The Right Man (10 page)

I
looked at my watch. In half an hour or so it would be time for me to start
rounding us up. ‘We have to go because of the baby-sitter.’ Useful things,
baby-sitters, on a night like this. Liz would probably want to stay longer, but
two cabs from Islington to Fulham is too expensive so we’d definitely have to
leave together this time.

It had
started to go wrong the moment she gave birth to Grace. During labour a lot of
women evidently scream, ‘You put me through this, you bastard, it’s all your
fault!’ Liz didn’t, but it was as if she let this thought linger over the
ensuing years. As if she nursed a resentment at me for the pain of childbirth,
and the ensuing tiredness and depression and, of course, what it had done to
her acting career. And how annoyingly dependent having Grace had made her on
me. Breadwinner, macho man, two thousand years of oppression — all my fault.
The more I tried to help, the more this resentment grew.

It
would be wrong for me, or anyone at Mullin and Ketts, to take on Liz, even
though professionally she uses her maiden name, Garnet. I am far too close to
tell if she’s really any good, for a start. It’s complicated because I don’t
think she’s a crap actress, I just fancied her more than I found her work
exciting. As an agent, if you meet someone you fancy, you have to make a
decision: whether to fuck them or represent them. This is why straight male
agents — of whom there aren’t many, actually — end up living with bad
actresses. And then came Grace, and suddenly we were no longer two autonomous
individuals. No, suddenly we were catapulted into ‘me Tarzan, you Jane’ time: I
get the money in, you do all the home stuff. Difficult for us, because Liz is a
good two inches taller than me. Definitely a no-win situation, bringing up a
kid with a partner and no little trickle of private income. Liz resenting me
for being out in the world, having a job, having a willy even, and me envying
her time with Grace, the fact that she’s provided for, the way she’s out of the
heart-diseasing marketplace. It’d be nice to share it out more evenly but
somehow, in this country, no can do. Sometimes I wish I was Swedish. Mind you,
their comedy is crap.

On
Sunday, the stress of having a weekend off continued unabated. I had suggested
we get off the bus and walk the rest of the way home after dropping Grace at
her mother’s for the night. To my surprise, Liz had agreed. Surprise, not just
because she hated walks but because her usual stance was one of contempt for
anything I might suggest, on the grounds, I assumed, that it had been suggested
by me. We were walking along the towpath at Fulham. It was Sunday, and the
calmness of the trees in the breezeless evening made it possible to ignore the
heavy traffic noise from the main road, and Putney Bridge, from which we had
just descended. We could talk more quietly now, the playground sandpit was
empty of children and beginning to lose heat. It was May 1st, I think. A few
young couples played showing-off games along the thick black wall, beyond which
the river ambled slowly at depth, while the twinkling reflections on its
surface danced hyperactively in the fading light.

Away
from the road now, I felt more courageous about speaking to her, I felt I could
broach subjects, ask questions. I could forget the bruising attack of the
traffic noise, which was now a distant throb.

‘So
what did you want to talk about?’ she said in a tone that did not exactly
invite a warm response.

The
evening was such that I let fear of her customary aggression subside in me.

‘Us,’ I
said as a joke, but managed to hang on to my thoughts enough to formulate them
into something which resembled coherence, while keeping the Bob Henderson
factor temporarily at bay. ‘I would like us to run our lives differently.’

‘I don’t
want my life to be “run” by anyone,’ she replied as I could have predicted.

Instead
of trying to rephrase my thoughts, try a different track that would be
acceptable to her, thus apologizing for my impulse, I felt unusually motivated
to continue in my own way. The trees and the river had given me that space,
even if Liz had not.

‘I know
you are not happy with me. These days I feel like I can’t do anything right.’

‘You
don’t even try any more, Guy. Do you?’

I knew
she was referring to the fact that I’d stopped making the beds. I always used
to make them, but then she would remake them afterwards, neater, with the top
cushions at particular angles. After a while, observing this ritual of hers, I
stopped bothering.

‘Look,
it would take me three hours to make the beds the way you do it. We can’t
afford the time. And anyway, I don’t feel the need to be so incredibly,
unbelievably tidy as you do.’

‘You
don’t have to look at them all day, Guy.’

‘I
could give up the agency,’ I said, feeling righteous. We’d been here before.

‘Bollocks,’
she replied. ‘It all has to be so stated with you, doesn’t it? So
self-conscious. You can’t negotiate for happiness, you know, I’m not a deal.’

I felt
the clanging bell of shame calling me again. D for Dong. D for Liz’s
disappointment in me. We lapsed into a silence in which she no doubt returned
in her thoughts to her Bob and their times together, while I muffled the hammer
of the bell and breathed deeply. The air smelt of beech sap. I tried putting my
arm around her. She let it rest there like a yoke while she trudged on like
some large pained ox. Hugs and cuddles between us had long ago become the arena
for savage disagreements, she maintaining that I saw them only as precursors to
sex, whilst I — well, no, she was right there too, I suppose. Clang. ‘We can
cuddle as much as you like afterwards,’ I can recall shouting at her through
some intervening door or other. Hugs which led nowhere with Liz seemed to me
like having diarrhoea with a cork up your bum. It’s funny, because at work I
spend half my time hugging people, I really do. It goes with the job. But
today, down by the river, I just wanted it to be alright between us. That, and
her to tell me about Bob Henderson of her own free will.

‘It’d
be good if we could manage to talk, don’t you think?’ I said.

Whether
rightly or wrongly, I interpreted her simple lack of response as a tacit
agreement. By now, we were approaching the football ground at the gates of the
park and soon we would be on the streets again.

‘I need
a sign,’ I said. ‘I need something to make it clear to me. A sign.’ I
fantasized her breaking down in loving tears and telling me that Bob Henderson
was a one-night mistake who had come in under three seconds from a penis so
small she’d gone to the opticians the next day.

From
the corner of my eye, I had been watching a small flotilla of mallards as they
meandered alongside us. They had split now into two groups of three. The two
brown females with a pair of males each. Both drakes fussed and fought, each
trying to be the one to keep up with their duck, as she changed direction in a
coquettish attempt to shake them off. I had learnt, when with Liz, to observe
things like the birds and the bees privately, to avoid her comments about
anoraks and trainspotters.

In the
water, about ten yards from the shore, on the receding tide, stood what looked
for a moment like a heron. I remarked on this since herons are not common on
that reach of the river.

‘It
looks more like the bottom of a tree,’ said Liz. And as usual, she was right.
It did look more like a tree. As we strolled closer alongside it, we looked
again and for a moment I thought I could see quite clearly that it was the face
of a bearded man, still in the water, his body submerged beneath him. From his
mouth came a string of what looked like seaweed, but could have been heavy
saliva, vomit and twigs. He exhaled hugely, like a snorting seal, and then
gracefully and slowly disappeared beneath the surface.

We
stopped and waited for him to come up for breath. I scanned the river ahead in
the direction of the stream, trying to calculate his speed in the undertow and
so predict the area of his re-emergence, but the river remained flat with its
sparkling ripples like dragonflies on the surface. Nothing. I ran in the
direction of the flow, looking for some trace of him. A hand, an arm, perhaps
his head again, further downstream. I climbed the thick black wall and
scrambled down to the shore. I made my way back up towards the bridge, skipping
across the driftwood and plastic detritus like a horse doing dressage. My feet
were splashing in the shallows now. A couple of teenagers on the top of the
wall stopped their kissing to look at me. I shouted to them to look for the man
and to point him out to me if I missed him surfacing.

By now
I was knee-deep in water and the ground beneath me was lumpy and unpredictable.
I would dive in but could not know where the man was. The river was unyielding.
He had disappeared. I looked back to where Liz was. She had walked to the steps
and was standing at the top of them, calling after me, but I couldn’t
distinguish the words. I slipped, as the bottom beneath me descended too
rapidly on an incline, and for a moment, I felt the huge power of the undertow
of the river, my feet bicycling madly into the freezing black.

The
water rushed to my shoulders, its coldness hitting me like a shot of iced Valium,
and I was spun around. I must have travelled for some yards before sinking
first one foot and then the other into the mud, which squeezed me to my knees.
Breathless, and having swallowed some of the Thames, I hauled myself to the
shore once again, and stood shivering and muddied.

The
teenage girl was alone on the wall now.

‘Are
you OK?’ she shouted down.

‘Yeah,’
I piped back, in that high pitch that comes from extreme cold on the testicles.

‘My
boyfriend’s gone to call the police,’ she yelled.

‘Good.
Did you see the guy?’

‘Naaa.’

I
needed to keep moving and ran back to where Liz was standing at the top of the
steps. There was a strange man in a shiny yellow shirt hovering just behind her
on the path as I came up the steps.

‘I can’t
get rid of this guy. He asked me if I was alone and if I would like to go for a
drink,’ she said to me as I joined her.

I didn’t
have the energy to do anything about the guy, and he hung around, a few yards
off, like the second male mallard, looking Liz up and down. I leaned on the
wall and gasped for breath.

‘You’re
filthy,’ said Liz. ‘You’ve probably caught some dreadful disease now.

I
thought of Liz watching me from the top of the steps as I was pulled away momentarily
by the river and wondered what her feelings might have been, if any. Whether
she would have willed me further into the stream to drown. Whether if I
subtracted myself from her life she would be happy at last, free to fly away to
the arms of Mrs Henderson’s hubby. Maybe it wasn’t a bearded man I had seen,
maybe it was just the roots of a tree, and I had merely tried to throw myself
away for Liz’s sake like in my dreams with Grace.

‘I’ve
got to keep moving,’ I said. ‘I’m frozen.’

She
helped me up, being careful not to get any mud on her new suede jacket. As we
neared the gate to the park, a fat policeman in a flat chequered hat came
towards us with a waddle in his walk, like a goose from Toon Town. The guy in
the shiny yellow shirt quickly took another direction and made himself scarce.

‘There
was a man in the water.’ I said to the policeman. ‘He had a beard and then he
just disappeared under the surface.’

‘Oh,
yes, yes, yes,’ he said. He was followed by a younger policeman who had a
crackling radio receiver. ‘Probably drunk.’

‘They
wander in, don’t know what they’re doing, don’t care. Spook, was he?’ I do not
expect your average friendly bobby to be anything other than a rampant racist.

‘No, I
think he was white, actually.’

I
pointed out to them where we had seen the man and turned down the offer of a
blanket, since we lived nearby and I was not in the mood for hearing a racial
diatribe from a cartoon duck in a uniform.

‘Could
have been drowned already up at Richmond. We get a lot of them. Might have been
in the water for days.’

‘He
sort of breathed,’ I said, ‘and then just disappeared completely. If I could
have seen where he was, I would have gone in.

‘Lucky
you didn’t, son,’ said the round policeman. ‘You’d have lasted about one and a
half minutes in there, with this tide. It’s a treacherous bend in the river,
you know. People don’t realize that. We get it all the time. He could have been
dead days ago and drifted all the way down here. Lucky you didn’t.’

As we
hurried back to the house, Liz was quiet. At the front door she said, ‘There’s
your sign.’

I was
getting out of drenched clothes in the front hall.

‘What
do you mean?’ I said.

‘You
wanted a sign. To make things clear. There it is. Don’t go jumping in to try
and save drowning things. It was probably just some driftwood anyway. You’d
have got yourself killed, you bloody arsehole. Like the policeman said.’

She got
me some towels. Old ones that didn’t matter, with trailing threads.

‘Who
was that weirdo in the yellow shirt?’ I asked.