Nineteen

New Year’s Day, that unnerving feast of abandoned hopes and cold promises, had dawned and passed. The Christmas break was well and truly over. January set in.

‘Where were you?’ Anna asked Vincy brightly.

They were having lunch in the Tower. She was smiling. It was as if nothing had happened, as if she had not spent the past five days twisting her hands and feeling as depressed as she ever had been in her life. She arrived at the pub full of anger, full of fear, full of anxiety. As soon as she saw him all that emotion vanished, to be replaced by joy – or was it a form of intense relief? He was like a magician.

‘In Grenoble,’ he said, as if he were saying, ‘I was caught up in the office’. He added, ‘I went there skiing with Joe. A spare ticket became available at the last minute.’

Jealousy jumped into her like an angry animal, claws bared.

‘So … and you turned off your mobile phone?’

‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘There was no coverage in the mountains. Were you trying to call?’

Were you trying to call? What sort of a question was that?

‘Yes.’ She looked bleakly at the brown panelling of the pub. Suddenly its dark decor and greasy smells seemed sordid rather than comforting.

‘I’m so sorry.’ He took her hand and patted it as if she were a child. ‘You look beautiful. I missed you.’ He kissed her quickly on the forehead. ‘A lot.’

She believed him when he said it. And yet if he’d missed her as much as she missed him, wouldn’t he have phoned? There must have been landlines in Grenoble that worked. Ski resorts were not the back of beyond. Thousands of people who would want to be on the phone all the time frequented ski resorts.

But he was back. She couldn’t waste the precious hour quibbling. So they talked about other things.

She wanted to meet him in his apartment again. To make love. Not like they had. Like the guys in Brokeback Mountain.

‘Joe!’ he said, throwing up his hands.

In the movie the cowboys had made love in the porch, with the wife and child inside the door, watching. It was not that they were cruel or thoughtless; no, it was that their passion could simply not be restrained.

‘Joe must go out sometimes,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Vincy said. ‘But I never know when. He’s very erratic in his habits.’

Anna suddenly remembered Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest. Or was it Earnest? The one who Bunberryed.

‘You could come to my house,’ she said, although she had not wanted this before. Ludmilla and Luz Mar were not back yet, though, so it was safer than usual. The only problem would be Rory, but she could get rid of him for an afternoon easily enough.

To her astonishment he said yes. ‘I’d like to see the house anyway.’

It wasn’t a Brokeback Mountain response but it was better than Bunberrying.

Vincy had seen her house before, something he seemed to have forgotten. He had driven out and looked at it, from the outside, a few weeks after their friendship began. When he told her this, she was very upset. The thought of him, sitting on her road in his car, examining her house from the outside, like a spy or a burglar, disturbed her for more reasons than one. But he explained that he had just wanted to know everything about her. She let it pass.

He came just before lunch the next day.

‘Mm,’ he said, and looked, rather too inquisitively and critically, at everything, stopping to check out a picture, picking up an alabaster vase, one she had bought on a holiday in Egypt, and fondling its smooth, warm surface. ‘It’s a nice house,’ he said.

‘Different from yours,’ she said.

Somehow his tone of voice disparaged her house and made her feel his was superior. That derelict couple of rooms in a rented house in Mountjoy Square. She loved him but increasingly, already, he seemed to be wrong-footing her, ever so subtly, in tiny, sly ways. Maybe she was imagining it.

She fed him a simple lunch of soup, sandwiches – what they always ate. This was the first time she had ever prepared food for him. Why should she like doing that for him, since she resented doing it for Alex and even Rory? One of her main complaints about Alex was that he never cooked anything, or even made her a cup of tea. Now here she was, delighted to be waiting on Vincy. What bliss it would be to cook him a real dinner, she thought. To sweep his floor. Until now she had not consciously considered anything like this; she had not considered sharing a real life with him. He belonged to the realm of imagination, or of play. But now, after the pain of the Christmas separation, she began to realise that she wanted him in her everyday life – as a partner, not a lover.

He ate the sandwiches and soup without comment, taking them for granted, exactly as Alex and Rory would have done, Anna noted: to that extent he was already behaving like a partner.

They were uneasy in this house, however. Anna knew that nobody would come home. Alex was at work, Rory had gone to a matinée pantomime with a friend from school, Luz Mar was in Spain. The coast would be clear for several hours. But they both felt nervous anyway. Vincy sat upright, his muscles tense and his expression alert. He sniffed nervously, like a dog investigating strange territory. His stone-coloured eyes darted around the room, examining corners and crevices.

When lunch was over, Anna kissed him quietly, aware of his anxiety. Vincy, she was realising, looked like a wolf or some wild thing, but at heart he was a mild, careful, modern man, with the instincts of a civil servant. Like herself. He was the product of generations of mild bureaucratic ancestors. He had a horse at his family’s home in the country, but it was a tame old trekking horse, not an unbroken stallion. Vincy was not a cowboy; he had never ridden bareback at a rodeo. He had never lived for months in a tent at the top of a mountain, herding sheep.

Sadly she led him upstairs. The best room to use would have been hers and Alex’s, where the bed was big and the huge window looked directly out on the sky and the sea. But some instinct prevented her from bringing him there, and instead they went to the spare room at the back of the house, which for some reason she had decked out with sky blue, flowery wallpaper and snowy lace, in some indulgence of a schoolgirl fantasy. In this room they made love, quickly and nervously, with their clothes on, on the princess bed. It was not like Brokeback Mountain at all.

Anna felt anxious all the time, although there was no reason for it. She felt as if gangs of fundamentalists wearing Ku Klux Klan outfits were at that moment assembling at the end of the drive, preparing to ride up waving torches, and planning some unspeakable end for both herself and Vincy.

She was glad when it was all over and Vincy was out of the house, driving down the hill and back to where he had come from.

He did not telephone her the next day, or the next.

The first day she was not unduly alarmed. She presumed that some practical problem had arisen. Work. The second day she was anxious. When he did not telephone on the third day, she felt distraught and abandoned.

He was tiring of her. This was her punishment, for drawing too close to him. For pressurising him to go to bed with her here, with the Ku Klux Klan at the gate. It was not coming to the house that had upset him. He had wanted that, more than her. His curiosity about her house had been enormous. It was making love to her in her own house that had upset him, as it had upset her, at the time, although probably not for the same reason.

They had been in love for several months, and made love twice, and already he was falling out of love, and preparing to leave her.

Could this be happening, already?

She blamed herself. She had done something wrong and she knew what it was. Anyone could see that she had overdone it. She was a woman who loved too much. Never give all the heart, Yeats had said, and he knew what he was talking about. If you care, don’t let them know. Literature was full of warnings, instructions on how to be successful in love. Popular parlance too. Make yourself scarce, some people said. Never phone! was a maxim her own mother had taught her in her youth. ‘They know your number.’

That seemed old-fashioned, non-assertive, anti-feminist.

But wise.

She didn’t phone.

Instead she sank into misery, into a kind of paralysis. She went through the motions of her life. Most of the time she felt physically wounded. The image of an apple sliced in two hovered in her imagination, its sliced centre unbearably raw and sore. She felt she had been skinned alive.

Alex noticed none of this, as usual. Rory did not either. He did not even notice that she was at home more than usual. Nobody paid the slightest attention to the fact that she was not going out, that she was hardly talking, or that she was not writing a word of her book. But then, they never noticed that.

Her editor, who had promised to get in touch before Christmas, had not contacted her as yet. Anna did not care. If they didn’t like her novel, it as all the same to her. They could lump it. What did it matter, by comparison with this abandonment by Vincy?

A week passed.

She had not capitulated. She had not telephoned.

That should have made her feel strong and victorious, but it didn’t. The strategy had had no effect at all on Vincy. He had not phoned her either.

The 13th of January. An article in the newspaper said it was the most depressing day of the year.

On the 13th of January, Anna realised that she might have something new to worry about.

Pregnancy.

Anna first did a home test, and then went to a doctor for a confirmation, which took a few days to come through. She didn’t contact Vincy. As soon as she had suspected she was pregnant, her need to talk to him vanished. Now she could wait. He would contact her, soon – suddenly what she could not believe before became self-evident.

And then she would tell him the news.

It was his.

Almost certainly.

She and Alex had hardly had sex at all in months. The last time had been two months ago. She knew the baby was not his. But Alex would not remember when they had last had sex – that was not the sort of thing he noticed much. So he would assume it was, unless she told him the truth.

It seemed to her, for a few days, that suddenly all the strings were in her hands and she could manipulate the situation whatever way suited her. Vincy was a modern man. He would want to do the right thing. He would want to be father to his child.

If she wanted him now she would have him.

She did not put it as crudely as this.

She told nobody about the pregnancy. But she felt calm and almost happy, as she went about her work.

The writing recommenced. She read the novel so far from beginning to end, and saw that there were some good things in it, as well as some bad. Over two days she wrote a new chapter, the first new chapter she had written in months.

Luz Mar and Ludmilla both came back.

Ludmilla had enjoyed her holiday, she said. It had been good to see her family again, and her friends. She was friendlier than before – the visit home had softened her.

‘What is it like?’ Anna asked. She thought it might be like a village in Russia, wooden houses, some apartment blocks in an Eastern bloc style. A bare, boring place with a duck pond or a lake nearby, maybe, a grocery store, a garage.

‘I can’t describe it,’ said Ludmilla. ‘It is just home.’

She showed Anna photographs of people who looked like Ludmilla: good-looking, fair, with what seemed to be hard expressions, as if they would not tolerate any weakness or nonsense. Ludmilla was like that, as well as looking like that. In fact, rather like Vincy, she managed to convey that she was always slightly superior to everyone. Probably that was as a result of fearing that they believed otherwise. She was defensive.

The photographs were all of interiors, which looked ok, rather drab, but with furniture that was surprisingly smart and modern, out of place in the surroundings – but then, the people themselves looked as if they belonged in a more modern, smart setting than that which they possessed. They looked like tourists in their own country.

‘Would you like to go back to live there?’ Anna asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said Ludmilla, with the first expression of emotion Anna had ever seen in her. ‘I would love to.’ Her eyes were wistful, but then she smiled. ‘I will go back.’

Some days passed. Anna worked with deep concentration on the book. Ludmilla spring-cleaned the house. Rory was busy at school, and Luz Mar settled back into her English classes and baby-sitting with a spurt of energy.

Harmony and order reigned in the house. Energy and work filled it like a sweet perfume.

Finally Vincy telephoned.

Anna spoke nonchalantly to him, as he did to her, although she detected a guilty tone under the surface. He had been away, of course, in Iraq, doing a story. Hadn’t she watched the news? She would have seen him reporting from Basra, where there had been renewed upsurges of violence.

‘Why did you go there?’ she asked. Until now he had always covered home stories – non-news about the government, usually.

‘I got an opportunity,’ he said. ‘I always wanted to go there, to report from a war zone.’

Anna did not know what to make of this.

He wanted to meet for lunch.

‘ok,’ said Anna, not feeling the need to get involved in an argument or recriminations.

He suggested meeting at his flat, to her surprise. This time she would have preferred the Tower, or any of the pubs they usually frequented.

He had prepared some lunch, with care; there was a premeditated air to the encounter. Anna decided to wait until after the lunch to tell him the news.

But as soon as they had eaten he drew her into the bedroom. The wide, comfortable bed was covered with what looked like a very new white spread, and the pillows and sheets were fresh. He had lit a fire in the big old black grate, so that the room was warm. The flames danced in the grate, the old browny walls with their charming stains and drips of wallpaper were bathed in soft sunlight, filtering in through the tall old window.

Her happiest fantasy had been realised.

He had prepared an elaborate scene of seduction.

Obviously he had missed her deeply, and realised how much he loved her.

Now was not the time to break the news.

They went to bed and stayed there for two hours. This time, everything worked very well. His smoke smell, his sweat smell, the fuzzy texture of his hair, his legs, his chest – hair was everywhere. She traced the line of his ribs, like the bent wood of a longship, with her fingers. She explored, she watched her skin against his – and their bodies joined, then, finally, neatly, like two pieces of a jigsaw, finding the right mate.

Today it happened.

Now was not the time to tell.