me in. It gives me a – might I call it a window? – on the world. Or maybe just a way of peeping, unseen.
The next morning I woke early, and after my showering and coffee rituals, arrived at the door at 7.58. I rolled up a newly washed, fluffy hand towel and placed it above the eyehole, leant forward so that my forehead rested on it, comfortably adjusted it until my eye was perfectly aligned. The world came into focus. Across the street, just on 8 a.m., right on time like the Bombay Express, the Singh family left their house. Doctor and young son, top-knotted, turbaned. Mother and daughter in immaculate saris. You could set your watch by them. Sikh and ye shall find. Every morning both parents walked the children to the primary school before making their way to the Tube: he to the Chelsea and Westminster, she to her accountancy offices. Deloitte’s, was it?
They were wonderfully presented, less disgusting than their English equivalents. Stripped of their ethnic accoutrements, their turbans, suits and saris, they would be the colour of lightly toasted Poilâne, redolent of cardamom and ghee. If you were a cannibal, you’d toss aside a pallid smelly Cooper – the colour and consistency of uncooked bread – and have a bite of these tasty Oriental morsels.
*
I’ve composed a list of further world-proofing chores. I like lists. You think of every contingency, plan for it, cross it off. It gives the impression that everything is controllable.
It’s going surprisingly well, the elements falling into place. First, the essential communication – I hope it will be the last.
Dear George,
It was good, all things considered, to see you last week. As I intimated, I have a small request. I am going to be taking some time off, and I need to redirect my mail. If you will be so kind as to receive it, all I ask is that you throw it away. All of it. Please. I do not want to be disturbed for the foreseeable future, for any reason. I will be out of touch.
I am most grateful for this.
I have also changed my email address, as you can see. I do not want this divulged to anyone. Indeed, I would rather you did not use it yourself, once you have confirmed you can help me in this minor way.
Thanks,
James
George is as close as I came to making a friend amongst my fellow schoolmasters. He is a harmless, good-hearted duffer, and a passionate enthusiast for all things Victorian. He kits himself out in fancy dress: silken cravats or bow ties, itchy tweed suits, waistcoats, flouncy shirts, shoes with buckles. And a bushy beard, of course. He is idealistic, staunch, sentimental, hearty, blinkered, patriotic, and hopeless with women. I suppose – there was speculation about this in the Common Room – you might have mistaken him for a repressed homosexual, but he is not. He is one of that virtually extinct species, the bachelor. He visits friends in the country at the weekends, is a reliable walker for widows and spinsters, has godfathered half the children in Gloucestershire, and is keen on travel, amateur theatrics, cricket, and especially on the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Every 15th of September he celebrates the death-day of Arthur Hallam, the poet’s lost friend and only true love, with a select dinner at Boodle’s, at which he insists on declaiming the entire text of ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, a poem that, like Hitler, should never have been born. He acts it out, waving his arms like a drowning fairy, sensuous, mellifluous and slinky.
But, comic figure though he is, I can count on him. I’d solved my incoming mail problem. Brilliant. I have also cancelled my landline, got a new mobile number, and made a database of essential providers: handyman, plumber, electrician, doctor, dentist, optician, nurse, cleaner, ironing and laundry service, computer and telly fixers. I can order cash, coffee, cigars, food from Waitrose or Harrods, wine from Berry Brothers if I outlive my cellar. I have enough clothes and shoes to last a lifetime.
I will never go out again. If I am incapacitated by severe illness or a heart attack, I will abjure the emergency call, suffer and die. If the house catches fire, I will go down with it, perhaps put on some smothering and sizzling music – Stravinsky perhaps, can’t think what else he’s good for – and smoke and barbecue like Joan of Arc.
Of course the price of my enforced isolation will be a regular invasion of both house and self by a succession of strangers, none of whom will be congenial to me. Of course I dislike a chippy chippy, but I’m equally hostile to the charming, the well spoken or well read, the interesting, the beautiful, the whimsical. Next thing I know they will be smiling and waving at me from their carriages.
Anyone who enters this house does so as an instrument of my will. I am not here to meet people, but to use them. If they could be replaced by machines, I would do so without compunction, and if they were robots they would be programmed to listen but not to talk.
Only four days after its installation, the doorbell rang. I ignored it. Either it was someone who didn’t matter or, much worse, someone who did. I cannot say what time it was. I have renounced my watch, drawn the curtains. It is dark amid the blaze of noon, a total eclipse without hope of day. I am become a thing of darkness.
I do not follow the news, hardly turn on the telly or wireless. My computer wants to tell me the time and date, but after some searching I turn off that function. The house is still, timeless. Eternal in its way.
I drift off in my chair, resolve to drink my way through the wine cellar, nibble smoked oysters on cracked wheat biscuits. The oysters are delivered (on Thursdays) from Scotland. They do not come in tins. Anything that is tinned, tastes tinny: baked beans, tuna in oil, white asparagus, all similarly contaminated. No, my oysters are plump, recently smoked, and come in plastic packaging that hardly affects their taste.
I eat grapes, though it is hard to source decent ones. But if I eat too many, or drink too much, I am sick, sick at heart, vomiting, bereft. The nausea rises out of me like a metaphysical force. It is in the walls, it is everywhere around me, it is the air that I cannot breathe. But I carry on with my grapes, both liquid and solid. I don’t wish to die of scurvy. I don’t wish to die at all, not yet.
I feel as if the house is under surveillance, staked out, as I am staked out within it. Crucified. But behind its blank façade, there are few signs of life, as I have few signs of life behind mine.
The only vulnerability is on Thursdays. If you were a weary gumshoe slumped over your steering wheel, eyes propped open, in need of a shave and a toothbrush after a sleepless Wednesday night, in the morning you might observe someone walk up the path confidently, open the door and go in. You might try to confront them, or more likely advise your employer to do so.
When the doorbell rang again a few days later – just once, that was a good idea – I snuck into the hallway, my footsteps muffled by the thickness of the carpet, and surely imperceptible outside the door. I looked through the peephole. It was just as I had anticipated, and feared. I retreated upstairs, my restless heart threatening its cavity, and a few moments later the knocking started, first a regular rapping, followed soon by a robust banging, less loud than burly James Fenimore had produced, but surprisingly vigorous nonetheless. I closed the door to my study.
It happened again the next day, the hammering, and a more protracted and furious banging. When I opened the door a few hours later, having ensured that the 200-degree coast was clear, there was an envelope taped to it, obviously with a letter inside it. Perhaps four or five pages thick. I took it inside, tore it up without opening it, and threw the many pieces into the bin.
From the outside, with the curtains closed, the house might well have looked uninhabited. The only tell-tale sign, ironically, was the change to the door. Why would someone who had left a house for a protracted period feel a need to reinforce its entrance in such a way? No, the unwelcoming
