The Bat Tattoo

9 Roswell Clark

OK. Deep breath. My wife, Jennifer. She taught flute at St Paul’s School and she was a good-enough flautist to play with the London Sinfonietta. She was a handsome woman, tall and graceful, dark and brooding. She and I had a fair number of rows but we experienced the world together; if it looked like rain we both noticed it and said something about it; we read things out to each other from The Times and the Guardian, went to concerts and watched videos together. Now the world goes on without her; she’s not here to see the nights and days, the rain, the changing of the seasons. At odd moments I want to tell her something or show her something, then it hits me again: she’s gone.

It happened on a rainy Saturday night in November. We’d been to dinner with friends in Highgate. It was an OK evening; the bonne femme was good; the beef olives were good; the wine was good; the conversation was lively. We’d got around to talking about how busy everyone was, how most of us had more things to do than there was time for. ‘Not Roswell,’ said Jennifer. ‘He has more time than things to do, but he keeps busy thinking about the things that nobody else has time for.’

‘Einstein had the same problem,’ I said.

‘So when are you going to come up with a universal theory?’ said Mark Simpson, our.host.

‘I’m working on a new relativity theory,’ I said. ‘This one is about wives and husbands.’

‘That was more than Einstein could handle,’ said Mark’s wife Nicola, and then Toby Gresham got us into the subject of the expanding universe while Jennifer gave me a look that said, ‘What?’

My answering look said, ‘I really hate it when you explain me to people in that patronising way.’

‘If what I said seemed patronising, that’s your problem,’ was her wordless reply. ‘Expansion can be a bad idea,’ said Jessica Gold. ‘Look what happened when Biba moved into Derry & Toms,’ and the conversation went on in various directions along with the cognac and the grappa.

‘Don’t forget that you’re driving,’ said Jennifer as my glass was refilled.

‘How could I, with you to remind me?’

‘More coffee?’ said Nicola.

It was pouring when we left; the streets were very black and shiny; the headlights of oncoming cars lit up curtains of rain, the windscreen-wipers flopped back and forth like an endless argument and in our little room on wheels the atmosphere was getting thicker. I said, ‘I really hate it when you explain me to people in that patronising way.’

‘If what I said seemed patronising, that’s your problem,’ said Jennifer. ‘Shouldn’t you have taken a right back there?’

‘Probably,’ I said. We didn’t visit the Simpsons that often, and on the return trip the one-way system in Camden Town sometimes defeated me. Things got blacker and more spaced out with dim lights here and there and I realised that we were in the usual wrong place somewhere around King’s Cross.

‘How much did you have to drink?’ said Jennifer.

‘Not enough,’ I snarled as I swung the car around into an intersection that seemed very dark and undefined.

‘Look out!’ said Jennifer as we were hit on the passenger side. Her last words.

I haven’t driven since.