Notes
1
It was a story he told me, and he described it as a dilemma that contained somebody else’s, but somehow helped explain the one he believed himself to be in. The story he was about to tell didn’t happen to him, he insisted, but to someone several years ago when he was living in Glasgow. They were both working in the same pharmaceutical company, and the word company seemed so inappropriate to describe the environment in which they worked, which was competitive, bitchy, and sometimes cruel. My friend, Rupert, reckoned the colleague told him the story aware that he was leaving, and felt he needed to talk about it to someone. Who better than a person who had once said to him he was looking for another job as well? Yet Rupert also thought, now, that it wasn’t a story irrelevant to his own behaviour.
Let’s call the colleague Charlie, and, as he explained to Rupert, for two weeks he was off work with a broken ankle, and then was allowed to work from home for a further six weeks. How he broke that ankle needn’t concern us; what mattered was that he was home for two months, and this is where he realised an affair was taking place between his neighbour and the postwoman. She would work her way up the building, dropping off letters, tapping on doors, and then, when she got to the neighbour’s place, he would answer the door and she would go inside, coming out about forty-five minutes later. She would then continue posting to the remainder of the building. Charlie’s was the flat after the one where she would have an assignation, and it didn’t initially bother him that he would wait so long to receive his mail. He thought the affair amusing, something out of a 70s sex comedy. He first suspected it in the first week at home, hobbling around the flat and with his ankle ice-packed and his leg often elevated. He didn’t have much to do but wait for the ankle to heal, and though he wasn’t short of company as friends visited every other evening, he lived alone. He was probably more attentive than usual, and receiving mail was the closest he would get to companionship from the moment he woke up to the moment a friend arrived after their work. He would hear sometimes the sound of the envelope in the first flat across from him, then hear nothing for what seemed close to an hour, and then a letter or item would pass through his letter box. Where had she been for the intervening period? It didn’t require much thinking about, and he had plenty of time to think about it.
While Charlie lived alone, he knew his neighbour across the landing, whose name he eventually discovered was Phil, didn’t. He wasn’t sure if he was married to the person he lived with, but they were a couple, as Charlie witnessed on several occasions when he saw them near the flat, arm in arm or holding hands. He surmised they were a couple who had been together at least a year or two and sensed something had changed recently: they had got engaged, married, or she was pregnant. Charlie had been renting the flat for less than six months; the couple were already living in their place when he arrived. Of course, Charlie had seen them holding hands or with their arms around each other before he had broken his ankle, but it was only after it that he cared to give their relationship much thought, when boredom gave him more time for recollection, and the affair a subject on which to hang those thoughts. Charlie saw in this man and his partner a mismatched couple. Neither was tall, but she could be described as petite, while he was squat. Phil moved as if in a hurry, while she looked happier to saunter, and though he was a couple of inches taller than she was, she gave a greater impression of height proportionally, with her longer legs and shorter torso. She might not have been described as beautiful. Yet this could have been because she wasn’t inclined to show it ,while her partner may not have quite been able to hide what some would have viewed as his ugliness. Rupert suspected Charlie was projecting a little here, wishing to see in the man a less attractive figure, all the better to view his partner as easily the more attractive of the pair.
2
Yet all of this might have remained in the realm of the curious had it not been for one morning when Charlie was back at work, yet working from home, waiting for an important document from the company which contained information he needed to act upon by midday. This would have been handed to him at work if he could have been there, and he knew that the company was probably a little irritated that they had to post it out to him, firmly announcing that he needed to look through it and get back to them by 12 noon. Again, the details needn’t concern us, and even my friend admitted he couldn’t quite understand what type of document needed to be posted out rather than sent as a Word file or PDF. What mattered was that it didn’t arrive until 1130, as the postwoman was at Phil’s, and Charlie failed to meet the deadline.
He was livid and vengeful, and especially so when he returned to the office a couple of weeks later and received a dressing-down in person that he had already received by email. The boss was in the office with two underlings when Charlie was called in only an hour after arriving back, and the boss insisted that, while he accepted, a broken ankle can take time to heal, a broken communication can take much longer. He explained that, after Charlie’s failure, he had to liaise with the firm they were working with to explain what went wrong. He had to swallow some pride in the process, and now Charlie, he said, would have to swallow some too, as he proposed his job was safe but that he was very lucky. If he’d been told this in a conversation between the two of them, Charlie would have been irritated, but the presence of two others who were lower down the corporate ladder than he was and would be able to look at him condescendingly thereafter left him raging in the days following it. How to do something about this feeling, he wondered, and knew he needed to go to the source.
3
Over the weekend, after seeing Phil leave the flat, and assuming his partner was still in it, after hearing faint noises in the flat next door, he dropped through the letterbox a note saying that this was from the postwoman and she thought Phil’s partner should know that he’d been having an affair with her for several months. Charlie signed it with the initial P, and supposed it would have various repercussions, though these needn’t be his concern. What was the worst that could happen to him, that the mail would now arrive on time?
Over the next few weeks, there were repercussions: this couple who rarely raised their voices and had in many ways been exemplary neighbours could now be heard shouting at each other, and even late at night, waking Charlie twice, and making him realise that indeed the consequences of his actions were affecting him. Yet at no point did he feel bad about what he did, and after, didn’t he believe even before he knew of the affair that this woman somehow deserved better than this foursquare man who walked like a crab? Yet when he hoped they would break up, he did so chiefly because he wanted once again a quiet life and, given the choice between mail arriving late or losing sleep, he would have preferred the former.
As he was now back at work, he had had no idea if his mail was arriving on time or whether the affair continued. He did hear on a couple of occasions through the walls Phil denying that anything had taken place, and said someone, presumably in the building, must have decided to take revenge. When Charlie heard this, he was worried that Phil might think it was him; he was the nearest neighbour. Yet Charlie also overheard him say that it was probably one of the two neighbours responsible for the stair cleaning money that Phil couldn’t be bothered paying. It passed for a plausible reason at least during that argument, because he heard nothing more from them until a couple of days later.
After a few more arguments, there was no noise from the flat and, while Charlie occasionally saw her leaving the apartment, he never saw Phil come and go. The postwoman was still the same, and if she was sleeping with Phil, Rupert assumed they were doing so out of work hours, unless Phil had managed to find a place within her postal route, which he supposed would show an odd sort of commitment.
4
Over the next couple of months, Charlie was working on a project with Rupert. They sometimes liaised with both the production facilities and the possible buyers. The facilities were in four places in the UK — outside Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, and London. The buyers were all over the country, doctors and pharmacists to whom they wished to sell the drugs, skin creams, shampoos, and other items. Rupert had gone on these trips twice before, and with colleagues he found far more obnoxious than Charlie. The first cheated on his wife at least twice during their trips away, and on occasion, when Rupert and the colleague were having dinner in the hotel restaurant, he would hear him telling his wife he loved her and to say goodnight to the kids. When he got off the phone, he smiled at Rupert as if to say his wife was an idiot, but he loved her, or rather loved the domestic life she provided, allowing them to raise two children. Rupert said he never once asked the kids’ names: to do so would have seemed like an act of complicity rather than interest, and he hoped never to see the four of them on the street and feel obliged to say hello. The second person he travelled with had no partner, nor seemed interested in finding one, but he could find a conspiracy theory in the most apparently innocuous places.
He would constantly assume the government was working against the people, yet had no problem with great wealth, nor great influence, as long as it was in private sector hands. Rupert knew the company he worked for was far from innocent and was more worried about revolving doors over deep state manipulations, and once proposed to his colleague that he might be better spending more time investigating the dubious activities of their own company over focusing on stories he gleaned from various websites that were, simultaneously, selling narratives of despair, with stories of aspiration. After watching one video the colleague recommended, Rupert couldn’t work out what was deemed more important: the collapse of Western civilisation or buying a new consumer product that would change one’s life.
Next to these two, Charlie was a relative pleasure to be around. He didn’t talk much and, when he did, it was with a sense of inquiry rather than with a set of assumptions. Yet throughout the trip, Charlie seemed to be keeping things to himself, and it wasn’t until over a year later that Rupert found out what these were — when Charlie decided to leave the company.
5
This was when Charlie told Rupert that while they were travelling around, he was often thinking of his neighbour. He supposed he’d always been attracted to her, but didn’t think much of it except to believe that she and her partner were physically mismatched and supposed he would have been better suited. Rupert didn’t know what the neighbour looked like, but he had overheard on a couple of occasions, while sitting at lunch with female colleagues, comments about Charlie’s good looks. Rupert recalled hearing one fellow worker say to him that it was good to have Charlie back and brightening the office with his handsomeness. Another said Rupert was lucky to be going around the country with Charlie, and she wouldn’t mind swapping places with Rupert, wouldn’t mind travelling around the country with Charlie herself. Charlie was slightly above average height, with medium-length, dark brown hair that always appeared the same length, and presumably cut every six weeks or so. He would also go to the gym three times a week, though he didn’t seem like he was interested in building muscle, and his face had subtle features without seeming soft. Rupert wouldn’t have been surprised if his neighbour found him attractive.
And so Charlie told him, shortly before they took that trip around the country together, he was on the landing, pumping up a tyre on his bike, when he saw coming out of her apartment his neighbour. He nodded hello as he was crouching on the ground. She said her name was Jemima, and that she had seen him a few times but never said hello. Here she was saying hello. He stood up, said hello back, saying that it would be nice to get to know someone in the building — most kept themselves to themselves or didn’t hang around in the tenement long enough to become familiar faces. Half the apartments were student-occupied. She agreed and said that perhaps they could get a coffee sometime. He said that would be nice, adding he was going to be away for a while and, though back at weekends, would have lots of work to do. He offered it as a fact but could see it might be read as an excuse, and wondered if he mentioned the trip as a subconscious self-sabotage that might have been a moral imposition, as he then explained to Rupert how he believed he was responsible for the breakup with her boyfriend.
This was on his mind a lot when they were travelling together, and he thought a few times about sharing it with Rupert, but there wasn’t much to say as the dilemma hadn’t yet arisen, and he had always been wary of sharing anything personal with work colleagues. It wasn’t just that he suspected people might gossip; he saw it as the sort of work environment where people would use that gossip against you. Rupert asked him why he was talking about it now, and Charlie said he supposed it was because he was leaving big pharma for a job in small pharma. He was with a couple of others, going to be responsible for the British branch of a small US company that researched psychedelic drugs, one that already had offices in Switzerland and Australia, all with only a few staff. His job wouldn’t be so different in some ways - he would liaise with university departments in the UK and persuade them to get involved in the research. He didn’t know quite what the work entailed, but whatever he’d read about the firm sounded positive; whenever he read about the one he was still presently working for, it didn’t make him feel good about himself. As he offered this to Rupert, he added that he wouldn’t want to judge others. He was lucky he found something else, and may not have been inclined to do so if it weren’t for the mess he had been making of his personal life. At least trying to resolve his professional one might allow him to make a few amends. Rupert said he didn’t feel judged — he was looking to leave himself, and it was great to hear someone who had found a job in pharmaceuticals that was more ethical than the firm they were working for.
Charlie said that he wanted to make amends, but knew that this wasn’t logical, though it at least made sense to him. When he returned from the trip, he and Rupert took together, he said hi when he saw Jemima a few times on the stairwell, but one or the other always seemed to be in a hurry, and he assumed that either Jemima had taken his busyness as a rejection, or that she only offered the suggestion of getting a coffee as something people say. Then a moment of chance made it seem inevitable they should speak to each other beyond the most rudimentary of pleasantries. He was meeting a friend for lunch at a cafe when he saw that no table was available, but did see, at one of them, Jemima seated alone.
She waved him over and said he should join her. She was eating a Swedish pastry and drinking what he assumed was a mocha or some other elaborate coffee beverage, and she looked at both as though she ought to feel guilty for the indulgence, before adding that she believed she’d earned the treats. He noticed a yoga mat beside her, and she added that there was a hot yoga class a few doors away — often, after it, she would come to the cafe and treat herself to an elaborate coffee, and usually a pastry. He smiled, saying that was exactly the word he had in his mind when wondering what she was drinking, as he wanted to treat himself after a morning run, and this hardly profound coincidence nevertheless was contained by the bigger one of finding themselves in the same cafe without anywhere for him to sit except in front of her. Meeting in the stairwell didn’t feel like chance but probability, even if there were neighbours in the building he had probably never passed. There would be no reason to read anything more significant into such contingencies, but this seemed more meaningful, perhaps all the more so as he wondered if they were both trying to avoid anything more than the most superficial of connections by saying hello on the stairwell and hurrying off.
She asked whether he was alone, and he said he would be for about forty-five minutes: he wished to arrive early, do a little work, and wait for a friend. She took this as a hint and said that she would be leaving shortly; he could have the table to himself. But Charlie said the work wasn’t that important, and he only wanted to arrive early so he could secure a table. She had helped him do that, though, of course, she would be welcome to continue sharing it when his friend arrived. After all, it was her table he insisted, as she, in turn, smiled and said she still hadn’t quite paid off the table’s mortgage. He scanned the room and, though all the tables were taken, there were two or three spare chairs, and as he was about to ask for one, Jemima insisted that she wouldn’t wish to intrude. She would leave when his friend came. Yet his friend didn’t come, adding to the meaningfulness of this chance encounter. The friend texted saying one of the kids was sick, his wife was stuck in a traffic jam outside of the city, and, rather than mucking Charlie about, by constantly pushing the time back, he suggested it would be best to meet on another occasion. Charlie texted him back with no more than a thumbs up, and told Jemima she had no excuse now but to stay — his friend wasn’t going to make it.
6
So the affair started, and one evening a couple of weeks into their relationship, Jemima told him about her breakup. She was no doubt at her most sincere, tearful and open, while he was pretending he didn’t know anything about a parting that he’d helped create. Charlie might have comforted himself by believing that Jemima ought to know her ex was a cheat and a liar. But if she subsequently deserved someone better, few people would have thought that person should be him. There she was talking about a major betrayal, and he was involved in instigating, albeit a smaller one — but it was a betrayal nevertheless. Rupert asked if Charlie had thought that night about telling her precisely what had happened. He said he didn’t, and wasn’t quite sure if it was for the best of reasons or the worst — was it about protecting her feelings or protecting his image? She needed to be heard, and his purpose was to listen. Were he to add a confession of his, that would have exacerbated the pain she was feeling at the very moment she wished to alleviate it. Wouldn’t that have been cruel? Rupert said cruel yes, but less cruel than finding out months later? Charlie concurred, but did she ever need to find out? At the time, Charlie didn’t know if they would be together in a year or two, yet if they were, he was the only one who knew the secret, and if they broke up for whatever reason, she would never find out, and it would have been a relationship based on far more decency than her previous one.
Over the next year, Rupert said he believed Charlie was a very good boyfriend, as he met her friends, she met his, he remembered her birthday, gave her for Christmas a gift based on a passing remark she made when they were out shopping months earlier, which she appreciated so much less because of the gift than that it proved he was a great listener and attentive. They often went away at the weekends, and went to the cinema regularly and restaurants almost as often. He didn’t lavish money on her as they discussed the word lavish and what it meant to them. Jemima had a friend who reckoned that no man loved her who wouldn’t spend his last penny on her, even if that last penny was to go on clothes, makeup and perfume. Charlie and Jemima usually shared costs but didn’t break down the items: he might pay for the hotel; she would pay for the petrol, he would get the cinema tickets; she would cover the restaurant bill. When her friend announced this was terrible — that she wasn’t being taken care of — Jemima replied: someone might see instead that her friend wasn’t being taken care of but being taken control of: a man who holds the purse strings is perhaps puppeteering her life. Was this her phrase, Charlie’s or Rupert’s? I didn’t know and didn’t ask, but whoever’s it was, it indicated a woman who wasn’t afraid of telling a friend a home truth, and there she was with Charlie, who was hiding a truth of his own. He wasn’t taking control of her, but he was in possession of a perspective to which she wasn’t privy.
These were my thoughts on Rupert’s telling based on Charlie’s confession, and I did wonder whether there were now three men who knew what Jemima seemed never to have discovered. I asked Rupert if Charlie told him the whole story in one sitting, and he confirmed he did. It was on the day he left, and around ten of them went for drinks, and he was the last to leave, perhaps because he felt some affinity with Charlie after their trip together, and it was then that he told him about Jemima. They insisted they would stay in contact after Charlie left the firm, yet Rupert had no reason to email or text him, nor did Charlie to email and text him. He even supposed that it would have been a violation if he did so, like a priest or therapist contacting a confessor or a patient outside the professional environment.
7
That evening, Charlie continued telling him about Jemima, all the while incorporating within the revelation what he saw as his increasing frustration with the job. He reminded Rupert of the day they went to an anxious pharmacist whose father’s shop he had recently taken over, and they were pushing him to take on various products their company was selling. Maybe Rupert didn’t know, but Charlie did, that the company’s items were no better than the ones the pharmacists was already using - and in some instances worse. Also, though the prices were similar, many were to go up substantially in a year, though this information wasn’t yet public knowledge. That didn’t bother him as much as it should have, Charlie proposed, and remembered them celebrating in the evening with a three-course meal and a few drinks when they managed to get the pharmacist to sign the contract. He went without Rupert to sign it, and the poor young man seemed to be nervous as he offered his signature, saying that his father probably wouldn’t be happy about his decision, but that he himself reckoned it would be good to change a few things in the business his father had owned for thirty years.
When he managed to get the man to sign, he wasn’t, of course, yet in a relationship with Jemima, and while he was aware that what he was doing wasn’t ethical, much about the job was no more or less so than getting a naive person to sign something against their own best interests. Charlie’s purpose was his own and the company’s. Yet during the following year, as he continued keeping to himself that he was the person who dropped the note through Jemima’s letterbox, the man’s face came to him often, and the image of his hand nervously signing along a dotted line. It seemed to Charlie an image he would sometimes see in wronged-man films, where someone would have a confession extracted from him, and the audience well knew he was innocent. Charlie was aware the films expected us to side with the person who’d been trapped, and there he was doing the trapping. He wondered why this hadn’t bothered him before and supposed it was a matter of priorities or maybe perspectives. He worked for a company that insisted on putting profit before people, and perhaps that is what all businesses do. Yet isn’t there a difference between one who sees it as a necessary evil and another who sees it as a raison d’etre?
As Charlie spoke, it was as though he couldn’t quite see Rupert in front of him, couldn’t comprehend that what he was saying was as relevant to a fellow company employee as it was to him. Yet Rupert believed it was different, with Charlie speaking about the firm because he’d allowed it in his mind to become conflated with his relationship. How many people in the company were staying because their ethical priorities lay elsewhere? They could handle a bit of backstabbing, bullshit, and moral turpitude, but at least they had a wife and kids who they could view as central to what mattered most to them.
I said to Rupert that he didn’t have a family; what made him stay as long as he did? I reminded him too of the person Charlie had earlier travelled with, the one who had a family but was always trying to cheat on his wife. Rupert supposed he stayed, claiming he needed the experience, and wondered if, while Charlie might have been able to convince himself, as he screwed people over, that he was closer to the detective who knew dirty tricks were sometimes important to achieve certain ends, Rupert believed himself to be a bit like an undercover journalist who was witnessing events without quite partaking in them. He didn’t doubt everyone was acting with a combination of self-interest and self-denial, and that colleague who would cheat on his wife, Charlie told him, never went to bed sober. But Rupert also believed that while numerous colleagues had private lives they were protecting, and occasionally had personal lives and professional lives they couldn’t distinguish, resolving the problem with alcohol, Charlie wanted to resolve a terrible moral entanglement. This was how Rupert put it and offered it with an awareness of the full story that he was still to divulge to me.
8
It was as though, Charlie said, the longer he kept from Jemima that note he put through her door, the more he saw what he was doing at work as despicable. There may have been apparently no connection between them in a rational person’s mind, yet perhaps the conflations weren’t that irrational. After all, he put the note through Jemima and her partner’s letterbox after he had to wait so long for the postman to deliver that important piece of mail. He looked back on that morning and recognised not only was he irritated, he felt anxious too, aware that he would be blamed for the consequences. He was sure he didn’t do it to try and steal Jemima away from Phil; it was to get revenge on two people (Phil and the postwoman) who intruded on his life. All those other letters and parcels that arrived an hour later were of no concern to him until that day when he needed the parcel on time. As they had imposed themselves on him, so he imposed himself on them. Hence, the note he sent as he became momentarily a postman himself.
But he supposed nine months after that impulsive gesture, he was perhaps more its victim than Phil and the postwoman, and that Jemima was its most prominent injured party as she found herself in a relationship with a man who had been lying to her since they met. Rupert asked a simple question but expected a complex answer. Why didn’t he eventually tell Jemima what he had done? Charlie didn’t quite have a proper reply, but he supposed speaking to Rupert was one way of either trying to find one or to ask advice on how to tell Jemima that he had withheld an important detail about his involvement in her last relationship. All Charlie knew was that he was relieved to be leaving the job, and hoped that his conscience would be clear enough for him to feel no reason to tell Jemima about the note. He was sure it was of no importance, but it became amplified the more he became unhappy with what was expected of him in the firm. That wasn’t quite how Rupert saw it, nor, when thinking about it afterwards, how he rationalised it. He saw that Charlie was capable of accepting that what he did at work was wrong, but was institutionally justified: everybody else was acting similarly, and the work expected people to act unethically for profit. Who else did Charlie know who was in a relationship for many months predicated on an act of deceit quite like his own? This act was more obviously his responsibility, yet he wanted to deny its magnitude. From a certain perspective, he was right: how could a note he had put through a neighbour’s door compete with all the prescription notes doctors would be writing for their patients and processed by pharmacists who might not have been offering patients the best available product?
Rupert reckoned Charlie was probably overestimating how unethically he had acted at work and underestimating how he was feeling over his deceitfulness towards Jemima. There really was very little between one product and another; the problem was big Pharma, generally, and the profits they were making, not salesmen persuading a pharmacist to go for one product over another.
9
I asked Rupert if his reasons for leaving the company were the same as Charlie’s, and he thought not. He supposed Charlie was looking for an explanation for his guilty feelings and found them in company policy. Rupert saw it as a problem of the industry rather than the company, which happened to be why he went and studied complementary medicine. He found a lot of people believed in one or the other — in conventional or alternative medicine —but reckoned that the point of complementary therapy was that it should complement the more scientifically focused without being beholden to the assumption that conventional medicine knew best. The company Charlie went off to work for was a variation of the one he was leaving, perhaps partly why he saw Charlie’s decision as a confused conflation of two issues in his life that would have been better dealt with separately.
He did see Charlie again, but Charlie didn’t see him. It would have been six months later, and Rupert was sitting on a bench near the entrance at the top of the park by Park Terrace, by the Lord Roberts Monument, when he saw walking along a lower path Charlie and what he assumed was Jemima, heavily pregnant. There Rupert was privy to details about this woman’s life, but also knew so little about her that he couldn’t say for certain this was who it was. It did seem unlikely, though, that Charlie had exited the relationship and got into another with a woman expecting a baby, as it occurred to him that this of course meant Jemima would have been pregnant when Charlie spoke to him, and that she kept this from him, that Jemima had yet to tell him, or didn’t yet know she was carrying a child. Rupert thought of sending him a text at that moment, saying he was also in the gardens, but instead observed them for another minute until they disappeared from view.
He didn’t think much more about Charlie, had a couple of relationships himself that were messier than he would have liked, and also plenty of individual sexual encounters that he found so much easier to have in his new area than his old one. During the first six months, he would often go on short courses lasting a weekend or a week. There was an odd sincerity to these environments, completely lacking in his old job, and he was also surrounded by far more women than men. He took advantage of this. Though he didn’t promise anybody he slept with that it was any more than the briefest of flings, it was as if the atmosphere lent itself to intimacy but also to vulnerability. He benefited from that intimacy without recognising enough the debt accrued as a consequence of it. He didn’t cheat on anyone during that period, but at the end of studying, he started seeing one girlfriend and then another, before he had quite got round to telling the first that it was over, and believed that his emotional life was more tangled than it should have been because he wasn’t paying it too much attention. He was focused on building his career as an alternative medicine practitioner.
Rupert saw Charlie again about eighteen months after the first time, again in Kelvingrove park, and this time saw Charlie pushing a buggy, with his partner beside him. It was on Kelvin Walkway, a narrow path, and they were coming towards Rupert, who was with his partner of the last four months. Charlie smiled as they approached and, stopping, he introduced Jemima, and Rupert introduced his girlfriend, Maria. They talked for several minutes and Charlie proposed they meet for a drink. Rupert agreed without assuming anything would come of it. After they parted, his girlfriend asked him who the people were, and Rupert said no more than that he was a former work colleague. She said he seemed very happy to see Rupert and keen for them to meet up. Rupert said he would contact him and assumed he’d made as false a promise to Maria as he and Charlie had made to each other. But a few days later, he received a text from Charlie, and he didn’t ignore it. He replied and they arranged to meet at a cafe bar off Byres Road.
10
During the time since they’d last met, Rupert had on a few occasions thought of Charlie, and in those moments also wondered whether he ever did tell Jemima of that deed before they became a couple. Rupert gave it some thought because he wondered if he was in danger of replicating the duplicity. He wondered whether he chose Maria over his ex because he had cheated on his previous girlfriend with her, but if he had stayed with his ex, then that infidelity would have created a horrible secret in their relationship. By breaking off with his ex and seeing Maria, it seemed he had ended one relationship and started another. His ex may have felt hurt that he had left her and had immediately started going out with Maria, but if he had gone back to his ex, he would have cheated on her and been forced to lie or confess. His situation wouldn’t have been too different from Charlie’s, and this was a situation he had wished to avoid.
He offered all this to Charlie when they met and then asked him whether he managed to resolve the crisis he felt by leaving the job, or did it still linger, despite his change in employment. Charlie said he did feel better after leaving the firm, yet he also told himself that he wanted to reveal he had kept a secret from Jemima. But he would wait for the right moment. Rupert looked at him sceptically, and Charlie said he was aware that this could seem as if he wasn’t looking for the right time to say it, but postponing saying it because he claimed he could only say it at the right time. Yet it arrived when Jemima gave birth, when she returned from the hospital with their baby to their recently bought home in Circus Park. She said tearfully that she wondered if meeting Charlie, having a child and building a home for themselves would have happened were it not for someone dropping through her letterbox a note, saying that her partner was in the midst of an affair with the postwoman. Before then, Charlie and Jemima had never discussed this at all. While he had never admitted it was him, Jemima had never before acknowledged the note she received, and all Charlie knew of her awareness of it rested on arguments he heard through the wall when he was living next door. She mentioned those arguments to Charlie, and said that while her ex was insistent it was one of the neighbours, she concluded it was from the postwoman herself. She supposed the postwoman was no longer happy with the affair continuing as an occasional assignation and reckoned the latter was a way of forcing her ex to make a decision, or more especially for Jemima to make one: throwing her ex out and then perhaps the postwoman would have him to herself. She was relieved that not only did Phil leave, but, soon enough, the postwoman was no longer delivering the mail.
11
Charlie knew this was the opportunity he claimed he’d been looking for, and was aware that if he didn’t tell her at that moment, he probably never would. He’d be adding lying to himself to lying to her. He said it wasn’t the postwoman who had dropped off the note, but him, and explained the reason why, and was surprised that a moment of petty revenge led to the most important relationship of his life. Jemima proposed that he didn’t do it for her, but did it against Phil and the postwoman, and started to cry again. Jemima had been tearful since their child was born, and he thus wondered if this might have been the best time to talk about things. She might have brought the subject up, but emotionally, it couldn’t have been a worse moment. He explained that it would have seemed cheaper still to have sent the note out of a motive other than cheap vengeance. He would have been intruding into other people’s relationships. It was only that her ex had intruded into his life that he felt entitled to intrude into his.
Jemima seemed less concerned that he had sent the note than that he had done so on such a vengeful premise, as though she would have preferred he had said to her he did it because he found her beautiful and wanted to break up her relationship , all the better so that they could start seeing each other. If that was his priority, he said, he wouldn’t have even needed the note to be true: its purpose would have been to make her finish with Phil and, in time, start seeing him. That is, of course, exactly what happened, but not for manipulative reasons but impulsive ones. He was infuriated with the postwoman and didn’t like finding himself complicit with two people who managed to get him into trouble at work. Why shouldn’t he stir up a bit of trouble for Phil at home? Charlie insisted to Jemima that what he did wasn’t noble, but it wasn’t premeditated either. Yes, he was pleased they had started seeing each other, so happy they now had a baby and a home, and could see his momentary gesture had led to long-lasting happiness. He added that he had found her beautiful, but that couldn’t surely be reason enough to try to break up someone’s relationship.
She agreed, and after a couple of days, she seemed to forgive him and even offered a disclosure of her own. Jemima said that a month after she’d started seeing Charlie, a letter arrived from Phil. He said that a week earlier, he was walking along Byres Road and saw on the other side of the street Jemima walking with what he recognised as his old neighbour, and said he no longer believed it had been one of the other people in the tenement but indeed the man she was now apparently going out with. She ignored the note, neither replying to Phil nor, of course, bringing it up with Charlie. But now she had to admit Phil was right, even if Phil proposed that Charlie did it to manipulate his way into her feelings, and Charlie had just explained it was instead an act of momentary vengeance. When he did it, Charlie expected no consequences to his action — positive or negative — and there he was, he said to Rupert, aware the consequences were enormous, both for good and ill. Jemima said that all she knew was that she felt betrayed again: once by Phil, and now by Charlie, yet she was also glad he told her, however long it had taken him. He explained to her he was waiting for the right moment, and that moment seemed to have arrived with the birth of their child. She hoped she could forgive him, he said, and several months had now passed; she seemed to have done so. They had a life to live and a child to look after. Though he did wonder if Jemima would have stayed with him if they hadn’t a child.
12
When Charlie had initially told Rupert that story when he was leaving the firm, he listened as a disinterested observer. When Charlie told him about how he finally confessed to Jemima, it was as though he was somehow implicated. This made no sense practically: he never knew Jemima and could hardly have told her Charlie had sent her the note. But emotionally, he found himself feeling a little like Charlie did when he believed he had to switch jobs, believing that his present employment might in many ways appear as benign as his previous job was malignant. Yet he usually saw himself as a pleasant person in dubious company; now he saw himself often as a dubious person in a decent environment.
He might have seen Charlie’s story as oddly reflective of his own predicament, but he did little to alleviate it, and over the following year, after last seeing Charlie, he broke up with the girlfriend he was with that day in the park, Maria. Rupert embarked on a series of the briefest of flings. He continued like that for eighteen months and then, as a fully qualified alternative therapist, and an altogether odious individual to many with whom he’d slept, promising them nothing but in a milieu full of promise, he moved to Edinburgh. He bought a flat that faced out onto Pilrig Park, off Leith Walk, and first met me at a talk about holistic medicine. When he told me about Charlie and his feeling that he was no better and perhaps worse, we had known each other for several months. Our fields weren’t so different: I was a masseur, but also a writer, and the story about Charlie, and Rupert’s own, on his mercenary love life, came out of a conversation we were having over professional milieux that lend themselves to certain types of behaviour. He wondered how I felt working with bodies of all shapes and sizes, ones with fatty folds and aged creases, skin so smooth that the hand seems to glide over it, and flesh so soft that one can knead it like bread. He asked if it was a tender profession, as he mentioned his own earlier work in the pharmaceutical industry, and, in turn, moved on to the story of Charlie and his own dubious behaviour.
He said our professions were similar, and yet nothing I’d offered in the couple of months I’d known him indicated I took advantage of the milieu, and I appeared to see my work strictly as a job, both with the clients I have and the people I knew in the broader field of alternative medicine. He knew my partner lived in London and taught at a university there, and that we would see each other twice a month. But I suppose, if I didn’t have a partner I’d been with for a decade, I would nevertheless have stayed away from what people would crudely call pooping in your own nest. It appeared Rupert had been doing a lot of that in Glasgow, and he didn’t disagree. But he added that he suspected what he did without realising it was to take some of the values he was practising in pharmacy which was part of the job, and found himself adopting them when it came to his new employment’s broader milieu. He found himself taking advantage of people all over again.
I asked him if he had resisted doing so since moving to Edinburgh, and he said that he had. He’d promised himself six months of celibacy, hoping after it to find, if not a steady relationship, at least flings that would have nothing to do with his work.
13
I am not sure if I would have bothered to tell this story were it not for the final irony it contains, but one often can’t resist the appeal of a circular narrative. While I saw him a couple of times during his final months of celibacy, we found ourselves discussing other things, and it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that we talked once again about more personal matters. He said he was working from home when he heard a knock on the door and, when answering, the postwoman asked if he would be okay taking in a parcel for a neighbour two floors above. She’d knocked on all the doors on the fourth and third floors, and nobody answered. She would go back upstairs and drop a note through the person’s letterbox, saying they could find their package with him. He agreed and thought little about it as the parcel sat for days in his flat. Rupert supposed the package was of little importance or that the person was away, but when it had been sitting there for almost a week, he thought more about this parcel and who its owner might be. He started thinking about others in the building and realised he’d met almost none of his neighbours. Who occupied these apartments? He would sometimes see a light on in the small window above their front doors, occasionally could hear music or laughter, but only very rarely saw anyone exit or enter, and almost nobody said hello. Were any of those he would sometimes see in the park his neighbours? He didn’t know. He supposed many were working from home, which is another way of saying everybody was on their computer, and he thought of me, he said, and how tactile my job was in a world that was increasingly virtual. Yet at least this neighbour appeared to be out in the world, and possibly somewhere in the further reaches of it, as he wondered when they would return and pick up their post. He even entertained the very opposite notion, that they never left the flat, and everything was delivered, from supermarket shopping to fast food deliveries, from items of furniture to electrical appliances. It had now become possible to live entirely within one’s four walls, to be under a self-imposed, permanent house arrest.
It was with such a thought that he went the next day and knocked on the door of the neighbour above, and on receiving no answer was tempted to look through the letterbox. But though he had the parcel in his hand, this would look too intrusive were a fellow neighbour to appear. He returned downstairs and allowed himself the most morbid of thoughts: perhaps the person had passed away and was beginning to rot. How long would it take for a body to start smelling, he wondered. He looked it up, and, assuming they passed away before the postwoman tried to deliver the parcel, they would already be very smelly indeed.
He thought no more about it over the next couple of days, except for the occasional harrowing images of decomposed bodies he’d seen online, when someone knocked on his door. He answered it, and whatever the opposite of decomposition looks like, she embodied it. He wasn’t quite sure if this was love at first sight, Rupert said, as he wondered if part of her instant attractiveness rested on how far away she looked from the corpse he imagined. He handed over the package and she apologised for not picking it up sooner. It was as if she thought for a moment whether to disclose the reason, but though she withheld it, he could see in her face a sadness that indicated it wasn’t a pleasure trip. He would have liked to ask her more, or at the very least ask if she was alright, but believed this might have seemed intrusive, and instead said it wasn’t a problem at all: the parcel didn’t take up so much space, and he would be happy to do it again. She said, thank you. As she turned to leave, and he was about to shut the door, she asked if it would be possible to give his address as a safe place if it became necessary once more. She suspected she might be away quite a lot over the next couple of months. Rupert said, of course, and she smiled as no decomposing corpse ever could.
14
In the following weeks, Rupert received another couple of parcels for her, and the next time she came to his door, she had a bottle of wine in her hand and a small card. By way of a thank you, she said, as they swapped items. Impulsively, he was about to ask if she would like to come in and share a glass of the wine. But then, perhaps more instinctively than impulsively, he proposed instead that it was a lovely evening, the park was only a few metres away, would she like to join him for a drink there? He had some plastic glasses leftover from a small housewarming, and they could sit on a bench or on the grass if it were dry. Rupert admitted that in recent years he’d become very good at creating opportunities to seduce women, but he believed this wasn’t one of them. Perhaps were he less practised, he would clumsily have asked Julia into his flat, and he supposed she would have said no. But this is where his developed instinct overrode what in another less effective womaniser would have been impulsive. Yet he insisted this wasn’t the same as the preconceived. It was as though the instinct had imposed itself upon the impulsive without quite indicating he was being manipulative, and if he were making much of the intricacy of his feelings, it was perhaps because he had been making so little of them in the time leading up to his celibacy.
Julia agreed, asked her to give him fifteen minutes, and she would knock again, and they could go together. During the two hours they sat in the park in the early summer evening, they talked about various things, but most importantly, why she hadn’t been around to pick up her mail. Her aunt, who lived near Aberdeen, had passed away a couple of days earlier. She was her mother’s only sister, and Julia was an only child, and her aunt often looked after her when she was young. She had never married, and her parents assumed she was someone for whom romance had passed her by. But that wasn’t so, and when Julia was a teenager and suffering romantically, her aunt talked about a lover of hers, from when she was at university. He left her, and left her bereft, and she decided that was her love life over; she would devote herself to writing and teaching, which she did. Julia’s mother was never close to her sister, and Julia wanted to be with her as much as possible in the last weeks of her life. She was going up in a few days’ time for the funeral.
Rupert felt closer to her as she talked than anybody he’d met in years, and a lot closer than anyone he had dated in all the time in Glasgow, whether when working in pharmacy or in alternative medicine. I asked what Julia did, and he said she was a primary school teacher. A caring profession, he said, as though he’d been initially in a careless one and then was himself careless in another. He asked me if I remembered the story about Charlie, and I said of course, and I wondered if he’d seen him again. He said no, and didn’t expect to do so, but he did think a little about how, in different ways, posties had brought them together, though he hoped his relationship with Julia wouldn’t be as fraught with ethical complications as Charlie’s had been with Jemima. I said to him I hoped not, as I added it might ruin the story I wanted to tell. He laughed and said perhaps one day I would write a story about myself. I said perhaps, but interesting things seemed to happen to other people; my purpose was to give as much shape to these lives other than mine as I could manage. His tale had given me that shape, and maybe too something of a moral lesson.
© Tony McKibbin