The Only Story(59)
‘He’s a dirty stop-out, that one,’ she will confide to the nurse in a stage whisper. ‘I could tell you things about him that would make your hair stand on end.’
The nurse looks at you, so you shrug and smile, as if to say, ‘What can you do, it’s so sad, isn’t it?’ while realizing that even now you are betraying her, even in this new and last extremity of hers. Because she could, of course, tell the nurse a thing or two about you, and the nurse’s hair might well stand on end.
You remember her saying that she wasn’t afraid of death, and that her only regret would be over not knowing what happened afterwards. But now she has very little past and – literally – no thought for the future. She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.
‘You’re a played-out generation.’
‘Got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.’
‘Clap hands, here comes … Sunny Jim.’
‘One of the worst criminals in the world.’
‘Where’ve you been all my life?’
At least, you think, there is something of her still left among these shreds and patches.
‘Oh dear, what can the matter be?
Three old ladies got locked in the la-va-tree,
They were there from Monday to Saturday,
Reading the Radio Times.’
Yes, you remember teaching her that one. So at least she hasn’t turned into an entirely different person. You’ve heard about that happening: pillars of the church screaming obscenities, sweet old ladies turning into Nazis, and so on. But this is faint comfort. Perhaps, if she became unrecognizable and slipped completely out of character, it would all be less painful to deal with.
Once – and naturally in front of the nurse – she dredges up a football song which can only have come from you:
‘If I had the wings of a sparrow,
If I had the arse of a crow,
I’d fly over Tottenham tomorrow,
And shit on the bastards below.’
But the nurse has, of course, heard far worse in her years of caring for the elderly and demented, so she merely cocks an eyebrow at you and asks,
‘Chelsea supporter?’
What makes it unbearable, what makes you so exhausted and depressed after twenty minutes in her presence that you want to run outside and howl, is this: though she can’t name you, never asks you any questions or answers any of yours, she still, at one level, registers your presence and responds to it. She doesn’t know who the fuck you are, or what you do, or even your fucking name, but at the same time, she recognizes you, and judges you morally and finds you wanting. It is this which urges you to run out of the house and howl; and this which makes you realize that, perhaps at some similar unconscious level, in some remote part of your brain, you still love her. And because this awareness is unwelcome, it makes you want to howl the more.
And while he was tormenting himself, here was a question he would often arrive at when his mind followed a particular trail of memory. Handing back Susan had been an act of self-protection on his part. There was no doubt about that; and no doubt in his mind that he had to do it. But beyond this, was it an act of courage, or of cowardice?
And if he couldn’t decide, perhaps the answer was: both.
But she had marked his life in so many ways, some for the better, some the worse. She had made him more generous and open to others; though also more suspicious and enclosed. She had taught him the virtue of impulsiveness; but also its dangers. So he had ended up with a cautious generosity and a careful impulsiveness. His pattern of life for twenty years and more had been a demonstration of how to be impulsive and careful at the same time. And his generosity to others also came, like a pack of bacon, with a ‘use by’ date on it.
He always remembered what she had said to him after they left Joan’s house that day. Like most young men, especially those first in love, he had viewed life – and love – in terms of winners and losers. He, obviously, was a winner; Joan, he assumed, had been a loser, or, more likely, not even a competitor. Susan had put him right. Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn’t make it any the less real. And it was the only story.
At the time, he had been sobered by her words, and Joan’s story had made him think of her quite differently. Then, over the years, as his life developed, as caution and carefulness began to predominate, he realized that he, no less than Joan, had had his love story, and perhaps there wasn’t another one to come. So now he better understood how couples clung to their own story – each, often, to a separate part of it – long after it had gone cold on them, even to the point where they were not sure they could bear one another. Bad love still contained the remnant, the memory, of good love – somewhere, deep down, where neither of them any longer wanted to dig.
He found himself often wondering about other people’s love stories; and sometimes, because he was a calm and unintimidating presence, they would confide in him. Mostly, it was women who did so, but that was unsurprising; men – himself a prime example – were both more covert and less eloquent. And even when he guessed that the love stories of the misled and the forsaken had become a little less authentic with each retelling – that such tales were the equivalent of Winston Churchill in an Aylesbury backstreet, all rouged and made up for the Pathé News camera – even if this was the case, he was still moved. Indeed, he was more moved by the lives of the bereft and the unchosen than he was by stories of success in love.