He rings her.
‘I’ve been rereading Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico and I am warming rather to a month in Taos,’ he says before she can even say hello.
She too has been reading Mornings in Mexico, on the off-chance. Fiesta time in a pueblo the shape and colour of a giant chocolate cake – how would that be? Mindless, without effort, under the hot sun, unceasing, yet never perspiring nor even breathing heavily, they dance on and on. He has only to say the word Taos for her to hear feet stomping on the hot clay. A month there! A whole mindless month. Dancing.
‘Is that a decision?’ she asks.
‘Would you like it to be?’
‘Just a minute,’ she says, coughing.
‘Is that toast I hear you eating?’
‘Yes. Soldiers.’
‘You’re breakfasting with soldiers?’
She laughs. But behind the jest she hears a trap. Is he ringing at breakfast time in order to learn more about her domestic situation? Husband? Children?
Does he want her to say, come live with me and I’ll make you soldiers?
Breakfast, she thinks, is the most intimate of meals. No wine, no candlelight, no music – so how come the intimacy?
It’s obvious. Breakfast is bed-warmed. She, for example, is still wearing pyjamas. Though not the pyjamas she’d wear if she were not alone. And he?
She imagines he has good legs. Long, sinewy, if a little hairy.
Silence falls between them. Is he undressing her?
‘I was wondering,’ he says, with clumsy suddenness, ‘if you’d been trying to get hold of me …’
What’s this? I was wondering.
‘No.’
‘If you’d rung me …’
‘No. Ah. Hang on. Yes. I did call, but your answerphone was on.’
‘You left no message?’
‘No. I wasn’t aware I was obliged to.’
He doesn’t know what to say now. But she can say it for him: If, in the future, you must call, please leave a message, otherwise …
She leaves him to find his own way out of this. Otherwise what?
But she can fill in the blanks for herself. Otherwise my wife …
And that he can’t say because to introduce the wife is to concede the mistress …
There she now sits, anyway, Mrs Playwright, on a silver breakfast platter between them, like a Sunday joint, her eyes dead, her mouth open with an apple in it.
Enough. I am supposed to be a feminist. I am not in the business of stealing husbands from their wives. This has to stop before it begins.
‘I won’t call again,’ she says.
‘No, all I’m saying—’
‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about it,’ is what she thinks. What she says is, ‘Rest assured – I won’t call. Let me know if you do settle on Lawrence.’ Whereupon she puts the phone down.
‘Because if you do,’ she says to herself, ‘I’ll sort you out another director.’
The next day she amends her list. In the CON column she writes:
Pusillanimous
Conceited
Arsehole
So that’s it. Whatever it is, or it isn’t, it’s stopped.
But the scent of war has entered their negotiations. Whoever pulls out now will have admitted defeat. And defeat in love – even incipient love – is unbearable.