It had been a long and difficult week for Leonard. Shelley had been off work since Monday and had not been in contact. He wasn’t sure whether she was avoiding him because of upset or awkwardness, or whether she was just at home with Patrick for his Easter school holidays. Perhaps she was even off sick with a tummy bug, or otherwise back to living her life in all the ways that didn’t include him.
Several times he had drafted a hands-off, solicitous text just to check in, only to think better of it, a misjudged text having been the cause of all this in the first place. He had hoped that, at the very least, she wasn’t mad at him, and that she understood that his clumsiness was not born of insensitivity but inexperience. In time, perhaps they would even be able to enjoy the odd platonic walk in the park or maybe she would tell her future boyfriends that, while Leonard was all wrong for her, at least he was one of the good guys. A mere week ago, he had considered himself to be Shelley’s boyfriend, but now he doubted whether he had even got that far. How would she have seen it? By his own standards, it had been a major relationship, the furthest he had ever got; but perhaps, for a woman of Shelley’s experience, it had ended too soon for him to be considered anything at all. ‘Just any man have I met for a few dates,’ she had said. A ‘no contest’ in boxing, a spoiled vote in a general election. In his imagination—which was located in his chest as much as in his head—he had already skipped forward a few chapters in their life together, but now he realised that they would be written without him. There was a palpable humiliation in having to pack up his ambitions and his fantasies and settle into a new type of dismantled normality.
After another lonely day at work, Leonard sat at home doodling in his sketchbook at the dining room table, his mouth in the twenty past eight position. He was too restless to concentrate, yet too listless to do anything worthwhile. The one thing that was on his mind would neither leave him be nor resolve itself. He still had many unfinished sections in his book about Patrius and the Romans, but it had become the last thread connecting Shelley to his life. His sadness over the break-up had become a secret new problem that was haunting the completion of the book.
For some it is the smell of a wet duffel coat at the radiator, for others it is the melting of a madeleine on the palate, but for Leonard it was the simple mistake of sucking the wrong end of a pencil. No sooner had the taste of graphite, so alien and unfoodlike, registered on his tongue, than he was transported back to the first time he had made that very same absent-minded error. It was a time many years ago: a time of power cuts; a time of milk bottle tops being pecked by blue tits; a time before kids’ car seats or Playstations. Doing homework in his room, he got distracted by the shouting of some boys playing outside and accidentally sucked the pointed tip of his pencil. Disgusted by its flavour, he ran out to the bathroom to rinse his mouth using soap, which was a mistake. Muttering a child’s curses, he comforted himself by sitting on the tiled bathroom floor with the Our World encyclopaedias, forgetting the time, or time itself, and nursing himself back to contentment in those pages. Closing his eyes, he swam inwardly towards the memory, not of the books, but of the feeling of reading the books. There, buried amidst the melancholy, he found the original charge that had animated his imagination all those years ago.
He began typing and sketching, transcending the space between his adult self and the young Leonard. A rediscovered magic energised and propelled him, as pages upon pages of imagination poured out of him. His touch for drawing came back to him, as he created tender scenes of Roman boyhood: the subtle expressions of wonder on the face of Patrius, as he pulled a frog from a well; a great double-paged scene of the boy’s mother sitting on a chair in her gladiator gear, watching him practising his handstands; and a carefully shaded look of sad awe on the boy’s face as he heard about his brave paterfamilias, who had loved him very much before he went off to fight the Goths all those years ago. Leonard emptied himself into those pages, smashing open his personal experience to release the universal experience within. He finally finished the book during that time which could be called very late at night or very early in the morning, and collapsed into bed with a feeling of sublime but exhausted calm, as if after a vomiting fit.
The next morning, Holy Thursday, the office was quiet. Leonard intended to sit at his desk for a few hours before packing up and going home to sleep through the weekend until the wedding on Monday, after which he had no idea what he would do with his book or his life.
He logged on and saw an email from Mark Baxter BEd:
From: himark@markbaxterbed.com
Hi Lenny,
Love, love, loved the pitch you sent me. Totally cooking my man. It needs a bit of work, so I think I’ll need to wave my usual magic wand over it, but we’re definitely on to something. I’m always into being innovative and disruptive. Let’s blow the whole Roman scene open, that’s what I say.
I’m off to the coast for the weekend. Some of the girls on the team managed to talk me into teaching them how to surf. I agreed as it’s a good teambuilding exercise. You and me are the last two good guys left Lenny! If we don’t give the girls a break it isn’t going to come from the bozos at Factorial Publishing, that’s for sure! I shouldn’t trash talk them though, they’re okay – they’ve got some really good guys over there. Real innovators, huge into disruption. I’ve actually got them lined up for a call on Tuesday – I think they’re going to love our book my man!
You may wish to note the above,
Mark Baxter, BEd
Leonard started clearing through the other unread messages that he had been ignoring all week. Not a single email was from someone he had met personally. A handful needed a response, but they were mostly just memos about internal procedures. There was a lengthy email thread between two people who had a professional disagreement about some editing point—Leonard was among the spectators in the cc line. Inevitably, there was a series of emails about the expensive, bipolar accounts system, which was down for a few hours, then back up before finding itself back down again.
Leonard ran off a mock-up of the book on the good colour printer, just to see how it looked. As he sat back in his ergonomic swivel chair, he read through it slowly, page by page. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever done, even if it nearly broke him to do it. He put all the pages in order and sealed them in an envelope with ‘Shelley’ written on the front. He wanted to leave it on her desk, along with a pyramid-shaped Toblerone Easter egg for Patrick.
Her desk was unoccupied, as he expected. Helpdesk Greg had a cereal bowl in front of him and was chopping a banana into what looked like dog food. He was wearing a paisley pyjama top.
‘Hey Len. Long time no see. I’ve been checking through your internet history. Just a standard audit. We can talk more privately next week unless there’s anything you’d like to confess now, just to get it over with.’
‘Hi Greg. I see Shelley is still out.’
‘Woah! You didn’t know? Trouble in Eden? Oh, I’m sorry my man. Still, at least we have each other. Do you want me to mind that Easter egg? And your little A4 love letter in the envelope. You can trust me with your life, you know that.’
Leonard thought better of leaving the book and egg on Shelley’s desk. Margaret, one of Shelley’s colleagues, came running back to her desk repeating a series of expletives.
‘Hi, I w—’
‘What? What is it now—and shut it you,’ she said, pointing to Greg without looking at him.
‘Hi, I was just saying, do you know if there’s anywhere I could leave this for Shelley? Somewhere private maybe?’
‘What is it?’
‘Just some personal gifts.’
‘Is the Easter egg for her?’
‘No, that’s for her son. The envelope is for her. Well, and for him too.’
‘Give it here.’
Leonard handed it over, not sure if he was doing the right thing.
‘Okay, thanks. Will it be okay like that?’ he asked.
‘I’ll see her over the weekend. I’ll give it to her.’
‘Okay, okay. If you don’t mind. That would be great. Thanks.’
‘That all?’ she asked, looking at her screen, printing something.
‘That’s it. Happy Easter.’
He turned to say goodbye to Greg, who was mixing up a protein shake on his desk. Greg showed Margaret the Star Trek gesture for ‘live long and prosper,’ before swivelling it and flipping her the bird.
‘Happy Easter, Greg,’ said Leonard.
‘Hey Mr Encyclopaedia. We’re going to have a history lesson next week. Internet history. Don’t miss it.’
Leonard packed up, went home and slept like a corpse for sixteen hours.
The next morning he felt rested and lighter. He got up to a new sense of clarity and equilibrium. He went through the house opening all the windows, like Yoko Ono in the Imagine video, only wearing paisley pyjamas and orange Crocs.
For weeks, the house he had lived in his whole life had unsettled him. He had felt homesick, its emptiness betraying him. But now, walking through each of its rooms, he felt ready to make friends with his own home again. Its space felt comfortable. All throughout there was an ambient sense of familiarity.
Leonard wore a new feeling of peace. He had always associated peace with the idea of happiness, as if it were some sort of steady state that happiness turned into when it was for real. But now he realised that peace is independent of any one feeling. The deep peace that he now felt was in a minor key. It was not blissful, but melancholy. It was a profound acceptance of things as they were, devoid of superficial preferences. The weight of effort that it took to be happy was lifted from his bones.
Before preparing his own breakfast, he stepped out to his neglected back garden where the bird feeders had been swinging for weeks, all empty and cobwebbed, and stained with the birds’ dirty leavings. Leonard scrubbed the feeders in scalding water to disinfect them, and dug out the tub of birdseed from the cupboard. He filled the seed feeder up to the brim and put out some fat balls for the bigger birds who couldn’t balance on the seed feeder’s small perches. Feeling generous, he also scattered some seed on the ground in open space, so that the less pushy birds could have something to peck at. As he stood filling the kettle at the sink, he could see through the back window that two blue tits were already getting stuck in.
Heading into his living room with his breakfast on a tea tray, Leonard had a look at his bookshelves for some of the paperbacks he had bought recently, which had been stacked in the horizontal unread pile ever since, vertical alignment being reserved for those he had already finished and enjoyed. He found the copy of The Mill on the Floss that he had bought months before and forgotten about. He knew it would be a test to read it without flinching from whatever traces of Shelley he found there.
Upstairs, he pushed open the door to his mother’s old room and sat on the bed, as he had often done to keep her company over a bedtime cuppa. The room was tidy and unfussy. It had already lost the characteristic freshness she had always brought to it, as much by her personality as her scent. In its place was the generic smell of dust undisturbed. On the bedside table stood the photo of his father that she had kissed with her fingers each night before going to sleep. Leonard hadn’t yet gone through her personal effects but there would be plenty of time for all the organising and charity shop donations. She really was gone. There would be no more chats or shared little routines. The never-again-ness of that thought played through him and chimed with the sad inner harmony he had awoken to.
His loneliness now had a different quality to it. Before, it had been a panicked loneliness, desperately churning his mind to find something to cling to, just to take him away. He had sought comfort in distraction: Hungry Paul, the Roman book, and most of all, Shelley. He could see now how scared he had been. How utterly terrified that life itself was going to swallow him up. And yet he had turned and faced himself. He had sat late into the night with his book and in the end he had broken through. The fear had been nothing more than the deep love for his mother that he had not been ready to admit to himself, lest it drown him in grief.
He patted her pillow gently and made his way back downstairs through the house, which was really too big for one person anyway. Over the next few months he would have some choices to make, but there was no rush. He sat on the living room couch, his coffee beside him in his New Scientist mug, and opened The Mill on the Floss with every intention of reading it all weekend until he finished it, which is what he did.