The Regime of Private Affairs by Orlando Whitfield / Fiction / Untitled Books

"He is a man who appreciates function, finds beauty in function, and it is in this way only that he is a Modern Man."

The Regime of Private Affairs by Orlando Whitfield

It is difficult to imagine what went into preparing for today; all the hours of thought and the list-making; the purchases, the cleaning and the people; doctors and nurses and well-wishers constantly calling and writing, wanting to share in the excitement of the parents-to-be. Letters and bills - many with foreign stamps that excite because as a boy he collected stamps but has lost the drive for it now but not the love, no, not the love - continue to be delivered and responded to; queries arrive by telegram and must be looked over. Most are short, no more than a few words, and the Master often tells the messenger to wait as he composes a reply, printing the words in pencil lest the message get wet in the rain outside and the ink run and can't be read by the postmaster. He must put off all of his business affairs for at least a month and each concern must be dealt with delicately. Everything must simply be made to lie dormant so that this month may pass without any added strain. After each of these interruptions he closes his eyes and sighs; there is a chill in the room and soon he will have a fire made so that he and his wife can sit and wait together. She will be back soon and so much will change.

Indeed, it is this change that worries him and it is in the thoughts that fog his mind and he is ashamed of it. At the end of each note he checks it over to make sure that this fear has not come across in his choice of words; that it can't be perceived in his tone; that it can't be seen in his handwriting. It will be not only the nature and the everydayness of his existence that will be altered, but also the feeling in the house around him. Each of his children has made him feel this way: their arrivals are the arrivals of expectant strangers, of intruders. There is nothing to do though, there is no defence against this invasion; its arrival answers a summons and as sure as the progression of clouds across the sky, he will come.

The room is long and filled with many wooden objects, things solid and warm to the touch. They are his things not because he is unwilling to share them, but because his wife has a notion that she should not want these things. In the wake of the two long windows, the colours in the carpet have been deafened by the constant sun and, in the evenings, when the room is lit only by lamplight and the curtains have been drawn against the evening, these bleached oblongs look as if they are floating above the rest of the floor. This is the room in which he is the man he used to be; the man who soon will be nothing but a remnant of the room that will remain.

He will spend less time here. They will arrange his desk all the same, as if he had been there, but he will see only the teetering piles of correspondence and the empty ashtray and the unopened books. The chessboard will stay the same though he imagines (imagines! what of his changed life can he truly imagine!) that Ernst will set out the chess problem each day all the same. The chair he sits in will be pushed under the desk and will cease to be a chair that he uses. It will, for a time at least, form another part of the desk; he grips the arms of it now feeling its dark resilience and the mutual trust that he will soon betray: without him the chair becomes useless, all of these objects revert to mere materiality and he is sorry because he is a man who appreciates function, finds beauty in function, and it is in this way only that he is a Modern Man.

The wind beats a cotton wool tattoo on the windows and outside in the street a man is shouting the headlines, hawking his evening papers. Inside nothing more than the fact of the shout is audible and it could be declaring anything, anything at all, but of course, to him, sitting at his desk in the final comfort of a dying existence it sounds like nothing so much as 'THE BOY IS BORN.' The crowd around the vendor swells and disperses like something awash in the Spree and occasionally someone buys a paper and either moves off without consulting it or stops in the line of one of the street lamps to read the front page. Light rain falls and spins in the lights of passing carriages and the world seems unaltered and yet he knows it is utterly changed, always changing.

He drains the coffee cup that he has had at his side for long enough that the coffee has cooled and is now in that stage between warm and cold - tepid, supposedly, still drinkable - and it tastes a little metallic and, though he drinks it in one gulp, he regrets drinking it at all when he is finished. When the maid brought it he asked her to tell Ernst to come for him when it was time and now he worries that the message wasn't relayed or that he has forgotten to come. He looks at the clock and sees that it must be about the time but doesn't wish to pre-empt Ernst since he is usually so punctual and must have a reason to be late if indeed he is late at all. He goes to the door and opens it but when he thinks he hears footfall, closes it again and returns to his chair and takes up a note as if he were deeply disinterested in what was about to happen. As the door opens, he is just able to turn the note the right way up and reads only one word: Heute - today.

As he passes through the hall he thinks he hears something break, behind a door to the kitchen but when he opens it and goes through he sees no one there and nothing broken and behind him he can feel the presence of Ernst that seems to say, 'We should go now. You'll be late for her.' But he lingers for a moment and sees the strawberries that he bought at the market this morning - the first he has found this season - washed in a colander by the sink. He turns and raises a finger, a gesture which says both: 'I've had an idea'; and, 'Wait.' Then he puts fruit into a bowl and, with the bowl in the crook of his arm follows Ernst to the waiting carriage and is gone.

The train from Lausanne takes eight and a half hours and by the end she will be very tired and will doubtless go straight to bed although he will come up and talk to her; he has missed her and wants to be with her again even if she falls asleep. The house is large and has been without her for two months now and there is a part of him that sees the house as having fulfilled less than its full function by letting her stay away for so long. The staff have been less attentive and seem to blame him for her absence. For a week he entertained his few close friends in the evenings and they smoked late into the night talking the talk that among women is termed gossip but among men is often called politics. Soon, however, he fell deep into his work and stayed long hours at his office and returned to the house ravenously hungry and took bread and cheese with him to bed so that in the morning, when Ernst came to wake him, the sheets were cluttered with crumbs and papers.

Now, in the carriage, as it stops and starts in the last of the evening traffic, he conjures her face, something he has not dared to do in the past weeks, as if its repeated imagining would mar its beauty or distort its truth. He pulls the elements together: first the skin, like the painter's canvas, is pale to the point of almost blue under a scattering of freckles, then her eyes which are grey like oysters and her mouth which is his and her chin which is perfect.

He is disturbed by trains and is convinced that it cannot be good for the child. Before she left and in many letters since, he has pleaded with her. He has horrors of the speed and the heat; of sheer mountain passes and craggy ravines and of the men who drive the engine, blackened by technology and hardened by the nightmare of the ever-quickening future. By the end, as recently as a week ago, he knew she would do what she wants, but he continued to write the letters if only to be able to imagine the face she make in the face of his disapproval, a tightening of the lips and a glimmer of eyelid.

On the platform she is large, almost comically so, and the hat she wears - a long-rimmed cream dome - makes her look like some ancient temple or folly as she stands among the ruins of her luggage. She is stately, she is tall and magnificent and he has to swallow hard his tears of joy at seeing her. Indeed, he waits, stays perfectly still in this hall of movement and of moving bodies, and watches her from where he is waiting for her to catch sight of him but with each passing moment hoping that she doesn't, hoping that... But of course it is his stillness that marks him out and she sees him all too soon and beckons to him without motion, but with the quiet dignity of strong marriage. And, of course, he goes.

'Emil, my dear, what's wrong? Why, you are so thin. What's wrong? Are you alright?' A train screeches and he says nothing but looks at her and then over her shoulder at the wheels of a train pulling off which spin briefly and then gained traction.

They wait as the porter loads the trunks and cases and he makes sure they stand a little way back in case the horse bolts. They stand side by side content not to say anything in the presence of so many others. Anything they say here may be overheard or part of its richness be absorbed by the mass of noise in the air that surrounds them and so they wait until they are in the compartment and he uncovers the bowl of strawberries that he has hidden with a handkerchief. She smiles in a way that refreshes him more thoroughly than he knew was needed and they eat the fruit and she tells him everything that she has already told him in a hundred letters. But these are their private words, what they have shared made theirs again and above the rattle of the wheels on the cobbles there is nothing but this.

In the short while that he has been gone they have done wonders, spurred into action by her imminent return. The house glows: where metals had dulled or tarnished and where dark wood has lightened or scuffed through lack of polish they have been at work. Now they are lined up in the hall, hands primly in front or behind them, and Ernst stands proud and stiff as a statue at the end of the line to welcome their mistress. The house smells of wax and of the dinner they have prepared for her; a chicken broth laced with garlic and thyme. The fatty steam pervades the rooms around them and they all know that there is enough that they will all get some and so there is a feeling of wellbeing and contentment quite literally in the air. She says that she will take it in her room and then she leaves them all to pore over the house, shooing away any last remnants of her absence.

In the bath he reads to her from the periodicals that she has missed, telling her of exhibitions she's missed and of plays that have met with success or failure. She cuckoos with delight at one particularly caustic review and asks him to read the line over again and the to cut it out for her so that she may read it again and keep it in a book she keeps of these things. He is again amused by the sights of her, each time he looks up from the pages. He can see only the rotunda of her belly above the cloudy water.

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Orlando Whitfield is a writer living in London. The Regime of Private Affairs is extracted from an ongoing novel.
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Thursday, 23 September, 2010

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Issue 44 / May 2012

"He is a man who appreciates function, finds beauty in function, and it is in this way only that he is a Modern Man."