She was, as suspected and for the record, FYI, entre nous, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, a natural blonde. I have her phone number but she does not have mine. She knows my name and address—I must be getting careless—but she has accepted the argument that, as a single parent and creative novelist, I require an occasional muse rather than a permanent companion. She has had a happy outcome. A walk in the park has turned into a roll in the hay with a literary figure. Major? Minor? Already forgotten? Does it matter? I have planted a tiny seed of self-reproach that her actions qualify her as a home-wrecker. We shower together. One thing leads to another. We shower again. She lets herself out, on track, I assume, to return to her day occupation as a student of art and her night job waitressing in Soho to help finance the living costs of the course gifted to her by doting parents. She lives in a flat-share in faraway Fulham, she has told me, and has traveled across London in quest of a breath of fresh air. Will she tell all? I doubt it. The tabloids would not be interested and there is no prospect of her tittle-tattle filtering back to the school-run set.
I open the studio windows to air the place. Can I really have done this? Double-deception? Betraying wife, mistress in one day? Betrayal, of course, is the inherent peril of love, the worm in the apple. Think of all those literary figures whose souls are tortured, and how often is deceit the source of the self-flagellation? Humans are frail, led by random encounters and physical urges. It should stop when the kids arrive on the scene, but it doesn’t. Swans show far greater commitment to monogamy than humans do, without the vows and contractual safeguards of wealth in the event of separation. You see them on the Highgate Ponds. The female warms the eggs, the male patrols, protects—no pursuit of paramour swans or wayward geese or horny little terns for him. The eggs hatch, the cygnets arrive, gray and sweet and fluffy, and the parents bracket them in regal procession around the earthly feeding grounds. Royal game, of course. And better behaved than most of the Royal Family.
So why am I more a cuckoo than a swan, laying my eggs in foreign nests? No wonder Marriage is stalled. My stamina, my creativity, has been diverted into the rut of physical passion. The juices flow as the libido demands. There is nothing left for words on screen. No time. No energy. Still, I am quite pleased with my continued ability to perform on demand.
When we met, Dolores and I, it seemed different. She wasn’t like the others. She didn’t do any of the drugs I was selling. Definitely a plus! She didn’t put out. Not an unambiguous plus, but all the same alluring, attractive. The virgin bride. And of course she possessed the knowledge of literature over the centuries. I was clay to be molded. Clunky, obdurate clay, perhaps. But good northern loam awaiting her touch to transform this rough patch of weed and nettle and thistle into a beautiful, landscaped garden.
It can’t have been easy for her. My education stopped at sixteen when I went to work to feed the family after Dad went AWOL with a lady bus-driver-whore-bitch from the depot where he was the chief mechanic. That came as a shock to all of us. And to Ma especially, of course. Five mouths to feed and no job. In those days, up in the northeast, all the old work had gone—outdated, outsourced, overtaken, globalized, sold off by the fund managers and sundry crooks of the south. Ma had such a thick accent that they laughed her out of the line of call-center job applicants. She had no head for computers. All she’d done was build a life in a rented row house around Pa and me and my brother and sisters—all younger, traipsing to school in their worn-out, hand-me-down blazers with the patched elbows and frayed cuffs. And Pa off somewhere on the bus driver’s pension, living it large in Benidorm. He sent us a card once, to us kids, saying we were welcome to come for a holiday. No way, Pops. We burned the card, ceremonially. Not even return to sender. Just a dad not known to any of us since the Pa who accompanied us through Christmases and birthdays and holidays on caravan sites in the Lake District, first bicycles and games of cricket in the park, and parents’ evenings at the crummy schools and breakfasts sizzling in the pan with bacon smells filling the house the morning after the payday binge—that Pa—had just fucked off. Pa became a memory. And a painful one at that. Without telling the others, I scrambled enough cash together to go and visit to try to persuade him to come home. But just going to Benidorm was a humiliation, a reminder of his betrayal, his abandonment of Ma. All the sunshine and the cheap living and the flowing Rioja—not to mention the sight of him and his floozy together—just reminded me of the crap he had left for us: social payments and shoplifting at Lidl.
“We’re still family, son,” he said.
“No we’re fucking not.”
I became a breadwinner, surreptitiously since Ma needed the benefits money, too, so we couldn’t tell them at the job center that I was, to all intents and purposes, an undeclared apprentice, working for the local plumber-cum-carpenter-cum-electrician-cum-handyman. Cheaper for cash, luv, we’d tell our customers. No VAT. No HMRC. No name, no pack drill. Just wads of grimy notes, stuffed into grimy jeans. And, removing or maybe not removing said jeans, depending on the haste of the moment, the occasional cliché shag that replaced my cherry innocence with the twisted cynicism of the lothario. Lust on demand. Lust like the first, most enduring drug. Even before the local pot dealer spotted the potential of my white van cover as mule and delivery boy, I was addicted to gratification, conquest. I could never look at a woman without wanting her. And they knew. Some inscrutable signal sent the clearest of messages about what I was offering and what I was not, about the utter dishonor of my intentions.
Until Dolores came along.
A cut above the rest in every way. A person of color. A different accent. Posh. Southern to my northern ears. Beyond availability. No known boyfriend on the scene. Library-bound. A swot. And, when I dropped by to supply her roommate with E and Charlie, surprised that I could also drop names from the books I had devoured—broadsides from the literary cannon in the siege of love. Ugh! I had read my D. H. Lawrence. I had lived it. I was the gamekeeper to all those lost souls in council flats, and semis in the suburbs and big, nob houses on the hill with their broken ballcocks and manky fuse boxes and rotting window frames. Not that she saw it that way. I tried all the names I could think of—poets and novelists, Eliot and Thomas, Dickens and McEwan. I knew she was interested and I knew she would not easily admit it, to me, to herself. Why would she? She was on track for the limelight. You could see it. Study, study, study. Postgrad course already booked down south at some fancy place on Regent’s Park. Then where? Business? Banks? Industry? Software? Hi-tech? Something brilliant for sure. And what was I? A drug dealer in oily jeans with a patina of paint on my steel-toed boots. A handyman good for freeing drains blocked with condoms and tampons and cocaine-tab-wrappers and dope baggies. Fused lights? Windows smashed in drunken brawl? Car won’t start? Itch needs scratching? Call for Gerry. Gerry Jones. Changed by deed poll to Tremayne when Pa left. Gerry the smitten provincial who read Baudelaire in translation and pined for his own black Venus. Gerald Tremayne, with a head full of strands and ideas and words and plots and characters swirling around for a Geordie trilogy—Birth, Marriage, and Death in a family not unlike my own: broken, fucked-up, dysfunctional, betrayed, belittled, shamed, humiliated, normal in this England about to go to war as a stooge of the Americans. Choose your own epithet or era. Treachery cuts across the aeons, poisoning its victims from womb to tomb.
I was there, in the background, when she went up on stage to take her degree. Her parents were all dressed up, proud as punch—African dad in a sleek, gray suit, English rose mother in floral dress and wide-brimmed hat. I had put on clean jeans and a button-down shirt and a soft jacket made of cashmere from the Oxfam shop. I’d even been to the barber’s shop for a haircut. I lurked and loitered, watching from the standing room at the back of the great hall as she went up in her gown and mortarboard and took the rolled paper that made her a bachelor of arts. There was a week left before she would pack up and go and leave my life forever unless I did something about it. So I introduced myself to her parents and tried to flatter her dad and smiled at her mum and extinguished the come-hither glitter. I offered her the latest printout of Birth Zero One. I offered her a lift to London, saying I’d planned anyhow to drive down that day because of the Cup Final at Wembley. I touched her arm as I made the pitch and saw the realization dawn in her eyes that there was a physical me, just waiting for the word. And, to hasten its arrival, I cleaned up my act and hosed down my van and fitted street-legal retreads from a dodgy scrapyard and threw away the mattress I kept in the back. I tidied my racks of tools and went to my supplier for the deal of a lifetime that took up a good chunk of my savings. And I gave the rest of my cash to Ma and told her I’d be back but I had to just try my hand on the wider stage.
“Just like Pa,” she said. “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“I’ll make you proud, Ma. You’ll see.” It was the litany of the generations born anywhere north of the Watford Gap on the M1 motorway: go south and prosper. Streets paved with gold.
But she was already too choked, dabbing at her eyes with an old apron she wore—as if, I swear, she was looking for a part in Coronation Street.
I said farewell to my brother and sisters and told them I would send money every week for them and keep in touch—the only promise I did keep. Don’t be like me, I told them. Don’t give up on school. Go to university and get degrees and good jobs and look after Ma like she’s looked after us.
“What’s so special about this girl?” my brother said. “Is it because she’s a darkie?”
It was the only time in my relationship with my siblings that my arm came up and my scarred knuckles bunched for the lightning jab and hook of the street fighter.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, facing me down, daring me to strike.
“I love her,” I said, lowering my arm. “That’s all. She’s the one.”
“And Ma? And the rest of us? Are we just scum?”
After Pa left, they had looked to me as the head of the household, the anchor. But, like some vessel pulled free of its berth by turbulent tides and irresistible currents, I had slipped my moorings, drifted into choppy waters with no chart or sextant or satnav to find my way home.
So here I am now, showered and spruced, sluiced clean of betrayal. At least Pa was honest and went where his heart took him, if that is what it was. I have stayed and shat in my own nest. I have allowed the your-place-or-mine spangle to return to my roaming eye. My moral compass has been warped by availability and opportunity, spinning giddily from north to south to east to west. I know it will not end here, with this latest one or two. Or three or four. How many? I lost count years ago. I look at my beautiful daughters and ask myself why I would jeopardize their well-being, their souls, their future. I think of my beautiful, passionate wife who trusts me and works to keep a roof over our heads, and love in our homestead and a future before us, and holidays in Alpine and Mediterranean and Caribbean settings, and I ask myself: why would you risk losing them for some chance encounter while you are trying to murder the family cat at the behest of a crazy neighbor, in a studio paid for by an errant French countess who might return at any moment? When I put the question like that I am taken aback by the extent of the huge web in which I have tangled myself. But I have no answer.
Right at the beginning, when we first moved south, I remember telling Dolores: “I will never let you down”—the most self-indulgent, touchy-feely of promises, the warm pledge of constancy, predictability, trustworthiness. Perhaps I meant it at the time. But I translated it into something else entirely. “I will always let you down. But I will never let you find out”—an altogether trickier proposition.
How on earth have I gotten here?
I am supposed to be a novelist but words elude me.
I am supposed to be faithful and true but I cannot do that, either. Why why why?
I have no answer to that, either. Except, of course, that the blame is not mine exclusively. Resisting temptation is not my strong suit. We met and married as equals. Now I am housebound, house spouse, househusband. It does not matter how often I tell myself that, in these modern times, there is no shame in that. It is a badge of honor to push the stroller with its all-terrain tires and disc brakes. It is a proclamation of manhood to wear the chest harness bearing the bairn, to load the marsupial shoulder bag with diapers and bottles and lotions and wipes. The very notion of the male breadwinner is an anachronism. The school run is asexual. Soccer moms. Hockey pops. The Range Rover is my mobile kraal, protecting the young from predators lurking below the mopane trees of Gospel Oak, the wait-a-bit thickets of South Grove.
Except that some ancient gene tells me it is not so. Does this gene come from my feckless father? Is it leeched from the stained soil of the northeast, seeping out from the tombs of mines and shipyards, where men in their flat caps toiled and delved, and women span and raised unruly broods of snotty children on diets of suet and tinned beans and medium-sliced white Wonderloaf smeared with Stork margarine and sliced Spam fried to a crisp in gobs of molten lard? I suspect, in fact, that there is nothing geographic in this gene. It is just as likely to be transmitted in posh southern mansions where tea does not mean supper and people say lavatory, not toilet, sofa, not couch, and make jokes about poor people nosing the brie; or in palm-shaded Mediterranean villas where the foie gras is washed down with sipped Sauternes. It is the gene that says: I am a man and men do not do women’s work! Men left alone will find mischief.
Men left alone are walking time bombs.
Dolores’s business trips just got longer, more convoluted. Her office hours extended into nights so that he became chef and storyteller and dishwasher and bottle-filler. While she traveled on business, in business class, he became the hunter-gatherer of the Waitrose shelves, the Top Shop lines. How, when, was he supposed to write? His day was set to the metronome of devoted parenthood. Tick, school. Tock, home. Tick, laundry. Tock, making the beds, de-turding the cat litter, buying lightbulbs, cooking suppers. Paying the cleaning lady to do the few tasks left over from his labors, his toil with the homework and the pots and pans at suppertime.
Not chicken and chips again, Dad!
It were good enough for me. And we never ’ad peas as weren’t mushy!—a northern accent that he affects now for effect, beyond his adopted, imperfect southern modulation.
Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, at the farmers’ market on the state school playing fields, he would espy a famous, Booker Prize–winning novelist buying his earthy organic carrots and leeks and fresh turbot and scallops. But that was Saturdays. What happened the rest of the time? No one, surely, no other artist, found his days so salami-sliced by the requirements of the brood.
And, if writing was out, how else was he expected to channel the creative flows? Was that what they meant by the objective correlative?
Gerald Tremayne strode across the road, ran up the stairs to the apartment three at a time, and noted that the treat on the frame of the cat flap was gone. Maybe, finally, X had disappeared and, with her, at least part of his potential downfall.
Then she materialized from nowhere at the corner where the vestibule met the passage.
Gerald retapes the flap so that the girls will not suspect perfidy. He picks up the keys to the school-run 4 × 4, needed to navigate the treacherous slopes, the dirt roads and bush trails, the swollen river-crossings and slicked mud slides and snowbound passes of Hampstead High Street and Highgate Hill.
“Still here, X?” His voice sounds a bit like a snarl.
“Well, not for much longer, buddy. I promise you that.”