The Essence of the Thing Read online

  Now it was dark; he got up and drew the curtains. Oh, but the silence! He turned on the wireless and went into the kitchen to see what he could find for dinner.

  Now there was a thing. The food had been exclusively Nicola’s department. They’d had an inequitable—if you like—arrangement whereby he paid all the quarterly bills and she paid for the food. Once a fortnight or so they went to Sainsbury’s and stocked up, and she picked up other bits and pieces as and when and, as Jonathan now discovered, opening the refrigerator, she hadn’t been doing much picking up recently: why, after all, should she have? And he looked in the cupboards as well. Tinned soup, spaghetti, oil, vinegar, tea and coffee. Three eggs in the fridge, half a pound of butter, a hopelessly wilted lettuce and a sad tomato. In short, there was nothing to eat. There wasn’t even any bread. He wasn’t sure where he’d find a shop still open at this hour: the weekend catering, if not that of the lifetime ahead, was going to be an awfully big adventure. The only problem being, that he had no heart for it. Once more he checked his pockets to make sure he had enough money in them, once more he slammed the door upon the ghost-ridden flat, and went out into Notting Hill in search of sustenance. He chose the wrong direction, and so had to walk for a good ten minutes before he came to an open shop, but he managed to find everything he thought he wanted; two large carrier bags full. The place was full of people like him, lost souls shopping for groceries on a Saturday night. It was only when he got back to the flat and dumped the whole lot down on the kitchen table that at last he saw Nicola’s note.

  She’d left him a note—yes, he remembered, now. She’d told him she’d left him a note. He’d quite forgotten about it, what with one thing and another. What thing, and what other thing, could have made him forget? Here, waiting for him after that journey across Lethe, was Nicola’s note: Nicola’s last words to him before leaving. He did not want to read it—not yet. But he must. Yes, but first he would just open that bottle of Graves he’d noticed in the door of the refrigerator. Always keep a bottle of white wine chilled and handy: there are moments when you need a petit coup de blanc like nothing else. Corkscrew, glass, draw the cork, so. Pour. Sniff. Taste. Smoke, raspberries, potash, whatever. Hunter Valley, eat your heart out. Another petit coup. Right; now for Nicola’s note.

  Last Minute

  1. Boxes marked Oxfam under window in bedroom.

  2. Three other boxes of my gear in wardrobe, to be called for asap.

  3. Don’t forget to leave out wages for Mrs Brick on Weds. mornings—£20 (in cash).

  I’ve left you a note, she’d said. There’s nothing more to say. No, quite: how could there be? It was commendably succinct. There was not, there had not been, another word to say.

  46

  ‘How’s Nicola then?’

  ‘You saw how she was.’

  ‘She seems perfectly okay to me, I don’t know why you’ve been making such a song and dance. Rails, and God knows what else.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake. Are you totally insensitive, or what? She’s putting on a brave face. A very brave face. She’s grief-stricken, that’s how she actually is.’

  ‘Are you serious, or are you serious?’

  ‘Right both times. Seriously, she is completely grief-stricken. She has her episodes of calm and lucidity, but then—she just caves in. She’s suffering from shock, clinical shock. It actually is a sort of bereavement.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So just watch it, okay? Be gentle.’

  ‘I’m always gentle.’

  ‘And watch what you say.’

  ‘All this for that wimp Jonathan.’

  ‘She really loves him, you see. She really does. She gave him her heart and he broke it.’

  ‘It’s pure Country and Western. I might write a song, make us all rich. She gave him her heart and he broke it. I like it. Guy can have a horse. Whizzy!’

  ‘Just so long as you don’t dare try it out in front of Nicola. Remember what I said. Okay?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, sure. Look, that’s enough Nicola for one day, okay? Could you hit that light? I’m falling…a…sleep…it’s been a long, long…day…’

  And tomorrow will probably be just as long, thought Susannah in the darkness. Bloody Jonathan. Miserable sod.

  Nicola, too, lying in her strange bed in Susannah’s workroom—at the top of the house, overlooking the back garden—was thinking of Jonathan. No amount of solitary thought, no amount of discussion with Susannah, however apparently reasonable their conclusions, exhausted the subject. Nicola was haunted by the suspicion that there was something she had not seen or even imagined; that there was something dreadfully wrong which had escaped her perception entirely: and yet no amount of thought or discussion might ever discover it. But this night as every night, as many times during the day, she once more entered the maze of remembrance in the hope of finding, this time, the path to the beast which might lurk at its heart. Perhaps Susannah was right in saying that there was a rock in Jonathan’s head: but was it not possible, wondered Nicola, that the rock was in her own head? and that Jonathan, seeing or sensing its presence, had been right to say to himself, I don’t actually love her; let’s make an end of it.

  But that being so, she wished—how she wished—that there had been some other way of doing so. The cruelty of his cold indifference had lacerated her. It was something she would remember with horror and shame all her days. It almost convinced her that it was indeed she who was at fault, and the worst of it all was that she could not see how, or where, or why. It was after three o’clock before she finally slept. So passed her first night away from the home whose loss compounded the grief which was engulfing her whole self.

  47

  It was a blustery, uncertain sort of day, with rushing clouds which seemed on the point of foregathering and darkening only to scatter again and admit the sunshine: one could not decide whether to go out or if so how far.

  ‘We’ll just go for a quick run on the Common,’ said Susannah, ‘okay?’

  Nicola was drying up the luncheon things and said nothing. She would do whatever was decided. She did not want to be awkward. Guy began to offer other more ambitious not to say altogether unrealistic suggestions; the doorbell rang.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Nicola unexpectedly.

  Susannah, eyebrows raised, threw Geoffrey a meaningful look: what had she told him?

  Nicola opened the door. Before her was a short rather plump rather ginger-haired and bearded man with a baby in a pushchair.

  He gave her a startled look. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Geoffrey not in? Or Susannah?’

  On being assured that they were he came in, pushing the baby before him, without further ceremony, Nicola (her heart thumping with a terrible disappointment) returning to the kitchen to summon her hosts. Out they came.

  ‘Oh, Sam,’ they said. ‘Nicola, this is Sam. And this is little Chloe. Hello, Chloe. Come into the sitting room, Sam.’

  The sitting room—knocked through—occupied virtually all of the ground floor, the kitchen having been thrown out at the rear. Sam wheeled the baby into a corner and put on the brake and they all sat down.

  ‘Will you have some coffee?’ said Susannah. ‘I was just about to make some. We’ve only just finished lunch.’

  ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ said Sam. ‘As long as you’re making it anyway.’

  He looked around the room, especially at the pictures hanging on the walls, with a frankly speculative glance, as if checking to see whether anything new and/or valuable had come into it since his last visit.

  ‘Still got that Hodgkin, I see,’ he remarked. He often said this, as if to say, you must be doing all right, if you can afford not to sell a Hodgkin.

  Geoffrey played up to this with gusto. ‘Yep,’ he said, with an air of oleaginous self-satisfaction. ‘Still got it!’ He all but smacked his lips.

  It was a very small Hodgkin and they’d bought it with a windfall about a million years ago, before acquiring a mortgage and a child and all that pertains
thereto, but Sam didn’t take any of that into account.

  ‘Saw a very tasty little Sutton the other day,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t afford it, of course.’ He gave a sort of snort which implied better than any words could do not only the utter unlikelihood that such as he might afford such a thing but also the evident turpitude of anyone who could.

  ‘Ah,’ said Geoffrey cheerfully, to all appearances oblivious of these implications, ‘a Sutton; yes. We haven’t got a Sutton.’ As if by mere oversight: a gap yet to be filled in a catholic—yet serious— collection. ‘How much were they asking?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ said Sam glumly, ‘five figures. More than that I’m not prepared to say.’ If I can’t have it, he seemed to imply, I’ll be damned if you shall. I won’t even tell you where it is, so there.

  ‘Cork Street, was it?’ said Geoffrey innocently. ‘Who is his dealer these days?’ As if he genuinely required to know.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t exactly remember,’ said Sam, almost ill-temperedly. ‘One of those rascals, does it matter which?’ He had Geoffrey there; he looked around the room again as if to change the subject. ‘That chair’s new, isn’t it?’ he said, almost accusingly.

  ‘Not really,’ said Geoffrey, all consolation. ‘Only new to this room. We had it upstairs.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Sam, as if to say, that’s the rich for you: chairs all over the place; upstairs and downstairs.

  ‘Nice, though, isn’t it?’ said Geoffrey urbanely. ‘Arts and Crafts. We managed to get in early there. Couldn’t afford it now, of course.’

  ‘No,’ said Sam abruptly. ‘I should think not.’

  Susannah had returned with the coffee halfway through all this and had been throwing warning looks at Geoffrey, who had been ignoring them. She now seized her opportunity. ‘How do you like it?’ she asked her guest, having seen to Nicola already. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sam. ‘Please. The lot.’ Take them for all they’ve got.

  The funniest part of all, as Susannah and Geoffrey later explained to Nicola, who had taken in all these proceedings with wide-eyed wonder, was that Sam, being a colleague of Geoffrey’s, was on exactly the same salary scale; although of course it was possible that Helen earned less than Susannah. It was also of course possible that she earned more. But there was little enough in it: in plain fact, Sam and Helen were as rich as they, and they as poor as Sam and Helen.

  Guy, perhaps infected by Sam’s need to be plied with all the luxuries of this world, perhaps on his own account, now enquired whether they might not now have a chocolate and was given leave to fetch the box, with which he returned at approximately the speed of light. Nicola having refused one they were offered to Sam.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he said, as if to say, chocolates, too.

  His hand hovered over the contents, and he chose one. He raised it nearly to eye level before eating it, as if to determine its provenance, and then it vanished into his mouth.

  ‘I say!’ he exclaimed. ‘This chocolate is the business all right!’

  His frank delight made up for almost all his former malice: Susannah all but forgave him while Geoffrey having so revelled in the game had nothing to forgive.

  ‘Yes,’ said Susannah. ‘They’re a present from Nicola. Fortnum’s, you see. Brilliant, aren’t they?’ She stopped herself just in time from observing that you get what you pay for. ‘Have another,’ she said.

  ‘All right,’ said Sam. ‘Just one.’

  The disregarded baby now let out a yell.

  ‘Oh, she wants one too!’ cried the heretofore silent and wondering Nicola.

  ‘No,’ said Sam abruptly. ‘She can’t. They’re too rich for her, she’ll be sick.’

  The baby began to wail.

  ‘Just a tiny bit, then,’ said Nicola. ‘I’ll give her a tiny bit out of mine.’

  She took the smallest one she could see, actually a chocolate-covered almond, and bit off a piece of the chocolate which she gave to the baby, who instantly ceased her clamour and smiled and waved her arms joyfully. Then she began to look around, as if for more; her smile faded and she began tentatively to wail anew.

  ‘She’ll never shut up now,’ said Sam crossly. ‘I was hoping she’d doze off while I’m here.’ That was his social life down the tubes for the afternoon.

  ‘Would you like me to take her out?’ said Nicola. ‘I could take her out for a walk if you like.’

  This offer surprised them all, especially Sam. He had so far paid Nicola no attention whatever, although she was in fact the only new and valuable item in the room since his last visit.

  He turned his head and looked at her, genuinely astounded. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘If you like. Yes, if you like. Yes, that would be very nice. If you’re sure you can manage her.’

  You’d have thought she was a Doberman.

  ‘Yes, we’ll manage,’ said Nicola. ‘I’ll just get my jacket.’

  The baby had stopped her tentative wailing and was listening with interest to this exchange, and she now kicked her legs in evident approval of the conclusion it had reached. When Nicola returned and began to wheel the pushchair out of the room she waved her arms joyfully again and uttered several small shrieks of happiness, and the two left the house.

  48

  ‘I wonder what has happened on the Jonathan and Nicola front.’

  ‘What front? Where?’

  ‘I told you. He’s given her the push. Or he had when last heard from. Or rather, of. I was just wondering if they’ve managed to patch it up.’

  ‘Oh, I expect so. He can’t afford to screw up at his age. Got to settle down sooner or later, make a few copies of the old DNA before the packaging passes its use-by date, it’s what we’re here for.’

  ‘Oh, that’s funny, I thought we were here to pursue goodness, truth and beauty.’

  ‘No, no, that’s just an optional extra, it’s only the DNA thingy which is obligatory. Time Jonathan got on with it.’

  ‘Perhaps he just doesn’t want to.’

  ‘Well it’s not really any of our business. Speaking of which—’ Alfred put down his coffee cup and moved slightly closer to Lizzie, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve given any more thought to the matter of a sibling for Henrietta, have you?’ He was looking rather sad.

  Lizzie put her head on his shoulder. ‘It’s awfully difficult,’ she said, ‘to find the time. You must understand.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know that,’ said Alfred. ‘But it always will be. And eventually it will be too late altogether.’ He looked even sadder.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alf,’ said Lizzie. ‘I really can’t think of doing it now. This is a really crucial time for indies. Perhaps in about six months. That’s the best I can say right now.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Alfred, still sad, but resigned. ‘Okay. What can I say?’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Which is that?’

  ‘You know what a child can do to a marriage. I mean, we are happy as we are, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Of course I would. I wouldn’t want us to have another sprog otherwise.’

  ‘Yes, but what if another sprog were to ruin everything? It wouldn’t be worth the price, then.’

  ‘No, of course not, but why on earth should it?’

  ‘Well, it can happen. Look at the Maclises.’

  ‘Oh. Them. Well, but—’

  ‘They were perfectly okay until they had Percy, and by the time he was walking it was all down the tubes. Awful. Poor Claire.’

  ‘Well, poor Alex if it comes to that. He rang me the other day by the way; he wants to ply me with strong drink and pick my brains, he’s doing a big piece about the Lloyd’s thing.’

  ‘Are you going to oblige him?’

  ‘I dare say I shall, I’m an obliging sort of chap as you know.’

  ‘Obligation, it’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? It’s so very human. I’m sure animals have no sense of obligation. Which reminds me, I think I’m obliged to telephone Nicola and see if e
verything is all right, considering how upset she was when I saw her.’

  ‘Oh, do it then if you must and get it over with.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m afraid of getting Jonathan, which would be awkward, because he presumably doesn’t know that I know, and I couldn’t tell him that I did, and I have nothing else to say to him; it’s Nicola I really need to speak to.’

  ‘If she doesn’t answer just say sorry wrong number and hang up.’

  ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’

  ‘Once or twice. In my rash and turbulent youth.’

  ‘I think the best thing is to wait and ring her at work.’

  ‘Yes, all right, you do that then.’

  But naturally, what with one thing and another, this being, truly, a crucial time for indies, she forgot to—not that it mattered at all seriously.

  49

  ‘Will she be able to manage?’ asked Sam, typically inspecting the bolt on the stable door with the horse already a good three fields away.

  ‘Probably,’ Geoffrey assured him; ‘very probably.’

  ‘Of course she will,’ said Susannah hastily. ‘She’s got nieces and nephews, she’s very experienced; she even used to look after Guy sometimes. Guy, perhaps it might be a good idea if you were to ride after them on the bike and make sure Nicola knows how to get to the Common in case she wants to go there. And we need some milk, so you might get that for me, would you?’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Guy without much enthusiasm.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ said his mother.

  He sloped off and a moment afterwards they heard him leaving.

  ‘Obliging sort of kid you’ve got there,’ said Sam. Was there no end to their privileges?

  Geoffrey pulled his face into an expression of judiciousness. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We feel, that—instil the aesthetic sense, and everything else will take care of itself. It seems to have worked, so far.’ He paused and then turned to his wife. ‘Wouldn’t you say, Susannah?’