Deeds

Deeds

It was the greatest deed of his life. We were discussing what he no doubt saw as his most terrible — that he was leaving his wife, his two children, the family home — for a lover he had been trying to remove from his mind for six months but without success. At the moment, he insisted, five people were unhappy. At home, he was moody and inconsistent, with his wife frequently asking him what was wrong, and the kids saying that he didn’t want to play with them anymore. His lover was unhappy too, of course, but insisted after their days together six months earlier that he should try and work on his marriage, and hoped for his wife’s sake, and the children’s too (if not for her own), that their brief affair was what he needed to realise how important they were to him.

Sean hadn’t told me of the affair before that day, and I suppose he told me about his good deed as no more than a parenthesis within the guilt he was feeling over the bad one, but while leaving a wife and children is a dreadful thing, it isn’t uncommon. The good deed was so oddly exceptional that I found myself thinking about it more than of the wife and his kids: a woman, a boy, and a girl I’ve met on many occasions and who received from me at Christmas modest presents, and at Easter, chocolate eggs. These were three people who I knew I might not see again, and yet I found myself for months after Sean’s divulgence thinking more about that beneficent act than the shattering of the family. I suppose the deed also interested me professionally: I taught religious studies at a school in the city.

Sean worked in the architecture department at the university. He had been there for ten years after leaving the competitive world of trying to win contracts from potential clients, a new environment he initially assumed would be rather less commercially demanding, only to find it so in a quietly different way. There wasn’t a lot of difference in finding clients and securing grant funding. Much of his job he increasingly found to be making contacts and though he rarely enjoyed the conferences he would go to, rarely met people he believed were greatly interested in the subject, and were often more interested in the dinner menus than the conference papers, he didn’t doubt that it helped him to augment the power and status of the department.

He initially wondered when he met and talked to Julianna at the conference in Dublin whether he found her company stimulating relatively. There he had been all day hearing dull papers and at break and lunch making talk so small he wondered if he might trip over it. Then, over dinner, he was sitting next to this woman who wanted to discuss the specifics of the profession and the possibilities of creating living spaces that people would wish to occupy without paying exorbitant prices for them, and containing all the anxiety that a mortgage on such a place would entail. Though she was from Berlin, she’d been living and working for five years in Vienna, teaching at a university that might have had mainly practical demands but that allowed her to offer the students a more theoretical impetus. Her colleagues joked that she was the visionary, which she managed to offer more with the mockery of the colleagues’ tone than the aggrandisement such a claim could have had when repeated by her. It is how he viewed it that evening, drinking a couple of glasses of wine during a reception after the talks, and a couple more during dinner. He was already drunk by the end of the main course but didn’t know if this was due to the quantity of alcohol consumed, or what he worried was becoming an all-consuming passion for the woman he was conversing with.

While some went to their rooms after dinner, saying they had wives to chat with, children to say goodnight to, others continued on to the hotel bar. Sean hastily composed a text to Muriel, asked her to hug the kids for him, and then joined the others. The hotel was on Grafton Street, and the conference was designed so that none of the attendees need ever exit the building. The conference room was on the first floor, the rooms above that, and the bar and restaurant on the ground floor. It allowed everybody to socialise comfortably but would have made liaisons uncomfortable. That first evening, Julianna and Sean stayed in the bar till midnight, and while they chatted with everyone, and about five others left for their rooms at the same time Julianna and Sean did, it was as if these fellow lecturers and professors were simultaneously intrusions and alibis; people they would have been happy to ignore but also pleased they were there so that it made their increasing intimacy look from the outside like no more than they were part of a convivial group. Sean knew more than a dozen people at the conference, and at least half of them would have been aware he was married with children. Julianna was single but wouldn’t have been happy assuming that colleagues were looking on as she embarked on an affair with somebody else’s husband.

At midnight, Sean went to his room on the second floor, Julianna to hers on the 3rd. They hugged briefly on the corridor but there was no hesitancy, no lingering moment where it looked like he ought to ask her in or that she would have accepted, and as he tried to sleep he went over in his mind various moments during the evening, and why he believed that this wasn’t a needless and one-sided infatuation. When he fell asleep about an hour later he slept deeply and awoke at eight, after a dream that didn’t include Julianna at all but contained a variation of his first meeting with his wife, and a dream that made him realise he would have been as passionate and excited then: when he was twenty-five and meeting Muriel in a Granadan hostel overlooking the Alhambra. He remembered they couldn’t stop laughing, that he would tell bad jokes she would find funny and she would make acerbic remarks that weren’t cruel but were unusually perceptive. The hostel owners were Anglo-Scottish, uptight and mean, and would sometimes make comments about the locals who kept the place running while they sedately moved through the place, making sure it was clean, tidy and hospitable. The owners possessed a dead energy that made everyone including the guests feel far from relaxed, and Muriel would often joke about their kempt body language and constricted vocal cords. They talked as though they were auditioning for a British costume drama. But while they hoped to get roles as the masters they were worried their accents might slip and they would end up cast as the servants.

He knew, he said to me, that in leaving Muriel he would miss her humour, and knew also that in his leaving he would probably be the butt of its acerbity amongst her friends. She would say he was a man who didn’t like consequences; that when she first became pregnant he had looked at her amazed, as if his insistence on eschewing a condom, and her insistence that she didn’t mind if he had no problem with becoming a father, would be unlikely to produce a child. He accepted it, of course, and again when she insisted that Scott needed a brother or sister. But he believed his life wasn’t quite his own; that he had been living for a few years the life Muriel wanted. What he liked about her when they met was her unconventional sense of humour; what he ended up with was a conventional life.

Sean knew I wasn’t inclined to be sympathetic to him destroying his family, but he knew too that I wasn’t given to praising it as an institution. I suppose he was aware that whoever he would talk to would give him an unsympathetic ear, perhaps even an earful, though he knew I would at least understand the principle behind freedoms that are difficult to hold on to within the familial. He said that since his marriage most of his life had been content in the twin sense: he was quite happy and it had things in it: a wife, two children, a job that paid a regular and decent salary. Between his wage and Muriel’s (she worked as a part-time GP), they lived well, and with the help from her parents they had bought a house in the Grange with a large garden for a place so near to the city centre. Yet he supposed the difference between us was that I lived for the unexpected and called it hope; he knew he wished to avoid it and called it fear. His life was full and he sometimes wondered what could make it empty. He thought by moving from an architectural firm and becoming an academic, he had both created more security and moved to a more exciting job. He was right: though he was expected to raise funding, he was at least tenured in the university. And rather than trying to design dull buildings, he had the opportunity to talk about exciting ones. He would teach classes on Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry. He could show clips from films and illustrate the different ways they conveyed the architectural. Yet he feared his life was precarious while he knew mine was not, since mine so deliberately lacked foundations, there was nothing to topple. He didn’t offer it as an insult, even if few would have claimed it as a compliment. He merely meant to say I seemed to live in a perpetual state of possibility; he feared that his might have become impossible. He didn’t want to leave Muriel and the children; he knew he wanted to be with Julianna.

The second morning at the conference he sat in the row behind Julianna and, looking at her diagonally, paid more attention to the nape of her neck, the lustre of her hair, and the nose and lips he could see in side elevation, than he did to the architectural properties of the buildings being discussed. When the talk was opened up for questions, when someone asked from the back of the room, Julianna turned round and caught Sean looking at her. She smiled, perhaps even blushed, and he knew that like a boy with a primary school crush, he would try and sit next to her at lunch, and beside her for the afternoon talks. He dawdled for a couple of minutes at the door of the hotel restaurant, letting others go ahead of him as he waited for Julianna to arrive. But after a few minutes, she still hadn’t appeared, and he started to feel clumsy; so went ahead and found a table, one of the few remaining. By the time Julianna appeared, twenty minutes after people had begun to order lunch, there were no free tables, so when he saw her looking around, he waved her over. He didn’t know then if she was looking for him or just for somewhere to sit, and he supposed she didn’t know if he was calling her over because he wanted to be in her company, or was helpfully proposing that he was happy to share.

When thinking back on this, he said what was so exciting was the ambiguity; the not-knowing what was going on in someone else’s mind. Of course, most of the time he didn’t know what somebody was thinking, but neither did he care. Usually, people told him and when they didn’t, it wasn’t important. Occasionally, Muriel would say she needed to get something off her chest but this was usually preceded by mild irritation that Sean sensed, would sometimes ask her about and she would then discuss it. At work, a colleague might be curt, but usually he discovered that they hadn’t received the funding they had applied for, the tech in the classroom wasn’t working, or that very few students had turned up for the lecture. Just as his life was full of meaning, it was empty of surprises. Yes — there were those occasional fears, but these were the underlying anxieties of a person living a very organised and predictable life.

After what was for Julianna a rushed lunch, they returned to the lecture hall and he noticed that while most returned to the seats they were in earlier, some had moved, and, since he had taken his jacket and satchel with him during the break, and the seat next to Julianna was free, he asked if he could sit next to her. She replied that she would like that very much, in what he took to be the first gesture of attraction or at least acceptance on her part — as if she knew how much deliberating had gone into the decision, and wanted to acknowledge it was appreciated.

There was again a drinks reception afterwards, and again Julianna and Sean talked, as they consumed two glasses of wine each and were intoxicated by more than the Rioja. They discussed the food in the hotel and agreed that the breakfast was excellent, the lunch solid and the dinner adequate. It was as if the hotel kitchen knew that its guests were often half-drunk at their receptions and weren’t so concerned about the food’s flavour as long as they could keep drinking.

Sean proposed they could eat elsewhere; he had a small expense budget he could spend on whatever he wished as long as it looked legitimate to the finance department. He said that over the years he had taken people out for dinner even when the conference was in a hotel and all was included. Sometimes, when you are speaking to potentially grant-funding bodies at these events it isn’t quite that you want to bribe them, more that you wish to make yourself more memorable to them when you apply. They are more inclined to remember the person who took them out for a meal rather than someone seated next to them in a hotel restaurant. As he spoke, he realised what he was doing was justifying his claim not so much to Julianna, nor even to a potential university finance person asking him to account for his spending, but more to himself: as though he wished to see that not a penny of family money was being spent on this attempted seduction.

He said they shouldn’t look online and check for the best reviews but wander the streets until they found a place they both agreed upon. This took them forty minutes, perhaps partly because neither was ravenously hungry, that both were so determined not to assert their choice upon the other and, too, as they would later admit, that the company mattered more than the cuisine. As they strolled the streets passing buskers, a couple of jugglers, one man staying as close to the wall as he could manage, as he kept threatening to topple over, looking like a product of an afternoon drinking session that didn’t know when to stop, they were absorbed by the world around them as much as by each other. He thought about the times he would often be wandering around Edinburgh, shopping with Muriel and the kids, getting them to try on shoes, finding a place where they could pee, stopping off somewhere so they could all eat some lunch, and had no time, energy or inclination to see anything of the world around him. It may be said that falling in love, you have only eyes for the object of your love, but he found himself looking at the world and perhaps was doing so through her eyes as she perhaps was doing so through his. What he knew was that his life felt free and without burdens, and as he said this, he looked at me, knowing that the expression on my face suggested he had instead added new ones.

If those days together with Julianna during the conference had been a moment of romantic madness that was seen of little more significance when he returned home, then there would have been no need for my expression. During those months afterwards, Sean phoned me numerous times, and we met up regularly, discussing what he should do. He and Julianna had been texting frequently and speaking on the phone when he could find the time and the privacy. When he told me of that moment in Dublin when he felt his life was free from hassle, he knew as he said it that the intervening months had made the remark ironic. Yet before that day when he told me he was leaving Muriel, he had said very little about the affair; he discussed mainly the difficulties of staying with his wife.

He said they found a restaurant that overlooked St Stephen's Green and realised what they had been looking for wasn’t a restaurant known for the quality of its food but a place that would meet the demands of their romantic interest. The restaurant was candle-lit and the modest light coming through the windows gave the environment a sense of both intimacy and the clandestine, as if they had conjured it up out of their imagination and that it met the requirements for a new love and hiding from an established one. At first, they were almost turned away, the waiter saying the restaurant was fully booked until what looked like the head waiter came over: there had been a cancellation ten minutes earlier and he hadn’t found a moment to cancel it. Sean and Julianna were given a table at the back of the restaurant and next to the window with a view of the park. By the end of the meal, it seemed inevitable they would sleep together, and the only question was whose hotel room. She insisted it should be hers, though he laughed when he entered, it was identical to his own in every way. To choose a restaurant was a choice; to choose which hotel room wasn’t.

The next morning, they missed breakfast and managed only to make the first talk by minutes — they were the last to enter the lecture theatre and a few heads turned as they realised they should have at least arrived separately. Julianna whispered to Sean that he sit in an aisle seat further down. She would take a seat at the back. The previous day he was seated behind her and could observe a woman to whom he knew he was attracted, yet everything in his mind was a projection. Now it was a reality, and he couldn’t see her at all; wishing, for the first time, as an idiom finally found its meaning in his thoughts, he had eyes at the back of his head.

At lunchtime, they made eye contact, but Julianna’s look indicated they should extend their estrangement, so he sat with some people he’d talked to over drinks on the first evening. She sat with one of the speakers that morning, and with a couple of other academics. He wasn’t listening to a conversation at his own table over whether almost all innovations in recent architecture were attached to private as opposed to public projects, and instead occasionally looked across at Julianna’s while thinking of the previous evening. She didn’t meet his eye once.

It was the last day of the conference, and again there were drinks at the end of it. Julianna sent him a text saying that they should avoid each other during the reception, and should stay at the hotel for dinner since it would look odd were they to disappear once more— especially on the final night. Sean asked if they could go somewhere after they’d eaten. She replied she wasn’t sure.

He didn’t know if her reluctance was based on trying to be discreet, that the night was of far less significance to her than to him, or whether she regretted sleeping with a married man. He hadn’t said anything about his wife or children, but hadn’t hidden his wedding ring. Throughout dinner, he couldn’t catch her eye and, after the meal, she sat again with the speaker from that morning. He was in a conversation with a professor from Vienna who was talking about the benefits of public housing and rent controls with a lecturer from the London School of Economics. The latter was saying London had become so dynamic in the 80s to 2000s, partly due to the freedom people had to build if they had the money to do so. In other circumstances, it would have been a discussion he’d have wished to follow and contribute to, but for most of the time he remained silent, thinking of other things and frequently glancing across at Julianna. By midnight, Sean was tired and disconsolate, felt as though he had dreamt their night together and was surely dreaming if he thought he could continue seeing Julianna for any longer than the one-night stand it appeared to have been. He went up to the counter, already feeling lightheaded after wine at dinner, and two gin and tonics in the bar, and ordered a double whisky. He drank quickly and carried on to his room, hoping the whisky would help him sleep.

Drowsing, he heard a knock on the door that he first took to be a product of his incipient dream, and then, hearing it again, woke with his heart quickening and a hope matched by Julianna standing in the corridor as he answered it. He realised in his dishevelment how little he expected her to appear, and how impatient he was to see her as he didn’t even attempt to stall her to put on trousers and a T-shirt. No, he stood in front of her with only his boxer shorts and hishair in disarray, asking her to enter. He returned to bed and she sat on it, apologising for her aloofness. She said she sensed several people wondering if there was anything between them and, while she had little to lose, he no doubt did as she pointed at his wedding ring. He then talked for a few minutes about Muriel and the children, saying that he knew he couldn’t leave them, but he didn’t want Julianna to exit his life so hastily. He expressed himself without much consideration for Julianna’s feelings, he quickly realised, and added that he wouldn’t know how to leave them but also didn’t know how he could stay, keeping from them this wonderful thing that had happened to him, which had nothing to do with them at all. Again, he was expressing himself poorly and so he asked Julianna what she thought, what she felt.

She said it wasn’t as though her feelings were so different, but the circumstances in which they were taking place were less complicated for her than for him, except ethically — if she were to think about his family. She wasn’t married and saw herself as single, but she did have a lover, someone she had been wishing to leave for months but habit rather than desire kept pulling her back. He lived in Innsbruck, a fifty-minute train ride away, and she sometimes wished he were in Berlin or Amsterdam, far enough away for visits to be an inconvenience rather than its opposite. He wasn’t married, had no children, and believed even a pet was too much of a commitment. He owned a small publishing house and liked that his lover was so close by; he could spend a night in Vienna and be back home the next morning. Sean said Julianna conveyed this to him wryly rather than with bitterness, as though she wasn’t blaming anyone but herself for tolerating a situation that made her so unhappy that she found now she could accept sleeping with a married man. She laughed as she said it, and he laughed back. It was the first time he realised they had done so in each other’s company. She said, though, that what she liked about Sean was that he seemed to care about people, and he said that might be true. But he never thought he did it well, adding that perhaps the best deed he’d ever done was so perverse and clumsy he suspected it said more about his personality than he might wish to reveal. He told her about it nevertheless.

He paused in the telling, wondering I suppose, whether what he could tell her after they had made love, he could freely tell me as well, musing over whether it was as necessary to what he was trying to convey as it had been to explain aspects of his personality to her. I knew him well, but I didn’t know him intimately; she knew him intimately and not well. I sensed such thoughts going through his mind as he decided to tell me what he had told Julianna.

When he was in his early twenties, shortly after leaving university, Sean said he worked in a shoe shop for six months. During this time, he still had a membership for the university gym, would go to it three times a week, and there he would sometimes see a former lecturer, someone whose lectures he remembered, though he never had the lecturer for any tutorials. Lectures could have a hundred and fifty students; perhaps he would have remembered Sean if he had been his tutor, but Sean was certain he had no recollection of him; he was just another face in a large crowd. During the lectures, Dr James, who was in his late thirties, conveyed not so much confidence as assuredness, as if nobody could have countered well his arguments, even if somebody might have offered a different perspective. Dr James didn’t only have the facts to hand, one believed that he had many more at his ready disposal were they necessary. At the gym, however, he was uncertain and hesitant, getting on the running machine like it was his first time, and using the weight machines as if at any moment the contraption might collapse. He had a skinny yet wiry frame: in repose, his body looked feeble, but his legs and arms were subtly sinewed, evident when he pushed a surprising amount of weight on the machine, and apparent too when he was running. Sean was once on the treadmill next to James; his pace was much faster than Sean would have anticipated.

Yet the lecturer looked out of place in the gym, and Sean witnessed it again when the doctor came into the shoe shop. Dr James was wearing battered brogues and Sean assumed that he would probably wish to buy another pair of the same. Yet rather than going over to the old man’s shoe section, as some of the staff called it, he moved towards the dress sneakers. As he was looking, Sean felt a perverse desire to sell him the most outlandish ones he could propose and asked the doctor what size he was looking for. James said he was a size eight and Sean picked up a pair that was bright blue with an orange stripe and a white sole. James looked hesitant as Sean insisted he try them on, and he knew as soon as they were on the man’s feet that the mismatch was enormous. He would try and get him to buy a pair a little more in keeping with his demeanour, but then the manager was hovering nearby. Sean knew their attitude was that if you’ve managed to get a pair of shoes on someone’s feet, then go hell for leather, so to speak, to sell them those. Once they remove them they might just as easily remove themselves from the shop — so try and convince them to buy the pair they initially try on. Sean knew and surely the doctor knew these were unsuitable, but there Sean was offering the hardest of sells as the manager continued to look in his direction. He hoped that Dr James would insist no less strongly that these shoes were not for him. However, while Sean didn’t doubt he would have offered this assertiveness in a classroom, he was sure the doctor was incapable of it outside his job.

As soon as the purchase was made, Sean felt a guilt which seemed disproportionate to the deed, yet believed he couldn’t simply blame the manager for it. If Sean hadn’t initially thought about a joke at James’ expense, the manager would still have silently demanded he sell a pair of shoes. But they would have been different shoes, ones more appropriate. Instead with the manager present he kept exaggerating how well they suited the doctor, how young they would make him look, how stylish he would be. He might have forgotten about it after a few days, but later that week he was at the gym, finishing his workout, and he saw the doctor come into the changing room, wearing the ridiculous footwear, or rather footwear ridiculous on the feet of Dr James. He suspected the doctor wouldn’t recognise him anyway (at no point had James met his eye) but Sean kept his head lowered, grabbed his bag and exited.

He found himself imagining students laughing at the doctor: for all the seriousness of his lectures, there the man would be wearing shoes that students couldn’t help notice. It would make it difficult for them to concentrate on the talk. He decided then to act with absurd generosity: he would buy the sneakers that he thought best suited Dr James and that he’d have sold him if the manager hadn’t been so silently insistent. He knew he had to do it quickly; there was only a month left on his membership at the university gym, and he never intended to buy a much more expensive one for non-students. He purchased the shoes from the shop (at a discount), took them with him each time he went to the gym and, after a couple of weeks, it coincided with a visit from Dr James. Again, Sean’s workout had finished and the doctor arrived, got changed, and like many, put his bag and his clothes in the locker and his shoes under the bench. When he left the changing room, Sean took out the new shoes, placed them under the bench and replaced them with the ones he believed suited the doctor so much more.

I interjected and said I had two questions. While I kept to myself that I found the story unbelievable, I at least wanted to see it if it was plausible. I asked how he knew that James would come in again wearing the trainers, and why he needed to replace the trainers instead of just leaving the new pair next to them. He had thought of leaving them next to the unsuitable pair, but believed James wouldn’t have noticed and of course assumed they were somebody else’s. By removing them, Sean knew the doctor would look for his own and, seeing they weren’t there, see this other pair in the same spot. It was why Sean added a note, saying the new shoes would suit him much better. If he still felt attached to the other pair, he could find them in a charity shop that the good Samaritan would deposit the next day — and named the shop, not far from the university. As for the assumption Dr James would be wearing the shoes when he went into the gym; if he wasn’t, Sean supposed that James had the good sense to put them aside and wear those better suited to his demeanour.

I still found the story no more believable but accepted its plausibility. Sean said he stopped going to the gym after that, but over the next few days, after depositing the shoes in the charity shop, checked to see if they were still there. They were, and remained so for a couple of weeks, when he guessed that whoever had bought them wasn’t the doctor. When he saw Dr James in a supermarket near the university about a month later, he was wearing the shoes that Sean had placed under the bench.

Sean told Julianna this story and I suppose, like me, she was baffled by it, and he admitted she was. She found the story as absurd as I did, unbelievable and wondered why he told her it. He said to her, as he was then telling me, that it was true, however unlikely, and that he had kept it a secret for many years, never telling Muriel or anyone else. It wasn’t that it was embarrassing, though maybe it was. It was as though it needed a context beyond the memory it happened to be and the confession it became. It maybe needed another deed that would give it the context it couldn’t quite find on its own. If Julianna was as puzzled as I happened to be, I supposed she was as intrigued. I asked him why he thought he now possessed the context.

Sean said that he wondered if many a good deed contained within it a bad deed if viewed from another perspective. After all, he stole the doctor’s shoes, and to replace them with another pair doesn’t make it any less of a theft in the eyes of the law: Sean only knew it wasn’t one from his perspective and hoped it wouldn’t seem one from Dr James’s. He assumed the doctor wasn’t overly unhappy because he wore the new shoes and didn’t appear to buy back his old pair. Of course, it was possible that he didn’t have time to go into the shop and repurchase them; it was possible also that he didn’t want to spend fifteen pounds on shoes that he had previously owned. (Sean did think of putting money in the new shoes so that the doctor wouldn’t likely have been out of pocket if he bought them back from the charity shop.) It was also possible he did purchase them again, but Sean thought that unlikely.

Yet he believed the deed came from an unequivocally good motive, even if the episode was initiated by Sean thinking he would have a minor laugh a James’ expense. He wanted to make amends, and the preposterous plan seemed to work. I asked Sean more specifically what Julianna made of it all. He said that friends and lovers in the past told her things that they found too personal and she felt privileged in being the recipient of their divulgence. But she also always believed without any hesitation in their revelation. She struggled to accept as true Sean’s story, but also wondered who would have such an idiotic imagination as to make it up. I smiled when he said this, feeling an affinity with a person I had not met. Throughout the telling my compassion had been for Muriel, and now my identification had momentarily shifted.

I asked him if he explained why he told her the story, and he said he hadn’t; there didn’t seem to be a need. With me, he suspected he ought to provide that context, and this is what he was trying to do, since I was one of his closest friends, knew Muriel, knew his children and would probably try and dissuade him from leaving them. He said he would think about Julianna often when he was with his wife and children; wouldn’t it be better if he was with Julianna and sometimes thinking of his wife, and certainly his kids? It was understandable that Muriel wouldn’t tolerate him thinking of another woman, but Julianna might just accept that he would give some thought to someone he had lived with for years and with whom he had two offspring. I asked him what this had to do with the story of the shoes, and he looked sheepish, saying he wasn’t always great at explaining himself but thought he might be able to do so on this point. He had devoted a lot of time to thinking about it.

He had never really understood why he replaced those trainers, and there was no other incident in his life resembling this situation. He would have liked to have thought this was because he was generally a decent person with no need to make amends: his actions were usually fair and just. It was as though he couldn’t quite understand why he wanted to mock Dr James, however temporarily, by having him wear a pair of trainers that were so unsuitable. But he did it anyway and then wanted to find a way to counter that meanness, and could only do so by an act of absurd decency.

Yet he also wondered for a long time afterwards whether he was playing God after playing just for a moment the devil. It must have been disconcerting to find your shoes missing and another pair replacing them, with a note saying where your original pair could be found. From a certain perspective, it was far more cruel a gesture than pushing the original pair of shoes on him and telling the doctor how well they suited him. The worst that could happen in the first instance was that he would be ridiculed; in the second, potentially a quiet collapse of his world. It would have surely been disturbing to James to find his shoes missing and another pair replacing them. Yet Sean assumed that this hadn’t been so for James, and he just wore the new shoes. As far as Sean knew, he didn’t go back to the shop and ask for Sean and wonder if he had replaced the shoes; nor did he go to the charity shop it seemed and buy them back, perhaps enquiring in the process if they knew who dropped them off. It appeared that the doctor accepted the gesture as the decent act Sean believed it to be, and after a while Sean accepted this was the best way to view it and no longer thought about it — until recently when he told the story to Julianna and was now telling it again.

He wondered if he was trying to see himself as having acted badly in the affair with Julianna but, by leaving Muriel, he was oddly rectifying the earlier error, just as he did so by replacing the shoes. If earlier I believed that Sean’s story was hard to believe, his moral justification for leaving Muriel and the children was even harder to accept. Did Sean think that he could solve a problem by exacerbating it, I asked. That is the point he insisted: he wasn’t sure if he would be; only that he needed to act from the best of motives; he couldn’t be responsible for the result. I wondered if he wasn’t thinking from the worst of them and told him so: he wanted to claim he was leaving them for their best interests and not his own. He supposed that would be a fair way of looking at things, but what was he to do? I said there were several options. He could say he had the briefest of affairs; it was his first, and that he wanted to remain in the marriage, but that it was for Muriel to decide. He could say he was in an affair and wished to leave Muriel, or he could say nothing and hope the feelings would go away and Muriel need never know of the harm he almost did to their lives.

Yet as I offered the options, I knew the one I might have been inclined to see as the best outcome was also the one where he would have been playing God all over again. Muriel would remain oblivious and be in a marriage with a man who had cheated once and might do so once more, either with Julianna or someone else. Yet it was also the best way to protect the marriage if this mattered most. Sean said he didn’t know what was more important, and it felt fatuous to say he would do whatever was most likely to protect the children. He had already neglected them for months. When he took them to the park, he left them to play as he often texted Julianna on his phone. Once, he allowed Sam to clamber up on top of the play frame he would usually only let him use with his help. Sean didn’t notice, and Sam would have fallen off and onto the albeit soft ground, were it not for another parent who caught him. Sean was left shamefully thanking this stranger, who probably wondered why the boy’s dad was more interested in what was on his phone than watching his child play in front of him.

I began to see why Sean had told me the story of the shoes: he wanted to see in it a parable, a tale that could tell him to act just as for centuries biblical stories contained within them a moral that could be applied to numerous situations, no matter how disparate and desperate. Better, I suppose, that we take an absurdly moral moment from our own lives over tales embedded within religious beliefs many no longer hold. After all, wouldn’t both Sean and Julianna be unlikely to live happily ever after if we accept that Exodus and Deuteronomy tell us that we ought not to commit adultery? Leviticus, meanwhile, insists that if a man sleeps with a neighbour’s wife, both will be put to death. Ancient wisdom has its use,s but not if you want to survive to live another day and into potentially a second marriage. Yet there we were well over three thousand years after Moses’ proclamations and many of them remained valid, even if the punishments were usually no longer so severe, at least in an insistently enlightened West. Yet while most would find the biblical judgement that both adulterer and adulteress be executed wrong, many would still agree they shouldn’t commit adultery. The commandment retained much of its validity even if the harshness of the punishment had been ameliorated and often came in the form of expensive alimony.

It was as though Sean wanted to find a story that would remove the punishment, but also make the moral ambivalent. He didn’t disagree when I proposed this, and wondered if there weren’t numerous biblical stories that had a clear moral but were no less absurd or unlikely as his, whether it was the serpent tempting Eve, God testing Job, or toying with Abraham. He supposed it was as if he needed to prove to himself that he was a decent person, and the only way to do so, after selling James the shoes, was in buying another pair and replacing the old ones in the gym. But here he was again in the wake of a deed trying to make amends and unsure how to do so. There can’t be many in the world who did what he did with the shoes, but how numerous has cheating on one’s wife been? Yet the rarity was easy to resolve however daft the situation and the outcome, and now he was struggling to figure out something so common. For all its occurrences in the world, for all the moral dictates of disapproval, he didn’t know how to act.

That was how we left it that day. I didn’t see Sean for a few weeks and didn’t expect to do so. His term was just finishing and he said, after telling Muriel he was leaving, he was flying to Vienna and would stay with Julianna for a while. Those weeks turned into months, and I concluded that not only was I unlikely to see Muriel and the children again, but that I wasn’t going to see any more of Sean either. I expected during the first couple of months after we met, he would keep me updated. But eventually I realised my role in his life ended with my judgment upon it. I sometimes wondered whether I was too harsh, if I had allowed too many biblical tales to affect my thinking; that too many years reading and teaching religious texts left me unable to attend to the ethical nuances of modern life.

However, more than a year after the chat with Sean, I was walking through Pilrig Park, near where I taught and where I’d been preparing for the new term, when in the play area I saw Muriel and the two children. I would have been surprised to see them anyway, but to see them in this part of the city was especially so. The family had lived in Bruntsfield, and it was a part of town I had no reason to visit after Sean and I had ceased contact. Muriel saw me and waved more eagerly than I might have expected, so I went over and offered a proper hello. She looked thinner and more nervous than I recalled, and the children seemed less gregarious and open. They shyly said hello as if greeting a stranger and I wasn’t sure whether this was because they hadn’t seen me for so long, that I had been a friend of their father’s, or that they were no longer as confident anymore. The children went back to playing, and I asked Muriel how everything was, saying I hadn’t heard from Sean for more than a year. She said she heard little from him either. He was living in Vienna, was no longer working at the university, and was back doing consultancy work while based there. I said I was surprised to see them in this part of town, and she smiled, saying I will be seeing a lot more of them. The smile was sad but warm, and I recalled it before as friendly yet cool. There was pain in this smile, no doubt, while before it seemed painless and matter-of-fact; the smile offered to thousands of patients whose ailments would have ranged from a sore throat to cancer of the blood. Yet the smile would have remained the same: a determined need to offer in her face the brave one they were expected to put on.

Muriel said she and the children recently moved to a flat on Balfour Place: this was the local park, and the school where I taught was going to be the kids’ local school. Was she still at the same medical practice, I asked. She said she was; the distance from her to it would be about the same as it was from Bruntsfield. We talked for a few more minutes; then the children shouted that she had promised them an ice cream. She said she enjoyed chatting, but the children’s needs came first. She said it without bitterness, without quite proposing for the children’s father this hadn’t been the case. I wondered how often the kids saw Sean but didn’t feel it was appropriate to ask, wondered also if I might see him at the school gates one day waiting for the children, and what he might say to me. After all, I was now going to be the teacher who would be instilling within his children various stories from the bible, the koran and other religious texts, and wondering how they might respond when I would propose to them that, in Leviticus, adultery is punishable by death.

Deeds

16/06/2025

Deeds