my skin.

  Silently, I implored, Don’t take your hand away. He took his hand away. He suggested we go to the kitchen to look at the view of the light falling across the busy river. He made tea, toasted some muffins, and we talked until it was dark; about music, food, and then love. Later, he put his arms around my waist and pulled me to him, trembling.

  I nearly said, ‘I know your game.’

  He said, ‘You are exquisite.’

  The very first time I saw him: at a party, for the opening of a new art gallery. I arrived in a light mood, unguarded. Within fifteen minutes Angus had happened. Introduced, he stopped talking to the person he was with and for longer than is customary on such occasions he gazed at me. My husband was with me – it was a work party for him, at which I was his guest – and I think they shook hands. I’m pretty sure they must have done for they both have impeccable manners. I do remember that with casual efficiency they established which other guests present were the ones with whom they shared an acquaintance. Like card dealers at a gaming table, shuffling packs in butterfly arcs as an artful prelude to their distribution, Angus and my husband deftly rearranged the assembled company into meaningful subsets because it was the only competitive game available to them at that moment, and they’re both competitive men. That’s how people like Angus and my husband pass the time at parties they affect to dislike but attend nonetheless.

  Meanwhile, I gazed back at this beautiful man, wordless – though stupefied would be the word. Stupefied is what I told Angus, weeks later. He raised questions about my choice of adjective. He thought stupefied a little blunt, lacking in scope. He likes words with dimensions. So do I, as it happens. Yet even when I presented to him a generous range of alternatives that the word embraces – bewildered, dazed, bemused, amazed, confused, astonished, stunned, impressed – he did not recant. Not until, sufficiently irritated with him, I insisted he look it up. After that, he withdrew his objections, grinning, pleased with himself to have had that effect.

  Looking back, I realize that it simply doesn’t matter – the when and where it all began: at a party; over tea in a cafe; in Angus’s unfamiliar, watery home; or perhaps most significantly during a thousand small-hour disclosures, half of them my own, feverishly typed on a laptop in the dim light of a muted kitchen. It’s irrelevant.
I fell in love so inordinately that time and place mean nothing. Like carbon dating, deciphering love’s earliest imprint is an imprecise business. When and where provide history and geography but only why conveys anything worthwhile. Only why is significant and only why matters. Like why, when I knew so little of him still, I would allow a man who is not my husband to declare himself to me, except that he recognized me for what I am: a woman at odds with herself.

  Nevertheless, until I left my family eating breakfast that morning and walked out of our house in Angus’s favour, I could reasonably well convince myself that nothing had altered significantly. Turning the key in the front door later that night, I might as well have been turning my own self-delusion on its head. It was fifteen hours that I’d been gone and they were all asleep when I returned.

  I have thought about it often, how easy it was to walk out of the door, empty-handed. Much later, redefined by the trauma of enchantment, I had a more punishing move to make.

  The time of the concert is not lost on me: a lunchtime recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. 1 p.m., safe as houses. Angus’s email asking whether I’d like to go with him arrived a week before the concert’s date, and in my book a week is no time at all to make a plan of that kind. In my book – an A4 lined diary bought from my village shop – there are biro-scrawled work appointments I must honour that stretch several months ahead, though admittedly some of them are moveable feasts and I don’t work every day. As it happens, I have work arranged for the day Angus suggests but in this instance, I change it. It’s a risk and a foolish one: my client is new and the commission quite big. I feel badly about messing her around but evidently not badly enough to behave better.

  Angus texts: ‘Is it okay with your husband?’

  ‘It doesn’t bother me who you listen to music with,’ Mark says, when I ask him. ‘It’s never going to be me, is it?’

  ‘But does Angus bother you?’

  Mark shrugs.

  ‘Why would he?’

  I text: ‘I wouldn’t come if it weren’t okay.’

  I think about the last time I went to a concert in London, when my brother was conducting. I went alone, described it afterwards to Mark; I told him again how music has always provided such succour for me. I said I remembered learning in physics that every object has a natural frequency at which it will vibrate when struck. I tried to explain that a lot of music produced in me the same powerful reaction, and whether proposed by a community of instruments or a solo voice, its impact was so perfectly matched to my sense of the sublime that momentarily I would experience the seemingly impossible – a feeling of being perfectly met and in tune, wanting for nothing on earth but the moment itself.

  I said, ‘Does that make any kind of sense to you?’

  He said, ‘I’m not sure. It sounds a bit like fantastic sex.’

  ‘I so wish I could share it with you.’

  ‘Me too, babe, but it’s never going to happen.’

  On the day of the concert there is a mighty freeze. It is not the first of the season but it’s the most severe so far; the trees are blanched, their twigs crystalline. From the freezer, I remove a fish pie that I made last week and put it to one side to defrost. I clear what’s left of breakfast and empty the washing machine of Mark’s jeans and the twins’ PE kits. I drape their small, navy shorts on a drying rack. My babies. I shake Mark’s jeans, smooth the pocket linings and pull out the creases. My man. Hanging laundry makes me sentimental. Upstairs, I make beds, picking up stray soft animals and littered felt-tip pens. My movements are automatic. I love these daily devotions, this liturgy of the hours. I shower quickly, and still wrapped in my towel I print out the month’s invoices and put them into already stamped, addressed envelopes. I’ll post them when I go to the station. That way, I may justify this afternoon’s excursion. (‘Daytime quartets in London, Mrs Burdett?’ ‘Ah yes, Your Honour, but at least I billed my clients en route.’)

  I pull on a pair of leggings and two heavy fleeces and walk over to the barn, where Mark is painting. The ground is crunchy underfoot and the air so still that the sound of my shoes on the gravel is jarring and harsh. I stop for a bit and stand perfectly still, riveted by the sudden silence and the sense of nature – of life itself – being peacefully deferred.

  The barn is so raw that inside feels colder than outside. Mark paints at the northern end of the building, where the light is right for him, his work uninterrupted by direct sun. I have entered at the south end, and though I am standing in a generous beam of silver light the illusion of warmth is just that – illusory. Church interiors always look warmer than they are, with their honey-coloured stone and stained glass in flame red and amber. Our barn is the same. I really only like it in the summer. Mark and I often discuss a better heating system for it, the one we will install when we can afford to, so he can paint in more comfort. In fact, we can just about afford it now but Mark is inexplicably resistant. I don’t understand why. I’ve been trying to warm him up for years.

  I walk around to one side of my husband so he can see me in his peripheral vision.

  ‘Babe. I’m off.’

  But Mark doesn’t look up so I reach out to touch his left hand, although I don’t actually touch it, I simply wait for him to register me. I spend quite a lot of my life waiting for Mark in this way, and not always because he hasn’t noticed I am there. When finally he looks in my direction, I repeat myself.

  ‘Babe, I’m off. Don’t forget the fish pie, and there’s plenty of veg in the fridge. Make sure the girls eat something green.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Don’t try, succeed. They’ll eat broccoli. Or just peas will do.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I look at the canvas. The work in progress is a Caribbean seascape in the early stages of a storm, a stretch of water that is quickly coming to life with undulations of aquamarine and pearl even though Mark began it only a couple of days earlier. He is working from a series of photographs that have been sent to him. Painting from static images is something he dislikes doing but that’s what the client has asked for and the client is paying – handsomely, given the speed with which Mark is painting.

  ‘It’s looking good.’

  ‘Getting there.’

  I contemplate my husband. He looks and dresses as if he could rescue me if necessary. I like that. Today he is wearing a navy-blue Cornish fisherman’s sweater, a thick wool scarf, a pair of old Levi’s, and walking boots with thick walking socks. The blow heater to his right is on full blast but I still don’t understand how his uncovered fingers remain dexterous. I work in the cold sometimes but I move around; it makes a big difference.

  ‘It’s icy in here. Surely you want some more heat.’

  ‘You’re the one that feels the chill, not me.’

  ‘Seriously, though,’ and I indicate the heater with my foot, ‘we can afford to heat you better than that.’

  ‘Not today, we can’t. The repair bill for your car just arrived.’

  ‘Ah, I missed that. What’s the damage?’

  ‘Over six hundred, plus the VAT.’

  ‘Jesus wept! It’s not even worth that any more.’

  ‘I know. We could do with being paid on time by some of my clients.’

  ‘Why do you never ask your agent to chase them? For heaven’s sake, Mark.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s not okay. You’re hopeless at billing people on time! I wish you’d get on top of it. It’s crazy. We run overdrafts when people owe you, and then I end up ringing them for you when I have my own work to do.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ He frowns. ‘You’re looking pretty hot.’

  ‘I’m not even dressed properly yet.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Are you really okay about today?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, some husbands might not like it.’

  ‘Look,’ Mark puts down his paintbrush and rummages around on the table to his right. ‘I’m not “
some husband”. And I’m not your keeper, either. You’ve always been a solo operator, it’s one of the things I like best about you. Just go.’ He pulls a long, thin brush from a glass jar full of almost identical long, thin brushes. ‘Go! I really want to get this picture cracked by the end of the week.’

  Turning back to the canvas he trails the brush across a section of it, leaving a vein-blue serpentine streak in its wake. At the door, I turn back to look at him. He is up close to the canvas, squinting. ‘Damn it,’ he mutters, ‘I really do need glasses. I can barely see what’s right in front of me these days.’

  Back inside the house, I take just thirteen minutes to change and get ready; any longer than that and the preparation will be something I don’t want it to be – excessive for a simple meeting of minds over music. My hair is not quite the way I like it and whilst I am irritated, a little bit of me, perversely, is glad. I do not think it right that I look my very best.

  Outside once more, bag over my shoulder, car keys in my hand, the stillness is breathtaking. I glance up at the dormant trees. Everything feels suspended.

  My train is late into London. I arrive at the concert hall flustered, sticky from running along Tube platforms, up escalators, and along the South Bank itself, cursing inwardly, my overcoat uncomfortably heavy, my face hot, and then suddenly – across the foyer – there he is. Wearing a long black coat, unfeasibly handsome, he is looking visibly concerned; checking his watch, scanning the small crowd, anxiously smoothing back his hair.

  He catches sight of me and his relief is immediate. I can see it even now, any time I choose to recall the moment, the way his face lights up. We accelerate towards one another, kiss quickly on both cheeks, hurry into the hall as the lights go down. An usher checks the tickets Angus proffers, whispers directions to our seats. Angus says in hushed tones as we sit down, ‘You look very beautiful,’ and I detect in his voice a combination of pride and pleasure, as if I am ratifying some choice he made earlier. I whisper in return, ‘I look very dishevelled.’ He murmurs, ‘I was honestly beginning to think you might not turn up,’ and I can feel his breath in my ear.