My House Is Falling Down Read online

  I pull him down to lie along the length of my body, aware of his weight.

  ‘Lie on me,’ I tell him.

  ‘I’ll crush you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, you never do. Lie on me.’

  He brushes a strand of my hair from my forehead, which he strokes, softly.

  ‘You are very bossy.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Well, you want to watch it.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘You do. Otherwise, I might have to take charge of you.’

  ‘You just did.’

  And he is very solid. Yet his skin is soft like a child’s. I think it may be softer than the skin of any man I have known. I am intoxicated by the smell of him. I bury my face in his chest. I feel, at last, located.

  ‘Nutcase,’ he says, after a little while, ‘you can’t breathe.’

  ‘Oh, but I can,’ I say. ‘See?’

  Angus laughs. He says, ‘I could never go back now, to life before you.’

  Angus’s parents were returning home from supper at the house of some friends, and it was a boy just two months older than Angus – intoxicated by a liberty that Angus was yet to experience – who caused the accident that killed them both before they reached it. They were very close to home, as it happened, on the notoriously sharp corner of a road that otherwise ran straight as a canal for a good quarter of a mile. Angus thinks his father tried to swerve to avoid the vehicle that bore down on them but no one is quite sure what happened except that the boy-driver just kept on coming and time was not on their side. The net effect was a head-on collision of such velocity and intensity that Angus’s father’s internal organs were pulverized, compressed by the steering wheel that rammed into his torso at a combined speed of ninety miles an hour. Angus’s mother, who was not wearing a seat belt, exited the car through the windscreen and most likely ricocheted from the roof of the other vehicle on to the road. Her head, caught as it had been on something (the police thought it was probably a slice of mutilated, inverted bonnet) became partially detached from her neck. All that detached from the seventeen-year-old survivor of the tragedy – if ‘survivor’ you could call the mute paraplegic he became – were his retinas. The force of the crash caused his optic nerves to sever and he was blinded at the moment of impact. People tried to spare Angus the facts of the matter at the time but without success: there were witnesses, police reports, an inquest.

  When Angus first told me all this – over that tea together in the draughty cafe after the concert – I asked him how you survive something so appalling. I remember him reaching for a teaspoon on the table, turning it over and over, and saying, ‘You get used to it, sweetheart, just like anything else.’

  But it isn’t just like anything else. When the accident destroyed his parents, Angus, like his mother, was arbitrarily tossed to one side of his own existence. Healing took place over the years. There was a kind godmother who provided a home that he could call his own for as long as he needed to; immersion in the study of music; college friends. He says these all helped. However, those around him at the time of the accident were so concerned with the immediate mopping-up of the mess that any lasting effects upon him were, perhaps understandably, barely considered. It might have seemed that the impact upon a seventeen-year-old boy of this sudden, family wipeout was most potent in its immediate aftermath, yet the greatest repercussions were chronic. Reconfigured by loss, Angus learned early on how to survive without others, and in this way, he was damaged for life. Some lessons, if learned too young, can’t be integrated by a person. There are injuries no one can treat, that a boy on the verge of manhood cannot wholly sustain and live an easy life.

  It is so visible to me in my lover, this invisible breakage, and it unsettles me. It is the thing to which I attribute some of Angus’s quirks, like his willingness to consume food at any hour; like the fact that he regards laying a table as absurd. In fact, his aversion to the rites that bind others is so strong it’s almost as if he believes they might somehow imperil his freedom. His mother must have laid tables, and his godmother too, when she stepped into the breach. When I do, he is amused. ‘You’re such a mum,’ he says, as I neatly align our forks.

  But it’s other things, too. Christmas and Easter: they mean nothing to him, or so he says. Maybe they are too sore a reminder of the family life that he had known and lost. Maybe Angus’s compact kitchen, compact discs and compact boat tell you all you need to know about a man who has everything he needs within reach but neither ritual nor ceremony in his life.

  I asked him once whether he would be happier on solid ground, like everyone else. He says living on a boat gives you a different sort of freedom, makes you feel you can always go somewhere, even though Verity will never set sail. From one end comes the rumble of traffic, and from the other, the interference of the wind over the river, yet he claims rarely to notice the noise.

  I say, ‘I worry that you’re lonely.’

  We are lazing on the sofa, listening to the sounds of a spring evening. Sometimes, beyond the whirr of traffic and the hum of passing boats, you can hear the energetic call of a bird, for a mate. We have listened to Bon Jovi living on a prayer and giving love a bad name, whilst mapping out loosely what wrongs we would put right if either of us were Prime Minister. Now, I am lying with my head in Angus’s lap, contemplating his early loss and how quietly life has turned out for him, his home un-peopled – hyphenated from the city by the small jetty that divides tarmac from water.

  Staring into his whisky glass, he says, ‘I wasn’t lonely before, really. I am now, sometimes. When I miss you.’

  He threads his fingers through my hair, and just as I did when he first told me about the accident, I feel the compelling tug of intimacy – an increase in the shared and confidential space we now inhabit. Bound by the truths he has told me, I am gentle with him. Over supper, I notice myself checking him as I would a child, for signs of malady. Yet when eventually we go to bed and he rises above me, ample with pleasure, I contract with pity and sorrow. Pain jabs at my insides but I do not tell him I will make it up to him. He is worth more than the lie I could tell – that I can compensate for his loss. So, I don’t imply an intention to fill the gap left decades earlier. Instead, mute, I sustain my grip whilst he, collapsed and expended, mutters his allegiance into my neck. I hold him tightly, digging my fingers into his back. My elbows are compressed against his ribs and our skin is sticking together so that when we come to peel ourselves from one another it will sting. I reckon it’s about the best I can do, for now.

  Mel winds her arms around me from behind.

  ‘Careful, darling. This pan’s hot.’

  ‘Are we going to school on our bikes today?’

  ‘No, just our legs. We’re walking.’

  She puts her hands on the backs of my thighs, strokes them, says, ‘You’re warm.’ I think of Angus, and how discriminating a body is in response to touch, depending upon the person who is touching it.

  She says, ‘You do need to get dressed, Mummy. You can’t go to school in your pants and T-shirt.’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  ‘Yuck! Embarrassing!’

  I reach around to squeeze my daughter. She giggles and pats my bottom. She does not know she is reinstating herself: I have always been hers.

  But while she and her sister are at school, I leave the house once more on Angus’s account. I find privacy on flinty banks beside dormant cornfields. I plug my ears with music that belongs only to him and me and I replay our latest couplings in unison:

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I adore you.’

  ‘Tell me again. Tell me anything.’

  ‘I want you, I love you, I’m yours.’

  Sounds. Sirens on the Embankment. A seagull screeching. The crackling of sheets and our breathing, afterwards – petty, shivering sighs.

  I kiss his cheeks, eyes, mouth, throat, chest. I move down his body to where he is still sticky and wet, cooling now. He groans gently. I lick his stomach. Its
surface is damp and salty but the skin sweet beneath.

  ‘I could do it all over again.’

  ‘So could I.’ He pulls me upwards into his arms. ‘If I were twenty years younger.’

  ‘I’m so glad you’re not.’

  ‘I wish I were. I’m an old codger.’

  ‘You’re not, you’re perfect. I love you so much.’

  ‘Why did it take me sixty years to find you?’

  ‘Why did it take me forty-two?’

  ‘I don’t ever want to lose you.’

  ‘I don’t ever want to be lost.’

  ‘Except like this.’

  ‘Except like this.’

  One man, Rich, a Canadian marine scientist (special subject, plankton) – he was the one whose jokes I remember best, the one before Mark who came closest to filling me with a sense of possibility in a shared future. I remember his body very well. Naturally, I have never told Mark how well I remember the feel of Rich, but I do. I remember my delight when he first took off his clothes, and then mine. It took about thirty unequivocal seconds. I thought, I could get completely lost in this man. Naked, Rich was perfect: broad-shouldered, with a wide, strong chest and immense, powerful legs. He had colossal hands, too, which were burnished from working fishing boats for a year in order to earn the money to be here in the Himalayas with a misty view of Everest and an English girl. ‘Except,’ I said, ‘I’m not really English.’ He laughed, ‘You could have fooled me!’ He picked me up and carried me to the poorly sprung bed in the squalid hostel room where we were staying, and with joy and deliberation made me his own. I remained that way for almost three years – his. On and off, we lived and travelled together and though we made no big promises we loved one another as loyally as if we had. Finally, the Atlantic got between us, as we had always known it would. We understood that with marriage any minor differences between us would likely transmute to major, given a breach of some 3,600 miles for one person, so we avoided any serious discussion of it. Our end was sad but good-natured. I would have been amazed if it had been otherwise: it had been an auspicious beginning.

  Rich came after a man whose shape was all wrong, someone I did not fit, who had no interest in the contours of my thoughts and laughed at things I found distasteful. I was on a train to Cornwall, heading to Sennen Cove to camp in the low dunes for the weekend with some friends. He was sitting in the seat opposite, a divorced BBC producer three decades older than me. He told me camping was forbidden on the beach. I said I knew that.

  I liked the unanticipated nature of our meeting and I gambled with myself a lot more in those days, so we became a couple somehow, if only for five months. I loved his cottage tucked like a sheltering animal into the incline of a cove on the northern tip of West Penwith: it was romantic waking up somewhere so remote, where gannets dived and the wind blew so hard that the windows were salted murky-white. Staying with him in the Langham Hotel opposite Broadcasting House felt glamorous as well, in the days when the BBC thought nothing of putting up its long-distance staff in expensive hotels. I loved the high vulgarity of the place; the breakfasts and the miniature shower gels that came as a by-product of time spent with my suitor. He was also very good-looking. What can I say? I was young. I thought I rocked.

  It was reasonably disastrous from the outset. Already impossibly jaded for his age, Trevelyan (for this was his name) was dismissive of the world into which I, aged eighteen, was just venturing. Trevelyan loathed my enthusiasm and had no defences against it save to belittle the things I held dear, and the people, too. When I introduced him to my friends it was clear he despised them, and they him. It wasn’t even a relationship I could later justify by saying, ‘Well, at least the sex was good,’ because it wasn’t, it was terrible.

  My friends thought I was nuts. No one understood what I was doing with such a nervy, graceless admirer (only much later did I wonder what the hell a man of forty-eight was doing picking up an A-level student on a train). His jealousy sapped me, his possessiveness, also: if I so much as acknowledged another male he would fume and sulk until he could take me to bed to reclaim me. Worse, he never stopped telling me how much he admired my father’s work.

  I might have stood for it had the relationship had any imaginative intensity but it did not. Yet for a good year, give or take, Trevelyan continued to write long letters explaining how his devotion would nourish my uncertainty. His attention could have been interesting, even in the most negative of ways, but it was not, and curiously, like a persistent virus, it was difficult to recover from. The ennui he induced drained me of colour for some time afterwards. Rich was the best possible retort. Only six years older than me, his home was a shabby shack on a fir-covered promontory above a beach on the Newfoundland coast. He made his own furniture and caught his own supper. He kayaked to work. He saw the world for what it might be, not for what he had already decided it was. He was refreshing, in all senses.

  I say Trevelyan drained me of colour but I have only myself to blame. Apart from the initial surprise of his Cornish name and the allure of his chiselled features there was nothing about him that made me catch my breath, so what I was doing with him God only knows, except that teenage vanity can be a ferociously potent driving force, especially if conflated with the impassioned Atlantic elements. Now, I know it was the ocean and the seabirds that kept me so long on that highly charged stretch of Cornish coast: drenched in sensation, I was busy claiming my life as my own; believing myself possible.

  Mark comes in later and later. I have usually eaten with the girls and put them to bed by the time he enters the kitchen and finds me sitting at the table, my laptop open. I tilt the screen down to a forty-five-degree angle and he says things like, ‘It’s a classic midlife crisis, this thing of yours: you do realize that?’ I indicate the food I cooked earlier, in which he shows scant interest. He makes himself coffee. I wait. When he leaves the room, I unfold the screen, continue where I left off.

  I calculate. I am forty-two. Twice that is eighty-four. It is hard to argue, statistically, that I am not in more or less midlife, or thereabouts. But crisis? When taking my daughters to school, I run ahead and pounce out from behind hedges to surprise them; and at suppertimes, I carve silly faces in their mashed potato. My husband never wants for clean, folded T-shirts. At any given point, there are two bottles of laundry liquid and a spare roll of bin-liners between me and poor husbandry. I am not in crisis.

  I think of my mother, for whom a well-stocked cupboard meant nothing. When she was the age I am now, she was buried in an abundance of data on the incidence of Aids and HIV in the UK’s heterosexual population. When Mark’s mother, Jane, was forty-two, she was buried in the ground of a Wiltshire churchyard.

  I’m sorry I never knew Jane, not just for obvious reasons but because I feel that Mark might make better sense to me if I had. A mother is key to a man, and whilst I had managed to find a way in to Mark I was not quite sure how I had got there, or why.

  There are photographs, of course. Impassive, Jane stands formally dressed beside her husband David in his army uniform, or in family clusters, her hands to her sides, touching no one in particular; necessary to the group but not critically bound to it. There are plenty of pictures of her with Mark and his older brother Philip and in those she looks suitably proud. As for her wedding photograph, like most wedding photographs it could be anyone’s. If her expression suggests anything specific you might say she looks untried, and by that I don’t mean virginal; I mean that she looks as more people should on their wedding day, like a new recruit at the beginning of a long posting, with a fitting degree of enthusiasm for what lies ahead but no concept of what that might be.

  I’ve been told she enjoyed walking and that she read a bit, Thomas Hardy and Dickens. I know she was well brought up, sensible, quiet, not given to colourful self-expression. I understand she took Mark’s deafness and David’s lengthy, worrying spells in Belfast and Kosovo in her stride. Whether that crucial third dimension, life’s breath itself, would have ena
bled Jane to shed any more light on her younger son for me I will never know, although I wonder occasionally whether Mark’s more oblique aspects derive from her. I can only see my husband’s mother as I imagine her: a person who disclosed little of herself before withdrawing unobtrusively from a life devoid of spectacle or personal request. But maybe that is fancy on my part.

  ‘No, you’re not far off. That’s pretty much what she was like.’

  ‘Don’t you ever wonder, though,’ I asked Mark, early on, ‘whether she was mysterious or passionate underneath? That perhaps there was more there than you saw when you were a child and teenager.’

  ‘I really don’t think so.’

  ‘Unlike your dad.’

  ‘Definitely unlike Dad.’

  David after Jane: a man with his life turned upside down (quite literally if you take into account the geography) and translated into something warmer, a second act set in a luscious, subtropical garden a short salt-breeze from the beach. He moved to Australia before I met Mark and during the times we’ve spent together I’ve come to like him well enough although I prefer his second wife, Lindsay, with her red-blooded, no-nonsense Aussie-ness. A pincher of cheeks and ruffler of hair, Lindsay’s fingernails are scarlet and glossy, her perfume is gorgeous and her rounded body abundant in denim shorts and men’s floating white shirts. Her fridge is a carnival of taste and colour, stocked with beer, pastrami, and strawberry tarts, and when her teenage grandchildren from her first marriage come to visit she invites them to help themselves to its pleasure-inducing contents before pursuing them around the shrubbery with the garden hose. She maintains a convivial, if merciless, atmosphere – something so redolent of the British military it is unsurprising that David finds marriage to her as agreeable to him as life in the army. However, Lindsay’s real talent is not pricking relentlessly at her husband’s taut Englishness but knowing exactly the moment to desist, so that whenever her caustic, Antipodean mockery threatens to overwhelm David, she winds her arm around his neck, kisses it sumptuously, and calls him a silly old bugger. I have always thought it would be delicious to be loved by Lindsay if you were a man: she would provide such a soft-scented, pillowy retreat. If you were an uptight English brigadier, your career concluded and your first wife dead, you could do a lot worse than wind up in Lindsay’s frank embrace. You might even consider yourself the luckiest man in the southern hemisphere.