The Only Story(27)

We were together – under the same roof, that is – for ten or more years. Afterwards, I continued to see her regularly. In later years, less often. When she died, a few years ago, I acknowledged that the most vital part of my life had finally come to a close. I shall always think of her well, I promised myself.

And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can’t.





TWO





Susan’s running-away fund contained enough to buy a small house in Henry Road, SE15. The price was low – gentrification, and juice bars, lay far in the future. The place had been in multi-occupation: a euphemism for locks on every door, asbestos panelling, a squalid kitchenette on a half-landing, personal gas meters and personal stains in every room. Through that late summer and early autumn we stripped it all back, joyfully, the dandruff of distemper in our hair. We threw out most of the old furniture, and slept on a double mattress on the floor. We had a toaster, a kettle, and dined off takeaways from the Cypriot taverna at the end of the road.

We needed a plumber, electrician and gas man, but did the rest ourselves. I was good at rough carpentry. I made myself a desk from two broken-up chests of drawers topped with cut-down wardrobe doors; then sanded, filled and painted it until it stood, immovably heavy, at one end of my study. I cut and laid coconut matting, and tacked carpet up the stairs. Together we ripped off the parchmenty wallpaper, back to the leprous plaster, then roller-painted it in cheery, non-bourgeois colours: turquoise, daffodil, cerise. I painted my study a sombre dark green, after Barney told me that the labour wards of hospitals were that colour, to calm expectant mothers. I hoped it might have the same effect on my own laborious hours.

I had taken to heart Joan’s sceptical ‘And, to start at the beginning, what would you do for money?’ Given that I didn’t care about the stuff, I could have lived off Susan; but, given that our relationship was going to last a lifetime, I acknowledged that at some point I would have to support her rather than the other way round. Not that I knew how much money she had. I never asked about the finances of the Macleod household, nor whether Susan had a traditional Auntie Maud who would conveniently leave her all she had.

So I decided to become a solicitor. I had no exaggerated ambitions for myself; my exaggerated ambitions were all for love. But I thought of the law because I had an orderly mind, and a capacity to apply myself; and every society needs lawyers, doesn’t it? I remember a woman friend once telling me her theory of marriage: that it was something you should ‘dip into and out of as required’. This may sound dismayingly practical, even cynical, but it wasn’t. She loved her husband, and ‘dipping out’ of marriage didn’t mean adultery. Rather, it was a recognition of how marriage worked for her: as a reliable ground bass to life, as something you jogged along with until such time as you needed to ‘dip into’ it, for succour, expressions of love and the rest. I could understand this approach: there is no point demanding more than your temperament requires or provides. But as far as I understood my life at this time, I required the opposite equation. Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.

I began my studies. Each morning, Susan cooked me breakfast; each evening, supper – unless I fetched us a kebab or sheftalia. Sometimes, when I arrived back, she would sing at me, ‘Little man, you’ve had a busy day.’ She also took my washing to the launderette and brought it home for ironing. We still went to concerts and art exhibitions. The mattress on the floor became a double bed, in which we slept together night after night, and where some of my cinematic assumptions about love and sex became subject to adjustment. For instance, the notion of lovers falling blissfully asleep in one another’s arms resolved itself into the actuality of one lover falling asleep half on top of the other, and the latter, after a certain amount of cramp and interrupted circulation, gently shifting out from beneath while trying not to wake her. I also discovered that it wasn’t only men who snored.

My parents didn’t reply to my change-of-address letter; nor did I invite them to visit the house in Henry Road. One day I returned from college to find Susan in agitated mood. Martha Macleod, Miss Grumpy herself, had descended without warning for a tour of inspection. She was bound to have noted that whereas in the Village her mother had slept in a single bed, now she had a double one. Fortunately, in my dark green study, the sofa bed had been pulled out, and left unmade by me that morning. But then, as Susan remarked, two doubles hardly make a single. My own attitude to Martha Macleod’s likely disapproval of our sleeping arrangements was – would have been – one of pride and defiance. Susan’s was more complicated, though I admit I didn’t spend much time on its nuances. After all, were we living together or were we not?

When she reached the two undecorated attic rooms at the top of the house, Martha had apparently said,

‘You should have lodgers.’

When Susan had demurred, her daughter’s reply, delivered either as argument or instruction, was:

‘It would be good for you.’

Quite what she meant by this we debated that evening. True, there was an economic argument for lodgers: they would make the house more or less self-sufficient. But what was the moral argument? Perhaps that lodgers would give Susan something more to do than wait for the return of her shameless lover. Martha might also have intended that lodgers would somehow dilute my noxious presence, and camouflage the reality of number 23 Henry Road – of Fancy Boy Number One living brazenly with an adulteress still more than twice his age.