The Essence of the Thing Read online

  She ignored him and turned to Sam. ‘How are things round at Cardamon Road? How is Helen?’

  ‘Oh, as far as Helen is concerned, she is the reason for my bringing Chloe here. Can you take that child out for a walk, she said to me, I need some space. Space! In a house with six-plus rooms, she needs space!’

  ‘I suppose she meant time,’ said Susannah. ‘How is the house?’ At least I got out of that pretty quickly, she thought. Sam had been looking oppressed; but his expression did not now brighten. Oh dear, now what, thought Susannah: out, but not far enough out.

  ‘That house,’ said Sam heavily, ‘is my Waterloo.’

  The association at this juncture of Sam with Napoleon was unspeakably ludicrous; Geoffrey and Susannah both began to laugh helplessly. After one very disconcerted moment Sam himself began to join them and was soon laughing as heartily as they.

  Having (however inadvertently) picked up the ball he now ran with it, treating them to a wild catalogue of mishap and disaster such as only a bricoleur can provide. Tears veritably pouring down their faces, they begged for respite, but he showed no mercy, and continued to sit, now glum-faced and hopeless, piling Pelion upon Ossa.

  ‘And with all that,’ he concluded at last, ‘I still haven’t managed even to touch the top floor. Status quo ante, right down to the kitchen sink. That top front room was meant to be Chloe’s bedroom, with a study for me at the back, much as you’ve got here; but as it is she’s right next door to us. No wonder our sex life has hit the buffers. Not that it wouldn’t have done anyway, but every little helps.’

  ‘Still, the kitchen must be looking pretty good,’ said Susannah quickly.

  ‘Ha!’ Sam ejaculated mirthlessly. ‘It’s the charnel house of all my good intentions and all my fundamental optimism. If that’s the sort of thing you go in for, it looks bloody good. Other than that, I could choke on it.’ And he fixed them with a belligerent glare, as if defying them—or anyone else—to provoke him into doing so.

  His hosts began to laugh again and were soon almost as helpless as before.

  ‘Lastly,’ said Sam, ‘in any case, to look on the bright side, I’m going to have to pull in my horns for a bit—’ Horns! It was too much, tears came into their eyes again; Sam looked from one to the other in blank astonishment and finding no ready explanation for their renewed mirth continued: ‘—because we’ve run into a cash-flow fuck-up, don’t ask me how. But I really don’t know which is worse, carrying on as I’ve been doing in the futile hope of finishing, some day, or stopping the show pro tem. If there’s one thing I know about doing it yourself, it’s that it costs a bloody fortune. In fact we’re thinking of letting the top floor to some student or other desperate character. With that back room still fitted up as a kitchen, of sorts, they wouldn’t be too much in the way, they’d only have to share the bathroom. That’s what we’ll probably do, after Easter.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Susannah. ‘Easter. Are you going away?’

  ‘If you can call going to my parents going away,’ said Sam. ‘It doesn’t fulfil any of the essential conditions except for the tiresome ones. Still, we’ll be shot of Chloe, in the main. She’ll be taken over lock, stock and barrel. That’s something. Too bad we can’t just send her by herself, to be collected at the other end like any other livestock, but BR won’t wear it. No wonder they’ve gone to the wall. They won’t provide the services the punters really need. So we’ve got to take her ourselves and hang about until it’s time to bring her back again.’

  ‘Where do they live, again?’ asked Susannah.

  ‘Cornwall,’ said Sam morosely.

  You’d have thought the name designated one of the kingdom’s most notorious hell-holes.

  ‘Sounds lovely,’ said Susannah firmly.

  ‘Oh, it’s lovely enough,’ said Sam, as if loveliness were the merest and most paltry of attributes.

  ‘What more could one ask?’ said Geoffrey rhetorically.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sam. ‘If I only knew.’

  Meanwhile, as they all immediately, perfectly, understood, he was asking anyway.

  The crystalline moment was shattered by the front door bell.

  ‘That will be Nicola,’ said Susannah.

  ‘And with any luck, Chloe too,’ added Geoffrey. ‘I’ll just go and see.’

  ‘I suppose she’ll be sopping wet,’ said Sam lugubriously. ‘That baby should be hooked up directly to Thames Water, I swear. Then the rest of us might get a bit of peace.’

  ‘The duck,’ said Susannah fondly. ‘The little precious.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Sam. ‘So you say.’

  50

  Sam had gone home with the baby and the electric drill, the retrieval of which had been his purpose in making the visit, and Nicola was looking at the job advertisements in the previous day’s Guardian.

  She often did this—supremely pointless as it was: for as was well known, no one ever actually got these jobs; no one was ever so much as short-listed; the entire exercise appeared in fact to be a sort of art form. Once in a while one might participate in it more fully by sending in an application, but it was essential in such an event to maintain the Dadaist stance.

  ‘Scunthorpe Literary Festival,’ she read; ‘Assistant to the Director.’

  Just so. That sort of thing: her qualifications met the case exactly; there was not the slightest chance of her being considered. It was a six-month contract and the starting date was the first of June. She counted on her fingers. In and out before winter set in. It was perfect.

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather have a Sunday?’

  ‘No, it’s all right, I’d just as soon look at this. I missed it yesterday.’

  Scunthorpe: it seemed the ideal way of fleeing the chaos of heartrending anguish and struggle into which her life had collapsed.

  ‘I think I’ll apply for this job in Scunthorpe,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, but you can’t possibly.’

  ‘I think I will though. Don’t worry, I won’t get it.’

  ‘So why bother applying?’

  ‘Someone should.’

  ‘Why you?’

  ‘I just fancy it.’

  ‘Well, so long as you don’t actually get it.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t conceivably get it.’

  Susannah had been studying the face of her friend. A notable alteration (it was too soon to say whether it was certainly for the better) appeared to have taken place in the last few hours: could one begin perhaps to hope for an early recovery?

  ‘Guy will be out visiting his friend for the rest of the afternoon,’ she said. ‘So we were thinking that we might go and see a truly adult flick. Do you feel like doing that?’

  ‘Which f lick?’ asked Nicola.

  ‘See if you can guess.’

  ‘Where’s it on?’

  ‘The NFT.’

  ‘Les Enfants du Paradis.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I give up.’

  ‘Just one more.’

  ‘Oh…Singin’ in the Rain.’

  ‘No! It’s the other one.’

  ‘I can’t. You don’t mean The Red Shoes?’

  ‘No, no. The other other one. All about Eve. Wanna come?’

  Nicola sat up. ‘Just try and stop me!’ she cried.

  ‘Well, we should push off fairly sharpish,’ said Susannah. ‘It starts at five. I’ll just go and round up Geoff.’

  She went upstairs; he was writing something on her word processor.

  ‘I think our Nicola could be having a miracle recovery,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘We’re going to see that film at the NFT, we have to leave soon.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I wish you’d be more surprised at her recovery,’ said Susannah.

  ‘But I’m not surprised at all. I mean, a day or two with me—she can see exactly how wimpy and unworthy that Jonathan actually is. It stands to reason.’

  ‘So it does. I was forgetting. Well, you can pay for our t
ickets then. That will put the lid on it.’

  And he did. But it didn’t. Not that they knew this. There were things which not even Susannah knew. There were things which not even Nicola knew, or knew that she knew. One knows, after all, virtually nothing.

  51

  On the way home (seatbelts well fastened) they collected Guy and some Indian take-aways, and while they were eating Susannah brought up the subject of Easter, which fell the following weekend.

  ‘Did you have anything planned,’ she asked Nicola carefully, ‘or could you come away with us? There’s plenty of room.’

  This was rather an exaggeration, but it did not signify, because Nicola replied that she meant to visit her parents for a few days.

  ‘I have to explain everything,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it on the telephone.’

  She began to look distressed and Susannah searched for a way to carry the conversation forward. ‘But the rest of the time,’ she said; ‘will you be all right here by yourself? We’ll be away from Good Friday until the Saturday week. I don’t want you to be lonely.’

  ‘No, I’ll be fine,’ said Nicola firmly. ‘I’ll be just fine.’ She dreaded it unspeakably.

  ‘You could come to us after Sussex,’ urged Susannah.

  ‘I can’t, I have to be back at work.’

  ‘I was forgetting,’ said Susannah.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ said Nicola again.

  ‘We’ll get Sam and Helen to keep an eye on you,’ said Geoffrey. ‘After they get back from Cornwall, at any rate. How would that be?’

  They all began to laugh, and then Susannah and Geoffrey told Nicola some of the bits she had missed while she was out with Chloe, and other things about Sam and Helen, and then Susannah remembered what Sam had said about his cash-flow problem.

  ‘There may be a little pied-à-terre in the offing round there,’ she said; ‘I don’t know whether you’d be interested.’ She said it more as a joke than not.

  Nicola stopped eating and looked up at her. ‘How do you mean?’ she said.

  Susannah explained. ‘When they first bought it the house was all divided into bed-sits, and they haven’t got around to dismantling the top-floor one yet. There’s a front room, like Guy’s bedroom here, and the back room is a kitchen. I haven’t actually seen it but Geoffrey has.’

  ‘It’s foul,’ said Geoffrey. ‘You’d loathe it. It’s quite out of the question.’

  ‘It would do for the time being though,’ said Nicola. ‘I need a bolt hole.’

  ‘Oh, but you’ve got one!’ cried Susannah. ‘You’ve got a lovely bolt hole right here. We’ve put up a rail, and everything, and Guy’s let you play with his mice—how can you even think of moving into another?’

  ‘She can take the mice with her, if she likes,’ said Guy. ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘You’re all so very kind,’ said Nicola. ‘But I couldn’t dare risk outstaying my welcome. Anyway this is rather premature, they may not want to let it to me.’

  ‘You needn’t worry about that,’ said Geoffrey. ‘If Sam wants to have my drill on an indefinite loan he’ll have to do what I say. So if you want that space, just say the word, and I’ll fix it for you, no problem.’

  ‘But you just said it was horrible,’ said Susannah.

  ‘The best thing would be for me to see it,’ said Nicola. ‘And then decide.’

  Susannah looked doubtful and disconcerted. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I could ring Helen in the morning and suss it out. Then we’ll take it from there.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Nicola.

  This was how she and Susannah and Guy (he having insisted) all came to be trekking up Sam’s stairs the following evening after Nicola got back from work, to inspect the bolt hole. It was just as Geoffrey had described, but it was felt that when it had been cleaned thoroughly and given a coat of white emulsion it would be quite tolerable. Once Helen had grasped that Nicola would not be averse to minding Chloe occasionally in the evenings, she had no further questions or reservations, but urged Nicola to move in that very minute. It was nonetheless agreed that she would do so after Susannah and Geoffrey returned from their Easter holiday, in just under a fortnight’s time.

  52

  The spare room was tiny, hardly more than a box room, but Jonathan had thought he might as well go on sleeping in it, now that his things were there. There did not seem to be any point in going to the trouble of moving them all back into the main bedroom again. The only real problem now was his shirts, the washing, drying and ironing of; it was real and it was even urgent, and he was going to get up and begin to deal with it this very minute.

  For the rest, now that there was no one peering into his soul, he couldn’t quite locate it. It seemed to have floated away somewhere just beyond his apprehension. Now it was he who was doing the peering, trying to find his soul, so that he could finally assure himself (for a strange and irrational doubt seemed to clutch at him) that what he had decided and what he had done were right. He knew he was right, but he did not feel right, and what was the use of being right if one were to be left feeling wrong? Feeling right seemed the better part of being right. But it’s perfectly useless to lie here thinking, thought Jonathan; the thing to do is to get up and deal with my shirts.

  He managed to get the washing machine loaded and switched on; now for some breakfast, he thought. So he got that started; as it was Sunday there was all the time one liked to take, one could make real coffee, even heat the milk. Plenty of toast. Something to put on the toast: he opened the cupboard to see if there might be some honey, or perhaps some strawberry jam, and he saw the marmalade.

  Marmalade, said the handwritten label; and then the month and the year. They always did that, put the date. It was an ancient practice deriving from an era when this information was pertinent or even essential; a primitive form of the best-before date: quite pointless now. But they still did it. It was like the jam-making itself, an emblematic gesture: quite pointless now, in this age of intercontinental industrial jam production. Of course they said that homemade jam tasted better. Did it?

  It was a large jar, one of those 2lb jobs; the contents were a rich tawny shade, almost brown. There wasn’t, that he knew of, a name for this colour, but looking at it one could imagine how it would taste, and he realised that it was exactly what he wanted to eat. He almost craved it, he could all but taste it now. Marmalade. But you used to love marmalade, I used to send it to you at school. He remembered, now; he remembered eating it straight from the jar. It was angels’ food. It was emblematic food. It was true that the commercial variety did not taste even remotely the same; it failed to achieve the balance between bitter and sweet which was the essence of the thing. Yes, marmalade: marmalade, yes.

  Marmalade, no. This marmalade belonged to Nicola. I must remember to take it with me when I go. She had forgotten it. He could put it with her other things in the bedroom, for her to collect asap. Not now, later. Later, later. The toast will be cold. It doesn’t matter. He found some gooseberry jam and sat down.

  Sunday breakfast in the empty, silent flat: senior back-benchers are reported…his soul was there, where it always had been, at the unlocated interface between brain and mind; it had come home—or he had—just like Mary’s little lamb. That was Nicola’s marmalade, and they were not now in a shared-marmalade situation. He knew he’d been right in principle, in essence: it was just the mundane details which took a bit of getting used to. Too bad about the marmalade. The balance between bitter and sweet was the essence of the thing.

  53

  It was Tuesday morning and Nicola was in the coffee shop eating a croissant, thinking hopelessly of the things still to be done. It got harder, not easier, as time went by: because as the shock wore off, the pain seemed to increase. There were moments when the pain seemed altogether insupportable: could one really survive such an experience?

  There were things still to be done which she could not face: they could be done only at the eleventh hour: you knew that had arrived only
when it seized you with its ice-cold claw. She still had for example to ask the Post Office to re-direct her mail: this was just beyond her present capacities, for she was not altogether certain where she was actually living, or for how long. She had after some thought sent the Scunthorpe application as from the Notting Hill address, since until the sale was effected this seemed to her to be her official residence; meanwhile, the thought of informing her other friends of the change in her circumstances was one more thing to be dreaded, and deferred. She needed all her resolution for the things which must be done immediately—the Scunthorpe business having been a diversion, feasible because so entirely unnecessary, not to say frivolous. Realising this, she all but smiled, and looking at the clock on the wall to make sure she had enough time still in hand lit a cigarette.

  At this moment a voice broke startlingly into her reverie. ‘Nicola! Now what could you be up to, lurking in here like a wan swan?’

  She looked up and saw Philip Colebrook, graphic designer— in his own formulation—extraordinaire. He was the nearest thing among her colleagues to a boon companion; someone to gossip with, someone to giggle with; she smiled at him. ‘Won’t you join me?’ she said.

  He sat down. ‘I’ve never caught you in here before,’ said Philip. ‘I should have known someone else would find out my secret cubbyhole, and that it would be you.’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone else.’

  ‘Please don’t. Why are you wearing dark glasses?’

  ‘To hide behind.’

  ‘What are you hiding from?’

  ‘Myself.’

  Philip missed a beat. ‘How’s that lawyer type,’ he said, ‘what you’re shacked up with? He hasn’t given you a black eye, has he?’

  ‘No, not a black eye. A bloody nose.’

  Philip looked shocked.