Midnight All Day

Girl

They got on at Victoria Station and sat together, kissing lightly. As the train pulled away, she took out her Nietzsche tome and began to read. Turning to the man at her side she became amused by his face, which she studied continually. Removing her gloves she picked shaving cream from his ears, sleep from his eyes and crumbs from his mouth, while laughing to herself. The combination of his vanity, mixed with unconscious naivety, usually charmed her.

Nicole hadn’t wanted to visit her mother after all this time but Majid, her older lover — it sounded trite calling him her ‘boyfriend’ — had persuaded her to. He was curious about everything to do with her; it was part of love. He said it would be good for her to ‘re-connect’; she was stronger now. However, during the past year, when Nicole had refused to speak to her, and had ensured her mother didn’t have her address, she had suppressed many tormenting thoughts from the past; ghosts she dreaded returning as a result of this trip.

Couldn’t Majid sense how uneasy she was? Probably he could. She had never had anyone listen to her so attentively or take her so seriously, as if he wanted to occupy every part of her. He had the strongest will of anyone she’d known, apart from her father. He was used to having things his own way, and often disregarded what she wanted. He was afraid she would run away.

He had never met her mother. She might be incoherent, or in one of her furies, or worse. As it was, her mother had cancelled the proposed visit three times, once in a drunken voice that was on the point of becoming spiteful. Nicole didn’t want Majid to think that she — half her mother’s age — would resemble her at fifty. He had recently told Nicole that he considered her to be, in some sense, ‘dark’. Nicole was worried that her mother would find Majid also dark, but in the other sense.

Almost as soon as it left the station, their commuter train crossed the sparkling winter river. It would pass through the suburbs and then the countryside, arriving after two hours at a seaside town. Fortunately, theirs wasn’t a long journey, and next week, they were going to Rome; in January he was taking her to India. He wanted her to see Calcutta. He wouldn’t travel alone any more. His pleasure was only in her.

Holding hands they looked out at Victorian schools and small garages located under railway arches. There were frozen football pitches, allotments, and the backs of industrial estates where cork tiles and bathroom fittings were manufactured, as well as carpet warehouses and metalwork shops. When the landscape grew more open, railway tracks stretched in every direction, a fan of possibilities. Majid said that passing through the outskirts of London reminded him what an old country Britain was, and how manifestly dilapidated.

She dropped her hand in his lap and stroked him as he took everything in, commenting on what he saw. He looked handsome in his silk shirt, scarf and raincoat. She dressed for him, too, and couldn’t go into a shop without wondering what would please him. A few days before, she’d had her dark hair cut into a bob that skimmed the fur collar of the overcoat she was wearing with knee-length motorcycle boots. At her side was the shoulder bag in which she carried her vitamin pills, journal and lip salve, and the mirror which had convinced her that her eyelids were developing new folds and lines as they shrivelled up. That morning she’d plucked her first grey hair from her head, and placed it inside a book. Yet she still had spots, one on her cheek and one on her upper lip. Before they left, Majid had made her conceal them with make-up, which she never wore.

‘In case we run into anyone I know‚’ he said.

He was well connected, but she was sure he wouldn’t know anyone where they were going. Yet she had obeyed.

She forced herself back to the book. Not long after they met, eighteen months ago, he remarked, ‘You’ve been to university but things must have changed since my day.’ It was true she didn’t know certain words: ‘confound’, ‘pejorative’, ‘empirical’. In the house they now shared, he had thousands of books and was familiar with all the writers, composers and painters. As he pointed out, she hadn’t heard of Gauguin. Sometimes when he was talking to his friends she had no idea what they were discussing, and became convinced that if her ignorance didn’t trouble him it was because he valued only her youth.

Certainly he considered conversation a pleasure. There had recently occurred an instructive incident when they dropped in for tea on the mother of her best friend. This woman, a sociology lecturer, had known Nicole from the age of thirteen, and probably continued to think of her as poignantly deprived. Nicole thought of her as cool, experienced and, above all, knowledgeable. Five years ago, when one of her mother’s boyfriends had beaten up Nicole’s brother, this woman had taken Nicole in for a few weeks. Nicole had sat numbly in her flat, surrounded by walls of books and pictures. All of it, apart from the occasional piece of soothing music, seemed vain and irrelevant.

Visiting with Majid she had, by midnight, only succeeded in detaching his hand from the woman’s. Nicole had then to get him to leave, or at least relinquish the bottle of whisky. Meanwhile the woman was confessing her most grievous passions and telling Majid that she’d seen him address a demonstration in the seventies. A man like him, she cried, required a substantial woman! It was only when she went to fetch her poetry, which she intended to read to him, that Nicole could get the grip on his hair she needed to extract him.

By providing her with the conversations she’d longed for, he had walked in and seduced her best friend’s mother! Nicole had felt extraneous. Not that he had noticed. Pushing him out of there, she was reminded of the time, around the age of fourteen, she’d had to get her mother out of a neighbour’s house, dragging her across the road, her legs gone, and the whole street watching.

He laughed whenever she recalled the occasion, but it troubled her. It wasn’t the learning that mattered. Majid had spent much of his youth reading, and lately had wondered what adventures he had been keeping himself from. He claimed that books could get in the way of what was important between people. But she couldn’t sit, or read or write, or do nothing, without seeking company, never having been taught the benefits of solitude. The compromise they reached was this: when she read he would lie beside her, watching her eyes, sighing as her fingers turned a page.

No; his complaint was that she couldn’t convert feelings into words and expected him to understand her by clairvoyance.

Experience had taught her to keep her mouth shut. She’d spent her childhood among rough people that it amused Majid to hear about, as if they were cartoon characters. But they had been menacing. Hearing some distinction in your voice, they would suspect you of ambition and therefore of the desire to leave them behind. For this you would be envied, derided, hated; London was considered ‘fake’ and the people there duplicitous. Considering this, she’d realised that every day for most of her life she had been physically and emotionally afraid. Even now she couldn’t soften unless she was in bed with Majid, fearing that if she wasn’t vigilant, she would be sent back home on the train.

She turned a few pages of the book, took his arm and snuggled into him. They were together, and loved one another. But there were unaccustomed fears. As Majid reminded her when they argued, he had relinquished his home, wife and children for her. That morning, when he had gone to see the children and to talk about their schooling, she’d become distraught waiting for him, convinced he was sleeping with his wife and would return to her. It was deranging, wanting someone so much. How could you ever get enough of them? Maybe it was easier not to want at all. When one of the kids was unwell, he had stayed the night at his former house. He wanted to be a good father, he explained, adding in a brusque tone that she’d had no experience of that.

She had gone out in her white dress and not come home. She had enjoyed going to clubs and parties, staying out all night and sleeping anywhere. She had scores of acquaintances who it was awkward introducing to Majid, as he had little to say to them. ‘Young people aren’t interesting in themselves any more‚’ he said, sententiously.

He maintained that it was she who was drawing away from them. It was true that these friends — who she had seen as free spirits, and who now lay in their squats virtually inert with drugs — lacked imagination, resolution and ardour, and that she found it difficult to tell them of her life, fearing they would resent her. But Majid, once the editor of radical newspapers, could be snobbish. On this occasion he accused her of treating him like a parent or flatmate, and of not understanding she was the first woman he couldn’t sleep without. Yet hadn’t she waited two years while he was sleeping with someone else? If she recalled the time he went on holiday with his family, informing her the day before, even as he asked her to marry him, she could beat her head against the wall. His young children were beautiful, but in the park people assumed they were hers. They looked like the mother, and connected him with her for ever. Nicole had said she didn’t want them coming to the house. She had wanted to punish him, and destroy everything.

Should she leave him? Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining a love, was bloody work, and not a soft job. Feeling and fear rushed through her constantly. If only her mother were sensible and accessible. As for the woman she usually discussed such subjects with — the mother of her best friend — Nicole was too embarrassed to return.

She noticed that the train was slowing down.

‘Is this it?’ he said.

“Fraid so.’

‘Can’t we go on to the seaside?’

She replaced her book and put her gloves on.

‘Majid, another day.’

‘Yes, yes, there’s time for everything.’

He took her arm.

They left the station and joined a suburban area of underpasses, glass office blocks, hurrying crowds, stationary derelicts and stoned young people in flimsy clothing. ‘Bad America‚’ Majid called it.

They queued twenty minutes for a bus. She wouldn’t let him hail a taxi. For some reason she thought it would be condescending. Anyhow, she didn’t want to get there too soon.

They sat in the front, at the top of the wide double-decker, as it took them away from the centre. They swept through winding lanes and passed fields. He was surprised the slow, heavy bus ascended the hills at all. This was not the city and not the country; it was not anything but grassy areas, arcades of necessary shops, churches and suburban houses. She pointed out the school she’d attended, shops she’d worked in for a pittance, parks in which she’d waited for various boyfriends.

It was a fearful place for him too. His father had been an Indian politician and when his parents separated he had been brought up by his mother eight miles away. They liked to talk about the fact that he was at university when she was born; that when she was just walking he was living with his first wife; that he might have patted Nicole’s head as he passed her on the street. They shared the fantasy that for years he had been waiting for her to grow up.

It was cold when they got down. The wind cut across the open spaces. Already it seemed to be getting dark. They walked further than he’d imagined they would have to, and across muddy patches. He complained that she should have told him to wear different shoes.

He suggested they take something for her mother. He could be very polite. He even said ‘excuse me’ in bed if he made an abrupt movement. They went into a brightly lit supermarket and asked for flowers; there were none. He asked for lapsang souchong teabags, but before the assistant could reply, Nicole pulled him out.

The area was sombre but not grim, though a swastika had been painted on a fence. Her mother’s house was set on a grassy bank, in a sixties estate, with a view of a park. As they approached, Nicole’s feet seemed to drag. Finally she halted and opened her coat.

‘Put your arms around me.’ He felt her shivering. She said, ‘I can’t go in unless you say you love me.’

‘I love you‚’ he said, holding her. ‘Marry me.’

She was kissing his forehead, eyes, mouth. ‘No one has ever cared for me like you.’

He repeated, ‘Marry me. Say you will, say it.’

‘Oh I don’t know‚’ she replied.

She crossed the garden and tapped on the window. Immediately her mother came to the door. The hall was narrow. The mother kissed her daughter, and then Majid, on the cheek.

‘I’m pleased to see you‚’ she said, shyly. She didn’t appear to have been drinking. She looked Majid over and said, ‘Do you want a tour?’ She seemed to expect it.

‘That would be lovely‚’ he said.

Downstairs the rooms were square, painted white but otherwise bare. The ceilings were low, the carpet thick and green. A brown three-piece suite — each item seemed to resemble a boat — was set in front of the television.

Nicole was eager to take Majid upstairs. She led him through the rooms which had been the setting for the stories she’d told. He tried to imagine the scenes. But the bedrooms that had once been inhabited by lodgers — van drivers, removal men, postmen, labourers — were empty. The wallpaper was gouged and discoloured, the curtains hadn’t been washed for a decade, nor the windows cleaned; rotten mattresses were parked against the walls. In the hall the floorboards were bare, with nails sticking out of them. What to her reverberated with remembered life was squalor to him.

As her mother poured juice for them, her hands shook, and it splashed on the table.

‘It’s very quiet‚’ he said, to the mother. ‘What do you do with yourself all day?’

She looked perplexed but thought for a few moments.

‘I don’t really know‚’ she said. ‘What does anyone do? I used to cook for the men but running around after them got me down.’

Nicole got up and went out of the room. There was a silence. Her mother was watching him. He noticed that there appeared to be purplish bruises under her skin.

She said, ‘Do you care about her?’

He liked the question.

‘Very much‚’ he said. ‘Do you?’

She looked down. She said, ‘Will you look after her?’

‘Yes. I promise.’

She nodded. ‘That’s all I wanted to know. I’ll make your dinner.’

While she cooked, Nicole and Majid waited in the lounge. He said that, like him, she seemed only to sit on the edge of the furniture. She sat back self-consciously. He started to pace about, full of things to say.

Her mother was intelligent and dignified, he said, which must have been where Nicole inherited her grace. But the place, though it wasn’t sordid, was desolate.

‘Sordid? Desolate? Not so loud! What are you talking about?’

‘You said your mother was selfish. That she always put herself, and her men friends in particular, before her children.’

‘I did say —’

‘Well, I had been expecting a woman who cosseted herself. But I’ve never been in a colder house.’ He indicated the room. ‘No mementos, no family photographs, not one picture. Everything personal has been erased. There is nothing she has made, or chosen to reflect —’

‘You only do what interests you‚’ Nicole said. ‘You work, sit on boards, eat, travel and talk. “Only do what gives you pleasure,” you say to me constantly.’

‘I’m a sixties kid‚’ he said. ‘It was a romantic age.’

‘Majid, the majority can’t live such luxurious lives. They never did. Your sixties is a great big myth.’

‘It isn’t the lack of opulence which disturbs me, but the poverty of imagination. It makes me think of what culture means —’

‘It means showing off and snobbery —’

‘Not that aspect of it. Or the decorative. But as indispensable human expression, as a way of saying, “Here there is pleasure, desire, life! This is what people have made!”’

He had said before that literature, indeed, all culture, was a celebration of life, if not a declaration of love for things.

‘Being here‚’ he continued, ‘it isn’t people’s greed and selfishness that surprises me. But how little people ask of life. What meagre demands they make, and the trouble they go to, to curb their hunger for experience.’

‘It might surprise you‚’ she said, ‘because you know successful egotistical people who do what they love. But most people don’t do much of anything most of the time. They only want to get by another day.’

‘Is that so?’ He thought about this and said that every day he awoke ebulliently and full of schemes. There was a lot he wanted, of the world and of other people. He added, ‘And of you.’

But he understood sterility because despite all the ‘culture’ he and his second wife had shared, his six years with her had been arid. Now he had this love, and he knew it was love because of the bleakness that preceded it, which had enabled him to see what was possible.

She kissed him. ‘Precious, precious‚’ she said.

She pointed to the bolted door she had mentioned to him.She wanted to go downstairs. But her mother was calling them.

They sat down in the kitchen, where two places had been laid. Nicole and her mother saw him looking at the food.

‘Seems a bit funny giving Indian food to an Indian‚’ the mother said. ‘I didn’t know what you eat.’

‘That’s all right‚’ he said.

She added, ‘I thought you’d be more Indian, like.’

He waggled his head. ‘I’ll try to be.’ There was a silence. He said to her, ‘It was my birthday yesterday.’

‘Really?’ said the mother.

She and her daughter looked at one another and laughed.

While he and Nicole ate, the mother, who was very thin, sat and smoked. Sometimes she seemed to be watching them and other times fell into a kind of reverie. She was even-tempered and seemed prepared to sit there all day. He found himself seeking the fury in her, but she looked more resigned than anything, reminding him of himself in certain moods: without hope or desire, all curiosity suppressed in the gloom and agitated muddle of her mind.

After a time she said to Nicole, ‘What are you doing with yourself? How’s work?’

‘Work? I’ve given up the job. Didn’t I tell you?’

‘At the television programme?’

‘Yes.’

‘What for? It was a lovely job!’

Nicole said, ‘It wore me out for nothing. I’m getting the strength to do what I want, not what I think I ought to do.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ her mother said. ‘You stay in bed all day?’

‘We only do that sometimes‚’ Majid murmured.

Her mother said, ‘I can’t believe you gave up such a job! I can’t even get work in a shop. They said I wasn’t experienced enough. I said, what experience do you need to sell bread rolls?’

In a low voice Nicole talked of what she’d been promising herself — to draw, dance, study philosophy, get healthy. She would follow what interested her. Then she caught his eye, having been reminded of one of the strange theories that puzzled and alarmed her. He maintained that it wasn’t teaching she craved, but a teacher, someone to help and guide her; perhaps a kind of husband. She found herself smiling at how he brought everything back to them.

‘Must be lovely‚’ her mother said. ‘Just doing what you want.’

‘I’ll be all right‚’ Nicole said.

After lunch, in the lounge, Nicole pulled the brass bolt and he accompanied her down a dark flight of stairs. This was the basement where she and her brother and sister used to sleep, Nicole wearing a knitted hat and scarf, as her mother would heat only the front room. The damp room opened on to a small garden where the children had to urinate if the bolt was across. Beyond there were fields.

Late at night they would listen to the yells and crashes upstairs. If one of her mother’s boyfriends — whichever man it was who had taken her father’s place — had neglected to bolt the door, Nicole would put on her overcoat and Wellington boots, and creep upstairs. The boots were required because of overturned ashtrays and broken glass. She would ensure her mother hadn’t been cut or beaten, and try to persuade everyone to go to bed. One morning there had been indentations in the wall, along with the remains of hair and blood, where her mother’s head had been banged against it. A few times the police came.

Majid watched as Nicole went through files containing old school books, magazines, photographs. She opened several sacks and hunted through them for some clothes she wanted to take back to London. This would take some time. He decided to go upstairs and wait for her. As he went, he passed the mother.

He walked about, wondering where in the house, when Nicole was ten, her father had hanged himself. He hadn’t been able to ask. He thought of what it would be like to be living an ordinary life, and the next day your husband is self-murdered, leaving you with three children.

On returning he paused at the top of the stairs. They were talking; no — arguing. The mother’s voice, soft and contained earlier, had gained a furious edge. The house seemed transparent. He could hear them, just as her mother must have heard him.

‘If he’s asked you‚’ she was saying. ‘And if he means it, you should say yes. And if you’re jealous of his bloody kids, have some with him. That’ll keep him to you. He’s well off and brainy, he can have anyone. D’you know what he sees in you, apart from sex?’

‘He says he loves me.’

‘You’re not having me on? Does he support you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

Quietly Majid sat down on the top step. Nicole was struggling to maintain the dignity and sense she’d determined on that morning.

The mother said, ‘If you stop working you might end up with nothing. Like I did. Better make sure he don’t run off with someone younger and prettier.’

‘Why should he do that?’ Nicole said sullenly.

‘He’s done it already.’

‘When?’

‘Idiot, with you.’

‘Yes, yes, he has.’

‘Men are terrible beasts.’

‘Yes, yes.’

Her mother said, ‘If it’s getting you down, you can always stay here … for a while.’ She hesitated. ‘It won’t be like before. I won’t bother you.’

‘I might do that. Can I?’

‘You’ll always be my baby.’

Nicole must have been pulling boxes around; her breathing became heavier.

‘Nicole don’t make a mess in my house. It’ll be me who’ll have to clear everything up. What are you looking for?’

‘I had a picture of Father.’

‘I didn’t know you had one.’

‘Yes.’ Shortly after, Nicole said, ‘Here it is.’

He imagined them standing together, examining it.

‘Before he did it‚’ said the mother, ‘he said he’d show us, teach us a lesson. And he did.’

She sounded as if she were proud of her husband.

Upstairs Nicole packed her clothes in a bag, then went back to find something in a cupboard; after this, there were other things she wanted.

‘I must do this‚’ she said, hurrying around.

He realised that she might want to stay, that she might make him go back alone. He put on his coat. In the hall he waited restlessly.

The mother said to him, ‘You’re in a hurry.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there something you have to get home for?’

He nodded. ‘Lots of things.’

‘You don’t like it here, I can tell.’

He said nothing.

To his relief he saw Nicola emerge and put her scarf on. They kissed her mother and walked quickly back where they’d come. The bus arrived; and then they waited for the train, stamping their feet. As it pulled away, she took out her book. He looked at her; there were some things he wanted to ask, but she had put herself beyond his reach.

Near their house they stopped off to buy newspapers and magazines. Then they bought bread, pasta, hummus, yoghurt, wine, water, juice, florentines. They unpacked it on the kitchen table, on which were piled books and CDs, invitations and birthday cards, with his children’s toys scattered underneath. It was only then they realised she’d left the bag of clothes somewhere, probably on the train. Tears came to her eyes before she realised the clothes didn’t matter; she didn’t even want them, and he said she could buy more.

He sat at the table with the papers and asked her what music she was in the mood for, or if she.didn’t care. She shook her head and went to shower. Then she walked about naked, before spreading a towel on the floor and sitting on it to massage cream into her legs, sighing and humming as she did so. He started to prepare their supper, all the while watching her, which was one of his preferred occupations. Soon they would eat. After, they would take tea and wine to bed; lying there for hours, they would go over everything, knowing they would wake up with one another.