An Irresponsible Age

EPIGRAPH

‘Here,’ he thought, ‘is where we differ from women; they have no sense of romance.’

Ralph Denham in Virginia Woolf’s

Night and Day

He had stylised himself – life was easier that way.

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

EPIGRAPH

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

ONE

‘So of course there was nothing for it but to leave.’

Juliet Clough had been about to sit down at her desk but now felt that although this was her room, she had interrupted something and ought to wait. She remained in the doorway while the voice coming from the other side of the wall continued: ‘Yes … well, thank you … No, absolutely. Of course … She’s just so … All the time these days … I do try but it’s just … You’re absolutely right … If only she could see it like … It’s just that I … You know … You do understand … Thank you … thank you …’

Juliet crept to her chair and lowered herself into it. The conversation appeared to have finished but she sat for several minutes, concentrating on staying still. Whoever he was, he must not hear her listening.

A telephone rang. Juliet tensed and leant towards the wall, only this time the man did not pick it up. Her own telephone rang so rarely that it took her a moment to realise that it was hers and not his that was ringing now. If she answered it, he would hear her and then he would know that she had been listening. She grabbed the receiver and moved across the room as far as the cord would allow.

‘Hello. Yes, it is. The Shipping Office, yes.’ She was crouching on the floor. ‘No, I can’t speak up. The opening? She’ll be delighted. I’ll tell her. Yes, I know who you are. Yes, I can spell it. Goodbye.’

So as not to have to speak again, she went outside to have a cigarette. She slipped out through the firedoors at the back of the building and hurried along the path by the river, relieved that she had not had to encounter him.

She stretched over the broad stone wall, trying to see the mud whose smell oozed in under her office door at low tide, only she wasn’t tall enough to manage it. The roll-up she had cobbled together with cold fingers kept going out, but she needed to smoke and to shake off the effect of the man who had turned up on the other side of the wall. So of course there was nothing for it but to leave. The line was familiar. Had she read it? Heard it? Never said it, though. That sort of thing hadn’t come up.

It was nothing, just something she wasn’t used to. Tania had had an odd corner at the back of the gallery turned into a self-contained unit to be rented out. Juliet had forgotten about it and could not imagine who might want it. Most of the nearby offices were unoccupied still – spice warehouses hastily converted for lease as work spaces, as if all it took was a rearrangement of letters.

Some of these streets were lined with blind walls while others were overlooked by tall windows and jutting iron hoists, suggesting such a scale of effort and industry that Juliet imagined the spices had once arrived here by the ton, in great sacks and chests that had to be heaved up and in. What surprised her most was the romance of the air, always a little stormy, into which the walls leaked the scent of nutmeg, coriander and cloves after rain. She was too wary and proprietorial to tell anyone about that.

It was January 1990, the end of a pugnacious decade and the tail end of a particularly long century. The city experienced a loss of tension and with it, a loss of momentum. Much that had been started had been set aside, but London was not a place to abandon an idea just because it proved to be a bad one. Attention wandered until no one could remember who had begun what or why, but sooner or later things would fall into place, although this usually took longer and cost more than anyone had predicted.

This in-between area east of the Square Mile and south of the river was now a blank space in the A to Z marked ‘under development’. It was being reconstructed in an optimistic mirroring of the Docklands project which was transforming the river’s north bank. The sidestreets around the hopeful, isolated gallery in which Juliet worked had been built for barrows and carts and did not encourage traffic, and so the cars belonging to the few who lived there got stuck negotiating tight corners. Juliet never saw these people in the streets, where there was nothing for them. They drove away early and came back late to sit behind glass and gaze across the river at the homes they had really wanted.

Juliet didn’t notice what was happening on the river because it was all so routine. Police launches veered waspishly about while barges slunk up and down, so low-lying they might be about to go under. What lay beneath their tarpaulins? What was left for them to transport? Dingy sightseeing cruisers ploughed back and forth, the wind garbling their amplified commentaries: ‘HMS Belfast … battle of … Elizabeth … The Tower … Docklands … Boom …’ Someone always waved and someone on shore, though never Juliet, always waved back.

On the north bank, the tallest office block in Europe had just been built on a redundant wharf. The roads that would lead towards it were as yet unmade. To the west was Traitor’s Gate where water splashed against an iron grid. Juliet could imagine those who acted against the state being taken through on a boat, blindfolded, hands tied, gagged; terrorists, perhaps.

A city with so little space and so much history that it had become its own obstruction. Juliet had wanted to study in London because she believed herself to be solitary, unknowable and footloose, and that this was the place most likely to confirm that for her. She could not say that it had, but nor did she care. She looked down into a swirl of rotten timber, industrial froth and brick-pink stain. She couldn’t care less about her stupid job in this gallery where she had to put up with things like the man through the wall. She was going to America.

‘I had no idea you could be so boring.’

For a moment Juliet thought it was a different voice: it was as light as before but needle sharp.

‘Calm down. I know you’re not shouting, Bar, but you need to calm down. And do stop swearing all the time. It’s not terribly attractive … I know … We must … we will … of course, sweetie … try to understand … Buck up, why don’t you … That’s better. Good girl. Now you’ve got work to do, haven’t you? Good girl. I’ll drop by and see you tonight … No, it was a triumph. You were a triumph. What do you mean let you down? What on earth would you need me there for when you were surrounded by all your … I’m going to put the telephone down if you start. You really can be very stupid … The reason I got this place was to be able to …’

Juliet heard a click and a curt laugh. Buck up? She felt appalled on behalf of Bar, or whatever her name was, to whom this man was speaking like a lion-tamer, games teacher and dentist all at once. He must be driving her mad.

For the rest of the afternoon, Juliet typed lightly, opened her filing cabinet smoothly and held sheets of paper by their edges but her computer bleeped and clicked, the printer growled and everything she touched crackled, whispered and whirred. She coughed twice. The first time without thinking and the second time on purpose, just to see what she could provoke. She hadn’t heard him leave but couldn’t hear what he was doing, which meant that after all he probably could not hear her. Juliet relaxed a little.

Tania was at a board meeting and so the gallery was empty. Quiet rolled back from the two locked front doors, whose original designations, ‘Upstream’ and ‘Downstream’, were still visible, carved into the lintels. It rolled through the fresh white space with its stacks of wrapped and sealed exhibits, along the corridor and into her office; it stopped at the wall.

She knew by his tone that this time it wasn’t Bar.

‘Yes, this is Jacob Dart … yes … really? You’d like me to …? Well, gosh, I mean … me? No, I’d be …’ His voice ran on in these bubbling, unfinished phrases with such sincerity that Juliet regretted writing him off as a creep. She thought now that he was a boy, nervous and strange and perhaps not in charge of himself.

Juliet chose this moment to leave. She dropped the padlock and chain on the cobbles, but he did not react to the clatter. Jacob Dart. It had been like listening to three different men and she was annoyed to find that she was three times as interested.

She cycled along the embankment path to London Bridge, where she dragged her bike up the steps and rode north on the crowded pavement, tilting and jinking, braking and back-pedalling. With her mind elsewhere, she could size up the slightest gap and guess where a foot would fall. She might lean a little too far over and brush the sleeve of a man in a heavy coat who would jerk and swing out his arm, his briefcase almost catching in her rear wheel. She would hear him grunt and then mutter something that might be ‘How’ or ‘Cow’, perhaps even ‘Wow’, as he realised that she had swooped past him and that he had had no idea she was there. What if he had moved this way or that? He might want to shout after her, but she was long gone.

Juliet Clough was twenty-eight. She looked like an Italian boy and sounded like an English girl. She had grown up in a village where she refused to make friends and had passed through her childhood landscape as she passed through the city now, removed from the drama but affected by the backdrop. She was young and immune and fond of her family, none of which encouraged her to find out more about what was going on around her.

In any case Juliet conserved herself because there was a slight hitch in her body, which had so far manifested itself in the stiffening of her lower back and a tendency in conversation to run out of steam. You may notice that she does not reach as freely as she might and that her gestures are economical, but you might also assume, as did her three brothers, her sister, her parents and friends, that this was characteristic.

There were more straightforward routes home. At Blackfriars Bridge, Juliet rode back to the south side where the beginning of an official river walk was broad enough for her to skim past the clumps of tourists taking photographs of a skyline flushed with a polluted sunset. When she had begun to travel to work this way, she made detours or waited for the tourists to take their shot, but there were so many of them that now she just rode through. She supposed that sometimes she must have got caught in the frame and would appear as a blur like that of a finger in front of the lens, spoiling the view – a notion that pleased her.

As far as Lambeth Bridge there were white walls, swagged chains and cast-iron railings. Then the path gave way to four lanes of traffic edged by an intermittent yellow line which was supposed to designate a cycle path. Half a mile ahead, this line ended as the road crossed from a borough which supported cycle paths into one that did not. Here, Juliet concentrated on being predictable. The last stretch took her through the backroads around Battersea Park, past the mythical white chimneys of the condemned power station and the overloaded mansion blocks, and on across an estate where Juliet had worked out a route along water-logged walkways, ending with a bump down a stinking spiral staircase and out onto a road of sorts lined with corrugated-iron fencing behind which was wasteland.

This had once been a grid of terraced streets named after military victories. Some had been bombed and the rest, except for two rows of six houses, had been knocked down. Over the last ten years, the tower blocks of the estate had been supplemented first by maisonettes offering a sliver of balcony or garden, and then by what were almost terraced houses again, except that they looked like broken-off chunks of the flats. One row of the old houses belonged to the railway and had been leased to the housing co-op Juliet belonged to. She lived at the end of the road, on what used to be a corner, between the newest houses and the wasteland.

On the stairs, she met her brother Fred who asked, ‘Going to change out of your uniform?’

‘I have to look smart. It’s a gallery.’ Juliet wore either neat shirts and narrow trousers, or t-shirts and jeans, and had the kind of light, straight figure which inclined her to look disciplined or childlike accordingly. She considered Fred, whom she could not imagine in a pair of jeans: ‘Did you sleep in your shirt and tie?’

He nodded. ‘And my waistcoat.’

‘You used to do that when you were at school.’

‘Sleep in my uniform? It saved time.’

‘What for? You didn’t do anything then except sleep or work. Same now, really.’

Fred had a job in the City, something so new to his family that nobody understood what he did or asked him to explain. He dressed with elaborate formality so as to convince himself that he was in costume. To him, making money was a game; he enjoyed the rules but did not show much interest in the result. He understood money well enough to know that when it accumulated it insisted upon change, something Fred was not good at and resisted. He never spoke about how much he lost or made, just as he did not acknowledge that the house in Khyber Road was quite different to the flats his colleagues were buying near the common and the park.

Fred followed Juliet into her room where she turned on a small heater and began to select clothes from the neat stacks of black, white and grey on her metal shelves.

‘Shut the door if you’re staying,’ she said. ‘It’s freezing.’

Fred had been a child who acted the part of a grown-up. Now he was a grown-up acting the part of a grown-up. He was the same height as Juliet, but did not have her coherence. With his red-and-white looks, fizziness and wild hair, he might strike you as badly wired whereas Juliet was wire.

He hopped from side to side. ‘I meant to say, to tell you, to warn you, the thing is –’

‘Could you stop jiggling about while you speak? It’s very annoying.’ Juliet had taken off her trousers and jacket, and was climbing into woolly tights, jeans, a vest, flannel shirt and jersey.

‘The thing is Caroline, a girl from work, tonight.’

‘You invited someone here?’

‘Not as such. Someone’s birthday party. She asked me to be her escort. She’s picking me up at seven.’

‘If you’re her escort, you ought to be picking her up.’

‘Really?’ He flushed and looked so worried that Juliet assured him it didn’t matter, and they went downstairs to light a fire.

In winter, they moved around the house like this, in a huddle, rushing from one source of heat to the next. The house was volubly falling apart. The bare stairs sagged and creaked. Few of the windows opened and some didn’t shut; all rattled. Ill-fitting doors created odd drafts and pockets of mustiness. There was a spurting growth of mould in the bathroom and the walls had begun to shed their plaster.

‘So where is this birthday party?’ Juliet asked.

‘In a bar on Lavender Hill.’

‘And you’re going in your suit?’

‘It’s what I wear.’

‘Perhaps a t-shirt? Or at least not a tie. You ought to show that you can differentiate.’

There was a firm knock on the front door. Fred leapt up and rushed into the hall but then started backing away towards the stairs. ‘Please, I better, like you said, change, could you just …’ He was gone.

Juliet brought Caroline through to the living room and shut the door.

‘It’s a very interesting colour,’ the girl tried out, looking around. Her voice was airless and emphatic. She perched on the edge of the sofa, smiling and wincing and trying to avoid the broken springs asserting themselves beneath the worn cover.

‘The sofa? Our brother Carlo, he’s training to be a pathologist, says it’s the exact tone of an exsanguinated corpse. You can tell from the seams that it was once bright pink. In full health, so to speak. So yes, it is interesting.’

‘Exsanguinated?’

‘Bled to death.’

Caroline looked so sincerely horrified that Juliet briefly felt guilty. She watched the girl push back the padded velvet band that hovered over her flat hair. Her upholstered jacket creased across her stomach and rustled as she shifted from side to side. She’s like a badly wrapped present, thought Juliet, and leaned over to shovel more coal onto the fire.

‘I meant the room. This … brown.’ Caroline leant back, trying to relax, remembered the springs and lurched forward. Her skirt caught and there was a tear of perhaps half an inch on her left hip.

Juliet explained: ‘Allie, the speedfreak who lives in the attic, painted it this colour because he thought it would help him sleep. We hate it, but our lives are a lot easier.’

Caroline looked mildly thrilled. ‘In the attic?’

‘Not now. He’s in hospital.’

‘Oh dear, an overdose?’

‘No. Blood poisoning. He gashed his leg and then he encouraged it.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Don’t feel sorry for him; they have central heating in hospital.’

There was a pause before Caroline hit on a new subject. ‘I knew someone who knew someone who slept in a room with a coal fire. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning.’

‘That old wives’ tale? Well, just to make sure, we’ve nailed polythene over the windows to keep out the cold, so the place is absolutely airless,’ snapped Juliet. Where was Fred?

Caroline rose. ‘I’m sorry to have imposed myself on you like this. You must be wanting to get on with your evening. I could wait for Fred outside –’

Juliet stood up to stop her going. She had to admit that Caroline was rather impressive after all. ‘It’s nice to meet you, and very kind of you to come and collect the boy and hugely impressive that you found us. Khyber Road isn’t in the A to Z, so we’re entirely off the map.’

Caroline looked as if she could find anyone anywhere. ‘I live nearby, actually.’ Not in the tower blocks, nor on the estate, but on the other side of Clapham Junction.

‘I live with people from work – Jane and Graham. We’re married.’

‘You’re married?’

‘Me? No, no, did I say me? No, no, I’m not married, they are. Graham and Jane. No. Them. Graham and Jane.’

Caroline’s face was scarlet, as if the fire she was staring into had suddenly produced some actual heat. Juliet watched her fiddle with the tear in her skirt, and wondered.

Fred appeared, wearing some old trousers and an untucked shirt, and they set off awkwardly into the night. Juliet wished them well but she was not hopeful. It must take a lot to make someone like Caroline blush, she thought, and she was right. Later, after Fred had walked Caroline home and Jane had taken her sleeping pill, Graham would creep into the box room they rented to Caroline for most of their mortgage payment, and it would be his finger that would find the hole in the tartan taffeta, and enlarge it.

When Barbara came back with a bottle of wine and saw Jacob sitting on the sofa as he always did, half kneeling and almost curled, she had to stop herself saying, ‘You look as if you never left’, or ‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ What pleased Jacob was knowing silence, so Barbara looked briefly struck and then got on with pouring them both a drink. Even though two people could have sat between them, she felt the shock of being close to him again. It had been three weeks since he moved out, if it could be called that.

‘What is it like then, your room?’

‘It has all I need – a table, a bed.’

‘I know, Jakes. A table, a bed, a scrap of cashmere, a drop of cognac …’

‘Oh come on, don’t be so leaden.’ Jacob’s mouth tightened at the corners as if someone had turned two screws. No one else teased him or called him by anything other than his full name.

‘Where do you wash?’

‘In the sink.’

‘I hope Tania hasn’t made the mistake of laying on hot water.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘You must be in heaven.’ Barbara still found her husband so interesting that she leaned back in order to scrutinise him more thoroughly. She knew what he was made of, parts that did not belong together and which ought not to fit: a bulky, almost square forehead, a cleft chin, a mouth unbalanced by the comparative slightness of the lower lip, a long thin nose with flared nostrils, heavy brows, and wide pale eyes that scattered light. Although he looked still, even disengaged, Jacob was continuously in the throes of process and adjustment, at a chemical level barely discernible to the eye. From moment to moment, he was a different creature.

Now, without moving or speaking, Jacob stopped being a man laying claim to a home and became nervous and rigid, a boy. To stop herself feeling sorry for him, wanting to do something for him, Barbara got up and went to run a bath.

‘Come on, Jakes.’

He would not look at her but let her raise him to his feet and steer him into the bathroom. As she reached round him to close the door, he leant back against it, pulling her towards him. They were about the same height and their bodies were the same mixture of angles and curves.

With Jacob pinned to the door, Barbara caught sight of herself in the mirror that ran along one wall, floor to ceiling. She looked clumsy, aggressive and unwelcome. ‘Christ, I feel like a man,’ she said and took a step backwards.

Jacob caught her arms with his fingertips. He turned his head away and slumped a little. Poor Jacob. Barbara pressed a hand against his jeans and felt a flick of attention. She knelt down, unbuttoned his flies and took the whole of his soft cock into her mouth. For the few moments in which nothing happened, Barbara felt the purest and most generous tenderness. She would have taken his body into her mouth entire, if she could.

Jacob made the small sound he made when he came, undressed and slipped into the water. Barbara stood in the middle of the stone floor and hitched her skirt up to her thighs before deciding to announce that she needed to pee, only she chose to say ‘piss’, ‘I really must piss’, and did so noisily, keeping her eyes fixed on his as she talked: ‘I love the light in here, how it’s so sort of steely and marine. Do you remember what you said when we first had it done? How it was like being in a bathysphere.’ She stood up and took off her clothes, at first angrily and then coquettishly. She had been undressing in front of Jacob for twenty years and wanted him to realise what that meant, and to want still to watch.