21

Two days had passed.

Robert had spent them in Manchester on business; now, as he got out of the Tube at Bank station, London in the rush hour hit him. He stood looking up Cheapside while the crowds surged past. His clothes stuck to him; he felt as if he’d been sleeping in his suit. It had been a long day; the train, as usual, had been delayed. He had been sitting for two hours this afternoon in a stifling carriage, watching Newcastle-under-Lyme pass at a snail’s pace. He was miserable, exhausted, and a headache was beginning far back behind his eyes. It was too hot to be in the city, he thought. Far too hot.

Leaning on the black railings, he tried his cell, but there was no reply from his office. Only voice mail. He left a message, to say that he would make the early morning meeting. When he had finished, he stared at the handset morosely for a few seconds before shoving it back in his pocket. He looked across the traffic; diesel hung almost visibly in the air.

Just at that moment, he badly wanted to be back in Dorset, driving out of Dorchester South station, the way he had gone a hundred times after a business trip. It seemed like some sort of distant paradise now. There were just two sets of traffic lights to get out of town and up onto the long straight drive toward Beaminster, out onto the breezy tops with green valleys stretching down on either side of the road. He wanted to be back in his hometown, with its sloping square. But that route was forfeit.

He wouldn’t pass the black-on-white 1940s signposts hooked crookedly up on the verges any longer, or take the left-hand turn down the hill toward Pearsons, its roof showing red among a haphazard jumble of sandstone and slate tiles. He wouldn’t pass through the great-banked edges of the lane, with its cow parsley and beech trees, braking carefully at the dogleg turn where the frost always lay in winter, and the rain could collect in one of the field entrances. He knew only too well that it had been his own decision—a premeditated, careful decision, or so he had thought at the time, at least—to come back to London. But he missed the past; he missed the peace. He missed looking at the patterns of things: leaf shade on the road, the peculiar chalk ridges and circles in the crops, the quiet of his own back garden.

For some unfathomable reason, the corner of the garden came into his head in vivid detail now. He propped his briefcase on the railing and leaned on it. A whole line of taxis drew up alongside him, rattling, panting like dogs, waiting for the lights to change. He shook his head at himself. Like dogs. Beset by dogs. Where the hell had that come from? What a thought. He closed his eyes and withdrew to the garden, where he had made a seating area last year, just wide enough for one bench. He had put up a little fence and painted it. His first practical project; he had been proud of it. Catherine had planted a climber; he tried to think what it was. A kind of clematis with a magenta flower. But the pleasure of having made it, of having completed the work, had been disproportionately huge to him.

He felt a pang of territoriality. It didn’t belong to him anymore, not in any real sense. They had an offer on the house already; the estate agent was keen to let the completion go through quickly. Someone else would sit in the corner by his fence. He felt suddenly ridiculously, almost childishly, cheated. He wanted to go and snatch that part of his life back; take the turn on the downhill lane and the garden seat and Catherine planting the climber in the rain.

He stared at the traffic a moment longer, then pushed himself away from the railings and walked down Lombard Street.

The flat was in a marble-faced block at the back of Bishopsgate. It was functional. That was the best that could be said of it. It hadn’t been designed to be lived in long-term. Reaching it now, stepping out of the throng of the pavement crowds and into the little foyer of the building, he walked up the three flights of stairs.

Letting himself in, he went through to the bed-sitting room. He took off his jacket and lay down on the sofa, sighing with exhaustion, feeling the smothering stuffiness of the room, and staring at the ceiling. He began to think of Catherine as he had seen her two days ago. She had been different, he thought; there was no doubt about it. Very different in the way she held herself. Quieter, calmer. There had been an air of confidence about her that he did not quite recognize. And then, closer to her, he had seen that his leaving had, after all, left a mark on her. It gave him no satisfaction to see that she had a direct, assessing look on her face when she talked to him, as if any preconceptions that she might have still carried about him had been swept away. She looked at him as one stranger might look disinterestedly at another, and he saw that she was also older. She had always looked rather childlike, but now that look had gone entirely.

He looked at his watch. Five forty. There was nothing to eat in the flat. He lay wondering what he could do. Go down to the Greek sandwich bar on the corner before it closed. Cross back over the bridge and sit in one of the pubs south of the river, one of the ones he used to drink in before he got the train at Waterloo. Sit near Tate Modern and watch the river go by; go in and eat there, perhaps.

He smiled to himself. If Catherine had been here, there’d be no doubt where they would eat. It was always galleries, galleries, galleries.

When he had first met Catherine—on the least beautiful, least painterly platform in London, Liverpool Street on the day of a train strike, and later in the crowded queue for the phone, before either of them possessed a cell phone—she had struck him as rather fey, something to be protected. On that first meeting, she had been wearing a black coat with the collar pulled up around her ears. He had noticed her thin wrists and pale skin. She had been shivering. He had bought her coffee, and that had been the beginning.

She had hardly spoken about her work at first. Indeed, it would be quite fair to say that she had kept it from him. She had said that she worked at Bergens, and let him imagine that she was some sort of receptionist. She seemed exactly like that; some girl from the suburbs who was good at looking attractive and being polite. He liked her modesty.

She had barely a word to say about herself; they spent most of their first few times together talking about him. She would draw him out; it was not that he wanted to monopolize the conversation. But then, he had seen her do that with other people, clients. She would let them speak and glean whatever she wanted from them in the process. She was a careful, pragmatic listener. And when you had finished talking, she would know all about you. And you would know nothing of her. Or very little.

That had been the attraction for him in the start. She had struck him as unknowable, distant. The princess in the tower. He supposed that he had barely given her any credit; he had been flattered by her intense gaze, her questions. He courted her. An old-fashioned word. But he liked it all. This quiet girl. Buying her roses. Her face had absolutely flooded with pleasure when he had given them to her that one time. She wasn’t used to being looked after; she had been alone since her parents died. She had gone through university alone.

For some reason—it turned out to be inaccurate—he had imagined that this was the same as his loneliness, the withdrawal he had experienced because he didn’t want to be near his mother. Not wanting to be near, and not actually being near at all—he had thought it was the same thing. Alone for the same kind of reasons.

Of course, it wasn’t the same at all. He had isolated himself from the incessant amateur dramatics of his mother; Catherine had been separated from a woman she adored. They were both alone, and he had thought they were of the same mind because of it.

He knew within a couple of weeks that she had fallen in love with him.

“I can’t think why,” he had told a colleague at the time.

The woman had smiled at him. “You’re a handsome chap,” she had said. “Very clever. Very reliable, Robert. Women like that.”

Had Catherine liked that? Perhaps. Everything had been all right at first. It was only after six months or so that he realized—a realization that had a terrible misgiving in it—that Catherine was much more than he had supposed. That the fey and fairylike exterior he had fantasized about actually hid a vein of steel. She was fixed and intent. She knew what she wanted. She was deeply a part of her job; she was visual, she had a perfect memory.

And it was then—probably just then, just before they were married—that he had realized that he had not paid enough attention, while Catherine was paying so much. He had gone on in his straight line, doing his work, being a dependable partner, earning a vast salary that he thought she admired, when it had hit him, quite suddenly, that Catherine was his equal. More than his equal. For she had something that he did not and would never possess.

It was not, in fact, a quality that he envied.

She gave everything. She handed her whole self to him, to the whole steadily growing edifice of their being a couple. She gave it concentration. She wanted to get to the heart of him. And he felt that acutely, as if he were under some insidious form of attack.

He suddenly realized that this was a woman who would inhabit him, colonize him, turn him over to her rule. She would want to know. She would want to see. And it was this curious, persistent, undermining seeing that he couldn’t stand. He resented it hugely. More than resented it, in fact. He feared it. He feared handing himself over to her. He feared her intensity. And the very thing that had first drawn him in began to repel him.

He had told himself that fact too late, when they were by then married, had been married a couple of months: he recognized that she would always want what he didn’t want to give. There would always be some way in which he would not defer to her. She would always feel herself held at arm’s length. He couldn’t help it; he did not even really feel that it was his fault.

He felt, if he were perfectly honest about it, that he had been artfully suckered into giving, or being asked to give, what he would not relinquish. He felt that she had somehow lied to him.

There had been one night when they had been sitting together—there was nothing remarkable about that night, he had said nothing, they had only been sitting together, each reading a book—when she had looked at him with such a glance. More than loving; it was a look of complete happiness, of utter happiness. A smile like that ought not to worry anyone—it sounded odd, now, to say that it could—but it had done just that, worried him like hell. That surrendered, complete abdication of herself. That amazing ability. He knew he’d never master it. He’d never feel it. More important, he would never want to feel it. To give yourself over like that. It made his blood run cold.

He thought of her like one of her paintings, one of those detailed Victorian canvases, the large ones that she knew so much about. The ones with a whole host of characters. She admired painters that had devoted so much care to such detail. He hated them. He hated the very idea that one person would consume another like that, every particle of her, each inch of cloth, every fleck of skin, every strand of hair. And paint the patterns of the carpets under her feet, and the flowers on the wallpaper behind her head, and the reflection in the glass that she held in her hands. It was almost cannibalistic, this greed to precisely replicate another human being.

Sighing, he got up off the bed and began to take off his travel-stained clothes. He folded the suit jacket and the trousers, putting them aside carefully for dry cleaning. Then he walked to the shower and spent several minutes standing under the hot water, feeling the pounding of the needlelike stream on his shoulders and back. He put his head under the hot water and let it douse his face. And all the time she was in his head, in the pictures that played there.

He had seen his mother the previous weekend; felt that he ought to at least see her once, take her out once, now that he was down here. He had offered to take her to tea at Fortnum’s, but had got little thanks for his trouble.

The moment that his mother had sat down she was complaining. “Jesus Christ,” Eva had muttered, rolling her eyes in the direction of a group of young women at a neighboring table, who were laughing loudly. “It all gets worse.”

He had ordered tea. His mother had sat back in the chair. She was wearing a rather absurd fifties-style shirtwaister with voluminous skirts.

“I remember that dress,” he told her.

“It’s like me,” she had said. “Moth-eaten.”

Above them the ceiling fans whirred. Their noise and movement increased Robert’s sense of disjointedness with the afternoon. He was not where he wanted to be, even now, even after all his efforts to break free. He realized with dulled disgust that he would probably never break free of his mother, and through her, his wife. Both of them clinging to him like webs.

As if reading his thought of Catherine, Eva spoke up. “Have you left her finally?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Good,” Eva commented. “She was no fun at all.”

He couldn’t look at her. Eva had taken a long sip of her tea. “Paintings,” she said. “All she ever talked about. I should like a bit more than that, myself.”

“A bit more than that?” Robert asked.

“A bit of fun,” Eva said. “Like your father and I had.” She smiled to herself and fingered the material of the dress. “Nine years in Singapore,” she mused. “A party every night. Every hour a happy hour. That was when the British knew how to live.”

He had stared at her, at her cruelty and selfishness. At her cruelty now over Catherine. At the elaborate necklace she wore, which he had given her for Christmas. It had originally been a gift for Catherine, a surprise. Until the realization had come to him that he was going to leave her, and the giving of such a necklace suddenly seemed absurd.

Seeing his mother wearing it now was uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a trophy of her daughter-in-law’s demise.

Getting out of the shower now, he suddenly heard his cell phone ringing.

He walked back to the bedroom and picked it up, expecting to hear his office returning his earlier message.

“Hello,” said a female voice. “Remember me?”

He knew it, but he couldn’t place it. “I’m sorry …?”

“It’s Helen,” she said. “Helen Brigham.”

He raised his eyebrows. He had taken Helen Brigham to the station the other day, and given her this number when she had wondered if the train would run on time. She had seemed so distracted that he had reassured her that he would help her if she were stranded; although what exactly he could have done, staying in a local hotel, or why Helen Brigham wouldn’t have rung her own brother, had not occurred to him until afterward.

“Hello,” he said now, still puzzled.

“Well,” she said. “I’m standing on Cheapside and I’m looking down Bransgore Street. Which number are you?”

He paused. She was here in London. But then she did live somewhere to the east.

“Is there a problem?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But I need to talk to you.” There was a pause. “If that’s convenient.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course. Yes.” And he gave her the number of the flat.

Five minutes later, she knocked on the door. He stepped back to admit her and led her into the tiny sitting room. “A drink?” he asked.

“A glass of wine would be nice,” she said.

He brought it from the kitchen a few moments later. She held up her glass in a joking gesture of celebration, to clink his. “What shall we drink to?” she asked.

“I’ve no idea,” he said.

“Life and its strange twists,” she said. “Life as a footnote.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “A what?”

“A footnote,” she repeated. “You know, the little bits they put as a backstop to text. A sort of afterthought.”

“Why would you think of yourself as a footnote?” he asked, perplexed.

“Don’t you?” she asked. “Left behind while they move on.”

“Are you talking about Catherine?” he asked.

“Yes. Catherine.”

“But she didn’t leave me behind,” he said. “I left her.”

Helen lowered her glass of wine, which was already half empty. She considered him. “You left her,” she repeated. “Why was that?”

He frowned. She smiled.

“She’s living with my brother,” Helen said. “I would like to know what sort of person she is.”

Robert took in the information “living with my brother” slowly. He took a drink of his own wine. “What difference does it make?” he said. “They’re both adults.”

“She’s very young,” Helen commented.

He thought about it. Catherine was three years younger than he was; this woman, conversely, was probably six or seven years older than him, nearing forty. Although it was hard to be sure. She looked very pale. Her hands were veined, the skin dry, the knuckles unpleasantly prominent. If she was coming home from work, he thought, she was dressed in a very casual manner: jeans, T-shirt, sandals. He noticed that her feet looked dirty, as if she had been walking a long way. And the jeans, too, were not very clean. She looked like some sort of aging child. Rather sad, too; he had seen that the other day as she sat beside him in the car.

He realized that he had been inspecting her, and blushed a little.

“Is she good at her job?” Helen asked. “This … art appraising. This auction business.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Does she specialize?”

“Yes. Victorian things.”

“Paintings?”

“And sculpture.”

Helen Brigham stood up. She put down her drained glass, walked to the window, and gazed at the office space visible below them.

“Is there a problem?” he asked.

He realized, then, that she was crying. There was a second of frustration—exactly that, not sympathy, but frustration that she should come here and burden him with it—before he walked over to her.

“Can I do anything?” he asked. “What is the matter?”

She had her hands over her face. “She’ll take it from me,” she whispered. “It’s all I have for the future.”

“Take what?”

She dropped her hands. “Does she have any money?” she asked suddenly.

He was lost for words. Helen had been to the auction rooms. She had heard Mark Pearson say that Catherine was a partner in the business.

“You see,” she said, “I have to protect my brother from fortune hunters.”

Robert laughed out loud, taken by surprise.

“It isn’t a joke,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “But I don’t think you need to be worried. Catherine wouldn’t be interested in that sort of thing.”

She made a disbelieving, sardonic face. “Everyone is, at some level or another. Everybody wants what they can get.”

“No,” he replied. “Not Catherine. It wouldn’t occur to her.”

“It might,” Helen said. “If she found something worth keeping.”

She turned away. She crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself rather than crossing them.

“Did you ask your brother this?” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s very hard to explain. He would think I was overreacting. You see, I asked him a while ago …” She paused, putting the knuckle of one fist to her forehead, and rubbing the skin. “I think it was last week,” she murmured. “I asked him … I am worried … I can’t sleep … I needed money …”

Robert felt embarrassed. He could see the tears slowly descending, tears that seemed to have more life than the papery skin beneath them. “I’m sure that he wouldn’t deny you help,” he said.

She glanced at him. “He wouldn’t?” she asked, as if Robert had more access to John’s motives than she did. “He wouldn’t keep it back, because of her?”

“I don’t know your brother,” he reminded her.

“Neither do I,” she said. “I don’t know anyone anymore.” And she dissolved into real sobs. There was nothing he could reasonably do but put his arms around her. “You can’t trust anyone,” she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder. Then she raised her face to his. “Isn’t that true?”

“I don’t know,” he said, disconcerted by the desperate expression on her face.

“Did you love her?” she said. “And she loved you? Once, I mean. You loved her once, and she loved you?”

“Yes,” he said, feeling uncomfortably that it was not quite the truth.

Helen Brigham’s fingers tightened around his upper arm. “But you can’t trust that,” she whispered. “Not even that.”

She moved her hand up his arm, along his shoulder, and then pressed her mouth to his. He was taken aback; yielded for a second or two to the insistent pressure, was almost tempted to respond; until he felt her fingers exploring his face and the intimacy of it jolted him backward. For a moment he caught sight of her, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. Something about the fleshiness of the mouth, the slightly stale smell of her, had suddenly overwhelmed him. She opened her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. She looked disoriented. “Come and sit down.”

She did so, looking intently at him.

“Are you all right?” he asked. Because it seemed to him that there was patently something not right about this situation, about this woman, but he couldn’t fathom what it was.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m all right.”

“Do you think,” he ventured, “that perhaps you should go and see your brother and talk this over with him?” He cast about for something positive to add, some piece of useful advice. “And perhaps Catherine,” he added.

“You want me to go and see Catherine?”

“To set your mind at rest.”

“You want me to go and see your wife and my brother,” she repeated.

“It’s only a suggestion.”

“Can’t you help me?” she asked.

He was thoroughly confused now. He felt that he wanted to wash the taste of her from his face, but couldn’t think of a reason to excuse himself. “I’m sorry?” he said. “But with what?”

“Can’t you speak to Catherine?” She put her hand on his knee.

“To say what? … I don’t understand. What would you want me to say to her?” He moved slightly back on the couch, gently disengaging himself from her reach.

She saw the movement and abruptly stood up. “I can see you don’t want me here,” she told him.

“Helen, I—”

“I’m sorry to have wasted your time.” He tried once again to speak: she held up her hand to stop him. She went to the door and paused there, hand on the latch. He hesitated at her back, embarrassed and dismayed.

She looked back at him. “You talk to Catherine,” she said softly. “You talk to your wife, and you tell her.” She stopped, inspecting him, his expression. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yes,” he said.

She opened the door. For a second, she paused on the threshold, one hand lingeringly caressing the other, stroking the back of her own hand, smoothing her own fingers and wrist and forearm.

“I’ll talk to her,” he promised.

She looked down at her arms, and then slowly around herself at the almost empty, anonymous room.

“Tell her to keep away,” she murmured. “From my brother.”