When I walked with her down the stairs, she held my arm. She kept holding it, walking down the hot boulevard, and we both seemed to take comfort for a while in saying nothing.
It would be a relief, wouldn’t it? she said eventually.
Not to talk?
To be understood.
She kissed me then, at the junction.
I have to pick up Jenny, she said. And you?
I have to work.
You understood me once, she whispered.
I watched her move off among the bobbing pedestrian heads and after a moment I began to follow. That blonde hair above the light summer dress was easy to keep track of and if she turned, though I knew she wouldn’t, I had two or three bodies between us behind which to lose myself. Would I understand her again, I wondered, if she led me to something unmentionable, to the thing she was so reluctant to talk about? She turned left then, down that warren of small cobbled streets, and I heard the cello playing and I stopped and let her disappear. She was on her way to pick up Jenny, and I was on my way, following that sound.
Again, the arch with the ceramic tiles, the courtyard, the balconies above. The stone steps, leading up into a mouth of darkness, and the bowed sound echoing round. There was something oriental about that space, a touch of fantasy; it could have lived in Tbilisi or Samarkand. Again, my echoing feet on the stairs the lace curtain drawn and pulled, the Slavic face behind. I walked up slowly, as if I wanted to delay the moment. Again, the door was half-open and it creaked as it let me inside.
And she was sitting on the couch, again, that woman-shaped instrument between her knees. The windows were closed for once and there was a scent in the air.
You wear perfume, I said.
She smiled. Laid aside the bow.
Yes. I am a woman, after all. Why do you mention?
My wife told me I smelt different.
What’s your wife’s name?
And for some reason I didn’t want to tell her, a reason I couldn’t fathom. Was it loyalty, guilt, or simple English manners? I asked her to play the thing again.
The fourth suite, she said.
Do you have a favourite? I asked her.
No, she said. But when I get to the sixth . . .
When you get to the sixth, what happens?
Shall we wait and see?
Do you have a husband?
Why you ask?
I asked because he was staring at me. Below on the street, on the opposite pavement, a dark slash against the sunlit wall.
There was a man outside, I said, the last time I left. He’s outside again now.
Tell me what he looks like.
He’s in a suit. A dark suit. His hair’s growing thin. He wears patent-leather shoes.
Grigory, she said, and put the cello to one side. First cellist in the orchestra. He was my teacher.
Was?
Before the love-thing happened.
The love-thing?
The love-thing, she said, is when you say, of all the people in the universe, I am bound to you. I give my memories to you, whatever I know of this world, I give my soul to you, I give you the possibility of hurting me, causing me infinite pain, grief, loss, the total sum of me will be known by you, and if one of us breaks this thing, the other is left unmoored, without reason, friendless, loveless, in a universe of hurt.
Standing in the shadow of the wall below, he seemed a most unlikely repository of all that emotion. I remembered the smell of his towelly robe. And I thought to myself: there is no accounting for taste.
You know the love-thing?
It sounds terrifying, I said.
It is.
And why would anyone want it?
They don’t, she said. It happens. You’re lying there. Afterwards. You look at the pile of clothes beside the bed. You think, don’t those clothes look good together? And you realise that your whole life has been a kind of waiting. For this moment. For this thing.
You’re talking about him, I said.
Am I? She turned her head towards me and away again, as if the thought upset her.
And the child you lost was his.
Now that, she said, is true.
Do all women do this? I asked her.
Do what? she asked.
Talk about an absent man with a present one.
Did your wife?
I suspect she did.
She began to stroke the strings again with the bow, softly.
And which were you, she said, above the gathering sound, the absent or the present one?