the Gate. She didn’t go so far as to give me her telephone number, but I prudently copied it from the instrument at a point during the interview when she was distracted: when one of Brenda’s children had somehow slipped into the room to find a drum stacked halfway down a pile of similar toys. My own children, Sophie and Ben, managed their early childhood well enough without the help of noisy, let alone musical, toys. My husband Lou was musical—a professional musician, in fact—and, I suppose understandably, couldn’t endure the sound of good instruments badly played, or bad instruments played at all. I notice I refer to him in the past tense. One speaks of ex-spouses in the past tense. Don’t you do the same? But Lou is still legally my husband: Sophie and Ben are certainly my children, not my ex-children. The title outruns even death. I suppose if a court denied me access to them, I might speak of them as ex-children. But that kind of thing doesn’t happen now. It used to, of course. Adulterous mothers would be prevented from ever seeing their children again, lest they spread the contamination of sin. Then I suppose they did turn into ex-children.
Lou is a kind, understanding and reasonable man: friend as well as spouse. All that has happened is that I met Hugo at a party and came to understand that, as well as having friend and spouse, a woman needs the excitement of a lover from time to time: a re-basing, as it were, in the physical: the reincarnation of the carnal self in a body which gets, over the years, far too controlled by spirit and mind. The customary sex of the marriage bed does so little to stop the mind working, and the mind must stop working if the flesh is to have its due gratification; the acknowledgement of its glory.
I called Lou. It seemed to me I owed him some explanation. Besides, he might be worrying about me. It was 10.23 according to the Holiday Inn’s radio alarm clock, which flashed on and off on the bedside panel, redly. I wished it would just steadily and quietly glow. My nerves were a little on edge. Shortage of sleep was beginning to tell. Lou would be in the middle of practice. He was—is—a man of regular habits: up at seven thirty, breakfast at eight, mail at eight thirty, and so on. Even his phone calls were planned and made on the half-hour. I should have postponed the call for seven minutes. It might have gone better.
‘Lou,’ I said, when I heard his quiet, familiar voice on the phone.
‘I think I’m possessed by the Devil.’ It wasn’t what I meant to say, but that’s the way it came out.
‘General belief is,’ he said, ‘that you’ve gone mad. My advice to you is to see a psychiatrist. I’m in the middle of practice, as you surely know. Have you anything important to say?’
‘How are the children?’
‘As well as children are when their mother fails to come home from a party because she’s shacked up with some gorilla in a cheap hotel. The children have rather a low opinion of you, I imagine.’
Lou is a slight, controlled man with a sensitive face: Hugo large, grizzly and loose-limbed.
‘Lou, you haven’t told them?’
‘We agreed to be honest with the children, I seem to recall.’
I could have taken him to task about how he was defining ‘agree’ and ‘honest’, but just somehow didn’t.
‘The Holiday Inn is far from being a cheap hotel,’ was all I could think of to say. ‘On the contrary, it’s rather expensive. They’ve taken a print of Hugo’s Amex, but I don’t somehow think he’s on good personal terms with them, and you know how tight everyone is on expenses, these days.’
‘You just stay in the media world you know and love,’ he said. ‘It’s all you’re fit for. Leave me and the children in our little patch of civilization. Roll round in the gutter as much as you like, but don’t call me to tell me all about it. We’re doing just fine without you.’ And he put down the phone. No, it was not a good phone call. It brought back to me the reality of the life I had so abruptly left behind: I had somehow assumed it would fade out of existence when I wanted, fade back in when convenient, unchanged. That was what years of impeccable behaviour earned you. A holiday. Apparently