Chapter 87
Empty Rooms
The train pulled up outside a large, intimidatingly grand house on Sumner Place in South Kensington on a sunny evening in August.
The house was set back from the street behind a wide front garden, laid with immaculate tiles, and home to three large square pots, each containing a laurel tree.
It was an impressive house.
The Dreamer looked at it with mouth agape. ‘This is ours?’
‘Uh huh. Oh yes. Six bedrooms. Five absolutely unnecessary.’
Wilbur, suited, wearily climbed the steps. He was talking into an old (new) Motorola mobile phone, with a little bulbous aerial sticking out of the top.
‘Wow,’ said the dreaming honeymooner of 1974, ‘a portable phone!’
‘Yes,’ Wilbur was saying, ‘we need the projection reports by Tuesday … Yes … Okay … Bye, Sheila.’
The Dreamer looked to the Ghost. ‘Who’s Sheila?’
‘My PA.’
They followed forty-nine-year-old Wilbur inside the house. A wide hallway led into a vast living room with expansive bay windows, a large opulent sofa and framed art on the wall, including Maggie’s poster for the Sheffield Crucible’s production of The Cherry Orchard.
And there was Maggie herself on the sofa.
She was as beautiful as she had ever been.
She was exactly herself, so looking at her could only ever feel like looking at home.
Yet there was a barrier up. And now there was a sense of guilt as he looked at her.
The way someone watches a wound that they inflicted.
The Ghost observed she was wearing a white T-shirt advertising a Kandinsky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. She had done a little freelance design work for them, helping with a catalogue.
The Ghost thought about her in a way that he never properly did when he was alive, at least not during this time. He had the desire to be tuned in, calm, just focused entirely on her. Rather than his head lost in digital economic graphs.
‘Oh, Maggie, I’m sorry. I missed you,’ said the Ghost.
That was what was coming to mind now. Not just how much he didn’t know about what happened to her after the divorce, but all those years before it. How much he missed.
He knew the basics. He knew she had been struggling, really, ever since she had left Sheffield.
She hadn’t worked full time in-house since she arrived in London nearly two decades before.
She had initially said she enjoyed the freedom of being freelance, but he doubted that was still true.
That was before the withering of her friends in the north, before the miscarriage, before Claudette snubbed her after Charlie was sacked, before they tried one more time for a baby, and before – not long after – she realised she was now only wanting a baby to reach a husband who didn’t want to be reached.
Before she swallowed her dreams, one morsel at a time, all while feeling enough guilt not to moan.
She had enjoyed doing graphics for Budd Books for a little while, but then Wilbur and the firm had decided they should take a more commercial direction.
‘Your style is too subtle, too brilliant,’ he remembered telling her.
When really he wanted the separation of his work from her, indeed from anyone he cared about.
He had been patronising to everyone, but to her especially.
Dressing up every rejection as a compliment.
Little by little, by a series of barely detectable steps, she surrendered her sense of purpose.
Or, living so in the shadows of Wilbur’s working life, and with her interests so unnoticed and untended by Wilbur, she surrendered to a role that always felt peripheral.
Not to Wilbur, but to the person she thought she would become.
She mourned that person, just as she mourned their marriage.
Because the thing was, despite everything, she loved the man she married.
She had always loved him. Just as he had always loved her.
The Ghost turned to the Dreamer, and saw him frowning at this Maggie from his future. A concerned, confused frown.
He sighed. ‘We’ve not appreciated her, have we?’
‘No. We’ve not appreciated anything.’
He pointed to a framed drawing on the wall. An illustration of the bandstand in Kensington Gardens surrounded by flowers.
‘After we gave up on having children, she went to the park to draw. Like the old days. She did it quite a bit, I think. I don’t know. But I remember seeing the drawings around the place.’
Maggie had a novel beside her but was blankly staring at The X-Files on TV, where a psychic was helping Mulder and Scully find a serial killer. For all its splendour, an air of sadness hung about the whole room. A London loneliness.
When Wilbur walked in she looked up. But the forty-nine-year-old Wilbur wasn’t noticing.
He walked straight through to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of red wine.
A minute later he headed back into the large living room, slipped off his shoes, and slumped on a seat near the sofa, pressing his toes into the plush carpet.
Only then did he finally notice Maggie. And he could see she was out of sorts and had no idea why.
He stared at her the way you might stare at a mysterious cloud, wondering if it was going to rain.
He was, at this point in his life, quite the opposite of Maggie in at least one sense. In the sense that he couldn’t read people very well. Where she could still read the book of someone from a single page, he could be presented with the entire novel and not follow its plot at all.
‘You all right?’ he asked, confused.
There was a pause. On the screen, Scully was frustrated with Mulder as he drove a car somewhere. Maggie pulled the remote control out from the gap between two cushions and switched the TV off. This made Wilbur a little more confused.
‘Maggie?’
‘They’re knocking it down,’ she said, her voice a little distant.
This did nothing to lessen his confusion. ‘What are they knocking down?’
‘The Palace Cinema.’
‘In Sheffield?’
He said it like it was a foreign and irrelevant planet.
She sighed. ‘Yeah. My dad called. You know. To ask about the doctor.’
A guilty look passed across Wilbur’s face. He was bad at guilt. He had tried to shut it away. Because the trouble with guilt was that it was sticky. It joined all the other guilts. And he had quite a few. ‘Doctor? Oh yes. I forgot it was today. How was it? How are you?’
‘Don’t worry. The results came back and it was benign. I’m fine.’
He smiled. ‘I bet you feel relieved.’
She smiled too, but it was a sad kind of smile. ‘It’s strange. Aye, I am, yeah. But also, for a month now I’ve thought I might have cancer. The doctor said it looked very ominous and I should prepare for the worst.’
‘You didn’t tell me that. The very ominous part.’
‘Oh, Wilbur, I did. I told you on the day but you had a lot on. And since then there’s hardly been a chance. I tried to tell you two nights ago before you rushed out to that do in the City. You know, the night we were meant to be going out for our anniversary and I had to cancel the restaurant.’
He sighed. He had a vague recollection of a medical conversation he hadn’t really had time to listen to. ‘I’m sorry about that. But I told you, we can go another time.’
Maggie sighed too. Or maybe it was just a slow exhale, a steadying of emotion. ‘The doctor had worried me. And so it made me think about things.’
‘What kind of things?’
She didn’t answer that. Not yet. She just stared at the unlit fireplace. At the bars of the empty grate like a tiny prison. ‘Dad told me they’re knocking it down to build a shopping centre on Union Street …’
‘Oh. Yes. I knew about that.’
‘It’s like capitalism is a bomb, isn’t it? One that creates cities then explodes them really slowly …’
He smiled. He wondered if she was depressed, and that thought troubled him, and he wanted to dismiss it by forcing himself and the atmosphere into an ill-fitting breeziness.
‘I like that you’ve kept that political side.
Like it’s still 1968. Like we’re off to a protest at the art college with flowers in our hair. ’
‘Don’t patronise me, Wilbur,’ she said quietly. ‘I can’t help it if I kept my compass.’
‘Compass? What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just tired. I’m just being unreasonable.’
‘Yes. I can see that.’
The observer who watched this from a dream was confused. ‘Why are we being like this?’
The Ghost sighed the kind of sad, defeated sigh that only the dead can manage. ‘Well, Dreamer, because she was right. She was right. I had lost my compass.’