Who knows a body until it is unwrapped, the scars revealed, the mapped skin laid bare? Who knows a body’s secrets even then? Certainly not the husband who lay for twenty-five years beside the wife, mixing their mutual breaths. Jonathan recalled the thin scar running along the length of Sarah’s left wrist, from where she fell on a barbed-wire fence as a child. He knew her particular, personal scent, the smell under her arms; he knew the way their bodies fit together in a bed. She slept on the left, he on the right; every night she fell asleep, one arm slung over him, her face pressed into his back. After she went, he had to learn how to sleep all over again, how to lie alone in bed. For a while, he had to learn what it meant to be built of separate bone and blood, the awful responsibility of it. His sorrow was his, it was his decision whether to keep breathing or not, the stoicism he found somewhere deep in himself, a willingness to endure.
He had never asked her—and never would—if it was Cath who rose like the moon and him who sank. Perhaps it no longer mattered; perhaps it amounted to the same thing. If she didn’t know who she was when she married him, then was it Cath who told her? Who was the Sarah of the many happy years of their marriage, when he could have sworn their bodies loved each other, worshipping pleasure’s infinite dimensions? What happened to their sighs, their slippery joys, were they untrue, undone?
Nothing prepared him for the shock of another body, another mouth that was not Sarah’s in particular. The first time he lay with someone who was not his wife it did not feel personal. It felt hallucinatory, weird, as if he had forgotten what his body was for, as if his body belonged to someone who was not him. He was returned to his forgotten fifteen-year-old self, to the oddness of the whole procedure, the importunate noses, the bra unfastenings, the mysterious panties. Her breath did not smell right; it was not Sarah’s breath, and the wild thrashing of the act so exquisitely mirrored the wild, aching thrashing within his chest that he could not tell where the sighing and the flailing ended and began. He feared he was constitutionally, fatally, monogamous.
Anna’s nipple in his mouth, the puckered pink scar in the valley of her body. ‘A botched job,’ she said. ‘An emergency caesarean.’ They talked the whole while, more or less, her dark, lovely voice, the cave of her mouth, his tongue inside. The act felt like an echo, too faint, a link in the chain of memories leading back to the ecstatic original.
Her head on his pillow, the streak of her plait, her eyes shining in the growing dark. ‘I am made to be married,’ she said.
‘So am I.’
He kissed her again, this woman of many husbands, of meandering words. He knew there was a difference between someone who was made to be married to the same person, and someone who was wedded to the enchanting promise of marriage, to its beguiling idea. She might be made to be married to the ceremony of flowers and lace, possibly she was made to be married to it over and over.
All day at work, he thought of her. It was improbable, of course; she was a kind of mirage. She was not a proper grownup person with a job and a line of steadiness behind her, a profession, a row of stable, civic years of staying in the same place, doing proper things. She had lived in Paris, New York, in a souk; she had married impecunious men, actors, unsteady types, men who did not even own a house. Owning property was surely one of the cornerstones of adult existence; he feared Anna naturally belonged to that rowdy crew who lived by their wits, surviving by the skin of their teeth, freelancers, contract workers, artistic sorts, men who inherited money rather than working for it. Her natural constituency was risk, that wide-open place of impulse, exhilaration and chance, of haring off down any new path that looked more interesting. How could an adult not have had a proper job, even a good-looking female adult? She was a throwback to women who were courtesans, kept women, to clever mistresses of eighteenth-century French courts. What would he do with her? How soon before she grew bored with him, tossing him aside for someone racier, more rackety?
When he came home he found Anna had been cooking, a Normandy bisque, heavy with cream, butter and Calvados, the prawn stock strained through a muslin-lined sieve; milk-fed veal, with tarragon. There was a pear tarte tatin cooling on a bench; the table was dressed, candles he did not know he owned in the centre, faltering in an unseen breeze. She kissed him, telling him about the particulars of the food, pouring him a glass of iced champagne. Where did she find a muslin-lined sieve?
‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’ he asked. ‘Consider me impressed.’
‘I had nothing else to do,’ she said. ‘And I love cooking.’
It turned out she was a magnificent cook, as if she had been spending her many marriages at cooking school. ‘I helped out at a friend’s restaurant for a couple of months once, in Soho. New York Soho, not London Soho. Everyone was a drunk or a heroin addict, just like in that book,’ she said.
‘I hope you didn’t spit in anyone’s dinner,’ he said.
‘Only in the dinners of people I didn’t like. I wouldn’t spit in your dinner,’ she said, leaning over to kiss him. She tasted of cream.
He had a giddy, sprawling feeling in his chest, as if he were about to do something rash. He might fall in love; he might lay himself out, as if at a feast, forget his terrors about remaining loveless the rest of his days, his fears about tourists walking past his house at The Landing, the last place on earth where he felt inviolate, himself, free of his useless, leftover love for a woman who no longer loved him. It did not matter if the tourists came, if they trampled his soft lilies underfoot or peered into his windows. He could live with a new wife; washed awake, cleansed inside and out, himself turned transparent as a window. He felt alive with possibility, with crazed, unruly hope, even while he understood it to be madness. He wanted to be an idiot for once. He wanted to be rash, foolish, to really give them something to talk about, becoming the fifth husband of a woman blown in from God knew where, a woman with fine breasts and a plait down her back, which he would climb, as if scaling the soaring heights of heaven.