Douglas missed the excitement of being with Julia. He knew it was wrong but he did not care. He no longer had the morals for resistance.
They had arranged to meet in Amsterdam and were staying in a hotel by the Vondelpark. The stairwell was decorated with portrait busts of Descartes and Spinoza. Douglas and Julia were told that there were philosophical discussions in Dutch every Thursday night.
A long quotation about absolute beauty from Plato’s Symposium had been painted on the wall of their room. The white gauze curtains were embroidered with a poem telling them that life should be taken ‘little by little’.
‘This could become annoying,’Julia said, as she locked the door and started to take off her clothes.
‘Yes,’ said Douglas, ‘there’s even a mirror over the bed, for God’s sake, Heb lief en doe wat je wilt. Have love and do what you will. We could give it a go, I suppose.’
‘You suppose? Is that all?’
Julia tilted her head to one side and took off her earrings. Then she pushed back her hair and waited for him to speak.
Come here. Have patience. I can have patience later, I want you now, is there anything wrong with that? No, nothing’s wrong with that.
She started to unbutton her blouse.
‘Come on then.’
Here he was again, Douglas thought. He could do nothing but this; and it was for this, he thought, that people wrecked marriages, ruined careers, and destroyed lives: and it was this that, when denied or abandoned, made people despair and drink and die. ‘What now,’ she said, ‘what next?’
The next morning a whole new set of messages had been posted in the Hotel Filosoof. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear. Douglas was amused that even the toaster had a message stuck to it. Silence is a friend who will never betray – Confucius.
‘I wonder if Confucius had any friends.’
‘Only very silent ones,’ Julia said.
They walked to the Rijksmuseum. An opportunistic busker was singing ‘Waterloo’ outside the Hotel Abba. One of a group of English stag-weekenders was enjoying his first pint of the day, telling his mates how he had been punched for trying to take a photograph of a prostitute in the red-light district.
Inside they began to walk freely through the galleries, aware of each other’s presence but never coming too close. They spoke so little that at one point Julia came up behind Douglas and whispered, ‘Hello, Confucius.’
They stopped in front of a painting, a Brueghel featuring a series of miniature dramas set in a small town square. It was a folk painting, earthy and unsentimental. There was country dancing and drinking, there were children playing with spinning tops and men with dice. In the foreground, the figure of Carnival sat astride a beer barrel. He was preparing to joust with Lent, an elderly woman with a bee-skelp on her head.
‘What do the bees mean?’ Douglas asked. He thought of his father tending the hives in East Lothian, smoking them out while wearing his large hat and veil.
‘Diligence. Temperance. Something you might need to work on.’
‘I’m very diligent.’
‘Just not so good on the temperance.’
The painting was a minute depiction of the daily process of living. It was a world without individualism, a song to the unsung. A woman had climbed a ladder to clean her windows, another sold fish, while a beggar with a bedridden child received money from strangers.
‘Let’s see if we can find ourselves,’ Julia said. ‘Who is most like us?’
‘I’m not some sixteenth-century peasant …’ Douglas began.
‘Look. There you are,’ she said. ‘In the top window of the pub, observing the action.’
Douglas tried to think what it would be like to film the scene from a high angle. He tried to find someone who looked like Julia, but the women all wore headscarves or danced with their backs to the picture frame.
‘I can’t see you anywhere.’
‘Of course not. I’m far too glamorous.’
Douglas looked at her and then at the dead in the painting, unnoticed amidst the revellers, the crippled and the blind.
‘Haven’t you got any work to do?’ she asked.
‘I’ve done most of the filming; I’ve just got a little more setting-up to do. I’ve called this a recce.’
‘I hope I’m not compromising your work.’
‘Does that mean I’m compromising yours?’
‘Well, we certainly can’t do this at home.’
They looked at simple paintings of Dutch interiors: a woman taking off her stockings, a mother delousing her child’s hair, a roistering man proposing a toast.
They stopped in front of Rembrandt’s painting of the Jewish Bride. Julia pointed out the sweep and volume of the groom’s golden arm, his right hand on her breast, her left hand on his; pearls and jewellery, cream and gold, ochre into darkness.
The husband was trying to give his wife comfort. Her eyes were past and beyond him, saying, ‘I don’t know … I don’t know.’ She was wearing bracelets of pearls, four twists on her right hand, and one on her left. Douglas could imagine her distracted with her jewellery, playing with the weight of the gold.
‘What if that was us?’ he asked.
‘Look at their hands.’
‘I can understand being him,’ Douglas said, ‘reaching out…’
‘They seem so gentle with each other. So full of care.’
Douglas began to think that perhaps this was a painting not about themselves but about their partners. He and Julia were already corrupted, fallen. And here it came again, without warning, the same feeling that he had had in Paris after Julia had left; the thoughts of Emma, the inevitable guilt. Was this going to happen every time or would he get used to it? He wanted to ask if Julia felt the same, if she was thinking of her husband.
They walked back through the streets and along the canals, avoiding the movement of trams and bicycles. It was warm on the bridges and in the sunnier streets but Julia insisted that they walk through the shadier parts of the city. The sun was too bright and unforgiving. It showed her age, she told him. Douglas should know this. She didn’t allow overhead lighting at home, she said. She liked the darkness.
They visited a shop full of mirrors on the Herengracht and saw themselves reflected back and forward, their images repeating in infinite regressions: Julia with her blonde hair and her red coat, Douglas with his black jacket, jeans and Converse trainers. Despite the distortion they looked like an ordinary couple. Douglas felt a fraud.
He bought blue flowers for their room, irises and cornflowers, and they browsed in bookstores and antique shops in the Jordaan. Douglas wondered how soon he could suggest they went back to their hotel.
Julia took his arm.
‘Isn’t this fun?’
‘Yes,’ said Douglas, unable to imagine how it was ever going to last.
Back in the hotel Julia said she was tired. She didn’t want sex. She just wanted a rest. It was the first time she had said no to him.
Douglas raided the minibar and watched her sleeping. Her head was turned away from him, her blonde hair falling over her shoulders. Her sleep seemed so careless and he was almost angry with her for not being as tensely, vibrantly, anxiously elated; for sleeping through the storm of this uncertainty and desperation; for being so calm and detached when he was so engaged and complete.
He wanted to make love to her again. It would be the only way he could stop thinking, by losing himself in her, by embracing the darkness, by exhausting himself to the point of collapse and oblivion, finding that sated sense of self where nothing could reach him.
He pulled back the sheets and looked at her naked body. He remembered asking if she had a birthmark and she had said no, she had no marks anywhere, not even a freckle. He listened to her breathing and adopted its rhythm himself, rising and falling, trying to calm himself down, but it was useless.
Julia stirred.
What is it? I can’t sleep, I want you. Again? Yes, again. Come on then.
She was still half-asleep, letting him do what he wanted. He tried to raise her energy, to stimulate her into some kind of response, but she lay back, more passively than she had ever done before. The excitement had gone.
It was like being married, Douglas thought. It was their first experience of bad sex.
Are you all right? I’m fine, I’m sorry it wasn’t very good. That’s all right, don’t worry.
Her agreement came all too readily.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Julia said.
But it did. Douglas knew that he had pushed it too far and felt ashamed. He felt worse than when he had begun. Now he would not be able to rest at all. He would have to wait until they were both ready and try again. He could not afford to mess it up. He wanted to make it right.
Julia was sleeping again. Douglas knew that he would never be able to make any sense of what he was doing. He could see no present and no future; only the past and everything that had led to this moment in which he was trapped, fearing the loss of this love, the end of his marriage, and all sense of himself. He had no idea how he was ever going to get out of it.