DURING MY STAY AT THE VICARAGE LAST SEPTEMBER, when my father was recovering from his heart attack, Jane came up for the second weekend. Because she had seemed so glad to get rid of me in London, I was wary of her. But she was surprisingly cheerful. We walked a lot in the countryside around the village. It was cold and damp, and the air slowly labelled her white cheeks with two pink dots. She gripped my hand and I gripped hers, and with nervous happiness I glanced at her often to see that she was indeed happy, taking my signs from the firmness of her chin and the always sensitive needle of her ponytail. I used to look sideways in this way at Jane, so as to know how to act, what to say.
We walked in the relentless northern rain, along the road between Durham and Sundershall, and I looked through Jane’s eyes and saw again the high hills, where cloud-shaped sheep moved, and the lower fields, which were full of cows. As the cows sighted us, they pricked a swaying wander over the sucking mud, came to the fence and snorted faint figures of steam. Their mooing noises buzzed deep down in their unemotional throats. We dripped at the cows and they dripped back at us, and then we walked a little more, noticing the birds that jumped onto the fence, the starlings and jetty rooks so abundant in the north, each high-strung, jerking movement resembling the separated frames of a film. At dusk, on the telephone lines, the starlings armied.
The rain ceaselessly fell, a million little surrenders of water, and the hills and fields surged green. Sometimes a car went past us, lashing water to the side.
We had been instructed by my mother to pay a visit to Max’s parents, Colin and Belinda Thurlow. The order was characteristic; I think that my parents considered that the Thurlows, whom I very much disliked, were somehow good for me. Peter thought that Colin’s abrasiveness fortified me somehow. And they also liked to show Jane off to the Thurlows, I think. On my own I was no match for Max’s great success as a journalist. Max the great columnist at The Times, Max the opinion-maker. Perhaps my parents were ashamed of my wasted years. But with Jane by my side, I was at least a significant married man, with an advantage over the still-bachelor Max. Jane was evidence that I had clearly made some use of all the hours and days of my wilderness twenties.
Colin and Belinda teach at Durham University, though Colin is now emeritus. Belinda is an historian, of leftish and once Marxist slant, and her older husband a classicist who writes under the forbidding initials C.R.M. Thurlow. When they first arrived in Sundershall, in the summer of 1973, Mother promised me that I would gain a friend: the Thurlows had a thirteen-year-old son, exactly my age. But Max was allowed out to play only rarely, as if ordinary life were a dubious party from which children had to be swiftly collected. Dear Max, bespectacled and tall, with a slight stoop even as a teenager, was studying for a scholarship to the day school I was already attending in Durham, and seemed to be almost imprisoned in his bedroom. When, rarely, he was released, he generally brought with him a schoolbook, which he read if the excitements flagged. But
Max certainly enjoyed smoking, which we did at the top of Pilgrim’s Path, underneath the large, spreading, Atlas-like oak tree. He became a junior scholar of cigarettes, erudite on the different strengths of Gitanes and Dunhills.
The Thurlows live in a pretty Georgian house lit with bright honeysuckle, which covers the dark red bricks in seasonal distractions. Other than the vicarage, it is the only large house in Sundershall, and is known as “The Oratory.” The household at The Oratory seemed strange to me when I was young. Colin and Belinda were remote, cold, pedantically involved in their “work.” There was none of the Bunting geniality at the Thurlowses’. I remember how Max used to open the door (whispering in my ear that he had “some new fags”), and as he did so, two study doors on either side of the hall opened. From one side appeared Belinda’s head, and from the other Colin’s nose. Belinda, seeing that it was only me, and Colin, apparently merely smelling my presence, then withdrew. The Oratory is very plain inside. I once peered into Colin’s study during the winter and was shocked to see plastic sheeting nailed to the windows, presumably to keep out draughts. Through these sheets the garden looked submarine. The corridors are freezing, in all weathers, and in the downstairs bathroom a bar of green medicinal soap, with a magnet embedded in it as if it were a grenade, clings stingily to a metal holder which extends from the wall. Thanks to its magnet, it seems, the bar of soap lasts years.
I especially dislike Colin. His ears are large and on fire with a tiny network of veins, which also cover his nose and cheeks. In some men these veins suggest a life of drink and wasteful pleasure. In Professor Thurlow’s case they suggest a lifetime of studying minute connections and branches of
knowledge; the veins are like little paths of rewarded endeavour; it is as if a map of diligence covers his face. In happier days, my mother used to imitate Colin Thurlow’s quick, uncertain smile; she made me and Father laugh when she reproduced some of his sayings, such as “Driving a motor car is intellectual suicide, of course,” and his peculiar complaint about “the girls who serve at Marks and Spencer—really the lowest of the low, intellectually speaking.” Belinda Thurlow lacks her husband’s pedantry and malice. (She also drives the family car.) She has a bad back and often leaves the room to “have a lie down.” She wears shapeless denim dresses with large storage-pockets, giving her the air of an intellectual poacher. Belinda is Max’s saviour; it can only be from his mother that he gets his sweetness.
Jane and I were led into the frigid drawing room. Belinda left, and returned, wheeling an ugly silvered trolley before her. It bore a white plastic Thermos flask and a plate of white sandwiches, which were organized in four batches of four sandwiches each. An ambassador of each batch was impaled with a little coloured flag on the end of a cocktail stick. “We don’t have you and Jane here very often, so we pulled the stops out,” she said. “Now, you see, this enables me to keep the fillings separate in my mind. The blue flag is anchovy paste, white is cucumber, green is tinned salmon, and red is gooseberry jam.” She poured tea from the Thermos. It fumed in the wintry air. “These cups keep the heat much better,” she said, as she handed us large plastic mugs.
I looked at the electric fire, at the tangerine grin of its single coiled bar, and wondered if it would be rude if Jane and I left within half an hour. I prepared myself externally
by “setting” my face. It was during the first or second year of our marriage, while I was working hardest on the Ph.D., that I contracted my habit of “setting” my face to resemble an appropriate emotional state—humble in post offices (because the staff are always so sullen), generous in shops, distracted at the university (to impress the students), arrogant in buses, confident with my parents, genial with Jane, sober with Max’s parents, and so on. It came about, I think, because I spent all day at home and had no one to show my face to until I blundered out onto the busy London street—and suddenly, people were looking at me, staring at me, and I had to appear correct. That is also why I began the trick of the solemn little cough. I can’t recall how that started. I think it was originally to hide a moment of social awkwardness. But then I began to give little coughs not to hide an awkwardness but simply to seem serious and preoccupied. There is something grave and quite contained about a man giving a little cough with his fist held to his mouth, in the classical way. Sitting there in the Thurlowses’ house, I made my face look serious and distinguished, with an analytical squint and pursed Bunting lips.
Colin Thurlow asked about Max. The Thurlows do not have a television, and Colin, at least, does not read a newspaper. He disapproves of newspapers. So I had to report on Max’s success in the media without making it sound as if it was actually occurring in the media. I thought a pompous patina might help.
“Is Max hard at work on his exposés?” asked Colin, stretching out the last word.
“Max prospers. He’s a most venerable figure now—at only thirty,” I said, with proper gravity.
“Aha,” said Colin. He always said “Aha” in a flat, verifying way, as one might when copying down a number. Even when I told him a funny or strange story, his expression would not change. He would study the room in general and calmly say “Aha.”
“What does eighteen ninety-six mean to you?” Colin asked me.
“Now, Colin,” said Belinda, “you’ve been riding this hobby horse so hard it’s broken its back.”
“Eighteen ninety-six,” said Colin, taking my silence to be ignorance, “is the date of the founding of the Daily Mail. I dare say one could do worse than date a certain civilizational decline from that moment. The tabloidization of our intellectual discourse.” Colin always acted like an inspector from a rarer country.
“But Max doesn’t work for the Daily Mail,” said Jane. It was the first time she had spoken in the drawing room. “He’s a columnist for a serious paper. It’s The Times.” Colin stared at Jane, as if astounded that a woman other than his wife would oppose him.
“He’s a pundit!” said Belinda brightly, with what sounded like a curious, evenly balanced mixture of pride and disdain.
“He’s a ‘pundit,’ as were, in their way, Voltaire, Heine, Carlyle, Orwell, Sartre, and on,” I protested.
“I think he had the brains to be an excellent classicist,” said Colin, ignoring me. “It’s a great shame that he did not carry on into the academy … like you.”
Like me … This was surely calculated irony on Colin’s part. But Belinda wanted to change the subject.
“Isn’t it sad about Mrs. Millington having to sell Vaughan House,” she said.
“Oh, Max and I loved that house when we were little.
The red bricks, and the ivy—the river. Who’ll buy it?” I asked.
“It’s already bought. With all contents. Philip Zealy. You know him.”
“Philip Zealy? That crook. My God.” Everyone in Durham knew Zealy; he had a local car dealership, which had expanded into an empire. His latest experiment was a financial services company: credit, brokerage, loans, mortgages. He was based in Newcastle but chose to live in Durham. A familiar sight of my childhood on billboards and local television advertisements, he was universally thought of as shady and disreputable, thanks to a local government scheme in which he had profited. The ringleaders went to prison; Zealy somehow escaped charges.
“That’s him. It’s a Cornish name,” said Belinda to Jane—“no, my dear, Cornish,” she repeated, anticipating her husband’s correction. “But he isn’t living in it, apparently. Expect the worst. He’ll break it up into flats or knock it down for profit.”
“Mrs. Millington had six Pekineses, and all of them had extraordinary names,” I said to Jane. “One of them was called B.D., for ‘brain damage.’”
“What were the others?” asked Jane.
“Horatio, Albino, Salmon, and—oh, I’m getting old, I forget now,” said Belinda. Our conversation was clearly becoming too warm, too feminine, too much of a conversation, to please Colin, who was staring at the window, waiting for a natural break to announce itself. Once again I marvelled that Max, so sane and dependable and cheerful, had grown up with these parents.
“How is that Ph.D. of yours progressing?” asked Colin. Enquiry had been inevitable.
“It’s nearly finished,” I said. “Really close to the end now.”
“Aha.” The verifying stare. “You know that I don’t have one? A questionable supplement. It’s largely for people who like letters after their name.” While you, I thought, like letters in front of your name.
“And how is Birkbeck?” Colin asked.
“It’s University College, actually.”
“University College. Indeed. A cut above, a cut above. No wonder you wanted to correct me so fast.”
My thesis is on the influence of the Epicureans on early modern English thought. Colin Thurlow told me that he did not “like” the Epicureans.
“Why not?” I asked.
“They were rather juvenile. They may seem mature about death, but if you study it you’ll see that they were juvenile about it. Terrified of it. Emotion posing as rationality.”
We got away as fast as we could. I told Jane how, when Max and I were small, we had heard Colin talking to my father at the dinner table. From the cigarette smoke drifted the phrase, in Colin’s precise accent: “ … the Kyrie is recited ninefold in that rite, I believe.” Max and I laughed for weeks about the word “ninefold,” which we had never heard before.
On the Saturday night of Jane’s weekend in Sundershall, I offered to cook supper for all of us. Father, who had been oddly invisible all day, stayed in his study; Mother and Jane, I remember, laughed at my grand manner in the kitchen: Jane stole pieces of food from the counter. I like to play at being rather magnificent when cooking; half the pleasure is in disobeying all the rules of the recipes and refusing to
measure anything as precisely as instructed. I threw around clouds of herbs and roughly upended the newly opened wine bottle into the casserole so that I could hear that delicious steady choking noise as expensive wine blunders in tides into the pot. Of course, I have to be careful to be not too blase. Jane, who knows nothing about cooking, used to enjoy suspending her adulthood in the kitchen. Her favourite trick was to give my arm a nudge while I was spooning or shaking something into a pot; she had no idea that I was really keeping a secret tally of weights and measurements—that, in effect, I was measuring my own carelessness. To her it was just another area of Thomas’s anarchy, but one which, unlike bill paying or accepting invitations, did not affect her.
I produced an aromatic coq au vin (made with some pricey wine I had bought in Durham and a few interestingly different spices) for my parents, who were at their best, high-spirited and genial. My father was exceptionally jaunty, and told Jane, when he emerged from his study, about his day. His bald head shone.
“Jane, Jane, my dear. Your presence in this house is the single star in the unrelieved blackness of my day.”
“Oh, Peter, it can’t have been that bad,” said Jane, enjoying the old man’s attention.
“I have passed the day in utterly monkish solitude. There was no one at all at the early communion this morning, not a solitary fig, so I had to administer communion to myself, swill down the wine like a Neapolitan, and resist the exceedingly strong temptation to skip great chunks of the liturgy. Then I went home, had breakfast—alone, because my esteemed wife had been too greedy to wait for me and you sluggards were still in bed—read the morning paper, changed
into civvies, and spent most of the rest of the day writing a book review for Jim Earley at the Theological Review.”
“You should have been resting, dearest,” said Sarah.
Peter looked meaningfully at me; it was my cue to ask him about the book.
“What was the book?” I asked.
“A shallow study of the resurrection, but it did allow me to invent a rather good joke, though I say it myself.” Again, my cue.
“Yeah?” I asked, stirring the casserole, and watching my strong, healthy father, impish and commanding. I tried to find any suggestion of weakness, of recent frailty, and failed.
“Yes, I said that the author was certainly right that although the resurrection is the hardest miracle in which to believe, it is nevertheless the central one, the only one really, and most faithful Christians in this country do in fact believe that Jesus rose again.”
“I don’t get it—”
“I’m not finished. I then added that there is a certain modishly unbelieving Anglican bishop, ‘who shall remain nameless,’ that was how I put it, who obviously does not believe in the great triumph of the resurrection and who ‘seems to think that when they took Jesus down from the Cross he just ran down the other side of the hill and disappeared. ’ That’s what I wrote. What do you think?” He looked at me hopefully.
“Not bad at all, Dad.”
“Oh good, you like it.”
At the table, Mother asked Jane about her teaching, and about future concerts. I couldn’t help noticing that my parents
seemed almost afraid of Jane, respectful of her talents and accomplishments.
“I haven’t been able to practise hard in the last two years, because of my heavy teaching load,” Jane said, and looked at me briefly, dazzlingly, with her dense, filled eyes. As usual, I had to look at the rest of her face to check that she was not angry. She was not; and yet I felt that she mentioned the teaching reproachfully, since had I not been essentially unemployed she would not have needed to support me. I felt my parents looking at me, felt some kind of hard rise of energy, and became irritated.
“I’m not going to apologize, if that’s what you want,” I said, cursing myself for having so baldly shown my hand.
“What on earth are you talking about?” said Jane. At which point my mother, whether designedly or not I don’t know, seemed to choke on her food, and said:
“This is a very strange coq au vin. Is that a caper on my fork? What on earth have you put in it, Tommy?”
“Made by a very strange chef,” said Father, and we all laughed.
After supper, at Peter’s suggestion, Jane played for us. The usual apologies were made—how often I have heard them—for the poverty of the English upright piano in the sitting room. (“No one ever plays it in this family, you see.”) As so often, Jane seemed to be lifting her hands to calm the instrument, soothing and stroking it. I identified with the piano. The black and white keys went up and down, madly disagreeing with one another, yet from this curious enclosure came beauty and loveliness and harmony, and Jane was their provider. I envied her this unworldly ability to bring flocks of sound from sheets dotted with abstract black collisions.
She played a Chopin mazurka, slightly primly seated in the way that had excited me when I first saw her, her bottom softly quenched by the soft seat, which made me want to be that seat, and she moved her long thin arms, and the bright repeating Polish music filled the room, the notes quickly running, but running a little stiffly, with pointed joints, as if a barrel organ were turning the sound, a street music, a people’s peg-leg dance, full of clanging joy—I could imagine them throwing out their legs and kicking the air—and all this raised by English Jane, primly seated.
When she plays, she raises her head and closes her eyes, and seems to leave the world a little, to be alone with her notes in almost religious silence. I have sometimes to struggle with selfish resentment—resentment that she is so free, that she can so easily slip out of reality, that she cannot take me with her, that she seems almost to be at prayer (which as a secularist I am bound to disapprove of). We do indeed differ on religious matters, though Jane is so mystical that we have never really argued about the subject. She pities me a little, I think, for having no God to believe in. But if Jane does believe in God, then, as far as I can tell, He is really little more than a bearded old patron of music, a male Saint Cecilia. “A note,” she once said to me, “is an extraordinary thing. It wasn’t created by humans. Humans reproduce it; they borrow it and lend it to each other, by using instruments.” I objected that the instruments were created by humans, not by God.
“Yes, certainly,” said Jane. “But you can’t tell me that harmony is created by humans; how could it be? It’s like logic in maths. We don’t decide that two plus two equals four, we come upon that, it’s already made—isn’t it?”
“Yes, the ancient world talked about the music of the world—they felt it lay in the arrangement of the celestial spheres, that kind of thing. You know how keen I am on Schopenhauer—”
“I certainly do. How much was that book you bought on him last week? Thirty pounds?” Jane was teasing me, smiling broadly.
“It’ll earn its keep, believe me … Well, Schopenhauer has this mad but really quite likable theory that divisions in music correspond to the divisions between the organic and mineral worlds. He says something to the effect that a chord with a wide gap between soprano and bass sounds good because it parallels the gap between the animate world and the inanimate realms. Though I should add that I could never quite work out if he was thereby saying that the bass voice belongs to the mineral kingdom and the soprano to the animal.”
“That sounds very silly.” Jane stuck out her chin.
“Well, don’t blame me, blame Schopenhauer. But look, there are plenty of things which obviously haven’t been created by humans—the sea, for instance, or most human and animal instincts—and this knowledge, this knowledge that they exist outside our creation and control doesn’t necessarily compel us to posit God as their author. Well, not me at least.”
But Jane had lost interest.
“Tom, you’re speaking your language again. I can’t stand it when you ‘go philosophical.’ You know I can’t, I can’t argue it logically. All I can say is that I feel when I am utterly suffused in music, immersed in it, so responsive to it that, that … well, in some silly way I want to change colour like a chameleon does, and become the colour of music—when that happens I go through the music as if it is a cloud, and,
yes, I believe, I believe. I can’t not believe; nor could Bach or Handel or Bruckner or Elgar, and many others.”
I told her my father’s joke about the chameleon who finds himself on a tartan picnic rug and is so confused by the challenge of mimicry that he explodes.
“That’s me,” I said. “While you’re turning the colour of music I’m exploding! By the way, what does this something, this musical God, look like?”
Jane seemed genuinely surprised by the question.
“Look like? He doesn’t look like anything. He sounds, He-She sounds like music.”
Actually, although I think of Jane as excessively law abiding, she and I are both rebels in our way, I against inherited religion, and she against inherited indifference. Her parents are certainly not spiritual or musical. They live in a beautiful old house in Wiltshire. We used to go there fairly often when Jane and I were together. Jane insists that her parents have no money, though they were always able to summon a few thousand—out of the question for my parents—when we got into difficulties. Her father, Humphrey Sheridan, had been a lawyer and then in his fifties had some kind of nervous “collapse,” and took early retirement. I wondered when I first met him if it had had anything to do with alcohol, since he was always inviting me to join him for a drink on the pretext that “it must be six o’clock somewhere in the world.” Her mother, Julia, is vague, amusingly snobbish, and intelligently frustrated—she reads a novel a day, she says, and has no one to talk to.
I remember how nervous I was when Jane first took me to Wiltshire. She told me that her mother disliked or disapproved of most of her daughter’s friends, and always communicated her disapproval in the same subtly oblique form:
by using the word “touching.” As soon as she told Jane that she had found one of her daughter’s friends “rather touching, darling,” Jane knew that it was all over. “I used to wait in terror for that word ‘touching,’ and Mummy knew of course exactly what she was doing.”
For whatever reason, Julia Sheridan did not find me “touching”—though presumably she now does—and Humphrey seemed quite taken with me. He asked me about my work, and when he discovered that I spent all my time at home on my Ph.D., he broke into laughter, which made the ice cubes in his gin-and-tonic chatter, and warmly said, “How very dolly! Welcome to the club. The ticklish thing is getting some poor bugger to pay for us to do nothing at all.” I laughed with him, though I was hurt and felt naked in front of Jane, who had heard her father. I coughed in embarrassment—this cough representing, perhaps, a forerunner of the “artificial” cough.
One of the Sheridans had inherited a Bechstein grand, which neither could play. Jane started thumping out notes when she was three or four, and her parents always supported her, with a sluggish upper-class amazement at their daughter’s brilliance. (There is a brother, Hugo, six years older, who is also intelligent, a lawyer like his father, but stolid and conventional, not very close to Jane.) In the English way, they made their support sound like benign disapproval, something wrested from them. Humphrey said to me: “Of course, Jane’s music is jolly deep water, pretty much beyond me and Julia, though Julia had a good voice when I met her. We put Jane on a musical fast track, sort of Ascot Gold Cup, just letting her vamoose through, after Miss Ison, her piano teacher, called us in and said Jane was special and should go to an actual music school. Ison was a
ferocious old bruiser. We bloody well did what we were told to do, or she’d rap you on the knuckles.”
They had watched Jane’s progress with secret pride of course, though success of any kind was looked upon with faint social amusement, and very successful strangers were talked about proprietorially, as if they were all part of the larger aristocratic family. At one of our visits, Jane put on a record; it was Daniel Barenboim playing Beethoven. Julia Sheridan wandered in, picked up the record sleeve, and said vaguely, “Oh yes, dear. Barenboim, we see his name in the papers. He’s doing frightfully well, isn’t he?” This way of looking at the world, as if it all belonged to them, was quite novel to me, and I wondered how far the sense of ownership might stretch. Was Beethoven considered to have “done frightfully well”? And if Beethoven had only done frightfully well, what of poor Jane (not to mention poor Thomas Bunting)?
But the Sheridans, petrified by the old bruiser Miss Ison, did indeed send Jane to a music college, where she prospered under the tuition of a formidable Armenian, who for a while forced her to play standing up, at a distance from the keyboard, to make her touch lighter and to wean her off the loud pedal. During the term-time, while Jane was away, her parents lowered the piano top and returned their silverframed family photographs; and in the holidays, when Jane came home to the half-timbered house, the photographs were removed and put in a box, and the top was raised, and Jane played and played, while her parents strayed in and out of the drawing room and sometimes stood by her, staring encouragingly at the inexplicable sheets of music. Her mother, who was moody and somewhat “sensitive,” would
come in when Jane was crashing out titanic Beethoven, and complainingly say, “It is awfully loud, darling.” Then, when the music, following its own form, suddenly became pianissimo for a few minutes, Julia would smile and say, “Thank you, darling, that’s much better,” as if Jane and Beethoven were willingly conspiring to ease Julia’s nerves.
It was during that visit to Humphrey and Julia Sheridan that I first thought of marriage. In fact, though, I never asked Jane to marry me; she hinted at it one wonderful evening, about two weeks after the trip to Wiltshire, and I found myself happy to be the recipient rather than the actor. I remember it well. Jane was in a buoyant mood and suggested that we have supper somewhere pleasant. We went to L’Escargot (she was paying, of course). It was a warm summer night, mid-June, and crowds were shuffling along the pavements as if they were chained together at the ankles; I felt as if I was being multiply pickpocketed; but there was no sense of menace—quite the opposite, it was the usual clumsy English attempt to mimic Italian or Spanish streetlife. The English version involves crowds of people squatting on pavements outside roaring pubs.
“They think they’re in Rome, so they’re having a great time,” I said, as we picked our way over the stationary drinkers. “They don’t have to go back to Neasden or Kilburn until eleven p.m.” I was still trying to impress Jane in those days, and I affected an occasionally snobbish tone, while subtly “improving” my accent as I spoke.
“Let’s go to Rome, darling,” said Jane. And then, shyly: “On our honeymoon.”
I ignored her—though her words had set off a great excitement inside me—and continued:
“Up in the north, in Durham or Newcastle, the men and women don’t get together like this. The lads go around in packs, looking like they want to beat you up, and the lasses go around in packs, looking like committees of prostitutes on the move.”
“Tommy, you’re very naughty! Do that northern accent for me again.” In those days, I found Jane’s pearly, upper-class diction quite erotic. Her chin was jutting forward.
I drew a breath, and then bellowed, Newcastle-style:
“How! You looking at my bird? Cos’ if you look at my bird one mair time I’ll knack ya face in!”
Drinkers gazed up at me from the pavement. Jane seemed delighted. “Then what happens, Tommy? You can’t leave me in the lurch.”
“Then what happens is that you cravenly apologize, you say that you weren’t looking at the bloke’s girlfriend at all, it was the furthest thing from your mind. But you lose anyway, because he says: ‘What’s wrong with me bird, then? Funny, last time I looked there was nowt wrong with her. Mind you, praps I missed summat. Praps there’s summat wrong with her? But I diwent see owt wrong with her.’ And so it goes, with everthreatening irony. The trick is to make sure that he doesn’t bring his mates into it. De-escalation is the name of the game.”
“How do you de-escalate? You know I had such a protected, completely musical upbringing that I barely ever went into a pub. By the time I was free enough—”
“Free?”
“Yes, free from the endless musical imprisonment, the music school, the relentless practising, all that. By the time I was more relaxed I didn’t feel like going to pubs anyway. I was too old. I was twenty-one.”
“An old woman.”
I used to tease Jane about her six years’ superiority over me. She would sometimes joke that she was “a woman in a hurry,” and I would calm her down with wise sayings from the Epicureans.
“You de-escalate, by the way, by offering to buy everyone drinks, or by introducing your own girlfriend to them. The latter technique is foolproof. Never fails.”
“Girlfriends, girlfriends!” Jane squeezed my hand as we walked down the street. “I don’t want to hear about them. I’ll edit them out of your photograph like Lenin did.”
“Stalin.” I kissed her. “As long as I can do the same with your boyfriends.”
We had a fine dinner. I would have liked to have shared the bill, of course—that was the only shadow, really. I remember that at one point in that dinner Jane suggested that I tended to see the world as a matter of strategies, techniques, tricks.
“You’re always going on about the ‘trick’ of things. The trick of this, the trick of that. Why do you need all these tricks?”
“Because the world is a tricky place, I suppose, and one must match it, evil for evil.” I spoke quite glibly.
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” I loved Jane for her inability to treat anything lightly.
“Yes, certainly. I think that adult life, that adulthood, is all struggle. The reason we so love, so cherish our childhoods, is that they represent life before this struggle of adulthood. I have a theory, actually, which I’d like to write about some day, that Adam and Eve deliberately got themselves booted out of Eden because they had not experienced childhood. Perhaps they thought that beyond Eden’s gates was childhood itself. How wrong they were.”
“You’re mad, darling. How would they want childhood if they had never known it? You go in for the strangest speculations. Is that what you do all day?” Jane would never have dragged herself into a project like my BAG. Far too sensible and direct.
“Well,” she continued, “what are your tricks? Hang on a minute, I have to deal with this awful music.” This was not the first time I had witnessed Jane’s absolute inability to eat while music is playing. She drew on all her reserves of haughtiness and calmly waved the waiter over with her long, professional fingers. “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m a musician, a concert pianist, and I am trained to listen to music. Now, I can either listen and not eat, or eat and not listen. But I can’t do both. I know it’s already quiet, but might there be a way for you to turn it down? I’d be so grateful.” And she gazed at the waiter with her dense eyes, and her ponytail swayed, and of course he complied.
“Now, darling, tell me about your tricks.” I am not ashamed to admit that it has always been the greatest joy to hear that word “darling” from Jane’s lips. It was spoken fast with a rather short ‘a’ and an almost Indian lilt—“daling.” In my family, my mother called both me and my father “dear” and “dearest” and “love,” but never “darling.”
“Which tricks are you interested in? Well, here’s one. If an argument seems to be getting out of hand, say at a dinner party, it almost always works to point to the chin of your interlocutor and say, ‘By the way, you have a little piece of food on your chin.’ For some reason it takes the wind out of people’s sails utterly. The palaver they get into with wiping their chins! ‘Have I got rid of it now?’ ‘No, you’ve just moved it to the right.’ ‘Have I got it now?’ ‘Not quite, it’s
still hanging on.’ ‘Now?’ ‘Yes, now you have.’ And all the while there’s nothing on the poor person’s chin at all. Once you are finished with all that, it rarely seems worth continuing the argument, and you can get up and go to the loo. It’s all about knowing when to break the moment. Once the right interruption has been launched, the hostile encounter often collapses like a tent that’s been blown over. But you have to be the controller of the wind, that’s what’s crucial.”
“The controller of the wind, I like that.” Jane’s eyes were very bright. We had ordered champagne, and it was making our blood fizz. “That’s your mode, isn’t it—being the controller? Controlling sticky situations?”
“I play them like a piano,” I joked, with mock assurance.
“Marriage wouldn’t be a trick, would it?” asked Jane, again shyly.
“No, it wouldn’t.” We were silent for a minute. “Am I hearing what I think I am hearing?”
“You might be.”
“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
“Well, make it so, then.”
We were married three months later. Max was my best man. Roger and his choir sang at least eight anthems—really, they gave a concert briefly interrupted by the triviality of our vows. It was held in Wiltshire. How well I recall shaving that morning in the little local hotel, with my parents coughing and stirring on the other side of the bathroom wall: my hands shook, even though there were three hours to go. Clear, breezy, lightly warm, barely blue English September day. High hedgerows. Everything prettier than in the north.
I remember sitting with Max, waiting for Jane to enter the church; with my hand I was keeping my right leg stuck to
the church floor in case it started shaking with nervousness. Trumpets and drums sounded at the back of the church: friends of Roger. The medieval sound of the instruments made Jane seem like a great queen and Max and I humble ambassadors representing a new republic. Jane advanced on her father’s arm, gently talking to him in that quietly theatrical way one sees on stage. Only I recognized the tiny hesitation of the left foot. What was she saying to her father, what was she saying? “I am afraid”? “I love him”? “I love you and Mummy”? “I have waited for ever to do this”? A fine grey veil obscured her face like a layer of expensive dust. But then she stopped next to me and raised that curtain and turned to me and smiled a calm, grateful smile. Into her hair chains of wild flowers had been sown.
The local vicar married us—the Reverend Hugh Fillimore, dressed from head to toe in black. Black suit, black priest’s stock, salty black Oxfords on his feet. He smoked a black pipe and had glasses seemingly made out of the same substance as his pipe. He seemed to have been carbonized long ago in some awful prehistoric conflagration. Remarkably, his amiable, ambling, vacant address never once mentioned our marriage. Not once! It was all about “the importance of having heroes—intellectual, spiritual, moral. Now,” he burbled on, standing in the exquisite carved pulpit, “enough abstraction. You all probably want to know who my heroes really are. All right, I shall oblige. My intellectual hero is Martin Luther. I don’t think that needs further justification. My spiritual hero—well, there are so awfully many, but I will nominate Father Brown, in the marvellous old Chesterton stories. And my moral hero: Winston Churchill. Plenty wrong with Churchill,
and actually the other day I was dipping into one of the recent revisionist biographies, but in the end he just can’t really be dented. Toenails of clay, I’d say, at the worst. Now, of course, Christ should be our greatest hero, but from time to time when our faith feels faint we do need worldly models, too! And that’s why I’ve dealt with the subject today.”
We spent the night in a country hotel. We were too late for dinner, but room service sent up smoked salmon sandwiches and a big Stilton cheese, veiny with blue fogs. Jane ran the bath, took off her dress, looked tiny in her punitive panty hose. Behind her in the bathroom the big taps were orchestrating volumes of steam.
“I am famished. God these sandwiches are good. Darling, you were a miracle,” she said.
“No, no, it was you. I did nothing.”
“Well, we both did it. And tomorrow Rome!”
“Poor us. Let’s toast Uncle Karl.” Karl was paying for our honeymoon.
“Uncle Karl.”
“Uncle Karl.”
I touched Jane’s anxious thin back, and then the calmer swell of the hips.
“Would it be a bad omen if we skipped our canonical marital obligations tonight? I am utterly exhausted,” I said.
Jane laughed. “Despite your unfamiliarity with baths, might I be able to persuade you to join me in the water?”
“Oh, I should think so.”
“And we can see what happens from there.”
“You bet. We can take it from the top, as they say in music, no?”
“That’s in pop music, Tommy. Though I must say I’d never thought of that phrase in a sexual light before.”
Probably, now that Jane and I are separated, our friends have said to each other, “I always thought it was a bad omen that the vicar gave that bizarre address—you know, you remember, the one in which he never mentioned Thomas and Jane.” But at the time it seemed only amusing.