The Point (2 page)

Flora wrote back a postcard with a picture of a hunting scene of men and rabbits, except that the rabbits had hunted the men and were carrying them on their backs, trussed up. It was from an old manuscript, in the Bodleian. She really wanted to see Elinor, she wrote. Adrian had died. As babies do, said Flora. No reason. Perfectly healthy. But he died. A cot death.

Elinor looked at the word
died
, written a number of times in Flora’s quick round hand. At the word
death
. Small plain words, and she imagined Flora’s pen forming them, over and over, as though repetition would make them bearable. As though these were now the baby’s verb, the baby’s noun, and now they had to be repeated, like a chant. Solemn and majestic words, which ought to be pronounced. And writing back, a letter not a card, Elinor spoke of the baby’s death, of the fact that Adrian had died, joining in the chant of grief.

She dreamed about him.

She dreams she is playing with him, this big strong dark-haired child. Playing as one does when changing a baby’s nappy, dressing him. Kissing his tummy, nibbling his toes, tickling, blowing on his fingers. The baby smiles and laughs and waves his arms, he makes deep excited gurgles in his chest. The energy in those arms, the beating of his little fists. He’s nearly dressed, with his nappy on, his tights pulled up, his jumper pulled down. He’s quiet. She sees that his face is covered with plastic film. Glad Wrap, as they call it, for keeping food fresh. Tightly across the baby’s face is wrapped this plastic film. His face like wax underneath, its folds and wrinkles. Ancient as baby’s faces can be. Cream-coloured, waxy. She unwraps the clinging plastic, but it’s too late, the baby is dead. Flaccid, his beating fists limp.

The dream stays with her. As though it has happened to her. No dream, but truth. It’s intimate, and obscene, and part of her. She is despoiled by it. Because she has lived through this dream, lived with it, when she meets Flora she simply puts her arms around her. There’s nothing to be said, no sorrow, certainly not condolence. Elinor has lived the death.

Flora, egg-smooth and secret. No more. Other people have smashed away at the smoothness, it’s wrinkled and cracked. The young woman whom Elinor envied is no more, gone the same way as Elinor herself. Now, to think of eggs in connection with Flora is to think of fragility.

Between them is the baby, ancient, beautiful, waxen, and wrapped in plastic film.

That night, in a hotel in Bloomsbury, filled with chintzy prints and the stale smell of air-freshener, she talks about it to Ivan. They are eating bread and cheese and drinking wine they have bought at an enormous nearby Sainsbury’s. Ivan’s large brown eyes are mournful as she speaks about it.

You know, she says, innocence is something that belongs to adults and children destroy.

His eyes gleam a little. A paradox? he says. These conversations are one of the reasons he didn’t finally go off with the girl he fell in love with, and Elinor went back to him.

Maybe a paradox, but true, in the tricky way of paradoxes, says Elinor. The thing is, adults have children in innocence, though they don’t believe that is so, they think that they are quite knowing, that they know all about it, but they are wrong.

She is swallowing the wine while she talks, and Ivan listens, letting her take her time.

It’s devastating, she says, that destruction of innocence. It’s as though your skin is suddenly permeable. Osmosis isn’t in it. Your self leaks out. Okay, maybe it should, and maybe you need to know that. It’s still terrible. And the world floods in … blackness, and horrors, terrors. You aren’t safe any more. You never were, but having children has made you understand it.

Later, in bed, lying in Ivan’s arms, not making love, just lying, with the covers up over her ears, she thinks, well, maybe you aren’t safe, but there are some illusions of it.

The next time she meets Flora, porous permeable leaking Flora, Flora says that she is stopping being married to Vic, her husband, and when Elinor says, But isn’t this just when you need his comfort, she replies that he has none to give, nor she him. Flora says that she is going to stop working in publishing, she is sick of that too, she is going to be a cook in a friend’s restaurant. And some time after their return home, Elinor gets a fax that tells her Flora’s new career is bringing her to Australia, and won’t it be wonderful, she will be able to see lots more of her.

And that was the beginning of Flora’s ending up at The Point.

2

Jerome

There will be no children. There can be no children. That, I see, was part of the bargain. Doesn’t seem such a good bargain now, but what bargain does, some time after the event? Love, marriage, adultery, they all seem an excellent deal at the time, and then, deception, disappointment. Birth, even. Would you choose to be born, knowing it all in advance? As for job, career, vocation … no, the bargains are never what we are led to believe. The price is always too high, too long, too hard. The diamonds are always paste.

Paste: it makes me think of glue, something viscous and sticky, and how can that look like diamond, so I look it up and it turns out it’s a heavy very clear flint glass for making imitation gems.
Heavy
and
flint
… they are my kind of word. My hand takes a morbid pleasure in forming them. Heavy. Flint. Good words for how I am, now. When once – did I ever believe I was diamond?

This isn’t a beginning, it’s making a start, just start, they say, anywhere
. Dear Diary
I remember when I was a child and people in books began diaries like that.
Dear Diary
, they wrote. It always seemed odd to me. And if you started off like that shouldn’t you end up with,
Love, Jerome
or
Yours sincerely
or
I beg to
remain your most humble and obedient servant
I was quite sure … nobody in real life ever wrote to their diary. Surely your diary is you? Wouldn’t it be better to begin,
Dear Jerome
? For a diary is so you can tell yourself something. It is you writing to yourself, and seeing where it gets you. And maybe this isn’t even a diary, so long after the event. Events: the series of them, and their … culmination. Inexorable, they seem, this series, but not when you’re living them.

It’s Elinor’s idea. She even gave me the notebooks, with thick smooth paper so they would be a pleasure to use. Just write it down, she said. It? I asked. What’s happened to you is so full of pain, it is unbearable, she said, but try to get it on to paper and maybe it will change. You mean writing as therapy, I said. Well, she said, I would not use that term, I would rather say, making another thing of it, not a work of art, I don’t mean that really, I mean an artifice, a creation. The thing is, just write. Anything. Not thinking too hard.

Of course this is therapy. She means a process to do me good, not a finished and possibly wonderful object.

It’s all right for you, I said, you’re a wordsmith. She smiled: Only at second hand. I collect the meanings of words, I don’t make anything out of them. Do you think I will, I asked. She kissed me, she’s taken to doing that. Humankindness, I think it is. It might be wonderful, she said, and at least it should help.

Help I do need.

All I have desired I have lost … I look at those words. Had I not desired, desired with such passion, such love, then I would not have lost … all that I have lost. I would be safe. But can I wish not to have loved, so as to avoid loss … ? I try out that idea. And, overwhelming, Flora is there, emblem and embodiment and dearest being, and no, I can never wish her away, never undesire her … I am bereft, but not so much as that.

People say to me, you will get over your grief. You will forget. I don’t want to. Grief is all I have and all I ever will have now. My love for Flora had such a short season, just winter into spring, but it was to time as a Tardis is to space. Inside itself it was enormous.

Move your bum, cat. Leonie, my cat. My cats are always called Leonie. They come and go and break my heart but at least being always called Leonie means that something remains, something isn’t lost. Leonie is for my namesake, Jerome, who had a lion for a pet. I make do with a cat. I wonder did his lion park its bum bang on the very spot on the paper where he was writing. His great exegesis. He made the first translations of the canonical books of the Old Testament from Hebrew into vulgar Latin. Jerome means the holy name. The holy pagan name, three centuries Before Christ, that’s when it started. Hallowed be thy name. My Jerome’s the scholar and hermit. Who fostered a marvellous flowering of asceticism. I like that, asceticism flowering. He also got up a lot of people’s noses. How do our names form us? Jerome and his leonine pet. Live blotting paper.

Leonie is a tabby. An ordinary cat. She is plump and cuddly. Her coat is so intricately and symmetrically patterned a tortoiseshell that you have to marvel at the gene, the mysterious magic switch, that brought such perfection to this pedigreeless child of the gutter. This funny little weed of a cat with her pretty pointed face and great glassy golden eyes which I look into and see only more layers of glass refracting like mirrors keeping their secrets. She loves me. She dribbles with delight when I fondle her. The page is gritty with the love she brings me. You are so fat, Leonie, move over. My pen wishes to be there.

Where to begin, properly. Now we’ve got the Dear Diary out of the way, where to start my story … I was born … No. Let’s not go there. Not yet.

Leonie’s predecessor was a Burmese. Brown and shapely, not like you, my little tub. I found her dead in the road and I don’t know how it could happen, I thought she was too clever, too fast, too graceful. Dead in the road, but no blood, no wound. One year old. I wrapped her in a piece of velvet and buried her in the garden, with violets to mark her grave.
And from her fair and unpolluted
flesh may violets spring
… Yes, I said that. And shed tears, though not enough to water the earth.

Leonie, this little tabby cat, is not so clever or elegant or graceful but I think she is safe.

Barely a page, and there’s death. (Now all we need is sex.)

Sex. Not that yet, either.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.

For he is the servant of the living God, duly and daily
serving him.

And so was I then, and maybe that will be a place to begin, since this ending if it is one can be said to have started there, with myself, tall, portly, pacing like the friar I was about the fishpond, my hands crossed behind my back, and that suddenly was intolerable, for the robes you see had no pockets, and I thought, here am I a grown man, a man beginning to decline into middle age, and I am not permitted pockets to put my hands in. I am walking along in this portly clasped-hands-behind-the-back pontificatory manner because I am seen as a masturbator who cannot be trusted with pockets. And at that moment I was filled with desire, not of course to play with myself, that in its tiny wrinkled walnut shell is the gravity of the joke against me, and not desire for women or a woman, not then, no, it was the desire to live that makes us alive, the desire for a world that the fish in the pond inhabited better than I, and I longed for this world with a bitter inchoate ignorant longing, and suddenly had to have it. Suddenly took it. Could not for a moment longer bear the polite calm ritual narrowness I’d dwelt in so long. Simple enough to undo. The provincial pained, amazed, my brothers angry and sorrowful, the fear flashing in their eyes: was I the lemming that would lead them over the cliff, the wide dizzy jump to freedom and the death of all they knew?

Once we lose the desire to desire we are as good as dead. Or perhaps a saint, but I never considered that. But look where it can take us; the sin of greed is one dangerous place. Clovis went there. Well, I suppose we all did, in our ways. But I jump ahead.

So: I stopped being a friar. A Franciscan. One of those gentle people. I stopped being a person who’d given up material goods for the embrace of poverty. The world, not the order, would be my fishpond. I made my bargains; brilliant at the time they seemed. And they have led me here. The paper, the pen, a narrow courtyard. The sun a slight greasy yellow slick through the dust motes, and Leonie, who does not believe I could not want her bum plum on the page. I form the letters slowly as I think, and remember. As I postpone remembering.

Christopher Smart’s is probably the best cat poem. Better than any of Eliot’s
Practical Cats
, even, perhaps. Christopher Smart understands cats, he sees them, he imagines them. I change it all to
she
because of Leonie and two centuries later nothing else needs to be different.

For she keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.

For she counteracts the powers of darkness by her clerical skin and glaring eyes.

For she counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.

For in her morning orisons she loves the sun and the sun loves her.

Cats make no bargains. There is no negotiation. They accept, they accept with glorious greed, and they give, when they choose they are generous givers, but the giving and taking is never laid up one against the other, there is no countering, no exchanging and never a thought for exacting. Either way.