Three Dont Tango 25

There is a house way down in the country, and within that house are many rooms. There is my room with its large table and all my books. There is Annabel's room with its long work bench, and the mezzanine floor stacked with canvasses and paints. Cephren's room has his own cardboard house constructed in the corner of the room. Min's room is never as exciting to her as Cephren's room. And there are a few rooms which are everybody's.
Annabel lives more and more in her room. She used to go there to paint; now she lives there. She used to live part of her life in the kitchen, part of her time in the living room, and part of the time in our bedroom. She used to live in the garden as well. She used to live with the rest of us, but now I am not so sure. She is feeling restless.
She is sitting in her chair, chewing her paint brush, and her eyes have that wide open expectant look as she contemplates her next creation. Or is she simply looking towards some new future? She is still in the process of painting this new future, and it certainly doesn't go the same way as the old one.
Downstairs is a blind man. He cannot see the discontent in the eyes he once saw looking lovingly into his. He cannot see many things he ought to be seeing very clearly. He certainly saw the monster that grew so strong and began to devour him as it made him build this home. The monster has fallen asleep temporarily. He can see what is in his wife's eyes because it is perversely making him fall in love. He is like a man who has been taking tablets for so many years and at last finds they are beginning to work. All this time he has been fond of Annabel, and has stuck by her, tried to support her, fought with her, shouted and ranted, cuddled and kissed her. It is only now, as her eyes take on that wandering look, that secret almost pregnant look, that he has started to fall in love with her.
Downstairs is a man beset now by waiting demons that shut him in his room. He is missing his children that he looks at and loves with a silent, all-consuming love he cannot consummate. There is a force-field between him and the little boy who rushes in, then charges upstairs; who cycles up and down the drive with a dreamy look on his face. He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know what to do.
There are so many rooms in this house, and people live in their own rooms, and it is difficult to knock on someone else's door. The voice says "Come in", and in you go, but what did you come in to say? What is your next move? Why is there that strange disconnection?
I peer at the cardboard house we built and ask a silly question. We all sit huddled together on the bench inside. I say something, I don't really know what, and after a while I leave.
Now I'm outside the door I stare hard at the wood panels. He is on the other side. I am frightened that he always will be. I feel that time is taking something away from me, but I don't know what exactly is being taken, or what to do about it.
Next time I will get something together. Next time.....
But what will I do next time? How can it ever be any different? I seem to be on a parallel train. I can see everyone in the other train, but I'm stuck in my own carriage, going in the same direction, but.....
Cephren is in his room. I am on the landing staring at the door. I guess I built the door, but things weren't meant to work out that way.


Now Cephren has gone to school. Mini has sneaked into his room. Usually she is thrown out, but now he is out of the house she can sneak in. She is sitting in a cardboard box reading his comics. I peer in through the open door. She doesn't move. Her small brain is trying to connect the pictures. Ten minutes pass and at last she turns the page, looking very serious, her small face hidden behind her fair hair that is growing long. She is to me a picture of something ineffable. I am afraid of sentimentality. I am afraid of my feelings. Yet I know they are there, and a moment ago I admitted to treasuring those thoughts. What on earth is going on?
I back out of the doorway and creep down the stairs so she will not know I have been watching her. The picture is in my mind. I have lodged it there deliberately. I will see that picture for the rest of my life. It will do me no good. I was watching a picture. I was not in the picture.
There is a house, and in that house are many rooms, and each of us dwells in a separate room. Both Annabel and I want to break down the doors to those rooms, and yet we treasure our separate rooms.
Should I go out and buy an axe and hack down all the doors?
I dont go out to buy an axe. I go into my room and stare at a blank sheet of paper. Annabel goes into her room, shuts the door, and chews the end of a paint brush, wondering how to solve the latest problem with her current painting.
Instead of breaking down those doors we are hiding behind them, struggling to make substitutes for something we know is there but cant quite see. The substitutes may be pretty, interesting, or clever, but they don't have the real life and meaning I thought they might have.
If the real life, whatever that may be, is eluding me, and my substitutes are no substitute, then the contents of this room of mine are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
So why am I hiding here? Why am I continuing to do these things which don't seem to have anything to do with anything? Am I just temporarily lost, or will life always be like this?


Where am I going? What am I going to do? How am I going to earn a living? Do I really want to earn a living? What's the point of everything?
All animals ever do is find food, eat it, sleep, and occasionally fight other animals for a mate, and procreate. I've got a shelter, a mate, and I could live on government hand-outs for food. It wouldn't be a very exciting existence, but it would cover all the basic needs. The trouble is I am not an animal. Animals operate on instinct. I don't have any instinctual drives that map out a set of tramlines upon which I can orientate my life. I am a confused, over-educated human being.
There are several points which keep churning round in my brain. "Work may en-noble a man but leisure perfects him."* Sounds good, but since when did work en-noble anyone? But the 'leisure perfects him' part of the equation strikes a chord.
The other phrase that keeps bugging me is: "Living? Our servants can do that for us."§
The more I think about things the more I feel like a servant. I am not living on this planet so I can pull up weeds, do the washing up, or the shopping, or the school run. Doing those sort of things every day is not going to get me anywhere. Those activities aren't fulfilling in any way. They are the sort of thing any sensible person would get someone else to do while they got on with something important.
Over and over again I am beset by grumpy thoughts that I have talents and abilities which I ought to use, and using those abilities would not only perfect me, but allow me to fit into the world. However, it would seem I am doing the wrong things.
For the past eighteen months I have been a builder. The trouble is I am not a builder. I am a poet. I am an artist. I am a musician. I have those skills. I should be using them. There are plenty of people who can lay bricks, install bathrooms, sort out electric cables, and mix cement. I don't need to add to their number. Those guys cant write music. I can. I should be writing music.
The trouble is, I have a family to support and I need to pay the bills. In order to pay those bills I have to work at something I don't like, doing something anybody else could do, which means I don't get to do the things I can do and want to do.
Here I am in somebody else's garden digging up weeds. This is boring. I don't want to do it. I hate it, but I get paid for it, and I can work whatever days I like, and turn up early or late, but that isn't the point.
I started off with the notion that if I worked three days a week I would have four days to do my own thing, and I would make just enough money to survive on. That way I could spend more time doing my things, and less time each week working for someone else. The trouble is, I still resent doing those three days, and hate every minute of what I consider is wasted time. I need a deal that will set me up. I need to rob a bank, or win the pools.
I have just spent eighteen months building a house. Perhaps I ought to spend another eighteen months building another house and sell it for a nice fat profit, then do it all over again. Maybe I should waste five or six years of my life doing that several times to build up a reasonable tranche of dosh which I can then invest, and live off the income. Okay, I would have to grind through life for a few years, but I would have at the end of that grind a way to live for the rest of my life without having to put up with all the tedious nonsense of doing work I don't want to do.
I mulled over this frightful prospect for the next few weeks, and eventually decided I would go for it. I drove round the countryside looking at building sites. The ideal site would be within commuting distance of London. It had to be close to a large town, but probably set just inside a nearby village. I wanted a site that looked not just good but spectacular. I wanted to end up with a property that I could sell easily when it was finished. I also wanted something that would make me a lot of money. The object of the exercise was to make as much money as possible in the shortest possible time.
The first place I scouted was Guildford, but found the area too expensive for me to get started. I could mortgage my home to get the initial cash, but I had no proper job, and so any loan had to be from the bank on the basis that I would be borrowing to upgrade my home, and would need to pay back the money in a year's time.
Week after week Ann and I went off looking for suitable plots of land. We made two-day trips, sleeping in the back of the car overnight in some quiet field. In Basingstoke one harassed estate agent started shouting at me when I asked him if he had any building sites. He paced angrily up and down his office, picking up pieces of paper, and throwing them up in the air. He moaned about people coming into his office always wanting 'a nice building plot'. "Everybody wants a nice plot. Everybody comes tramping through this office day after day harassing me for building plots. There aren't any building plots. None at all. None." And he kicked the waste paper basket, and poked at a pile of papers. He turned and looked at me, waved his arm around the room. "No building plots. Anywhere."
I went and sat in the car. I knew I was on to something. If there were no building plots I needed to corner the market fast. I could make money here.
Then I visited Newbury where I was shown two sites. The first was at Donnington, with the A4 trunk road passing the gates. It was a lovely one acre site. There were plans to shift the main road to the east. If I could buy now and sit on the land for two years, time on its own would make me money by the uplift in value from the removal of a noisy road from the front gate.
The other site was just outside Hermitage. It had an amazing view to the south towards Newbury. It was set back from the road. It was ideal. I stood there staring across the grass towards a flotilla of hot air balloons drifting slowly from the west towards Thatcham. That view would sell any house the moment a prospective purchaser looked out of the living-room window.
I bought the plot there and then. I was in business.


* "Work we know may make a man stoop-shouldered or rich. It may even ennoble him. Leisure perfects him. In this lies its future." (Of Time, Work and Leisure. de Grazia.)

§ Villiers de l'isle Adam

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