She was beside a flower bed, looking down at the first crocuses, two frail little ribbony things, mites that had sprung up. The city was not yet awake, not the sound of a single engine and not yet the soft throaty half-sounds of the pigeons, though she could see them shuffling around in the ruminous limbs of the fig tree. Leaves that were upright held drops of water, like little hourglasses, and elsewhere the clay and the rosebushes were damp. He came out to tell her that he was leaving. He was quite grave about it, said grown-up things such as that they needed a break from each other, neither having realised until the row the night before how wound up they were. He apologised for his own part in it.
“I’m sorry, too, Paddy,” she said, which was also a way of pleading with him not to go. He was going. He was leaving London, making a break, away from the bulldozers to the calm of the country—rabbits, pheasants, gurgling streams, orchards, the dappled shade; the quintessential world, as he called it, twice. He had been on the phone to his friend Stefan and they had both agreed that he go there for a bit. Stefan was an older friend, married, a stabilising influence. That and quintessential were his key words.
“But what about your crammer and university, Paddy?”
“I’m not cut out for university … the groves of Academe,” he said, and flinched.
“Give it a chance,” she said, doing everything now to erase the spleen that had shown its vicious face the previous night.
“Don’t force me,” he said.
“I’m trying not to force you,” she said simply, reminding him that he could go to university, get a degree, and then commune with nature, the dappled shade and so forth. She begged him to think on it.
“I can’t think just now,” he said. “I can’t concentrate … I can’t even read a book … I can’t can’t can’t,” he added feverishly, then opened his mouth very wide and said he was having a breakdown.
“No, you’re not,” she said, frightened to hear him use the word, but he shook his head and insisted that he was and that there was no stopping it. It was an avalanche, it just came, it took over, it swallowed one up.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said, regretting every moment of the row, the ugly things she had said to him, his insolence, his savagery towards her, lumping her in with all the other smug, self-satisfied parents, then her rounding on him, saying that he was happy enough to eat her food and drink her drink and take her money for crammer, for drugs, to lavish on his top-notch friends, who had trust funds but who never carried money; no, like the Queen they never carried money.
“Are you getting at my friends?” he had said.
“Users … users all,” she said, asking him to cast his mind back and think when a friend of his had brought as much as one daisy or written as much as one postcard to say thank you for supper or the weekend. If he was going to demolish her and her ilk, the consumer society, then he was a consumer, too, and so were his fake friends.
“I can see that I have overstayed my welcome in this prison,” he’d said, viciously gleeful at having secured his exit at last. But now it was a different thing, it was two people unnerved, unslept, who were trying to patch things up.
“What is this breakdown?” she asked.
“I can’t describe it … except that it’s v. painful,” he said, and looked down at the two little crocuses and said, “Are they lilac?”
“Has someone let you down?” she asked.
“That, too,” he said, and she remembered his terror the day he kept saying, “Don’t lift the lid,” and it was now as if the lid were lifted, flapping up and down, his sanity in jeopardy. He said no one had any idea how knotted he was and how confused, and by the way he looked at her, it was as if he wished her to stand on tiptoe and look into the cavity of his mind and see the crags there.
“Is it Clarissa?” she asked tentatively. Clarissa, his ex-girlfriend, had disappeared. Clarissa, whom everyone called Puggy and who loved being called that; Clarissa, who arrived most evenings on her bicycle, eager, demanding, always with a sheet of hotel paper on which she had written pert summaries of films they might go to—“For interesting teenagers or sexy adults”; “Small budget film with considerable elan”; “Family fare.” Hearing this read aloud Nell would think, She knows how to get around men … she knows the ropes. Clarissa spent her days in a gymnasium that adjoined a smart hotel, and in the afternoons she sat downstairs and wrote letters to her friends and read the film critiques in the hotel papers, then had tea, which she put on anyone’s bill, any room number that came into her head. If he voiced the slightest opposition to any of her suggestions, she turned on her heel and said he didn’t have to go with her as she could always go with her brother. To this he said, “Pugs,” touched the lightly rouged point on one of her cheeks, and repeated, “Good Pugs … good Pugs … what would you most like to see?” Now she was missing and mutual friends believed that she had bolted with a famous pop singer who spotted her in the hotel lounge.
“She doesn’t want to know,” he said, and the earnest way he said it made it seem so finite, so brutal.
“Don’t leave home just yet,” she said, and looking at her, with his unslept eyes, the little red veins like hairs in the whites that once were a marvelling blue-white, he reminded her that when he was young she had always quoted him a proverb and he was now asking her to abide by that proverb, which was that “a good heart always gives a little extra.”
There was nothing for it but to help him pack, to try to be cheerful, offer him knickknacks, since he was quite sentimental, and ask if they could keep in touch or have dinner from time to time.
“As often as you want,” he said with a new largesse. Now that the break had come, he felt free of her clutches, free to offer the gift of friendship. The taking down of the suitcase, removing a strip of tinsel that had clung to it, the opening of one latch, then another, putting shirts and sweaters in, all these actions were happening to someone in a daze, or rather to two people in a daze, two people listless from the fever of the row that had both shocked and drained them. He had promised to come home the previous night, because it was his birthday, but instead the rack of lamb, the savoury stuffing, and the Brussels sprouts had dried on a plate which was kept heated over a saucepan, while friends phoned intermittently from pubs trying to locate him. To them he had also promised the favour of a dinner. Around three or four she had met him on the stairs, punitive, in a nightgown, the very image which she vowed never to present, tackled him about how selfish he was, how careless, how he couldn’t keep the smallest promise, how different friends had rung, all without a vestige of manners, and though at first he merely ground his jaws, so that she could just hear his teeth crack, eventually he had told her to shut up. He was not selfish and mendacious, he would not have it said; moreover, he worked harder than she ever gave him credit for.
“Like hell you do,” she said bitterly.
“You want to call me a liar.”
“I haven’t called you a liar.”
“You want to call me a liar.”
A catalogue of grievances on both sides was aired, and even as she heard them or voiced them, she thought how muddled it all was, how far removed from the nub of the matter, which was that the love they once had, the sweet vital reserves of love, had vanished, disappeared like those streams that go underground without leaving a trace.
“What about Charlie?” she said.
“He’s coming … aren’t you, boy?” he said, and Charlie, realising that something unpleasant was afoot, got up and licked them both, first his master, then her, as if to say, “Be friends … be friends.”
“I’ve got quite fond of him,” she said, which was about all she could say without breaking down completely.
“City of Bells and My Heart” they heard, in the interval of the chamber music on the radio. It was a Russian poet’s cry to a fellow poet, and it spoke to them so piercingly, so succinctly, that she still thought it was being recited as she heard them go downstairs, Charlie’s excited patter, the swoosh of his tail, louder than Paddy’s tread, then the closing of the front door, softer than at any time, as if to close it at all was a death.
“City of Bells and My Heart,” she said again and again in an endeavour to repiece the moments, embattled moments which at the time she could not endure but which no doubt would return to shame her and to startle, as when upon opening a shutter in winter time, a host of sleeping butterflies come rising up. “City of Bells and My Heart” … she said again and again waiting for a cue, a voice that would carry it on.