The Method

Now that my wife, Julie, is pregnant with our child, it is clear that some kind of method is essential to our survival. Thus: night time. To divert attention from a dream, press the third eye, think of orange until heart stops pounding then concentrate on moving toes one at a time starting with the left little toe, moving across the spectrum to the right little toe. Do the same with the hands. These movements do not disturb my wife, who is a very light sleeper. If successful this creates a kind of wheeling sensation, which is very good for neutralising a particularly tenacious dream. Success lies in repetition. Give up too soon and you fall back into slumber, straight back into the dream. Imagine you’re a wheel. You can feel every bump and pebble as you roll across — what landscape? My favourite landscape, the mountains, with the sea in the distance. You can feel the salt on you, the wetness.

It is an October Sunday. The day is fine, the colour of sweet white wine. Mellow fruitfulness, whispers my wife, turning her freckled face to me, placing my hand on her belly where I can feel the faint movement of the baby, like a dreaming eye beneath its lid.

‘What shall we do?’ she asks me. ‘There aren’t many days left like this, you know, just the two of us.’

My wife likes to spend time with me. I find this marvellous, and unnerving. She likes simply to be with me, even if we’re just sitting there in the sitting room watching Dog Borstal on the TV. I don’t know how to be comfortable like this, though I try. We don’t like the same things, you see. Crosswords — yes for me, no for her. TV comedy (American) — yes for her, no for me. Discussion of the past — yes for her, no for me.

‘Let’s take the boat out,’ I say. Mucking about on boats — yes for me, no for her, but now that she’s almost immobile she finds she likes to sit quietly at the back of the boat as I scoot us round the Gareloch, the sun on her face.  She grins, the awkward grin that always lifts my heart. ‘Okay.’

While she’s having a shower I stand out on the lawn and wait for the dog to have a pee. The sky is tall today, and Arran is bitten and blue in the distance. The lawn is covered in dew, it springs beneath my feet, flush with moss and water that can’t drain. The dog bounces and rustles in the border.  It’s then that I see her. It is not unexpected, but still of course a shock that has me gasping for air. My first wife, Grace, is sprawled face down in the mud and stones of the drive. Her head lifts and she looks right at me. ‘Peter?’ she says.

The Method, whilst not preparing me exactly for this gives me a foundation. Of course I must not respond. Of course it must be resisted.

‘Peter?’ her eyes have gained a temporary focus now. Despite the indignity of her position, she is pleased to see me. I notice the sweater she is wearing is one I bought her long ago. She’s washed it wrongly of course — or I did — and it’s shrunk right up her arms. She’s wearing some dreadful old slacks and sand shoes. She is thin.

‘Ready!’ my wife appears in the doorway, showered, blow-dried, impossibly young. She moves awkwardly, unused to the bulk she carries in front of her. Said bulk is wrapped prettily in a flowered smock. ‘Shall I lock up?’

Grace and I exchange a look. Julie ushers in the dog, closes the door, fiddles a little with the lock then steps out towards me, right over Grace.

I am pressing my forehead. I am thinking desperately of orange. Grace waves at me from the mud and I find that the comic aspect of the situation is weighing on me, pressing me to laugh.

‘Got a headache, love?’ Julie asks me.

‘Yes, suddenly. Splitting.’

My wife reaches over and strokes my cheek and starts the car. I glance in the rear mirror. There’s a shadow in the earth, where Grace was.

When we get to the boat, I check it over obsessively. Julie, sitting like a Buddha on the marina with her head tilted back into the sun does not know that the checks I am doing are nothing to do with safety and everything to do with seeing if my first wife is likely to roll out of a cupboard or from under a cabin bunk. My hands are trembling.

I loosen the knots on the ropes, help Julie into the boat where she settles herself with a sigh. We pull out of the marina, the boat grumbling and spluttering. The seals watch us from the barnacled hull of a ruined boat. I am thrown back to a time before all this when my every moment, waking and sleeping was overtaken in this way, when all I thought about was my first wife and how I might prevent disaster. Around us, the sea is flat calm. It looks back at me, as if my life is just a soft, grey pause. I pull the engine cord and the boat retches into life. At the helm, I set it free: it rears its shark nose out of the water and begins to cut through the loch.

We’re cruising when my mobile phone goes off: I glance at the screen and see that the caller is Catherine, a friend from my old life, a mutual friend of my first wife and me. I kill the engine, say brightly, why did I bring this thing! and answer the phone.

‘How are you? We hardly see you,’ says Catherine. Her voice has the faint whine of ownership frustrated. She is bursting with something that has to be imparted urgently and Julie is four feet away, already bristling.

The phone feels unwieldy in my hand and Catherine’s voice crackles like an old ’78. Of course I know what she’s going to say. Already I am composing myself: Julie would say I am getting that ‘look’ of which I am not conscious, but is the look I assumed for years. I experience it as a kind of flex in the brain, an urge for distraction, a wander of the eyes to the landscape, to the sea, plunging softly beside me.

‘She’s very ill. She wants to see you.’

My eyes dart across the ceiling of the boat, and the chinks of the higher ceiling beyond it rolling back and forth through tears in the canvas.

‘I see.’

‘I said I would tell you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it difficult for you to talk?’

I look at my wife, her lovely shape swollen with our so longed-for child. She is looking purposefully out of the side of the boat. I want to say, no of course it isn’t, but of course it is.  I will my wife to turn round so that I can flash her a reassuring smile. She does not, fixing her attention on the eiders speckling the far waves of our wake.

‘No of course not,’ I say, firmly. The Method, as recently defined, demands disclosure, it demands honesty, it demands saying what you mean. Nevertheless I receive the information through the mask that has become my face, the mask of the man I’m trying very hard to be. After the information is relayed Catherine finally gets to asking how I am, but neither of us cares about that and I can get out of the call. I go straight to my wife, whose shoulder is turned away and completely stiff. I practice opening my mouth and relaying the contents of the call, but the Method fails me here. I almost giggle at the tableau we present: man standing beside his wife, his hand clumsy meat on her shoulder, the wife staring back down the loch, both of them rigid as pillars of salt.

After the call the engine won’t start. I flail at the cord like a dying fish, and the boat chokes and spits and remains completely stationary. My wife is completely unrattled. She does not sigh nor tut, nor say God I’m going to need the loo soon, which are all signs that her pregnant patience is wearing thin. Meanwhile the October sun has decided to turn the heat up a little. It begins to crash onto the water. It begins to send little knives of blindness into the boat. We haven’t brought any water, nor any food. I decide to tackle the emergency, secondary engine, which I’ve never used before. I get on my knees and dangle out of the back of the boat, fiddling with the bolts that secure it out of the water. My face is burning, my wife closes her eyes and begins to hum a lullaby to herself. Then she says, ‘Don’t worry. We can always call the coastguard.’  I labour at the emergency engine, and I think that I don’t know if this is a companionable silence or not, and I wish more than anything that I knew her better and could amuse her instead of stranding her like this. Both of us, fish out of water. It’s not what I wished for her.

Forty-five minutes of heaving later, it occurs to me to check the ignition, and I find the keys have fallen out, and this is why it won’t start. I hold them up, I take a small bow, and my wife laughs good naturedly. She’s caught the sun, her face is pinked. ‘I think it’s time went home, don’t you?’ I say. She nods wearily, and I marvel at how the afternoon has slid around the things we needed to say, and how easily I have slid into my way of forgetting, of being several people, of being no one at all.

The Method, I realise, needs some refinement. I find over the following days that a quick nip of brandy from my desk drawer on the way home helps me relax, and later, when I am home a bottle or two of good wine before and during dinner makes me much more like the man I need to be. A small top-up on my way into work doesn’t go amiss either.  I wonder about my wife, as she plods about the house, larger and larger, more and more captive. I look at her sometimes as she frowns over something she is reading or thinking and I wonder if I can ever give enough, in exchange for her.

A few days later I am unsurprised to find Grace waiting in the bar where I have found it beneficial to call in. It’s a secret call-in, as secret as anything can be in a small community by the sea. But there she is, despite all the Method refinements.

The bar is in the sunniest part of an old Gothic pile, that also houses a hotel and restaurant. Grace is sitting by the window, a glass of white wine in front of her. She looks up as I arrive and shows her teeth, which are newly white and even. I blink and I see her hair has changed: long like it was when we met, no particular style, parted simply in the middle. She wears no make-up, except a tiny bit of awkwardly applied rouge around the cheeks. She’s wearing a shirt under the sweater, something with a long floppy collar. She’s looking from here like she’s blown in from 1973, although as I get closer I see her face is the face of a someone much older.

She lights a cigarette, oblivious to the new law which means it’s illegal and offers me one. ‘Hello, baby,’ she says.

A bottle of wine appears on the table, brought by the fat-haunched barman who knows me well. His beagle eyes regard me. ‘How’s Mrs?’ he asks.

‘Fine, thanks.’ I say defensively, and I feel my face flush with embarrassment. I pour a glass, slowly to the brim. Outside the day is drifting into evening. The sea is a pure grey, like something expensive in wool. The barman sighs and drifts away.

I know I should be invoking some aspect of the Method at this point. I should be leaving, at the very least I should be turning away, but where I am feels so familiar. I notice anxiety flickering somewhere in my throat. Grace has downed one glass and another has appeared. How much has she had? Her eyes, though intense, are clear, and her words are carefully said. The light is soft on her face, and certainly she looks younger now. I always thought of her as a child, coming up with crazy ideas.

I was her crazy idea.

She was my crazy idea.

And now we’re talking, we’ve picked up where we left off long ago, and we’re remembering all our old friends, and she’s telling me who called that day, and we’re laughing because she’s a wonderful mimic and I am grateful to her, she’s bringing back to me a whole lifetime, another country, and another person, a person I used to like. I ache for it, familiarity, easy silences, I miss it, being young.

She helps me finish my bottle, another arrives. I join her in a cigarette, although officially I’ve given up because of the baby. There seems no need to mention it, the baby, the wife, the Method. We both know about these things, there’s no point throwing them at each other, is there.

The barman is at my side, and on the other side, a scent I know but still jolts me. ‘Peter, what’s happened?’ asks Julie, and her hand is on my shoulder. I glance at Grace who is wearing a wide-eyed smirk. I know she is just bursting to mimic my wife’s horror and embarrassment. ‘Oh my Gaaaaad! My husband has gone out on his own!’ up to a shriek, ‘He’s had a drink! Waddabout the Babeeeeeee!’

My wife sits between Grace and me. The barman slips away. I glance quickly round the room and notice that everyone is talking very quietly with their heads turned away. Grace looks a bit rattled. My wife’s freckles have all but disappeared, as if we were all underwater. I find I am laughing, and then coughing.

‘Hello, darling,’ I say. ‘I just called in for –‘

‘Shut up,’ she says. Which seems very rude to me. This is the trouble with the young, they are so bloody rude. I find I am snickering again.

My wife pours herself a large glass of wine, in my glass and drinks the lot. Then she fills it up and downs that too. She takes a cigarette from Grace’s packet and lights it. This is interesting.

‘I know what’s going on,’ she says.

‘There’s nothing going on!’ my defence slips in at the end of her attack seamlessly. I am always ready to defend myself. I have to be. 

‘I’m not angry about it. I’m just observing. It’s a statement. I know what’s going on.’ She looks straight at Grace, who is hunched over her drink, bracing herself. I sigh theatrically.

‘OK then. What is going on?’

Grace is staring at my wife. More specifically, she is staring at the size of my wife. My wife’s breasts have the magnitude of beachballs, her belly creaks and strains against the edge of the table. Lately her face seems to have put on weight too, as though there is another face growing behind it, waiting to be birthed. Grace’s eyes move slowly around the body of my wife, taking her in inch by inch. Usually by now her face has acquired a mask of drunkenness, a deliberate expression that is no expression at all. But tonight the shock of my wife truly has registered.

‘What’s going on, is this.’ My wife rests a soft, luminous hand on her belly as if for reassurance. ‘Something in you has died, or was never there, or is lost in the past. I don’t know which it is, and I’m tired from trying to work it out. You don’t want me, you want another try at something that’s gone.’ Grace, hearing this, blinks slowly. Such observations are rather beyond her:  Grace’s relationship to everything, myself and booze included, was always much more a matter of simple and tenacious attachment. She is trying to work it out, though, and trying to see something positive for her situation in what my wife has just said. You want another try at something that’s gone. I can see that she has decided to focus on that.

‘That’s not true,’ I mumble. ‘It’s just that it’s hard to –‘

‘Hard to what?’

‘You know, thirty years. It’s hard to write that off.’

My wife’s fingers shake as they grip her glass. ‘So you think it’s better to write off the next thirty years of my life?’ she asks quietly. ‘You think that’s all right?’

‘You’re just a Johnny-come-lately.’ whispers Grace, mostly into her glass. My wife flinches and turns to examine the line of the curtains and the panelling and the intricate watercolours the hotel owner has recently placed in an uneven line down the wall.

‘You’re just a Johnny-come-lately.’ Grace says again, louder this time. ‘Peter and I — we’ve been friends for most of our lives. We have a friendship that goes back to practically before you were even born. You need to know that.’ She pauses for breath, takes another drink. ‘You can’t change that. To get rid of me, you have to cut out part of him. You’re probably the type to do that though. You’d probably rather he was all cut up and yours, that a whole man who remembers me.’

‘You should go,’ says my wife to me.

‘Go where?’

‘To see her. I know what’s going on. I know she’s ill.’

I repeat almost verbatim what my wife has said to me about this possibility in the past: ‘But I can’t do that. It’s going into the past. And anyway, it’s self-inflicted. She’ll just do it again.’ I speak quickly, my heart racing.

We look at each other, and I see a challenge in her face. It gives her face a lustre, like a polished piece of steel. I reach for her hand, and when I have reached it, I realise that Grace has gone. Her glass still has her lip marks around the rim. It is, of course, empty. My head is spinning. My wife’s hand is limp inside mine. ‘You should go.’ She repeats.

We discuss it no further, for which I am grateful, as analysis of that kind exhausts me. I am of another time where it is important to do and not to explain. And what does one do? The right thing. It is important above all other things to do the right thing.

A few days later I pack a small bag — I won't be staying long — and I make my way to the airport. My wife is kind throughout, makes no further mention of where I am going or who I am going to see. We seem almost to communicate telepathically those last few days. It is a relief no longer to hide phone calls or my concern about Grace (which seems strangely to diminish now that I am actually going to see her — for what? To say goodbye?)

And now, the air hostess is bending like a mannequin to hand me a drink, and outside the clouds seem as still and permanent as mountains. At the far horizon runs a line of orange, gorgeous and blinding. I let it burn the backs of my eyes, I keep my eyes open until they stream. I’m thinking of my wife and how she said nothing at the airport and walked quickly away from me, comical in her pregnant body — and though I try the Method, I find in this case that it does not work. The Captain makes a confident announcement about bad weather and a turbulent journey and suddenly I see the face of the air hostess and the soft American boy next to me have been changed forever, turned pale by the act of travelling into the past and away from the future. I tighten my seat belt and bite my lip as the plane gives a decisive shake. The time has come, I realise, to devise a new method. I call the hostess for another drink, I give her a wink, I swallow in one gulp the man I wanted to be, and I brace myself.