Chapter XXI Martin
XXI.
Martin
STRANGE TO ADMIT BUT WITH OLD SCORES SETTLED, I find my days are empty.
There’s nothing that excites me. No interruptions to the regular stultification of lectures and notes and essays and television and sleep and lectures and notes and essays and television and sleep.
The perpetual cycle of the mundane. Term has finished and I’m stuck teaching bored, rich summer-school students from America.
‘Is this where Shakespeare was born, Mr Gilmour?’ they’ll ask, in their sing-song Texan drawls while I try to teach them the rudiments of Impressionism. ‘Have you ever met Princess Kate?’
Sometimes I lie and say yes to both, just to interrupt the monotony.
My sessions with Joanne Buster have come to an end, so I don’t even have the enjoyment of feeling infuriated by her anymore.
Cosima has left and the cottage is empty without her.
In her absence, the press interest has waned.
No more bawdy shouting from those wretched photographers gathered on the pavement in their large leather jackets and knitted hats.
‘Oi, Martin, gizza smile!’
They must have taken thousands of photos and yet I only appeared in one.
It was taken on the day of Cosima’s departure.
She was leaving to get into her taxi, head bowed, shielding her face with her hand and I was the indistinct out-of-focus figure helping her with her case in the early-morning gloom.
The caption called me ‘Fitzmaurice family friend, Martin Gilmore’.
Oh, the irony! For so long I’d wanted to be recognised in this way – in print, by others, as part of the historical Fitzmaurice record – and now I had made it with my name misspelled and my physical self forever in the shadows.
I suppose I hadn’t quite realised how much of my life I had carved around the central plinth of my resentment.
Stupid to admit, but there we are. I hadn’t understood how much I needed Ben (and then, when we ceased to be friends, the idea of Ben) to focus on.
I’ve finally got what I wanted – or, at least, a version of what I wanted – and I don’t know what to do with myself.
It’s a funny thing, revenge. It winds its way around you, muscular as a rattlesnake, and squeezes until you gasp for air.
The only way to breathe is to wrestle yourself out of its tightening grip and kill it.
A university colleague of mine once told me a story about his sister, who had been living in Australia shortly after the birth of her son.
She used to leave her baby in a Moses basket on the floor of her kitchen until, one morning, when she was still in her nightgown and putting the kettle on for tea while her baby slept, she heard a hissing sound.
When she turned, she saw a black snake slithering across the linoleum with alarming speed towards her baby.
She grabbed a carving knife and beheaded it before the kettle boiled.
‘She didn’t think twice,’ my colleague said. ‘Some maternal instinct just took over.’
The floor was splattered with snake blood, he told me. So she lifted her baby out of his basket and held him close to her, then watched in a state of incredulity as the headless snake continued to move.
‘They retain their reflexes after death, you see,’ he said. ‘They can still bite for hours after they die.’
I think of this dying snake now, of the way it would continue trying to poison even in the absence of its prey, not knowing that the game was over, that its brain was no longer sending signals to its body but was guided instead by some primitive natural impulse over which it had no control.
My revenge against Ben had been the snake.
I had thought that beheading it would give me peace or satisfaction, a sense that my life could now start being lived on its own terms, rather than in the shadow of unsettled scores and betrayal.
But still my serpentine vengeance tries to hiss and lash out, despite there being nothing to sink its venom into.
I am left without purpose, lost in this newness.
There’s a fatal flaw in revenge, I realise, which is that the pursuit of it brings you closer to your nemesis than you will ever be again.
You have to study their every intricacy, to know the twists and turns of their character better than you know yourself.
You have to remember the particular inflection of voice, the specific shading of their behaviour, the teleological narrative of their past history, all while anticipating their next move.
I suppose, in the end, revenge is a lot like love.
And when love vanishes, one grieves for it.
I admit it. I miss him. I miss Ben.
Richard Take is our new prime minister, which is not a sentence I ever thought I’d write.
I suppose his bad decisions will be the result of incompetence rather than malicious superiority, so that’s some small comfort.
He hasn’t been in touch, which is wise, but I know that he knows that I know he owes me.
It could be very helpful in future, to have the ear of the PM.
I’ve got my eye on a consulting role of some sort. Cultural advisor has a nice ring to it.
Cosima emails me updates from Bali. She barely uses punctuation or capital letters but I’m grateful for her communication nonetheless. She sounds busy, which is good. It’s important to keep her mind off things. I’ve told her she’s always welcome here when she decides to come back.
The odd thing is, I actually mean it.
I dreamed of Fliss last night. She was on a beach, beckoning towards me and smiling. She looked – and I can’t think of a less hackneyed word – beatific.
A terrible day.
I came home to silence. Normally Maurice would jump off and rush to the kitchen as soon as he heard my key in the lock, waiting for his bowl to be filled as if he hadn’t been fed in weeks.
But today there was no leaping or rushing.
There was no waiting by the bowl, nudging my hand with the top of his head as I tried to open a can of his ocean paté.
In the hallway, I called out his name. No response.
It was only when I walked into the sitting room that I saw what had happened.
He was lying there, curled up on the sofa in his usual place, his nose tucked under his tail, his paws neatly crossed.
He didn’t move when I came in. There was no welcoming purr or quizzical mewing.
When I reached out to stroke him, his fur was cold, the small, dear body rigid.
He was a good cat. I never knew his real age. He’d turned up unannounced in my garden one day seven years earlier and that was that. He was my most loyal companion. I was never judged by Maurice.
I buried him in the garden. I took the rusted spade from the shed and dug a spot beneath the acacia.
The ground was harder than I thought it would be and it was a mucky business – as I write, my trouser legs are still splattered with mud – but I wanted to give him a dignified final resting place, so I kept at it.
I wrapped Maurice in a yellow hand towel, giving his head one final stroke.
Then I laid his body in the hole. He looked so small there and I worried he would be lonely, so I went back inside the house and brought out one of his favourite catnip fish toys.
I put the fish next to his front paws. Better.
I started filling the grave, spade by spade.
Clods of soil landed with a thud. Soon, every scrap of yellow was covered.
I patted the earth flat and, kneeling there, was seized with the desire to pray.
I muttered the lines of Our Father, for the first time since school, and asked a God I don’t believe in to look after Maurice in the afterlife.
Perhaps he’ll find a nice warm radiator he can sleep next to.
The cottage is very quiet tonight.
I think I will go to bed.
I’ve had the television on all day. Most unlike me but I wanted to hear the sound of other voices. The news leads with the charges against Jarvis being dropped. Not enough evidence. Hard to prove cases of historic sexual assault. The victim now dead and unable to press charges. Etcetera.
It’s a blow, I can’t deny it. The older I get, the more I think that there is no justice, that Thomas Hobbes was right when he wrote that human life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’.
We convince ourselves that we care about something greater than our petty little lives, that we exist in civilised connection with each other, building communities of enlightened compromise and calling them ‘democracies’, but really we’re guided by pure self-interest. Jarvis has money, which means he has power: the more of the former he’s amassed, the more of the latter he’s been granted and the more he’s been able to twist the truth into a lie that serves him.
He scares me. He always has. When he bullied me at school, it was because he saw his own weaknesses mirrored by mine.
We were the ones who never fully fitted in, who had no weapons of belonging at our disposal.
We needed Ben. But now, in adult life, the axis of power has shifted.
It is Jarvis who can manipulate people and bulldoze systems; who can bend the arc of justice itself.
I had hoped other women might come forward but I think they’re all too frightened. He’s covered his traces well. I imagine he picked his victims with care – either the women with nothing to lose, whom no one will believe, or the women with everything to lose who do not want to risk it.
Is there no one who can stand up to him?
I wonder if Jarvis will come after me. I wonder if he knows. He always did possess a reptilian instinct for uncovering secrets.
The cameramen follow Jarvis as he leaves his house in Holland Park. He’s dressed for jogging, in unappealingly baggy shorts and a black sweatshirt with the logo of his hedge fund embroidered in white thread over his right nipple.
‘Anything to say, Mr Jarvis?’ a reporter shouts, off-screen.
‘I feel totally and utterly vindicated,’ Jarvis says, running his fingers through messy hair. ‘This whole case has been a tissue of fabrication from beginning to end. Now get out of the way, lads, I’m off on my run.’
‘And what about your friend, Ben Fitzmaurice?’
I watch as the cameras trail Jarvis’s receding form, running with ungainly slowness down the street. He raises one arm aloft but doesn’t answer.
What the fuck does that mean?
And if I never see Ben again, who am I without him?
I contemplate my future. It stretches out, long and dull and undistinguished.
Lectures and notes and marking. Tepid instant coffee in stained cups in the staffroom, mystified by colleagues who find their own conversation interesting and their jokes amusing.
An endless parade of disappointing students.
My cottage, an empty refuge. No Maurice or Cosima now.
No Tipworth to go to. No campaign to be part of.
No more press cuttings to gather about Ben Fitzmaurice’s luminous career. No sense to any of it.
A muffled drumbeat of a question: does he ever think of me?
Serena calls to invite me to dinner four days from now. I am sick with gratitude.
Firstly, this means they do not suspect me – but, of course, how could they? There is no trace back to me.
Secondly, I will see him again. I have something to do with myself. I am going to book my train tickets this instant.
The hydrangeas are in bloom, the garden awash with dusty pink. I cut a stem with secateurs and leave the rosy blossoms on Maurice’s grave, patting the earth gently as I do so.