‘Wise and eloquent in thei-ei-eir in-struct-shun.’
My father made me sing soprano solo in Handel’s Messiah before the days of my defection to rock ’n’ roll. How easy admiration and adoration once seemed, before we realised men were merely men, not heroes; before we got to see our leaders on TV.
‘Welcome to the club,’ as the experienced divorcees say to the new arrival. ‘Welcome to our wonderful world!’
What a wonderful world, as Disney says, Mickey Mouse gliding on liquid waters between faery parapets opening out on chubby kings and cute princesses, yellow curls and pink cheeks, and perhaps Prince Othello to keep us in officially correct countenance, with a gnarled tree or so and a witch for an enemy: between English hedges and Swiss mountains and Rhine castles and Mowgli jungles. Eskimos tend to get left out.
People in cold climates need their energies for survival: they need other humans if only for warmth: why argue, kill and render cold when the fun of doing that is as nothing compared to the enjoyment of just being warm: of touching another person and knowing they’re part of the living world, not the dead? The difficulty is that the chilly folk don’t have the energy of the warmer folk, let alone the time left over, after the demands of survival have been met, to weave cute costumes and develop intricate dances. In the realer world – I don’t say ‘real’, notice, these things are all comparative – in the realer world out there, in the arctic wastes, a stamp or two on the ground to bring a seal to its airhole will do for a dance, and the greatest kindness is to offer your wife to a passing stranger.
Does the wife say to the husband over the seal-stew meal, ‘Nudge, nudge, he’ll do’? An unwilling wife wouldn’t be much fun for the stranger. What are the divorce laws like in the far tribal Arctic? Does adultery count? What does alimony consist of there? Do they have their own equivalent of Catterwall & Moss? Does a calm, handsome Brian lookalike offer his tissues to the chilly, lonely, weeping, un-velcroing men and women of the Arctic wastes? Men weep, too.
‘Welcome to the club!’ as the velcro rips and tears. ‘Welcome to our wonderful world. Divorcees unite; you have nothing to do now but compare notes.’
Unlike many a member of the club, I am not living in humiliating circumstances, but that is due to my cunning, not Edwin’s will.
‘Not a penny will she have from me,’ I heard him tell Brian Moss on the phone. He’d got fed up waiting for letters which never came. ‘Not a penny, the slut. She’ll have to take me to Court before she gets a penny!’
This is the voice that once spoke lovingly, protectively.
It is sad for me to have to call The Claremont home, but I grant you it’s better by far than to live in a cardboard box. One must do without the world’s sympathy, it seems, damned by the standard of my accommodation, whilst attempting to save that world from self-destruct. The whole universe, willy nilly, has focused down on Catterwall & Moss, and its humble, legal assistant, Jelly White. Everything, everything, is at stake. Justice must be exacted, wrung out of the world like water out of a stone. It can be done.