Had Joanna bitten back her anger, jealousy and resentment, and not visited Carl, her life would have gone calmly on: as it was, she was saved. Without the assault of these passionate saving graces she would have aged slowly and gracefully, developed a touch of arthritis here, a backache there: Oliver would have drifted off – men with guitars seldom stay, as she knew in her heart; a few languorous, heart-strumming chords, and they’re off – and her fate would have indeed been that of the elderly woman who has never been employed, has no husband, no children, no former colleagues or particular interests, a handful of friends still around, with any luck (though their particular loyalties stretched by distance, exhaustion, their own problems) but who is fortunate enough to have a lot of money.
She would have given up the King’s House in time. It would have come to seem, as her body shrunk, too big, too echoey, too frightening, too empty. Most women end their lives in bedsitting rooms, one way or another; possessions exhaust; they get discarded. Even pets become too much of a responsibility. The walls close in as the years pass: rooms get smaller. Joanna might have joined, for a time, those groups of women who go from good hotel to good hotel, up and down the coasts in winter – in to the cathedral cities in summer – filling up the vacant rooms of hoteliers, who smile to see their income coming through the door, but whose hearts sink at the very sight of them, boredom and grievance incarnate. And how can these old ladies, these outlivers of men, not be boring, being so bored themselves? And how can they not complain, whose very life is a reproach to the young and vigorous? Joanna May’s mind would have narrowed with her life: she would have stopped contemplating the nature of existence, stopped worrying about the constituents of identity, thought only of whether Tuesday’s lamb chop and mint sauce was any more or less digestible than Wednesday’s escalope and mushrooms. These terrible things she knew in her head: they lurked on the edge of her consciousness. And with that instinct for the preservation not just of life but of aliveness, not just the body but the soul, Joanna acted; driven by indignation, whipped-up emotion, frothed up to twice its proper size like a dollop of cream in a fast-food restaurant, she was moved to confront Carl in his lair, knowing perfectly well that he’d snarl and scratch, that his snarls and scratches were dangerous, and she was glad of it.
Why else had she married Carl May, in the first place, but to be saved from boredom? The boredom, the depression, of childhood, of home? Why had she brought about the divorce, but because boredom hadn’t been routed, no: it had been creeping behind her for thirty years, waiting to pounce, and it had almost caught up with her again, peering out from behind soup tureens at official dinners, perching on the white ties of elderly gents at functions, waving; nothing to talk to Carl about any more: or anything he was prepared to listen to, his life so divorced from hers, yet she so used to him, he to her, they could hardly tell each other apart.
Something had to happen.
Isaac happened. Isaac talked, talked, everything interested him; more, he listened. Illicit excitement sent boredom running, far far away, over distant hills: but excitement, danger, was like a drug, you got used to it, you needed more. At first, sex in his bedsitting room was enough, more than enough, mad enough, with the strange smells of toothpowder, and undone laundry, and disorder, books and papers everywhere, bits of old pottery, half a mummy’s head; dead flowers in a vase, from 4000 BC for all she knew, the old sometimes looked so new, the colours so bright, the shapes so distinct. And Isaac’s voice wonderfully on and on, including her in his universe, and the universe seemed to have a history, a purpose, a meaning, which started in the past, collecting as it went, arriving at now. Carl’s universe started in the future and came back to today – it collected nothing. Well, that was understandable. Carl May’s experience of the past was not pleasant, so he looked to the future, of course he did. But then Isaac’s bedsitting room was not enough: she got used to it: it seemed too ordinary for something as extraordinary as Isaac and Joanna May, wife of Carl: boredom crept back, nearer, began to wave, sitting on mummy cases, on the edge of the chipped bath, sooty from an ancient gas-fired geyser, which puffed out black dust if you wanted hot water to wash. In the end the gallery was the only place he wouldn’t come, this ghost of her own past, outdone at its own game by the half-haunted gloom, the watching eyes of history, which seemed to approve – or Isaac said they did; sex was just fine with the Ancient Egyptians, according to him – and of course in the gallery it was perfectly possible for Carl to come in at any time. They must have been mad. She must have been. But again, she was angry. A woman without children, now wanting children, too late to have children. Carl’s fault. She loved Isaac, let Carl know it. He deserved it. Something had to happen. And one day it did: Carl pushed the door open.
And that stopped Carl being bored, for a time. He’d got too cosy anyway: he was the media’s darling, the Government’s blue-eyed boy. Garden Enterprises was under way. Britnuc was belching clean air into a threatened atmosphere – with only the occasional release of unscheduled radioactivity, which was in any case the least of many polluting evils. Something had to happen.
Carl May, before his wife’s infidelity, was beginning to get pains in his chest. His was the kind of boredom which destroys life, like a slowly creeping fungus on a pear tree, causing leaves to wither and fruit to fall, unripened. Let him lose his wife, then, thought Joanna: that’ll cure him: a swift blast of fungicide in the form of jealousy, outrage, anger. She’d been right. Carl shook himself and thrived. Only in the shaking he’d shaken her off too. She hadn’t done it for his sake, had she, but for her own.