The Light of Amsterdam Read Free

Susan. Gordon who was good with his hands – why didn’t she just come right out and say that he was red-hot in bed and in comparison made him look like an undersexed wimp? The solace he tried to take in his intellectual superiority was thinning in spiteful synchronicity with the thinning of his hair and if at the back it still rested at an artful and slightly rebellious length below his collar, there was a melting polar cap at his crown that he monitored in the mirror on a weekly basis. In spiteful contrast Gordon sprouted hair from every possible part of his body: he had a Michael Heseltine hairline that started low on his head and swept back like the thickest of hedges where all sorts of wildlife – foxes, rabbits, birds’ nests – could hide undetected. It fell out from his always open shirt like tumbleweed in an abandoned Wild West town; it swathed his forearms. He remembered the story of Jacob who deceived his blind father by covering his arms with animal skins to get the blessing and started to think that the hirsute Gordon had stolen his.
    He wondered what their daughter Caroline thought of him. Away at university in Scotland she had less time to form any strong opinion but he fervently hoped she disliked his replacement before telling himself that he was being selfish, that if he had been so committed to happy families he wouldn’t have strayed one night in October when false faces and municipal firework displays were the order of the day and somehow, and for reasons he didn’t fully understand, he had succumbed to temptation, only to find that what held the tantalising prospect of passionate excitement fizzled out almost instantaneously like a damp squib. A Master’s student he was supervising. A mature student thankfully. A ceramicist. He had felt it coming for weeks – the needing advice, the enjoyment of his praise, the way that being together subtly left him feeling slightly different, in some vague but pleasant realignment. So maybe it wasn’t about future possibilities so much as nostalgia, a rediscovering of what had been lost. Late at night in the studio. She was rolling clay, slapping and stretching it with an honest vigour and a simple determination that made him stretch out his hand and touch her hair. That’s all he did, all he would have done, except she was in his arms and kissing him with an urgency that took his breath away and before any part of his brain could engage with the moment she was pulling him backwards on top of the table, on top of the clay. Afterwards – one of several embarrassments created – there was a pressed print of the moment. But a print of what? Passion? Loneliness? Stupidity? He still didn’t know and it was followed by nothing else. Nothing was ever fired or formed beyond that brief, breathless encounter where two strangers stumbled against each other. Afterwards he did what he thought was the gentlemanly thing and inflated her marks and they parted wishing each other well with an unspoken understanding that they would never see each other or mention this thing ever again. Ships in the night they sailed steadily on.
    So why then had he felt the necessity of telling Susan? Why in hell did he tell her? Well, of course, there was the usual tongue-loosening prompting of shame – the hair trigger of guilt – but also, if he was entirely truthful, a self-destructive desire to suggest that he was still someone that someone else could want, in a way she no longer did. None of it mattered really because before he had finished his genuine expression of abject remorse and appeal for forgiveness, she had dismissed all such present or future pleas and sent their marriage to Death Row.
    He made himself a cup of tea and let the record finish, complete with its occasional crackle and one large jump, before driving over to the house that he still thought of as his home. But at the front door he rang the bell and waited, the