It started in the dead hour. Three o’clock, after lunch, when every cell in Richard’s body felt heavy, pulling him down. His frame sagged. It happened every afternoon, but it was intolerable the days he worked at home and every cure had failed – drinking water, turning off the heating, salads for lunch. He’d consulted the internet, Googling ‘afternoon drowsiness’, and got some faintly unrealistic advice – stick your head out the window, share a joke with a colleague. The morning contained some sort of charge and he could attack his dissertation for a few hours. On Thursday afternoons he had a seminar, which wasn’t ideal but it forced him to be active. But on Fridays, alone in his study, he would start to slow and the sentences would become stunted. He became conscious of the untamed, unexplored space surrounding him – the attic above him and the room next door – and he found himself standing at the window, looking over the quilt of gardens and the backs of houses, the maze of drainpipes and aerials, the uncoordinated protrusions of kitchen extensions.
Occasionally, he wondered if it was the room that made him feel like this. It was cramped, a little overfull, and although he’d tried to protect the space, he was hemmed in by cardboard boxes and temporary bookshelves. It had become a repository for those liminal possessions no one knew what to do with: postcards, orders of service, a staplegun, a pair of flippers. He was never relaxed or at peace, the way he always imagined he would be.
Eleanor thought there was something strange about this floor of the house. He’d told her over and over again that there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, that the writing on the walls next door was just a slightly weird child messing around. He didn’t say that it unnerved him as well.
Richard didn’t usually have much time for the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘moods’ or ‘energy’, but he found himself reaching for those words instinctively. It felt almost more difficult to breathe here, as though the air was slightly contaminated, and something was always compelling him downstairs, away. Once or twice, Eleanor had joked about the upstairs room being haunted. He didn’t believe in ghosts – that was central to his identity, like not believing in fate or karma or homeopathy. And yet, if he was honest, he’d been slightly too quick and defensive when he rejected the idea.
Last Thursday, when he’d gone into his study, the door to the upstairs room had been wide open. He shut it again, certain that Eleanor hadn’t been up here and that she wouldn’t have left it open. Keeping the doors shut upstairs was one of the things that was important to her, like matching crockery, or candles or guest towels. He didn’t want to ask her in case he unsettled her even more. At his desk, he’d had a strange feeling that nothing was in the right place; he thought his notebook had been moved and his pen. It was just a feeling, there was no evidence for it and the rational part of him longed to dismiss it; yet his discomfort remained, unarticulated.
He couldn’t write, so he started to scroll back and assess what he’d produced. That was always the worst part. The afternoon was ahead of him, theoretically two or three hours’ work was there for the taking, but he knew that worryingly soon the streets would be filled with chatter and screams from the primary school across the road and he would have to confront the fact that the day was beginning to conclude. Zoe would come home. Another ninety minutes or so, and Eleanor would be back with the children and then: resignation. Whatever he was left with was the sum of his achievement. This was what the day – and with it time, money, his family – had been sacrificed for.
As he was casting around for something to distract him from the inevitable despondency, the lights went out. It was a grim day, overcast and raining, and the room was filled with a bluish-grey gloom. He got up and tried the switch at the wall, and then the desk lamp. Nothing. He went out and clicked the switch on the landing. Success. A blown fuse. Drawn to the sterile comfort of the electric light in the hall, he headed downstairs.
The fusebox was in the basement, on the landing between Zoe’s bedroom and living room. Richard hadn’t been down there since Zoe had moved in. He opened the box, flicked the switch and paused to see if it would trip again. It didn’t, but instead of going upstairs to check the lights, he stayed where he was, occupying this place that was both his and not his.
The door to Zoe’s bedroom was wide open. She clearly hadn’t been expecting anyone to come down here and something about that assumption irritated him: it was their house, after all. The staircase and the landing couldn’t be considered fully hers, just as the kitchen and the living room weren’t fully theirs. There was something provocative about the open door. He stepped inside.
To say it was a mess was an understatement. The duvet was rucked off the bed, exposing wrinkled, stained sheets and a pyjama top, one arm flung out. The bottoms lay at the side of her bed, where she’d stepped out of them, a wrinkled figure of eight. When he got closer to the bed, he noticed her underwear was inside her pyjamas; it looked like she’d pulled them off in the same movement. There was a reddish-brown butterfly imprint on the gusset. Her things were scattered all over the room, like a garbled description of a woman: an inside-out skirt, a single boot, a wire coat hanger, splayed tights, a small black bra with a lace trim.
Richard was mesmerized. All this intimacy, just lying all over the floor. He could almost see her getting out of bed in the morning, tracing her path from the trail of belongings. He knew, and had come to terms with the idea, that Eleanor was the only woman he would ever have sex with. He hadn’t thought that she was the only woman he would know like this, about all the other kinds of closeness he was giving up.
He went back out into the hall and stood at the foot of the stairs for a long time. Then he opened the door to Zoe’s living room and went in. It should have been less of a transgression than the bedroom, but somehow opening the door seemed to be going too far, as though his fingers might burn dents in the handle.
The living room was tidier, but he counted six mugs: four were hers and two belonged to him and Eleanor, which really annoyed him. One of the mugs was a third full of the weird red tea she drank and it had solidified into a sort of milky jelly. Another had a hard black-brown disc stuck to the bottom, light green spores of mould on it. Richard badly wanted to reclaim them. There were two bottles of wine on the mantelpiece and a tumbler next to them, with a sticky red residue at the base. There was a white plastic fold-out table in the corner, piled with notebooks and paper. Was she writing something extraordinary down here, while he was struggling to eke out a single paragraph upstairs?
He felt sick and full up, cross and guilty, and he went back upstairs to his desk. He was out of the slump now, but he still couldn’t concentrate. Something had altered. His mind was working horribly fast, with no real progression.
*
Mostly, Richard tried not to think about his younger self. He was just grateful that he was no longer the same person, with that unappealing inheritance of hubris and self-doubt he’d shouldered at Cambridge. He tended to think more about the future than the past, about what was missing rather than what was lost. But sometimes, in the wrong light or the wrong space, he wondered if they were the same thing after all.
The first time he kissed Eleanor, he thought it was a mistake. It was one in the morning and they’d come back from a dinner to celebrate Amy’s birthday. He’d been slightly annoyed with Eleanor all evening: she was sparkier, looser, more silly than he’d ever seen her before. It was April, halfway through the third term, and he now felt he knew her well enough to see that her garrulousness was an act. It felt like a betrayal of the private, sincere friendship they’d been building steadily over the two twenty-five-minute walks a week. And, although he was getting better with practice, this kind of party still made him ill at ease. Eleanor seamlessly fitted in.
It was a mistake because he wanted to fall in love, and he knew that Eleanor wasn’t the sort of girl he could fall in love with. Since he’d arrived at Cambridge, he’d had fierce spontaneous crushes: on Cara, who had blonde hair and wore red lipstick; Juliet, who wore turbans and modelled for life classes; the red-haired girl who sat in front of him at Dr Cooper’s 9 a.m. lectures. For a while, he revelled in these wild, obsessive feelings, picturing himself as a romantic hero, plagued by unrequited love, but they quickly became dissatisfying. He could never turn them into anything tangible or solid. He became shy and clumsy around these girls and all too aware of the gap between who he wanted to be and who he really was. He wanted to be witty and razor-sharp but the words left his mouth sounding unfathomable or insulting. When he had a conversation with any of them, it was as if there was a pane of glass between them.
He had barely noticed Eleanor. She wasn’t very pretty, she wore ordinary clothes and she was quiet. It was only in the second term, when they had been walking to supervisions together for some time, that he noticed he was starting to enjoy talking to her. She was cleverer than he’d given her credit for. She was funny and sympathetic. The newest and strangest sensation was how comfortable he felt around her and how much he liked himself when he was with her. He only occasionally said things which made him wince when he remembered them, like the time he’d complimented her by mistake and hurriedly tried to take it back in case she somehow exploited the weakness.
It wasn’t just that he liked being with her, there was a charge to their conversations too. He didn’t fancy her because she wasn’t the kind of girl people fancied: she wasn’t exotic or lively or remarkable. He supposed they were friends; it was just a wholly inadequate word for what was going on between them. It didn’t feel like any friendship he’d ever had. The amount he looked forward to the walks wasn’t normal. And when he saw her in seminars or lecture halls and they caught each other’s eye, he felt that there was something connecting them, a level of vibration that only they could sense. They belonged to each other in some way. It was disturbing.
When he woke up in her bed the morning after Amy’s party, sweaty from sleeping in his clothes, they kissed again, and this time it was more tender and intuitive. The next time he saw her, they got drunk and ended up in bed together, in their clothes, again. The third time it happened, he woke up before her and watched her sleeping and wondered why he was trying so hard to resist how he felt about her. The realization was instant and overwhelming: it didn’t matter that she was not the kind of girl he had imagined ending up with. She was not some unattainable bloodless figure; she was here and he was in her bed and he was happy. Within a week, he was fully, properly in love.
*
Love was an ambush. It was like everyone described and at the same time utterly unique. Every song was about him, and yet he still couldn’t fully articulate what it was that was so perfect about Eleanor. They stayed up all night talking, skipped lectures and had sex in the afternoons. Ordinary things, like drinking a coffee outside the English faculty library, became emblazoned and delineated with her. Everything he’d ever cared about became unimportant; nothing would ever matter as much as being in bed with Eleanor, her sitting astride him wearing his T-shirt. He had sex for the first time. He felt mildly jealous of her ex-boyfriend, and even that was intoxicating. He had a love rival. He was starting to live.
The sharpness and brightness of his feelings intensified until they were almost unbearable and then gradually, inevitably, they began to dim and dull. His focus widened and the rest of the world reopened to him. The structure of his life re-formed. He started going back to lectures and tried to make amends for all the work he’d missed. In some ways, it was a relief; he could work and eat and sleep again. He wasn’t going to fail his exams. Things weren’t the same as before – his life had still changed monumentally, it was just recognizable again. And Eleanor was still funny, sympathetic and clever, and he started to admire things about her that he hadn’t noticed before, like the way that she was practical and robust. No one had ever suggested that you could find these qualities attractive in a girl. She was less volatile than him and, although she said she loved him, she hadn’t lost herself in the way he had: it meant she was always slightly enigmatic in a way that was very appealing. They still had sex and it was still good, though it was becoming a more reliable, comfortable kind of pleasure, like a cup of tea or a pasta bake.
Towards the end of his second year, he and Eleanor celebrated their first anniversary. Now, he disposed of years casually, but then it had been a landmark of gravity and significance, positioning them as ‘long-term’, an achievement Richard hadn’t dared hope for. He took her out for dinner in the smartest restaurant he knew, which in retrospect didn’t seem that smart. Eleanor had worn the black dress that she wore for formals, and for Amy’s birthday dinner. They talked about what they were going to do when they graduated, though at that point it felt adult and abstract, like a conversation about political systems or philosophy. He said that he wanted to study more, possibly abroad; Eleanor thought she’d go to London and try to get a job, ‘something to do with reading and writing, I don’t know.’ ‘I’d miss you,’ he said, and they smiled, widely, infinitely, at the thought that they might mould their lives around each other. It had felt exciting, then.