Love ObjectsGerry Blick It had been harder for him to say that he no longer loved her than it had been to say that he had loved her. It had been to deny part of himself, to acknowledge there was an emptiness where once there had been a richness. He could remember the moment when he had fallen in love with her, completely, irrevocably as he had thought, if the sensation he experienced could be reduced to such a simple concept as a thought. They had arranged to go to see a production of "The Three Sisters", her choice, she had wanted to educate him and at the time she was still hoping to get a job in the theatre world. He had been late. He caught sight of her in the foyer pacing up and down. He watched her like a voyeur rejoicing in his illicit glimpses of another’s intimacy. He knew her worried expression was caused by him, by his absence, and that only he would be able to remove it. He had a momentary feeling of power, of superiority. He reasoned now, in the unwanted luxury of objectivity, that at that moment he had not been in love with her, love would not have permitted such calculation, such amused detachment. Perhaps he should have savoured it for longer than he did for he was never to experience anything like it again. He had relented, emerged from behind the pillar, made himself visible to her and when he saw her face radiating delight it had called forth in him the love that now was but a memory. They had gone for a meal afterwards to a small Italian restaurant in Soho, where they had had the conversation which was to alter the course of their lives. "That was quite depressing." "Isn’t that the point?" The play had rather confirmed his preconceptions that it would be about lots of people sitting around complaining they weren’t sitting around somewhere else marginally more interesting. "Not really. There is a lot of humour in it, depends on whether the director manages to brings it out." He did not know enough about plays and their production to be able to distinguish between the playwright’s intentions and the director’s interpretation. "Well I can’t ever imagine that lot ever being a barrel of laughs. I mean all they did was bemoan their lot, and if you think about it, a pretty privileged lot - they were hardly serfs, were they?" "That’s irrelevant, well almost. They could have been anybody. Why do you think Chekov is still so popular? His characters are universal." "For you, not for me." "You might be right. I’m beginning to see myself as one of those sisters." "What rubbish Mary. Let me tell you something, a universal truth if you like. They were simply not getting enough." She had looked at him in mock horror. They had become lovers a couple of weeks before. She had been so shy, not wanting him to see her naked, that he wondered if she had been a virgin. There had been no blood on the sheets, but that didn’t mean anything. It didn’t matter to him, not then. They had made love a couple of times since and she had been slightly less inhibited, though far from abandoned. His remark was quite risky as it could have appeared crude, offended her sensibilities, but he had wanted to claim her back from what it was that was drawing her towards the neurasthenia of the three sisters. "Typical male." She laughed and squeezed his hand. It came out. He hadn’t planned it. It was not necessary, the evening, their relationship was enjoyable without it but like a genie once out of the bottle he couldn’t put it back in. "I love you Mary, with all my heart and I want to spend the rest of my life with you." She had not looked at him straight away, had stared at her plate as if miles away and when she finally did return his look he saw she was crying. He had never been as moved by the sight of another human being as he had at that moment. "I mean it. I’m so happy." "Oh David, so am I. I love you too. Seeing that play. We mustn’t waste our lives, must we?" And for several years they hadn’t. The following week she had moved into his flat in Maida Vale near what was to become their beloved canal. Every Sunday they would walk along its banks to Camden Lock to join and compete with the crowds in search of a relic of somebody else’s past, and once found, making it instantly part of theirs. Eventually, they decided the flat was too small to contain them and the possessions they had accumulated, so they moved to a pleasant but anonymous suburb the main virtue of which was that it was near an incongruously leafy tube station. They reassured each other they would still be able to see a play or a film or catch an exhibition, but gradually they found it more of an effort especially after they had had Timothy, so they began opting for evenings at home in front of the television. They did not make many friends in the area and those they did know rarely came round. He would have liked dinner parties brimming over with witty repartee, dangerous flirtations, confidences exchanged, heated arguments followed by reconciliations as they surveyed the debris on the table and the wreckage of their lives. The only parties they did have were for Timothy. There were plenty of arguments and a lot of debris but not quite the sort he had had in mind. He had continued to work for the building society at its West End branch, his income rising steadily if not dramatically. His job occupied him without fulfilling him, but as he heard of contemporaries being made redundant after commanding fat salaries for short periods he did not think he could complain. Mary would occasionally talk about finishing her drama course but after one of their serious conversations, which occasionally punctuated their mainly domestic narratives, they decided it would be better if she could bring in some extra money by finding a part time job. One of the other mothers at the play centre said she was looking for somebody to help her run her clothes stall on market days, and Mary thought she would give it a try. Looking back he thought that it was that decision which had been crucial. He was not deluding himself that if she had not begun to earn extra money, their marriage would not have ended, but the details, even the timing might well have been very different. They had always struggled compared to others in the street, a fact which worried her more than him though she claimed it was Timothy who would suffer as a consequence, not them. He was not sure what she meant other than that Tim would not be able to wear the latest designer jumpers or trainers. Surely it wasn’t as reductive as that, but then his experience of their son’s world was very different from that of Mary’s. It was after Tim’s wardrobe was improved to the standards thought appropriate to one of his station that Mary brought up the question of their holidays. Usually they stayed with her parents in Devon. Actually, he had always looked forward to walking along the cliffs, the desolate beauty of the scenery finding an echo in him which he had never sought to share with Mary. She would usually become restless before the holiday was over; he attributed this to the increasing frequency of the criticisms, masquerading as advice, by her mother on how best to bring up Tim. What does she know, she had once said, she wants me to keep him wrapped in cotton wool all his life. The "like she tried to do with me," was left unsaid. So it had been Mary who had suggested they go camping in France. She had been there once when she was in the sixth form. He had no real desire to spend night under canvas but it had turned out all right, both of them finding it easier to relax with their fellow campers than they would have if they had met them in other circumstances. They teamed up with one particular couple who were staying in a farmhouse nearby. They were not sure if Tom and Lucy were married or even living together, though they had told them they had been coming here every summer for about ten years. Tom was a sports journalist and Lucy a free-lance beauty consultant. The four of them quickly established a routine of going to the restaurant in the village, getting slightly drunk and walking back before protracted farewells at the fork in the country lane. Tom kept them entertained with an endless stream of anecdotes about the sports personalities he had interviewed, and related the gossip he heard about them from other sources. David had no means of knowing how true any of it was, the stories were usually about sex, alcohol and, with the modern players, drugs; sporting success rarely came into it. David had half assumed they would stay in touch but they never heard from them, which was why they didn’t go back the following year. Mary, having made a confidant of Lucy, something she had never done with a comparative stranger, said she would be embarrassed to see her again. He had realised that, they, especially Tom, had treated them like an audience but then he had thought weren’t nearly all relationships, to a greater or lesser extent, functional. This did not necessarily make them inauthentic. However, he did not press the point. The idea of travel was beginning to excite him. He had never really had the opportunity when younger, it was good he thought that surprises occurred, it meant there would be others. Too right, yet was what happened a surprise? How could it have been when he was a party to all that had preceded it? They had gone to a few travel agents, pored over the brochures; there were so many places, they were in danger of achieving a state of perfect equilibrium, becalmed in a sea of possibilities. "This is ridiculous. Just choose. First place which comes into your head." She had finally said in total exasperation. "Barcelona." "Great. Barcelona it is. What made you say it? Funny because you seemed so definite about it. I mean, why didn’t you suggest it before?" "I was flicking through ‘Homage to Catalonia’ the other day. Remembered the first time I read it. Must have been about seventeen I suppose. The impact of those first few pages, how the revolution changed ordinary people’s lives, real equality, no snobbery, uniforms, servility anything like that, a classless society just for a short time anyway. My grandfather used to tell me about his cousin or someone who’d fought in the Civil War. Not for long though. He was pretty useless as a soldier. He was one of the first casualties. Half his leg blown off. Grandfather reckoned he had done it to himself." "You never told me any of this." "No. Don’t know why, never seemed to matter." "Did you ever meet the cousin?" "No, he was a fairly distant relative. I’m not even sure he and granddad knew each other, old granddad was probably just passing on a family story but, I don’t know, coming on top of the Orwell which I had just read it made a deep impression on me for a while. Book brought it all back and anyway, didn’t Tom say it was his favourite city, the Olympic village and so on?" They decided to leave Tim with his grandmother. David had joked about a second honeymoon. His first impressions of Barcelona were very different from those he had experienced vicariously through Orwell, but he wasn’t disappointed, indeed it was as if he fell in love with it at first sight. They headed straight for the Sagrada Familia. It had a most disturbing effect on him; he found it ugly yet its sheer religiosity of building, its towers seeming to be striving to touch heaven itself, overwhelming and repulsive in equal measure. Mary had been transfixed by it but had been non-committal, either reluctant to talk to him about it or needing time to evaluate her response. He preferred the playful shapes and animals in Parc de Gruell which were to him like a cross between surrealism and a Disney cartoon. In the evening they walked up and down the Ramblas a couple of times, simply soaking in the carefree atmosphere, just being part of the scene themselves, putting themselves on display as seemed to be the main concern of all the others who, like them, were out for a stroll. Mary quickly decided there was a typical Catalan middle aged woman, quite small but sturdy with rather refined features, very stylish looking, in control of her life. He had tried to translate some of the Catalan street signs and adverts. They argued about the exact sexual orientation of the little group which hung round the corner of a rather seedy looking side street. He was convinced they were transvestites, she thought they were transsexuals. She only mentioned Tim once to say how he would have loved some of the street entertainers, especially the man who did not move. He had tried to make a joke about an Andy Warhol film, she hadn’t laughed, it didn’t seem to matter. He had anticipated making love to her but when it came to it was quite relieved when she said she was very tired, for he was quite happy to relive the day. He was first up in the morning. She told him to go ahead, find the table for breakfast. He started to talk to one of the waitresses. She told him she was studying English. After the conversation had run its predictable course she asked him if they were planning to go to Montserrat. He said they weren’t. You must, she had said, really unusual. She told him there had been a fire last year but it was still magical. Why not? Mary had said. The journey was quite complicated for after they left the train they had to get into a cable car. Normally something of a coward, he revelled in the precarious passage of the little yellow car, as it swayed on its fragile seeming wire up the side of the mountain. He tried to take a photo of the other car as they passed each other halfway. He felt a childish excitement at the whole thing. They joined the queues in the Monastery as they shuffled past the Black Madonna, part of him envied the devotion of the others. He noticed Mary crossing herself, a reflex from childhood he assumed, for she had never been to church in the time he had known her. He couldn’t imagine ever finding significance in anything, not in that way. The final leg was by funicular railway, the mechanics of which intrigued him in contrast to Mary who had hardly said a word since the short service they had sat through in the Monastery. Well, in his case, endured; he had found the congregation more interesting than the pseudo dramatics going on at the altar. They had found themselves in what seemed the middle of nowhere, the effect of isolation compounded by the blackened scarred landscape, the result of the fire the waitress had referred to. They followed a path to a hermitage. It proved to be little more than a hut decorated with a few religious symbols and icons. He peered inside and saw a cross, but little else. "He appears to have popped out." He noticed he was developing the habit of making rather weak jokes, just like his father, but there was nothing he could do about it and like his mother had, Mary chose, out of charity, to ignore them. He had always lived in London so he had not really been prepared for the views that were offered up to him, the azure sky, the perfect backdrop to the harsher, dramatic colours of the mountains themselves. He experienced a serenity he had only come close to before, when once they had been out walking in Devon at sunset when the sea and the cliffs had been bathed in a strange eerie glow, completely transfiguring a scene which was already quite beautiful. He wanted to share what he was experiencing with Mary yet of course, ironically, this was instantly translated into sexual desire, the most facile expression of the need for intimacy. The path had petered out, there was nobody in sight, they were alone in the world, Adam and Eve, he remembered thinking. She had divined his intention. She had seemed to him to have been willing enough, whether moved by what had touched him or in response to his desire, he did not know nor was he ever to. They had made love in the open a couple of times before, no relationship he believed, could be said to be truly consummated until this had happened. Over the years he had learnt what gave her pleasure so there was nothing different about the routine. The urgency was in his mind, not in his body or his hands, but what was new was that she did not react, did not slip from compliance to arousal, that transition which had always thrilled him. He was inside her, supporting himself on his hands, she naked from the waist, "I’m sorry, I’m not going to come. You don’t have to wait." Her words chilled him, she obviously wanted to get it over with whereas he had longed for it to last for ever. He could have put it down the mysteries of the female cycle, or some other related reason, but something in her tone suggested an indifference that was not physiological in origin. "Are you all right?" "What do you mean, because I didn’t feel like a fuck?" The word grated on his ears. She rarely swore, she was quite fastidious about such things. "No, yes, I don’t know." His mental confusion was heightened by rapid detumescence and his having to untangle himself from her clothing. "It’s no good, is it David?" "What?" He was being rendered monosyllabic as he began to hear the first sounds of his world collapsing around him. "I mean us. I know it sounds corny. Just isn’t working anymore is it?" Had he been living a different life from her? Had he been preserving his love for her whilst she had become somebody quite other? He looked at her. She was still, for him, the woman in the restaurant, one of the three sisters whom he had rescued from her fate. OK, there were more lines on her face and she had never quite regained her figure after Tim, though he secretly preferred her few extra pounds, in essence she was still Mary, his Mary, or that was what he had believed up until that moment. "We are going through the motions." "You might be. I’m not. I mean this holiday." "I know - I was looking forward to it, the two of us again and for a little while, yes, I fooled myself into thinking, oh what is the use?" A thought occurred to him, perhaps the problem was outside them. Surely not. He had to ask. Had to. "Nobody else is there?" "No, not in the way you think, but there is, isn’t there?" "What are you talking about?" "People we were, not just them, the people we thought we would become. We are not them, are we? I wasn’t going to say anything, really David, that would be wrong though, wouldn’t it?" "But you have, haven’t you?" "You are going to hate me for this. It was when you touched me just now. I wanted you to stop." "Mary." He wanted to shake her, shake some sense into her, exorcise the impostor who had taken her over. He didn’t. He couldn’t. Despair had immobilised him and it wasn’t just despair, it was recognition - she was right. He had been living in a dream world, sleepwalking through each day mistaking habit and routine for what he would have chosen to be his life. He had no idea what this life would be, only that it wouldn’t be the one he had. They had stayed talking quite calmly, melancholic not angry, the mountains indifferent witnesses to her descriptions of how she had felt her love for him dying inside her, and how his not sensing this had meant there would be no reprieve. There had, she said, been fluctuations, rekindlings and she had hoped that this holiday might have restored everything to as it was, but it had not. It was nothing specific about him, just that her passion for him had diminished gradually and she no longer found him interesting, was no longer able to share her dreams with him. His habits, once endearing had begun to irritate and most of all, he seemed indifferent to Tim, their son, the one thing they had created, the one thing which was unique and special to them. He had attempted to defend himself except when it came to Tim. She was right; fatherhood had been for him an unwanted intrusion, bringing in its train dilemmas, problems and responsibilities he had not sought, but, it had seemed unfair, illogical, she had loved him before Tim. "Yes David, that is true, but I don’t love you now and it is not only Tim, though that somehow proved it to me." "Mary. Mary." He started crying. The pain welled up inside him and then the words came. "I don’t love you either, not any more." He did not want to say anything else to her, not then, not ever for she had unlocked his heart and found it empty. He had gone over that afternoon in the mountains so many times since, obsessively, always finding some new nuance, some little aspect yet the ending was always the same. And now here he was waiting for her. The separation had been hastily arranged. She had gone to stay with her friend who ran the stall taking Tim with her. He had stayed in the house for a few weeks until he found a buyer. This was to be their last time together in the house, the spoils were to be divided deciding who was entitled to what. He was in no mood to argue. He had begun to sort out her books and records from his, putting them in separate piles in the front room. Books, some in pristine condition, others dog-eared and well thumbed, collected plays by Chekov, that had given him pause, Ibsen, Shaw, Pinter, books by critics about plays, histories of the theatre. How long had it been since they even talked about a play, analysed it over coffee late at night, thrilled by connections in their lives and those they had just seen on stage? His collection, smaller in number but more eclectic, so many dead ends. Kafka, Pirsig, Grisham, Kerouac, Monty Python, books left over from childhood, memories embedded in them if he chose to excavate, he didn’t. A few, like Joyce and Proust, he had always meant to read but which had remained untroubled on the shelf, that is until now. As the respective piles grew, he imagined they were reconstituting the people they had been, the people who had happily let themselves and their possessions become entwined, the people who had bought them in the second-hand book shops or from rickety stalls off the Charing Cross Road, the people who had read aloud favourite passages in the evening, the people who had listened as they curled up on a sofa high on the music and each other, the people.... The piles of records and books confronted each other across the room. He heard the bell.
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© 1999 Westminster Writers' Group. Last updated 02/07/99.