My House Is Falling Down Read online

  A man carrying a baby asks me for one orange juice and two raisin muffins. Angus is still looking at me. I am here and I am there, and how both places feel authentically my own I do not understand, but they do. Even so, as I serve soft drinks and cakes to familiar people in a bunting-swathed playground, I am aware as never before that not one of them knows who I really am. I give the man his change, in twenty-pence pieces. I smile at the baby. I feel like a secret in plain sight, invisible and exposed. My head swims, back to the boat. Sometimes, I lie with my nose so close to Angus’s skin that it is hard to breathe properly. I love the way the smell of him cancels out everything else. I want it to. I remember how much of the twins’ first weeks I spent inhaling them. Nuzzling their round, furry heads, I couldn’t get enough of whatever primal scent it is that so captivates new mothers. But it faded eventually, the magnetic aroma of the young and fresh; it faded and there was nothing I could do to preserve its essence. Some people say it’s like being unable to smell your own home, the way you cannot readily verify your own family: you are part of it, so how could you expect to identify it as separate? On the other hand, what would you do if cast into the wild? Animals detect their kin by sniffing them out but could I locate Mark and the girls by scent alone? Is this what partly draws us to others, I wonder? The heady provocation and enticement of a new aroma that will reawaken our senses and make our skin prickle – reminding us of the animals we are? Angus smells of soap and aftershave and the resolute warmth of his body. But I have ceased to be able to smell Mark. When did that happen? I cannot tell. I can still bury my face in the twins’ hair and know where I belong but the scent of Mark has assumed neutrality as if my nose, like my heart, is recalibrating itself. I remember Angus making clear to me, not the first time together but maybe the second or third, exactly what he wanted: ‘Breathe me,’ he insisted. ‘Make me us.’ I recall feeling flattered, required and alarmed.

  Ways of coping with the fear develop and become ingrained. On journeys back from Verity, I reassemble myself. As if I were a player switching costumes for the next scene, the train has become my place of transformation. I shower and change before leaving but on the train the ritual of cleansing and rearrangement is internalized. Always, I sit facing the direction of travel, make a point of taking in the view as I get closer to home; and though trains lend themselves perfectly to reflection, I do not reflect. I do not dare. I have become too frightened by how quickly my life recedes the minute I turn the car off our yard and on to the single-track road into town. I am scared that even as I leave I am already elsewhere, the train journey merely a migratory passage, of the flesh. Which is why, returning, I banish all thoughts of Angus and allow a hollowness to settle upon me. I stare out of the window, unseeing. Fertile hedges streak past and I fail to register them. If it rains I do not care. When the sky clears, I barely notice the division of the clouds.

  Time has begun to lose its meaning. At 7 p.m. on a school night, Angus drives us through London’s expensive, antiseptic heart. I’d be happiest on the boat going nowhere but he wants to treat us to a restaurant. I tell him it’s May, it’s warm enough to eat on deck, on Verity – but he replies, ‘I’ve thought of that, nutcase, and booked a table outside, on the terrace.’

  I never get this time again.

  Mark is always saying that. He says it to the twins when they are fighting. He says it in traffic jams. He says it when he has explained three times by email to his mobile phone provider why he doesn’t want to pay for five hundred minutes of free calls a month because, being deaf, he has no need of them.

  I will never get this weekend again. Or more accurately, I will never get to spend it with my children: I have given it away, to someone else, and they will never have it. It will not be part of their childhood store of their mother.

  Angus does not know how homesick London makes me. I look out of the car window. Street after street of halogen-lit boutiques adorned with things that shine. I search for evidence of normality until somewhere amongst the couture and jewellery shops I spot a small sign for a hospice – the clearest of reminders that real life exists beyond this assembly of decadent emporia, and is precarious. Quite suddenly, in my slinky dress, one hand resting on Angus’s thigh, I miss the twins with such intensity that my throat constricts. I think about taking them to the GP when they were very small, each with a fever and rash, both of them pink and tetchy. The advice dispensed was sensible, predictable: Calpol and rest, wait and see, come back if it persists. It persisted. Their rashes worsened. They vomited and shivered and were difficult to hydrate. Nauseous with fear, I rolled glass tumblers over the spots on their backs and outlined with felt-tip the blotches on their thighs so that I could chart the progress of their rashes. I resisted A&E but a bag was packed and ready. Mark was halfway up a Scottish mountain at the time, painting cloud formations in a rented croft with no Wi-Fi: texts and emails outlining my insomniac near-derangement went unanswered. When he reappeared a week later, the twins were full of post-viral ennui – sporadically active, then listless and irritable. ‘See,’ he said, ‘you didn’t need me anyway. They’re fine. You’re such a good mummy.’

  Now, as Angus negotiates a road diversion – ‘Christ, we’d be better off walking!’ – I see Miranda on her side, thumb in her mouth, damp-haired after a bath. I want to walk into her bedroom this minute: I want to stroke her forehead and lift her plump arm to my mouth and kiss it, savour the softness of her skin. Melanie sleeps on her back, arms slung across the duvet. At six, she is already becoming long-limbed: one day, I know, she will be inviting to other people, in other ways. I do not want to imagine it.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ murmurs Angus, and he turns his head slightly towards me, having extricated us from a tangle of one-way streets and located a parking space, ‘you look so very lovely tonight.’ And it is probably the effect of Angus swinging the car around all those right-angled bends but I feel nauseous. I smile, wanly, and my lover smiles back, broadly, his face crumpled with pleasure, convinced by the here and now. Angus’s faith in the present differs from mine.

  In bed, he sings into the back of my neck, ‘“Birds flyin’ high, you know how I feel . . .”’

  ‘I was asleep.’

  ‘Okay, “Goldfinger . . . He’s the man, the man with the Midas touch . . .”’

  ‘Be quiet.’

  He says, ‘I can’t believe we have a whole weekend together.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Good heavens, it’s exactly midnight.’

  I squeeze myself backwards into the curve of him.

  ‘I’m hungry!’ he announces. ‘I’m always hungry when I’ve eaten out. Mouse portions, it’s absurd.’ He kneads me gently in the hip. ‘How about you?’ Without waiting for a response, he disentangles himself and springs out of bed.

  ‘Come on!’ he calls back down the stairs. ‘Lots of good things up here!’

  In the kitchen, I put on his large cook’s apron before sitting down at the table.

  ‘Mmmm, kinky!’ he murmurs. ‘But you won’t be needing that.’

  ‘I will. It’s the only item of clothing in this room and I’m starkers.’

  ‘Precisely,’ says Angus. ‘Just as the Almighty intended.’ He makes his way to the table, a bottle of Famous Grouse under one arm, a pair of tumblers in one hand, and a circular wooden board in the other: upon it is some geological-looking fruit cake and a strapping chunk of Stilton. A knife with a curved blade lies to one side of the cheese. He sits down heavily, opposite me.

  ‘Here we go,’ he announces. ‘Midnight snack.’

  I eye the provisions with some concern.

  ‘That’s not a snack, it’s an expedition survival kit. Can I be honest with you?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I hate Stilton, I hate fruit cake and I hate whisky.’

  ‘You hate whisky?’

  ‘Paint stripper.’

  ‘Oh, my darling, a woman agin both jazz and Scotch. This is not looking promising.’ He cuts a broad
wedge of cheese for himself and blows me a kiss. ‘Thank heavens we’ve found a mutual love of something else.’ Frowning at the apron, which is hanging limply down my front, he says, ‘Take that thing off. I want to look at you.’

  I comply.

  ‘Ah. How much better that is. What would you like instead?’

  ‘Nothing. Sleep. And that’s a fish knife you’re using for the cheese.’

  ‘So it is.’ He hums, frowns, says, ‘I’m thinking some tinned pears would go nicely with this.’

  ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘Come with me.’ He takes my hand. ‘I can fix that in a jiffy.’

  Beside the sofa, he wraps me in a rug that he takes from the basket on the floor, and a pale blue jersey that has been squashed beneath it, reveals itself. ‘Aha!’ he says. ‘I’ve been looking for this!’ He pulls it over his head. ‘And it’s long enough to cover my vitals, too. Marvellous. You sit down, angel. I’ll be back.’

  I don’t sit. I wander around, looking out across the river at the lights in the buildings opposite, and inside, at Angus’s sheet music on the piano: Chopin’s Minute Waltz; Mozart’s Sonata No 16 in C major; Debussy’s Clair de Lune. He has a private recital coming up in a fortnight, in Bath. I scrutinize the only framed photograph on the entire boat, of a tall, teenage Angus standing between his parents in a garden – theirs; his. I screw up my eyes but it is impossible to make out as clearly as I want to the finer features of the man and woman flanking him. I pick up a couple of postcards, lying along the top of some books in the long shelves, and read the messages on their reverse sides. ‘Thanks so much for a lovely supper and evening. Anna.’ ‘Dearest A, Brilliant to see you, as always. Love, S.’ Anna has signed off with one kiss, S with two.

  Angus reappears with a bowl of tinned pears. He sets them down on the low table beside the sofa and says through a mouthful of cake, ‘What you got there, sweetheart?’

  ‘Missives from your ex-girlfriends, I think.’

  He takes the cards from me, flips them over.

  ‘Nah. This one’s a colleague from the Royal College, married. And this one’s a very old friend.’

  ‘S?’

  ‘Sarah. We’re just mates. We went to bed for the summer about forty years ago but we never made a proper go of anything. She’s a violinist with the LSO, also married. You should meet her sometime; you’d like each other.’

  I think, All this life he has had before me.

  ‘My darling girl,’ Angus asks, ‘are you jealous? You’ve no need to be.’

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’

  ‘You are!’ He throws back his head and laughs. ‘Oh, nutcase, how sweet! And over an old chubster like me, too; how very gratifying.’ He slings one arm around me and with his other one, stretches across to some CDs in the shelves. ‘You’re the love of my life,’ he says. ‘You know that.’

  ‘I’ve come so late in the day, though.’

  ‘If you’d come into my life when I was twenty-five, I’d have been down on one knee without a second thought.’

  ‘I was seven.’

  ‘Thirty-five, then. Forty-five. Whenever.’ He kisses the top of my head. ‘What shall we listen to?’

  ‘You choose.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘lucky dip.’ He pulls out a CD. ‘Ah, Vivaldi!’ he declares, as if he has run unexpectedly into an old friend in the street. ‘How lovely!’

  Mark will be at home with the girls, sleeping.

  Angus inserts the CD into the player and sings the opening along with the soprano: ‘Nulla in mundo pax sincera . . .’ He says, as if emerging from a trance, ‘God, it’s beautiful. And she ain’t lyin’, nutcase. No true peace in this world, indeed.’

  From the ambit of his arms, I say, ‘That photo of you with your parents.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it the last one ever taken of the three of you?’

  ‘It is.’ He pauses. ‘This man is an island. Population: one delectable woman.’

  I think, You can’t say that. I am another country, and I am already fully populated. You can’t just colonize me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  I think, I am not who you think I am. The me that you love is an adaptation of someone else. I am just a version of her, happening to you.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  He smiles and lowers his eyes, and there is something about his expression that, quite suddenly, I do not approve of – a bashfulness I have not seen before that does not strike me as entirely authentic – and I realize that I must never feel sorry for Angus, for sympathy works like a hook. Even my mother – her marriage to my father a complicated exercise in compromise – never submitted to my father’s entreaties for reassurance, whether overt or otherwise, and I am certain the devotion she engendered in him was due in no small part to this. I could see, when I was growing up, that she was without question the deepest and most enduring of his passions, yet even to him she retained sufficient distance that his desire for her never really waned. Her ease in male company may also have contributed to my father’s sense of his wife as the jewel in his crown. There was something about her that made men behave like small boys, as if she were a puzzle in the room they all wanted to solve. She was perfectly happy for them to feel that way, and so was my father, for he was the one to whom this singular woman was married; the one with whom she went home. Never mind that he was well-known and polished. My mother was cleverer than my father, difficult to instruct and impossible to perturb. A man knows when he’s in luck and my father knew not to push his.

  I never wanted to feel the way my father did: I never wished simultaneously to endure, as he so clearly did, the longing for a loved one and the loss of self – and self-respect – that went with it. It is terrible to love and not possess: it is terrible to possess and not to love. Someone said that, or wrote it, and during my father’s manic phases, when two dozen roses were not enough, when only emerald earrings would do, or an impromptu trip to Florence, unbidden and ill-timed, I witnessed his deflation as my mother did her best to show appreciation. That she wished quietly to be left alone was obvious; and yet she adored my father, and understood perfectly his need to demonstrate to her as extravagantly as possible his copious love. Growing up, I observed it all and promised myself that in union with a man I would never put myself in either of my parents’ positions.

  It left its mark on me and Ed, being so rarely the targets of our parents’ affections. Their love flew like arrows over our heads, missing us, and in the end, I held my father largely responsible: I was convinced that it was my mother’s time-consuming management of him that apprehended her and kept her detached from my brother and me, from who we were and what made us tick. Ed fared better overall: he was absorbed into music, and my mother, the frustrated pianist who studied epidemiology only when it became clear she would never make the concert-hall platform herself, found a way into the soul of her son, and he into hers.

  With Mark, I swore I would keep my distance, having learned early on the trick of surviving alongside a compelling man: want him less than he wants you; or appear to, anyway. I never wanted to feel responsible for a partner’s happiness, I was well aware of the potential for failure – so when Angus asks, as our time together draws to a close, ‘Do you think you will always love me?’, instead of registering a straightforward request for reassurance from a man in love with a woman, I hear a bereaved child, whose needs no adult can meet. And rather than folding my arms around Angus with whom I am so much in love, and whispering heartfelt, amorous solace – and I wish I could, for I want to, I really want to be the kind of woman who can at any given time and without argument or defence offer ready consolation to a man – I reply, ‘Not if you ask me questions like that.’ And for that alone, never mind all my other defects and indiscretions, I despise myself.

  ‘Okay. Apart from no kids, lots of time and a musical boat –’ Mark says ‘musical boat’ as if something sour has got into his mouth, a
nd I picture Verity on high seas, rising and falling to a symphonic swell – ‘what the hell does he have that I don’t?’

  ‘Those are not the reasons why I like his company.’

  ‘Really? Then I assume he’s bloody magnificent in the sack.’

  ‘I’ve told you already, it’s not about the sex.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to think about that? I mean, you and I don’t have any, and you’ve never been especially drawn to celibacy.’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘Please what? Look, you can’t just tell me it’s not about the sex and think that makes it all okay.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘All right, so if I accept what you’re saying, it must mean that something else is lacking here, for you.’

  ‘Nothing’s lacking.’

  ‘It must be, otherwise you wouldn’t be going elsewhere.’

  ‘But it isn’t. It’s not a case of either/or. What I have with Angus is totally different.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘It doesn’t take anything away. In a strange way it augments—’

  ‘Augments?!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yeah? Augments what, exactly?’

  ‘What I mean is, if anything, now that I feel more—’

  But I can’t do it. I can’t easily explain that moments with Angus do not equate to moments with the family because they bear no relation to it. The two kinds of experience can’t be weighed or measured against one another because they’re not made of the same material. A ton of feathers and a ton of lead weigh the same but even when you learn about things falling at equal speeds in a vacuum you know it’s not the point because we don’t live in vacuums. Feathers and lead dropped from a high-rise building will have a significantly different impact on anything below: a child could tell you that. No one would think to compare the two, except as opposites.