My House Is Falling Down Read online

  ‘I belong to you but you don’t belong to me.’

  What particular days of the week does a relationship need to have, in order for it to be fully functioning? Is a man short of Sundays to call his own with the woman he loves short of something essential? Or are Tuesdays and Wednesdays the deal-breakers, freighted with the satisfaction and tedium of weekday routine? ‘Amputee’ was the one word that Pincher avoided using. Yet if ordinariness is our aim and I can’t plan even a week with Angus, then is our relationship incapacitated to the point of being untenable? After all, if a husband is a man who can count on his tomorrows, then presumably for a lover, the opposite is true.

  I get out of bed and go upstairs. I sit on the piano stool and look across the river and envisage the field behind my home, its skyline enhanced by trees, not eclipsed by buildings. Home, where until I met Angus, I felt gratified and safe. Home, where these days, I miss Angus so badly that I daydream constantly of a different sanctuary altogether, its mood susceptible to the elements and its light inconstant – and containing below the waterline in a bed beneath a crazy horse, libidinous, delirious us.

  The children are asleep across the back seat in a mess of old cushions and books. Some of the books have been damaged by travel: bent, or their pages stuck together by long-ago spilt milk. Mel is sucking her thumb. Peter Rabbit dangles precariously from her lap, upside down, long ears hanging down towards the floor: abandoned, I think, remembering an afternoon with my own head tilted back at much the same angle as Peter Rabbit’s, over the edge of the bed on Verity. Miranda is slumped like a drunk in a railway carriage, her long legs hanging heavily, her head inclined towards Mel, her arm in Mel’s lap. Her mouth has fallen open and she is snoring softly. Baby snores. But Miranda is not a baby. Miranda is six.

  What will I tell these children when they are older? Will I be able to explain myself in a way that is not, to them, entirely unbecoming? I doubt it. There is probably no account I could give that would bear the weight of a stranger’s scrutiny, so why should my daughters be any different? If anything, they might – embarrassed, perhaps pious, possibly horrified – consider me wanton and foolish. I will doubtless keep quiet. The alternative will be to tell them that I love their father deeply but I let him down, and even though such transgressions are commonplace, I cannot give reasons for my own infringement that are beyond reproach. What about the vows I made before a community of believers in marriage, if not in God? For better, for worse. In sickness and in health. As long as ye both shall live.

  What if my daughters want to follow suit? (And why should they not?)

  With my body I thee honour.

  Forsaking all other.

  I will say nothing. I will not explain to the young women they will become that I rarely break my word; that I believe in promises and they should, too, because promises give you the freedom to love another person properly. I will not tell them that the possibilities of love are endless and that it may be cherished or suppressed but it can’t easily be contained; that it can be as wilful as a genie escaped from a bottle – which is fine just so long as you have infinite capacity for its expansion. And I will save them from my supposition – that you may be gay or straight, irreligious or devout, left-wing or right-wing, black or white, amiable or disobliging, even downright horrible, but if you are a woman attached in some way to two men, you may find the comprehension of others a bit beyond reach.

  So, I will not point out that infidelity is not necessarily about what we do but who we pretend we are not. I will not explain that to love more than one adult at a time is inconvenient at best and shattering at worst, but it is not a crime. I will not tell them that because lying is mean and cowardly, I did not lie to their father, nor to Angus. It would give me more moral purchase than I feel I deserve, to present verity as a noble choice, and dissension from the norm as brave: it would imply that living truthfully is always an act of courage, when it is not – or not invariably. It cannot be: context is all.

  Unless one day they ask me, and they wish for an answer. If they do, I shall tell them only this: that the possibilities of love are legion and should know no shame; and that sometimes, we do things that we ourselves find hard to understand.

  As we approach a set of traffic lights, Mark says, ‘Does that man have any idea what you walk away from every time you see him? Does he? Because that should have been his starting point. He’s a child. He’s a child because he has no idea what it means to have one.’

  I feel it incumbent upon myself to defend Angus, as at times I defend Mark against Angus’s charges of marital indifference. When the next available opportunity presents itself, I say, ‘That’s a pathetic argument. You can’t suggest that any man without children is therefore a child himself.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m suggesting that Captain Truth himself is particularly juvenile.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Captain Truth, Commander of HMS Verity, on which he lies with my wife – no doubt in some nautical hammock.’

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’

  ‘A musical hammock, perhaps. Does it rock you to sleep to Brahms lullabies?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Well, he’s a child.’

  ‘You don’t know him.’

  ‘I know enough,’ says Mark. ‘Life is different for men like him. They have no one else to consider. They are loose in the real sense of the word because they are completely unattached.’

  The lights change and Mark begins to pull away. I think, No ties that bind. For all his solidity, Angus is vulnerable to every passing breeze. I picture the stays on the boat, straining against their only contact with the land.

  ‘If he were serious about his life,’ Mark says, ‘he’d set himself some standards in his choice of woman.’

  ‘What, like you did?’

  But Mark can’t see what I am saying.

  ‘You are not his wife,’ he continues.

  ‘He knows that.’

  ‘Why does he set his sights so low?’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘Can’t he get someone available, his age?’

  ‘Mark!’ I lean into his peripheral vision. ‘Slow down! This is a forty limit.’

  ‘He must think so little of himself.’

  I think, Car journeys are when blood is spilt.

  I picture Angus practising the piano, hair swept back from his forehead, shoulders raised, pursuant, intent, seeking amongst the keys what he can find there, and there alone.

  At the next set of traffic lights, Mark looks at me and I say, ‘Actually, no. I think he avoids thinking too hard about anything to one side. He’s just like you in that respect: he concentrates only on what is in front of him.’

  ‘He’s selfish.’

  ‘He’s focused.’

  ‘Regardless.’

  ‘He’s full of regard.’

  The lights turn amber.

  ‘Yeah, for you, perhaps,’ says Mark. ‘For himself, certainly.’ The green light signals the last word, for my husband. ‘Does he have a clue what it is you walk away from, to see him?’

  ‘Probably not,’ I reply, when he slows at a roundabout.

  ‘Does he care?’

  ‘I don’t think he thinks about it.’

  ‘Why would he? He has you and that is enough for him.’

  But Mark can’t look at me, so I can’t respond. I think of Angus, quieter than usual one afternoon, his mood portentous, staring glumly across the giant slab of river, polished silvery grey in the noon light of a windless day.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask him.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on, Angus, what is it?’

  ‘You love Mark more than you love me.’

  I hate it when Angus does this.

  ‘See?’ he persists, when I fail to respond.

  ‘I have never loved like this before.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean and you know it.’

  ‘Angus, I love you completely.’

 
; ‘Maybe,’ he sighs, ‘but the fact is, I do not have the exclusive attention of the person that I love and that is depressing.’

  I watch a distant police boat darken momentarily in the shadow of Battersea Bridge. A day-cruiser is heading the other way, towards it. Even from here I can see tourists outside on deck. They will have photos of the Power Station nicely in the bag. The police boat bends away and out of sight, in a last metallic flash of blue.

  He says, ‘I don’t expect you to change your life for me, you know that. I wouldn’t ask you to.’

  I tell him that if we had children, it would be the case also; that he would never be the one and only. He says I know perfectly well that’s not what he means.

  When Mark slows the car again, I tap his knee to get his attention and say, ‘I am not enough for Angus.’

  He says, ‘Then, why the hell?’

  Arriving at friends’ homes after journeys like this, our appetites wrecked by a glut of bickering, we get out of the car, stretch, and say, ‘How lovely to see you, too!’ And always, I wonder if they can tell.

  Angus is sick and I go to him. I tell Mark I’ll be back the next day but Angus has a high fever. I stay two nights.

  The weather is squally and the bedroom portholes decorated with the residue of angry spray. I minister and tend. The tide is high. The boat rocks. Water everywhere. Outside, river and rain. Inside, tea, hot-water bottles, soup; liquids with which I express my love for Angus and further cultivate his trust.

  ‘You are so kind to me.’ His voice is raspy. ‘I don’t deserve you.’

  ‘I do it because I love you to bits,’ I say, which is true.

  ‘That’s helpful, nutcase.’ He coughs and splutters. ‘God, I feel awful.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s nothing,’ I say, which is not true. It is not nothing to leave your family with frozen stew while you spend your evening, and theirs, making Lemsip in London for someone else.

  Moving around the bedroom, I pick up Angus’s trousers from the floor where he has dropped them. They have collapsed like an accordion, with his pants and socks concertinaed inside them. They look like cartoon characters that have been run over by a car and squashed entirely flat. I met a woman once, from Makuyu, in Kenya. A party was given in our village, to celebrate the twinning of our local secondary school with the high school in Makuyu. The woman’s husband was there as well, tall and impressive, dressed in long robes of cream and burnt umber in tie-dyed patterns. He ate sausages on sticks and slices of damp, floppy quiche whilst numbers of Englishwomen in chunky Peruvian sweaters questioned him earnestly. He stood at least a head and a half taller than most of them and with their autumn skin and hair they looked overcast, like greying spirits that might fade in his summery proximity. I don’t recall what got us on to the subject but with very little English on her part and zero Swahili on mine, the man’s wife and I managed comfortably to establish that despite the divisions of continents and cultures, both of our husbands dropped their pants into their trousers and their trousers on to their socks, and the whole lot on to the floor, when undressing for bed.

  I fold Angus’s trousers and put them on the chair in the corner of the room. They’re brown cords, soft and faint at the knees. I run my thumb across the worn areas. I am overwhelmed by how much I love this man. His underpants and socks I drop into the laundry basket in the bathroom. On the floor beside the bed there is the Arts and Books section from last weekend’s newspaper, discarded; on the bedside table, a tablet strip now empty of paracetamol, its sharp, white plastic bent up at one end; and a glass, cloudy with use, with a chalky smudge across its base where the last of the water it contained has evaporated.

  I stop. Something isn’t right. I shut my eyes, concentrate, open them again. In the half-light, I see two small faces. It is the twins in their cot-beds, watching me as I draw the curtains, raising their arms in unison to be held and kissed: ‘Mummy, Mummy, me first! Me first!’ They are three years old. Or rather, they were.

  The boat groans and lists. It is never quite the same, always moving slightly, always bearing risks – of the ingress of water, or breakages; subject to the vicissitudes of weather and tides.

  From the bed, Angus says, ‘God, this storm’s severe. The piano’s going to need tuning again after all this rock ’n’ roll.’

  ‘Not really the best thing for a piano, foundations made of water.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I’m a chump. Tell me, how long do I have you, my darling?’ From his easy tone, I can tell he is thinking another night.

  ‘Three hours.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The girls have an assembly tomorrow first thing, for parents.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I think we’re all supposed to—’

  He says it’s fine, he doesn’t need the details.

  I ask if there’s anything else I can do for him before I go.

  He says there isn’t.

  Then he says, actually, he has a question he has been meaning to ask.

  Mark says, ‘France?!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘A long weekend.’

  ‘I see.’

  I explain that I haven’t agreed to it yet. I say, ‘He has a recital, for one of his private clients; some Euro-Fatcat he’s played for for years.’

  Mark says he doesn’t need the details.

  ‘Obviously, I don’t have to go. Nothing’s fixed. I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘What you do is your affair.’

  When I ask him, is he being sarcastic? he says, ‘What would be the point of that?’

  In a sizeable chateau near the mountains, on Lake Annecy, Angus is playing Chopin and Schubert for sixteen people, with a bit of Scarlatti and Clementi on the side.

  He explained his client to me before we came: a banker, Swiss, too rich and too flawless but – honestly – a nice guy nonetheless.

  ‘A banker? Jesus, Angus.’

  ‘I know. But Verity’s coming out of the water next summer. It’ll pay for her hull to be stripped. And the grub is exceptional. Worth going for that alone.’

  I imagined a Swiss-styled French chateau: ivory stone exterior, brocaded interior, everything quiet; furniture padded against the coarseness of life outside.

  ‘We’ll have to take a few formal clothes,’ Angus warned.

  ‘It’s not cravat territory, is it?’

  He said, ‘I promise you, it’ll be fun.’

  I thought of Alan Bennett asking the actress Coral Browne, during a telephone conversation, the whereabouts of her husband (the actor Vincent Price). She replied that he was in America ‘at the opening of something’. The opening of what? Alan Bennett enquired. A film? A museum? Coral Browne had no idea. ‘Oh, you know Vinnie, darling,’ she replied. ‘He’d go to the opening of a manhole cover.’

  I thought, Call me Vinnie. I’d go anywhere, with Angus.

  The first few times Angus and I spent together we went out on minor errands dressed up as jaunts and excursions: Tesco, the car wash, the post office and a key-cutting kiosk. They could have been the Royal Opera House for all I cared. I wanted only the proximity of shared experience with this man. In fact, the more prosaic the activity, the better, for the intimacy it implied. Our very first trip of this kind was to Homebase to buy some light bulbs. We might have been choosing an engagement ring, for the brightness it generated in us.

  Now, hundreds of miles away, I am missing nothing more than the ordinary. Just a usual weekend: get up; do stuff; have lunch; do less; then supper, which bears us into the last segment of the day, with its bath-times and bedtime stories. But the ordinary is the constitution and I cannot help but feel that I have violated it. I see, too, that this is all it takes: a quick bolt on Eurostar and I am spirited away like a character in a fairy tale – the mother who is gone – and my children’s routine is interrupted, if ever so carefully. I have left their favourite suppers, cooked ahead. I have bought special puddings, written a comprehensive list,
reminded Mark of the babysitter’s number. ‘Remote control,’ Mark calls it.

  In the evenings, however, in the Swiss plutocrat’s chateau, I wear silk dresses and my best jewellery, and Angus, in the nicest sense, wears me. He is visibly proud. Eating butter-soft slices of duck with potatoes shredded like matchsticks, my regret dissolves as I relax, knowing that my children are now sleeping and I am here to be entertained and perhaps also to entertain, in return. Our host is charming, his other guests are friendly and the conversation rich. I enjoy it all very much. Beside an Alpine lake streaked silver by a plump moon, and with Angus across the table, I am blissfully happy. Who wouldn’t be?

  Angus says, ‘Oh, that went far too fast.’

  I say, ‘It really did.’

  Mark says, ‘We managed fine without Mummy, didn’t we, girls.’

  Arrivals and departures hang over us all, like clouds.

  My sense of panic at waking in the wrong place increases manifestly. These days, when I am on Verity, I get up in the middle of the night. I look out over the river. Orange neon reflects back. Overboard, I think. I have fallen overboard and here I am, waiting for the tide to sweep me somewhere, to wash me up.

  Angus sleeps. I have never known him anxious to the point of wakefulness. He shuts his eyes and drifts off, his feet and hands twitching like a dog giving chase in a dream until he comes to rest, his breathing a soft, steady snore. If I move, his grip around me tightens, unconsciously. I envy him. I cannot match his sense of where I belong.

  Increasingly, when sleep arrives, dreams become nightmares. Everyday worries are swollen into menacing versions of themselves as I search for my daughters in stretches of black ocean. The light is gone, my panic increases, and only as the water dips and then rises into a thundering wall above me, do I comprehend that Mel and Miranda were never mine in the first place; that I am not a mother after all, and I am not married. Mark and our babies do not exist. I am a woman alone when once I was a woman, peopled. Alone, and soon to be overcome.