The Only Story(53)

Now he was getting off the point. Susan and himself, all those years ago. There was her shame to deal with. But there was also, he knew, his shame.

An entry from his notebook which had survived several inspections: ‘In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.’ He had liked this remark since first discovering it. Because for him it opened out into a wider thought: that love itself is never absurd, and neither are any of its participants. Despite all the stern orthodoxies of feeling and behaviour that a society may seek to impose, love slips past them. You sometimes saw, in the farmyard, improbable forms of attachment – the goose in love with the donkey, the kitten playing safely between the paws of the chained-up mastiff. And in the human farmyard, there existed forms of attachment which were just as unlikely; and yet never, to their participants, absurd.

One permanent effect of his exposure to the Macleod household had been a distaste for angry men. No, not distaste, disgust. Anger as an expression of authority, an expression of masculinity, anger as a prelude to physical violence: he hated it all. There was a hideous false virtue to anger: look at me, angry, look how I boil over because I am so filled with emotion, look how I am really alive (unlike all those cold fish over there), look how I am going to prove it by grabbing your hair and smashing your face into a door. And now look what you made me do! I’m angry about that too!

It seemed to him that anger was never just anger. Love was, usually, in itself, just love, even if it impelled some to behave in ways which made you suspect there was no love present any more, and perhaps never had been. But anger, especially the sort which coated itself in self-righteousness (and perhaps all anger did) was so often an expression of something else: boredom, contempt, superiority, failure, hatred. Or even something apparently trivial, like a chafing dependence on female practicality.

Even so, and to his considerable surprise, he had finally stopped hating Macleod. True, the man was long dead – though it was perfectly possible, indeed reasonable, to hate the dead; and at one stage he imagined he would live with his hatred until the day he himself died. But it hadn’t worked out that way.

He wasn’t sure about the chronology of it all. At some point, Macleod had retired, but continued to live on in that large house, attended by a cook–housekeeper to whom he behaved with elaborate, antiquated politeness. Once a week he would go to the golf club and hit a stationary ball as if it were a personal enemy. He would garden furiously, smoke furiously, turn on the goggle-box and drink along to it until he could still just get himself to bed. Often the thieving Mrs Dyer would find the blank-screened set still buzzing when she arrived.

Then, one winter morning, while he was planting out cabbages, Macleod had fallen to the hard ground and wasn’t discovered for hours; the stroke had done its worst. Half-paralysed, but fully silenced, he now depended on regular visits from a nurse, monthly ones from his daughters, more erratic ones from Susan. Maurice, his old pal from Reynolds News, would drop by from time to time, and, in knowing contravention of medical advice, would pull out a half-bottle of whisky and pour some of it down Macleod’s throat while the familiar eyes blinked back at him. By the time the housekeeper found him dead on the floor with the bedsheets wrapped round him, Susan had long since handed power of attorney to Martha and Clara. The house, with many unwanted contents, was sold to a dubious local who might have been fronting for a property developer.

Somewhere in this sequence, he had stopped hating Macleod. He didn’t forgive him – he didn’t consider forgiveness the opposite of hatred – but he acknowledged that his seething antipathy and night-time rages had become somehow irrelevant. On the other hand, he didn’t feel pity for Macleod, despite all the humiliations and infirmities visited upon him. These he regarded as inevitabilities; indeed, he nowadays regarded most things that happened as inevitabilities.

The question of responsibility? That seemed a matter for outsiders: only those with a sufficient lack of evidence and knowledge could confidently apportion blame. He was, even at this distance, still far too involved to do so himself. And he had also reached a stage in life where he had started pursuing counterfactuals. What if this had happened rather than that? It was idle but involving (and perhaps held the question of responsibility at bay). For instance, what if he hadn’t been nineteen, with time on his hands and – while hardly aware of it – desperate for love when he had arrived at the tennis club? What if Susan, from religious or moral scruple, had discouraged his interest, and taught him nothing more than tactical astuteness when playing mixed doubles? What if Macleod had continued to hold a sexual interest in his wife? None of this might have happened. But given that it had, then if you wanted to attribute fault, you were straight away into pre-history, which now, in two of their three cases, had become inaccessible.

Those charged first few months had reordered his present and determined his future, even up to now. But what if, for instance, he and Susan hadn’t been attracted to one another? What if one of their many cover stories had been true? He was a young man who drove her because she needed new glasses. He was a friend of one or both of the daughters. He was a kind of protégé of Gordon’s. Now, in his state of slowly acquired calmness, he found he could easily imagine things other than they had been; the facts and feelings quite different.

Curious, he pursued this untaken path. For instance, he started helping Old Man Macleod with the gardening. As well as playing tennis with Susan, he took up golf, had lessons at the club and would often partner Gordon – as he’d been asked to call him – round the local eighteen holes when the dew still sparkled on the fairways. There was something about his presence which relaxed Old Man Macleod: that gruffness was only a mask, and Paul was able to help him relax a bit more on the tee; he even taught him (after flipping through an American golf manual) how to love that little dimpled ball rather than hate it. He – Casey Paul, as more than Susan now called him – discovered that he rather liked a drink: gin with Joan, beer with Gordon, an occasional glass of sherry with Susan; though all agreed that at a certain point enough was enough and one more was too many. And then – why not pursue this alternative life to, if not a logical, at least a conventional conclusion – what if he and one of the Macleod daughters became (as their parents would have put it) ‘sweet on one another’? Martha or Clara? Obviously Clara, who took more character traits from Susan. But this was counterfactual, and so he chose Martha.