The Temporary

Eight

Camden Road was a flooded river of cars and from the top of the bus Ralph had watched the traffic jam take on the irremediable, erupted look of a disaster. For a while the packed chain of dirty, disparate metals had been forcing itself thickly through the gates of the traffic lights in a unified triumph of will, but suddenly it was as if the crowd of cars had lost faith in the principles of their community and people had begun breaking from lanes in an attempt to escape, skewing themselves across the white lines and nudging into other hostile queues to a rising clamour of horns. Ralph knew that he should get off the bus and walk the last half-mile to the office, but he was hindered by a strange paralysis, an inability to free himself from this vision of chaos in which he seemed so to belong. Unchained and let loose in the streets, who knew where he might wander? On a Monday morning such as this, when his membership of the city was an imprisonment and the emergent self the weekend had allowed to roam must be forced back into its cell, it was better that he should be delivered defeatedly to his door.

His patchy performance in the closing stages of the previous week made the proper execution of the day imperative. He had been distracted on Thursday, his mind crowded with what proved to be unplayed scenes, his body bent on leaving early, and on Friday he had been morose and unwell. He had run into debt and must use today to replenish his reserves of good conduct. Once their taste was acquired, such disruptions of routine could, he knew, lead to larger rebellions. Ralph feared the prospect of his own disobedience, and although he had never really detected in himself any sign that he might one day decide, for perhaps no reason other than perversity, not to follow the path that necessity had laid down for him, still he remained vigilant against the possibility of his insurrection. He couldn’t afford to entertain ideas of his own freedom: once admitted, he could not be sure of ever persuading them to leave. It was not that he judged himself particularly prone to being led astray, but he had always ascribed the right to build fantastical, foolish plans as belonging to those whose foundations were secure. He didn’t regard the people he knew as dependent, exactly, but he felt sure that they would never be permitted to slide into poverty or destitution: there would always be someone, some relative who could be dug up and appealed to, someone who would feel pity or guilt at their demise. Ralph was alone, and although sometimes he could go for weeks without really thinking of his solitude, some deeper instinct always remembered it. It was a mercy not to think of it too often, in fact, because when he did he would often grow angry or morose at the relentless contingency of everything in his life; and what was the point of self-pity if there was nobody to pity you for it? He had learned to accept certain things: the inescapability of work, regardless of whether he enjoyed it or not; and the possibility that no one might care if he lost everything. Stephen would mind, probably, but he couldn’t be counted on really to care in any useful way.

Ralph supposed that his situation carried within it the danger of relying too much on love to swaddle him in illusions of security. That had been the problem with Belinda, really, because he had somehow got the impression that his orphaning, his terrible aloneness, was one of the things for which she loved him. She used to ask him about it all the time, wanting to know exactly when each beam had rotted and given way and how he had felt as the sky and ground came terrifyingly into view; and he would enjoy watching her face soften with sympathy as he told her, knowing that his subscription to things he hadn’t really felt, but knew none the less to be tragic, would make her care for him. In the end, though, the feelings gave him no pleasure, for they were impersonal, humanitarian things, and Belinda had grown tired of it as her love curdled to pity and then, he feared, contempt. He suspected that the lack of visible evidence of how he had come to exist made people uncomfortable with him. For a while, certainly, he was unusual, but eventually he was only odd and difficult to fit into the scheme of things. He had come to regard his solitude as a principle by which people felt it correct to act, a feature which generated its own response: he had been deserted, therefore it was possible, necessary even, to desert him.

Stephen was different, Ralph supposed, in that it never seemed to occur to him not to be Ralph’s friend. Their alliance was what Ralph imagined to be brotherly, an unquestioned linkage which demanded no particular profit or return and which didn’t seem to have arisen out of personal choice. It irritated Ralph that he sometimes wondered why Stephen stuck with him; partly because he knew it never occurred to Stephen to wonder the same thing about Ralph, but largely because his criticisms of Stephen were deep and should not have manufactured a sense of good fortune at Stephen’s friendship as their irrational by-product. He supposed it was an unreformed conviction of their schooldays, when Stephen had been a princely character whose patronage was an asset. If Ralph was honest it had been his only asset, the thing that had got him through it all.

Stephen had never asked about Ralph’s parents, although when his father died at the end of Ralph’s first year at the school and he had had to go to Stephen’s house for the summer holidays, Stephen had been kind to him in a clumsy way and patted him on the back once or twice. When they went back for the new term, they had gone on a school trip. As the bus wound its way through the outskirts of the town, Ralph had suddenly recognized the road in which he had lived with his mother and father when he was younger. He had gazed out of the window and as they approached his old house he had turned to Stephen to point it out.

‘Plebsville,’ Stephen had said before he could speak, following Ralph’s eyes through the window. He made the hilarious vomiting noise which they had lately been using to signal disgust or contempt. For a moment Ralph had a strange feeling in his stomach, but then he had made the noise too and had sat back in his seat, glad that he hadn’t said anything.

It made him sad to think about that now, although he scarcely remembered his mother any more and the confused, itinerant portion of his life with his father had long since supplanted the old house with a set of diffuse, unrelated memories. He remembered running into their bedroom, though, early in the morning, and climbing up on the bed beside his mother in her nightdress. Her bare arms used to seem colossal to him, riven with a delta of frightening veins, but he had loved the way she smelled in the mornings. Later in the day she would be perfumed and distant, but in the morning she had a human smell, a smell of herself, which made him burrow against her like an animal. She was called Angela, although remembering her name made her recede even further in Ralph’s mind. His father had always called her ‘Mother’, which now struck Ralph as strange, but at the time had seemed a natural extension of his partnership with his father against her hygienic and dissatisfied leadership.

‘Better shape up,’ he would whisper to Ralph, as his mother swept in some nameless fury through the small rooms of their house. ‘Else Mother’ll have us.’

The bus had heaved itself past the traffic lights and was now thundering down the Holloway Road towards Ralph’s stop. Returning from his recollections he felt all at once rather lost and he reminded himself of the suddenly distant necessity for getting off the bus and going to work. He stood up, clinging to the metal poles as he staggered along the swaying platform. His body felt large and heavy, as if he had just woken from a dream and found it newly so. The bus stopped and he disembarked. Hurrying along the pavement towards his office building, he saw himself calling for his mother through the quiet house when he came home from school one day, worrying that she wasn’t there. He had used to call her ‘Mummy’, and he remembered now that she hadn’t liked it.

‘You sound like a little pansy,’ she had said, emerging wearily from the bedroom as he stood calling her in the hall. Her face was full of secrets. ‘What’s wrong with “Mum”?’

He opened the door and walked quickly across the foyer to the stairs. He hadn’t thought of that in years.

*

‘Good weekend?’ said Roz, who sat opposite him.

Their desks were pushed together at the front to form a square, a contact Ralph found obscurely intimate. Roz was in charge of the office computer and had discovered how to play games on the screen. She would sit for hours at solitaire, or a faster game involving spinning meteors which made explosive noises, and Ralph would grow infuriated at the incessant clicking and the blank rapture of Roz’s face, sighing and clearing his throat to no avail.

‘It was all right,’ he said.

‘What did you do, then?’ said Roz after a pause, her hand still clicking on the desk as she spoke.

‘Not much,’ said Ralph. He bent over his work and began writing something.

He occasionally felt guilty about his unkindness to Roz, for she was always interested in him in her slow, impervious way. She would ask him questions with apparently no memory of repetition or rebuff, retaining nevertheless the few blunt details he was obliged to divulge about his activities outside the office and stringing together a little narrative from them of which it pained Ralph to be the subject. He was ashamed of his feelings of physical repulsion for Roz’s pale, doughy form, her big moon of a face with its round eyes and slack, wet mouth. He would find himself watching her occasionally in wonder at her almost impossible plainness and sometimes she would catch him doing it and would reveal her teeth in a mirthless, fleshy smile.

He didn’t know much about her, for her fascination with Ralph’s life seemed to carry within it an almost dutiful apology for the monotony of her own. She lived with her mother in Hendon and she didn’t have a boyfriend. He had asked her about boyfriends when he first started the job, trying to be friendly, but something had lit up in her eyes which told him it had been a stupid thing to ask. The result of his enquiry was the flailing rapport which now plagued him daily, and it was with dumb misery that he realized Roz liked him — and, worse, that she was now irreversibly possessed of the conviction that he liked her — and that no amount of curtness would ever erase his early blunder. He had encountered girls like this before, big, silent girls who required only the acknowledgements his politeness obliged him to offer for their sad, obedient devotion to be forever nourished. At university there were several of them, and they would stop and greet him in the street, standing before him with the mute expectation that he would talk to them, until he had to excuse himself quite rudely and would go on his way with his heart thudding angrily in his chest. He perceived in their attentions some notion of affiliation, a disquieting recognition of his hopelessness which hurt him more than the disdain of loud, confident girls who had made the same discovery.

Roz never asked Neil any questions, although they talked all the time in a way Ralph knew he could not imitate; chatting about things they’d seen on television, or reading a tabloid together while they ate their sandwiches. Neil would ask her how her mum was, what she was seeing at the cinema that night, would even joke about who she was going with, and yet Ralph had never once seen her fix Neil with that dogged, injured look which suggested an outstanding debt awaiting payment. The worst thing was how, on a Monday morning, Roz would unfailingly ask him, with a dull glimmer of painful anticipation in her pale eyes, if he’d met anyone new over the weekend. The question was so audacious to Ralph, and yet bespoke a joyless void of opportunity so horribly familiar to him, that he always answered it awkwardly. His embarrassment made it sound as if he cared that he hadn’t met anyone, and would often inspire Neil to shrieks of effeminate laughter from the other side of the office and a high-pitched rendition of some song about searching which Ralph vaguely recognized.

‘Did you meet anyone new over the weekend, then?’ Roz asked now, her fingers momentarily stayed from their clicking but still poised over the handset as if ready to annihilate Ralph with an electronic pulse.

‘Yes,’ he said suddenly. He heard it fly from his lips and saw Roz jerk slightly, as if the murder of her hopes had been too swift even to feel. Her eyes welled with water and for a moment Ralph wondered in terror if she was going to cry. ‘Yes, I did, actually,’ he continued hurriedly. ‘I’ve got a new girlfriend.’ The words were large and clumsy in his mouth, as if they didn’t fit.

‘What’s this?’ shouted Neil from his desk. ‘Ralph’s got a new bird? You got a bird, mate?’ he said, getting up and coming over.

‘What’s she like, then?’ said Roz.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Ralph. The conversation was unbearable to him. He could scarcely believe he had started it. ‘She’s very pretty.’

‘What’s her name?’ persisted Roz, as if in the hope of finding some ground on which she could conduct a contest.

‘Francine. She’s called Francine.’

‘Francine,’ howled Neil. ‘Francine. Not a frog, is she?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ralph irritably.

‘Where does she work? What’s her job?’ said Roz.

Ralph looked at her with horror.

‘She’s a secretary,’ he said.

Roz didn’t speak to him for the rest of the day, but the Morse of her clicking informed him that an injustice had been perpetrated against her.

*

Ralph’s indiscretion haunted him that evening at his flat, and although he tried to subdue his memory of it by the devotion of his energies to domestic tasks, the resistance of his surroundings to further regulation so soon after the previous week’s reforms permitted his thoughts to churn and race as he drifted desultorily through a series of minor activities. His slip rose up before him everywhere he looked, monstrous in the familiar, cautious landscape of his communications, and although he knew his customary reticence made a more terrible spectacle of his transgression than perhaps it really was, it seemed ridiculous to try and change the way he saw things merely to diminish it. His preposterous and meaningless untruth appalled him, not because of any fear of it being found out — although the thought of Francine overhearing his conversation with Roz made him grow hot with shame — but more for the burden the very idea had placed upon him, which seemed in his quiet hours to have handcuffed and marched him considerably closer to its fulfilment.

He had telephoned Francine the day after their extraordinary evening, calling secretively from the office in the afternoon when he knew she would still be at work. For him the message had been a polite escape, a gesture to his own sense of how these things should be brought off, nevertheless making it clear, he thought, that their evening had been a pleasant but unique occasion. He supposed everyone had their own set of rules to be applied in such cases, measures long since drawn up by experience to curb the impulses of feeling. He had arrived at his own judgement swiftly, barely able to touch the raw memories which burned in his thoughts as he sat at his desk, but the unavoidable glimpses he had had of their blurred, complex images urged him to parcel up the whole affair and consign it to history. His hangover had been mingled with something darker and more sticky, a strange, guilty sense of himself whose taste he remembered from childhood. He had behaved oddly, had borrowed feelings he had no wish to own, and his desire to forget the episode could not be fulfilled merely through the partial erasure of its worst moments. It had surprised and somewhat irritated him that Francine had called him back late that same night. She had obviously interpreted his message as a statement of infatuation — an impression gained no doubt from its precipitance, the very thing he had thought would inform her of his retreat — and being caught off his guard, his confounded politeness had prompted him to compensate for their silence with the acceptance of another meeting with her during the week. He thought it odd that she could take him for such a fool, and yet still wish to prick him into a semblance of pursuit.

He didn’t exactly regret their evening together, merely the silliness that had gone before it. He had wrought such things in himself, such breathless spirals of hope and despair, for all the world as if he had had nothing better to think about. The ghostly apparitions of wisdom astonished him with their many illusions and tricks, making one quite sure of the existence of something which in the next moment vanished. In the end, though, the discovery that really he was just like every other man filled him with a horrifying form of relief. It was a burden to consider oneself different, and what had he done but for once in his life take something cheaply? And afterwards, what more than feel every man’s mild ache of redundancy, and the desire to move on from what was empty to what was full? For a while, certainly, it had fascinated him to see how little he could care about Francine while sharing with her what he regarded as the most precious and precarious intimacy, but it was no more than a callous experiment with himself which would prove nothing. He had emerged from it belittled, sullied with the memory of what felt afterwards like his own violation.

Their night remained oddly bereft of recollections, for all that. Searching for its reality, he found only his phantoms of thought, a heap of discarded disguises garish by daylight. She had insisted on darkness, and in it he had felt lost and detached, his body given a command for which he had feared drunkenness and muddled desires would render it unfit. He wondered what amnesia it was that time and time again generated a pleasure in the anticipation of an act which was almost always destroyed by its fulfilment. In the end he had not been as awkward as he would have thought likely, but he had been so intent on giving a correct performance that it only occurred to him afterwards, straining to remember what had happened in the darkness, that Francine had done nothing at all. The acquiescence which had so struck him modulated at the first touch into submission, and in the very granting of her permission he had felt her sudden absence, as if she had what it was that she wanted and was leaving him to the business of his own pleasure. What struck him now was how confident she had seemed that this was enough, but for him the privilege had been a lonely one. He had finished it all quite quickly and had surprised himself by going straight to sleep. When he woke up in the morning she wasn’t in the room, and he had found her in the kitchen, sitting fully dressed at the table with a piece of toast on a plate in front of her. It was then that he had felt most unnerved by her. He had tried to make a joke of it, saying how much more organized she was than he, but she had looked at him as if she didn’t understand what he was talking about. When she left he had gone back to bed and lain inertly for half an hour, his head aching and blank.

He abandoned the evening’s regime and made a sandwich, carrying it into the sitting-room with the intention of eating it in front of the television. As he sat down on the sofa, the thought of his claims for Francine came round again on the trundling wheel of his consciousness. It all seemed rather comic to him now, and he smiled at his own foolishness. He supposed he hadn’t behaved very well, but he would be kinder to her when next they met. He turned on the news, and felt all at once overwhelmed with contentment at the warmth of his flat, the correctness of its comforts, his freedom to be alone there, while beyond the drawn curtains the city night began again the long drama of its uncertainties.