After much heart-searching, GoodNews has been given three months to find somewhere to live. He says he appreciates that he has been a burden on us; we are, after all, a middle-class nuclear family, he knows that, and he should respect our, y’know, our nuclearness. We know we are being insulted, but we don’t care very much—or at least, I don’t. David agonizes about it every night just before we go to sleep, wonders aloud whether we want to be nuclear, whether we should become a denuclearized zone, but much of his conviction has gone.
The children seem pretty depressed, too. They were shaken by my outburst, and I have had to talk to them about my boyfriend, and they watch their parents with panic-filled eyes each time we eat, or go out together anywhere. We have only had one argument in the last few days, David and I—about a grillpan—and the kids needed counselling afterwards. I suspect that after a few months of dullness they will forget our woes, but right now I feel sorry for them, and I wish that we had not contrived to make them feel so insecure.
Me, I don’t think I’m depressed. That’s not the right word. I’m daunted. I no longer think about whether I want a divorce or not—the nice vicar took that option away from me. It is just beginning to register that those post-divorce fantasies I had before I was married were untenable, and that I am likely to remain married at least until the children are adults. So that’s… Fifteen years? By which time I will be in my mid-fifties, and one part of life—the Kris Kristofferson part—will be a long way behind me. But there is a sort of virtue in having no choices remaining, I think. It certainly clarifies the mind. And there is always the possibility that David and I will be able to say to each other one day ‘Do you remember when we nearly packed it in?’, and we will laugh at the sheer idiocy of these last few months. It is, I cannot help feeling, a remote possibility, but it is there nonetheless. I’m sure it’s right, that thing about leaving the knife in when you’ve been stabbed. Maybe I should check it out again. Just to be sure.
We are cooking my father’s birthday dinner, and my mother has called to say that he has given up red meat. David buys a free-range chicken, and it is nearly ready when Molly asks us what we are eating.
‘Hooray!’ she says, with more excitement than the menu really warrants.
‘I didn’t know you liked chicken that much.’
‘I don’t. But it means that Brian can come for dinner.’
‘It’s Grandpa’s birthday.’
‘Yes. But chicken. You promised.’
I had forgotten my promise. When I made it, it seemed like the best and easiest deal I could possibly strike; now it is preposterous, unreasonable, a deal with God made by an atheist at a time of crisis, forgotten when the crisis has passed.
‘Brian can’t come tonight.’
‘He has to. That’s why he’s not living with us, because he was allowed to come whenever we’re having chicken.’
‘Grandpa won’t like Brian.’
‘Why did you promise, if you were going to break it straightaway?’
Because I didn’t mean it. Because I did it to get myself out of a hole. Because we have done enough for Brian, even though we have done almost nothing, and even though he is a sad and pathetic man who will devour any crumb of comfort that is thrown at him, like a duck in winter.
‘I didn’t mean birthdays.’
‘Did you tell him that birthdays didn’t count?’
‘Molly’s right,’ says David. ‘We can’t just go around making promises to people like Brian and then breaking them when it is inconvenient.’
‘Brian is not coming to my father’s birthday dinner,’ I say. Of course he isn’t. It’s obvious, surely? It’s common sense.
‘You’re a liar, then,’ Molly says.
‘Fine.’
‘You don’t even care you’re a liar.’
‘No.’
‘OK. Well, I’ll be a liar, too, whenever I feel like it.’
I suddenly realize that David’s part in the chicken debacle might not be entirely innocent.
‘You bought that chicken deliberately,’ I say to him.
‘Deliberately? Well, it wasn’t an unconscious purchase, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
‘OK. I wasn’t entirely unaware of your promise to Brian and Molly when I put it in the trolley.’
‘So you were trying to catch me out?’
‘It didn’t occur to me that you would need catching out. It didn’t occur to me that your offer was anything but genuine.’
‘Liar.’
‘So what you’re saying is I should have realized that you didn’t really mean it? Even though you said you meant it with all your heart?’
‘Is this really what it’s all come down to, David? Playing games with chicken dinners?’
‘It rather looks like it. I don’t know what else is left. I couldn’t get you to do anything else. I’d rather hoped we’d drawn the last line in the sand.’
‘I just want my dad to have a nice birthday. Is that too much to ask?’
‘That’s been the question all the time. Or a version of it.’
We end up compromising. The night after my father’s birthday dinner, we cook another roast chicken, and we invite Brian round, and thus the spirit of the Brian treaty is upheld. Stuffing our faces with meat and three vegetables on consecutive nights may seem like a peculiar way to make the world a better place, but it seems to work for us.
OK, Vanessa Bell. She was a painter, so, you know, easier for her to live a beautiful life than it is for someone who has to deal with Mrs Cortenza and Barmy Brian and all the Holloway junkies. And she had children by more than one man, which might have made things a bit richer than they might otherwise have been. And the men she knocked around with were, it is only fair to say, more interesting and more talented than David and Stephen. They tended to be writers and painters and what have you, rather than people who wrote company brochures. And even though they didn’t have money, they were posh, whereas we’re not. It must be easier to live beautiful lives when you’re posh.
So, what I’m beginning to think—and I’m only halfway through the book, but I’m sure the second half will be more of the same—is that Vanessa Bell isn’t going to be too much help. OK, my brother may well end up filling his pockets with stones and jumping into the river, just as her sister did, but beyond that… Anyway, who lives a rich and beautiful life that I know? It’s no longer possible, surely, for anyone who works for a living, or lives in a city, or shops in a supermarket, or watches TV, or reads a newspaper, or drives a car, or eats frozen pizzas. A nice life, possibly, with a huge slice of luck and a little spare cash. And maybe even a good life, if… Well, let’s not go into all that. But rich and beautiful lives seem to be a discontinued line.
What helps is not Vanessa Bell, but reading about Vanessa Bell. I don’t want to be like Poppy the squashed cat any more. Ever since I moved back into the house after my stay at Janet’s, I have had the nagging feeling that I miss something, without quite being able to describe precisely what that something was. It’s not my former flatmates, or the chance of sleeping on my own in a bed (because, like I said, David and I fit, or have learned to fit, and sharing a duvet with him is frequently a comfort rather than a hardship), but something else, something that is clearly not important enough to me, in both senses: it should be more important to me than it is, because I miss it, and yet life is clearly not impossible without it, because I have been managing to survive despite its absence—in other words, it’s some spiritual equivalent of fruit, which I am bad about eating. And it is only when I have shut the bedroom door for the third or fourth time on my husband and children in order to find out precisely how Vanessa Bell’s life was better than my own that I work it out. It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn’t stale, that hasn’t been breathed by my family a thousand times already. Janet’s bedsit seemed enormous when I moved into it, enormous and quiet, but this book is so much bigger than that. And when I’ve finished it I will start another one, and that might be even bigger, and then another, and I will be able to keep extending my house until it becomes a mansion, full of rooms where they can’t find me. And it’s not just reading, either, but listening, hearing something other than my children’s TV programmes and my husband’s pious drone and the chatter chatter chatter in my head.