Love You Madly. Alex George
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very much a work in progress. For example, I’m having second thoughts about the ‘swarthily crooked’ walking stick. The image is almost too rich, too complex. I read my solitary sentence again. Is it, I wonder, too demanding, too majestic, for an opening paragraph?
This will be a rites-of-passage novel which uses, as a structural device, song titles of the Plastic Ono Band to establish the chronology of the narrative. It’s all rather complicated, and is lodged firmly in my head. The difficulty is getting it from my head on to a sheet of paper. At the moment it refuses to budge. Instead it just sits there, driving me mad with frustration and guilt.
After a few minutes I abandon my typewriter and prowl around the flat. A sea of champagne corks floats in a bowl on the coffee table. I pick up a cork and examine it. Around its neck Anna has written in black biro, ‘A’s BIRTHDAY. M, A, THERESA + AL’. This is one of Anna’s intransigent habits: every time we drink champagne, she keeps the cork and inscribes on it the details of the event and who was there to help us drink it. This bowl is an alcoholic documentary of our time together. If I delve deeply enough, I will find corks commemorating our engagement, the flat purchase, Anna’s qualification as a solicitor. These corks have always bewildered me. I have never been able to invest inanimate objects with particular emotive significance, but Anna loves to rummage through the bowl, sighing with memories. Her birthday was five months ago; I remember nothing about it. I certainly don’t remember drinking champagne with my sister-in-law Theresa and her idiotic husband Alistair. This bowl, so full of memories for Anna, is quite empty for me.
I walk into the bedroom and start sifting through the laundry basket. It’s Monday, so it’s whites. As I work, I ponder the fate of my novel. Given Neville’s aversion to advertising or marketing, perhaps it’s not surprising that the staff in the bookshop hadn’t heard of me. I put down the bundle of dirty clothes on the bed and open the top drawer of Anna’s dresser. I am confronted by her collection of exotic silk underwear. Beneath these alluring items lie prosaic white cotton stand-bys, and one or two more elaborate pieces, frilly things with lace panels and interesting quick-release gussets. I begin to dig, but I am not looking for saucy lingerie: this is where Anna hid the joint that we smoked on Saturday evening, before the launch party. I am hoping that she had more than one stashed away: I am suddenly craving a calming hit of marijuana. I’m not in the habit of smoking pot in the middle of the day, but after my book’s abject non-appearance in the bookshop, I need cheering up.
As I delve, my fingers fall on something alien amongst the smooth silk. I pull out a small, sky blue bag. On the front are printed the words ‘TIFFANY & CO’ in black type. Curious, I open the bag and tip out its contents. On to my open palm fall two silver cufflinks. Their design is simple: heavily-wrought silver knots are connected by a gleaming argent arc. They are elegant, unfussy, and beautiful.
I sit down on the bed, my search for drugs forgotten.
After half an hour I carefully put the Tiffany bag back where I found it.
They were unquestionably men’s cufflinks. But they couldn’t be for me. Anna knows I’d never wear them; I own one shirt and one tie which I put on, grudgingly, once a year, for the mandatory appearance at church with Anna’s family on Christmas Day.
But if they’re not for me, then who are they for?
And why has Anna gone to the effort of hiding them?
Suddenly the flat seems unbearably small. The walls close in around me. My discovery of the cufflinks brings all my worries about Anna back, redoubled. Claustrophobia crowds in. Pulling on my coat, I hurry out of the flat. Drawing in cold lungfuls of icy November air, I walk quickly through Camden, hoping to escape my anxieties. The streets are quiet, unrecognisable from the edgy chaos of the weekend and its quick, carnival atmosphere.
I turn left past Chalk Farm station and walk over the bridge which spans the railway lines, towards Primrose Hill. On Regents Park Road, the atmosphere of domestic refinement is in stark contrast to the litter-strewn sprawl of Camden High Street. Leaves dance in the quiet road. I step through the gate at the bottom of Primrose Hill. In the distance two figures, their collars turned up against the wind, walk their dogs. I begin to climb the steep path up the hill. At the summit, the wind whistles past my ears. I almost feel as if I’ve escaped London’s grimy clutches. I look southwards across Regent’s Park and towards the grey, silent city beyond.
What is happening with Anna?
I allow the wind to sweep through me, clearing my head. Up here I am free, shucked from my life. Finally I walk back down the hill, through the long grass towards the swooping aviary of London Zoo. At Prince Albert Road I turn left and trudge back towards Camden, my mind a grateful blank. On the way home I go into the supermarket. After finding everything I need for supper, I wander over to the Household Goods aisle for a spot of thoroughly modern angst.
There comes a time in everyone’s life when the grim realisation dawns that the party is over – that it’s finally time to grow up. This usually happens when people take out their first mortgage, make their first pension contribution, or change their first nappy. Of course, I haven’t done any of those things. For me, the death knell of my carefree youth, the herald of sombre responsibility, was when I started having to buy lavender toilet paper.
Until our bathroom was redecorated I never worried about what colour of loo roll I pulled off the shelf; I chose whatever pastel hue took my fancy. But all that has changed now. Now it’s any colour I like, as long as it’s lavender. Lavender, Anna tells me firmly, is the only colour that works. I have reservations about this rigidly monochromatic approach. Does it really matter whether we use colour coordinated paper? Would it really spoil the overall aesthetic effect if we had Buttercup Yellow, just for once? It’s a bathroom, after all, not an art gallery. But Anna is unmoveable on this issue. Lavender it must be. I pull a pack of four rolls off the shelf and deposit them in my basket with a heavy heart.
I walk home with my shopping. Tonight, as usual, I will be cooking chicken. I am great at chicken. I am a maître de poulet, a fowl supremo. I can grill it, roast it, poach it, steam it, pan-fry it, blanche it, deep-fry it, curry it, stew it, parboil it, barbecue it, griddle it, marinade it, or stuff it. Unfortunately, it’s the only thing I can cook. Tonight, I am preparing pan-fried chicken breasts in a cream, garlic and cider sauce. I put the shopping away and consult the recipe book, even though I won’t be cooking for hours yet.
Lunch is baked beans on toast, and then I settle down in front of the television for my usual afternoon diet of wooden game-shows and repeats of old soap operas on UK Gold. My brain goes numb, which is how I like it nowadays. I resolutely ignore my typewriter on the table behind me. It sits in silent reproach as I stare, eyes glazed, at the television screen. My fingers never stray far from the remote control, as I flash across the networks, praising the day they laid the cable in our street. I try and follow six or seven programmes simultaneously, in an attempt to distract my brain from Anna and the cufflinks hidden in her underwear drawer. It doesn’t work. I cannot get the sight of the heavy lumps of silver out of my mind.
After all the recent changes in Anna’s behaviour, especially after her furtive trip to the cinema, I no longer know what to think.
By the early evening news, I have wound myself into a tight ball of anxiety. I realise that I am going to have to ask Anna about the cufflinks if I am to avoid the descent into fretful madness. I run through various possible opening gambits, trying to decide how to broach the subject. I need something nonchalant, urbane, and relaxed. Every formulation I concoct is nervy, self-pitying, and paranoid.
Finally, at about eight o’clock, I hear the front door open. I feel my heart stretch and skip a beat in anticipation.
‘It’s me,’ calls Anna from the hall.
I get up to greet her. She is hanging up her coat. ‘Hello you,’ she says. I kiss her on the cheek. We walk into the kitchen. Anna sits down at the table and lights a cigarette.
‘So,’ she says. ‘Come on. Tell me everything. What was it like?’
‘What was what like?’
‘Don’t be a tease, Matthew. Seeing