In the City of Love's Sleep Read online

  In the City of Love’s Sleep

  LAVINIA GREENLAW

  to Lesley Henshaw and Franny Bennett

  – friends of almost forty years

  Pray then in your most brilliant lonely hour

  That, reunited, we may learn forever

  To keep the sun between ourselves and love.

  from ‘Venus’, Malcolm Lowry

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  yes

  follow

  the bone skates

  the only thing to do

  a failed instrument

  who are you?

  anywhere

  is he flirting with her?

  the cloud mirror

  meeting point

  varnish

  withdrawn memory

  curiosity

  I am not what I am

  black mist

  the little rebellions

  a pattern

  the interrupted city

  the merman

  a crowded room

  something is pressing

  how a heart is broken

  I’m not, I don’t feel

  a blade

  our best selves

  the sting

  an anatomical model of a horse

  an understanding of its parts

  he wants to speak

  space so easily overthrown

  display

  a yardstick

  rain

  a small green space

  the real thing

  shall I leave you now?

  the towers

  the heart

  glare

  where are you where I am?

  a diversion from a conclusion

  this is all true

  love

  the mortsafe

  the new

  a lapse

  I can’t say

  the object reminds us

  alarms

  the iron lung

  questions

  what’s missing, what remains

  the jealousy glass

  whose story?

  the black place

  used, broken, lost

  a switch

  blossom

  practical momentum

  history

  kissing

  daylight

  a museum

  the wonder box

  what if she falls?

  where certainty lies

  the shape it takes

  a strengthening

  the glamour of the object

  a skeleton

  a provocation

  fucking

  happiness

  the unknown object

  weakness allowed to remain

  it won’t change anything

  sometimes we are in the same city

  Acknowledgements and sources

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  yes

  Imagine a woman running. The long corridor is dark except for the red blips of smoke detectors and the green vapour of low-level after-hours lighting. She slams her raised hands into each set of fire doors and pushes hard so they flap behind her as if urging someone to follow her. Is someone following her? She takes the stairs two and then three at a time. These are the back stairs. They’re concrete worn to slipperiness and she stumbles, bangs her knee, gets up and keeps running.

  She reaches her office door but her keys – where are her keys? She pushes a hand into her bag but her fingers can’t make sense of anything, they’re not fingers at all, and so she shakes the bag, hears a clink, pushes her hand through it again and still can’t find them. Is someone coming? She tips the bag onto the floor, grabs the keys, rushes in and stands there, against the wall, trying to catch her breath. She watches the open door. Nothing happens.

  There was no touch, only the thought of it, not even a thought, less than thought. Her body was responding to – what? Even now, minutes after their conversation, she has no clear idea of what he looks like. When they spoke she could not meet his gaze. If she were to see him tomorrow she might walk straight past him. But something about him – what? – has woken a part of her that she had forgotten and which is right now the part most defining and defined.

  Where is he? She’s watching the door even though she knows he won’t appear. She doesn’t want him to – or does she – and anyway who is he? A man she’d never met before who turned towards her while unbuttoning his coat. There was something about him she recognised so strongly that she had to stop herself reaching out her arms.

  They happened to leave the cloakroom together and walked into the hall side by side before moving apart. She spoke to colleagues and acquaintances, and she waited. If you’d asked her what she was waiting for, she wouldn’t have been able to say. She had not yet formed so much as a thought about him but moved and spoke as if knowing herself watched. At certain points she caught sight of him and her body told her that she knew him, only of course she didn’t. She’d been reminded of something by the way he unbuttoned his coat. That was all. She waited.

  Neither could later remember how their conversation began. It was a turning towards one another as natural as waking. Within minutes they were talking about their fathers, both architects, neither successful and both now dead. She asked him if he’d wanted to become one too, was it expected of him as it had been of her, and he laughed and said no, his family never thought him clever enough and anyway what interested him was cupboards and what people chose to put inside them. She came away with an impression of gentleness and complication that she later construed as warmth and depth. And while she couldn’t describe his face, she would remember the pleasure of being unable to place him. Who was he?

  She had been telling him about her work, how she too was interested in small things, and then she was about to ask if he would like to – what? Come up to her office? Even though the reception was ending and there was someone who she could tell was waiting for him, standing at the boundary of her awareness. She took his card, said goodbye and walked off behind the row of banners and press boards, back through the darkened gallery, past the locomotives and rockets and on up to the small things – the jealousy glass, the cloud mirror, the merman – any of which she could have offered so as to have him follow her. And as she walked away she saw it all – that her body was ticking and had she asked and had he followed she would have done anything, so sharply did the space between them fall away. And so she ran.

  *

  One night long ago, before she knew anything much about anything, Iris met a man at a dinner. It was a formal occasion to which she’d been invited at the last minute by her employer because someone had dropped out. She knew no one and realised as soon as she got there that she was wrongly dressed. All this meant she was particularly grateful when the man next to her introduced himself warmly and confided that he didn’t know anyone either except – he gestured down the table towards a tall woman with a plait of slate-and-silver hair – his wife. At that same moment his wife shook hands with the man who had just sat down beside her. Oh! Iris exclaimed, because she saw something in the wife’s face: she was saying yes to this stranger as you can only say yes to someone who is saying yes to you. Yes, they were saying to each other. Yes.

  We can say yes to a stranger without even slowing down as we pass by. This is not the yes of accepting something offered (nothing’s been offered) but that of recognition. What is it we recognise? The stranger is rich in tension, both body and blank surface, never seen before and yet familiar. Some detail of proportion, tone, feature or gesture connects with a memory we may not even know
we have and this is what we recognise.

  It doesn’t have to be a stranger. It could be someone you’ve known for years who was once the person who unbuttoned their coat, walked beside you into a room or sat next to you at dinner. There would have been a moment of yes but of the kind that is folded away. That kind of yes can settle beyond reach. Or it might keep a loose shape and be there every time you meet, and one day suddenly become so clear.

  From time to time Iris has wondered what happened to the couple at that dinner. Back then she’d thought them too old for their flirtation to be anything more than good manners. The husband had persisted in talking to Iris, trying for minutes at a time not to look at his wife, only sooner or later his head would turn and his sentence trail off. Not once when Iris followed his gaze did she see his wife look back. The yes that she and the stranger were saying to one another was so strong that at the other end of that crowded table, they were terribly clear. The wife had turned her seat towards the stranger and remained fixed, her arm propped on the table, her hand holding a glass as if it were a divine attribute, that heavy slate-and-silver plait now brought forward, girlishly, over one shoulder. The stranger leant back and spread his arms as if to receive her, one disappearing along the back of her chair. At a certain point he left the table and Iris saw to her surprise that he looked much like the husband, who had just spilt his drink and so did not watch the stranger pass.

  Did the wife carry home this encounter like a jewel slipped into her pocket, something she found in her hand now and then, turned over and let drop? Did her husband see after all that this woman was not just his wife but a creature of volition and mystery who might at any point reach past him? Or had he always known? Was whatever remained of her love for her husband demolished by that evening’s strength and shine? If their marriage came to an end, we might say that it was always going to do so and that the stranger’s attention only lit her discontent.

  In adolescence, love is like a river urgently in need of direction. It might flow towards a horse, a superhero, a football player, a singer. These are love’s rehearsals. One day the river flows towards someone who is real and there. This suggests that the feeling comes to us before the subject and yet that’s not how it’s experienced. A fifteen-year-old girl is struck by the boy who cycles past her window each evening. She is not struck by her love.

  Only when it’s over and she has discovered his ordinary nature, might she wonder. Probably not. She will go on experiencing the yes in herself and only when it has led to more than the gentle disappointment of the boy on the bicycle, to damage and pain, might she stop within it and say I know what this is. I’m saying yes. That’s all and it’s nothing – memory, association, need, desire, nothing.

  Or she will look at the person she’s chosen and remember the first time she saw them and how her whole self said yes and here they are in a life together. Perhaps that’s what happened to the woman with the slate-andsilver plait and her stranger. In hindsight we call this love at first sight – when yes is met with yes and circumstances or propensities allow it to amplify unending.

  follow

  The man Iris watched unbuttoning his coat also finds himself hard to place. The complication she saw in him is sadness. His wife died and such is his grief that he appears more alive when he feels less so. If he feels anything at all it is that life has become diagrammatic. There are steps and he takes them.

  At forty he is six years younger than Iris, although the tentativeness with which he moves through the world makes him appear well-established in middle age. He has his Mauritian father’s Arab father’s name, Raif, which his parents chose as his other, Irish, grandfather was called Ralph. Most assume it is an alternative spelling and he does not correct them.

  Raif grew up in a town on the south coast in a street between the golf course and the sea wall. He teaches at one of the dozen universities in the city. His subject is the history of science and he was on the museum’s guest list because he once wrote a book about curiosity cabinets. It was published ten years ago and has now disappeared so completely that he’s not even sure he owns a copy. He didn’t notice Iris when he was taking off his coat but he was conscious of the moment they passed through the entrance to the hall. Something formulated itself as if they briefly entered a dance. This remained with Raif throughout the party and drew him to her.

  Had they met before? Iris was a powerful presence though he could not yet say why. She was small and simply dressed but she was quite definite and unusually still. In the sea of the room, she appeared as dry land. In the end she turned and there he was and they started talking as if someone had just introduced them. He found that he wanted to tell her things and gave extensive answers to her questions until they both caught up with what was happening, something was moving too fast, and the conversation faltered. Iris said she must leave. Raif gave her his card but she did not reciprocate or even say thank you as she hurried away.

  His colleague Rosa came over and slipped her arm through his. (In what way did she want to say he belonged to her?) She suggested they go for a drink. For ten years I was a married man, he pondered, and now I’m not and I don’t know what this means. This thought has become a habit and a place to rest. I don’t know what this means.

  As soon as they were in the street, Rosa pulled out her phone and started tapping through her messages. Raif walked beside her as she made a call and, still talking, gestured towards a sign that said Bar. Raif nodded his agreement and they followed the sign down into a basement.

  The table was small and the music loud. They had to work to keep their legs from touching and lean forward so as to hear one another. Their mouths almost brushed when they spoke. What was he thinking? Rosa was chatting in a distracted way that made clear this meant nothing. They’d worked together for years and yet now she was so close that he was overcome by dangerous detail: her open mouth, the three studs in one ear, her pea-green fingernails and—

  Rosa was talking. She had taken his hand.

  Raif.

  He moved his fingers. Did he really just stroke her wrist? She pulled her hand away.

  It’s a long process, she was saying, but don’t use it. Two years is long enough.

  Use what? What for? She stood up and bent to kiss his cheek. This time her proximity was motherly. Had she turned something off or had he? He pretended he wanted to stay and have another drink and watched her go. He had nearly done something very stupid. What had he been thinking? I don’t know what this means.

  *

  He’s crossing the city, surprised to realise that it’s not all that late and that other people are just starting out on their evenings. The streets are still relaxed, the pubs crowded but orderly. It is early summer, the time of year when the city offers its gentlest possibilities. A chance for things to unfold at their own pace and yet Raif hurries home. It’s only ten o’clock and so much has happened. He’s exhausted.

  Back in his flat he wants to stop thinking about Rosa (or is it Iris who has disturbed him so?). Eventually he phones Helen, the woman he’s been seeing for a while. At first Raif contacted her whenever he wanted to do the kind of thing you do with someone else. They would go to a film or a concert and wake up together and she’d suggest ways of filling the day that meant leaving the house and being in the world. He’s not good at such things on his own. His inertia is habit as much as grief. Women perceive him as deep and men as slow.

  He asks Helen to come over and she hesitates because she has an audition in the morning and then says yes. Raif lets her in, offers her a glass of wine and talks about how tired he is. They sit for a few more minutes and then he gets up and says, as if to no one in particular, that he needs to go to bed. Helen has already taken her overnight bag upstairs. She goes to the bathroom and applies cream to her face with concentrated little dabs that Raif finds annoying. He reaches for his toothbrush and Helen steps aside.

  Raif climbs into bed as if alone and reads the paper while Helen gets undressed. He doesn�
��t look up as she slips off the underwear she changed into when he rang and stuffs it into her bag. She lies neatly beside him. Raif puts down the paper, turns out the light and places his hand between her legs. She waits but his hand is still.

  Three hours later Raif starts to sob and Helen wakes him. He kisses her deeply, pressing his head against hers. She takes her cues from him as they try together to make him come but he is medicated as well as exhausted and this is like dragging up an anchor. Eventually he lifts Helen’s face to his.

  I’m sorry.

  It’s fine.

  I’m sorry that I can’t—

  You’re tired.

  That I can’t offer you more.

  I’m fine, she says, and just as he starts to drift off she adds, It’ll soon be a year.

  You mean two.

  Two? Oh. I didn’t mean … I meant—

  Two years. Since my wife died.

  I meant us. Helen’s voice has become repellently small. Almost a year since the start of us.

  She knows he’s not listening and wonders why she brought it up. It’s not something she’s thought about before but there have been enough nights like this for her to start to wonder what she’s doing, what this is. He is not unfolding. If anything, tonight, he is more tightly folded than he has been before.

  Raif spoke to Iris for a matter of minutes. What does he see in her? What he needs to. He sleeps and wakes and what comes to mind is a woman turning away. He follows her.

  *

  At nine o’clock, Iris leaves the museum and walks towards the station. The great blank doors of this street of institutions are closed. The drifts of children have gone. The tourists, amiable and regular, have gone. Now there are students returning to their dilapidated residences and cleaners going to work. Iris is wearing her summer clothes because it is the end of May and an old tweed coat because it has been cold for weeks and she is slow to make such adjustments. In her loose dress and large coat, with her short hair, she might look childish were her bearing not so considered.