My House Is Falling Down Page 7

  Ssssseveral. Ssssseek. Sssssomething. Sssssuccinct.

  ‘That was a bit of a bummer,’ says Mark. ‘Suck-Sinkt. Not the easiest word.’

  Mark and I live in a couple of tiny farm cottages knocked into one, with a barn across the yard which the local planners won’t let anyone convert into a home, so instead we adapted the barn into a studio for Mark, with a bathroom and a sofa-bed at one end for visitors who want a bit of beams-and-rafters romance but don’t mind the discomfort. The house is small for four of us, and so low-ceilinged that Mark has to bend his head to get through its doorways, but the barn is why we bought the place. In its cavernous space, shared with a number of pipistrelle bats we are not at liberty to evacuate, Mark can spread out several large canvases at once. He keeps a set of drums in there, too, at some distance from his easels and frames, and sometimes in the evenings he wanders back over to the barn and beats the hell out of them. Judging by the look on his face when he’s at it, anyone watching him drumming would be forgiven for thinking that he is intensely angry, but he isn’t. He is simply abandoned. He used to look like that in bed, with me. He is at his least restrained when lost in a rhythm he can feel.

  I reckon Mark is pretty musical, which is heartbreaking for he has never heard a note above the D below Middle C. He can still just about detect it now, but only with the help of the powerful hearing aids that give him access to a narrow band of bass sound, and when I ask him what it sounds like he produces a raspish nuuurrrr from the back of his throat, off-key. In fact, you’d think that music would be the one thing Mark might have given a miss but he longs for song, so much so that with prodigious determination he learned the ballads – or at least a fair smattering of them – that found their way, unimpeded, into the consciousness of his teenage friends. With the television volume turned up full and lyrics written on pieces of paper torn from school exercise books, Mark would sit in front of Top of the Pops straining not only for the faintest sound but for its variation, riveted by the body language of the singers that itself provided important additional clues about pitch and mood. Self-teaching has been an essential instrument of Mark’s survival, so his commitment to memorizing tunes he would never hear himself was not the exercise in futility that some privately believed it to be. It was evidence of a childhood resolve not to be excluded from ordinary life more than he already was; not least from the sweet and easy pleasures of popular culture and the opportunities for camaraderie that it provided, that were so effortlessly enjoyed by his contemporaries.

  Now, he has a repertoire that begins with early Abba and ends around the time that Queen were on the wane and Chris de Burgh well into his stride, and somewhere along the line the bass beat of the Panorama theme tune found its way in. This was a notable exception, as a solo human voice is easier to decipher than a mess of instruments, and songs sung by individuals were much easier for Mark to learn than anything performed by groups – which accounts for a final collection with heavy leanings towards Eric Clapton, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, Lionel Richie and George Michael. Stalwarts admittedly, each of them, but deafness is not a prerequisite for broad musical taste.

  Mark works hard to stay in tune. He sings daily, expecting me to correct him when he slips off-key, which is lots. ‘Money, Money, Money’ is a breakfast-time favourite. I object to it on the grounds that money is an unseemly everyday subject when children are present but Mark doesn’t care. The truth is, I’m bored with it: we’ve been married sixteen years and that’s a lot of ‘Money, Money, Money’. ‘Lady in Red’ I get in bed quite often. ‘I Am Sailing’. ‘Wonderful Tonight’. Mark is by no means melodic and his higher register is grating but you would expect that and I’d be mad to object to a husband who wants to sing love songs to me. How many wives have that? ‘Dancing Queen’ he likes to dance to with the kids. If turned up loud enough anything with a strong, reverberative pulse that he can pick up through his feet will do but he has never known the perfect, aching beauty of Bach, Mozart or Handel: he will never experience the lavish grandeur of Beethoven, Schubert’s easy turn of phrase or the impeccable frugality of Corelli. He has no more concept of plainsong, or the tremulous echo of the countertenor, than the ping of a microwave oven. With all his might, he once bent his mind around three or four Verdi arias but tragically late, when he could hear nothing of them.

  When I met him, Mark’s life had already swerved off a number of courses it might otherwise have taken. It has never gone in quite the direction he wanted it to and while you could say the same is true for many people, for Mark deafness put paid to a lot of dreams – like becoming a drummer in a rock band or joining the army, under whose protective umbrella he was raised. Mark is built like his father, David, who was a brigadier. He has the same strong, dense body, the same spry intellect and a near-identical tenacity and resilience. He tends naturally towards the stringent and enjoys the requirements of demanding activities and tricky terrain, whether actual or metaphorical. He is more animated by impediments than anyone I’ve ever known. But the military doesn’t do a great line in deaf personnel. I don’t think the army would have suited him anyway.

  Painting does, however, requiring neither hearing nor extensive social intercourse. Mark likes best of all to paint landscapes, in oils mostly, though occasionally he switches to watercolours. He has painted quite a lot overseas, African skies and Greek seas for the London market, but the quixotic light and contrasts of the British landscape move him most. Even so, while his landscapes account for eighty per cent of his work, what mainly pay the bills are not moody Celtic panoramas but traditional, individual portraits. Opulent and splendid but visually articulate as well – which is what I believe sets them apart – they are mostly commissioned by banks, law firms and wealthy private-sector businesses, although there are lots of individual commissions, too. Mark has three pictures in the National Portrait Gallery now: two are of well-known British film actresses; the other, a controversial former Cabinet Minister. This has not only raised Mark’s profile but also tripled the value of his work.

  Painting is something Mark originally did in his spare time because he loves it and has real talent. Why he never went to art school I still don’t fully understand, and neither does his former art teacher, though he says it was because he never believed painting would make him a decent living. He was wrong. Mark’s serendipitous encounter with an investment banker, when he was at Oxford reading History, changed everything. The banker’s moderate-sized but prosperous firm was sponsoring a portrait prize through the university, so in between studying, swimming and sleeping with almost as many women as there were weeks in the year, Mark stretched a large canvas with some difficulty under the low eaves of his tiny college room and produced a huge, swaggering study of his best friend, Jay.

  Jay is a large, amiable African-American. He and Mark met at a Hampshire boarding school that was densely populated by confident, Anglo-Saxon sons of British professionals and they hit it off immediately; a couple of oddballs in a straitjacket. Jay’s father was an American film director of some note who travelled all over the world, his mother a film actress of Scottish descent who mainly stayed home in New York but had a thing about English public-school education. She liked the neo-Gothic architecture, said Jay, and all those sweeping lawns: they gave her a sense of history and space that she wished her son to appreciate and to aim for himself. She also felt strongly that Jay should be equipped with Latin and Greek. Jay’s white parents plucked him out of a hostel in Harlem when he was six months old, or so the story goes. Jay has always wondered about his drugged-out, teenage mother. I have, too. He is a magnificent man and she is missing out on him – if she is even alive, still. He’s a paediatrician now, in Truro.

  That painting changed Mark’s life. It features a glistening, vivacious Jay with a basketball under one arm and a viola partially balanced along the other. Ready to Play is its title, which is just the kind of appellation you come up with when you are twenty. The painting’s background is all swathes of rich, scarl
et velvet (a roll of which Mark found in a charity shop) and dark, mulch-green shadows. In the foreground, Jay is wearing tight running shorts that showcase his thighs to obvious advantage and a long, heavily brocaded jacket. It’s a dog’s breakfast of a portrait but it works really well. The baroque background is a piss-take but it gave Mark the chance to demonstrate his talent for painting cloth as well as skin.

  Ready to Play won First Prize – three thousand quid, which was a lot of money in the mid-eighties – plus a commission to undertake a traditional portrait of the firm’s outgoing chairman. Except that Mark’s portrait wasn’t traditional, in terms of ambience at least, because he managed to capture something essential and in this case distinctly discomfiting about the smooth-fleshed man inside the pinstripe. The picture so reeked of entitlement that you could practically smell the musk of expensive, old-fashioned shaving soap and the delicate, muzzy scent of cashmere from which the suit was made, warmed by the chairman inside it who looked as if he was rarely anything other than exactly the right temperature.

  Mark invested the three thousand quid immediately. He put the money towards a deposit on a tiny, one-bedroomed flat on the outskirts of Oxford that he rented to a couple of medical students. The rest of the deposit he borrowed from his father, although in three years he had paid it back with earnings from word-of-mouth commissions. By then, the property market had boomed and the flat was worth a mint so Mark took out a second mortgage and bought another one. By the time I met him, at a party when he was thirty-five and I was twenty-six, he owned two flats, one of which produced just enough income to allow him to paint full-time and one of which – in central Oxford – he lived in by himself.

  I remember what I was wearing at that party. A dark green roll-neck jersey, long black boots, and one of my favourite skirts, red wool, very short, A-line, with silver thread running in fine vertical stripes through the wool. My diamanté earrings had a slightly bauble-like appearance. It was August but the party was in someone’s garden and it was unseasonably cold outside.

  ‘Well, hello,’ said Mark, smiling lazily. He was lolling against the trunk of a short cherry tree, wine glass in one hand. ‘You look like Christmas.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I observed his checked shirt and Levi’s. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Mmmm!’ He shifted slightly and his smile changed; it held itself to account, somehow. ‘What do I look like, then?’

  Self-regarding, I thought.

  ‘Self-regarding,’ I said.

  Two months after that party, Mark hid a shiny new set of keys to his flat in my trainers. This was a man whose romantic commitments had previously run to not much more than sex followed by breakfast, followed by a steady flow of flirtatious one-line faxes until the next encounter. I wasted no time. I moved in, threw a few cushions of my own around the place, established a row of lipsticks on the bathroom shelves and upgraded Mark’s mugs. I bought some nicer underwear, a set of gleaming white bath towels, and replied when Mark was out to the women who sent faxes asking whether he was in, with the words, ‘I’m afraid not but I’m Mark’s girlfriend, Lucy. Can I give him a message for you?’

  ‘This is it, isn’t it,’ said Mark, drily, a few months later. ‘I think we’d better get married. What do you think?’

  What I thought was, Gosh, is that a proposal?

  Mark put down the tea towel he was holding – we were drying up after supper – and took both my hands in his.

  ‘Luce,’ he said, ‘did you hear me? Will you marry me?’

  ‘Oh, yes please.’

  We kissed hurriedly; not like a couple with a whole lifetime ahead but as if one of us were boarding a train that was due to depart. I can even remember thinking, Slow down, what’s the rush? but I had no answers. My ears were ringing slightly, as if I were dizzy. Mark looked down at me and said, ‘I love you very much,’ and I said, ‘I love you, too,’ and with our arms wrapped round each other we stood for a while, nuzzling, until Mark – noticing the tears in my eyes – pulled back, frowning, and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Tell me it’s real.’

  ‘Of course it’s real!’ He laughed, and then he said softly, ‘You’ll be wanting a nice engagement ring.’

  ‘I will!’

  I left the ring behind once, on Angus’s bedside table when we were first together; it’s the only time in my life I have mislaid it, albeit briefly. I always take it off at night, and I remember thinking I mustn’t forget it. I had to get Angus to turn the car around when we were already on our way to the station.

  ‘Honestly, nutcase,’ said Angus.

  I thought, Angus, you have no idea.

  Hot waves of anxiety rippled down my back as I let myself back in to retrieve my precious stones from the bedroom, which was now so quiet that I could hear the tick of the alarm clock. Sweating with relief, I put the ring back on.

  That such a thing might happen. That I might be on a houseboat on the Thames in London at eight o’clock on a school morning, fishing around for my engagement ring many miles away from the children in Year Three (with whom I have volunteered to plant spring bulbs at eleven o’clock), while Angus who did not give me the ring and to whom therefore I did not properly belong, waited in a car on the Embankment. That such a thing happened astonishes me still. As an emblem of my own shame it remains pretty hard to beat but in fairness I wasn’t altogether myself at the time. (I tell Angus often what a shock he was to me then – and is, even now: ‘You’re the shock of my life,’ I say. ‘Well, you’re the love of mine,’ he answers.)

  When I reached school by ten-thirty that morning I was elated: on time, still intact and where I was supposed to be. This is possible, I told myself, all things are possible. The children seemed sweeter to me than usual. The sun was shining through the windows in the corridor outside the main classrooms, its rays intercepted by the plane trees in their path. Their branches and emerging leaves threw shivering lines across Millie, Callum, Josie, Oliver, Lauren and Liam, as they struggled excitably into their coats. The chosen few, ready to dig. I looked at these lovely children and wanted to hug them tightly but there’s plenty in the rules about not doing that – and certainly not just because, intoxicated by ardour, you suddenly feel the whole world amended.

  ‘What are you up to right now, my darling? xxx’

  Bits of woodchip crack under my feet.

  ‘Stacking log-pile with Mark.’

  ‘Can you visit next weekend?’

  ‘What does he want?’ Mark asks. ‘It is him, isn’t it.’

  ‘. . . Because if you can, I want to kiss every inch of your beautiful body, very, very slowly. xxx’

  Mark sighs heavily.

  ‘He’s just asking me for a meal or something; if that’s possible with you, of course.’

  My husband looks at me pityingly. ‘Do me a favour.’

  I regard my mobile phone. It is as if it has a life of its own, now improbably connected with mine. A current of shame passes through me as I tap my assent on to the screen.

  Mark throws a couple of logs to one side. For a while, we continue to stack in silence. Eventually, he says, ‘Fait accompli. What day are you going, and what exactly do you propose I do with the kids? The long-range forecast is lousy.’

  I should care. I should pay attention to long-range forecasts. But my capacity to care is reduced and my attention span narrowed. My world has blown open in a blaze of colour and light and now my vision is so contracted by the glare that I am half-sighted, blundering.

  My phone buzzes.

  ‘Fantastic! Are you happy to eat swordfish? xxx’

  Mark says, ‘Jesus! Does this guy have nothing better to do than text my wife?’

  Angus opens Verity’s front door. He is wearing his navy bathrobe. His hair, slicked back from his forehead, is glistening from a shower. He pulls me towards him, kicks the door shut, lifts my coat from my shoulders and lets it drop to the floor. ‘Leave it,’ he says, when I move to pick it up.

  Taking my face in
his hands, he bends to kiss me. His thumbs are in the hollows of my cheek. His fingers brush my ears, sweep the nape of my neck, knit into my hair. ‘My darling you,’ he murmurs. He is breathing fast. I untie his bathrobe, discover him inside it; I press my belly against his.

  When we make love, I love to watch his face change. First, his expression is eager, hungry, then tender, longing, almost mystified. Later, losing himself, it is something bordering on the savage. The first time, it shocked me – his ferocity. He growls with pleasure, staring hard into my eyes, seeking me, not satisfied until I am staring back, stupefied once more and biting my lower lip so hard that it hurts afterwards: more than once, I draw my own blood. He is relentless, he pitches me this way and that, pins me down the way we both love, watching my face for the signs he has come to understand, listening to my voice, brushing my closed eyes with his mouth, and when I open them he is smiling down at me, saying, ‘I love you I love you I love you I love you,’ over and over, and he is so deft I can bear it no longer and I am over and over, too.

  ‘Oh,’ Angus moans, ‘my angel,’ and I, emergent, watch in wonder as everything about him that is contained is cast aside in favour of magnificent negligence. He cleaves to me, cries out, revealed and surrendered, and here in his arms, in his exquisite agony, I am restored. To initiate such tremors through that sturdy frame of his and to be unearthed so, myself: it is disclosure of the sweetest kind.

  Coming to, he cradles my face with both his hands and kisses me deeply and slowly, and how I love it this way. I don’t think there is a thing he can do that betters this.

  ‘Oh, my darling.’