Downsizing

(there is a reading of this story at the end of the post)

Downsizing

There was a game they used to play: “if you had been a character from a novel, who would have written the book?” He liked to joke his creator would have been Hemingway and that he’d be hard-drinking, hard-smoking, tough and rough - and he did so knowing he was nothing like that. As did she. In her case she hadn’t chosen Austen as he suspected she might, but rather Woolf, saying she saw herself as slightly wan and scatty, but intellectual and interesting with it. When he suggested she’d be more at home in The Old Curiosity Shop she feigned a swipe at him.

But life wasn’t like a novel; at least not theirs. Not in the way they thought a novel should be.

They had met not because of a novelist but thanks to a poet. Eliot had been required reading during their first term at Southampton: “we like to throw people in at the deep end” their tutor had boasted. Where Kate had been able to swim, Patrick struggled to keep afloat, and her providing him with the occasional literary arm-bands inevitably brought them together. As if to justify her selection of the creator of her novel-persona, Kate would later tease him that their courtship had been closer to Woolf than Hemingway; his standard rebuttal, subsequently in use for many years, was that Henry James was more likely to have been the culprit on the basis that it took them so long to get anywhere. The first time he used the joke she had thumped him on the arm, and it became their own little Vaudeville routine. When did the friendly punches stop being thrown? Patrick tells himself he can’t recall, even though he knows precisely the year, month, day and minute.

And now, since that first Eliot-driven encounter, over fifty-five years have passed and tomorrow is their Golden Wedding anniversary.

He has nothing particular planned. There had been a time when they celebrated every passing year as if adding to their stock of achievements, as if each individual twelve months was a remarkable triumph in itself. And then the motivation for the cakes and cards shifted to give their children a chance to go to town; the seventeenth of July became like an extra birthday, an excuse for a party. How long did that last? Patrick knows not long enough. Those more family-oriented affairs began when Sarah was six and Henry four, but then - in the blink of an eye! - they were fifteen and thirteen and starting to have other things on their minds. Rather than let the ceremony suffer a painful and slow death, the month before their eighteenth anniversary Kate suggested “let’s not do the wedding anniversary thing this year, eh?” Neither of the children complained, and even though Patrick felt it was signalling the end of something, he said nothing. For him it symbolised a turning point, as if all their lives they had been scrambling up to a peak of some kind and were now heading down the other side. Then, in rapid succession, the kids seemed to race into and out of sixth form, into and out of university; the house became a refuge for them out of term time, and later little more than an occasional holiday home. When they started their own families it became less than that.

Kate started talking about ‘downsizing’. She had thrown it into the conversation ten years earlier when they were out walking in the grounds of a local National Trust pile, the annual activity which had become their low-key acknowledgement of another year together. For Patrick, taken a little by surprise, her proposal suggested their metaphorical descent was suddenly over, the mountain replaced by a broad flat plain stretching as far as the eye could see. Thus ‘downsizing’ prompted him to think of something beyond the sensible and practical; it felt like giving up, as if the future ahead was going to be bland and inconsequential, as if all excitement was behind them and there was nothing else to look forward to. But knowing Kate’s logic was sound - as it had seemed to be for over forty years! - he went along with the idea, and for a few weeks they toured estate agents and browsed websites looking for their final ‘forever home’. But their hearts proved not to be in it, and eventually they conceded they could do without the fuss and expense of moving, and that it was useful having the extra space for when either Sarah or Henry brought their expanding families to visit - even if for just a day. So little changed. Gradually they got older, time went faster.

And ten years later, on the verge of their ‘golden’ anniversary?

As he contemplates tomorrow’s walk, a dull pain reminds Patrick of the trouble he has been having with his knees over the last couple of years. He wants to avoid giving it a name as naming something makes it real, allows it to attach itself to you, and, once attached, means it’s even more difficult to shake off. It’s ‘another one of those things’ age bestows on you whether you want it or not: the need for an extra wee in the middle of the night, the slight shortness of breath when reaching the top of the stairs, the inability to snap open a tight jar lid the way you used to. Knowing there is nothing he can do about any of those things doesn’t help. Indeed, birthdays have become less a cause for celebration and more a kind of bodily MOT where you discover that during the previous twelve months something else has worn down, seized up, or fallen off. But he will walk tomorrow all the same because Kate will want him to, even though she won’t be there with him.

She was spared the gradual decline to which Patrick now finds himself subject, and occasionally he tries to find some consolation in the thought she avoided all the nonsense attendant on remorseless physical degradation. Virginia Woolf or not, she would have hated that. Of course, he has no possible conception of how the end had been for her, no notion of the terror she may have felt as the speeding car - being chased by the police - tore round the corner at the top of the High Street and mounted the pavement. There can be no doubt she would have heard the wail of the sirens behind her and, if she did, was it not likely that she would have turned to see what all the fuss was about? But in reconstructing the scene as he has been unable not to do in the intervening four years, he tells himself that she had been unaware, most likely distracted by notices in the Newsagent’s window: offers of second-hand sofas; Yoga or homeopathy classes; or puppies - again! - from number thirty-two’s unspayed Labrador-cross. Conscious of the crisis or not, he was told it would have been over in a flash, as if that made any difference. They were trying to be kind, consoling, yet they failed to recognise that for him it could never be over in a flash; each day for the rest of his life would be slower and emptier.

There had been an investigation, the outcome of which was to suggest failings on the part of the chasing police car: knowing they were coming up to the High Street they should have slowed down, backed off. It was a verdict which provided compensation for Patrick - as if money made any difference. When the cheque arrived he imagined Kate looking over his shoulder and joking “never mind downsizing, now you can afford to upsize!” Needless to say, he never moved.