My Father feels as if he is breathing aerated gold. Every object within his field of vision, every piece of furniture, every picture on the wall, every item of clothing on the mounded coat-rack by the window, seems suffused with a warm unearthly radiance. Every sound – the hum of the fridge, a 59 bus slowing down as it passes the end of the road, the voice of the Woman He Loves, who seems to be asking him something – is supernaturally seductive and pleasing to the ear. And oh god, the scent of her, and of the dog that has the astounding good fortune to live with her, and of his own damp overcoat; he realises he has never had a functioning sense of smell until now. He knows that none of his senses has ever really, properly, worked until this moment.
And how has My Father entered this new world, this parallel universe of wondrously heightened sensation? Through the window! A bit like entering Narnia through the wardrobe, he thinks, delighted by his own delicious quickness to see the similarity.
My Father is in the half-basement kitchen of the looming terraced house belonging to the Woman He Loves. He is visiting her at home for the first time. He has just arrived by cab, and after briefly blundering around outside – homes in this part of North London being unencumbered by anything as suburban as house-numbers – he has seen her, sitting at the kitchen table, drawing. And she has beckoned him in…. through the window, which, she explains, she uses for her everyday comings and goings, in preference to the front door.
This seems wholly delightful to My Father. As does the very notion of a semi-subterranean knocked-through kitchen, which he has never encountered in the Surrey commuter-belt, where he lives.
“Would you like a drink?” is what the Woman He Loves is saying to him.
Would My Father like a drink? Of course he would! So she pours lengthily, from a large plastic bottle into a tall glass tumbler. Wine from a plastic bottle! Served in a socking great tumbler! Again, My Father is delighted beyond measure.
For a moment, My Father and the Woman He Loves are a little awkward with each other. They stand in her kitchen holding their drinks like strangers at a party. My Father experiments with glugging red wine from a tumbler. Successfully! It’s like drinking from a wine glass, but with a greater volume of wine. The moment passes.
“So this is where you live,” he says.
“Is it how you imagined?”
How has My Father imagined the home of the Woman He Loves? The truth, he realises, is that he has made hardly any effort to do so. Over these last eleven-and-a-half months since they became lovers (he’ll never forget the date; it was the day after devaluation), the time they have spent together has, for him, been very largely a shining continuous present. Of course, she has told him about her childhood (unhappy), her work (creatively fulfilling but unremunerative), her children (loveable but insanely demanding), her dog (loveable but malodorous), and her husband (unloveable, unmitigatedly unsatisfactory, and soon to be her ex-husband). But, to be honest, he’s let it wash over him, along with her plans for the future – all of which are problematic, revolving as they do around his leaving My Mother, in order to begin a new life with the Woman He Loves in a Cornish fishing village, a Tuscan farmhouse, or indeed this North London terrace.
For My Father, at this point, she – the Woman He Loves – is nothing as mundane as another person, with desires, dreams, uncertainties, anxieties of her own, but a kind of walking miracle; an assemblage of perfections, put together, presumably by some beneficent universal life-force, for the sole and exclusive purpose of making My Father feel whole, happy, fully himself for the first time in his life. He does. And what other explanation can there be?
“I’m not sure what I imagined,” he admits. “Except that it would be beautiful, like you.”
She looks around, humorously. The kitchen possesses a degree of bohemian shabby chic, and a couple of the water colours are good. But the room is on the cavernous side; in fairly urgent need of redecoration; more shabby, objectively, than chic. Not really beautiful, by any criteria.
“Would you like to see the rest? Or are you hungry? I threw some chicken in a casserole.”
Is My Father hungry? Of course he is! For as long as he can remember, there has always been an aching void inside him, a permanent, clenched, gnawing appetite, which can never be fully satisfied.
“Ravenous,” he says, “but not for chicken. I’d love to see the rest – particularly your bedroom”. (He is, incidentally, delighted with her choice of verb: “threw” chicken in a casserole!)
She holds out her hand to him. For a small woman, it’s a surprisingly large hand, with catastrophic nails, chewed to oblivion. It seems to him the very essence of female manual perfection. He can’t imagine how arms could possibly reach a more beautiful conclusion.
She leads him upstairs. She is wearing something floral and floaty, yet also somehow clingy. Her body is not as spectacular as some he has seen, but in some sense – in its being, corporeally, her – it too is perfect, unimprovable. He follows her into the enormous high-ceilinged ground floor sitting room, where she pulls him towards a massive dark maroon crushed velvet sofa. She turns, throws herself into his arms, and clasps her strong dancer’s legs around his waist.
“I’ll show you my bedroom later,” she says. “We’ve got all night.”
And they have. She has offloaded her three young boys on her sister, boarded out the dog, temporarily expelled the unsatisfactory soon-to-be-ex-husband, who has been squatting in the attic since the irretrievable breakdown of their relationship almost three years ago. They have the place to themselves, and the whole night ahead of them.
My Father and the Woman He Loves fuck on the sofa.
She is not a particularly expert lover. She possesses no rare or exotic sexual accomplishments (certainly not compared to the mousy typist My Father was seeing before he met her). But she fucks as if her life depends on it. As if their lives, entwined now and for ever, depend on it.
***
Later, My Father climbs out through the kitchen window (which is harder than stepping down from ground level), and pops around the corner to buy Scotch.
Also, to find a phone box so that he can call My Mother, with some barely semi-plausible story about a crisis at the office, a long evening’s work still to be done, and a kind offer from his colleague Ian to spend the night on his sofa, in Kilburn.
My Mother believes not a single word.
When he gets back, the Woman He Loves is in tears. She’s not sniffling discreetly into a handkerchief, or even suppressing sobs behind her hand, but howling piteously, her face upturned, collapsed, snot-streaked, like a grief-stricken toddler’s. The casserole, which has been bubbling away on the stove, has dried out and burnt, to the point of inedibility.
Also, she knows – somehow – that My Father has called My Mother.
“You’ve been talking to that ghastly bloody woman, haven’t you?” she gasps, shoulders heaving.
He momentarily considers lying, but decides against. To the Woman He Loves, My Father is transparent. She knows him, sees him, as no one ever has before.
So instead, he comforts and cajoles; he enfolds her in his arms, and murmurs something apologetic and exculpatory, into the fine blonde hair on the top of her head. He is aware that reasoning with her – pointing out that “that woman” is his wife, and would certainly report him missing to the police if he simply failed to return to the family home – would not be a fruitful approach. And, in any case, he is in no particular hurry for her rage to pass. Soon enough, he knows, her wracking sobs will have turned to raucous self-mocking laughter.
And this – as perhaps My Father is hazily aware – is truly why he is here this evening. He has fucked other women before. He has had relationships with other women before. He has, he supposes, loved – and been loved by – other women before. But all that has always seemed to him conditional, transactional, even adversarial; a chess-match contested by two more-or-less evenly matched players, each intent on a different outcome, each essaying various gambits, offering up sacrifices, trying to foresee the other’s next-move-but-one, in pursuit of victory. With the Woman He Loves, there is no games-playing, no concealment, no pretence of any kind. Every emotion she feels is real, intense, fully experienced, and broadcast uncensored. And to his astonishment, he’s discovered that he loves this. He loves the rawness and epic scale of her emotions; their mutability. He loves never having to guess what she’s feeling, or pre-empt what she might be about to feel. He loves knowing – although it also frightens him – that here, beside this woman, is where he belongs; his home, the place where, at last, he can feel loved.
***
A little later again, calm restored, they sit at her kitchen table, drink more red wine poured from the plastic bottle, and also Scotch, and eat some delicious black olives, with a hunk of stale bread – which are the only food, apart from the incinerated remains of the casserole, in the house.
Olives for supper! With nothing but a hunk of stale bread! Impossible for My Father to imagine a more delightful meal.
*****