The Essence of the Thing Read online

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Obviously you’re right, technically. I’d simply rather.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see.’

  ‘And now if you’ll excuse me,’ said Nicola, ‘I’m going to bed.’

  He stood aside for her and she left the room, and it was now that he saw what was different about it; wrong with it: the mantelpiece was bare; all the dogs were gone.

  40

  ‘Geoffrey, what have you done with the drill?’

  ‘Why do you want the drill?’

  ‘So that you can put up that rail.’

  ‘What rail?’

  ‘For Nicola’s clothes.’

  ‘Oh, not that again.’

  ‘She’ll be here on Saturday.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I’m not though.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘So where’s the drill?’

  ‘Sam’s got it.’

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Yes, he borrowed it, a while ago, to put up shelves.’

  ‘Honestly, you’d think with a whole house to fix up he’d buy his own drill. Pathetic.’

  ‘Yes, well, there it is.’

  ‘Well, you’d better get it back, pronto.’

  ‘I can’t go round there now, I simply can’t.’

  ‘You don’t have to, Guy can go on his bike. Just ring up and say he’s coming.’

  ‘Oh, God, must I?’

  ‘Please. I just want to get this bloody rail sorted out once and for all. Now. Look, I’ll get the number for you. Where’s that address book? Ah, here we are. Now.’

  They did the business: Sam was in, thank goodness, because it was his turn to look after baby Chloe while her mother, the not-so-very-fair Helen, worked in an advice centre. Guy was called and sent off to do the errand and within half an hour Geoffrey with loud complaint was at work fixing the rail. The task itself was accomplished in ten minutes flat, it was only the stages leading up to it which had taken up a total of—con servatively—five hours, spread—to be fair—over four days.

  ‘Shall I take it back to him now?’ said Guy. ‘He said he hadn’t finished with it.’

  ‘Of all the bloody cheek!’ said Susannah. ‘No you won’t. He can bloody come and get it himself. The very idea!’

  ‘How long is Nicola going to stay here?’ asked Guy.

  ‘I don’t know. As long as she likes. Listen. I want you to be very very nice to Nicola when she’s here, okay. Not that you wouldn’t be, but still. She’s feeling rather frail.’

  ‘Frail. What does that mean?’

  ‘Fragile.’

  ‘Like glass?’

  ‘Yes, exactly.’

  ‘Might she break?’

  ‘Yes. In a way.’

  ‘Cor.’

  ‘So just be very very nice, so that she doesn’t.’

  ‘I’ll let her play with my mice.’

  ‘That’s the ticket.’

  ‘She can have them in here if she likes.’

  ‘That might be going a bit far. Just let her play with them, if she wants to. She might not want to.’

  ‘Oh, she will.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Yes, we’ll see—when’s she coming?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s when I’ll be at my riding lesson!’

  ‘So, she’ll be here when you get back.’

  ‘Whizzy!’

  41

  She did not know where he might have gone, rising while she still slept and leaving the flat before she had got out of bed: bargain-hunting (some chance) in Portobello Road, or playing squash with some athletic crony, or simply wandering in a stupor of unease around the neighbourhood, up to the Gate, through the park, all the way to Kensington, and even beyond: who knew? He was returning, had already returned, to the secret state of his bachelor existence, before she had met him; all that was wanting was the murk of Crawford Street.

  It was eleven o’clock already: she had done almost everything which had been listed under the rubric of ‘last things’ and was anxious to be gone: to prolong the appalling horror of her departure—a horror so appalling that she could not face it, but had hidden from her grief behind a storm of activity—was out of the question. She would leave him a note. She began to write.

  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).

  She took the last load of laundry from the dryer and packed it and was ready to leave. First she would just take everything down to the entrance hall; then ring for a taxi. And that would be that. She put the front door on the latch and carried the first box downstairs.

  As she was coming down with the second box she met Jonathan on the stairs.

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘I was just leaving.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’ll be back for the suitcase in a minute.’

  She continued on her way and then ascended the stairs once more and entered the flat. Jonathan was hovering in the sitting room.

  ‘I’ll just call a taxi,’ she said; she picked up the receiver.

  ‘I could take you,’ Jonathan said.

  She glanced at him and began to telephone for the taxi; then she looked up again. ‘Drop dead,’ she said.

  Five minutes, the taxi controller told her. She hung up.

  ‘I’ve left you a note,’ she said, ‘on the kitchen table. I wasn’t sure you’d get back before I left. There’s nothing more to say.’

  The telephone rang; she picked up the receiver and listened and after a word of thanks hung up.

  ‘That’s the taxi,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Jonathan.’

  She walked over to the doorway and picked up the suitcase.

  ‘Let me take that down for you,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I can manage it easily. Goodbye.’

  And she was out of the front door, and had closed it behind her, and was gone, just like that.

  The driver helped her with the boxes and then they were off. She sat back in the rear of the taxi, looking at the gay and carefree Saturday crowds thronging the streets all the way across the Royal Borough, and then they were on the Albert Bridge crossing the mysterious Thames, and then they were in the otherworld of south-of-the-river, and Nicola, stricken almost unto death, sat there, immobile, incredulous, her broken heart thumping, thumping, her hands curled into fists so that she should not even begin to cry.

  42

  ‘Just go straight inside, darling—no one’s there, Geoffrey’s taken Guy to his riding lesson—I’ll get the luggage.’

  Nicola went into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa and buried her face—down which as soon as Susannah had opened the front door her tears had started to stream—her terrible, strange, stricken face, in her crossed arms, and wept. Here were all the tears she had not shed during this terrible week: all the tears, for all the horror which had come upon her, and which, unendurable as it was, had to be nonetheless experienced. Then Susannah was with her. She cried for a very long time; Susannah had never heard a sound so utterly bereft. At last her tears subsided and she looked up, her expression hopeless and beaten.

  ‘I think I might just pop over to Notting Hill and kill him now,’ said Susannah matter-of-factly. ‘Do you want to come with me, or would you rather wait here?’

  Nicola tried to smile. ‘Hasn’t Geoffrey taken the car?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes, I was forgetting. We’ll have to wait until they get back. That won’t be for another hour or so. They might stay out for lunch. Well, we’ll have plenty of time to have a nice cup of tea first. And something to eat.’

  ‘Just tea,’ said Nicola. ‘I can’t eat anything.’

  ‘Just a slice of ham? Nice ham from the bone? On a very thin slice of bread? With the tiniest dab of mustard? And just one weeny leaf of cress? Just
to please me.’

  Nicola managed to laugh, and then tears started coming out of her eyes again. ‘What would I do without you,’ she said brokenly.

  ‘You’d have to kill him by yourself,’ said Susannah. ‘Which might be quite difficult.’

  ‘He’s probably not even there,’ said Nicola wanly. ‘He’s probably gone out.’

  ‘I hope he gets run over then,’ said Susannah.

  Nicola imagined the scene, Jonathan lying in the street, as still as death, covered in blood, and began to weep again in earnest.

  ‘No,’ she cried, ‘don’t say that! I don’t want him to die!’

  ‘All right then,’ said Susannah. ‘All right, all right. We’ll let him live. But if he’s going to live, he’s going to have to shape up, he truly is.’

  And she began to wonder just how Jonathan might really have been living and thinking, and feeling, for the relationship to have come to this, and she thought it might be a good idea to do something about lunch, because then Nicola might be able to talk about everything which had happened, and she might gain some true perception of this extraordinary and terrible situation.

  ‘It may be I who has to shape up,’ said Nicola miserably.

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ said Susannah. ‘The first thing to do is to have some tea and something to eat. Just a tiny snackette. Come on.’

  And she took Nicola’s hand and they went into the kitchen.

  43

  So, she’s gone, thought Jonathan, she has actually gone. It’s all over; she’s gone. And the flat itself seemed, from the moment that the front door had closed behind her, to have stopped breathing, to have been stilled into a silence so vacant that he was almost afraid to move, and still stood on the spot where he’d been standing, just inside the sitting-room doorway, when she’d made her exit, suitcase in hand.

  But I should at least have helped her downstairs with her things, he thought. There had been something so disturbing about the sight of her, carrying that large cardboard box down the stairs, hardly able to see over the top of it. She could have missed her footing. She could have fallen down the stairs. She might have broken her neck. And then the suitcase. It must have been heavy. It’s not as if she’s an Amazon. That old 1950s pigskin suitcase, from her mother’s old honeymoon luggage, with the watered silk lining beginning to fray: he remembered it, because they’d taken it on holiday to France last year, and it had earned them respect all over the Vaucluse. Useless for air travel, but just the thing on the road, in France. The French know how to read the signs at forty paces, no, make that metres. One of the very best things about being English was living next door to the French, who among all their other talents knew how to place a piece of luggage at quarante mètres: you could roll up at a decent hotel dirty and tired and crumpled at the end of a long day, and they’d give you one of their looks, but as soon as they saw that suitcase it was chouette, it was oui monsieur je vous en prie madame pas de problème. Voilà. He could remember exactly how heavy that suitcase was, taking it out of the car, glad to hand it over to someone else to carry upstairs to their room, and now she’d taken it all the way down two flights of stairs by herself: I can manage it easily, she said. Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t offered. It wasn’t his fault if he hadn’t helped her. That he should have this sense of having left undone something he ought to have done was totally unreasonable.

  I suppose it’s time I had something to eat, he thought, and then I can get on with some work: because he’d brought some work home for the weekend. This Lloyd’s thing will go on and on and on, he thought: one of the biggest fuck-ups in the history of the world. It had come along at exactly the right moment for Jonathan: he was like an actor who has just been offered his first Hamlet. I’ll just get something to eat. He was quite hungry now he came to think of it.

  But he didn’t go into the kitchen: instead he sat down for a moment on the sofa and looked at the fireplace, and wondered what was wrong, so terribly wrong; and then it came into focus again: it was the bare mantelpiece, of course. He remembered, now. She’d taken away all the dogs. Well, of course she had, they were her dogs. He hadn’t even liked them all that much—he’d used to tease her about them at first; they weren’t even good, most of them. ‘Bad dogs,’ he’d said. Except for the Derby pug he’d given her, that they’d seen one night, walking up Kensington Church Street together after seeing a film at the Odeon, looking in the windows of the antique shops on the way.

  ‘Oh, look, Jonathan,’ she’d said, in front of Stockspring, ‘a little dog! Isn’t it sweet!’

  He was happy enough to humour her. He looked at the dog indulgently. ‘It is rather nice,’ he said. ‘A pug.’

  ‘I expect it’s expensive,’ she said. ‘Come on. But, oh, sweet. Look at its little face, and the tassels on its cushion.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jonathan, making up his mind then and there; and he made a mental note of the telephone number on the fascia and rang the shop the very next morning, and got there just before they closed in the evening and bought the little dog, the dear little pug on its cushion, and took it home in his pocket, and when she was in the kitchen getting the casserole out of the oven, just before they sat down to eat at the dining table at the end of the sitting room—there, under the window—he’d put the little dog on her plate, and waited for her astonished, delighted, ecstatic discovery. The look on her face had been worth £300-odd of anyone’s money.

  And why, why on earth was he remembering all these things now? What point, what benefit, what pleasure, to him to remember such things now, or ever? It was just that, in this first hour or so of his new existence the flat was so extremely silent, felt so extremely empty, had ceased, so uncannily, to breathe. He might, after all, go out and get some lunch in a pub; yes, that would be best. He could do with a pint. Good. He got to his feet and checked his pockets to make sure he had plenty of money on him and left the flat, slamming the door to expel all the ghosts and goblins and wanly wandering spirits that threatened to take possession of its immensely yawning, silent emptiness.

  44

  ‘I hadn’t done a proper shop for ages,’ said Nicola. ‘There can’t be a scrap of food in the house.’

  ‘You should worry.’

  ‘All the same.’

  ‘For God’s sake. Sorry, sweetheart, don’t want to be harsh, but I mean—’

  ‘Oh, Susannah—’ and Nicola began to cry again.

  Susannah patted her shoulder for a while, and poured her out a fresh cup of tea.

  Nicola dried her eyes. ‘If only I knew,’ she said miserably, ‘what I’d done wrong.’

  ‘Very likely, nothing whatsoever.’

  Nicola was staring at the far wall in a terrible effort to see into the past, which can be more difficult even than seeing into the future. ‘I suppose,’ she said slowly, ‘that it really was all brought on by my having to go off the pill.’

  ‘The old pill has caused a lot of problems, one way or another, if you ask me,’ said Susannah.

  Nicola, trying to laugh, managed to smile. ‘I suppose that was what provoked Jonathan to consider the whole situation in depth, seriously,’ she continued. She was smiling no longer. ‘And then, to find it wanting. To find me wanting.’ She paused. ‘Which, after all, I am.’

  ‘But not in his sense,’ said Susannah sharply. ‘He’s the one who’s wanting, in that sense. And if I know anything about it, he’s going to end up wanting in the other sense too. He’s going to be as miserable as hell, once he comes to his senses.’

  ‘That’s where he thinks he’s come to now,’ said Nicola.

  ‘Well, he’s entirely wrong there,’ said Susannah very firmly. ‘If you ask me, the poor sod’s actually got a major rock in his head. So there.’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Nicola; ‘I wish I really knew what it all means. The worst of all is not knowing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Susannah, squeezing her hand, ‘I know what you mean. That’s always the worst. Nevertheless, I vote for t
he rock. Think about it.’ They were silent for a while, then ‘Poor old Jonathan,’ said Susannah, unexpectedly.

  Nicola looked at her, taken by surprise, and then briefly, faintly, smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I guess.’

  It was at this moment that, very fortunately, the front door opened and in a trice Guy came bouncing into the room. He leaped into the air and then struck an attitude. ‘Shazam!’ he cried. ‘Shazam! Guess what?’

  ‘Did you say hello to Nicola?’

  ‘Hello, Nicola!’ He turned back to his mother. ‘Guess!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I trotted today!’

  ‘I say, well done! Whizzy!’

  ‘You bet. I say, Nicola—Nicola, would you like to see my mice now?’

  ‘I say, darling, I don’t think—’

  ‘I’ll just go and get them—hang on a tick.’

  ‘Oh, God. Sorry. He’s been so looking forward to showing you his mice—can you bear it?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing particular against mice.’

  In fact she loathed them, but fortunately Guy returned with just one, and she endured its running up her arm and sitting, terrified, on her shoulder, quivering. Then the sight of its fear and bewilderment aroused feelings of real pity, if not affection.

  ‘Poor little thing,’ she said. ‘Poor little mouse.’

  ‘She’s not little, for a mouse,’ Guy pointed out. ‘She’s quite big, actually, as a mouse.’

  Nicola began to laugh, as did Susannah; in a while, Nicola was laughing almost helplessly, and Guy, pleased with himself, had joined in too. When Geoffrey came in he couldn’t have seen even the slightest sign of anything but ease and merriment. Thank God at any rate for that, thought Susannah, with real gratitude.

  45

  The day died away around him, the dusk fell and the street lights came on; the liggers and the shoppers had all gone home and the revellers and rioters had not yet emerged: in the half-empty streets below him people walked their dogs and children circled each other on their bicycles, prolonging the last late evening minutes before going home to supper. Jonathan switched on the lamp and worked on for another hour.