Inglorious Read online

  ‘Rosa, you should go and see a doctor,’ said her father.

  ‘That’s not on my list.’

  ‘Your response is disproportionate. Your grief is disproportionate, self-destructive. You refuse to accept that life is hard. Things are never perfect,’ he said. He was always ready with a platitude. He was good at them, quite adept in their use. Some days he talked in fluent cliché. But so did she. It was a genetic trait. Her family had been unoriginal for generations.

  ‘I understand. I’m one of the lucky ones’ – this she told herself a thousand times a day.

  ‘Well, now you’ll find out,’ said her father.

  ‘Find out what?’

  ‘If you are one of the lucky ones,’ he said.

  *

  The other immediate consequence – aside from those that revealed themselves later, including debt, social ostracism, and a few other minor trials – was the end of her relationship with Liam. That was the storm-lashed bark, but really she would have stepped off long ago had the weather been better, the sea altogether calmer. She should have left months ago; that would have been the decent thing to do. But she was weak and a coward, clinging on. Liam, by contrast, and surprisingly, became clinical, like a surgeon. He assessed her chances and decided she was not going to come through. On the day she left her job he came to her with a thin smile. ‘You did what?’ he said. ‘Really? You did that? Why did you do that?’ That! Of all the things she could have done. For Liam, it was the last straw. He wanted to cast her out, denounce her. Then he shook his head. He gave her a profound look. It was an illusion, but Liam was a proper denizen, a firm believer in progress. ‘Let’s not discuss it,’ he said. ‘Let’s eat.’ He was terse that evening, and she wondered what he was about to say. He usually judged her harshly; he liked to tell her she was self-dramatising and, sometimes, obscene. He threw her a sortie of stern glances, pierced her with harsh looks, and turned to his food. Recently he had stopped finding her funny. They were both misbehaving at the time; neither of them was being reasonable. Rosa had an excuse, she had the stark fact of recent bereavement, loss of meaning, acedia and the rest, but really she hadn’t been reasonable for years. Their life together looked impermanent. Things were definitely going down the pan. She didn’t blame it on Liam. But she hadn’t thought about it too hard. She had left her job, and now, she thought, she would get to grips with everything, all the things she hadn’t been thinking clearly about. She had begun to mistrust herself. Her own self – that was a schizophrenic state, a piece of blatant nonsense. She needed to change her circumstances, but she was lazy and her habits were ingrained. Even so, she was sanguine as she sat there, casting glances across the table. She was upbeat, slightly restless. It was the summer, and she always liked the summer. She had walked out of the office, never to return, but she enjoyed the shifting of the seasons. Her plans were basic at the time, she was thinking of deep blue skies and how much she liked wearing shorts. She was planning evenings at the Windsor Castle pub, sitting in the garden with friends drinking wine. Saturday mornings, reading papers on Westbourne Grove. The season, she imagined, would run along as the seasons had been running along for years. No one really worked in the summer. They went to summer parties, drank wine from the ritual plastic goblet, and talked about sport. She would take up the guitar again. She would bake bread and cultivate window boxes. She would train rigorously and run every day. By the autumn she would be fit and lively again. She was only relieved she didn’t have to go to work the next day.

  *

  Liam was quiet and watchful for a week, and then he said it all. It was a fine June evening when he spilled it. On that evening, like so many others, they were having a quiet meal. The only sound across the silence-shrouded table was the click of cutlery. They were like a pair of venerable cockroaches, dining together. She had cooked fish and vegetables with sauce from a packet. She hadn’t taken too much time over the details. They were living in a high-rise block by Notting Hill tube. From their living room they could see the city, glowing and sparkling beneath, the cars weaving patterns of light, the buildings rising towards the centre. There was an orange glow hanging over it all, a dusty halo. The evening was crisp, the air was thin, and the noise of traffic filled the room.

  Liam had no sense of occasion. He disliked high drama. He despised parties; he refused even to celebrate his own birthday. He was deeply uncomfortable at weddings. He thought it was all a fuss, a suspicious fuss. So he had hardly prepared a violent scene. He was dressed in his usual innocuous way: trousers in a cotton fabric, a long-sleeved blue T-shirt. He hated to be conspicuous. He never raised his voice and he disliked confrontations; it was why he struggled in his job. He could generally see the other side of an argument. He called it negative capability and referred proudly to Keats. She thought it was cowardice. They were all afraid, Rosa was afraid of a lot of things, most of them inchoate or unmentionable, but Liam was afraid of his boss and this enraged her. He mostly didn’t try. He assumed that his opponents were benighted, but he lacked the will to convert them. He’d suffered a few minor hitches, the painful discrepancy between aspiration and realisation. Still, he was successful enough as a political lobbyist. He had a firm handshake; he looked good in a suit. He was plausible whatever he did.

  Usually, they were measured with each other. He had thanked her for dinner, a solitary foray. ‘Thanks so much. Delicious sauce.’ ‘Sainsbury’s very own,’ she said. ‘Delicious.’ ‘Mmm, I know.’ It was the sort of script that ended with a murder. Or death by mutual tedium. Someone had to crack! Now he was looking carefully at her, wiping his mouth. The dining room was untidy. They had a lava lamp in the corner, which had once seemed like the height of irony. The curtains were purple velvet and had been made by Rosa’s mother years ago, when she was a seventies queen of home-baking and floral skirts. They had hung in the living room when Rosa was a child. They made the flat look like a stage, prepared for an amateur production, a village panto or a motley farce. In recent months she had found they pained her, brought it all back, her vanished mother, the very thoughts she was trying to evade. She had thrown out a lot of things, photos and letters, but she had left the purple curtains hanging there.

  The floor of the dining room was covered with newspapers they somehow never managed to throw away, and the living room was just as littered with ephemera. They had a long black leather sofa and black leather armchairs, which matched nothing else but amused them both. Really, neither of them had any sense of style. Rosa had hung some pictures on the walls, West Country landscapes from her parents’ house. The walls were white. Rosa distrusted colour and didn’t like to use it. It made for an ascetic effect. Visitors often thought they had recently moved in. But they had been there for years.

  Liam was rocking back on his chair. In this bland room, wearing bland clothes, Liam was a beautiful man. It was always a shock to Rosa to see how beautiful he was. Now, after ten years, they no longer spoke about the things that concerned them. It was another sort of quietness, like the quietness Rosa found enveloping her prose. He was beautiful, but Rosa wasn’t whipping herself too hard. Rosa and Liam had certainly dropped out of the idyll. Their pocket utopia had decayed and a feeling of strain had developed between them. Familiarity made them slovenly with each other; they barely made an effort in their conversations. They gossiped in an easy way, about friends they had known for years, about their jobs. They liked to squabble about the washing up. Of course they loved each other. They had a shared past; they had been friends before they fell in love. Rosa had found Liam fascinating at the start: he was a handsome awkward man, her favourite type. Her love was a mixture of inevitable cliché and basic lust and a sense of shared sympathy and she liked his hurried way of speaking. It was easy to romanticise him, and she did for a few years, until they began to bore each other. They moved in together a few months after they began their relationship; they were inseparable, they couldn’t bear to spend a night apart. When he went away for a few days she was bereft.
Later they couldn’t spend a night apart because the habit was so ingrained.

  She had become insensitive and bullish, tardy in her praise. He had become obsessed with the minutiae of their living arrangements. It was impossible for her to explain it to anyone else, it sounded too much like an argument between people who have lived together for too long, but Liam picked at everything she did, an amiable, almost affectionate picking, but it vexed her all the same. It made her reluctant to decide anything for herself, the colour of a cushion, the contents of the fridge, because Liam was likely to complain, gently, mildly, but complain all the same. It all got rancid, touched with fraudulence. When he was irritated his mouth sagged at the sides. He looked like a mangled piece of fruit. And Rosa was like a nought, her mouth constantly open in self-exoneration. She spent far too much time explaining why she put the towels where she put them, or the bread where she put that, or the rest. It was bad for them both. At work, Rosa was an efficient, sensible woman, or had been until she became inefficient and completely nonsensical. But at home she was ill at ease.

  ‘Why do you bother?’ she had asked. ‘Why does it matter at all?’

  He would seem to understand, but ten minutes later it would start again. ‘Just leave that.’ ‘Why are there crumbs on the floor?’ ‘What is this doing here?’ ‘Where is my phone?’ ‘Don’t move it again.’ ‘What is this?’

  Initially she had rebelled, they had fought over trivia, and then she had compromised. She adhered to his customs, she obeyed the edicts of the kitchen, the rigid laws of the living room. Whatever she did, Liam was fussy; he developed an aversion to water, a loathing of open windows, a set of strange ideas about how you hung dishcloths. So they had piles of perfect dishrags and a committed silence about important things.

  ‘Do you do it because you are trying to control me, or the environment?’ she asked.

  ‘You are the environment,’ he replied. Beautiful Liam, so young-looking, with his muscular frame, his air of health, his smile, his ready charm. A handsome man. Women adored Liam. Men admired him. But she saw him as a nag, a man with his head in the dirt under the table.

  When she had posed the question – trying to fix herself to a ritual, eager to get herself locked in to something permanent and unceasing, marriage, a romantic idea, good for morale, a ceremony, a party, her father would be pleased, fantastic, a wedding! and so on – and Liam had said no, of course they knew that was it. That precisely was it. Their own miniature Armageddon. The death of love! Completely trivial compared to the chaos around them, of course. It was hard to keep a sense of perspective. For herself she felt her miniature life was going badly. Her mother dead and burnt, and like a sap-headed coward Liam had stalled. He said he loved her, but it wasn’t quite right. He had a few things to sort out. They could discuss it in a few months, he said. The rest – on he had gone, like a nervous actor given a difficult speech. Since then, she had been idle and uncertain but really she was waiting for the end. Unable to effect it, but expectant.

  On that evening – the finale – Liam looked particularly beautiful. His brown, wavy hair, curling onto his collar. His small nose, which dipped towards his firm lips. The severity of his jawbone. His wide shoulders, his almost hairless chest. His long elegant legs, his small waist, his bony ankles. His white, crooked teeth, chipped at their ends. When she saw him curved into the chair she wanted to fall to the floor and beg for forgiveness. Instead she stood and began to clear the plates away. He was still silent, intent on his glass of wine. He looked fascinating. It was only when he opened his mouth that he betrayed himself. Then he poured it out, a steady stream, placatory words, words for falling asleep to. He didn’t believe them anyway, he just poured them out. It was beauty-worship, she had diagnosed it long ago. She would hardly have loved him so long, had he not been so beautiful. Recently they had become more polite than ever. It had to be a bad sign. When Grace came round – which she had been doing constantly in recent months, as if she feared to leave them alone – she mocked them for their silences. She chain-smoked and explained that they had developed a fatal caesura. She sat there with her thin hands outstretched, refining her points.

  Grace was a towering extrovert – ‘fatal caesura’ precisely the sort of showy phrase she would come up with – but she was considerate. When Rosa’s mother died she had been formidable, relentless in her kindness. Though she had never met Rosa’s mother, she said many things that even now Rosa remembered. Decent understatements, offers of help, quiet maxims. ‘Don’t ruin your life. Your mother gave her life up for you. Don’t make her sacrifice worthless.’ ‘Don’t sink. You owe it to yourself. You’ve tried so hard. And worse will come.’ Really once Rosa wrote them down, they sounded hackneyed enough, but when Grace pattered them out she thought they were the sanest things anyone had said in a long time. Yet Grace wasn’t always such a saint; she was fiercely critical and easily bored and when she found something dull she mocked it. She shifted jobs a lot: she had begun as an actress then she changed to TV production and retrained as a lawyer and most recently she had become a journalist, which was how Rosa met her. She lacked inhibitions, and she liked to talk about relationships, psychobabble much of it, but Rosa lapped it up, babbled it back and cited Grace like a friendly guru. For months, Grace had been coming round and saying, ‘You two, you two are just so fine. You want to grind each other into the ground.’ She called them pitted; their energies, apparently, were pitted against each other. ‘It’s like a World War One aerial battle,’ she said. ‘One of you has to bale out before you both crash. Someone must make the sacrifice, go down in flames.’ When she said that, she raised her eyebrows and dared them to look uncomfortable. Still they sat there and took it, because they knew she was right.

  She would never have been friends with Grace, had her mother not died. It was after the death – only a few weeks after – that she went to a party and got so drunk she started talking to Grace about extinction. Grace – always one for talk – lapped it all up and ordered them a taxi. Grace liked Liam from the start; she called him the beauty. Really she was a tonic, and Rosa soon found she was unburdening everything to Grace. She disgorged it all, and Grace smoked and made her salient comments, qua a lot of psychogurus and philosophers Rosa hadn’t read. While Rosa had lost all sense of myth and purpose, Grace was sure she had it cracked. ‘Humanism, with dignity,’ she said, Grace the oracle with long blonde hair. ‘That’s all we need. Compassion for fellow man.’ And then she said, ‘Bentham, Mill, utilitarianism, darker twist, Sartre and existentialism, Richard Rorty. Anti-Darwinism. No selfish gene. Dependent on others. The Beauty of Creation’ – she said something like that, though it sounded pretty fluid when she said it.

  On the evening when Liam spilled some of it out – not all, not all by a good way, a long shot short of the truth, but spilled out more than he had before – they were treading in matrimonial treacle, both of them well-stuck, struggling to lift a foot. That night the room was full of signs and portents. Liam had left his jacket on the floor – for him, a cataclysmic act. The kitchen was a serried shambles of pots and pans. The system had broken down. A dishcloth had dropped on the lino and no one had stooped to collect it. There were these small signs of ferment and then a few remnants of order, everything incommensurate. On the mantelpiece were some postcards, which had curled with the heat from the gas fire. The shelves were full of books they could hardly say one of them owned more than the other, the furniture belonged to both of them, tasteless though it was. The sofa, the inconsequential oak table with the matching chairs, the bookcases they had built together. The room felt like a museum, even as Liam started to speak.

  ‘This can’t continue,’ he was saying. He was sounding very quiet and reasonable. That was a trick of his; it had nothing to do with what he was saying at all. There was a long pause, while Rosa wondered what couldn’t continue, whether she had broken another of Liam’s domestic codes, but there was something about his expression, the twitching of his brow, and the way he kep
t running his hands up and down on his arms, that made her think it might be the end. He was explaining that he had talked to her before about their problems. He wasn’t sure they could carry on. Had he even said ‘fight the same fight?’ Or was it ‘run the same race?’ It was that sort of phrase-slinging, and then he said they had different goals. It was clear they had stultified. The marriage question had brought it all into relief. They had struggled on, but now they had to be sensible. He mentioned that you had to abandon a sinking ship. It was the best thing to do, for everyone.

  ‘But the captain has to go down with it,’ said Rosa. ‘With the ship.’ Though she realised that wasn’t the point. So she stayed there on her chair and shifted around, bit her nails, picked a scab on her finger. He was talking about love and choice and other things she later found she couldn’t really remember, and then he said, ‘There’s nothing else to do.’ He mentioned the future, a future that would make them happy. He couldn’t see it, he said, with his hand on the back of a chair. He couldn’t imagine it at all. Then he said, ‘I just don’t feel I can offer you the love you need.’

  That phrase, of all of the phrases he used, was the one that really stuck in her mind. Anyway, personal pyrotechnics aside, solipsistic whinging and so on, it was clear that he had an objective. Liam was rarely honest, he hated telling the truth, but he was decisive. He stood and walked to the window. The evening light was kind to him, faint and flattering. His face looked particularly high-boned and perfect; his eyes were cloaked in shadows. He cut a fine stoical figure.

  ‘Things have shifted altogether,’ he said. ‘We have to let each other go.’

  She put the plates back on the table, and sat down again. Already, he seemed more energetic. She realised he had been thinking this for months, perhaps years, and this caused her to reassess him. There was hardly even a chance to resist, so persuasive were Liam’s pauses. Into the pauses, she understood, he was pouring the weight of his conviction. His brow was furrowed but he had stretched his legs out under the table. He looked settled and quite determined. He would stay there, stock still and patient, until she walked the plank, unstuck herself altogether.