It was a start, and the structure was there. He set to work in earnest, switching the font from Courier to Arial to Times New Roman and back again, changing it all to italics, counting the words, adjusting the paragraphs and margins so that it looked more substantial.
Finally, he started to speak it out loud, using the text as notes, trying to recall the fluency he had once had on TV.
‘I’d just like to thank everyone for coming here today . . .’
But he could hear the creak of floorboards above his head and quickly he closed the lid of the laptop, slid it furtively beneath the sofa and reached for Wuthering Heights.
Naked and sleepy-eyed, Emma padded down the stairs, stopping halfway and sitting with her arms wrapped round her knees. She yawned. ‘What time is it?’
‘Quarter to ten. Wild times, Em.’
She yawned once more. ‘You’ve tired me out.’ She laughed. ‘Stud.’
‘Go and put some clothes on, will you?’
‘What are you doing anyway?’ He held up Wuthering Heights and Emma smiled. ‘“I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul”! Or is it “love without my life”. Or “live without my love”? Can’t remember.’
‘Haven’t got to that bit yet. It’s still some woman called Nelly banging on.’
‘It gets better, I promise you.’
‘Tell me again, why is there no television here?’
‘We’re meant to make our own entertainment. Come back to bed and talk to me.’
He stood and crossed the room, leaning over the banister and kissing her. ‘Promise you won’t force me to have sex again.’
‘What shall we do instead then?’
‘I know it sounds weird,’ he said, looking a little sheepish. ‘But I wouldn’t mind a game of Scrabble.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Middle
THURSDAY 15 JULY 2004
Belsize Park
Something strange was happening to Dexter’s face.
Coarse, black hairs had begun to appear high up on his cheeks, joining the occasional long grey solitary hairs that crept from his eyebrows. As if that wasn’t enough, a fine, pale fur was appearing around the opening of his ears and at the bottom of his earlobes; hair that seemed to sprout overnight like cress, and which served no purpose except to draw attention to the fact that he was approaching middle age. Was now middle-aged.
Then there was the widow’s peak, particularly noticeable now after a shower; two parallel byways gradually widening and making their way to the crown of his head, where the two paths would one day meet and it would all be over. He dried his hair with the towel, then scrubbed it this way and that with his fingertips until the path was covered over.
Something strange was happening to Dexter’s neck. He had developed this sag, this fleshy pouch under his chin, his bag of shame, like some flesh-toned roll-neck jumper. He stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror and put one hand on his neck as if trying to mould it all back into place. It was like living in a subsiding house – every morning he woke and inspected the site for fresh cracks, new slippage in the night. It was as if the flesh were somehow cleaving from the skeleton, the characteristic physique of someone whose gym membership had long since lapsed. He had the beginnings of a paunch and, most grotesquely, something strange was happening to his nipples. There were items of clothing that he could barely bring himself to wear now, fitted shirts and ribbed woollen tops, because you could see them there, like limpets, girlish and repulsive. He also looked absurd in any garment with a hood, and only last week he had caught himself standing in a trance, listening to Gardeners’ Question Time. In two weeks’ time he would be forty years old.
He shook his head, and told himself it wasn’t that disastrous. If he turned and looked at himself suddenly, and held his head in a certain way, and inhaled, he could still pass for, say, thirty-seven? He retained enough vanity to know that he was still an unusually good-looking man, but no-one was calling him beautiful anymore, and he’d always thought he would age better than this. He had hoped to age like a movie star: wiry, aquiline, grey-templed, sophisticated. Instead he was ageing like a TV presenter. An ex-TV presenter. A twice-married ex-TV presenter who ate far too much cheese.
Emma came in, naked from the bedroom, and he began to brush his teeth, another obsession; he felt like he had an old mouth, like it would never be clean again.
‘I’m getting fat,’ he mumbled, mouth full of foam.
‘No you’re not,’ she said without much conviction.
‘I am – look.’
‘So don’t eat so much cheese then,’ she said.
‘I thought you said I wasn’t getting fat.’
‘If you feel you are, then you are.’
‘And I don’t eat too much cheese. My metabolism is slowing down, that’s all.’
‘So do some exercise. Go to the gym again. Come swimming with me.’
‘No time, have I?’ While the toothbrush was removed from his mouth she kissed him consolingly. ‘Look, I’m a mess,’ he mumbled.
‘I’ve told you before, darling, you have beautiful breasts,’ and she laughed, poked him in the buttock and stepped into the shower. He rinsed, sat on the bathroom chair and watched her.
‘We should go and see that house this afternoon.’
Emma groaned over the sound of the water. ‘Do we have to?’
‘Well I don’t know how else we’re going to find—’
‘Okay. Okay! We’ll go and see the house.’
She continued to shower with her back to him and he stood and stalked into the bedroom to get dressed. They were scrappy and irritable once again, and he told himself that it was because of the strain of trying to find a place to live. The flat had already been sold and a large part of their possessions placed into storage just to make room for the two of them. Unless they found somewhere soon they would have to rent, and all this brought its tensions and anxieties.
But he knew that something else was going on and sure enough, as Emma waited for the kettle and read the paper, she suddenly said—
‘I’ve just got my period.’
‘When?’ he asked.
‘Just now,’ she said, with studied calm. ‘I could feel it coming on.’
‘Oh well,’ he said, and Emma continued to make coffee, her back to him.
He stood to wrap his arms around her waist and lightly kissed the nape of her neck, still damp from the shower. She didn’t look up from the newspaper. ‘Doesn’t matter. We’ll try again, yeah?’ he said, standing there with his chin on her shoulder for a while. It was a winsome, uncomfortable stance, and when she turned the page of the paper, he took it as his cue to return to the table.
They sat and read, Emma the current affairs, Dexter the sport, both taut with irritation while Emma tutted and shook her head in that maddening way she sometimes had. The Butler Inquiry into the origins of the war dominated the headlines, and he could feel her building up to some kind of topical political comment. He focussed on the latest from Wimbledon, but—
‘It’s weird, isn’t it? How there’s this war going on, and virtually no protest? I mean you think there’d be marches or something, wouldn’t you?’
That tone of voice riled him too. It was the one he remembered from all those years ago: her student voice, superior and self-righteous. Dexter made an uncontentious noise, neither challenging nor accepting, in the hope that this would be enough. Time passed, pages of the newspaper were turned.
‘I mean you’d think there’d be something like the anti-Vietnam movement or something, but nothing. Just that one march, then everyone shrugged and went home. Even the students aren’t protesting!’
‘What’s it got to do with the students?’ he said, mildly enough, he thought.
‘It’s traditional, isn’t it? That students are politically engaged. If we were still students, we’d be protesting.’ She went back to the paper. ‘I would anyway.’
She was provoking him. Fine, if that’s what she wanted. ‘So why aren’t you?’
She looked at him sharply. ‘What?’
‘Protesting. If you feel so strongly.’
‘That’s exactly my point. Maybe I should be! That was exactly my observation! If there was some kind of cohesive movement . . .’
He returned to the paper, resolving to keep quiet but unable to do so. ‘Or maybe it’s because people don’t mind.’
‘What?’ She looked at him, eyes narrowed.
‘The war. I mean if people were really affronted by it there’d be protests, but maybe people are glad that he’s gone. I don’t know if you noticed, Em, but he wasn’t a very nice man . . .’
‘You can be glad Saddam’s gone and still be against the war.’
‘That’s my point. It’s ambiguous, isn’t it?’
‘What, you think it’s a fairly just war?’
‘Not me necessarily. People.’
‘But what about you?’ She closed the newspaper, and he felt a genuine sense of unease. ‘What do you think?’
‘What do I think?’
‘What do you think?’
He sighed. Too late now, no turning back. ‘I just think it’s pretty rich that a lot of people on the Left were against the war when the people that Saddam was murdering were exactly the people the Left should have been supporting.’
‘Like who?’
‘Trade unionists, feminists. Homosexuals.’ Should he say the Kurds? Was that correct? He decided to chance it. ‘The Kurds!’
Emma snuffled righteously. ‘Oh, you think we’re fighting this war to protect trade unionists?’ You think Bush invaded because he was worried about the plight of Iraqi women? Or gays?’
‘All I’m saying is that the anti-war march would have had a bit more moral credibility if the same people had protested against the Iraqi regime in the first place! They protested about apartheid, why not Iraq?’
‘ . . . and Iran? And China and Russia and North Korea and Saudi Arabia! You can’t protest against everyone.’
‘Why not? You used to!’
‘That’s beside the point!’
‘Is it? When I first knew you, all you did was boycott things. You couldn’t eat a bloody Mars Bar without a lecture on personal responsibility. It’s not my fault you’ve become complacent . . .’
He returned to his ridiculous sports news with a little self-satisfied smirk, and Emma felt her face beginning to redden. ‘I have not become . . . Don’t change the subject! The point is, it’s ridiculous to claim that this war is about human rights, or WMDs or anything like that. It’s about one thing and one thing only . . .’
He groaned. It was inevitable now: she was going to say ‘oil’. Please, please don’t say ‘oil’ . . .
‘ . . . nothing to do with human rights. It’s entirely to do with oil!’
‘Well isn’t that a pretty good reason?’ he said, standing and deliberately scraping his chair. ‘Or don’t you use oil, Em?’
As last words go, he felt this was pretty effective, but it was hard to walk away from an argument in this bachelor flat that suddenly felt too small, cluttered and scuffed. Certainly Emma wasn’t going to let a fatuous remark like that go unanswered. She followed him into the hall, but he was waiting for her, turning on her with a ferocity that unsettled them both.
‘I tell you what this is really about. You’ve had your period and you’re angry about it and you’re taking it out on me! Well I don’t like being harangued while I’m trying to eat my breakfast!’
‘I’m not haranguing you—’
‘Arguing then—’
‘We’re not arguing, we’re discussing—’
‘Are we? Because I’m arguing—’
‘Calm down, Dex—’
‘The war wasn’t my idea, Em! I didn’t order the invasion, and I’m sorry, but I don’t feel as strongly about it as you do. Maybe I should, maybe I will, but I don’t. I don’t know why, maybe I’m too stupid or something—’
Emma looked startled. ‘Where did that come from? I didn’t say you were—?’
‘But you treat me like I am. Or like I’m this right-wing nut because I don’t spout platitudes about The War. I swear, if I sit at one more dinner party and hear someone say “It’s all about the oil”! Maybe it is, so what? Either protest about that, or stop using oil or accept it and shut the fuck up!’
‘Don’t you dare tell me to—’
‘I wasn’t! I wasn’t talking to . . . oh, forget it.’
He squeezed past that bloody bike of hers, cluttering up his hallway, and into the bedroom. The blinds were still drawn, the bed unmade, damp towels on the floor, the room smelling of their bodies from the night before. He began searching for his keys in the gloom. Emma watched him from the doorway, with that look of maddening concern, and he kept his eyes averted.
‘Why are you so embarrassed about discussing politics?’ she said calmly, as if he were a child having a tantrum.
‘I’m not embarrassed, I’m just . . . bored.’ He was searching through the laundry basket, pulling out discarded clothes, checking trouser pockets for keys. ‘I find politics boring – there, I’ve said it now. It’s out!’
‘Really?’