England and Other Stories

I LIVE ALONE

THERE WAS A moment, as Dr Grant spoke, when he didn’t see Grant’s face at all. He saw Anne’s face, streaming with salt water. He saw her wet arm held out to him, as if she herself had delivered this news. It made it strangely bearable.

It didn’t otherwise help to know that he was the victim of a rare disease, with some foreigner’s name — as if the rarity, so Grant seemed to be suggesting, was some kind of compensation. He didn’t feel privileged to have been introduced, in this intimate way, to this Dubrowski or Bronowski or whoever he was — as if he too might have held out a hand across Grant’s desk. He saw his wife’s hand. Anne’s hand, Anne’s face.

He saw, but in a different way and more vividly than ever, what he’d never failed to see every day for ten years.

He stopped listening to what Grant was saying. There was only so much you could take in after the announcement of such a basic fact. He was trying to take that in — along with his vision of Anne. He was trying to take in the fact that his life was no longer the indefinite thing of which he’d always been the subject, it was a closed thing, a finite thing, an object.

And he suddenly remembered himself, distinctly, at primary school, aged perhaps ten, holding a cricket ball. It had been a matter of some debate — he remembered this — whether small boys should be allowed to use proper hard cricket balls. But this was the school team, it was serious grown-up stuff, and they were playing St Michael’s. Astonishingly, he remembered even that. He saw himself in the outfield on the off side, picking up a cricket ball struck in his direction. He saw the dry summer grass beneath him, the flattened dandelions. He saw the ball he’d grabbed, its scuffed red surface, felt its solidity.

His life was now like a cricket ball.

But he saw himself, too, fling back his arm and hurl this same ball, with inspired force, not just towards the wicket keeper, but directly towards the stumps. Saw it shatter the stumps long before the running batsman — or batsboy — even with bat outstretched, could gain the crease. Saw the wicket keeper lift his gloved hands in jubilation. Saw everyone lift their hands.

It was a spectacular throw, perhaps thirty yards, and perhaps his only moment of sporting glory. And the strange thing was that he’d known it wouldn’t miss. He hadn’t thought about it in decades, but he saw it now, in Grant’s consulting room, as clearly, as triumphantly as yesterday. He saw the ball, with its dense red weight, briefly clutched in his hand.

After leaving his office he’d taken the bus across the city and by the time he’d entered the now familiar private hospital and sat in the waiting room he’d set out in his mind three possible outcomes for this visit and given them each a percentage. One was that Grant would say the latest tests had revealed nothing of further importance and, though they should keep it under review and meet again in, say, a couple of months, there was really nothing to worry about. Thirty per cent. Second, Grant might say there was now a clear diagnosis, but the problem, though significant, could be treated. Sixty per cent. Third, Grant would say that unfortunately the diagnosis was that he had a rare incurable fatal disease. Ten per cent.

He’d considered these options to be fairly weighted, if anything rather tilted against him, and he’d believed in them like a superstition. Of course he’d hoped for option one, if not exactly for an ‘all clear’. Though he was technically prepared for it, he hadn’t believed in option three, but to have left it out would have been tempting fate.

Yet he’d known from Grant’s face, even before Grant began properly to speak, that option three was actually the one.

There’d come to him the absurdly calming notion that since Grant was a doctor and he was a lawyer a certain professional comportment should be maintained. The roles might be reversed. As a lawyer he’d often had to give clients grave disquieting news or maintain a quasi-clinical detachment while they exhibited signs of distress. He couldn’t complain if it was now the other way round. He should handle himself properly. He should look Grant in the face. He did.

But he saw Anne, he saw her arm. And seeing Anne was really the thing that saved him, not his professional decorum.

This was what kept (these very words came to him) his head above water and made it look to Grant perhaps that he was taking it rather well, he was taking it like a man.

He told himself: I deserve this, I’d even wanted it. This too was the other way round. Ten per cent.

So then.

Then the notion of his life as some small separate finite object, like a cricket ball, had rushed towards him.

He told himself (he actually had the sense of standing outside himself to do so): And anyway it’s hardly unfair. I’m fifty-nine. Many will live to a much riper age. But many, many — though, above all, Anne — have died long before.

And with that supremely balanced thought there’d entered his head — no, it seemed that they themselves had entered Grant’s room — the actual roster of all those he’d known but who’d died before him. They appeared with remarkable clarity and in remarkably organised reverse order, taking him all the way back to the very first of their kind he’d known.

Yes, he remembered now. It popped up from some submerged place as if it had only been waiting for this moment. The very first had been little Howard Clarke. Now he remembered even the name — and remembered the other thing too. Howard Clarke had been the wicket keeper, his small hands encased in monstrous gloves, the wicket keeper whose skill had not been needed when he’d made that legendary throw. The wicket keeper who’d raised his exultant arms.

The point being that Howard Clarke, aged ten yet already marked out as a wicket keeper, had gone off as they all had for the summer holiday, but had never returned. It had been somehow conveyed to them, early in September, that he was never going to return. A brain tumour, someone said, whatever that was. A brain tumour, perhaps as dense and undeniable as a cricket ball, inside his head.

Grant continued to speak, but he didn’t listen or couldn’t focus. It was enough — surely enough since it was everything — to have to take in the main thing. He’d already asked the question that he’d never thought he’d hear himself ask, the question people only asked in films. And Grant had answered, though through a sort of fog. Had he said six months or eighteen, or that it could be anywhere between the two? Grant was now speaking of what might be done to ‘maximise his quality of life’ (had he heard that phrase?). But he wasn’t really listening. Oddly, given the crucial nature of it all, he wasn’t concentrating.

Again, he knew this sort of thing from the other side. How many times, after telling clients some urgent sobering fact, had he watched their faces glaze over as he went on to explain the repercussions? They were still digesting the main thing. But what could you do except carry on? It was your professional obligation.

But mainly he couldn’t concentrate on Grant because of the way Grant was crowded out, in his small room, by these others, by these ranks of dead ones, or of living memories, going back as far as Howard Clarke. They were far more important than Grant. Grant was being replaced by them — he’d even for a moment turned into Anne — so that his voice seemed to become increasingly feeble. It even seemed — but was this another confusion with Anne? — that Grant was the floundering and struggling one, the one in difficulties, and he felt a great gush of pity, mixed with something like wise seniority, for this man placed in the awful position of having to make the announcement he’d just made.

Grant, he supposed, when he wasn’t being a physician, was a family man with a wife, and children perhaps now in their teens. He would go back to all that this evening. Which meant that he belonged, unquestionably, to the freely living, to those whose lives were not closed and finite. Whereas he, now, was of the other sort, the minority. He was not now of the same kind as Grant, though he had been moments ago, before entering his consulting room.

Yet he’d always been — or had been for the last ten years and those ten years had become a sort of ‘always’—a man of a different kind of minority. Of a kind who’d sometimes say, by way of giving a general, guarded account of himself, ‘I live alone.’

Had he said it at some point to Grant?

It had become his watchword. He said it to clients, particularly clients he was guiding through the troublesome process of divorce, and he could say it with a judicious ironical tone, even a crinkly smile. So they could never tell what he really meant. An expression of sad fact? Or of proud resolution? An explanation, or a recommendation?

Grant, he thought, was speaking, in his flailing voice, with the strange loquacity of the living, with the gabble with which one might speak about all the detailed necessary arrangements for a wedding while somehow forgetting the main thing, that two people were about to commit themselves to each other for life.

Except this wasn’t a wedding.

Yet he saw himself clearly for a moment (no longer a small boy on a cricket field) at his own wedding, nearly thirty years ago, and all the other people at it, several of whom were now dead and thus among this muster here in Grant’s room. It had been a thronged lavish wedding because Anne came from a large and wealthy family, while he was just a suburban boy who’d landed on his feet. West Ealing to Winchester. The Sixties song had lodged in his brain. Win-chester Cathedral. . Would they have to get married, he’d joked, in Winchester Cathedral?

How strange to have had such a packed wedding when he was now a man who said, ‘I live alone.’

And he remembered how before the wedding he’d gone with Anne down to the jetty at Lymington with two bottles of champagne clanking in a bag. And they’d rowed out to where the Marinella was anchored. It was theirs now. It had been in Anne’s family for years, but it was officially theirs now, a wedding present, though the sort that can’t be wrapped or hidden. And before they climbed aboard — to drink the second bottle and make ceremonial waterborne love in the cabin — Anne had smashed the first bottle, with a fine flourish of her arm, against the bows, saying, ‘I name this yacht the Marinella, the yacht of our marriage. May God bless all those who navigate and copulate in her.’ He’d never thought he could become (with Anne’s instruction) a sailor. That, with Anne, he could sail the Marinella to Jersey, Guernsey, Brittany, Portugal. He was a provincial lawyer, a decent fish in a smallish pond, whose only act of physical prowess had been that amazing throw at primary school, Howard Clarke’s leathered hands raised high.

‘I live alone.’ Fewer and fewer people now knew, or remembered, why he said this. One of them was Janice, the receptionist, the veteran uncomplaining Janice, right now guarding his office.

Why had Janice, who was not dead, sprung suddenly into his mind?

Because, he realised, she’d almost certainly be the first person, not counting Grant himself (who was still wittering on), he’d have to confront after having received this news.

And then. . and then he’d have to confront Mrs Roberts, whom he’d never met. Mrs Roberts: 5.15. Mrs Roberts who was on the brink of that troublesome process, or precipice, known as divorce.

Why was he thinking of his office — in Grant’s ‘office’? ‘Eliot and Holloway’. He pictured it for a moment like some distant light seen in a dark forest. Why was he thinking of Mrs Roberts whom he’d never met? But he knew now. He knew now why he’d kept his 5.15 appointment, despite Janice’s puzzled and concerned gaze. ‘Why don’t you get me to move it?’ she’d almost said. He’d read her thought: Why, if your appointment’s at four, don’t you just take the afternoon off? A fair question. But he’d insisted. ‘I’ll keep my 5.15.’

‘I live alone.’ Would he say it to Mrs Roberts? And in the same cryptically smiling way as ever?

I live alone. Did that fact, too, save him, come to his rescue now?

Grant was gabbling on, so it seemed, like a man put on the spot. And he was listening to him, hearing him out, like some silent patient judge. It came to him that what Grant was saying might be a fabrication, a ruse. He knew it wasn’t. Little Howard Clarke had proved it. Nonetheless, the idea was somehow to be seized. There also came to him, in this meeting of two professional men bound by rules of confidentiality, the phrase he sometimes used, with a certain solemnity, in his own profession: ‘Nothing need go beyond this room.’

He saw the cubicle of a room he was in like some locked vault in a bank. It was a very important room — it was the room in which he’d learnt the most important fact of his life — but nothing need go beyond it.

Except himself. He saw that it was vital that in a moment he should get up and leave and in passing through the door, crossing the waiting room, signing out at the desk, then exiting through the glass doors be absolutely no different (though he absolutely was) from the man who’d walked in.

And he was no different. How could he be different, even to himself? He was the same creature, with the same legs beneath him, the same mobile, thinking, breathing vessel that contained all he was.

He did get up. It wasn’t difficult. He didn’t totter. It was 4.25. He may have shaken Grant’s hand. He may have shaken Grant’s hand in a way he’d never shaken anyone’s hand before. He may have looked him in the eye and nodded obligingly in response to some further reassurance on his part about ‘what should happen next’.

But what should happen next was that he should put one foot in front of the other. That was the most important thing. One foot in front of the other. He walked, feeling the extraordinary exactness of his steps, to the desk in the waiting room. The nurse smiled at him. She couldn’t possibly know. It was an ordinary smile. But the fact that she’d smiled so simply must mean that his own face looked ordinary. So — Janice was not, quite, the first and he’d proved that the thing could be done.

There was a name tag over the nurse’s left breast: ‘Gina’. He noted this fact and the smooth skin of her throat.

When the glass doors slid open and he emerged into the cold and darkening air of a November afternoon it was a sort of shock, but also a kind of cancelling continuity, to know the world was still there.

He began at once to walk, buttoning his coat: across the forecourt, through the main entrance, turning left onto the pavement. One foot in front of the other. He knew this was the walk of his life. He knew he could have picked up one of the taxis that dropped incoming patients by the glass doors, or just got the bus. He’d got the bus on the way and now he knew why. The company of other, living people. But now he knew he must walk.

Across the city, beyond the cathedral, to his office. There was time. He knew he must walk, to prove he was healthy and alive and able to place one foot in front of the other. And to give himself time, while his legs worked beneath him, to cement and seal up inside him the great secret he’d just learnt. If the secret could be successfully hidden from all but himself (and Grant) then it would be as though the secret — even perhaps to himself — might not be real.

Win-chester Cathedral. .

He walked. It would take half an hour, perhaps a little more. He wouldn’t disappoint Mrs Roberts.

Dry leaves scurried along the pavement like small alarmed animals. The lights of passing traffic glared. He couldn’t drive any more, of course, because of his mysterious blackouts, and he’d supposed it was a temporary prohibition. Now he knew it wasn’t. So he should sell the car perhaps. But what did it matter now to sell it or not? Six months? Eighteen months? Scores of practical considerations and decisions, as if he were being a good solicitor to himself, suddenly rose before him, then scattered meaninglessly away like the leaves at his feet.

He’d sold the Marinella quickly enough. That hadn’t been a protracted decision. It had come with the force of a gale behind it, if not like the gale — but it had been more than a gale, it was a mad murderous whirlwind brewed up by a gale — that had smashed through the sea around them that afternoon, ten miles off the Needles, and picked up the Marinella like a toy boat and tossed it over. And tossed them out of it.

Hours later, close to freezing and like a drowned rat, he was winched up on the end of a wire, clutching a man in a helmet who’d said, ‘Hold me, hold me,’ like a lover.

This was something also that he’d never seen himself doing, or having done to him, in his life.

But Anne was never winched up. The last he’d seen of Anne alive, as a huge wave lifted her then took her sweeping away, was her face and outstretched arm — as he’d seen it in Grant’s office, as he’d seen it countless times. Hold me, hold me. But she’d been too far away for holding, even reaching. Then she was gone.

He’d sold the boat, after the salvage team had brought it in and the damage was repaired and paid for. He’d never stepped in it again, would never sail again. He’d been a sailor once, to his surprise, a lawyer and weekend sailor, a solicitor and occasional marine adventurer, but he’d never be those things again, except the solicitor, and he’d never know again the joy of being married to Anne and of riding with her, in the boat of their marriage, the high, astonishing seas.

‘I live alone.’ Some who heard him say it understood. After all, the thing had been in the papers.

And now he’d never even drive a car again. Though, in any case, now he must walk. Now he must feel beneath him his own motor efficiently propelling him forward.

And so he did. He crossed the city, here and there taking short cuts he knew through back streets, away from traffic, so that he could even hear the rasp of his breath and steady scuff of his footsteps. Even now, there was the feeling like a patent disproof: look, there’s nothing wrong with you.

Win-chester Cathedral. .

He seemed to be walking back into all the previous bodies — which were only this same body — that had once been his. His younger stronger imperishable bodies. So that at one point the legs beneath him even seemed to be — he could feel them there again — the little stick-like but superbly alive legs he’d had when he’d once hurled a cricket ball and had, soon afterwards, resolved that Howard Clarke, who had similar stick-like, immortal legs and who’d so spontaneously applauded his spectacular throw, should become — perhaps when they all returned after the summer — his friend.

And as he walked he couldn’t help noticing, within this body, this fifty-nine-year-old motor that was himself, the central pulsing component that kept now thumping out its rhythm as never before. He could feel it, hear it. Surely others must hear it. How was it possible that he’d carried this same beating thing inside him all this time, since he was a boy with stick legs? How was it possible that it had kept up its persistent and so often unappreciated beat all this time, as if it would never stop?

He reached his office. It was now completely dark and the lit-up windows and railed frontage — a fine Georgian centre-terrace converted, like others in the row, into offices — struck him, as it sometimes did but now more than ever, like a stage set, like a doll’s house. ‘Eliot and Holloway’. He seemed to see, through the windows, the swallow-tailed and crinolined folk who’d once inhabited it.

Janice knew, of course. Janice knew what ‘I live alone’ meant. Janice had been there when. . Janice had watched and known ever since. And Janice had been there some nine months ago when he’d had that first extraordinary, and extraordinarily embarrassing, blackout in his office. She was there beside him — he’d never seen her knees so closely — with a glass of water, looking down at him on the office carpet as he came to. She’d called an ambulance. Janice was there, and he’d recognised her face, among the others (Alan Holloway looking a bit white) pressing round and looking down, before he’d even recognised who he was himself.

That’s Janice. What on earth is she doing? And then he’d seen rapidly disappearing from Janice’s face, but not so rapidly that he couldn’t notice it, her horrified conviction that he was dead.

Janice looked up at him now as he walked in. He knew that how he looked back at her and how he spoke to her was of the utmost importance. Even so, he wondered if she could see — surely Janice must see — through his gaze and his words.

‘Nothing new, Janice, don’t even ask.’

Did he sound sufficiently disgruntled?

‘Same as last time. More tests. Honestly, I sometimes wonder if they know what they’re doing.’

When Janice kept looking he said, ‘I walked. I walked all the way back. Did me more good than going there.’

He eyed his watch. Ten past five. He took off his coat. Alan had closed shop for the day, so it seemed. Good. Well, Alan would be ruling the roost before long. He peered into the open door of his own office as if into a room that some other person had left.

‘So, Janice, we have. . er. . Mrs Roberts.’

As if Mrs Roberts hadn’t become his unexpected lifeline.

Even as he spoke a figure in a black coat and red scarf entered where he’d just entered, a woman of forty or so, not unattractive, but etched by an anxiety she was clearly trying to hide.

Was it so difficult then, to wear a disguise?

‘Mrs Roberts?’ he said and, when she said yes, held out a hand and smiled. ‘David Eliot.’ How strange his own name sounded. ‘And this is our receptionist, Janice. You’ve caught me on the hop. I’ve just returned from an appointment of my own.’ She only blinked at this. ‘So then—’

And now he extended an ushering arm, in exactly the same way, he realised, as Grant had done at his consulting-room door, just as all professional people habitually do.

He’d quickly made his assessment: Well, she’s not one of the hard-bitten ones, out to grab all she can. She’s one of the ones (he seemed to see this more clearly than he’d ever done) who thought this sort of thing could never happen to her, not to her — that her marriage, her life was all soundly, safely in its place. She’s putting up a good front of businesslike poise, but really she’s lost, she’s all at sea. She’s looking out over a gulf which was never meant for her and which she has no idea how to cross.

They sat down. He made some lawyer’s small talk. He looked at her, at the notes he had. Then he leant back patiently and attentively in his chair.

‘Now, in your own words, in your own time, tell me all about it.’