The Only Story(22)

Then she said, ‘Try lobbing me the first question that comes into your head.’

I did so without reflecting. ‘Do you think Susan would leave Mr Macleod?’

‘My, my,’ she said quietly. ‘You are aiming high, young man. That’s a pair of balls you’ve got on you. Talk about one step at a time.’

I grinned inanely at what I took to be a compliment.

‘So have you asked her?’

‘Gosh, no.’

‘And, to start at the beginning, what would you do for money?’

‘I don’t care about money,’ I replied.

‘That’s because you’ve never had to.’

This was true; but not in the sense that I was rich. My state education had been free, I received a council grant to attend university, I lived at home in the holidays. But it was also true that I didn’t care about money – indeed, in my world view, to care about money meant deliberately to turn your eyes away from the most important things in life.

‘If you’re going to be a grown-up,’ said Joan, ‘you’ve got to start thinking about grown-up things. And number one is money.’

I remembered what I’d been told about Joan’s early life – her being a ‘kept woman’ or whatever, living no doubt from cash handouts and rent-payings and gifts of clothes and holidays. Is that what she meant by being grown-up?

‘I suppose Susan’s got some.’

‘Have you asked her?’

‘Gosh, no.’

‘Well, maybe you should.’

‘I’ve got a running-away fund,’ I said defensively, without explaining where it had come from.

‘And how much rattles around in your little piggy bank?’

It was odd how I never took offence at anything Joan said. I just assumed that beneath her brusqueness she was kind-hearted and on my side. But then lovers always assume that people are on their side.

‘Five hundred pounds,’ I said proudly.

‘Yes, well, you could certainly run away on that. It’ll keep you for a few weeks in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage as long as you don’t go near the casino. And then you’ll come running back to England.’

‘I suppose so.’ Even if I’d never thought of Le Touquet-Paris-Plage as a destination. Was that where fleeing lovers went?

‘You’re going back to college next month, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re going to keep her in a kitchen cupboard there? A wardrobe?’

‘No.’

I felt stupid and hopeless. No wonder Susan was ‘thinking’ about it all. Was I merely entertaining some romantic notion of flight, a ladder with no steps attached?

‘It’s a bit more complicated than working out how to save me on the gin and the petrol.’

I had been brought solidly down to earth, as Joan no doubt intended.

‘Can I ask you something different?’

‘Off you go.’

‘Why do you cheat at crosswords?’

Joan laughed loudly. ‘You cheeky bugger. I suppose Susan told you. Well, it’s a fair question, and one I can answer.’ She took another pull of her gin. ‘You see – I hope you never get there yourself – but some of us get to the point in life where we realize that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters. And one of the few side-benefits of that is you know you’re not going to go to hell for filling in the wrong answers in the crossword. Because you’ve been to hell and back already and you know all too well what it’s like.’

‘But the answers are in the back of the book.’

‘Ah, but you see, to me that would be cheating.’

I felt absurdly fond of her. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Joan?’ I found myself asking.

‘Just don’t cause Susan any harm.’

‘I’d rather cut my own throat,’ I replied.

‘Yes, I think you might even mean that.’ She smiled at me. ‘Now, off with you, and mind your driving. I can see you’re not yet hardened to the gin.’

I was about to put the car into gear when there was a tap at the window. I hadn’t heard her behind me. I wound the window down.

‘Don’t ever care what they say about you,’ Joan said, looking at me intently. ‘For instance, some kindly neighbours assume I’m just a ghastly old lezzer living alone with my dogs. So, a failed lezzer at that. Water off a duck’s back. That’s my advice if you want it.’

‘Thank you for the gin,’ I replied, and released the handbrake.

Joan was demanding that I be grown-up. I was prepared to try if it helped Susan; but I still regarded adulthood with some horror. First, I wasn’t sure that it was attainable. Secondly, even if attainable, I wasn’t sure it was desirable. Thirdly, even if desirable, then only by comparison with childhood and adolescence. What did I dislike and distrust about adulthood? Well, to put it briefly: the sense of entitlement, the sense of superiority, the assumption of knowing better if not best, the vast banality of adult opinions, the way women took out compacts and powdered their noses, the way men sat in armchairs with their legs apart and their privates heavily outlined against their trousers, the way they talked about gardens and gardening, the spectacles they wore and the spectacles they made of themselves, the drinking and the smoking, the terrible phlegmy racket when they coughed, the artificial smells they applied to conceal their animal smells, the way men went bald and women shaped their hair with aerosols of glue, the noxious thought that they might still be having sex, their docile obedience to social norms, their snarky disapproval of anything satirical or questioning, their assumption that their children’s success would be measured by how well they imitated their parents, the suffocating noise they made when agreeing with one another, their comments about the food they cooked and the food they ate, their love of stuff I found disgusting (especially olives, pickled onions, chutneys, piccalilli, horseradish sauce, spring onions, sandwich spread, stinky cheese and Marmite), their emotional complacency, their sense of racial superiority, the way they counted their pennies, the way they hunted for food trapped between their teeth, the way they weren’t interested enough in me, and the way they were too interested in me when I didn’t want them to be. This was just a short list, from which Susan was naturally and entirely exempt.