Sorrow and Bliss(47)
I told Patrick I would, although I didn’t know how.
‘Maybe, not a book club obviously but like a book club.’ He said, ‘You don’t have to get a job straightaway either if –’
I said there weren’t any jobs anyway, I had already looked.
‘Well in that case, it makes sense to focus on the friends thing. And maybe you could think about doing something else workwise, if you wanted to. Or, I don’t know, do a masters.’
‘In what?’
‘In something.’
I screen-shotted a picture of Kate Moss in a fur coat ashing a cigarette into a hotel topiary, and said, ‘I’m thinking about retraining as a prostitute.’
In the middle of overtaking a van, Patrick shot me a look. ‘Okay. First, that term isn’t used any more. Second, you know this house is in a cul-de-sac. There won’t be the foot traffic.’
I went back to my phone.
Nearing Oxford he asked me if I wanted to drive past the allotment he had put his name down for. I said that unfortunately I didn’t since it was winter and presumably it was a square of black mud at the present time. He told me to wait – by summer we would be entirely self-sufficient, in the area of lettuce.
That night we slept on our mattress in the living room surrounded by boxes, which I had opened one by one and become overwhelmed by when none of them were all just towels. The heating was too high and I lay awake thinking through the catalogue of terrible things I have done and said, and the much worse things I have thought.
I woke Patrick up and gave him one or two examples. That I sometimes wished my parents had never met each other. That I wished Ingrid didn’t get pregnant so easily and that everyone we knew had less money. He listened without opening his eyes, then said, ‘Martha, you can’t honestly think you’re the only one who thinks things like that. Everyone has terrible thoughts.’
‘You don’t.’
‘Yes I do.’
He rolled away from me, and started to fall asleep again. I got up and turned the ceiling light on. Back beside him I said, ‘Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever thought. I bet it’s not even remotely shocking.’
Patrick moved onto his back and bent his arm over his eyes. ‘Fine. At work a while ago they brought in a man who was in his nineties. He was brain dead from a stroke and when his family got there I explained that there was no chance he was going to recover and that it was a question of how long they wanted to keep him on the ventilator. His wife and son said, essentially, to go ahead but his daughter refused and said they should wait in case of a miracle. She was incredibly upset but it was midnight, and I’d been there since five o’clock in the morning and all I could think was hurry up and sign the jolly thing so I can go home.’
‘Gosh. That is quite bad.’
He said, ‘I know.’
‘Did you actually say the jolly thing to their faces?’
He said okay shut up, and felt on the floor for his phone. He started streaming Radio Four. It was the Shipping News. ‘You will be asleep by the time he gets to the Scilly Isles, I promise. Please can you turn off the light.’
I did, and lay looking at the unfamiliar ceiling, listening to the man say, Fisher, Dogger, Cromaty. Fine, becoming poor.
He said, Fair Isle, Faeoro, the Hebrides. Cyclonic, becoming rough or very rough. Occasionally good.
I turned my pillow over and asked Patrick if he thought the forecast for the Hebrides was really a metaphor for my interior state but he was already asleep. I closed my eyes and listened until God Save the Queen and the end of transmission.
The next morning, in the kitchen while he looked for the kettle, I said, ‘What did you do about the man in the end?’
‘I stayed for another six hours until the daughter changed her mind, then I managed his death. Martha, why did you label every single box Miscellaneous?’
*
There was a gate at the bottom of the Executive Development which gave access to the towpath. We walked along it in the afternoon. On the other side of the canal, Port Meadow was a flat, silver expanse stretching towards a low black line of trees and behind them the outline of spires. Horses were grazing half-hidden in the mist. I did not know who they belonged to.
At its end, the towpath joined a street into town and we kept going. Patrick showed some sort of card to the man inside the gatehouse of Magdalen College and took me in. He promised me close-up deer but they were standing together, in a distant corner of the park, and the only thing roaming freely on the grass were young, vital people, students who called out to each other, broke into little sprints for no reason, existed as though nothing bad had ever or would ever happen to them.
*
I found a book club and went to it. It was at someone’s house. The women all had doctorates and did not know what to say when I told them I didn’t, as if I had just confessed to having no living relatives or an illness with a residual stigma.
I found a different book club, in a library. The women all had doctorates. I said mine was on the Lancashire Cotton Panic of 1861 because I had listened to an In Our Time about it while I walked there. A woman I talked to afterwards said she would love to hear more about it next week, but I had already told her all the things I could remember. I left knowing I could not go back because I would have to listen to the episode again, and one of the three male experts on the panel had been a compulsive throat clearer, and only ever interrupted its sole female.