Chapter XVI Martin
XVI.
Martin
‘Who could that be?’ I asked Maurice, who looked at me through half-closed eyes and thumped the tip of his tail decisively against the sofa cushions.
I paused the TV and let the phone ring out.
In the silence, I pressed play, stroking the top of Maurice’s head in the rhythmic, smooth way he appreciates.
I know I shouldn’t love this televisual dross as much as I do but we all have our vices.
Besides, the chap who plays Daemon Targaryen is rather fetching with all that peroxide hair.
The phone rang again.
‘Oh do leave me alone,’ I said, rising from the sofa. Maurice miaowed resentfully and leapt onto the floor, aggrieved by the impertinence.
In the hallway, I picked up the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘Oh, hello there, hi, am I speaking to Martin Gilmour?’
‘You are.’
‘Ah great, that’s great.’ It was a woman’s voice, cosy and overly familiar. ‘It’s Linda here, from the USA. I’m on the night-time security desk and you have a visitor.’
‘I’m sorry?’
I glanced through the doorway into the living room where Maurice had taken up residence on his favourite mustard-yellow armchair.
‘A visitor. She says you’re expecting her. Her name is …’ There was a ruffling sound on the other end of the line and he heard the woman speak to someone, but more distantly this time, as if she were holding the receiver away from her. ‘Cosima Fitzmaurice.’
As I say, it was the last thing I expected.
And now here she is, bedraggled and stubborn-looking, standing on my doorstep with a horrid backpack and wearing those heavy, military boots.
‘Cosima,’ I say. ‘What are you doing here?’
She raises her hand, in a gesture that reminds me instantly of Ben. Part of his politician’s patter, along with the y’knows and the I-hear-yous and the if-you’ll-just-let-me-finishes.
‘I’m sorry, I knew you’d say that. But I just … didn’t know where else to go.’
She looks at me in the same beseeching way Maurice does when I’m opening a can of tuna.
I am intrigued, it’s true, but I also don’t particularly want her hanging around.
My cottage is not open to guests. I’ve never had anyone over for dinner in the seven years I’ve been living here.
The idea appalls me. Stacking plates slippery with uneaten lasagne, trying to make small talk as the wine grows tepid amid guttering candlelight. Just awful.
‘I’m not equipped for guests,’ I say.
She twiddles the ends of her hair with one finger.
‘Could I maybe just stay the night? I promise I won’t be any trouble. You don’t have to talk to me, or make a bed. I’ve got a sleeping bag. I’ll sleep on the floor.’
I lean against the doorframe, arms crossed, assessing.
‘Why can’t you go home?’
She shuffles her feet.
‘Long story.’
‘Does it have to do with … what you shared with me?’
She shakes her head.
‘No. It’s more that they hate everything I stand for and I hate everything they stand for, so …’
The thought lapses.
So, obviously, I have to invite her in. It’s not just my curiosity, I’ll admit.
There might be an opportunity here too, although what shape this will take has not quite clarified itself in my mind.
I stand aside and beckon her into the hallway.
She casts her eye over the stacked towers of old newspapers and the unopened mail – brown envelopes and pizza delivery flyers, mostly – and I see her turn away quickly.
It strikes me that I’ve let things get a bit unwieldy on the domestic front.
When we walk through to the sitting room, I notice that apart from Maurice’s chair and the side of the sofa I’ve been sitting on, every other surface is covered with books and bits of paper.
There is a mustiness to the air – perhaps it’s the wilting peonies I have yet to throw out or maybe it’s something Maurice has unwittingly dragged in.
But I can’t tackle it now so I open the window instead, to let in the night air.
Maurice starts at the noise, leaping off the chair.
Cosima stands in the centre of the room, holding her backpack in her hands, while I clear the scrapbooks I’ve left on the leather armchair.
They are bulging with all the press cuttings I’ve collated over the years – articles profiling Ben, news stories with mentions of his career, the glossy Homes & Gardens spread they did last year at Tipworth and so on.
It’s probably best she doesn’t see them.
She plonks herself down on the armchair.
‘Thanks,’ she says, shrugging herself out of her jacket.
‘Do you want a water or something?’ I ask, my arms still full of papers. ‘Or, I don’t know … a tea? Do you drink tea?’
She laughs.
‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I?’
‘One never knows what’s “in”’ – I mime quotation marks – ‘with young people these days. What’s been cancelled and what hasn’t.’
‘OK, boomer.’
‘Milk?’
‘Yes please. And one sugar. I mean … if you have any,’ she adds hastily.
That’s the thing about the upper classes: beautiful manners. Very well brought up by their nannies and housekeepers and boarding-school matrons.
When I return with her tea, I sit and face her from the sofa. I allow her the chance to speak, but she doesn’t take it. Instead, she clasps the mug between her small, pale hands and blows on the tea.
‘Why are you here?’ I ask.
She tells me a convoluted story about how she became an activist and got involved in various protests – shackling herself to oil tankers and spraying orange paint over priceless objets d’art and so on.
It all sounds terribly effortful and dreary, especially the nicknames which are things like Turnip and Knotweed.
At some point in her story, she mentions an undercover police officer called River and claims to have fallen in love with him.
Well, she’s seventeen, I suppose. I thought I was in love at seventeen.
It was this chap, River, who gave her the hushed-up reports on what happened to Fliss.
Then she says she was at an ‘action’ earlier this evening at the British Museum and hadn’t known her parents were going to be there, but there they were and when they recognised her she ran away.
‘But why on earth did you come here?’ I ask.
‘Couldn’t think of anywhere else.’
We hadn’t been in touch with each other since she’d given me access to the files that night at Tipworth.
It had seemed safer not to be linked but I realise now that she thinks we are bonded in some way because of the secret she confided in me.
I confess, I hadn’t thought of it like that. And yet I suppose we are.
‘You must have friends …’ I counter.
‘Not really,’ she says. ‘I mean, there are the other activists but I’ll be dead to them now.’
There is a certain starkness to her face when she admits this.
How interesting, I think. Maybe we have more in common than I might previously have imagined. Because I don’t have friends either. Unless we’re counting Ben, which, obviously, given the present circumstances, we are not.
‘Do you really think you’ll save the world?’ I ask.
‘Probably not,’ she says. ‘But you have to try, don’t you?’
I leave this unanswered. There’s no point in trying, is what I want to say. The odds are already stacked against you. There’s nothing you can do to stop the onward march of collective self-interest. The world is going to implode no matter what you or I do.
‘But do you really believe in it all?’ I press.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean: did you do it all because of what you believed in – the “cause”, as you put it – or because you were angry at your parents?’
Cosima contemplates this.
‘Bit of both, not gonna lie.’
Not gonna lie. One of my least favourite phrases: no liar would ever use it, rendering the whole point of it meaningless.
‘I hate what they’ve done to the world,’ Cosima continues calmly. ‘Capitalism, greed, the rapacious march of corporate misogyny.’
‘That’s quite a statement.’
She shrugs.
‘If we aren’t going to right the wrongs of our parents’ generation, then who is?’
A memory comes to me then, unbidden, of my mother sitting in front of her large television in her airless bungalow, slumped forward in her dressing gown, shouting at me to get out of her house, screaming that I wasn’t ‘right in the head’.
I remember her withered chest, visible under the open neck of her nylon nightie.
She had dementia by then, with a vituperative turn of phrase, full of effing and blinding.
When I had been a child, swearing would make her angry.
It was one of the many forbidden behaviours in our home, along with elbows on the table, forgetting to take your shoes off, and saying ‘what’ instead of ‘pardon’ (although, when I went to Burtonbury, it transpired she’d given me the wrong advice.
If you said ‘pardon’, it marked you out as unbearably common.
‘What’ was actually the posher expression).
Alzheimer’s had stripped my mother of her hard-earned propriety, the rules she’d learned from etiquette books and Reader’s Digest periodicals.
Her viciousness, which had previously been kept in check, burst forth like a marauding drunk thrown out of a pub at closing time.
I was never sure whether her failing mental acuity revealed her truest nature or obscured it, but I strongly suspected that she had always despised me for not knowing.
I had spent years being scared of her. My solution was to remove myself from her life and when she died, in my late thirties, it had been a relief.
I never hated her, though. Hating would have felt too close to caring and so I refused the lure of it and didn’t allow myself to feel anything at all for Sylvia Gilmour.
But her existence as my mother was an inescapable fact.
I couldn’t deny her, like Cosima is trying to do.
Instead, I chose to blame love itself. I became wary of it.
I held it at arm’s length, finding it untrustworthy.
I began to regard love as a slippery pollutant which turned the seas toxic.
As a tactic, it had worked pretty well for me – minus Ben and his assault on my fragile certainties.
Even then, I tried not to love but instead to control him (and by extension, myself).
I can see it now, the inevitable linear progression of it: Sylvia to Ben to my current existence as an almost fifty-year-old man who has never had a relationship in the way he would have liked.
Stupid, really, to have fallen into the trap set by love despite my strenuous attempts to avoid it. Because even the avoidance shapes you.
‘… they don’t understand me and they never will and I don’t want to be anything like them,’ Cosima is saying.
From outside comes the high-pitched wail of a mating fox.
The foxes are everywhere at the moment. This morning, one was strolling along the road in broad daylight, snouting through pavement rubbish, unperturbed by my presence.
I pour myself another glass of Pinot.
‘It’s probably just a phase.’
She stares at me with great intensity.
‘Was it just a phase for you?’ she asks.
Well, I think, she’s got me there.
‘They aren’t my family, so it’s a little different.’
She turns away, her face screened by that curtain of dark hair.
‘But no,’ I say. ‘It’s not been a phase for me. I still feel all the same rage. I’ve just got better at disguising it. I’m better at playing by the rules and staying quiet and, well … I suppose you’d call it biding my time. The difference is …’
I sneak a sideways glance. I have regained Cosima’s attention.
‘… that I don’t want to be one of them anymore. It’s more that I want to expose them for what they are.’
I place my wine back on the side table. There is a fine layer of dust across the surface, apart from the circular imprint of the glass’s base.
‘Cool,’ Cosima says.
I confess, I was expecting more – a little hint of drama wouldn’t have gone amiss – but at least she hasn’t run shrieking back to her parents or denounced me as a crazed narcissist or gaslighter or sociopath or whatever pseudo-psychological label is au courant with Gen Z this particular week.
Or would Cosima be Gen Alpha? I lose track.
Either way, we seem to be aligned in our ultimate objective.
‘So, I read those files,’ I say.
She raises her eyebrows.
‘And now you know,’ she replies.
‘Know what?’
‘How awful my father is.’
I feel the familiar twitch in my left lower jaw.
‘I think,’ I say softly, ‘I already knew that.’
She gives a sharp semiquaver of laughter.
‘What did you do with the files?’
She scratches at her left wrist with her right hand. Lines of pinkish skin form underneath her fingernails.
‘You did do something with them, didn’t you?’ she asks, trying to disguise the undercurrent of desperation in her voice.
‘Are you sure you want to know?’
Maurice stalks back into the room and, ignoring me entirely, goes straight to Cosima. I watch as the cat twists between her legs, nudging her calves until she reaches down and strokes his head. He starts to purr, with unseemly volume.
‘I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life,’ she replies.
So I tell her all about Richard Take and the sushi place and what’s going to happen next.
‘Wow,’ she says when I’ve finished. ‘That’s perfect.’ She leans back in her chair. ‘Perfect,’ she repeats.