The Living and the Dead in Winsford

30

When Martin celebrated his fiftieth birthday, his present from me was a long weekend in New York. It was in September 2003: we arrived on a Thursday afternoon and left four days later. We stayed at a hotel in Lexington Avenue quite close to Grand Central Station, and I never set foot outside our room from start to finish.

The cause was a major stomach upset which had begun to make itself felt as our flight was approaching Newark, and which forced our taxi driver to stop twice on the drive into Manhattan.

I needed to be within easy reach of a lavatory, it was as simple as that. I suppose I thought it would pass after a few hours — or a day at most — but it didn’t. I couldn’t keep down a crumb of food until the Sunday evening, and as we boarded the plane the next morning for the flight home I was extremely grateful for the fact that I’d treated ourselves to business class in view of the journey’s significance. If I’d been in economy I’m quite sure I would have been sick again.

Martin was loyal that first evening, just went down to the hotel bar for an hour and spent the rest of the time with me in room number 1828. The room was on the eighteenth floor, and so we had a splendid view. To the south and the east, downtown and over the East River towards Brooklyn on the other side. From the very beginning, that first evening, I made it clear to Martin that this was to be his trip and it wasn’t the intention that he should sit twiddling his thumbs in a hotel room on my account. Neither of us was especially familiar with the city (Synn hadn’t yet moved there, that happened about three years later and in any case didn’t increase the frequency of our visits), so he ought to get out and about.

It wasn’t too difficult to persuade him of that. On Friday he went out after breakfast, came back at six o’clock, had a shower and a whisky, then went out again. If I remember rightly he eventually tumbled into bed at about half past two.

On Saturday Martin woke up at about eleven and asked if I still had the stomach problem. I admitted that unfortunately that was still the case, he went back to sleep, got up an hour later and after another shower wondered if, given the circumstances, I didn’t fancy going out for lunch.

I confirmed that unfortunately that was also the case, and he left me soon after two.

He returned thirteen hours later in a new but somewhat soiled suit. I asked him where it had come from, and he explained that it had come from Fifth Avenue and was his fiftieth birthday present to himself. I wondered what had happened to his old clothes, the ones he had been wearing when he went out, and he said he had given them away to a down-and-out in Union Square.

He fell asleep still wearing half his suit, without asking me about the state of my stomach infection.

I woke up early on Sunday morning, went to the bathroom and was sick. I realized it was due to the banana I had eaten during the night, and wondered if it was going to be possible for me to board a plane the next day. I also felt rather annoyed about Martin, and wished we had had separate rooms. But at the same time I felt a bit guilty: here he was, for once, in the city of cities, and of course it was only right that he should go out and enjoy himself.

But you can’t deal with annoyance using reasonable thoughts of that kind, and when he had left me alone again, a few hours into the afternoon, I was merely glad to be rid of him. I didn’t ask him to tell me what he had been up to the last couple of evenings, nor what he had in mind for the third and last one. And he didn’t seem all that interested in informing me either, so in that respect I suppose you could say that we were on a par. I was also so exhausted after all my visits to the toilet that I reckoned as far as I was concerned he was welcome to go and drown himself in the Hudson River.

Or why not the East River — then I could watch it happening from my window.

The phone rang at a quarter past one in the morning. It was from the police station in 10th Street in Greenwich Village. Somebody called Sergeant Krapotsky.

He asked if he was talking to Mrs Holinek, and I confirmed that he was. What was it all about?

Was I perhaps married to a certain Martin Holinek? Sergeant Krapotsky wanted to know.

I confirmed that as well

‘Very good,’ said Krapotsky. ‘We have your husband locked up in a cell at the police station here. Could you perhaps be so kind as to come and collect him?’

‘What has he done?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure you’d rather not know that,’ said Krapotsky. ‘But if you were to come and fetch him we could draw a veil over the whole business.’

‘Is he drunk?’ I asked.

‘Is the earth round?’ said Krapotsky. ‘Is there water in the sea?’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid the fact is that I’m ill and would have great difficulty in travelling from one end of the town to the other. We’re flying back home to Sweden tomorrow, so you’ll be rid of him in any case.’

‘I know that,’ said Krapotsky. ‘He says he has to catch a plane early tomorrow morning. That’s why I want to get him out of here.’

‘Has he said anything else?’

‘He says he’s been trying to follow in the footsteps of Dylan Thomas, and it was going very well. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, but those were the exact words he said before he fell asleep. The footsteps of Dylan Thomas — I’ve no idea what that means.’

‘I think I understand,’ I said. ‘But the fact is that our flight doesn’t leave until tomorrow afternoon. Couldn’t you let him sleep it off in his cell, and I’ll pick him up in our taxi on the way to Newark?’

‘Just a minute,’ said Sergeant Krapotsky. ‘I need to consult my boss.’

The telephone was silent for about half a minute. I looked out over the skyline of south Manhattan — you can’t avoid being impressed by it. Then the sergeant spoke again.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘My boss says that’s okay. What time will you be calling in?’

‘At about two o’clock, is that all right?’ I asked.

‘That would be absolutely fine,’ said Krapotsky. ‘Make sure you have his passport with you, assuming you have it, and tell them I’ve told you to collect him then. The address is 112 West 10th Street, but I won’t be on duty then. Thank you for your cooperation.’

‘Thank you for your help,’ I said and hung up.

‘I don’t want to talk about this. Not ever, not with anybody.’

That was the first thing — and generally speaking the only thing — that Martin said during the taxi ride to New Jersey the following afternoon. I could see that he was on the point of bursting into tears and had the impression that if I hadn’t had my sensitive stomach to think about I ought to have taken hold of his hand and said that I had forgiven him, irrespective of what there was to forgive him for. But I didn’t. He was still wearing the suit from Fifth Avenue, but it was hard to tell that it was only two days old. It looked more like twenty years old, and it also concluded its short life in a rubbish basket at the airport. Later I found a receipt indicating that it had cost 1,800 dollars, which was roughly the same as the price of the hotel room. But I took it for granted that this was also a part of our agreement: that we shouldn’t keep going on and on about the whole affair.

But the remarkable thing, the reason why I keep recalling those four days in New York, is the sudden feeling of tenderness that overcame me with regard to Martin. When I collected him from that police station in Greenwich Village, when we sat in silence on the back seat of the taxi, looking out through our respective windows, when he was in the toilet at the airport, changing his clothes. I ought to have been absolutely furious with him, even if it’s not for me to require people to live up to great heights; but the feelings that actually filled me were the precise opposite. True enough, this hung-over wretch was a fifty-year-old literature professor; but he was also a little boy who had gone astray, and if I hadn’t still been plagued with the after-effects of my stomach upset, I might well have told him so. That I really did feel sympathy for him. That there was something there reminiscent of what is called love — during those brief hours of our long marriage.

Perhaps it might have made him feel happy if I’d said something.

Perhaps it might have changed something.

Anyway, I told Christa about it a few days later, of course I did. Not that feeling of tenderness, just the rest of it. I remember her laughing, but I noticed that she did so because the situation demanded it, and I suspected she had been through similar experiences in her own life.

‘I expect you know the difference between a fifteen-year-old and a fifty-year-old man?’ she asked rhetorically in order to maintain the arms-length tone of the conversation. ‘Forty kilos and enough money to put their daft dreams into practice.’

I have sometimes felt that life is in fact about as half-baked as that summary suggests. And that we really shouldn’t go on and on about things.

I myself celebrated my fiftieth birthday a few years later. I travelled to Venice without Martin — that was a present I had asked for, and the family duly obliged. When my daughter asked why I wanted to go there on my own, I told her I’d had a secret lover in Venice for many years, and that shut her up.

I could see that she wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that I was joking.

I could also see that she hoped I wasn’t joking. That made me sad, extremely sad.

But I didn’t go there alone in fact. Christa was with me for four of the five days I spent in that magic city, and I’ve already mentioned that business of ashes in the canal.

But that feeling of tenderness in New York: where did it come from? Where did it go to?