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| Photograph by Christopher Anderson |
He simply said my name. He said “Martha,” and once again I could feel it happening. My legs trembled under the big white tablecloth and my head became fuzzy, though I was not drunk. It’s how I fall in love. He sat opposite—the love object. Elderly. Gray eyes. Dull blond hair. The hair was graying on the outside and he had spread the outer gray ribs across the width of his head as if to disguise the blond, the way some men disguise a patch of baldness. He had what I call a religious smile—an inner smile that came on and off, governed, as it were, by his private joy in what he heard or saw: a remark I made, the waiter removing the cold dinner plates that served as ornament and bringing warmed ones of a different design, the nylon curtain blowing inward and brushing my bare, summer-ripened arm. It was the end of a warm London summer.
“I’m not mad about them, either,” he said. We were engaged in a bit of backbiting, discussing a famous couple we both knew. He kept his hands joined all the time, as if they were being put to prayer. There were no barriers between us. We were strangers. I am a television announcer; we had met to do a job, and out of courtesy he asked me to dinner. He told me about his wife—who was thirty, like me—and how he knew he would marry her the very first moment he set eyes on her. (She was his second wife.) I made no inquiries as to what she looked like. I still don’t know. The only memory I have of her is of her arms sheathed in big mauve crocheted sleeves, and the image runs away with me and I see his pink, praying hands vanishing into those sleeves and the two of them waltzing in some large, grim room, smiling inwardly at their good fortune in being together. But that came much later.
We had a pleasant supper, and figs for after. The first figs I’d ever tasted. He tested them gently with his fingers, then put three on my side plate. I kept staring down at their purple-black skins, because with the shaking I could not trust myself to peel them. He took my mind off my nervousness by telling me a little story about a girl who was being interviewed on the radio and admitted to owning thirty-seven pairs of shoes and buying a new dress every Saturday, which she later endeavored to sell to her friends and family. Somehow I knew that it was a story he had especially selected for me, that he would not risk telling it to many people. He was in his way a serious man, and famous, though that is hardly of interest when one is telling about a love affair. Or is it? Anyhow, I’d peeled the figs and I bit into one. How do you describe a taste? They were a new food and he was a new man, and that night in my bed he was both stranger and lover, which I used to think was the ideal bed partner.
In the morning, he was quite formal but unashamed; he even asked for a clothes brush, because there was a smudge of powder on his jacket left when we had embraced in the taxi coming home. At the time, I had no idea whether we would sleep together, but on the whole I felt that we would not. I have never owned a clothes brush. I own books and records and various bottles of scent and beautiful clothes, but I never buy cleaning stuffs or aids for prolonging property. I expect it is improvident, but I just throw things away. He dabbed the powder smear with his handkerchief, and it came off quite easily. The other thing he needed was a piece of sticking plaster, because a new shoe had cut his heel. I looked, but there was none left in the tin. My children had cleared it out during the long summer vacation. In fact, for a moment I saw my two sons throughout those summer days, slouched on chairs, reading comics, riding bicycles, wrestling, incurring cuts, which they promptly covered with Elastoplast, and afterward, when the plasters fell off, flaunting the brown-rimmed remains that traced their shapes. In that instant, I missed them badly and longed to hold them in my arms—another reason I welcomed his company. “There’s no plaster left,” I said, not without shame. I thought he would consider me neglectful, and I also wondered if I ought to explain why my sons were at boarding school when they were still so young. They were eight and ten. But I couldn’t. I had ceased to want to tell people the sorry tale of how my marriage had ended and my husband, unable to care for two young boys, insisted on boarding school in order to deprive me of the constant pleasure of their company. It was an unsavory story, and would not have helped.
Two mornings later, he rang and asked was there a chance of our meeting that night. I said yes, because I was not doing anything, and it seemed appropriate to have supper and seal our secret decently. But the current between us started recharging.
“We did have a very good time,” he said. I could feel myself making little petrified moves denoting love, shyness—opening my eyes wide to look at him, exuding trust. This time he peeled the figs for both of us.
He brought me home. I noticed when we were in bed that he had put cologne on his shoulder and that he must have set out to dinner with the hope—if not the intention—of sleeping with me. I liked the taste of his skin better than the chemical, and I had to tell him so. He just laughed. Never had I been so at ease with a man. For the record, I had slept with four other men, but there always seemed to be a distance between us where conversation was concerned. I mused for a moment on their various smells as I inhaled his, which reminded me of an herb garden. It was not parsley, not thyme, not mint, but some nonexistent herb compounded of these three smells. On this second occasion, our lovemaking was more relaxed.
Two mornings later, he rang and asked was there a chance of our meeting that night. I said yes, because I was not doing anything, and it seemed appropriate to have supper and seal our secret decently. But the current between us started recharging.
“We did have a very good time,” he said. I could feel myself making little petrified moves denoting love, shyness—opening my eyes wide to look at him, exuding trust. This time he peeled the figs for both of us.
He brought me home. I noticed when we were in bed that he had put cologne on his shoulder and that he must have set out to dinner with the hope—if not the intention—of sleeping with me. I liked the taste of his skin better than the chemical, and I had to tell him so. He just laughed. Never had I been so at ease with a man. For the record, I had slept with four other men, but there always seemed to be a distance between us where conversation was concerned. I mused for a moment on their various smells as I inhaled his, which reminded me of an herb garden. It was not parsley, not thyme, not mint, but some nonexistent herb compounded of these three smells. On this second occasion, our lovemaking was more relaxed.
“What will you do if you make an avaricious woman out of me?” I asked.
“I will pass you on to someone very dear and suitable,” he said.
With my head on his shoulder, I thought of pigeons under the railway bridge nearby, who passed their nights nestled together, heads folded into mauve breasts. In his sleep, we kissed and murmured. I did not sleep. I never do when I am overhappy, overunhappy, or in bed with a strange man.
“You don’t know what an oasis this is,” he would say, and then in the hallway he would put his hands on my shoulders and squeeze them through my thin dress and say, “Let me look at you,” and I would hang my head, both because I was overwhelmed and because I wanted to be. We would kiss, often for a full five minutes. Then we would move to the sitting room and sit on the chaise, still speechless. He would touch the bone of my knee and say what beautiful knees I had. He saw and admired parts of me that no other man had ever bothered with. Soon after supper, we went to bed.
Once, he came unexpectedly in the late afternoon when I was dressed to go out. I was going to the theatre with another man.
“How I wish I were taking you,” he said.
“We’ll go to the theatre one night?”
He bowed his head. We would. It was the first time his eyes looked sad. We did not make love, because I was made up and had my false eyelashes on. It seemed too troublesome. But all through the play I felt angry for our not having done so, and later I regretted it even more, because from that evening onward our meetings became more difficult. His wife, who had been in France with their children, returned. I knew this when he arrived one evening in a motorcar and in the course of conversation mentioned that his small daughter had that day scribbled over an important document. I can tell you now that he was a lawyer. From then on, it was seldom possible to meet at night. He made afternoon dates, and at very short notice. Any night he did stay, he arrived with a travelling bag containing toothbrush, clothesbrush, and the few things a man might need for an overnight, loveless stay in a provincial hotel. I expect that his wife packed it. I thought, How unnecessary. I felt no pity for her. In fact, the mention of her name—it was Helen—made me quite angry. He said it very harmlessly. One time, he said they’d been burgled in the middle of the night and he’d gone down in his pajamas while his wife telephoned the police from the extension upstairs.
“You must have a rich house—they only burgle the rich,” I said hurriedly, to change the conversation. It was reassuring to find that he wore pajamas with her, when he didn’t with me. My jealousy of her was extreme, and of course grossly unfair. Still, I would be giving the wrong impression if I said her existence blighted our relationship at that point. Because it didn’t. He took great care to speak like a single man, and he allowed time after our lovemaking to stay for an hour or so and depart at his leisure. In fact, it is one of those after-love sessions that I consider the cream of our affair.
“I’ll think of you,” I said.
“And I of you.”
We were not even sad at parting.
When something has been perfect, as our last actual encounter in the gaslight had been, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it. Unfortunately, the next occasion was clouded. He came in the afternoon and brought a suitcase containing all the paraphernalia for a dress dinner he was attending that night. When he arrived, he asked if he could hang up his tails, as otherwise they would be very creased. He hooked the hanger on the outer rim of the wardrobe, and I remember being impressed by the row of war medals along the top pocket. Our time in bed was pleasant but hasty. He worried about getting dressed. I just sat and watched him. I wanted to ask about his medals and how he had merited them, and if he remembered the war, and if he’d missed his then wife, and if he’d killed people, and if still he dreamed about it. But I asked nothing. I sat there as if I were paralyzed.
“No braces,” he said as he held the wide black trousers around his middle. His other trousers must have been supported by a belt.
“I’ll go to Woolworth’s for some,” I said. But that was impractical, because he was already in danger of being late. I got a safety pin and fastened the trousers from the back. The pin was not really sturdy enough, and it was a difficult operation, “You’ll bring it back?” I said. I am superstitious about giving people pins.
He took some time to reply, because he was muttering “Damn” under his breath. Not to me but to the stiff, inhuman starched collar of the new shirt he was wearing, which would not yield to the little gold studs he wanted to pierce through. I tried. He tried. Each time one of us failed, the other became impatient. He said if we went on the collar would be grubby from our hands. And that seemed a worse alternative. I thought he must be dining with very critical people, but of course I did not express my thoughts on the matter. In the end, we each managed to get a stud through, and he had a small sip of whiskey as a celebration. The bow tie was another ordeal. He couldn’t do it. I didn’t dare try.
“Haven’t you done it before?” I said. I expect that his wives, in their turns, had done it for him. I felt such a fool. Then I felt a lump of hatred toward him. I thought how ugly his legs were, how repellent the shape of his body, which did not have anything in the way of a waist, how deceitful his eyes, which congratulated him in the mirror when he succeeded in making a clumsy bow. As he put on the coat, the sound of the medals tinkling was happy and enabled me to remark on their music. Lastly, he donned a white silk scarf that came below his middle. He looked like someone I did not know. He left hurriedly.
I ran with him down the road to help get a taxi—trying to keep up with him—and chatter was not easy. All I remember is the ghostly sight of the very white scarf swinging back and forth as we rushed. His shoes, which were patent leather, creaked unsuitably.
“Is it all-male?” I asked.
“No. Mixed,” he replied.
So that was why he hurried. To meet his wife at some appointed place. The lump of hatred began to swell.
A few days later, he did bring back the safety pin, but my superstition remained, because four straight pins with black round tops that had come off his new shirt were on my window ledge. He refused to take them. Hewas not superstitious.
Bad moments, like good ones, tend to be grouped together, and when I think of the dress occasion I also think of the other time that we were not in utter harmony. It was on a street; we were searching for a restaurant. We had to leave my house because a friend had come to stay and we would have been obliged to tolerate her company. Going along the street—it was October and very windy—I felt that he was angry with me for having drawn us out into the cold, where we could not embrace. My heels were high and I was ashamed of the hollow sound they made. In a way, I felt we were enemies. He looked in the windows of restaurants to see if any acquaintances of his were there. Two restaurants he decided against for reasons best known to himself. One looked to be very attractive. Orange bulbs were set into the walls, and the light came through small squares of iron grating. We crossed the street to look at places on the opposite side. I saw a group of rowdies coming toward us, and for something to say—what with my aggressive heels, the wind, traffic going by, the ugly, unromantic street, we had run out of agreeable conversation—I asked if he ever felt apprehensive about encountering noisy groups like that late at night. He said that, in fact, a few nights earlier he had been walking home very late and saw such a group coming toward him, and before he even registered fear he found that he had splayed his bunch of keys between his fingers and had his hand, armed with the sharp points of the keys, ready to pull out of his pocket should the boys threaten him. I suppose he did it again while we were walking along. Curiously enough, I did not feel that he was my protector. I only felt that he and I were two people; that there was in the world trouble, violence, sickness, catastrophe; that he faced it in one way and that I faced it—or, to be exact, that I shrank from it—in another. We would always be outside each other. In the course of that melancholy thought, the group went by, and my conjecture about violence was all for nothing. We found a nice restaurant and drank a lot of wine.
Then, to my great surprise, the opportunity to meet her came. I was invited to a Thanksgiving party given by an American magazine. He saw the invitation on my mantel and said, “You’re going to that, too?,” and I smiled and said maybe. Was he? “Yes,” he said. He tried to make me reach a decision there and then, but I was too canny. Of course I would go. I was curious to see his wife. And for the first time I would meet him in public. It shocked me to think that I had never met him in the company of any other person. It was like being shut off—a little animal locked away. I thought distinctly of a ferret that someone used to keep in a wooden box with a sliding top when I was a child, and of the time another ferret was brought to mate with it. The memory made me shiver; I thought of those two white ferrets with their little pink nostrils in the same instant as I thought of him sliding a door back and slipping into my box from time to time.
“I haven’t decided,” I said, but when the day came I went. I took a lot of trouble with my appearance—had my hair set, and wore a virginal attire. Black and white. The party was held in a large room with panelled walls of brown wood; blown-up magazine covers were distributed along the panels. The bar was at one end, under a balcony. The barmen, in white, looked shrunken, lost underneath the cliff of the balcony, which seemed in danger of collapsing on them. A more unlikely room for a party I have never seen. There were women going around with trays of champagne, but I had to go to the bar, because I have a preference for whiskey. A man I knew conducted me there, and on the way another man placed a kiss on my back—the neckline of my blouse curved fairly low. I hoped that my friend witnessed this, but it was such a large room, with hundreds of people around, that I had no idea where he was stationed. I noticed a dress I quite admired—a mauve dress with very big mauve crocheted sleeves. Looking up the length of the sleeves, I saw their owner’s eyes directed on me. Perhaps she was admiring my outfit. People with similar tastes often do admire each other’s clothes. I have no idea what her face looked like, but later, when I asked a girl friend which was his wife, she pointed to this woman with the crocheted sleeves. The second time, I saw her in profile. I still don’t know what she looked like, nor do those eyes into which I looked speak to my memory with anything special.
Finally, I searched him out. I had a mutual friend walk across the room with me and apparently introduce us. He was unwelcoming. He looked strange, the flush on his cheekbones vivid and unnatural. He spoke to the mutual friend and virtually ignored me. Possibly to make amends, he asked, at length, if I was enjoying myself.
“It’s a chilly room,” I said. I was referring, of course, to his manner. Had I wanted to describe the room, I would have used “grim,” or some such adjective.
“I don’t know about your being chilly, but I’m certainly not,” he said with aggression. Then a very drunk woman in a sack dress came and took his hand and began to slobber over him. I excused myself and went off. He said most pointedly that he hoped he would see me again sometime.
I caught his eye as I left the party, and I felt both sorry for him and angry. He looked stunned, as if important news had just been delivered to him. He saw me leave with a group of people, and I stared at him without the whimper of a smile. Yes, I was sorry for him. I was also piqued. The very next day, when we met, he did not even remember that a mutual friend had introduced us. “Clement Hastings!” he said, repeating the man’s name. Which goes to show how nervous he must have been.
It is impossible to insist that bad news will have a less awful effect if it is delivered in a certain manner and at a certain time. But I feel that I got my walking papers from him at the wrong moment. For one thing, it was morning. The alarm went off and I sat up wondering when he had set it. Being on the outside of the bed, he was already attending to the clock.
“I’m sorry, darling,” he said.
“Did you set it?” I said, indignant. There was an element of betrayal here, as if he’d wanted to sneak away without saying goodbye.
“I must have,” he said. He put his arm around me, and we lay back again. It was dark outside and there was a feeling—though this may be a memory feeling—of frost.
“Congratulations. You’re getting your prize today,” he whispered. I was being given an award for my announcing.
“Thank you,” I said. I was ashamed of the award. It reminded me of being back at school and always coming first in everything and being guilty about this but not disciplined enough to deliberately hold back. “It’s beautiful that you stayed all night,” I said.
He said he had never known anyone so sweet or so attentive.
The compliment caused me to grip his hand. There is something about holding on to things that I find safe, therapeutic. I was holding it in both of mine, smothering it, him, with the loving urgency of a clasp. At first, I was unaware of his speaking voice.
“Hey!” he said jocularly, just like that. “This can’t go on, you know.”
I thought he meant, of course, that it was late and he would have to get up shortly. Then I raised my head and looked at him through my hair, which had fallen over my face. I saw that he was serious.
“It just occurred to me that possibly you love me,” he said.
I nodded and pushed my hair back so that he would read it—my testimony—clear and clean upon my face.
He put me lying down so that our heads were side by side, and he began, “I adore you, but I’m not in love with you. With my commitments, I don’t think I could be in love with anyone. It all started gay and lighthearted . . .”
Those last few words offended me. This was not how I saw it or how I remembered it—the numerous telegrams he sent me saying, “I long to see you,” or “May the sun shine on you,” the first few moments each time we met and were overcome with passion, shyness, and the shock of being so disturbed by each other’s presence. We had even searched in our dictionaries for words to convey the specialness of our regard for each other. He came up with “cense,” which means “to adore or cover with the perfume of incense.” We used it over and over again. Now he was negating all this. He was talking about weaving me into *his life—*his family life, that is—becoming a friend. He said it, though, without conviction.
I could not think of a single thing to say. I knew that if I spoke I would be pathetic, so I remained silent. When he’d finished, I stared straight ahead at the split between the curtains, and, looking at the beam of raw light coming through, I said, “I think there’s frost outside,” and he said that possibly there was, because winter was upon us. We got up, and, as usual, he took the bulb out of the bedside lamp and screwed in his razor. I went off to get breakfast. That was the only morning I forgot about squeezing orange juice for him, and I often wonder if he took it as an insult. He left just before nine.
The sitting room held the traces of his visit. Or, to be precise, the remains of his cigars. In one of the blue, saucer shaped ashtrays, there were thick clumps of dark-gray cigar ash. There were also three stubs, but it was the ash I kept looking at, thinking that its thickness resembled the thickness of his unlovely legs. And once again I experienced hatred for him. I was about to tip the contents of the ashtray into the fire grate when something stopped me, and what did I do but get an empty lozenge box and with the aid of a sheet of paper lift the ash in there and carry the tin upstairs. With the movement, the clumps lost their shapes, and whereas they had reminded me of his legs, they were now an even mass of dark-gray ash, probably like the ashes of the dead. I put the tin box in a drawer underneath some vests.
Later in the day, I was given my award—a very big silver medallion with my name on it. At the party afterward, I got drunk. My friends tell me that I did not actually disgrace myself, but I have a humiliating recollection of beginning a story and not being able to go ahead with it—not because the content eluded me but because the words became too difficult to pronounce. A man brought me home, and after I’d made him a cup of tea I said good night circumspectly; then, when he was gone, I staggered to my bed.
When I drink heavily, I sleep badly. Wakening, I saw that it was still dark, and my memory went back straightaway to the previous morning and the suggestion of frost outside and his cold warning words. I had to agree. Although our meetings were perfect, I had a sense of doom impending, of a chasm opening up between us, of someone telling his wife, of souring love, of destruction. And still we hadn’t gone as far as we should have gone. There were peaks of joy and of its opposite that we should have reached, but the time was not left to us. He had said, “You still have a great physical hold over me,” and that in its way I found it degrading. To have made love after he had discarded me would have been too hurtful. We had come to the end. The thing I kept thinking of was a violet in a wood and how the time had come for it to drop off and die. The frost may have had something to do with my thinking—or, rather, my musing. I got up and put on a dressing gown. My head hurt from a hangover, but I knew that I must write to him while I had some resolution. I know my own failings, and I knew that before the day was out I would want to see him again, to sit with him, coax him back with sweetness and my overwhelming helplessness.
I wrote the note, leaving out the bit about the violet. It is not a thing you can put down on paper without seeming fanciful. I said if he didn’t think it prudent to see me, then not to see me. I said it had been a nice interlude and that we must entertain good memories of it. It was a remarkably controlled letter. He wrote back promptly. My decision came as a shock, he said. Still, he admitted that I was right. In the middle of the letter, he said he must penetrate my composure, and to do so he must admit that above and beyond everything he loved me and would always do so. That, of course, was the word I had been snooping around for for months. It set me off. I wrote a long letter back to him. I lost my head. I oversaid everything. I testified to loving him, to sitting on the edge of lunacy in the intervening days since I had seen him, to hoping for a miracle.
It is just as well that I did not describe the miracle as I saw it in my mind, because possibly it is—or was—rather inhuman. It concerned his family. He was returning from the funeral of his wife and children, wearing black tails. He also wore the white silk scarf I had seen him with, and there was a black mourning tulip in his buttonhole. When he came toward me, I snatched the black tulip and replaced it with a white narcissus, and he, in turn, put the scarf around my neck and drew me toward him by holding its fringed ends. I kept moving my neck back and forth within the embrace of the scarf. Then we danced divinely on a wooden floor that was white and slippery. At times, I thought we would fall, but he said, “You don’t have to worry. I’m with you.” The dance floor was also a road, and we were going somewhere beautiful.
For weeks, I waited for a reply to my letter, but there was none. More than once I had my hand on the telephone, but something cautionary—a new sensation for me—in the back of my mind bade me wait. To give him time. To let regret take charge of his heart. To let him come of his own accord. And then I panicked. I thought that perhaps the letter had gone astray or had fallen into other hands than his. I’d posted it to the office in Lincoln’s Inn where he worked. I wrote another. This one was a formal note, and with it I enclosed a postcard bearing the words “Yes” and “No.” I asked him to kindly let me know if he had received my previous letter by crossing out the word that did not apply on my card and sending it back to me.
It came back with the “No” crossed out. Nothing else. So he had received my letter. I think I looked at the card for hours. I could not stop trembling, and to calm myself I took several drinks. There was something so brutal about the card—but then you could say that I asked for it by approaching the situation as I had. I took out the box with his ash in it and wept over it, and both wanted to toss it out the window and preserve it forevermore. In general, I behaved very strangely. I rang someone who knew him and asked, for no reason at all, what she thought his hobbies might be. She said he played the harmonium, which I found unbearable news altogether. Then I entered a black patch, and on the third day I lost control.
***
Well, from not sleeping, and taking pep pills and whiskey, I got very odd. I was shaking all over and breathing very quickly, the way one does after witnessing an accident. I stood at my bedroom window, which is on the second floor, and looked at the concrete underneath. The only flowers left in bloom were the hydrangeas, and they had faded to a soft russet, which was much more fetching than the harsh pink they had been all summer. In the garden next door, there were frost hats over the fuchsias. Looking first at the hydrangeas, then at the fuchsias, I tried to estimate what the consequences would be if I were to jump. I wondered if the drop was great enough. Since I am physically awkward, I could only conceive of injuring myself severely, which would make matters worse, because I would then be confined to my bed and imprisoned with the very thoughts that were driving me to desperation. I opened the window and leaned out, but quickly drew back. I had a better idea. There was a plumber downstairs installing central heating—an enterprise I had embarked upon when my lover began to come regularly and we liked walking around naked eating sandwiches and playing records. I decided to gas myself, and to seek the help of the plumber. Because I wanted to do it efficiently. I am aware—someone must have told me—that there comes a point in the middle of the operation when one regrets it and tries to withdraw but cannot. That seemed like an extra note of tragedy, which I had no wish to experience. So I decided to go downstairs to this man and explain to him that I wanted to die, that I was not telling him simply for him to prevent me or console me, that I was not looking for pity—there comes a time when pity is of no help—and that I simply wanted his assistance. He could show me what to do, settle me down, and—I know this is absurd—be around to take care of the telephone and the doorbell for the next few hours. Also to dispose of me with dignity. Above all, I wanted that. I even decided what I would wear. A long dress that was the same color as the hydrangeas in their russet phase—one that I’ve never worn except for a photograph, or on television. Before going downstairs, I wrote a note, which simply said, “I am committing suicide through lack of intelligence, and through not knowing, not learning to know, how to live.”
You will think I am callous not to have taken the existence of my children into consideration. But, in fact, I did. Long before the love affair began, I had reached the conclusion that they had been snatched from me irrevocably by their father’s insistence on boarding school and his total governing of their habits and their education. If you like, I felt I had let them down years before. I thought—and this was an hysterical admission—that my being alive or my being dead would not particularly alter the course of their lives. I ought to add that I had not seen them for months, and it is a shocking fact that although absence does not make us love less, it certainly cools down our physical concern for the ones we love. They were due home for their midterm holiday that very day, but since it was their father’s turn to have them, I knew that I would only see them for a few hours on alternate afternoons. And in my despondent state that seemed worse than not seeing them at all.
Well, of course, when I went downstairs the plumber took one look at me and said, “Do you want a cup of tea?” He actually had tea made. So I took it and stood there warming my child sized hands around the barrel of the brown mug. Suddenly, swiftly, I remembered my lover’s measuring our hands when we were lying in bed and saying that mine were no bigger than his daughter’s. And then I had another and less edifying memory about hands—the time we met when he was visibly distressed because he’d caught that same daughter’s hand in a motorcar door. The fingers were badly bruised, and he felt awful about it and hoped his daughter would forgive him. Upon being told the story, I bolted off into an anecdote about almost losing my fingers in the door of a new Jaguar I had bought. It was pointless, although a listener might infer from it that I was a boastful and heartless girl. I would have been sorry for any child whose fingers were caught in a motorcar door, but at that moment I was trying to recall him to the hidden world of him and me. Perhaps it was one of the things that made him like me less. Perhaps it was then he resolved to end the affair. I was about to say this to the plumber, to warn him about states of so-called love hardening the heart, but, like the violet, it is something that can miss awfully, and when it does two people are mortally embarrassed. He’d put sugar in my tea and I found it sickly.
“I want you to help me,” I said.
“Anything,” he said. I ought to know that. We were friends. He would do the pipes tastefully. They would be little works of art, and the radiators painted to match the walls. “You may think I will paint these white, but actually they will be light ivory,” he had told me. The whitewash on the kitchen walls had yellowed a bit.
“I want to do myself in,” I said hurriedly.
“Good God!” he said, and burst out laughing. Then he looked at me, and obviously my face was a revelation. For one thing, I could not control my breathing. He put his arm around me and led me into the sitting room, and we had a drink. I knew he liked drink, and thought, It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good. The maddening thing was that I kept thinking live person’s thoughts. He said I had so much to live for. “A young girl like you—people wanting your autograph and everything, and a lovely new car,” he said.
“It’s all . . .” I paused to find the word. I had wanted to say “meaningless” but said “heartless” instead.
He became seized with suspicion. “And your boys,” he said. “What about your boys?” He had seen photographs of them, and once I’d shown him a letter one of them had written. The word “heartless” seemed to be spinning around in my head. It was screaming at me from every corner of the room. To avoid his glance, I looked down at the sleeve of my angora jersey and methodically began picking off pieces of its fluff and rolling them into a little ball.
There was a moment’s pause.
“This is an unlucky road—you’re the third,” he said at random.
“The third?” I said, industriously piling the black fluff into the palm of my hand.
“A woman further up, her husband was a bandleader, and he used to be out late. One night, she went to the dance hall and saw him with another girl; she came home straight away and did it.”
“Gas?” I asked, genuinely curious, “No, sedation,” he said, and was off on another story about a girl who’d gassed herself and how he was the one who found her because he was in that house treating dry rot at the time. “Naked except for a jersey,” he said, and speculated once again on why she was attired like that. His manner changed quite considerably as he recalled how he went into the house and smelled gas and searched her out.
I looked at him. His face was grave. He had swollen eyelids. I had never looked at him so closely before. “Poor you,” I said. A feeble apology. I was thinking that if he had abetted my suicide he would then have been committed to the eternal remembering of it.
“A young girl,” he said.
“Poor girl,” I said, mustering up pity for her.
There seemed to be nothing else to say. He had shamed me out of it. I stood and made some kind of effort at domesticity—that is, I took some glasses off a side table and moved in the direction of the kitchen. If glasses are any proof of drinking, then quite a lot of it had been done by me over the past few days.
“Well,” he said, and rose and sighed. He admitted to feeling quite pleased with himself.
As it happened, there would have been a secondary crisis that day. Although my children were due to return to their father, he rang to say that the older boy had a temperature, and since—though he did not say this—he couldn’t take care of a sick child, he would be obliged to bring them to my house. They came in the afternoon. I was waiting inside the door, with my face heavily made up to disguise my distress. The sick boy had a blanket draped over his tweed coat and one of his father’s scarves around his face. The first thing he did when I embraced him was to cry. The younger boy went around the house to make sure that everything was as he had last seen it. Normally, I had presents for them on their return home, but I had neglected it on this occasion, and consequently they were a little downcast.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Why are there tears in your eyes?” the sick boy said as I undressed him.
“Because you’re sick,” I said, telling half a truth.
“Oh, Mamsies,” he said, calling me by a name he had not used for years. He put his arms around me and we both began to cry. He was my less favorite child, and I felt he was crying for that as well as for the various unguessed afflictions that the circumstances of a broken home would impose upon him. It was strange and unsatisfying to be holding him in my arms when over the months I had got used to my lover’s size—the width of his shoulders and the exact height of his body, which caused me to stand on tiptoe so that our limbs could correspond perfectly. Holding my son, I was conscious only of how small he was and how he was using the angora jersey as a handkerchief and how he must be put to bed quickly. The younger boy and I sat in the bedroom, and we all played a game that entailed reading out questions such as “A river?” “A famous footballer?” and then spinning a disc until it steadied down down at one letter and using that letter as the first initial of the river or the famous footballer, or whatever the question called for. I was quite slow at it, and so was the sick boy. His brother won easily, although I had asked him to let the invalid win. But you know unsentimental children are.
We all jumped when the new heating came on, because the boiler, from the basement just underneath, gave an almighty churning noise. As a special surprise, and to cheer me up, the plumber had called in two of his colleagues, and among them they got the job finished early. To make us warm and happy was the way he put it when he came to the door to tell me. It was an awkward moment; I’d avoided him since our morning’s conversation. At teatime, I’d even put his tea, on a tray, out on the landing. Would he tell other people how I had asked him to be my murderer? Would he have recognized it as that? I gave him and his friends a drink and they stood uncomfortably in the children’s bedroom and looked at the little boy’s flushed face and said that he would be better soon. What else could they say! I concluded that he had told them.
For the remainder of the evening, the boys and I played the quiz game over and over again, and just before they went down to sleep I read them an adventure story. In the morning, they both had temperatures. I was busy nursing them for the next couple of weeks. I made beef tea a lot and broke bread into it and coaxed them to swallow those sops of savory bread. They were constantly asking to be entertained. The only things I could think of in the way of facts were particles of nature lore I had gleaned from one of my colleagues, a man in the television canteen. Even with embellishing, they took not more than two minutes to tell my children: a storm of butterflies in Venezuela; animals called sloths, which are so lazy they hang from trees and become covered with moss; the sparrows in England singing differently to the sparrows in Paris. “More,” they would say. “More, more.” Then we would have to play that silly game again or embark upon another adventure story.
At these times, I did not allow my mind to wander, but in the evenings, when their father came, I used to withdraw to the sitting room and have a drink. Well, that was disastrous. The leisure enabled me to brood. Also, I have very weak bulbs in the lamps, and the dimness gives the room a quality that induces reminiscence. I would be transported back. I enacted various kinds of reunion with my lover, but my favorite was our meeting unexpectedly in one of those tiled, inhuman, pedestrian subways and running toward each other and finding ourselves at a stairway that said (one in London actually does say), “To central island only,” and laughing as we leaped up those stairs like people propelled by wings. In less indulgent phases, I regretted that we hadn’t seen more sunsets, or cigarette advertisements, or something, because in memory our numerous meetings became one long, uninterrupted state of lovemaking without the ordinariness of things in between to fasten those peaks. The days, the nights with him seemed to have been sandwiched into a long, beautiful, but solitary night instead of being stretched to the seventeen occasions they actually were. Ah, white vanished peaks! Once, I was so sure that he had come into the room that I tore off a segment of an orange I had just peeled and handed it to him.
But from the other room I heard the low, assured voice of the children’s father delivering information with the self-importance of a man delivering dogmas, and I shuddered at the degree of poison that now lay between him and me when once we’d admitted to love. Plagued love. Then some of the feeling I had for my husband transferred itself to my lover. In considering the death of the earlier love, I began to think of the more recent one and to wonder if it, too, could be called by something else. I was a stranger to myself for the questions I proposed and the answers I was obliged to admit to. Reason told me that the letter in which he had professed to love me was sham, that he had merely written it when he thought he was free of me, but, finding himself saddled once again, he withdrew and let me have the postcard. Hate was welling up. I wished multitudes of humiliation on him. I even plotted a dinner party that I would attend, having made sure that he was invited, and snub him throughout. My thoughts teetered between hate and the hope of something final between us so that I would be certain of his feelings toward me. Even as I sat in a bus, an advertisement that caught my eye was immediately related to him. It said, “DON’T PANIC, WE MEND, WE ADAPT, WE REMODEL,” It was an advertisement for pearl stringing. I resolved that I would mend, and with a vengeance.
***
I cannot say when it first began to happen, because that would be too dramatic—and anyhow I do not know. The children were back at school, and we’d got over Christmas, and he and I had not even exchanged cards. But I began to think less harshly of him. The thoughts I had about him were silly thoughts, really. I hoped he was having little pleasures, like eating in restaurants, and clean socks, and red wine the temperature he liked it, and even—yes, even ecstasies in bed with his wife. These thoughts made me smile to myself inwardly, the kind of smile I had learned from him. I shuddered at the risk he’d run by seeing me at all. Of course, the earlier, injured thoughts battled with these new ones. It was like carrying a taper along a corridor where the drafts are fierce and the chances of its staying alight pretty meager. I thought of him and my children in the same instant; their foibles became his—my children telling me elaborate lies about how many sweets they’d eaten, his slight puffing when we climbed steps and his trying to conceal it. The age difference between us must have saddened him. It was around then, I think, that I really fell in love with him. His courtship of me, his telegrams, his eventual departure—even our lovemaking—were nothing compared with this new sensation. It rose like sap within me; it often made me cry—the fact that he could not benefit from it! The temptation to ring him had passed away.
His phone call came quite out of the blue. It was one of those times when I debated about answering, because mostly I let it ring. He asked if we could meet, if—and he said this so gently—my nerves were steady enough? I said my nerves were never better. That was a liberty I had to take. We met in a café for tea. Toast again. Just like the beginning. He asked how I was, remarked on my good complexion. Neither of us mentioned the incident of the postcard. Nor did he say what impulse had moved him to telephone. It may not have been impulse at all. He talked about his work and about how busy he’d been, and related a little story about taking an elderly aunt somewhere in the car and driving so slowly that she asked him to please hurry up because she could have walked there quicker.
“You’re over it?” he said then, suddenly.
I looked at his face. I could see the question was on his mind. “I’m over it,” I said, and dipped my finger into the sugar bowl and let him lick the white crystals off the tip. Poor man. I could not have told him anything else; he would not have understood. In a way, it was like being with someone else. He was not the one who had folded back the bedspread and brought a reservoir of love and finally left his cigar ash for preserving. He was the ghost of that one.
“We’ll meet from time to time,” he said.
“Of course.” I must have looked dubious.
“Perhaps you don’t want to?”
“Whenever you feel you would like to.” I neither welcomed nor dreaded the thought. It would not make any difference to how I felt. That was the first time it occurred to me that all my life I had feared imprisonment—the nun’s cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people—but, sitting there feeding him white sugar, I thought, I now have entered a cell, and this man cannot know what it is for me to love him the way I do, and I cannot weigh him down with it, because he is in another cell, confronted with other difficulties.
The cell reminded me of a convent, and for something to say I mentioned my sister the nun. “I went to see my sister.”
“How is she?” he asked. He had often asked about her. He used to take an interest in her and ask what she looked like.
“She’s fine,” I said. “We were walking down a corridor, and she asked me to look around and make sure that there weren’t any other sisters about, and then she hoisted her skirts up and slid down the banisters.”
“Dear girl,” he said. He liked that story. The smallest things gave him such pleasure.
I enjoyed our tea. It was one of the nicest afternoons I had had in months, and, coming out, he gripped my arm and said how perfect it would be if we could get away for a few days. He meant it, too.
***
In fact, we kept our promise. We do meet from time to time. You could say things are back to normal again. By normal I mean a state wherein I notice the moon, trees, blobs of spit like jade upon the pavement; I look at strangers and see in their expressions something of my own predicament. I am part of everyday life, I suppose. There is a lamp in my bedroom that gives out a dry crackle each time a train goes by, and at night I count those crackles, because that is when he comes back. I mean the real he—not the man who confronts me from time to time across a café table but the man that dwells somewhere within me. He rises before my eyes—his praying hands, his sly eyes, his inner smile, the veins on his cheeks, the calm voice speaking sense to me. I suppose you wonder why I torment myself like this with details of his presence, but I need it; I cannot let go of him now, because if I did all our happiness and my subsequent pain—cannot vouch for his—will have been for nothing, and in my experience nothings are two a penny these days. ♦
Published in the print edition of the May 13, 1967, issue, with the headline “The Love Object.”
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