you, and your father is dead enough to turn in his grave, you have no option but to look after yourself.
There were, of course, other reasons for my feeling justified in leaving home. As so much that happens in this life is, it was a matter of convergent dynamics, rather than a simple answer as required in murder cases. ‘But why did you do this?’ ‘Because, your honour, because…’ The because is never single-stranded, it is a whole tassel of factors: you have to extract the brightly-coloured one and offer that as explanation. My becauses in this case included it seeming wrong to me to live with one man while being in love with another—the Dane, that is to say, the sailor ad-man. My father sending a messenger from the grave. My husband’s averring that after we were dead we would live together in the hereafter, just him and me, in a little cottage on a mossy bank by a river. Forever. ‘ I saw it in a vision, darling.’ You could play grandmother’s footsteps with fate as much as you liked, but when the music stops and you are playing pass the parcel you must on no account be caught with the wrong man. Or they might be with you for eternity. That too was a very bright thread in what I would refer to as the knotted tassel of reasoning that leads to action.
Young women are beyond belief. I wish I could report less superstitious nonsense on my part but I can’t—not and still speak the truth of my experience.
The stairs which led up from the dry-cleaners to Trisha’s new living quarters were very narrow. It is unlucky to pass another person on the stairs, for fear that in brushing up against them your souls will be exchanged, and you will reach the top of the stairs, or the bottom, a different person. That day Trisha Perle crossed on the stairs with a stranger to her, Peter Watson, whom you have yet to meet. Both, at the time, were in a bad, ungenial mood.
Well-behaved, handsome, de-natured Peter Watson, thirty-six, lived as it so happened with Doralee Thicket, journalist. They had been together for six years. ‘This is Peter Watson, you know, Doralee’s feller?’ Not that Doralee was particularly famous, or rich, or in any way unusual, just that somehow she seemed more vivid than he. Once upon a time women were indignant to be introduced as someone’s wife, daughter or sister, as if they had no identity of their own—these days the insult is more likely to be offered to men. Women are so vivid and mettlesome these days, so vigorous in their being, even when like Trisha down on their luck, I am surprised they do not subsume the whole male race.
If I describe Peter Watson as de-natured, as one describes a piece of much-laundered fabric, it is because one has the sense that once there was more stuffing to him. Yet he has a handsome enough, thinking, empathic, executive face, is over six foot and goes to the gym religiously, as does Doralee. He does not look unlike Russell Crowe but wears glasses. He seems to have a promising future before him and one feels life has gone comfortably enough so far, but that perhaps his mother, or someone, has made him anxious and a little jumpy in childhood, and over anxious to please. But you would be glad enough if he had the window seat in the aircraft, the one given to an able-bodied man so he can open the door in case of an emergency and a chute landing. The barber uses a number two clipper on his hair, so it is short-cropped in the modern style, and his clothes are smart and clean. His hands, unlike Trisha’s, are not nicotine stained.
Peter Watson works for a daily newspaper: indeed he is deputy head of its research department, and sees himself as being ‘in the loop’. He goes to senior editorial meetings. It is not as exciting as being in features or on the news desk, but the whole place so pounds with energy the job is more than good enough for him for the time being. He is the one who knows the facts behind the facts, and the detail behind the sweeping statements newspapers love to make: he is consulted on international affairs, the mood in the Congo, the state of the Albanian Air Force, whither Europe, and why Gibraltar. If he does not know he will find out. He is relied upon and trusted, and the Editor does not shout at him.
Peter’s partner Doralee is pretty and smart, and more ambitious than he. You could accuse both of smugness, but that would be unkind. They have both had parents who loved them, and no reason to believe the world won’t go in the way they have experienced it to date: they love the nanny state and feel that nanny is perfectly well suited to looking after them, and that so long as they behave like everyone else all will be well. They talk out any emotional problems that might arise, and look after their health. They drink bottled water, and choose flat not fizzy: bubbles seeming to the young couple to be somehow chemical, trivial and false. Tap water was to be avoided: it had been recycled through other people’s bodies too many times for comfort, and was full of their hormones.
It is true that Doralee sometimes swigged a glass of tap water in secret, in desperation, having read that over-chlorinated water contributes to the current rise in infertility. It wasn’t that she didn’t want a baby, she did, indeed, she was ‘trying’, like so many of her colleagues at Oracle, the woman’s magazine for which she worked. It was just that sometimes courage failed her, and she would like to put motherhood off for a year or so, while seeing herself as the kind of person who never goes back on a decision, and not wanting her partner to see her as a ditherer. The occasional glass of tap water seemed to take the responsibility of choice away. Anyone is entitled to an off day, and to have doubts about the wisdom of procreation, let alone its expense, and act upon these doubts. And sometimes when the water from the shower was blue from excess chlorine, she’d wonder what kind of unhealthy chemical world was this to bring children into, anyway? She did not tell Peter of these concerns: he wanted a baby even more than she did, and would only quote statistics at her to demonstrate that this was an ever-improving world, and not even overcrowded. Indeed, the latest demographic trends showed a falling population rather than a rising one – except in China – and they had a duty to spread their genes as plentifully as possible. Then Doralee would think, ‘but we aren’t living in China’ and mutinously swig some more tap water. She would leave it to chance.
Trisha’s world scarcely extended beyond what she could see around her, let alone encompass the problems of China. She thought that so long as she was happy she would be healthy, forgetting it was a long time now since she had been happy. She dieted furiously from time to time but not for long. One glass of wine and she forgot about the future and lived in the present – and what is dieting but living for the future and declining to enjoy the present – and the diets she chose were always ones which allowed her to drink alcohol. She smoked dope on occasion, and drank Chablis in the years when she could afford it. One can always remember the name and vintages are not a bother. She seldom took cocaine – as Peter and Doralee would occasionally, and in moderation, the better to keep up with their smart friends. Trisha preferred to be soothed, cooled out, rather than speeded up.
Both Peter and Doralee were very aware of the dangers of stress, and did what they could to avoid it. Peter had learned deep-breathing techniques and Doralee always meant to go back to yoga classes though actually the thought of the boredom entailed was in itself stressful. Trisha on the other hand, by the manner of her living, the general messiness of her life, seemed to invite stress in. If nothing happened she panicked: perhaps nothing would ever happen again. So naturally her life was full of untoward events. When what happened, happened, Trisha was the one to face it with greater equanimity.
My suspicion is this – that just as one day Peter and Trisha cross on
