My House Is Falling Down Read online

  He releases me and looks down into my upturned face. Conspicuously, he is happy. I am shaking. I take a slight, faltering step backwards and we stand quietly, inches apart. He raises his right hand and with the back of it softly strokes my right cheek.

  Don’t take your hand away.

  He takes his hand away.

  I look out of the large window. The rain is easing.

  ‘Ah, look,’ says Angus, following my gaze. ‘There’s a break in the clouds. Come with me to the kitchen and I’ll make us some tea. We can enjoy the light better in there.’

  I will tell Mark. I will explain to him what has happened. I will tell my husband I didn’t kiss Angus and if he asks me if I wanted to I will answer him honestly. I will tell him everything I am feeling at this moment because we promised each other we would never lie and if there is one promise I know I can keep, it is that; and because he knows me he will understand.

  ‘I didn’t kiss him.’

  ‘I don’t need to know.’

  ‘But I didn’t, I swear.’

  ‘Then spare me the details.’

  ‘There aren’t any.’

  ‘Fine.’

  My head swims. I recall the dizziness I felt on the boat. I think, Is this really now?

  I ask, ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  I don’t know. What I do know is that I want suddenly to have a knock-down, drag-out row with Mark in which I can accuse him of being cold and unreachable, though I am clearly in the wrong and should instead be grateful that I have a husband so strongly disinclined to outright opposition – even in this painful instance – that he will resort to silence rather than stoop to a raised voice. There is no situation in which Mark does not enjoy pursuing logic to its logical conclusion and if pressed, he can be derisive, even caustic, but he is more wont to adopt an attitude of lofty dispensation than antagonism. This often makes people feel patronized, which troubles him not in the least: he has a reason for repudiating conflict and it is sound.

  That he wishes now to suspend discussion of marital transgression should not surprise me: I’ve often thought that if Mark could erase all evidence of vulnerability from himself he would, so that others wishing to know or care for him would encounter stamina and resourcefulness in place of a range of identifiable susceptibilities. I’ve sometimes wondered – aside from desire and fascination – what fundamental thing attracted me to him. Why did I marry a man who so strongly rejects help of any kind? Was it because I wanted to help him or because I knew I would never have to?

  Yet today, when I might respectfully accept Mark’s wish for quiet and even use it to my advantage (so I may creep away privately to assess my own shortcomings), all I want is a fight. I need something ruthless to happen. He seems so unjustifiably composed that I want to rough him up with my guilt and resentment; I want to scream, ‘This is how you always win! This is how you always get what you want! You turn away and you will never hear me out. Damn you. Just damn you.’

  Instead, I put my hand on my husband’s arm to get his attention and when at last he looks me in the eye I say, ‘Nothing happened, I promise.’

  ‘Please,’ he says. ‘I’m busy. Just leave it.’

  For days after Angus, I lay siege to the notion of love at first sight. Stupid. Illogical. Fanciful. And yet because I cannot explain myself to myself, slowly I give up, I give in. I don’t know what is happening to me, except that something has already started to demolish what I can only think of as some internal rule of law, some code I had never thought to question. And whilst this sense of being dismantled is gradual, it is definitive also: my certitude, my faith in my own judgement, is utterly awry. This is what it’s like to lose your reason. This must be what is meant by madness.

  And yet, the truth is this: the very first time I saw Angus I thought to myself, This is a man I could love, and nothing could have felt more sane. I don’t know why. The systemic conviction, the capsizing of previous certainties, is something I will never be able to explain, either to myself or anyone else. It wasn’t even like a normal thought when it happened, it was more of a sensation – a voltaic jolt of inevitability and recognition combined. The lightning strike. Bang through every part of me. I guess that’s precisely why people talk about lightning strikes, why they seem appropriate for moments like this. Piercing, scorching and electrifying, and once experienced, irreversible.

  The confusion is mind-blowing.

  Family life continues. The children go to school. Clothes are washed and meals produced but I no longer feel the ground beneath my feet. I float through the hours in a state of incomprehension, all ordinary plans supplanted by thoughts of Angus. I am surprised when it is time to go to bed and yet another day has passed.

  Mark goes to London to visit his agent and a gallery owner; he is planning a retrospective next winter. On the days when I am out at work he warms up the shepherd’s pies and chicken casseroles I have cooked for the girls. In between-times we talk almost non-stop, as if by doing so we will reimagine a narrative strong enough to overcome our disturbance and disorientation. All I want to talk about is Angus. I don’t, of course. It would be indecent.

  Oddly, we laugh quite a lot, much more than you might expect a couple to do when one person is in danger of falling overboard and the other is understandably stunned. Why is this? Our humour has admittedly assumed a darker complexion – sometimes it feels like a kind of demented release – but perhaps this is not as weird as it seems. I have no idea. Who knows how anyone else negotiates stuff like this?

  We still niggle at one another. Occasionally, we raise our voices but we stop short of fighting. I think we are too terrified to do that. Instead, we reiterate everything that binds us and consider it evidence of fresh insight. We zoom in on our capacity to enjoy one another’s company, run two jobs, and raise children together. Putting out the rubbish in the early-morning damp we remind ourselves of the fundaments of teamwork. While I lie in the bath and Mark brushes his teeth we agree that family matters most, yet in bed we are quiet, deflated.

  ‘We’re still us,’ Mark whispers, his arms around my waist.

  But doubt is there. It has interposed itself into the present.

  Night-times, I lie awake. Beneath a plain, white-covered duvet, Angus’s emerald-and-gold bedspread occupies me.

  Mark props himself up on one elbow. He pulls the duvet down a little, strokes my shoulder. I freeze.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘I just want to be close to you.’

  ‘You are close to me. We’re close to each other.’

  ‘You’re close to the girls, Luce.’

  I think of them, fast asleep, in rooms either side of ours. Most nights we look at them sleeping and marvel at the love they arouse. When Mark sleeps, it is very easy to love him, too: recumbent, he is within my grasp, unguarded and vulnerable. Sometimes at night, I reach out and stroke his hair.

  I pull the duvet back up.

  ‘I’m cold.’

  Mark rests the back of his hand on my face.

  ‘You are.’

  He says we should have more sex.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Isn’t the average married couple at it at least twice a week?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  I don’t, is the answer, and I am scared that it may be true; that beyond the four walls of our home, everyone else is at it hammer and tongs whilst we sleep fitfully beside each other, tense and vacillating. Mark’s amatory decree has brought to the fore a hollowness that has been troubling me, and made more conspicuous a lassitude I have been trying hard to ignore. Yet with it comes a sense of relief that runs counter to this soul-sapping indifference, a sudden surge of pride in my husband for being a man who never beats about the bush. I am grateful. Mark has spared us both a drawn-out confession. He could have done otherwise.

  ‘Do you think we could be bored?’ I ask.

  ‘What, us?’

  ‘Ye
s.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  I think Mark thinks we’re above boredom, and perhaps I do, too. And I am wondering whether it is the lie we have assumed as a truth – that we are somehow immune to ennui; that shared projects and busy lives may protect us from everything, including wearied physical appetites. Dullness and apathy is not our currency, Mark’s and mine, at least not as far as we’re concerned: we deal in vivid colour and joint enterprise; it’s what we do, the way we define ourselves. It is how, as one, we evade the grey areas. So, we don’t talk about the things that are wrong with us. I think we honestly believe there isn’t anything. Hubris doesn’t even begin to cover it.

  In the meantime, emails fly back and forth.

  ‘You just come again,’ Angus writes, ‘as soon as you are able. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.’

  I say, ‘Angus has asked me for supper.’

  Mark shrugs.

  I seek permission.

  Mark says, ‘Not mine to give.’

  I suspect he believes we are bulletproof.

  Angus is wearing his Nordic-style cardigan again, and a pair of navy cords.

  ‘Cords,’ my best friend Di used to say. ‘Don’t get me started on cords. Or cardigans. Kiss of death.’

  When I was twenty-one, I had a date with a divorced forty-something man in tomato-red corduroys and it is something Di has chosen not to forget. He turned up at our flat with his wavy, blonde hair parted so strictly to one side that he looked like an exile from a BBC drama set in the forties and immediately I was overcome with such strong distaste that the thought of a whole evening with him filled me with panic. He wasn’t wearing a cardigan, which might have added further period integrity to his look: he was sporting a navy-blue blazer, with anchors embossed on its brass buttons.

  Di smiled apologetically at him as she tugged me forcibly by one arm into the kitchen.

  ‘Are you serious?’ she hissed. ‘He looks like a Tory MP!’

  ‘Well, he isn’t.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Not a hundred per cent sure.’

  ‘Don’t give me that.’

  I admitted that he insured ships for the UAE government from a glass-walled office in Blackfriars.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God! That’s almost worse! Where did you find him?’

  ‘A party.’ I pulled away from her. ‘And what’s with the Catholic invocation? You’re an atheist.’

  ‘Religious people swear better. Were they all ancient at this party or were there other options?’

  ‘I like ancient. They usually have something to say for themselves.’

  ‘But he’s not even your type.’

  ‘He’s interesting to talk to. Look, I’m not planning on sleeping with him.’

  ‘What’s the point, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I just want a date.’

  ‘Well, Jesus, who doesn’t? But keep it simple! Pull a bloke in a club like the rest of us and be done with a simple once-over, why don’t you?’

  ‘I hate clubs. I hate once-overs. You know that.’

  ‘You’re a freak.’

  I wonder what Di would think of me now, leaning against Angus’s kitchen cupboard and watching him slice an onion into tiny pieces and with a long-bladed knife sweep its luminous splinters into a casserole dish of sizzling butter. He chops potatoes, carrots and red peppers into chunks and adds them to the gently frying onions, along with some diced pork, fresh sage and stock; then he sloshes in some white wine, stirs the whole lot, places a lid on the casserole dish and turns the gas down low. There is a pleasing rhythm and ease to his movements. I believe it may be contentment.

  ‘Hello?’ he murmurs. ‘What are you smiling about?’

  In some partially unfolded greaseproof paper on the worktop is a slab of brie, discharging itself around the edges. An unopened packet of Bath Oliver biscuits stands alongside. Angus, it seems, is planning an extended evening.

  ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘Really? Well, you look very cheerful, that’s for sure.’ He opens the fridge door, pulls out a bottle of white wine, raises it: ‘Yes?’

  At the table, we toast one another. Between us, there are fresh lilies, white. Ah yes, I think, perfect confessional flowers.

  ‘What’s this wood?’ I tap the table. ‘Is it elm?’

  ‘It is! I’m impressed! Beautiful grain, don’t you think?’

  I trace the swirls of the grain, elongated like isobars, and wide apart. High pressure. A warm front.

  ‘Lovely. You know that elm was used to make ships’ keels because it bent well and didn’t split?’

  ‘I do, actually.’

  ‘Right, but the strange thing is, it’s only resistant to water if it’s submerged. If you put elm wood on to wet ground it rots.’

  ‘Really? Now, that I did not know.’

  ‘It also doesn’t burn very well; it spits a lot. You don’t want it on an open fire.’

  Angus grins and shakes his head, as if he has just heard a good joke.

  ‘You really are a very surprising woman,’ he says. ‘You and your wood.’

  ‘Not really,’ I reply. ‘And anyway, these days I only chop the stuff up occasionally. It’s a very long time since I went up a tree, except for the fun of climbing it.’

  ‘That in itself still sets you apart somewhat.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Every woman I can think of.’

  ‘Perhaps you need to think differently, or meet more women.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I like the one sitting right here. The first-ever tree surgeon to do so.’

  On a crash course, it can take as little as eight weeks to become a tree surgeon but I took four months because I had two other part-time jobs at the time and not much spare cash. It seemed easier on both my bank account and my body, to take a little time; it spread the pain, in both senses. I was twenty-two, and for nearly a year I worked as an assistant cutter for the Forestry Commission in north Wales, where the scenery proved so enticing that I found myself armed with my camera almost as often as my chainsaw, and eventually, my growing interest in photography overrode my childish desire to prove that I could cut it in a job that really irritated my parents.

  Photography was my first attempt at doing something I genuinely enjoyed. I felt capable when armed with a camera and comfortable with the conflicting senses of immersion and detachment that it produced. When I met Mark, I was on a one-year foundation course at Oxford Poly, and soon afterwards I began to take wedding pictures for friends, specializing in images of the things people generally don’t see before the event, like a marquee refusing to stay up in a high wind and the caterers in extremis, or guests having a fag, or a disagreement, or a change of clothes in the car park. There was nothing special about them – these days such images are commonplace – but back then, they were popular.

  For a while, I dreamed of being a good landscape photographer and thought maybe I could part-fund my travels that way but it was a tough market stuffed with talented and established people, and though a couple of agencies were happy to put some of my images into stock no one wanted to pay me much. I can see why. Although my early landscape photographs were tonally well-balanced and quite pretty they lacked theme and punch. In short, they were not really pictures you would look at twice. So, I learned to take photographs that gave the viewer somewhere more interesting to go. I came to understand the importance of the unexpected and no longer sought composure but disquiet. In amongst my favourite images a pack of skittering cats interrupts the passage of a wedding party in Udaipur; and in a panoramic shot of the Wadi Qelt desert in Israel, a nomadic woman is just visible bottom left, running into the frame, alone – her movement and sense of dispatch both affecting and faintly unreal in such a vast, lunar-like space.

  Later still, with Mark’s unforgiving eye on mine, I found myself on the lookout for quirks that previously had intimidated me. Geometric shadows and the blunt shock of dark abutting light at an acute
angle grew as alluring to me as a honey-lit human face or a near-flawless vista messed up around one edge. I experimented for a while with the surprise of shapes and I surprised myself. In my first picture to win an award, a wild pig is snuffling through a rubbish pile in Giza while a boy looks on impassively; the Sphinx is clearly visible in the top right-hand corner of the photograph. The point is not the juxtaposition of filthy swine with iconic monument: the pig with its foraging snout has exhumed a cardboard box bearing the word Pepsi along one side, the boy is drinking a bottle of Pepsi, and a billboard advertising Pepsi is visible in the background, in soft focus. Each flourish of red script moves in imperfect diagonal steps across the image. The picture is called America.

  ‘What about now?’ Angus asks. ‘Is it only portraits?’

  ‘Yes, mainly. I still like landscapes but we don’t really travel together now, Mark and I. Not since the kids were born. He goes alone.’

  ‘That sounds a bit lonely.’

  ‘He loves it.’

  ‘No, for you, I mean.’

  ‘I’m okay. The twins keep me occupied.’

  ‘I’m sure they do. Shame about the tree surgery, though. Sounds funky.’