Clement sat over his brother’s old exercise book for a while, engaged in unconstructive musings. Then, sighing, he made a few phone calls. As he was setting the phone down, the intercom buzzed. It was Michelin.
‘Your supper’s all ready, Clem. And I’m just off out.’
‘Got another party?’
‘Yes, another party …’
‘Oh, well, enjoy yourself.’
He went downstairs slowly, dragging his steps so that anyone observing him might imagine there was something weighty on his mind. Downstairs, where the temperature was cooler, Sheila was in the conservatory pouring herself another glass of white wine.
‘Where’s your glass?’
‘Oh, I left it on my desk upstairs.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll get another. It’s so hot, Michelin has laid a table outside by the pool for us. She’s just gone.’
‘Another party …’
‘Good drinking evening.’
She was pouring wine slowly into the glass she had taken from the cabinet, letting the neck of the bottle chink once against the rim of the glass to emphasize the benefaction of what she was doing. It seemed to him, watching her, that her strong nose was slightly less sharp this evening, as if a certain watchfulness, apparent in her manner during their time in the States, had now relaxed.
Passing him the brimming glass, she said, ‘If you go outside, I’ll bring the food. It’s all ready.’
The garden was still mainly in sunlight, slanting over the old brick walls. The little pool was in the shadow cast by the Farrers’ house next door. But it was warm there, and in the patio area Michelin had laid a pink linen cloth on their white conservatory table.
‘Did you have a dip?’ he asked, when she emerged with avocados.
‘I spent a whole hour on the phone catching up with news since we’ve been away.’ She passed on various items of gossip.
‘The film contract’s come alive again,’ she said.
‘I don’t believe it.’
They chatted about the Kerinth film contract with Obispo Artists. A letter had been awaiting her from Tarleton Broker, film agent in London for the Green Mouth novels. A deal with Obispo had been on and off for over a year; now they were involved with a director-producer called Calvin Boas Lee, whom both Sheila and Clement had met, and liked tolerably. Now the deal was alive. Tarleton had a contract ready. After they had demolished most of Michelin’s strawberry shortcake, Sheila produced Tarleton’s letter, and they read it over between them.
‘So I’ll go up to London on Thursday and work over the contract page by page with Tarleton.’
‘Looks as if you’re going to be rich and famous. Even more of both.’
She pulled a face at him. ‘Don’t say it. It frightens me. Poor me. Everyone will hate me even more.’
‘Love you even more.’
She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ll keep my head. Promise.’
‘Don’t count your chickens, love.’
‘That’s right …’
Thursday, the day that Sheila took the train up to London to see her film agent, was also the day of the week when Clement drove to Headington for his regular appointment with a fellow analyst. This analyst, a Jungian like Clement, was a Czech exile called Mrs Vikki Emerova. They had known each other for some years, and occasionally met in the Department of Psychiatry in the Warneford, or at official functions. He always addressed her as Mrs Emerova, and she him as Dr Winter.
Clement’s clinic, which these days he held only once a week, was in central Oxford. Mrs Emerova had a downstairs room in a small Edwardian house with a neglected garden off Headington High Street. Headington was full of similar houses with similar rooms, each occupied by people much like Mrs Emerova. The Emerovas of this world sat in chairs listening to the woes of people sitting opposite them. Anything could be said to them. One could talk in intimate detail about sexual perversions, or one could enter on a lengthy diversion concerning politics. One could be fearfully academic or downright coarse. The Mrs Emerovas would never flinch.
Unnatural though this arrangement might appear, many of the academics of Oxford, burdened with personal problems, made their pilgrimage weekly to the shabby rooms in the discreet houses of Headington.
In the back garden at Mrs Emerova’s were three ancient apple trees, and nothing else. The grass did not seem to grow. It was never short and never particularly long. Perhaps, Clement surmised, there were special nurseries – garden centres, they were called nowadays – in the wilds beyond Headington, in Wheatley and Holton and Horspath and Garsington which supplied special grass seed for analysts’ gardens, guaranteed to lull their clients with its monotony. His own clinic had no garden.
Once a year, in the Headington spring, the three ancient apple trees burst into blossom. Hope sprang into the breasts of the analysands. Christ may have died for them, God might have created the world for them … All was possible … But come the autumn and the fruits were as green and acid as the lives of those who looked out upon them from Mrs Vikki Emerova’s window.
‘But she had it off with him in the next room. This was in Boston. In our hotel – the well-named Luxor Hotel. A little Spanish type, five feet one and pretty weedy, I’d say. Always had a smarmy sort of grin for Sheila. I watched him. I saw him last year and was friendly. Arthur Hernandez. More properly Arturo, I’m sure. Her editor at Swain Books – not that he seems to do much editing. Those guys have generally tried their hand at writing, had no joy at it, but ever after think they have special insights into writers’ lives. He’s probably straight out of university, probably only twenty-three or twenty-four – half her age. No real experience of life. They probably did it last year too, and I never found out. There I was, being nice to him. Oh, of course he was all over me when I arrived at the Luxor from New York. By that time, they’d probably been doing it all round the States. It’s the sense of betrayal … I can’t see how Sheila could possibly – And all the time he was “Green Mouth” this and “Green Mouth” that. I said to him, “Look, when we’re not performing in public, couldn’t you relax and call her Sheila? Green Mouth is only her trade name.” And he said, “Oh, I do zees only to show respect.” Respect, and the whole time he was bloody well shafting her. I mean, there are rules about these things, and the Americans know that as well as anyone else. I’ve never been anti-American. Rather the reverse. Of course, Arthur Bloody Hernandez is probably from Puerto Rico. I wondered if I wrote to Swain and complained if they’d sack him. Sheila is their most valuable property. They wouldn’t want to lose her. Of course, I suppose they might argue that it was Arthur Hernandez, damn him, by offering his services, who kept her there instead of with a bigger organization. I know Random House made overtures. They have business arrangements with her publisher on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe I should try to persuade her to – no, I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t work.’
‘You feel more anger against him than against Sheila?’
‘Really, I don’t blame her. Well, not much. I have always been generous. Quite generous – in fact, more generous in that respect than she’s ever been with me, by a long chalk. It was just a passing fancy – well, no real harm done. One must have a perspective, yet all the while the other person just goes on acting however they feel like, without restraint. I really don’t think Sheila has much power of self-analysis. You can see that in her novels. No kind of self-analysis. Her characters, even the sensitive ones, just barge ahead and act. She is very warm natured. All credit for that. I do try to be generous. Even when I walked in and caught them at it – there was her big soft white bum, Mrs Emerova, she on top and you could hardly see him at all, except for two nasty little thin hairy legs, like a beetle crushed by a cream puff – I’ll never forget it. You may – you should – try to be detached but it still hurts deeply to catch your wife in flagrante delicto, and on top, too. Jealousy is hard to eradicate. She gave me such a look. I simply backed away into the sitting room. Knocked over a vase of flowers. Couldn’t think what to say. At such a time, you find yourself completely at a loss. Now why should I have felt such a fool? I suppose it’s because – there’s a whole tradition behind it, a whole rich tradition. The cuckolded male is a figure of fun, even to himself. It’s not so bad for a woman who catches her husband at it. She tends to engage more sympathy, don’t you consider? It’s something to do with the shape of the sexual organs, basically, I suppose. The male equipment looks a lot funnier than those rather pretty little purses you women have. I just stood there shaking but, in a minute, out he came, all dishevelled and looking a bigger fool than I felt, tucking in his shirt. When he saw me, he made a dash for the door to the corridor, so I ran after him and managed a good kick up the arse to help him on his way. That was the most satisfying bit of the whole affair. I rather hurt my left leg doing it.’
‘Kicking him satisfied you?’
‘What do you think? Then out she came, dressed, but hair dishevelled. Wanted a drink and a cigarette. Did I tell you she smokes when she’s on these tours? Cigars if nothing else is available. She’s like a demon. Well, it is all a bit testing. I sympathize with her and I do see why she’s got to do it. And I said to her, quite quietly and decently, “I know you’re under pressure but this has got to stop”, and she said, in a sort of level voice, “I’m enjoying it too much to stop.” That’s what she said. “I’m enjoying it too much to stop.” As cool as you like, Mrs Emerova. I’ll tell you the effect that sentence had on me, shall I? She never wrote a sentence half as powerful. It just destroyed me. I suppose I didn’t look any different. She gave me a drink from the drinks cabinet and I drank it. But something went inside me. I still feel … of course I do. It was bad enough to be told she was enjoying it. One does enjoy these affairs. The surreptitiousness, the sense of … But to rub it in … And then to say point blank that she meant to continue, whatever I felt about it. What I felt about it didn’t matter to her in the slightest. How can you recover from that? It’s so unlike her. Generally she’s so considerate. But perhaps she’s been like that all the time. I mean, how long have we been married – and all the time she was secretly quite indifferent to what my feelings were if they got in the way of her pleasure? “I’m enjoying it too much to stop …” Christ, what an insult. It’s as if I’m bleeding inside and yet, now we’re back home, I have to continue as normal. We both continue as normal, as if nothing had happened. It’s grounds for divorce, isn’t it?’
‘Do you want a divorce?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. It’s a crowning insult, isn’t it?’
‘Did she mean it as an insult? Was she not also upset at that moment?’
‘I should hope she was! Isn’t it at such moments that the truth slips out? How often had they had it off together? Not just in Boston. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles. Can you imagine, they might have done it in Salt Lake City? Ugh … At least I seem to have put paid to Hernandez. I made sure they weren’t alone together for the rest of the time we were there. And I don’t think he had the appetite for it after being found out. Men don’t, do they? There are rules to the game, you know, and if you’re caught out, fine, then however much it costs you say you’re sorry and you stop. You stop, don’t you, for the sake of the other person’s feelings? Isn’t that the rule? You and the other woman know you run that risk. If found out – all over. Finish. Isn’t that the rule?’
‘Do you think of it as a game with rules?’
‘There are rules, aren’t there? Remember your ethology. In everything there are rules, in every species. Otherwise civilization falls apart. Even when two nations threaten each other, rules remain. If that wasn’t so, then the planet would have been destroyed long ago. Even nations which hate each other obey rules, almost unwittingly. How much more so between individuals. How am I going to live now? Am I supposed to go on as if nothing had happened?’
‘What has really happened? Sheila returned to England with you, didn’t she?’
‘I can’t talk to you, Mrs Emerova. You’re supposed to offer me something, you know. A therapist is supposed to use his or her own feelings in the service of the patient. That’s me. How should I best behave in this mess?’
‘Do you feel it is a mess? Your marriage is continuing, isn’t it?’
‘It’s continuing, yes. But for how long? What’s she thinking? Is she longing for Hernandez every moment of the day? “I’m enjoying it too much to stop.” It puts me off my stroke, I don’t mind admitting. Yes, I do mind admitting it. I feel that when we have intercourse she’ll just be thinking of him all the while, and making comparisons.’
‘Does that make you feel inferior?’
‘Oh, Christ, it makes me feel bereaved. Our calling has little defence against bereavement. How am I to know what she’s thinking?’
‘May you not suppose that she wants everything to continue as normal?’
‘What right has she to hope that? I’m the one who should be deciding about that! Instead, I’m arranging for a party for her next Thursday, to celebrate her latest effusion …’
‘Doesn’t that suggest that you both want everything to continue as normal?’
‘Well, it can’t continue as normal, can it? That’s not possible. Not while I still have so much anger inside me. Okay, under the stress of the tour, when she’s the cat’s whiskers and the whole world’s bending an ear to her, I quite understand that then she’s feeling so good that she wants the odd extra bit of adulation – I mean, this guy Hernandez, he has no interest in her as such, he’s only interested because she’s the grand and glorious Green Mouth who brings so much money into his company, whose new novel has got 1.5 million copies in print. It’s impersonal on both sides, in a way, all part of the big Green Mouth act – I understand that, it’s my business to understand. Good for her! But “I’m enjoying it too much to stop …” Am I supposed not to feel angry and hurt because I’m an analyst? What do you expect?’
‘If you accept that she is having to undergo a big act, then perhaps this hurtful thing she said was also a part of the big act and has no further meaning? Couldn’t it just have been Green Mouth speaking?’
‘Big Mouth, you mean.’
‘Well, I’m afraid that it’s ten past twelve. Just gone …’
‘I meant to ask you about my brother.’
‘Can we talk about him next week?’
Clement got to Carisbrooke in time for lunch. As he collected a plate of plaice and pommes frites, he saw that he would be sitting next to George Forbes, the Medieval History Fellow, with whom conversation was no bore.
‘What did you make of Playing for Time?’ George asked.
‘Yes, very funny. I took it with me for light reading on my trip. I’ll let you have it back. He used to live just near here, you know.’
‘You’re looking a bit battered.’
‘Worse than usual? What about you?’ Such remarks as George’s were perfectly acceptable, coming from George. He spoke in a kind of conspiratorial way. He was a sturdily built man with a beaky face and high cheek bones, on which there rested a high colour. He had a shock of white hair. A handsome-looking man, Clement thought. Also, he voted Labour, which Clement considered was to be prized in a Professor of Medieval History.
‘I’m fresh as a daisy,’ George said, smiling to show it was not true. ‘I’ve been invigilating. Ten more days and I’m off to Stanford. What’s the matter?’
‘Oh …’ He picked at his fish. ‘Usual boring problem … Domestic, blah, blah, blah. Let me ask you something, George. Don’t you regard life as a game to be played according to the rules? Wouldn’t you say that? I mainly mean unwritten rules.’
Without ceasing industriously to demolish his fish, George said, ‘We live in a post-Christian society where the written rules were brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses. We subscribe to the idea that it is wrong to murder or steal. “Do not adultery commit, Advantage rarely comes of it”, etcetera. These days, there’s less of a consensus than there was, say, before the world wars. It’s harder to know by what rules the other chap’s playing.’
‘You don’t quarrel with the idea of life as a game, though?’
‘A bloody unsporting one.’ George removed a bone from his mouth. ‘A philosopher would say your question was without meaning.’
‘It’s true we impose the idea of a game. For most of the people I see, “game” has comforting connotations. It implies that there will be a half-time, and someone will be looking on to see fair play. It’s an antidote to injustice. People hate injustice.’
‘No. They like it. They are happy to put up with it. Otherwise, they’d all vote more sensibly.’
‘I’ve got a spot of injustice at the moment. I’m supposed to sort out Joseph’s life, as if I was capable of sorting out my own.’
‘I thought you chaps were used to that kind of situation. Doubtless it’s rather different if it’s your brother. Comes a bit too close to home. Are you going to have some pudding?’
‘All his papers have been dumped on me. I can’t just throw them away, can I?’
‘How about letting the dead bury the dead?’
‘That comes well from an historian. He wants – wanted – me to do something with them. I don’t know whether I’m supposed to write his biography or what. Or just put out a collection of his letters or miscellaneous pieces … He wasn’t all that well known, that’s the trouble.’
‘I suppose that Joseph Winter is quite a respected name in some circles. Trouble is, his chosen field was the Far East, wasn’t it? Pity he didn’t play safe and go for the Tudors and Stuarts, where the big money is.’
‘His involvement was with the East.’
‘I didn’t mean to belittle him. I just meant that it’s a rough old world and there are hierarchies in historical circles as in everything. Really, the study of things Far Eastern is in its infancy. The documents aren’t easily available – or extant, in many cases. No prestige attaches. He wrote the standard history of Sumatra, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, C.U.P. Sells all of ten copies a year.’
George pushed his plate to one side and sipped his wine. ‘Your brother did something in the East during the war, didn’t he? Remind me.’
Clement said, ‘He served in the Forgotten Army.’
George spread wide his hands in a despairing gesture. The two men looked at each other. Then they began to laugh.
‘Come round and have a drink this evening and advise me,’ Clement said. ‘I’d like you to view the documents. Make it six o’clock and we’ll have a bit of a tipple. My wife should be back by then.’
George Forbes arrived in Rawlinson Road shortly after six, wearing an old cream jacket Clement recalled from previous summers. The two men sat by the swimming pool for a drink and a gossip; then Clement led the way up to his study, and the bundles of Joseph’s papers.
‘It’s a bit of a clutter as yet.’
‘My brother inherited the family business. I don’t suppose he’ll leave any papers, thank God.’
Boxes full of notes and notebooks presented a problem. George nosed here and there, muttering to himself.
‘Literacy, the curse of the thinking classes …’
Clement sat at his desk and watched. ‘One owes one’s brother something. We were never all that close. Joseph was twelve years my senior. The war came between us, that Grand Canyon between generations. I admired him from afar.’
George presented himself as a solid block between Clement and the window, as he leafed through one of the notebooks. He read out, “‘War. Why is war so popular? Because it allows us to cease being rational. (Not only war itself but armed forces, the acolytes of war, also irrational, organized as secret societies, end product death and disability.) Instead, more like animals, being aware of sacrifice, blood flowing, substitute of primitive courage for passage of time. Intellect tells us to hate war; an older thing sees in it a dangerous release. Like a drug.” Good enough in its day, possibly. Bit dated now. Not the stuff for the eighties.’
‘There are a lot of essays in that box which appear never to have been published.’ Clement felt embarrassed and got up to pour them more wine.
After reading spasmodically, George said, ‘Trouble is, Joseph was really a popular author without being all that popular. All these Thai dynasties – they’re too remote for the average reader. Why don’t you turn all this material over to the Far East Library, and let them sort it out?’
‘Have a look at his wartime stuff. That’s in a different vein.’
Ignoring the invitation, George said, shuffling in a box, ‘And I believed it was only in plays that men wrote on the backs of envelopes …’
‘I thought of trying to write Joseph’s biography. It might get some events in my own life clear.’
George gave him a sage look. ‘Would it add to your reputation? Even in College? Bit obscure …’
A touch of colour entered Clement’s sallow cheeks.
‘I feel I want to give him a chance …’
George’s expression showed what he thought of that remark. The evening sun was slanting in at the window, illuminating the dust on bundles of old newspapers.
‘For instance,’ said Clement, going over to another box by the window, and selecting from it a black binder containing a number of typed sheets, ‘there’s this. It’s a record of a British post-war operation which, as far as I’ve checked, has never been written about. Joseph links the personal – sometimes very personal – with the historic. It gives a clear picture of what conditions were like in Sumatra in 1945–46, after the Japanese were beaten. Would you like to take a look?’
George was already glancing at his watch and sighing.
‘All those damned exam papers waiting to be marked. I’d better get back. Thanks all the same. Maybe another time.’
After George had gone, Clement wandered through to the rear of the house, touching items of furniture as he went, sometimes only with an extended finger. Michelin had laid a supper table for two in the dining room. He preferred not to glance at it, turning instead into the wide kitchen which opened from the rear hall. There he poured himself a Smirnoff, trickling the vodka on to the rocks at the bottom of his glass and tempering it with a little white Cinzano.
Clutching this glass, sipping at it, he made his way slowly into the garden, across which long westerly shadows had fallen. The shadow of the great Norway maple, growing two doors away in the Phillips’ garden, and a living memorial to the time when North Oxford had been pleasant farmland, was cast on the kitchen and guest bedroom wall as if to emphasize the redness of the brick. This wall was pitted with holes and rusted nails, scars and gouges, like a landscape of the past, where previous generations of householders had encouraged green things to scale the heights up to the bedroom window. Various bees and flies took refuge there in the autumn, living out October in increasingly rickety state, on this sunniest of walls. Now it was the ragged pattern of the maple which dominated the brick face.
Generating half-articulated thoughts, Clement stood gazing at the brick. He had another life which had never been lived, a life strangled somewhere in those tangled years of his childhood and adolescence, when he had been possessed by a wish to ‘get on’, and had sacrificed the chance of journeys to foreign lands by sitting for his various degrees. By so doing, he had become successful in a modest way, if being part of the academic environment was success; certainly in Sheila’s Kerinth there were other criteria for success – a strong sword arm, cunning, hatred of scholars, power, magic, virility … The ragged pattern on the kitchen wall seemed to stand momentarily for all the ragged coastlines he had never sailed to as sun was setting across torn sea, mysterious land. He had presided over the rebuilding of other lives; now here was his brother’s, lying in fragments. How could it be meaningfully put together, put together in such a way as to express a certain muted exhilaration, romantic but submerged, which belonged to the Winters?
Why had Sheila not come back on the five o’clock train as she usually did? What was she up to now? Other houses could be seen from where Clement stood – the backs of houses in Staverton Road; the families there seemed to be working as they should. Old Badger, the Bursar of St Arnold’s, was a funny little ineffectual man, yet his existence, at least from the outside, appeared to run in a perfectly smooth and pleasant way. Of course Badger, looking from one of his upper windows and seeing a fellow of Carisbrooke drinking vodka in his back garden by his swimming pool, might be thinking identical thoughts.
Sheila did not arrive until eleven-thirty, disgorging from a taxi with some style. She had caught the ten-five from Paddington.
Dragging a large carrier bag labelled Dickins & Jones, she entered talking and put her free arm round Clement’s neck as she kissed him.
‘I caught the train by the skin of my teeth. Jessica Bishop was on it. The taxi was so slow – traffic in the West End was worse than ever this evening. The taxi driver did his best. He told me he was going to retire to Clacton next week. Clacton’s probably full of retired taxi drivers.’
He recognized her chattery London persona, a mock-up perhaps of a woman Sheila would have liked to be, still not integrated into her personality.
‘Have you bought yourself another outfit?’
She twirled the carrier bag and then dumped it on the sofa. ‘I’ll tell you about that later. Calvin Boas Lee is a bastard. After Tarleton wrote to me, he got a phone call from Calvin in Hollywood to say he would be over in London today. So Tarleton booked us a table for three at Sidebottom’s. You know how these people are – one o’clock came and went and Calvin did not show.’
He noted the Americanism, as she went into a long description of what they had done and not done, and how stingy Tarleton had been about phoning the Hollywood office for information. As she talked, she went to stand by the fireplace, hands on hips.
Clement had been playing Wagner; she turned down the volume.
‘So eventually Tarleton said that we couldn’t let the Sidebottoms down – he’s friendly with them and takes all his best clients there. So we went down for a bite and it was after two before we arrived. Of course we had to have champagne to soothe ourselves. And you, Clem, why have you not eaten supper? You were being moody, weren’t you? I ought to have phoned you from Sidebottom’s, and this is your way of reminding me.’
‘I just didn’t feel hungry.’
‘Well, then I’m sorry. Have some toast and pâté now. I’m going to have a cup of tea and then I’m going to stagger to bed. It’s been a hard day and I’m absolutely exhausted, and Calvin’s a bastard of the first water. And the second and third, and however many waters there are.’
‘So does this mean the film deal’s fallen through?’
‘Who knows what it means?’ she said wearily, turning to march into the kitchen, her figure momentarily framed in the dark doorway and then encompassed by it.
‘What else did you do in town?’ he called through.
‘Nothing. What do you think I did?’ Her voice came accompanied by the sound of the kettle filling from the cold tap. ‘I’ll show you the new outfit in the morning. I expect you’ll hate it.’
Clement decided to have a cup of tea with her and forgo his pâté for the pleasure of going to bed at the same time she did. Perhaps she might not want that, although she sounded amenable enough.
After the usual ritual of turning out the lights and chaining the front door, they took their tea upstairs. All was peaceful in the street. She talked intermittently about her agent, Tarleton, and his marital problems, as they washed and undressed. After they had scrambled into bed, under the king-size duvet, Clement clasped her to him, feeling her considerable bulk roll readily towards him. He kissed her and murmured in her ear.
‘Oh, that’s how it is,’ she exclaimed, putting on a light girlish intonation. ‘I thought you were just a little bit huffy with me downstairs. A general huffiness ever since I came in. Favourite pupil had misbehaved.’
‘Is that really how you see yourself?’
‘I couldn’t help being late. I didn’t do it to annoy. Or did you think I was hanging about on Paddington station on purpose?’
He preferred not to pursue that line of thought, and said so, slipping his hand down under the duvet instead. Yet he heard the edginess in his own voice.
‘I can’t think what it is you see in me,’ Sheila said, in a mock-naive chirping voice.
He growled. ‘This neat little box of tricks so cunningly hidden where none but I may find it.’
‘Oh, that’s what it’s all about, is it? Is that all I mean to you? Is that what you were waiting for?’
‘You ask as many questions as Mrs E. Had you forgotten I still fancy you?’
Despite the dark, she moved her head back as if to get a better look at him.
‘What’s that mean?’
‘You seem to have forgotten what happened in Boston with that Spanish gigolo!’ He had not meant to say it.
She lay back with her head on the pillow. He could feel the emotion warm in her, without being able to read its content. Anger welled up in him. Unsatisfied, they fell apart. Her refusal to speak seemed to smother them. But, as he was about to withdraw his hand from her thighs, pity for her and all her difficulties overcame his anger.
With compassion in him, he felt able to make love to her. She did not resist.
Afterwards, when he heard Sheila sail on relaxed breathing into the caverns of sleep, he thought to himself, soothingly, ‘It’ll be all right. She never admits when she’s in the wrong. I’ll just have to forget about it. Bury it. That’s best. She will never refer to it again if I don’t; I know that. It means much less to her than it does to me. We’re different people.
‘What a mess. Half the time, she’s Green Mouth, leading that other life in that dream world of hers. I must take it easy. There’s no need for it to infect me. It’s such a misery … Why can’t people just screw and be done, for the simple pleasure of it?… But I suppose that’s what she did with the little Hispanic sod. Don’t go over it all again. Think of something else. Remember how she was in Berlin.’
There was always another circle to descend, down to the smallest circle that could never be reached – his self. Before that was the newly activated circle of his lost brother. He found himself lying there addressing Mrs Emerova; and he and she were back in their familiar chairs, in the darkness.
‘I wonder why it is I find myself upset about Joseph? After all, his wasn’t an easy or a very successful life. Perhaps I envy him because he’s out of it all. Or perhaps I’m jealous of the way he’s got out of it and left all this stuff – his problems – for me to resolve. What do you think?’
‘If you find yourself offering so many alternatives, could it be something more important to you than any of them?’
‘It’s as if I’ve had no life – no, as if I’ve only lived through other people, and now he’s offering me another substitute life, his secret life, well …’
‘And do you want the life he’s offering you?’
‘I partly admire, partly despise the all-consuming love he had for a Chinese woman. It seems to have haunted him.’
‘Is that what you want in the way of love? Do you feel Sheila gives you a lesser kind of love than the Chinese woman gave Joseph?’
‘Yes – I mean no. I don’t really believe in all-consuming love. It’s a Romantic myth. Perhaps I envy him the myth. He was very much a man who lived with myths. My life seems devoid of myths. It’s stuffed with contemporary history instead. For two brothers we were very separate …’
‘But now he’s trying to come closer and you don’t want it?’
‘Well.’ He laughed. ‘It’s a bit late to try and come closer now, eh? He should have tried that when he was alive.’
‘That sounds rather like your father, doesn’t it?’
Clement was silent a long time. Bloody Mrs Emerova, with her irrelevancies, disrupting his line of thought. There was so much hatred and disappointment in various relationships that it was difficult sometimes to see your way.
‘Anyhow, this great love of his. It failed, didn’t it? He couldn’t see it through. He wasn’t quite determined enough.’
‘Is that how you see it?’
‘How do you see it?’
‘I want to see it through your eyes. I think that for some reason it is important for you to believe that neither he nor your father loved you enough, or was capable of loving enough …’
‘You confuse me. There are so many points on which we disagree. Sometimes I can’t help wishing I was anywhere but here.’
‘Far away from me, eh? Like Joseph in Sumatra …’