My House Is Falling Down Read online

In London, in the flat I shared with two old school friends who had proper jobs with moral purpose (trainee teacher, trainee physiotherapist), the bookshelves in my tiny room were covered with the totems of my travels: wooden bowls, pottery, seashells, pebbles, small carved animals, and sticks stroked smooth by the oceans. On my return from Harare I removed some bookshelves altogether to make room for my photographs. Space was tight, I wanted visual inspiration, so some literature had to go. Twentieth-century authors survived the transition but Jane Austen and her ilk were relocated to Oxfam. My rebellion was complete.

  Disappointment comes in many forms. My loose-fitting life with its ill-defined perimeters did little for my parents. I stretched their comprehension to its limits. They were exasperated by the walls that no longer displayed rows of orange-spined Penguin paperbacks but instead, in A4 clip-frames from WHSmith, images of pearl-toothed Zimbabwean toddlers, the pyramids at Giza, and a pleasing range of Middle Eastern sunsets. My parents saw no potential for intellectual satisfaction in the arenas that I chose and little to justify what seemed to them a promiscuous attitude to culture in general. That I could reside briefly in Bombay and learn no Hindi bewildered my mother, especially. I was only there for four months, working mainly with a bunch of Australian rugby jocks and Dutch primary school teachers – the latter group spoke perfect English – but she was unconvinced. My tendency to hop from one place to another, investing in each no more than temporary interest, was about as close to whoring as she could imagine, only more demeaning.

  In our family, foreign excursions came with the territory that was my parents’ lot: public appearances, talks and conferences took them to the furthest reaches of a number of university campuses and as children, my brother and I sometimes went, too. We were invited to eat home-made ice cream with a history professor at Harvard, offered a bumpy ride across Sydney Harbour in a speedboat owned by the Director General of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and permitted to stroke the husky dogs in Tromsø that belonged to the only doctor in the Arctic Circle with a special interest in tropical medicine. That my own progress across continents should be motivated by neither academic pursuit nor pilgrim intent but instead be a means to an end in itself, my parents simply did not understand.

  ‘Peripatetic,’ I once said to my father, ‘that’s all I am. Nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘There’s plenty wrong with it,’ he replied, ‘including the fact that peripatetic implies a certain nomadic grandeur, or at least a vague sense of purpose. Itinerant is I think the word you want.’

  ‘Tramp’ came to mind. I thought about my backpack, of which I was proud. Battle-scarred, it had been crushed beneath the wheels of a bus in Victoria Falls and stained by stray splatters of engine oil when strapped to the rear of a sputtering 1972 Enfield Bullet on which I hitched a lift to Varanasi with a gay nurse from Auckland, named Ron; a nice guy.

  Stung, I retorted, ‘Okay then, so how about “drifter”? “Wanderer”?’

  ‘They’ll do, too,’ my father remarked, vaguely. ‘By the way,’ he continued, jabbing at the paper in front of him, ‘when did you last read anything worthwhile?’

  I stared at him. Perusing the London Review of Books over his little frameless glasses his nose was wrinkled as if he were taking issue not only with me but with the premise of the article he was reading. His hair was tousled and sun-streaked and his arms brown: he was still in his tennis gear from early that morning. ‘Prof Hollywood’, they call him at the university – not on account of his TV films but his appearance. He looks like Robert Redford.

  Sod you, I thought. I love my dad, but still.

  My mother for a change put to one side her concerns about my lazy mind and lack of ambition and was merely relieved I wasn’t raped or murdered. I was robbed, three times to be precise, and found myself in plenty of dodgy situations with men but they were par for the course and mostly easy to handle. Only once did I wonder earnestly whether I would successfully exit a car unharmed by its two male occupants. Yet while she remained unaware of the genuine dangers I had permitted myself, my mother was as disappointed as my father by my repudiation of a livelihood – any livelihood – they thought worth writing home about.

  Meanwhile, my brother Ed charted with care and purpose his route to distinction in a single, hard discipline. Decorated with prizes and plaudits, including gold-dust student placements in Tokyo and Berlin, he was mentored by Vladimir Ashkenazy and – in the very same month that I secured a summer job making cheese-and-ham toasties in the Penzance Lido Snack Shack – invited to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra for the first time, aged only twenty-five.

  By the time I was twenty-five myself, defending the liberty of a baseless and impecunious lifestyle had worn thin. I fancied myself as a travel photographer but floating around with a camera was lonely and I knew the way forward financially was more likely the recording of local weddings and children’s portraits than colourful Eastern spice markets. I longed for an anchor and knew that I needed to tether myself to something solid: my friends were all toiling or roosting. Un-garlanded, I was an embarrassment to my parents. Until, that is, aged twenty-six, I became engaged to Mark. Only then was I released from the pressure to prove myself. My own shortcomings were no less extant but in my parents’ eyes they were moderated by my future husband’s excellence. I had wound up with a man of calibre. I wondered whether to feel relieved.

  ‘My home,’ says Angus, as I stand and look around me.

  ‘What’s it like?’ I had written in an email. ‘I’m fascinated.’

  ‘It’s not a narrow-boat like the ones you see on the canals, it’s a former Dutch timber barge. It’s no beauty on the outside but it’s pretty big, with two proper storeys – it’s about 1,000 square feet which is more than enough for me. I bought it in the seventies as a shell because it was dirt-cheap and I rebuilt it with a couple of mates, which is why it’s a bit of a hotch-potch. It’s all changed along here since then. It had a lovely, artsy vibe when I was younger but now it’s sadly rather smart and wealthy (neither of which I am!), though you still can’t beat the view of the river. But why don’t you come and see for yourself? Houseboat Verity, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, SW10.’

  Before me is an open-plan, blonde interior of pale walls, flaxen sofa, creamy floorboards and glass tables. It has the unifying pallor of a place suggestive of life but not properly inhabited and quite suddenly a 1970s hotel suite in a James Bond film springs to mind; I am half-expecting a shagpile carpet. Angus’s home, with its soft, light appearance, seems somewhat incompatible with its imposing, charcoal-maned occupant.

  But then, like a mist lifting over a town to reveal the edges of buildings and trees, details come gradually into sharp relief. The shock of the new – the shock of being here at all – has temporarily blinded me to the long row of bookshelves all the way up and along one wall. Hardbacks, paperbacks and music scores are clearly divided but jammed together or piled on top of one another horizontally where space has become tight. A separate section of the shelves, with specially designed, small compartments, is crammed with CDs, many hundreds – no, more like thousands – of them.

  At the end of the room, in front of a huge picture window, is a Steinway grand piano in toffee-coloured wood, the Thames its backdrop. The piano lid is halfway up. Three modern landscape paintings in oil (two of them are on the slant, I notice, wishing immediately to correct their angles) are on the wall opposite, interspersed by some etchings; and an inundation of wool blankets in deep reds and blues – Scottish wool perhaps, or Welsh – spill from a large wicker basket on the floor at one end of the sofa. The rug behind the sofa, that abuts the long windows at the boat’s prow, is Persian, with borders and motifs in sapphire and scarlet, and in all of it I see what I missed at first: the joyous colour and mild disarray of a life in process.

  ‘Oh, it’s amazing.’

  ‘I am so glad you like it!’ Angus’s eyes crinkle with pleasure. ‘It’s me, really, this place. I’ve been here all my life; wel
l, all my adult life, anyway.’

  His hands are stuffed deep into the pockets of a navy-blue-and-grey-speckled cardigan: it’s baggy and the wool is thick and coarse; it has a Nordic air about it. Now, in a broad gesture that embraces this marine home of his, Angus stretches his arms out wide so that the cardigan momentarily becomes wings. Beneath the cardigan wings is a blue cotton shirt with a subtle flowery pattern and beneath that a pair of dark blue cords with an attractive plain brown leather belt. I imagine a moment of undoing.

  ‘My darling,’ he says, ‘let me take your coat.’

  My darling.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He moves behind me and my overcoat slides into his waiting hands.

  ‘You look wonderful,’ he says.

  I am wearing a short dark green skirt, a white shirt and long, black boots. A substantial gold rope chain that once belonged to Mark’s mother Jane is around my neck and a heavy gold bangle that Mark gave me on our first wedding anniversary is on my left wrist. I would be lying if I said that – this time – I had given my appearance little thought. My mother used to do that and it was annoying: I remember thinking that the least she could do was admit to the trouble she took.

  By the front door, where assorted jackets hang, and shoes are lined in rows, Angus places my coat on a chunky wooden peg. I notice the highly polished, black slip-on boots, the heavy winter lace-ups and two pairs of beaten-up deck shoes, those slip-ons that are really plain old moccasins but with a name to suggest place and purpose, and with it the implication that you will never slip and break your ankle on deck with these on your feet. And maybe you won’t, although presumably the real point is this: you have the shoes, you have the boat, you are a dude.

  A phone rings, its sound muffled.

  ‘Damn,’ says Angus, hesitating.

  ‘It’s no problem. Answer it.’

  ‘It can wait. You said this would be a flying visit. I mustn’t waste a second of you.’

  ‘I shan’t disappear while you take a call. Please do.’

  ‘Okay.’ He rummages in his trouser pocket, pulls out his mobile. ‘Hello? Ah Richard, hello! Can you hang on a second? I have a friend visiting.’

  He covers the phone with his hand. ‘Actually, I probably should deal with this if you honestly don’t mind? I’m so sorry. I won’t be more than a couple of minutes. Please, go downstairs and wander round. Make yourself at home.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ he smiles. ‘I’ll join you in a jiffy.’

  The stairs are steep and I have to mind my head going down. A long corridor, also book-lined, runs the length of the boat ahead of me, and a row of portholes are dotted at regular intervals high up along its right-hand side. They are too high to see out of. On the left at the bottom of the stairs is a small room that has the subdued look of a spare bedroom, its double bed covered by a dark blue cotton bedspread, with books covering one wall and a free-standing mirror leaning against another. The room is dark, lit by just four high portholes, facing east. There are some cardboard boxes piled in one corner of the room, a newish-looking folding bicycle leaning against them.

  In the next room along, tiled in large white squares, is a generous-sized shower behind a large sheet of glass. I notice a pair of grey sweatpants draped over a chrome towel rail, and the smell of coal tar soap.

  At the end of the corridor, its bleached floorboards covered with a Persian runner that is fraying at the edges, I pause – a doubtful intruder – before entering Angus’s bedroom. Its size surprises me. It stretches across the boat’s entire width, with portholes along both sides. Through the ones to the east I can see the dark bulk of a hull, of the boat next door. The light through the ones to the west is unimpeded and even though clouds are gathering and it is just beginning to rain, they admit the last of the diluted afternoon sun. A weak splash of wintry light swims fleetingly across the bed as I enter the room, briefly illuminating one half of the bedspread, which is rich and heavy, a patchwork tapestry of cottons and silks in indigo, emerald and gold.

  Above the bed is an abstract oil painting of a horse’s head, neck and back. The horse’s head is thrown back, its mane awry and its nostrils flared. I lean closer to the painting, scrutinize the brushstrokes. It is interestingly turbulent but a bit too fussy. I don’t like it.

  On a low table beside the bed is a small pile of books. I cast my eye down their spines: a biography of Ella Fitzgerald; a Danish thriller; a recently published account of the Second World War. I notice that Angus sleeps on the same side of the bed as I do, or so I assume from the book pile. I scan the top of a large mahogany chest of drawers – Victorian, by the looks of it – for framed photographs. There are none.

  In the bathroom that leads off Angus’s bedroom there is a sizeable oval bath, sleek and modern, white, with one elegant, chrome mixer tap placed centrally. The wall behind the bath is mirrored, which gives an effective impression of depth in what is otherwise quite a narrow room. On the floor, a pair of hand-weights rests beside a copy of Private Eye. A navy-blue towelling bathrobe hangs on the back of the door. The aftershave I failed to recognize at the concert is on a shelf to one side of the basin. I peer closely at the label.

  ‘How do you like it?’

  Angus is in the doorway. He makes me jump.

  ‘Your aftershave?’

  He laughs.

  ‘No. My pad.’

  ‘I think it’s a fantastic pad.’

  ‘Oh, thank you. I’m genuinely pleased.’

  ‘I do quite like your aftershave, too.’

  ‘Do you now?’ says Angus, one eyebrow raised. ‘Well, that’s very good to know.’

  Upstairs, we contemplate the piano.

  ‘Play me something.’

  ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Anything. Not jazz.’

  ‘You don’t like jazz?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My darling girl, you haven’t lived!’

  He sits. He raises his hands above the keyboard, pauses, then releases them; they descend upon the keys like two birds coming to ground. He plays the opening of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Oh, I should have known he’d pull a stunt like that. Who wouldn’t, if they could? Who would resist co-opting a virtuoso to invoke such easy surrender in the listener, with those opening notes, that cadence that rolls smoothly, effortlessly downhill and into the distance? And who would not be taken captive? I listen to Angus play and everything around me – the pictures, books and rain-streaked views outside – begins to blur; and as if I am pulling away from my life, disconnected from everything but the potency of the music, I sense myself separating. A dizziness I remember from childhood overcomes me, the kind I recall from banging my head too hard during a rough-and-tumble game, a soaring light-headedness that disembodies you temporarily before the pain kicks in. I feel removed, as if in some way I do not apply.

  Confused, I seek bearings. I glance out of the window to the river beyond but because the view is foreign the sensation of abstraction intensifies and for a few seconds, maybe more, I do not understand where I am. This moment – its peculiar fullness – seems to belong in another phase. My thoughts expand and contract and reduce finally to the plainest longing: I want to put my head in Angus’s lap. I want his fingers in my hair. I whisper something unsayable to him, under my breath. He will not hear it.

  Outside, a sudden volley of raindrops beats against the windows.

  Angus has stopped playing. He is staring down at the keys, as if mildly surprised by what he discovered there.

  ‘That was beautiful.’

  He turns sideways on the piano stool and looks up at me.

  ‘Bach,’ he replies, with a contented sigh. ‘A great jazz musician.’

  ‘So some people say.’

  ‘They do indeed. You told me you play.’

  ‘Yes, but nothing like you, obviously. You’re a professional musician.’

  ‘Play me something, Lucy.’

  ‘You must be kidding.’

/>   ‘Go on.’

  ‘No way. I’m honestly no good.’

  ‘For me? Just something?’

  ‘No,’ I repeat.

  Especially not for you.

  He rises from the piano stool.

  ‘Tell me, Lucy,’ he asks, ‘do you always say no?’

  His tone, quite suddenly, is assertive, and now the troubling, heady strangeness of the situation threatens to engulf me. In over my head I am, and how fast – how alarmingly fast – I am being swept along on this stretch of wide, grey water. I try to summon up my children, like a talisman, to keep me safe from where I am this minute, to detain me, prevent me from being carried away by a man in a boat. I picture my daughters, hair round their shoulders, glued to cartoons, oblivious to everything around them, including their mother. But the image has no imaginative force. Everything about it is situated elsewhere, so far away that it may as well not exist.

  ‘No,’ I reply, and Angus, correctly interpreting my sly, single-syllabled equivocation as the invitation that it is, takes a couple of steps towards me; and as he carefully inserts himself into my vision so that I can see nothing but him my memories of previous first encounters – thrilling discomposures long since safely archived – threaten suddenly to re-tell themselves in the present. Now, I understand all too clearly where I am. I am on the boundary of probity and licentiousness where good sense may prevail but folly and desire may, too. My weaknesses are declaring themselves but until either discretion or intemperance proves stronger I will remain at a border crossing, with no patrol here but myself. This is the last safe point. Beyond it, things will happen.

  I realize the seriousness of this. I remember only too well what it is like never to have felt this way before; I am perfectly acquainted with that exquisite half-truth. Yet I never expected to encounter such complications again: I’m married; I thought I was safe. Compelled and stalled in equal measure by the promises and apprehensions of possibility, I hold back. I cannot endorse what I want to do, for my husband is real and I love him, so when it happens, when Angus lowers his head to kiss me on the lips, I turn my face away and stand, transported, as he kisses my hair instead – and then my neck, and after that my throat, and lower still, the V of skin unconcealed by my open-necked shirt. I close my eyes. I tell myself this is the most I can accept in the circumstances, convinced that I will need and want no more; that this will be sufficient for my future recollections of what might have happened but did not, this afternoon on the river. And while Angus’s lips brush my left ear, my hands find their way to his hips – but not to the small of his back or around his neck, in which my face is now buried, so I can assure myself that I am no real part of this. And as his breath warms my head and he kneads the back of my neck as tenderly as I once caressed my babies’ plump thighs, I believe I even congratulate myself for my self-control.