Published Novel and Short Stories

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Opening Section of 'Depth of Field'

Setting the focus

I am in the dark. This small room is like a nun's cell. Everything in its place. Neat, spare and entirely functional. There is a sink, the developing trays, a shelf of chemicals. Above the workbench the safety lamp glows a womb-like red. 1 have got used to doing things by feel or touch, by intuition. On the other wall, away from the water is an enlarger and a stack of boxes containing different grades of photographic paper and my books. The walls are bare except for a small spot where the paint peeled when I finally took down the photo of Liam. It left a small patch like pale new skin after a sticking plaster has been removed. In the developing trays black and white shapes are beginning to emerge from the bromide like thin ghosts. They seem to come out of nowhere, fragile as those transparent moths that gathered in our garden porch, clustering round the storm lantern on late summer evenings. They surface silent as memories and like the moths will only last for a while until they too perish; their paper yellowing or torn, lost or crumpled at the back of some dark damp drawer. Born from silver grains, they will eventually begin to age, will suffer attacks of light, of humidity; fade, weaken, and then vanish. Once transcendence was achieved through remembrance; through the images we keep in our head, or a smell, a taste, the chance sound of a voice. Perhaps it isn't coincidence that this is the century that invented both photography and history. But whereas history is simply a construct, the photograph is a device through which we try, for a brief moment, to hold time still before it moves relentlessly, indifferently on.

Sometimes I work listening to music. To Bach's late cello concertos or a Brahms intermezzo. But this morning I need quiet. Being here in this silence, among the faint whiff of chemicals reminds me of the labour room, of all that whiteness. Only the dull electronic blip, that thin line pulsating on the green screen monitoring the foetal heart beat, the sound of my own breathing; the icy tiles and starched linen.

Through my lens I have raised them from murky obscurity. Particularised and named them. In a way given them birth. Mary, Winston, the small girls with black braids like oiled rope, in pink nylon dresses, skipping. The abandoned synagogue in Princelet Street.

In order to obtain a positive picture, in which the light and shade corresponds to the original subject, it is necessary to print the negative. Everything contains the potential to be its opposite.

First published in Leviathan Quarterly

Rothko’s Red

“It’s like your cunt,” he’d whispered in her ear, in front of the magenta Rothko. “All that velvety redness. I know it so well; every fold and crevice. I don’t have to be an expert on art to understand these paintings.”

He’d been standing behind her in front of the large canvas, his arms wrapped around her waist, his chin on her shoulder, as she’d talked him through Abstract Expressionism. She’d liked standing like that in a public space, the bulk of him pressed against her back, their smells mingling. She had felt, what? Owned. Later when they’d gone back to the little hotel room with the low ceilings in the Marais and made love in the afternoon, the shrieks of the children playing in the playground of the Ếcole Maternelle below had floated up through their window. He’d brought her to Paris for her birthday. They’d sat in a small side street outside a café in a shaft of spring sunlight drinking café au lait.

“When I was trapped in my marriage, this is what I dreamt of,” he’d said. “Sitting having breakfast in Paris with a beautiful woman.” No one had done anything like that for her before. None of the occasional lovers who had crossed her path when she’d been living alone, trying to make ends meet, struggling to bring up Suzie. They had only been together for two months. On the journey back to London on the Euro-Star, whilst he’d slept, she’d watched their joint reflection in the train’s dark glass, her head resting on his shoulder, trying to seal the image in her mind like those fossilised flies in amber that the overeager Algerian trader had tried to sell them on the steps of the Musée D’Orsay; though the amber, laid in rows on a rush mat, had probably been plastic, the flies fake. But they had looked good together. Not quite young anymore, but good. And as he’d slept, she’d been conscious of the need to file and catalogue the moment, conscious of its transformation from the present into a memory.

***

Belle was waiting for Maggie under the clock at Grand Central station. The concourse was busy. It was snowing outside and Manhattan had become grid locked. Commuters scurried to catch their out of town trains before the weather got worse, hurrying to their platforms beneath the elegant crystal chandeliers across the marble halls. Belle was reading a book, her coat collar pulled up against the icy February chill. The navy cloth was covered in cats’ hairs and there was a small hole in the toe of her shoe. She looked up from her reading as Maggie approached and broke into a smile.

“You must be Maggie, great to meet you.”

Maggie lent forward, relieved, and kissed her on the cheek. Belle was Adam’s cousin once removed on his American mother’s side. When Adam had been twelve his father had sent him to stay with Belle’s family up in their cabin in the Adirondacks. Adam had often wondered if it was supposed to have been some sort of consolation prize, that holiday, compensation for his mother’s sudden death in that terrible pile up that rainy night on the M4. His father had never really been able to talk about it, had retreated into the carapace of his own grief, leaving the boys to cope the best they could. He was also a believer in The Great Outdoors, thought it was good for both young bodies and minds, especially as he, Adam and his younger brother, Tom lived in suburban Fulham. So that summer they’d been packed off for a month in the States. They had fished and canoed, made campfires down by the lake, and Adam had tried not to think about his dead mother.

During the funeral service at the crematorium, a vicar whom Adam had never met before, had compared his mother’s earthly life to the state of an unborn baby, explaining that a baby lived in a safe environment, blissfully unaware of what fate awaited it once it was pushed out from its warm watery cradle into the wide world. The baby, the vicar had said, was without fear for its future. And while, in life, we might think we had an idea of what death might entail, we could not possibly conceive of the journey into the light that would follow, imagine the comfort that would engulf us, any more than the baby could picture being born. For as with infinity, the human mind could not comprehend the mysteries that belonged only to God.

Adam had tried to listen but felt nothing. The vicar’s words hadn’t helped very much. He’d bit his lip hard and hoped the pain would stop him crying. He just wanted his mother back.

That summer in the Adirondacks Adam had thought Belle a bit odd. There had been something intense about her, something of the outsider. She’d been physically inept, always losing her sneakers or stepping on glass, dropping her swimming costume out of the roll of her towel as they’d gone down to bathe off the wooden jetty in the cold lake. But she had been funny. He’d liked that about her, though perhaps it had been a bid for acceptance, an apology for her clumsiness, but she’d been a great mimic and had made him laugh as they’d sat round the campfire melting marshmallows on sticks. Before that he hadn’t laughed for a while. He had only ever seen her once again. Years later when he’d gone to a Sociology conference at NYU. They’d met in a bar in TriBeCa. She was small, mousy, but not unattractive and trying to be a writer but without much visible success. She’d been married for a while to one of her Latino students from the language class she taught to make ends meet. But it hadn’t worked out. There had been something a little down-at-heel about her, he’d thought, a little desperate. He’d bought her dinner, feeling slightly overwhelmed by the details of her chaotic life, secretly relieved when the evening was over. He had not seen her again, but they’d kept in touch, tied by their childhood summer, she extending a permanent invitation to repay the dinner if he was ever back on her side of the Pond. She always sent Christmas cards. One had mentioned she’d published a story in the Atlantic Monthly. He dropped her a postcard from wherever he happened to be, including from Paris congratulating her on the story, mentioning there was someone new in his life. Her next Christmas greetings, in her familiar looping American script, had generously included them both: “To dear Adam and Maggie.”

***

It had been those words that had so hurt her. Their names linked together on the inside of the card. A tasteful photograph of a fir tree, its boughs bent with crystals of snow, wishing them Season’s Greetings. It had made her cry, the acknowledgement of them as a couple, an item. But it had come too late. Five days before Christmas Adam had told her he was moving out.

“Maggie, I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t give you what you want.”

“I don’t understand, I don’t know what I’ve done. Anyway I’ve never told you what I want.”

“You haven’t done anything. It’s probably selfish, but I need more space. I need to be in my own place, have time to get on with my next book. I’m sorry. I really am that it hasn’t worked out between us.”

Perhaps she should have seen it coming. But she hadn’t. She had thought that now they had found each other they would grow old together. How many more chances did one have of happiness on the slow slide down towards 50? As far as she was concerned, there was nothing much wrong. Nothing that couldn’t be negotiated, sorted out through talking, a bit of gentle, mutual care. But that was just the trouble. He wouldn’t talk. Not about feelings anyway. She remembered how, in bed one night as they had lain like two spoons in the kitchen drawer, her back against the curve of his stomach, his face buried in her hair, he’d mumbled something about the vicar’s words being, all those years before, just a formula, how he’d never even met his mother, that he could have been talking about anyone. She had tried to probe, but he’d just clammed up saying he didn’t want to talk about it. When he told her he was leaving she had suggested Relate, but had known in her heart that he would never go. “Maggie, that’s your solution. I just don’t accept therapy as a paradigm.”

She hadn’t meant to love him. When they’d first met that day, by chance, in the bookshop in the Festival Hall, she hadn’t been particularly attracted to him. They’d both been killing time. He waiting for his train from Waterloo, and she too early for her appointment with the Southwark design company for whom she did occasional watercolours for their greeting and birthday card range. She’d accidentally knocked over a pile of books with her bulky portfolio and he’d helped her re-stack them. She had thanked him, perhaps rather too profusely, and they’d ended up going for a coffee. He had asked her about her work and something in the tone of his voice, some slightly forced air of interested politeness, had made her wonder if she had sounded impatient or rude. She knew she could appear either too opinionated or too shy. People, who didn’t know her, thought her feisty. She alternated between feeling guarded and prattling on, wanting to say something interesting or wondering if she was just sounding pretentious. Nevertheless he’d asked for her number and the following week had rung her. Suddenly he was just part of her life.

“I’m not in love with him,” she’d told her friends, “after all he doesn’t know a thing about art. How could I possibly be in love with a man who doesn’t know his Picasso from his Pollock? Seriously though, it just sort of works. He’s nice and likes Suzie; I like his stepsons. We have fun.”

And now, now after two years, after he had woven himself into the warp and weft of her life, he had suddenly snipped the stitches, cut and run. He seemed to have done it so easily, but she felt like a piece of old knitting, the unravelled thread all twisted and furred. She no longer knew whether the man she’d been with for two years was the real person, or this cold stranger who seemed to have dropped a steel portcullis in his head leaving her stranded on the other side. She hadn’t known she would miss him so much; his skin next to hers, the fur of his stomach against her spine, even his snoring. Perhaps you never recognised love for what it was until it was no longer there for the taking.

For an intelligent man, he was so out of touch with his feelings. She’d tried to pinpoint when it had started, the shift, the slow, imperceptible withdrawal, that only now she could begin to chart. Perhaps it had been when he’d agreed to help set up a new course at Newcastle University. He’d get up at an ungodly hour, leaving her sleeping, to catch the earliest possible train and then not phone her all week, caught up in his own agenda.

“Maggie, why all the fuss? You know I’ll be back at the weekend. What’s there to say? You really don’t understand the pressure of academic life. You’ll still be here when I am back on Friday, but my paper has to be in.”

She had begun to feel pushed to the margins of his life, like that Styrofoam packaging used to fill the gaps around fragile objects sent through the post. All she wanted was to matter. Was that too much? It had seemed so. Perhaps intelligence was the last refuge of the emotionally deprived. Work seemed to be the only place where he felt really safe, in control. It was a known quantity. She remembered that night just before he’d moved in when, in her cold dark kitchen, he’d undone his zip and pushing her hips hard up against the edge of the cold steel draining board, had entered her with an urgent insistence and then, quite suddenly, burst into tears. He’d said it was for all the wasted years with Joanna, for his inability to resist her histrionics and emotional blackmail. Perhaps that was the moment Maggie had started to care. Vulnerability was, after all, erotic. She’d tried to comfort him, wondering if this was the first time he’d wept since he’d been a child. If his tears, as his mouth reached wet and hungry for hers, were really those of a young boy for his dead mother.

Maybe that was the key to his leaving, that excessive childhood suffering had made him cruel because it had made him unduly self-protective, unable to empathise with what she had come to feel for him; this unromantic, daily, ordinary sort of love.

They had gone to the cinema the night he’d got back from Newcastle. She had known there was something wrong when she’d tried to slip her hand into his and he’d withdrawn it.

“Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Move your hand.”

“I didn’t. You’re imagining it. I was just getting comfortable.”

The next evening she cooked spaghetti vongole, laid the table with candles. As they sat at the kitchen table, over a bottle of Rioja, she knew she had to ask him.

“Adam, are you going to leave me?”

It had been then that he admitted it, that he couldn’t go on.

He’d gone straight upstairs and thrown his things into a holdall. “I’ll pick the rest up some other time. There’s not much. Just a few books.” But she knew he would never come to get them.

She hadn’t wanted to cry, to make a fuss, to mirror Joanna’s manipulative behaviour, but the tears came anyway, silent, unbidden, streaming down her face as she stood on the doorstep watching him load the car in the icy evening air. All along the street, lights from newly decorated Christmas trees blinked in lit windows.

“Now you are going I can say what I’ve never dared say before,” she said looking him straight in the face, “that I learnt to love you.”

After that she turned quickly into the house, not waiting to watch him get in the car and drive away. She went in shutting the door against his loss, against the winter dark.

***

Belle’s apartment was above an Irish pub on the Lower East Side, a tiny island of Green in the once largely Jewish neighbourhood, and whilst some of the old sweat shops and tenement buildings with their heavy iron fire escapes had been taken over by young artists or turned into Tarot reading or tattoo parlours draped with batik and smelling of incense, there was nothing hip about Muldoon’s with its murky, greasy interior. The stairway leading from the side door up to Belle’s apartment smelt of cats and boiled washing. It had been a sudden decision. When the Christmas card with the snow-laden pine branches had arrived, Maggie had, on the spur of the moment, phoned Belle. She needed to get away, put some distance between the sense of rejection and confusion Adam’s leaving had stirred in her, and Belle had seemed genuinely pleased.

“Come any time. Anytime you like, Maggie I’d be delighted to meet you. I’ve nothing planned, no commitments. I’m so sorry about Adam. He’s an idiot. He never struck me as very in touch with himself. That summer we spent together as children, he never once mentioned his mother and he’d only lost her three months before. To me that didn’t seem quite normal. But I just assumed it was his English stiff upper lip. But men! Seems they’re just as useless both sides of the Atlantic. There certainly aren’t any here worth having.”

Her apartment consisted of three rooms laid out like a railway carriage. A living room with a small blue sofa covered in cats’ hairs, Belle’s bedroom, and a room with an old wardrobe, its bursting doors tied together with string, a cat litter tray full of chalky cat turds and a broken filing cabinet. In the kitchen the table was barely visible under the piles of old newspapers, the bits of photocopying, old string and student essays. At the very end was a tiny bathroom. It had lost most of its tiles and from the hairline crack in the sink ran which ran from tap to tap, water seeped slowly onto the floor.

“Hope you don’t mind cats. I used to have mice,” Belle said taking off her heavy navy coat and slinging it on the nearest chair.

“Not at all,” Maggie answered handing her the flowers she’d bought at the airport florist. She hoped there weren’t also cockroaches.

When Belle wasn’t teaching she spent most of her days at her chaotic kitchen table, surrounded by piles of washing up, correcting and sending out poems and stories to various literary magazines. She’d won a couple of prizes in contests and was waiting for her big break. But this week she had to teach most days. She was a regular adjunct in a school out in Queens. Maggie admired her gritty tenacity for she hated the journey; hated the kids who didn’t want to learn and were insolent and rude.

“I also hate, Maggie, that last term I slept with the guy who taught Math. After a few weeks he told me he needed some space to think things through, that he wasn’t sure he was over his past relationship. I feel awkward being around him now, but I need the money.”

As she came out of the subway on 68th Street the sky was heavy with snow. Maggie turned up her coat collar. It was much colder here than London, the sort of cold that got into your bones, weather straight down from Canada and off the great lakes with no Gulf stream to warm it up, she thought, as she walked west towards Central Park. She’d always wanted to visit the Frick with its Rembrandts and El Greco’s. She particularly wanted to see Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring. She’d do the smaller galleries in SoHo and Chelsea on Monday and Tuesday and leave MoMA until her last day. The Frick was more like a stately home than a museum with its elegant, serene rooms built in the European style, by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, in 1914; the acme of luxury, the appropriate home for the successful industrialist and paterfamilias. A museum not only to art, but also to an ordered, successful life. She particularly liked the enclosed courtyard garden with its marble fountain. Sitting there among the ferns, listening to the trickle of water was like stepping back to another age, into a Henry James’ novel. She felt sad being there alone. All her recent trips abroad had been with Adam. She’d got used to taking him round galleries, educating him about art. He had, for a while, at least, been a willing pupil. But now, now she had to find a new centre, make sense of this renewed single status. What was it that all those New Age self-help manuals always talked about, loving yourself? Was that the key? She’d never thought that she would ever have to face being on her own again. Not at this age. She’d expected they’d turn grey together.

When she climbed the cat-scented stairs to Belle’s apartment, she found Belle with her arms plunged in the kitchen sink trying to make half-hearted inroads into the piles of washing-up. A wet pyramid of crockery, saucepans and glass was balanced on the draining board. As Belle went to fetch a cloth for Maggie to help her dry, the whole edifice slipped and a tumbler smashed onto the floor. “Shit, goddam shit,” Belle said angrily, bending to pick up the broken glass and cutting her finger, which began to bleed all over the floor. As Maggie handed Belle a cloth to staunch the cut she noticed her face was streaked with smudged mascara and that her mouth was set in a tight little pucker. She’d been crying.

“The son of a bitch didn’t even tell me,” Belle said shoving her bleeding finger angrily under the cold tap so that the blood swirled among the debris of coffee grouts and unwashed cups. “I only learnt by chance. If I hadn’t gotten to work there again this term, if I’d been sent to another school, I might never’ve found out that he’s getting married. Married! And he never even told me, the jerk. So I stood there in the staff room and threw a cup of coffee at him. That caused a bit of a stir, I can tell you,” she sniffed.

“Belle come and sit down. How’s the finger? Let me have a look. Do you need a bandage?”

“No it’s fine,” she said parking herself on the only free stool not covered by papers and wrapping the discoloured dishcloth in a wad around her damaged finger.

“Had you been with him long?”

“No I wasn’t with him at all, that’s the point,” she said brushing a strand of faded hair from her damp face. Maggie noticed, for the first time, there were streaks of grey in it. “He slept with me twice and then made this excuse that he wasn’t over his previous relationship and needed time to think. Think. Ugh! And now he’s getting married. He didn’t take long to think about that, did he?” and she started to cry again, dry, hot, angry tears. “At least I ruined his leather jacket, though. A direct hit.”

“Was that a good idea?”

“Sure, it felt great. It was no more than he deserved, the lying sonofabitch. Maggie, the worst thing is that I now have to go back and teach there and listen to all that wedding shit. I can barley make ends meet as it is. Not until the novel is done and I sell it. Then it’ll be different, I know it will be a hit if I can just get it with the right publisher. Then I can put all this shit behind me. But at the moment I don’t even have next month’s rent. Married! I’d have married him if he’d asked. Why didn’t he ask me?” her voice was wistful, hardly audible. “Perhaps,” she said, her anger flaring again, “because she’s ten years younger than I am with long blond hair and has had a nose job. But I don’t look my age, do I Maggie? And we really did have something in common. What’s it with me and men?” she asked her face beginning to crumple again, “they never last more than a couple of dates.”

Fifth Avenue. Maggie turned up past the Flatiron Building from E23rd Street towards MoMA. It was still cold, though the sky had cleared and was now high and icy blue. She was glad that Belle had gone to work early, glad to get out of the apartment. She didn’t want to be ungrateful, it was generous of Belle to have her to stay, but she felt more and more claustrophobic there. Waking early, she had crept from her mattress on the floor in the corner of the front room and tiptoed across the dirty kitchen for a pee with a sinking heart. It was not Belle’s poverty that was getting to her, but the sense that this was the apartment of someone who didn’t even know how out of kilter her life had become. One day when Belle had been out, she’d tried to clean up a little. She had bought a pot plant, had thought it might cheer Belle up, make her feel cared for. But Belle had been upset, had accused her of moving her things. Maggie had begun to feel the place closing in on her, her mood slipping down.

She walked briskly because of the cold and because it was her last day and she had to make the most of it. Tomorrow she would be going back to London and have to face up to the reality of life without Adam. This had just been a diversion. She wondered, what it would have been like to have been here with him. They’d often talked of coming to New York together, perhaps when he next had a conference. It was his sort of city. He liked the downtown bars, the style and energy. They would have had fun. He was extravagant and generous. He liked eating out, drinking, having a good time. On her own she was much more frugal, less celebratory. That’s what she’d learnt to love about him, the way he balanced her life. She was too introverted. All those years working in her small studio at home, doing watercolours of flowers and still lives for card companies, had taken their toll. She could spend days without seeing anyone now Suzie was away at college. He was the opposite, extrovert, sociable. Yin to her yang, she thought sadly.

She spent a long time looking at the Americans. She was drawn to Barnett Newman’s austere monochromatic canvases, his mystical zips of paint that were supposed to represent heaven or at least a spiritual dimension. She loved the de Koonings, the Motherwells and Pollocks. All that pure expressionistic feeling poured onto the canvas, all that unmediated spontaneity and energy. She was so absorbed that it took her quite by surprise when she moved into the next gallery and there it was, suddenly in front of her, the deep crimson and magenta of the Rothko that had been on loan to the exhibition when they’d been in Paris. She started, for some reason taken aback, as though she’d bumped into someone she hadn’t expected to meet and a dry, involuntary sob, caught in her throat.

“Like your cunt,” he had said. And then it all came rushing back. His wet mouth on hers in that small high Paris room, his fingers opening and reaching inside her. Yes that was it; it was that he’d somehow touched the lost, unnamed part of her, her centre, her core. The bit hidden behind the façade of professional designer, of single mother. And she remembered, how after they had made love, as the room darkened, she had lain with her head on his thigh stoking his long pubic hair, her fingers caressing the corrugated skin of his balls - like the ripple of hard sand after the tide had gone out - cupping them like walnuts in her palm. And she wondered how it might have been if they had been able to dare, to stay there, in that red vulnerable space, open and disclosed to each other, a place of trust where he could shed tears for his dead mother and where he had touched and known her; neither mother nor painter, but simply herself.

Maybe that’s what those moments had given her, she thought, standing now in quiet contemplation in front of Rothko’s stained red field of colour as other visitors listened to the gallery commentary clamped behind headphones. Maybe that’s how she could make sense of the pain of his leaving. That, for a second, he had shown her a glimpse of herself, a depth, a hidden strength that she didn’t even know she had.

She still wanted him. God how she still wanted him; the touch of his skin on hers, his warmth, his caustic humour. But she didn’t need him. He had shown her, without realising it, who she was, and now, maybe if she was brave enough, there might be some new role waiting for her when she got back to London. Some different turning she could take on the track up ahead.