My husband sets off for a day at the British Library. He has a flask of coffee in a knapsack, and a pad of paper my father has given him. For his sake, I’m relieved he is going; my father has taken to him like a chainsaw to a plate of sausages. It has been tense in the house. Unpleasant.
But I am glad to be here in Brighton, away from our Dublin flophouse. It feels nice to have hot water to bathe in and light to see by. It’s good not to have to burn our furniture, or our trousers, in a fireplace that sucks heat from the room as efficiently as a black hole sucks suns. It’s a break not to be taking a pony and trap (ok, a reach) to the unemployment office and returning sixteen hours later with a few Punts and a can of Spam in my pocket (not a reach). Although I like yellowed doilies at the windows, it’s nice to see clear out. The sea is here somewhere. And even though my father’s sublimely delicious bolognese requires him to bolt a Nebuchadnezzar of Sancerre while he makes it, I’m glad the local beef tastes like beef and not squirrel.
So I’m – what do we say? – grateful for these un-things. And grateful, too, to be waving to my husband’s back as he walks away from me, down the road toward the train station. For today, at least, he will be safe. I’m certainly grateful for that.
Once I’m back inside the house, things have improved. My father’s mood has lifted. He has poured his Sancerre to the rim of a measuring jug and is about to get cracking – to throw himself energetically into voodoo-dolling the man I have married. Being American, my husband is an easy target. Being an American-with-a-Republican-president, he’ll be needing his white flag and his knee pads (will those do it?). But in an about-turn, my father decides to save those particular pins for later, when there’s my husband’s actual body to stick them in.
Meanwhile, he has different pins for me, and these slide in in subtler ways (he knows how squeamish I am).
So here he sits, examining his glass – the fetching way the light cuts through – and he begins to ponder, and to reminisce. He wonders aloud about a wide range of things: If The Guardian ever runs want ads for ‘Philosophers.’ How a philosopher! and a historian! imagine they will eat, and under what bridge. He wonders if I’m familiar with the term ‘little wifey,’ and ponders my husband’s position on Freud’s five rungs of psychosexual development. He gushes down memory lane, recalling old boyfriends of mine, forgetting that he ripped them to shreds, too, but not before they’d kindly helped him haul the rubbish to the tip.
And then he gets grim; my mother has popped into the room. She’s over there, sitting in the window, her back to the telly. Always sitting. Why must she sit that way? And the light is always shining on that hair, which my father liked to call a ‘helmet.’ I suppose he was reaching for ‘bob.’ He had no idea. And nor did he know, have any inkling, that this Bond Street scissor-work had cost an arm and two legs. But the hair. Always the hair. It had to be the hair.
“You have to have hair that moves,” my mother would say, jerking her head, swinging the panels. And look, she’s doing it now. See the way the sunlight plays? She’ll spill that drink if she’s not careful. The martini she has, with the lemons and ice. The light plays in that, too. She’s wearing raisin, or is she wearing dusty pink? Would you call it a ‘shell suit,’ or a ‘track suit’? Or would you call it a gorgeously soft and floppy, hand-dyed, hand-stitched, organic linen number from Hobbs in Covent Garden? I dunno.
But it looks like she forgot her earrings, Those beaten silver hoops are on her dressing table, waiting ‘til next time – for their chance to frill a face that never needed frilling to begin with.
When my husband returns from London, he seems edgy. There’s something on his mind beyond how to exist through dinner with a succubus.
As I to-and-fro from the kitchen, he follows me close and then, on the down-low, he says he has something to show me. He checks to see if my father is, indeed, in a pre-dinner wine coma, and then pulls the pad of paper from his knapsack. He flips quickly past his history notes (snooze) to a page of my father’s handwriting which bolts me from my boredom. It goes something like this: Dear old love, By the time you get this – dot-dot-dot – I’m so very, very sorry.
AB - 20.01.23
KOD,
This is my email, can’t find yours: alexabeattie14@gmail.com
So we can have a phone call. xxx
Oh B. All of this. Pulsing through me.