Part 4

Other than the impromptu visits to Elda’s wing, Ludwig very much kept himself to himself in his wing, which had gotten progressively dingier the longer he had sequestered himself away in it, notwithstanding his aforementioned forays to Elda’s wing and the odd day here or there when he went to London to teach at Goldsmiths, which is where he had ended up working after leaving Oxford in a fit of pique, having been passed over yet again for a promotion that he felt, very strongly, he deserved, even though, as he himself conceded, he had produced very little written output, a few obscure academic essays a year published in the most esoteric journals, nothing more, not a hint of this masterwork he felt he had in him, in all the years he’d been an academic, not even an outline of a proposal for a book had he produced, just essays, all he wrote was essays, all of which I read, being a stalwart friend and believing that this is what a stalwart friend did for a friend who wrote obscure philosophical essays, not that I understood a word, I thought, though I tried my hardest to understand I just could not parse any sense out of any of those essays, out of a single paragraph or sentence or even clause of a sentence, the essays being written with the utmost inscrutability, in a technical language that was as inaccessible as it was arid, as dense as it was oblique. Of course, I never let on to Ludwig that I found his essays incomprehensible, reasoning to myself that this was to spare his blushes, protect him from the indubitable knowledge that his essays were full of impenetrable mumbo jumbo, the worst thing that an essay can be full of, of course, although sanctimonious bullshit comes a close second, which itself is only marginally more objectionable than sententious claptrap, but in fact my withholding of my feedback was more about sparing my blushes than Ludwig’s, since I very much suspected that his essays would be perfectly intelligible to someone possessed of the requisite intelligence, which I so patently lacked and had always lacked, even though I affected to be intelligent, I was nothing but an ignoramus, a vacuous waste of space as an erstwhile teacher of mine once pointedly put it in front of a classroom of tittering sycophants who I felt then and still feel now had it in for me. I was downright dumb, a dullard, a dolt. Yes, I could pass exams, even excel at the taking of them, but what did that prove?, merely that I had the ability to swot, as they say, to get my head down and do the work, namely to memorise verbatim other people’s thoughts, concepts, ideas and so forth, which I would then regurgitate in peristaltic waves onto the pages of an exam script, an exam script marked by a marker looking for precisely those thoughts, concepts and ideas etc to be rendered with fidelity, which is what I did to an absolute tee, hence why I got the top grade in pretty much every exam I ever sat, hence why people, especially Ludwig, assumed I was smart. But I wasn’t smart, I thought, far from it, having never had a single original idea in my life, having only ever assimilated the ideas of other people and passed them off as my own, and that is why, I felt, I had not understood Ludwig’s essays and that is why, I suddenly realised with absolute clarity, I was dithering so much over Ludwig’s notes. I wasn’t up to the task of reviewing them, I thought, it was as simple and ghastly and obvious as that; what was I thinking? what have I gotten myself into? I lamented to myself or maybe said out loud. I’ll tell Elda immediately, I thought. I took a fulsome swig of whisky from the bottle and an extremely long drag on my vape device, so long I started to feel woozy, although that could well have been the whisky kicking in, then I jumped off the bed, got dressed and without allowing myself a moment to hesitate or reconsider or backtrack on what I had decided and was determined to do, I went downstairs and trundled along the vestibule until I got to the door that connected the two wings of the house, which I opened tentatively, having never opened it before I was nervous about opening it, even though I had seen Ludwig open it many times and knew it was no big deal to open it, I still felt apprehensive doing so, this being my first time I was a virgin when it came to opening the connecting door of the two wings, and so naturally I felt some trepidation as the door opened onto an altogether lighter vestibule, uplit on both sides by clam-like metallic sconces. I didn’t open the door fully, I didn’t need to, instead I opened it only far enough to squeeze my body through, and then I closed the door with enough force that it was obvious the door had been opened and then closed again, not a great deal of force so that a slamming sound ensued as the door connected with the doorjamb or door frame or whatever, but enough so as to alert Elda to my presence in her wing, reasoning that she would prefer to know I had entered her wing to give her a moment to collect herself and perhaps even put on a dash of make-up, straighten her hair etc, not that she had to do those things on my account, far from it, I was the last person to care if a woman wore make-up or had straightened-out hair, but I knew Elda did care, was absolutely the sort of woman who liked to be well turned out on all occasions, even an occasion such as this, a very strange occasion now I came to think about it, the occasion being essentially that of a good friend of her deceased husband entering her wing from the wing her deceased husband used to occupy without a pretext or advanced warning, entering on a whim, as it were, for no better reason than the idea had occurred to me to do so, without assessing whether it was a good idea, I had simply acted on it, just as I had acted on so many other whimsical ideas over the years without giving them a moment’s reflection. The oddity of the occasion of my entering Elda’s wing struck me with such force that I immediately re-opened the connecting door and returned to Ludwig’s wing, it had been too much for me, I thought, to enter Elda’s wing through the connecting door unannounced, it had been a step too far, having acted spontaneously I had not thought through the implications of entering Elda’s wing, implications I now saw all too clearly. I was sweating profusely, what with the stress of having entered and then almost immediately exited Elda’s wing, so I continued on down the vestibule, one of those vestibules that seemed to go on and on as if in a bad dream of a vestibule, until it did in fact come to an end by leading to the so-called rustic kitchen, across which I hastened to the back door, a stable door type of door that I opened only the lower section of, not wanting for some reason to open the upper section of it, and then I crawled through the open lower section and lo and behold I was outside, the astringent light of a new day bearing down upon me as I reassembled my body into a standing up position. I breathed in deeply. The air was cold, fresh, sightly dewy. It felt good to breathe it in, to get as much of it into my lungs as I could, so I stood there breathing in deeply for a while, until I started to feel dizzy from too much breathing, from over breathing as it were, which I knew and probably always had known was a bad thing to do, dangerous even, like anything else that was done to excess. I closed the bottom half of the stable door and I sloped off along the path and let myself out through the rusted iron gate and then I set off down the road, away from the Devil’s Punch Bowl, I’d had enough of that overly arboreous place for a lifetime truth be told, taking the first left and then walking down the hill to Haslemere, which took a long time, Haslemere being far further away on foot than I’d realised or bargained for; by the time I got there, I was starving, not literally in the sense of being malnourished, emaciated, close to death etc, but metaphorically, meaning I was very hungry, not having had anything to eat since the biltong an hour or so prior to this moment, which had hardly been the most substantial snack, which itself had been the only thing I’d eaten since the risotto, the portion size of which had been less than what I would consider reasonable, the portion size being, as it were, inversely correlated to the deliciousness of the risotto; that was frequently the case when it came to restaurant food, I thought, all too often the biggest servings were of the blandest, most uninspiring food, whilst the tastiest dishes were served in miniscule portions that left you needing to eat more in order to achieve that feeling of satiety one should, I thought, expect to feel when one has paid to eat a meal in a restaurant, that one has a right to feel in fact. It was a quandary, I thought, perhaps even a paradox, a subject worthy of further reflection, something no doubt Ludwig had opined over and note taken on, but at that precise moment it wasn’t something I was interested in cogitating any further over, at that precise moment, I was famished, so I went into the first place I could find that served hot food, which happened to be a cafe, not a café but a good old-fashioned blue-collar worker’s caff, where I ordered an obligatory fry-up consisting of bacon, sausages, black pudding, chips, beans, bubble and a fried slice, a meal I ate with relish as I listened to the blue-collar workers at the tables in my vicinity discussing matters of the utmost tawdriness, remarking to myself frequently how unlike me they were and how unlike them I was, even though my parents were just like them and had always expected me to be, I simply wasn’t, it was just the way things were, I neither could be like them nor did I want to be, I was the way I was and they were the way they were and nothing would ever brook the divide. I was simply unable to speak the way they were speaking, every other word being cunt or fuck or whatever, not that I never used such words, I did, I thought, but I either did so ironically or I did so out of anger when I needed to express myself with force, I never used such words recursively and continuously like these boorish blue-collar workers I found myself surrounded by did, who by dint of their uncontrollable unhinged repetitive swearing devalued swear words, depriving them of their ability to evince irony and anger, effectively reducing them to signs without significations, the worst fate that a sign can suffer, I thought, a fate akin to a life being lived without any purpose or meaning, to my life for example, which for a long time had had no purpose, even though it had had meaning, of a sort, a strange enigmatic meaning, but even that had been abraded away over time, until at some point it no longer existed, so that my life had found itself not just lacking purpose, but also denuded of meaning, a husk of a life, I thought, a moribund life that no one should endure, but which I nonetheless was enduring and would continue to have to endure unless I ended it, which I very well might, I thought, even though I was scared of killing myself, I probably could do it, but then why had I not done it, I thought, why if my life was devoid of purpose and meaning did I continue to live it. It was an important question, probably the only question that mattered in the final analysis, but at that moment I wasn’t up to the task of postulating an answer; I’ll return to this question, I told myself, when I am up to the task of postulating an answer, even though I knew I might never be up to the task of postulating an answer. I paid my bill, left the cafe, walked to the train station and toyed with the idea of buying a train ticket to London, but I didn’t do that, the reasons against going to London having outweighed the reasons for, instead I walked back to Hindhead and let myself into Ludwig’s wing and got straight into bed, whereupon, and completely unexpectedly, I fell asleep. Soon thereafter I started dreaming about my wife, which wasn’t unusual, in fact it was unusual not to dream about my wife when I was sleeping; in the dream, just like in all of the dreams about my wife, my wife was having a go at me, telling me repeatedly what a no-good fuck I was, terrible husband, father, human being etc, I tried to appease her by agreeing with her and saying I would try to do better, that I understood where she was coming from and could see I had to change etc, but it was futile, my wife was adamant, could not be mollified, I tried to mollify her, but she just wouldn’t be mollified, the more I attempted to mollify her the more vehement she became, nonetheless I continued to try to mollify her, even though I knew it would only make matters worse, that what I needed to do was either to remain silent and take my punishment or else walk away, I still tried vainly to counter my wife’s diatribe with mollification, I knew in my dream that it was precisely the wrong tactic or strategy or whatever, but I was powerless to effect another one, just as my wife was powerless to do anything other than channel her rancour, a rancour that gathered more and more power until it transmuted itself into a violence that took the form of my wife stabbing me in the abdomen with a sharp implement, whereupon I woke up and immediately got out of bed. The notes, I thought, I have to make a start on them. But rather than making a start on them, I went downstairs and made myself a cup of tea, which I sipped standing at the kitchen window staring out at the garden, not that I was really taking in what my visual field was registering vis-à-vis the garden, since I was too busy thinking about the notes and my having to commence my reading of them, too busy fretting in other words, about the impending moment when, my cup of tea having been slurped dry, I would have no choice but to go up to Ludwig’s wing’s study, even though I knew there was no choice, I still believed that there was one and even when I went upstairs and entered the office and fetched one of the boxes from the shelving unit and opened it and retrieved a pile of notes and started reading those notes, I still clung to the hope that it wasn’t necessary for me to read them, even after I’d read all of the notes in that box and several others besides, I still felt in some way that I had a choice about reading them, even when I’d read every single note that Ludwig had ever noted down, a part of me still believed that there was a choice available, that I could either read the notes or not read them, or rather I could pretend that I hadn’t read them even though I had, which is in fact precisely what I chose to do when Elda phoned to ask me how I was doing, which I felt was really just her euphemistic way of asking how the note reviewing process was going; it’s understandable, she said, utterly nonplussed by my apparent lack of progress, Ludwig himself could barely bring himself to read his own notes, she said, so it’s no surprise that you find yourself in the same funk, I myself would never even contemplate reading them, even though I want nothing more, of course, she said, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, just as Ludwig in all his years of compiling them couldn’t, it’s no surprise at all to me, therefore, that you haven’t managed to read them and you mustn’t worry about it, in fact what you need is to take your mind off it, why don’t you come around to my wing she said, come have some supper with me, maybe we’ll watch a movie afterwards, play a game of cribbage or some other card game. I told her I’d like that, even though I detested and always have detested card games, and so an hour or so later I found myself in Elda’s wing sitting at the dining table eating a plate of spaghetti whilst Elda regaled me with stories from her side of the table, stories about Ludwig and old times and things that had been happening recently in her life, and then abruptly she stopped speaking and started eating her spaghetti and I realised it was my turn to regale her with stories, stories that like hers were about Ludwig and old times, but not about things that had been happening recently in my life, since I didn’t want Elda to know about them, not that there was much to tell, but even so, anything about the recent happenings in my life were confidential as far as I was concerned. After dinner we retired to the living room. Elda gave me a glass of wine and invited me to sit on the sofa next to her, which I did, and then Elda put on the television and we watched a documentary about the sub-prime mortgage crisis, which needless to say held me in thrall, just as it held Elda in thrall, even though it felt as if she was at the same time trying to make a move on me by frequently touching a part of my body as she moved a part of hers, she nonetheless sat there glued to the screen, meaning that I couldn’t be sure if she was in fact trying to make a move on me, even though I had a strong presentiment that she was, the intensity with which she was watching the documentary about the sub-prime mortgage crisis led me to think that her frequent touching of me was entirely inadvertent and that it in no way signified a desire to initiate carnal relations with me. As soon as the documentary was over, however, Elda made a definitive move on me by leaning over and kissing me on the mouth. I, of course, responded in kind by kissing her back and pulling her towards me, but Elda resisted being pulled towards me and instead took my hand and led me away to her boudoir, which is where we had sexual intercourse, anal intercourse in fact, since Elda preferred it up her bum, something I remember Ludwig telling me and being jealous of, since I too preferred anal intercourse, only my wife would never oblige, not once would she allow me to stick my penis in her anus in all the years we’d had sex, which always and exclusively involved vaginal penetration, but Elda did like it in her backside, and so naturally I was overjoyed to oblige, although the excitement of doing so meant that I was barely able to do more than three or four thrusts before exploding inside her, which ordinarily, with my wife anyway, would have meant the end of the matter, but with Elda it didn’t mean the end of the matter, since I found that I could carry on thrusting my cock, which for some reason wasn’t even remotely flaccid, into her arse, and this time around it took me twenty or maybe thirty thrusts to ejaculate, even then I wasn’t done, could carry on thrusting etc, and so it went on, for many hours, me thrusting my phallus in and out of Elda’s arse, her groaning and saying filthy things like ‘fuck me in my arse you dirty man’, ‘yeah, fuck me in my shit hole’, ‘stick it in deep you disgusting pervert’ etc. Afterwards, we slept in Elda’s bed, or rather Elda slept, but I just lay there thinking about the situation, i.e., the fact that I had just remorselessly fucked the widow of my deceased best friend up the arse, something I had thought might happen as soon as I accepted Elda’s request to review Ludwig’s notes, even though I had told myself that this expectation was completely unwarranted and distasteful etc, nonetheless I had felt that this very well could happen, that in fact the main reason Elda had asked me to come and review the notes was so that she could have sexual intercourse with me, and the main reason I had agreed to review the notes was so that I could come and have sexual intercourse with her, even though it was abhorrent to me that I have sexual intercourse with the widow of my deceased best friend, I still couldn’t help wanting to, not that Ludwig would have minded, Ludwig having long lived a polyamorous existence in which Elda was merely one of a great many women and indeed men he slept with on a regular basis, even though Elda was also polyamorous and had often intimated to me that she would like to sleep with me, still I felt it was wrong for me to have actually done so. The simple fact of the matter was that I had a prudish disposition, notwithstanding my strong preference for anal sex, I thought. I didn’t want to be a prude, but I nonetheless was one. Sleeping with the widow of my deceased best friend offended my conscience, left me feeling guilty, disgusted with myself, wretched etc, I thought as I lay there next to Elda staring up at the coffered ceiling, as I tried to figure out what I should do next, even though I knew that whatever I should do would be subordinated to whatever I wanted to do, which was almost certainly screw Elda again, provided, that is, Elda was also desirous of screwing again, which I couldn’t take for granted, but equally I had no reason to think that she wouldn’t want me to screw her again given she had been the one to initiate carnal relations with me and as far as I could tell had enjoyed our earlier romp and therefore would likely be keen to repeat the experience, which, as it turned out, was exactly what she wanted to do when she woke up however many hours later, and exactly what we did do. After fucking, we had a shower together and then, without bothering to get dressed, we went downstairs and Elda rustled up pancakes for breakfast, which I ate with relish, although Elda only picked at hers, probably because, I thought, she regretted fucking her deceased husband’s best friend. I couldn’t be sure, but that was my working hypothesis. Certainly, I regretted fucking her. Even though I had enjoyed it immensely I nonetheless felt it was deeply wrong for us to have copulated, hence why as soon as I’d finished my share of the pancakes, I suggested it would be best if I went back to Ludwig’s wing, but Elda was affronted by my suggestion. So you fuck me and then fuck off, is that it? she said, to which I spluttered that that wasn’t it, no. Then stay, she said. Stay? I said. Yes, she said, stay here with me in my wing. In your wing? I said. Yeah, she said, I mean, is it such a crazy idea, we both like each other, right? And my wing is by far and away nicer than the shithole wing you’ve been staying in, she said. I couldn’t fault her logic. Her wing was the far superior of the two wings and we did, it seemed, like each other. Okay, why the fuck not, I said, you only live once, right? Right, she said. After this brief exchange we fucked again, on the kitchen table, and then I went back to Ludwig’s wing to pick up my things, or ostensibly that’s what I went back for, but as soon as I stepped foot in Ludwig’s wing, I immediately realised that I didn’t want to move in with Elda, that in fact the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to move in with Elda even though I was fairly certain that I was in love with Elda, nonetheless I couldn’t move in with her, perhaps it was because I was in love with her, I thought, perhaps if I wasn’t in love with her, I could move in with her without any qualms whatsoever, but I was in love with her and so therefore I absolutely couldn’t move in with her. I phoned Elda and explained my position, but she couldn’t seem to understand what my being in love with her had to do with anything. Besides, she said, you’re not really in love with me. I’m not? I said. No, she said, you’re infatuated with me probably, that I don’t deny, just as I am infatuated with you, but that is not the same thing as being in love. I told her that I was fairly sure this wasn’t an infatuation. Even though I was in fact unsure of whether it was an infatuation, nonetheless I continued to insist that I was in love with Elda and Elda continued to insist that I was infatuated, rather than in love, with her, hence we reached a kind of stalemate, a stalemate that I resolved by hanging up the phone and immediately leaving the house. I wasn’t sure anymore what was going on, perhaps I had never been sure and not realised it, but right now I was completely sure about not being sure about what was going on. I had read Ludwig’s notes and yet I couldn’t admit to myself that I had read them. I had screwed Elda and I shouldn’t have done so. I was either in love with her or I was infatuated with her; even though I felt the former was true, I had to accept that the latter was equally possible. It was too much! I was in danger of going completely insane, I thought, I had always felt I was insane, or for a very long time I had, but in fact, I realised, it was only now, in the midst of this situation, that real insanity beckoned.