The Only Story(64)

He knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn’t just about privacy, about an Englishman’s home – even a pebbledash semi – being his castle. It was about something more: about the self, and where you kept it, and who, if anyone, was allowed to fully see it.

He knew that no one can truly hold their life in balance, not even when in calm contemplation of it. He knew there was always a pull, sometimes amounting to an oscillation, between complacency on one side and regret on the other. He tried to favour regret, as being the less damaging.

But he certainly never regretted his love for Susan. What he did regret was that he had been too young, too ignorant, too absolutist, too confident of what he imagined love’s nature and workings to be. Would it have been better – in the sense of less catastrophic – for him, for her, for them both, if they had indeed had some ‘French’ relationship? The older woman teaching the younger man the arts of love, and then, concealing an elegant tear, passing him out into the world – the world of younger, more marriageable women? Perhaps. But neither he nor Susan had been sophisticated enough for that. He had never known sophistication of the emotional life: anyway, to him it sounded like a contradiction in terms. So he didn’t regret that either.

He remembered his own early attempts to define love, back in the Village, alone in his bed. Love, he had ventured, was like the vast and sudden uncreasing of a lifelong frown. Hmm: love as the end of a migraine. No, worse: love as Botox. His other comparison: love feeling as if the lungs of the soul had suddenly been inflated with pure oxygen. Love as barely legal drug use? Did he have any idea what he’d been talking about? Some years later, as it happened, he’d been with a group of friends when an excited junior doctor joined them, having just ‘liberated’ a cyclinder of nitrous oxide from the hospital where he worked. They were each given a balloon, which they inflated from the cylinder then held tightly by the neck. Emptying their lungs as much as they could, they put the balloon to their lips, and released into themselves the roar and lift of a sudden, rushing, eye-blinking high. But no, it hadn’t reminded him at all of love.

Still, were the professionals any better? He took his little notebook from the desk drawer. He hadn’t written anything new in it for a long time. At one point, frustrated by how few good definitions of love he could find, he started copying down at the back all the bad definitions. Love is this, love is that, love means this, love means that. Even quite well-known formulations said little more than, in effect: it’s a soft toy, it’s a puppy dog, it’s a whoopee cushion. Love means never having to say you’re sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that). Then there were all those love lines from all those love songs, with the swooning delusions of lyricist, singer, band. Even the bittersweet ones and the cynical ones – always true to you, darling, in my fashion – struck him as the mere counterfactuals of sentimentality. Yes, it was this bad for us, buddy, but it needn’t be this bad for you: such was the song’s implicit promise. So you can listen with sympathetic complacency.

Here was an entry – a serious one – which he hadn’t crossed out in years. He couldn’t remember where it came from. He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn’t want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported. This one went: ‘In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely.’ Yes, that deserved to stay. He liked the proper inclusivity of ‘happy or unhappy’. But the key was: ‘Once you give yourself over to it entirely.’ Despite appearances, this wasn’t pessimistic, nor was it bittersweet. This was a truth about love spoken by someone in the full vortex of it, and which seemed to enclose all of life’s sadness. He remembered again the friend who, long ago, had told him that the secret of marriage was ‘to dip in and out of it’. Yes, he could see that this might keep you safe. But safety had nothing to do with love.

The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder. Which was the correct – or the more correct – formulation: ‘Life is beautiful but sad’, or ‘Life is sad but beautiful’? One or the other was obviously true; but he could never decide which.

Yes, love had been a complete disaster for him. And for Susan. And for Joan. And – back before his time – it might well have been so for Macleod as well.

He skimmed through a few crossed-out entries, then slid the notebook back in the drawer. Perhaps he had always been wasting his time. Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.

Then there was the case of Eric. Of all his friends, Eric had truly been a man of good intentions, and therefore had always ascribed good intentions to others. Hence the lack of rebuke after he’d received a kicking at the fair. In his early thirties, working in a local planning department, and with a decent little house in Perivale, Eric had become involved with a younger American woman. Ashley said she loved him; a love which expressed itself as wanting to be with him all the time and never wanting to meet his friends. And Ashley wouldn’t sleep with him, no, not now anyway, but certainly later. Ashley had her faith, you see, and Eric, having been religious himself in his youth, could understand and appreciate that. Ashley wasn’t a member of an established church, because look at all the harm established churches had caused; Eric could see that too. Ashley said that if he loved her, and agreed with her contempt for worldly possessions, then he would surely join her in such beliefs. And so Eric, temporarily cut off from his friends, put his little house up for sale, planning to give the proceeds to some cockamamie sect in Baltimore, after which the couple would move there and be married by some cockamamie religious theorist, or shaman, or sham, whereupon Eric, in exchange for his Perivale house, would be granted squatter’s rights in perpetuity in his new wife’s body. Fortunately, almost at the last minute, some survival instinct asserted itself, and he had cancelled his instructions to the estate agent, whereupon Ashley vanished from his life for ever.