Sometimes, however, plans branched out into other things that hadn’t been planned. Gavin had got seats for Harry and himself to go to Covent Garden the following Wednesday evening. The opera was Traviata, ‘good old Traviata’ Harry called it: he shared with Gavin a predilection for Verdi. Gavin loved going with Harry, because they both wept copiously at all the desperate and sad moments (often, indeed, at any moment at all) and Harry was the only person with whom Gavin felt comfortable at such times. They usually met in the Circle Bar with time for a drink, and ate in a Chinese restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue afterwards. They always got good seats, and had Peking Duck with all the trimmings afterwards; ‘You’re only young once,’ Harry would say, and Gavin, while he did not particularly associate youth with pleasure, felt that a treat was not a treat unless they were doing everything they could to make it one. He looked forward to Wednesday to brighten an uneventful and slogging week at the salon.
On Wednesday morning, Harry rang up to say that Winthrop had hit him so hard with yet another ashtray (not the Pisa one) that he had a huge great black eye and wasn’t at all sure that his nose wasn’t broken. Anyway, he felt dreadful, and Gavin would see that he couldn’t go out like that. Also, he needed to have a serious chat with Winthrop who was clearly not himself. ‘See if you can sell my seat,’ Harry said, ‘and if you can’t, well, never mind.’ He went on to give Gavin a blow by blow description of Winthrop’s blow by blow behaviour until his voice broke . . . Gavin said he’d ring on Saturday and come round if wanted, and that was that.
Gavin did actually think for a bit about whether there was anyone at all that he would like to ask instead of Harry, but there wasn’t. Domingo was singing, and he sold the seat quite easily and then wandered up to the bar to get himself a drink. He had arrived early, because of selling the ticket, but part of the treat was simply being in such a beautiful building – surely the most beautiful and suitable in the world? Only the people, he thought, as he caught sight of himself in the enormous mirror half-way up the main staircase – only the people let the place down in their boring clothes. Still, he couldn’t talk; he was simply wearing the better of his two suits. It was amazing, really, the way the opera house went on being so majestically festive in spite of its drab occupants: if he had any choice in the matter, he’d make everybody have to have special clothes just for going to the opera in . . . He, for instance, would have a velvet suit and an enormous cloak lined with red – no, not red with his complexion – with pearl-grey satin. And of course, in this case, he would be accompanied by the most stunning, fabulous amazing girl the place had ever been graced by – in a long yellow silk dress with a little crown of diamonds: a kind of Violetta, really, only without anything wrong with her chest . . . Here he remembered Garbo in the famous film and the wonderful way that her eyes had flickered upwards as she died . . . That was another thing that he and Harry enjoyed together, ‘the golden oldies’ as Harry said . . . Briefly, he wondered whether it was better to die in the full flood of an undying passion – rather than hang on and get hit by ashtrays – it might depend a bit upon whether you were the one who died and/or the one who got hit. He had a feeling that that was the one he’d be: the usual, no win situation. Then he thought that, as he certainly didn’t want to go to the Chinese restaurant by himself, he’d better have a sandwich. They were expensive, and very good: he decided that, if he had one now, he’d want another in the first interval and then, probably, another in the second. He’d put it off and save some money. He’d have another drink, instead.
The place was filling up, and he had to wait. He waited while someone who looked startlingly like Professor Moriarty collected three glasses of white wine and turned to donate two of them to – this was really too much – two people who could easily have been Dr and Mrs Watson . . . What on earth would Holmes have thought of that? Impossible to accuse Watson of treachery; he probably thought that, by having a straight talk with Moriarty, he was calming everything down between them, and getting everything above board. He was probably the only person in the world who could believe for an instant that Moriarty would connive at anything above board . . . But then he realized that, of course, Moriarty was simply Holmes in disguise; any minute now, he’d pull off his wig, grow about two feet in stature and have Watson laughing heartily at having been so taken in.
He paid for his drink and wandered off with it. He was beginning to wish that he had someone to talk to: it would be all right once the opera started . . . he certainly didn’t want anyone new to talk to . . . he had collided with a girl who smiled at him almost as though she liked people running into her and spilling her drink . . . good God, she might have thought he’d done it on purpose! As he apologized, backing off and feeling the sweat prickling his skin, he wondered with angry terror whether she simply came to the opera by herself for the sole purpose of making it seem as though people bumped into her with a view to getting off with them. It was quite possible; anything was possible. But she wouldn’t catch him like that – he knew a thing or two. It was exactly the sort of way that Minnie would behave. Thank goodness she wasn’t here. He went and bought a programme (he collected them) and thence to his seat (in the Amphitheatre), well chosen in the middle of the front row. The occupant of Harry’s seat was a very small, old man with gold-rimmed glasses and a ragged white moustache, who turned out – they spoke because Gavin tripped over his feet – to have heard every Violetta Gavin had ever heard of and some that he hadn’t, and the ones he had heard of he only knew through his seventy-eights – like Rosa Ponselle – he had a recording of her with Martinelli doing two arias from Aida . . . But he didn’t need to do much talking; the old man produced an uneven flow of happy reminiscences, with great names periodically exploding like rockets in the hazy dark of his memory. By the time he got to Caniglia whom Gavin knew only through the Rome Opera Company recording of Verdi’s Requiem, the house lights were dimming, the conductor had arrived, and they were off.
In the interval, rather to his relief, the old man elected to stay put, drawing magically from some pocket a jar of Brand’s Essence which he proceeded to eat with a plastic spoon. Gavin, who did not want to hear the present performances unfavourably compared with the past, decided to go in search of his sandwich. Then, in view of the crowds round the refreshment bars, he decided to give that up in favour of the Gents, and it was coming out of there that he met Joan; almost, in fact, ran into her, since she was emerging from a box.
‘Well, Gavin, how are you?’ she immediately said.
‘Fine.’
‘Well, come and have a drink with me. I’m on my own – like you.’
She strode purposefully ahead. She was wearing a dress with a lot of black sequins on it, and two black sequin butterflies in her orange hair. How did she know he was alone, he wondered, but he felt quite simply glad to see her; glad, and a bit excited.
She had reserved a little table on which stood a bottle of wine in a bucket and two glasses.
‘I have it out here, because I like to smoke,’ she said. ‘You pour the wine.’
The wine was white, cold, and with a delicate flinty taste.
‘How did you know I was alone?’ he asked after a short, easy silence.
‘I saw you come in . . . I watched that old man talking to you. I have some very powerful opera glasses. Also, it didn’t surprise me.’ Her spectacles were black diamanté this time and the plate-glass lenses seemed to be tinted.
‘Did you get my card?’
‘I did. Meeting you was the best part for me, too. Although, when you come to think about it, it’s a pretty guarded compliment. It was a pretty terrible party.’
‘Why did you have it?’
‘I had it for Dmitri. He said he’d be home by then. And he gets into a frenzy of boredom if I don’t arrange things like that for him.’
‘Would he have enjoyed it?’
‘Would he? I don’t know. Because, you see, if he’d been there it would have been a different kind of party.’
‘Is he – has he got a very strong personality, then?’
‘He’s certainly a personality. He’s got a wonderful side to him,’ she added, which to Gavin opened up vistas of terrifying other sides, but he nodded.
‘What’s with you? What happened to you after the party? If you feel like telling me, that is.’
‘That thin girl – in a red dress – she offered me a lift to get my bike, and then it turned out that she had nowhere to sleep, and she sort of chased me back to my parents’ house and in the end she slept there. On the settee,’ he added defensively . . . Her large, orange, painted-on mouth smiled, and he wondered what her real mouth inside it was like. She asked him to pour more wine.
‘Do you often come alone to the opera?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Often. Most of the people I know either don’t care for it, or they regard it as a luxury. That’s the last thing that it is. For me it’s like being a fish put back into water.’
‘You mean – because it’s larger than life?’
‘It’s exactly the size of life. There are just a lot of undersized people about.’
‘I don’t suppose Alfredo’s father would mind anything like as much today about who his son went about with, though.’
‘He wouldn’t mind for the same reasons. Anyway, that’s just plot. Themes don’t change: they’re elemental.’
‘Morality changes, though.’
‘Not as much as you might think. Most fathers would worry about their only son marrying a renowned prostitute; they’d find different reasons for it, but they’d mind.’
‘You mean if Graham Greene, for instance, was writing about Violetta, she’d only have to be a married Catholic and Bob’s your uncle.’
‘Alfredo would be the married Catholic: she’d have leukaemia.’
‘But if it wasn’t a Catholic writer – ’
‘Oh, then Alfredo’s wife would have to be brought into it. After God, you get Freud and guilt. I bet you Freud’s inhibited far more people than he’s liberated.’
This was a new idea to Gavin and he digested it in silence. Then he said: ‘You mean, hell has simply changed into being other people – like Sartre said?’
‘Yes. I don’t care for it much, do you? It still smacks of us all being victims. Smarter, and more knowing, but still victims. I really prefer the happiness is energy notion.’
‘Who said that?’
‘I think,’ she said, after a pause, ‘I think it was Balzac.’
‘I haven’t read much of him.’
The first bell went, and she said: ‘Make with the wine . . . Listen: would you like to sit with me? I’ve got a box – all to myself . . . It’s the kind of box for four where two people can see properly.’
‘Thanks very much. I would.’ He had never been in a box. He poured the rest of the wine, feeling exhilarated.
Following her back into the auditorium, he wondered how much playing that curious game with her had to do with this absence of any discomfort that he felt in her company. Something, surely – there was a feeling of intimacy, and dishonest intimacy was not, he thought, possible. But he wasn’t much of an authority upon intimacy really.
The box was just what he hoped it would be: glamorous, cosy, and dark red. It also gave him a kind of Lautrec view of the audience which somehow made being there doubly exciting. Then the curtain rose on the second Act idyll, and he became lost in Alfredo’s rapture.
Once or twice during the Act, he glanced at his companion, who sat motionless, turned away from him, her face resting upon one hand. Silhouetted thus, she had at once a vulnerable and a mysterious air: her absorption enhanced his own; each time he looked back to the stage with another dimension to his pleasure.
In the second interval she proposed that they go out ‘for our drinks’ and which this time proved to be two large brandies waiting on the same table.
‘I suppose one thing that would have to be different, morally speaking, would be Alfredo’s sister’s future in-laws. They’d have to be real Washington bourgeoisie to refuse to let her marry their son because of what her brother was up to. So you may be right about morality changing.’
‘It doesn’t really need that bit, though, does it? I mean, the father not wanting them to marry would be enough.’
She lit another cigarette and gave him an absent little smile, but he could not really tell what her expression was, because of the tinted glasses. He wanted to ask her to take them off, but decided that it would be forward of him to ask that.
‘Do you understand Italian?’ she asked after quite a long pause.
‘Good Lord, no! I’m hopeless at languages. Tried to learn one once, but I didn’t make much headway.’
‘Which one?’
‘Latin, actually . . .’
‘What made you choose Latin?’
‘Well – feeling I stopped my schooling a bit young. And they didn’t teach Latin where I went, anyway. I was reading a lot, and I kept not understanding words, and I know at the posh places where you really get an education they seemed to go in for Latin so I thought that was the ticket.’
‘Did you want to be thoroughly educated, then? Go to university, and all that?’
‘Me? I never really thought. I mean it didn’t come out like that. I wanted to know things, you know, but they mostly seemed to be things they didn’t go in for much in my school. I just took to reading really, because the teaching was so dull.’
‘You must have had one good teacher though.’
‘Funny you should say that. I don’t know if he was much cop at teaching, but he knew a lot. He taught arts and crafts where I was, and he loathed it. And he knew I loathed it. We used to talk about books and things . . .’ His voice tailed off. Whenever he read anything that really touched him, or made him laugh, he thought of Mr Allsop, who had a bald patch on the top of his head that went shiny when he got excited . . . Aloud, he said: ‘He knew Latin. I think I sort of thought I’d like to be a bit like him, and that’s what started me on the Latin.’
They finished their drinks, and he said:
‘How did you know to get two glasses of brandy?’
‘I always order two of things to be on the safe side . . .’
‘Do you often meet people here, then?’
‘No.’ She said nothing more, and he felt he’d stumbled, as it were, into being forward. Then, for the millionth time since he’d met her this evening, he remembered the Secrets game and said: ‘If you don’t like me asking you questions, you’ve only to say.’
‘Would you stop then?’
‘Yes.’ Then he added: ‘I might go on wanting to know, but I’d shut up.’
‘That’s very sweet. Thank you.’
The bell rang. She got to her feet before he did; the black dress was another tube – like the silver one in which he had first seen her and, as he got up, he realized again how very tall she was, taller than he by about three inches. He also noticed that people were looking at her – with the kind of glancing stares that denoted curiosity more than anything else. This made him feel angry for her, because he would have hated being stared at in that way, and, on impulse, he took her arm and marched back to her box beside her. When they were back, and seated, she said:
‘It was nice that we didn’t spend the interval having little judgemental comparisons of performances. A look-what-a-lot-I-know-about-opera conversation.’
Gavin agreed, and then, as the house lights went, he remembered that, in a way, that was the sort of conversation he often had with Harry. This lent a discomforting dishonesty to his agreement, and then the beautiful prelude to Act Three began – one of his favourite bits of the whole work and he remembered nothing but that Violetta was to die and that not even love could save her.
From then until the end – ‘Oh God, to die so young!’ – he was transported past the physical confusions of impending grief – thorn in throat, hammer on heart, icy fingers, scorching eyes, until he had given himself, soul and body, to the sad magic.
Applause always came too soon for him and he resented it: it was like being shaken awake on the instant of a dream and he sat plummeting helplessly back into himself until the (infinitely) milder sensations of gratitude and admiration took over . . .
When the last call had been taken, she said:
‘Would you like some dinner?’ And, not needing to think about it, he said that he would.
In the taxi they talked a bit about opera, but not much. He asked her whether she thought that in real life people did actually die for love. She said she thought that people would do anything for it, and for some that would include dying. ‘Harder to live for it, though,’ she said. ‘It goes on so much longer.’
Later she remarked that beauty was useful stuff.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, it enables us to accept so much truth that we would otherwise find unbearable.
‘What I find so awful, Gavin,’ she said, ‘such a dirty trick, is our life span. That was the wicked fairy at the christening all right. We shan’t live long enough to make the best use of our experience . . .’
‘Really? Do you think that?’ Redoubtable old geniuses like Bach and Einstein were in his mind backing disbelief.
‘But of course!’ she said impatiently. ‘We spend the first quarter of our lives like good, innocent little slates on which any old graffiti get written; we can’t choose anything much. Then there is the heady time when we can make choices, but by then they’re going to be conditioned by the graffiti, you bet. And then, when a little wisdom starts creeping in, we start breaking up physically, so that we have less and less power to use what we know. And practically the only weapon we have against all that is art. I think that was the late fairy’s attempt to give us a chance, at least. Let there be condensed experience available.’
‘What about the great people? What about genius?’
‘The point about them is that they’re the exceptions, aren’t they? They’ve slipped through the net: lonely, privileged bastards.’ She laughed then, and added: ‘I can combine being envious of them with not in the least wanting to be one of them. I’m simply full of human nature.’
Gavin said nothing: he was thinking – testing himself to find out how much, if at all, he agreed with her. She was talking about too many things at once, he decided, or else he was lacking in any overall philosophy (most likely, that), and for a moment he wished he was at the Chinese with Harry – a relatively familiar and undemanding situation. Then, as though she knew something of his mind, she said: ‘Look here. Let’s have a simple, merry time. To hell with it: you’re only whatever you are, once.’
And that was how it turned out, or certainly began to turn out. She took him back to her flat, now seeming even larger without all the party in it. It was completely silent up there, and although lights were on – in the hall, in the large sitting room with its open doors – it seemed a rich and desolate place. She went away to take off her coat and he stood uncertainly, beginning to wish that he wasn’t there, with small nagging thoughts about the last train back to Barnet, and wondering how he could mention that without being rude. She was away a long time. He stared at a Rouault over the hall table (by now he had come to accept that there would be no doubt of its being a Rouault – whom he didn’t care for anyway), confidence ebbing: if happiness was energy, he was fast approaching a limbo of paralysis where he could feel nothing at all.
She returned through an unexpected door in the passage – not the way she had gone, and she had not only taken off her coat, she had removed the sequin tube dress and was now clothed in a kind of housecoat, or wrap – voluminous, but somehow not shapeless and of a strikingly beautiful colour that was neither grey nor green.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘we’re going to move to another part of the forest. Follow me.’ They went back through the unexpected door, into another, much smaller passage that seemed to lead nowhere. Her skirts trailed at the back, and he was reminded of Callas in Norma. At the end of the passage was a fitted bookcase which swung open at some touch of hers to reveal a narrow staircase. ‘You go up first, because of my skirts,’ she said.
There was a final door at the top: he opened it and stepped into a place so different from the rest of the flat at first he could hardly believe it. It was a room, a studio, an attic with an enormous skylight revealing the reddish glow of a London sky faintly peppered with stars. The floor was painted yellow, the walls white, and at the far end of the room was an open fireplace with long, large logs burning in it, and a large multi-coloured rug of a kind he had never seen before. It was so surprising, so different from the rest of her flat, that he simply stood trying to take it all in. There was very little furniture, but it seemed furnished; there was a feeling of space, but also of intimacy. It was the most beautiful comfortable room he had ever encountered. He said so.
‘It’s my one private place,’ she said. ‘I spend a lot of time here. When Dmitri is away. Which is quite often. Go and sit by the fire, while I get our food.’
He went and sat on a small stool on the multi-coloured rug which turned out to be made of rags. The logs that were burning made a fragrant fruity smell. It was wonderfully silent; he could hear nothing but the sounds of the fire.
When she returned to him with a tray of food and drink which she put on the rug between them, he said: ‘It’s a bit magic, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you mean it to be?’
‘That’s right. It isn’t meant to be like the rest of life at all. Now, let’s eat and drink.’ She poured some wine, handed him a glass and said: ‘Help yourself to food.’
There was some kind of fish pâté and dark bread, and, the moment he started, Gavin realized that he was very hungry. There was also a dish of cold meats and a salad full of delicious and unexpected things, followed by cherries in a very beautiful white bowl . . . She sat opposite him, on the rug, with her back resting against an enormous cushion, and with her feet tucked up under her – he had noticed earlier that they were bare. They talked: indeed, Gavin realized, by the time they got to the cherries, that he had been doing most of the talking. ‘I’m curious about you,’ she had said, as they spread the pâté on their bread, ‘start by telling me three things about yourself that you know I don’t know. Unless you absolutely don’t want to, of course.’ He had been momentarily confounded: she already knew some things about him that nobody else knew; what could she want to know? What was there about him that could possibly interest her? He began to feel frightened – both of her, and of boring her. ‘I’m not playing any games,’ she said, ‘just being personal.’ So he told her that he lived with his parents in a house that his father had built, and that he, too, had one room that was really his own. And that he cut people’s hair. ‘I knew that,’ she said. ‘Somebody at the party told me that.’ There was a short silence while he tried to think of something else. Then she said: ‘Tell me about your room.’
‘It’s not as good as yours, not by a long chalk. But it’s got something about it that I like.’
‘Describe it to me.’
So he told her about the faded red sofa, and his mirror with gilded birds and roses on it, and the second-hand flowered carpet, and his old Persian silk rug with its faintly musty smell and the white walls and his books and records and plants by the dormer windows . . . ‘It’s far too crowded, really,’ he said, ‘but I have to keep everything I want in there.’
‘Does anybody else ever go into it?’
‘My mother – to clean once a week. But you can’t count her.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she doesn’t really see it. She’s not aware of it at all, except as rather a difficult place to clean. I’d rather she didn’t, but it would hurt her feelings if I asked her not to.’
‘Nobody else?’
‘Only Harry sometimes. He’s the friend I was meant to be going to the opera with tonight.
‘Why?’ he said, a moment later. ‘Don’t people come up here?’
She shook her head. ‘You are the second person who has ever been here.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’ He felt a bit shy of her when she said that; it seemed like a great compliment, but he wasn’t sure that it was and anyway, if it was, he didn’t know what she expected him to say back. Instead he asked: ‘Why is the rest of your flat so very different? I mean if this is what you like, you could have it everywhere, couldn’t you?’
‘The rest of the flat has been entirely designed by Dmitri. He did it for me, so I wouldn’t want to change any of it.’ There was a pause, then she added: ‘He’s a designer, you see.’
This made Gavin remember the conversation in the car going to the party, when people called Joan and Dmitri had been mentioned; it seemed a hundred years ago; what was it Noel, the Australian, had said, that Joan had started Dmitri on interior design in an effort to keep him at home, but it hadn’t worked because he kept going away and designing the interiors of yachts. Something about her marrying him with her eyes open, and the other one saying that she’d had to keep them shut ever since . . . That made him think of something else, but he didn’t know how to ask her that . . .
‘Is Dmitri away designing something now, then?’ he asked.
‘That’s what he says he’s doing . . .’ She said it without emphasis. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’
He got to his feet. ‘Let me help.’
‘You can bring the tray. But first, if you’re going to walk about, I’d rather you took your shoes off. My yellow floor doesn’t respond well to shoes.’
He took off his shoes, and then, on second thoughts, his jacket, since the room was very warm.
She had a sort of kitchenette in a cupboard, and there was a hatch into which she told him to put the tray. ‘It goes down in a lift.’ They were standing side by side, and without her high heels she was only an inch or so taller than he. She was pouring water from a kettle into a coffee machine: the wide sleeve fell back as she poured and he saw her strong, white, rather muscular arm that ended in an unexpectedly delicate wrist and narrow hand. She reached with her left arm for a bottle on the shelf before her, and without thinking and before he could stop himself he said: ‘Why do you wear those stupid glasses? They really don’t suit you at all!’
Then immediately he said, ‘I’m sorry; can’t think why on earth I said that. It must be ever so late; I’ve got to go soon anyhow.’ She laughed then, and said: ‘Oh, Gavin! What do you mean “anyhow”?’ – and took off her glasses. Then, he was hardly aware of how it happened, she put her hands round the back of his neck and kissed him, or rather simply put her mouth gently against his. The most extraordinary thing about this was that while it was happening he didn’t feel anything – except her mouth – anything at all: no thoughts, no time, nothing, as though the whole of him was holding its breath.
She withdrew and, at arm’s length, she looked at him. Her eyes were a dark brown that was almost black, so that the pupils were almost lost in the iris. Being able to see her eyes changed her whole face for him, or, it occurred to him, it had changed anyway. Now, the orange hair and orange-painted mouth seemed no more than clownish trappings – clapped on to conceal some reality – a sense of sadness so private that he could only receive it in silence.
Without taking her eyes from his face, she moved one hand from his neck, lifted the orange wig from her head and let it drop to the ground behind her. Her own hair, dark brown and perfectly straight, sprang to life from a deep and irregular peak on her broad forehead; he could see, now, her real mouth curving to a smile inside the painted paeony, and he put his finger on that to rub it out. She pulled out a handkerchief then, from the grey and green robe, and scrubbed until the paint, still perceptible, was almost gone. There was a new and separate silence.
‘Here I am,’ she said.
There ensued, for Gavin, a time so far exceeding his dreams of what might ever occur that he could never go back to what for ever after seemed to him mawkish invention; nor could he dream at all of any woman without this one lending something of herself. There were moments that he could afterwards clearly recapture – when he pulled the robe from her shoulders, apart from her breasts, wide of her belly and across one thigh until she was lying, like some beautiful sprawled painting to be seen and touched and stirred to life. There was the moment when she set him free within her, and there was a hush even to sensuality; they remained locked, motionless, eye drinking eye, until he moved in her and the trance was broken by a shock of ecstasy – of feeling so deep, so sharp, so near, so new and so shared that he was engulfed. And, after that, a kind of adoring sadness when he knew they were again separate – the magic fusion gone – that, in touching her, he was touching someone else. He would always remember her face then, ageless, pagan, washed of thoughts, with a beauty that was at once hers and belonging to the whole world.
And that was just the beginning: there was, there turned out to be, the whole night. There was a bed behind the Chinese screen and at some point they repaired to that. ‘Let’s move it by the fire,’ she said. The bed was on castors, and moved at a touch; it seemed all part of the dream-like ease – only it wasn’t a dream, it was reality. All through the night, he kept rediscovering that: the third time that he wanted her, and she said, ‘It doesn’t all have to be Wagner; we could be at home with Mozart,’ and there began to be an element of lightness, of playful gaiety that in no way diminished passion. Her body bore no resemblance to those bodies of his dreams; it was heavier, fuller, older, and, released from the tube dresses, deeply curved. Her skin smelled of some fruit or fruits, sometimes sweet like melon, sometimes sharper, like strawberries. He had not imagined that skin smelled of anything. When he told her, she said, ‘I know,’ and a look of child-like complacency flitted across her face that made him want to laugh, it was so endearing. Once, he said: ‘Tell me what you like,’ and, without saying anything, she showed him and he could watch her face change. But perhaps the most amazing discovery that he made was that responsibility for what happened was no more his than hers. One of the things that had frightened him all his life was the idea that he would have this responsibility alone; that the other person expected him to take entire charge; they would simply lie there and judge him afterwards . . . When he told her this, she simply said that it would be a lonely way of going about it. There was a wonderful time when she found out what he liked, which turned out to be practically everything. At some point he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep and when he woke the stars had gone from the sky which was now the colour of grey pearls and the room was filled with a discreet early light. She was not there, and for a moment the night did seem like a dream and he felt panic and fear that it should come to so arbitrary an end. But, ‘I’m making tea,’ she said, and he saw her, wearing the robe again, pouring real water into a real teapot.
‘You shouldn’t have let me go to sleep.’
She brought the tea over to the bed. ‘We both slept. In any case I don’t think I could have stopped you. You went out like a light.’ She sipped her tea, and then said: ‘The fire’s hopelessly dead, because there aren’t any more logs up here. I’ve just had a hot shower to warm me up.’
‘I could have warmed you up.’
She smiled and touched his face with the tips of her fingers: ‘I know.’
There was something vaguely maternal in her voice and the gesture that he did not much like, and this feeling was accompanied by a wave of anxiety – general in nature, but prepared to attach itself to almost anything. Was he in love with her? Did she love him? What was going to happen next? What about Dmitri? Did she do this sort of thing with anyone who turned up? What did she, or would she, expect of him? How did he feel about her?
He looked up to find her steadily regarding him. After a pause, she said: ‘You know when we played the Secrets game, I said that there was a law about not having post-mortems? Well, I don’t think they’re ever any good. But there are one or two things I should like to tell you. You are a lovely person to go to bed with. I’m married to Dmitri, and that’s what I want. I’m going away today for a week or so. You don’t need to feel in the least responsible for me, and I shan’t for you.’
Perversely, because a part of him felt relief, he heard himself saying: ‘What about Dmitri, then?’
‘He’s still in France, so I’m going to join him. For a bit.’
‘Do you love him?’
‘I love him.’ There was a silence while he searched for the way to ask what he discovered he really wanted to know. Before he found the way, she said: ‘He doesn’t love me, you see. He doesn’t – love – anyone.’
‘Do you – sort of – hope he might?’
‘That’s it. That’s what I hope. So long as he doesn’t love anyone, he might love me. He has affairs with people, of course.’
Before he could stop himself, he said: ‘You mean, like you’ve had an affair with me?’
He felt she was angry then, as she answered coolly: ‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’ Then she added more gently: ‘There’s no need, you know, to compare you and me with anybody else in the world. One of the best things about us is the impossibility of doing that. But I will tell you something about you, if you’d like me to.’
‘I think I would.’
‘You need to trust yourself more. You don’t need reflections of yourself from other people. You’re the original. There is no one in the world exactly like you. Enjoy that. It’s not a question of good or bad, or better or worse. Your life is simply a question of you being faithful to you. Making the most of what you are. Everything else is one kind of Jellybyism or other. I take it you know about Mrs Jellyby?’
‘The Africans, and her own curtains being held up by a fork?’
She laughed. ‘I love you, Gavin. I really do. You know all the right things. But Dickens was writing about that syndrome on a fairly coarse level – as so often. It really applies in all kinds of ways he probably didn’t think of at the time. That’s one definition of genius. Only knowing part of what they do. Don’t you think?’
‘Could we get back into bed now?’
‘I don’t know. Could we? What time do you have to go to work?’
‘Not now.’
This time was different; he wanted to be in charge – to please her, to make her remember him. Once, he whispered: ‘I shall miss you,’ and she whispered back: ‘Don’t miss me now, I’m here.’ This time he was more conscious of her body than of his own; her few words about Dmitri had touched him past any kind of jealousy; he felt generous and tender towards her, and wanted to give her everything she could want. Afterwards, she lay with her face turned towards his, tears streaming out of her eyes without a sound. Then he felt so close to her that he knew it was not comfort she needed, or words of any kind, simply time and his being there.
When it was over, she picked up his hand and kissed it. Then she said:
‘Would you like a shower while I get some breakfast?’
The remaining time seemed both rapid and vague: afterwards he had very little recollection of it, and could remember only things like the coffee scalding his tongue, that a button must have come off his shirt when he had torn it off the previous evening, that the razor she lent him was a kind he’d never seen before. He asked her when she was leaving for France because he wanted to be able to think of her then. He also asked her why she bothered with the red chrysanthemum wig and all that. Dmitri preferred her like that. This silenced him. She came down the stairs with him, but left him to find his way out from the false bookcase door. ‘Don’t let’s say goodbye,’ she said. ‘You simply go.’
So he did. Out of the flat door, down in the lift and out into the unreality of the street.