Irene flew to Amsterdam with Richard and his designer, Adam Fernhill, on the last flight the following Friday evening. At first, driving in from the airport in the dusk, she thought that they had made a serious mistake in planning to shift her play to Amsterdam. The evening arrival at Venice had always been completely mesmerizing, and it was part of the whole atmosphere of the place that had made her choose it as her setting.
The airport, Mestre and the rest of the mainland were hardly beautiful but the pulsating rush of a small motorboat tearing across the lagoon, surging forward between the old, dark brown stakes that marked the channel, making for the smudge on the horizon that grew slowly into Venice, had a romance about it that the traffic-clogged drive through the ordinary streets of Amsterdam’s suburbs entirely lacked. But as they turned at last into Prinsengraacht, where they were to stay, Irene began to understand.
They were deposited beside the canal and, while their luggage was carried into the hotel, the three of them stood at the edge of the water, looking at the reflected lights and what they could see of the tall, thin, gabled houses through the trees on the far side.
‘I think I’m going to like this,’ said Irene, turning in pleasure to Richard.
He touched her face briefly and said: ‘Good. Let’s go in. It’s late and you’re beginning to look stretched with tiredness.’
She stood in front of him, speechless with gratitude that he should have noticed her state and produced exactly the right word for it. Although it was not tiredness that had done it to her, stretched was just how she felt, like a piece of elastic that has no spring left in it and might snap at any moment.
Yes, she thought, stretched out by fury with Fin, anxiety about Jane, fear for the play, and the constant effort of not surrendering to anyone.
It would be so much easier to give in to Fin, let him take all the decisions about their joint life and responsibilities and order her about as he wanted, and yet if she did that she would have no hope for her work or herself for the rest of her life. However hard it was to keep up the struggle, she had to fight back.
Richard smiled encouragingly at her. There was no need to say anything. If he had understood so easily how she was feeling, then he would know what his perception had done for her.
‘Breakfast at nine all right for you, Irene?’ he said casually as he and Adam left her at the door of her bedroom ten minutes later. ‘There’s no point getting up any earlier than we have to, and they’re comfortably late starters here.’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you in the breakfast room, shall I?’
Richard nodded and raised a hand. Irene shut the door on them both and unpacked the few clothes she had brought. Moving about in the large twin-bedded room on her own seemed to be the extreme of luxury, and, having had a long, scented bath, she ordered some cold white wine from room service, and drank it in bed watching television. It was an extra boon that she could get BBC programmes as well as the usual international news and shopping channels that were available in other European countries. She lay back, taking a private pleasure in the fact that Fin would have disapproved of it all so much. Eating and drinking in bed were anathema to him; the television hardly figured in his life at all, and he would have been horrified by the idea that she was lolling in bed watching it when she should have been either looking at Amsterdam or reading up the guide books in preparation for serious sightseeing the following day.
‘This is the life I like,’ she said aloud in supreme satisfaction. ‘And his views suck.’
She had not quite got to the stage of using phrases like ‘this sucks’ in public, but she took a good deal of pleasure in saying them aloud to herself.
The satisfaction lasted through a more comfortable night’s sleep than she had had in weeks and she woke feeling not only healthy and clear-headed, but also full of energy. She could hardly wait until twenty to nine when she thought it was just about decent to find the breakfast room and get started on the day. Richard appeared ten minutes later, but Adam was very late.
She and Richard sat in easy companionship, eating a huge breakfast of sausages, eggs, onions and tomatoes, followed by cheese and pumpernickel, fruit and cakes, while she read The Times and he the Independent. Their coffee cups were refilled whenever they were empty. No one interrupted or bothered them until Adam appeared, looking rumpled and wet-haired at half past nine.
‘Sorry,’ he said with a charming smile. ‘My alarm clock failed me.’
‘It couldn’t matter less. We’ve plenty of time,’ said Richard. ‘All we’ve got to do is let Irene see what we mean about the place and show her the particular stretch of the canal you want as the basis for your sets. Get yourself some food and we can plan the morning. I think we might lunch on the Brouwersgraacht.’
‘Lunch?’ said Irene in almost genuine horror as she looked at the remains of the food on her plate. ‘I won’t be able to eat again for a week.’
The two men laughed and Adam went off to the buffet to load his plate even higher than she had done. When he came back and started to eat, Richard began to talk to her about Amsterdam and its history, revealing a much less arrogant side of himself than she had yet seen. He clearly knew a lot about the place and cared for it, too. When Irene asked why he liked it so much, he paused and after a while said thoughtfully: ‘I think because it’s so at ease with itself. Once hugely powerful …’
‘Like Venice,’ she said and nodded.
‘Yes, but it’s not a museum like Venice,’ he said, his eyes almost disappearing as his face wrinkled into a cheerful smile. ‘Amsterdam’s a real place with real people. There are far too many of them really, and yet they deal with the overcrowding by extra civility rather than the aggression of somewhere like New York. You’ll see. I’ve never felt ripped off here or a target for anything. There’s no show or having to stand up for yourself. It’s a great place, the acme of civilization.’
‘It sounds as though my stepdaughter would love it,’ said Irene, forgetting Richard for the moment. ‘I must bring her one day.’
‘I didn’t know you had one. How old is she?’
‘Thirty-one.’ Watching Richard’s face, Irene wondered how much – if anything – he knew of her life since they had parted twenty-eight years earlier. ‘I know she’s far too old to be brought anywhere. It’s just … Oh, well: I don’t want to bore you with stepmaternal chat.’
‘You couldn’t bore me,’ said Richard, ‘and Adam’s far too interested in his food to mind what we talk about.’
The designer looked up with his extraordinarily sweet smile and said nothing.
‘I expect you’ll meet her soon and then you’ll see what I mean,’ said Irene. ‘She’s my greatest friend, I suppose, what’s made life bearable during some pretty tricky moments, and so I like to share my pleasures with her.’
‘Yes,’ said Richard, ‘I remember that about you.’
‘What d’you remember?’
‘Your generosity. It was always obvious and quite different from other people’s careful weighing up of what they could afford to give.’
Irene felt as though her real self had suddenly become visible again for the first time in years.
The two men took her to places they particularly liked, clearly wanting to know what she thought and felt, instead of wanting to make sure that she was not feeling – or about to say – something that would need containing or altering to make it acceptable. The effect of that combined with the slowly revealed charm of the small city until she felt peculiarly at ease.
The scale of the place pleased her enormously as did the domestic elegance of the grey houses. Richard had been right. Except on the grander parts of the Kaisergraacht and Heerengraacht, which she did not much like, none of the houses was pompous or showy. Their scale was comfortable, and they looked thoroughly civilized. Some were purple-grey, others nearly black, others again pale grey. With the dark grey-brown water of the canals, the green of the trees, the cream paint of the window frames and the pinkish-grey of the bridges, the whole scene was relaxed. Irene had rarely felt less angry or impatient.
She had a sensation of coming home, too, although she had never been to Amsterdam before in her life. Increasingly as the morning went on she saw how perceptive Adam and Richard had been in choosing the place for her play. That, after all, was partly about getting oneself to the point at which one could go home and be at ease with oneself and one’s surroundings.
In deference to her appetite, they did not eat a proper lunch, but stopped in a smoky, brown-walled café for beer and sandwiches. The comfortably informal place was staffed by a slender couple, both dressed in jeans and open-necked shirts, who seemed untroubled by the numbers of people milling around ordering food and drinks. Irene, thinking of similiar establishments in London filled with a mixture of students, adult inhabitants, and tourists, was bemused by their good humour. She sat at the old, scarred wooden table, resting her feet, which were beginning to swell after the morning’s walk, and watching the people around her.
As she and the two men waited for their drinks, they looked through the Polaroids Adam had been taking of each particularly appealing bit of canal and argued amicably about exactly what the play’s house should look like. Irene had strong views and was once or twice tempted to expostulate that it was her play and she had imagined the house and so she should choose, but she slowly began to admit that both Richard and Adam had read the play with such sympathetic understanding that they, too, had some rights over it.
When they had eventually agreed on the house Adam had always wanted to use, a smallish, dark-grey and cream one on the corner of Prinsengraacht and one of the streets that ran north from it, they paid the bill and went back to double-check the reality.
‘Sure?’ said Adam when they had walked across the bridge to view it from the far side of the canal and walked up the side street to check it from there, too. ‘This is really the one?’
Richard looked at Irene, apparently deferring to her.
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling at first one and then the other. ‘This is it. This is where my girl really could have been happy. You’re brilliant, the pair of you. I’d never have known if it hadn’t been for you.’
‘We’ve always been a good team,’ said Richard cheerfully, ‘and you’re an honorary member too now. OK, Adam?’
‘Sure. Look, I’ll stay and take some more photographs and check my measurements and things, and then I think I’ll leg it straight back on the last flight out tonight – unless you need me for anything else?’
‘No,’ said Richard definitely. ‘Irene and I have to sort out one or two things in the text now that we know we’re here for sure, but all the rest of the visual stuff – lighting and so on – can wait until we’re back in London. All right with you, Irene?’
‘Absolutely fine,’ she said. ‘But are you going to have time, Adam? I’ve only just realized that if rehearsals are about to start, your set needs …’
‘That’s OK,’ said Adam with an air of unshakeable confidence. ‘The basic design works for both here and Venice. A bridge over a canal, a house, and either a straat running down between it and the next or a calle. Easy. It’s only the detail and the colours that are different. I’ll adjust the model as soon as I get back and then the workroom can get on with painting the flats.’
‘You mean you’ve already made the model?’
‘Sure. You’re looking very worried. I don’t think you need, do you, Richard?’
‘No. But she’s new to all this. She still thinks she has to be responsible for everything.’ He turned to Irene. ‘Doesn’t she?’
‘In a way. But it isn’t that. There are so many things to ask. I’ve never been sure how much scene changing …’
‘Ssh,’ said Adam, holding up his hand as though he were directing the traffic. ‘It’s all under control. Look, there’s a bench over there under the plane trees. Why don’t we sit down and I’ll tell you what we’re doing?’
‘All right.’
The two of them sat at either end of the bench, while Richard leaned against one of the tree trunks, looking detached and wildly romantic. Bicyclists whizzed past at the most dangerous-looking speeds, sometimes loaded with parcels or passengers, but Irene did her best to concentrate on what Adam was telling her.
‘The scenes with the older version of Maria in the airport will all be at the front of the stage. There will be two sets of back-to-back seats and lots of silent extras coming and going with prams and babies …’
‘And luggage,’ said Irene urgently. ‘It really is important that Maria has lots of luggage.’
‘Yes, I know. I grasped that: by the time we reach her age we all have a great deal of accumulated baggage to carry about with us, which trips us up and causes trouble.’
‘Exactly.’ Irene looked at his sensitive bony face and wanted to take it between her hands and kiss it.
‘Then high up, hanging against the plain black cloth will be one of those announcement boards they have at mainline stations. The sort with all the black flaps that clatter up and down. D’you know what I mean?’
‘Yes. But airports don’t have them.’
‘No, I know. This is a bit of artistic licence, but I want to have it. Have you ever seen a station crowd on a night when all the trains are delayed? Every time one of those columns of clattering bits starts moving, the whole crowd shifts; and then when it becomes clear that no new information is coming up, they subside again. The fogbound airport will be very like that. It really is justified. And it’ll work.’
Richard moved away from his tree as though he could not bear not to be centre-stage for very long.
‘Budge up, you two,’ he said. ‘And then, you see, Irene, as Maria’s talking about her past, the announcement board will disappear up into the flies and the black cloth will be revealed as a gauze as the lights come on and we see the house behind it. I know, I know,’ he added, as though Irene had protested, which she had not even thought of doing, ‘gauzes are fantastically old-fashioned, but Adam thinks it’s the best way of getting over what we need to express.’
‘We thought,’ said Adam, deciding to grab the initiative again, ‘that we’d divide the stage for all the non-airport scenes so that both the house and the canal and its bridge are visible all the time. We’ll fly the front of the house so that for the interior scenes there just won’t be a front and for the exterior ones all the audience will see is the façade.’
‘I’m impressed,’ said Irene. ‘I can’t wait to see the model. But what are you going to do about the canal itself?’
Adam looked at Richard. They were both boiling over with satisfaction.
‘You say,’ said Richard. ‘It’s your coup.’
‘OK. You see, Irene, we think we’ve worked out how we can have real water. Obviously it can’t be deep, not least because the stage has to be raked, but it will be wet – and Blackson will produce a noticeable splash when he flings the books into it from the upstairs window. The audience will see passers-by getting wet.’
‘The same silent extras, I take it, from the airport scenes. It sounds wonderful,’ said Irene. Then, looking down at the water, which was a good five foot lower than the edge of the canal, she frowned.
‘All right, it’s true we will have to cheat,’ said Adam with the first hint of petulance. ‘That’s inevitable.’
‘And it doesn’t matter,’ said Richard. ‘The whole of theatre is an illusion. We’ll make the audience believe in it. Don’t you worry your pretty little head, Irene.’
For once she did not automatically rebel at the sound of a patronizing instruction coming at her in a confident male voice. Instead she smiled at the cliché and bowed her thoroughly large – and not at all pretty – head, feeling unusually glad of her bulbous nose and wide mouth.
They left Adam on his own with his cameras and sketch books soon after that and wandered back through the warm streets, stopping here and there, leafing through old prints in a gallery, examining antique Delft tiles, and eyeing a window full of the most lavish-looking cakes and wishing that they were hungry enough to want to eat again. They talked about everything except the play and did not get down to serious work on it until they had reached the hotel again. Then, sitting either side of a small table in Richard’s room, they went through a long list of questions he had prepared.
Irene began to understand that part of the reason he had wanted her to come to Amsterdam must have been to soften her up, to get her believing in his pleasure in what she had written so that his various comments and criticisms were not too wounding. It was unexpectedly sensitive of him, but even so there were times when she did feel wounded.
The work was also wearing; surprisingly so. She had to concentrate hard to see the point he was making, work out an accurate response, and then find acceptable words for it, pushing the ensuing argument to the limit of what she could bear.
By six, Irene was genuinely tired and snapped a thoughtless answer to something Richard said. Before she could apologize or make a joke to dilute her anger, he had put down his pencil, taken off his glasses and looked at her with unexpected benevolence.
‘Done enough for the moment?’
‘Yes, I think I must have,’ she said, rubbing her forehead. ‘I’m aching and cross and almost …’
‘Tearful?’ suggested Richard with a hint of a smile.
‘Certainly not,’ said Irene. ‘I am never – ever – tearful.’
‘It wouldn’t be surprising if you were. Big strong men get weepy when their words are misunderstood or misapplied or criticized.’
‘Do they? Well, perhaps that explains my tetchiness, then.’ She frowned as though that might make the feelings go away. ‘It’s all so new to me – first having my play taken at all seriously and now savaged like this. It makes me wonder what you really think about it, whether I can trust those first compliments, or … Perhaps I just need a bit of a break.’
‘Probably,’ said Richard. ‘And a drink and some more food in due course. Why don’t you go and have a bath and change? Then we’ll go out to supper. They eat early here, so I’ve booked us a table at seven-thirty. Is that all right?’
Almost beyond the stage of being able to say anything coherent, Irene just nodded and went back to her own room. Once she had had her bath, she wrapped herself in one of the hotel’s comfortingly large towels and telephoned Fin, telling herself that all she wanted was to make sure that he was managing without her.
He sounded quite untroubled by her absence, politely interested in the work she had been doing, and sympathetic to her brief, supposedly funny description of her dislike of Richard’s attempts to change some of what she had written.
‘How have you been?’ she asked eventually, remembering why she had called him.
‘Irritable. Partly because I made a nonsense of cooking my lunch and partly because I’ve had another letter from Jane.’
Ignoring the question of his lunch, which had entailed nothing more complicated than grilling two lamb chops she had bought him and cooking a few vegetables, she asked about the letter. Fin gave her a crisp précis and then said outrageously: ‘I’ve decided that we must pay her a greater allowance in spite of your reservations about her extravagance. She really should not be put through so much anxiety while she is working for her degree.’
Irene opened her mouth to protest, but then said nothing. There seemed no point when Fin had at last agreed with what she had always wanted him to do. And if she needed extra ammunition at any later stage in their war, she could always use it then.
‘I’ve sent her a cheque and a letter suggesting that she learns a little of Ivo’s self-discipline. You could do with it, too, Irene. Your telephone bill will be huge if we speak any longer.’
‘Have you any idea how humiliating it is to be criticized for what I’m spending, even when it’s not you who has to pay?’
‘Irene,’ he said, sounding tired. ‘What are you talking about now?’
‘I’m perfectly well aware that the money I spend on the house, food and children was originally yours, but the cost of this trip is nothing to do with you. This is to do with my work and you have no right to criticize me for anything that I do in connection with it or for anything I spend while I am being funded by it.’
‘Irene, I’m perfectly well aware that you are trying to manufacture a quarrel, but it is quite absurd. I passed an idle remark about the cost of international telephone calls, which is huge, particularly when a hotel’s profits have to be added. You must admit that there are times when you, quite as much as your daughter, need reminding of the value of money and its limited supply.’
‘Oh, no, I do not, Fin. If I were ever to get into debt, you could, I suppose, have some reason to talk like that, or if I were to feed you on lentils when you had given me enough to buy fillet steak you could ask why – ask, mind you, not assume I’ve embezzled it. Oh, there are times when you make me so unutterably furious that I … What’s the use in talking?’
‘None, as I said, but then you never listen to me. Good night, Irene.’
She banged down the receiver, telling herself that everything would be different once the play was actually staged. If it should have even a moderate success she would earn some more money. Once she had some money of her own, she would be fine. She would be able to put Fin in his place once and for all, even leave him if she wanted.
‘He’s such a cantankerous old bugger,’ she said aloud. ‘What a blissful word that is! Bugger off, you old bugger.’
In a spirit of renewed, furious rebellion, she dressed in black and scarlet and stormed out to meet Richard, who was waiting for her in the big, white lobby.
‘You look devastating,’ he said, brushing her silken shoulder with his hand as he bent down to kiss her cheek. It struck her that he really was remarkably tall. At five foot eleven, she was almost the same height as Fin, but Richard was a good three inches taller. She liked that, just as she liked his easy, unembarrassed stroking. Fin had never been much of a toucher except when they were making love, and Jane had shrunk from her mother’s hugs and kisses from a very early age. Ivo let her pat his arm or shoulder sometimes, and had recently taken to kissing her forehead in an almost avuncular fashion whenever they met. Only Helena was unequivocally glad to be hugged, and that left Irene seriously short of physical contact.
‘Are you on for another walk or are you too tired?’ Richard asked, looking at her with friendly concern. ‘We could easily whistle up a taxi.’
‘No, I’d like to walk – whip up a bit of an appetite.’
He laughed and took her off to a small, wonderfully camp restaurant with antiqued gold walls and very pretty waiters, who brought them delectable food and kept out of the way when they were not wanted.
‘So tell me what happened to you after you ran away to your lawyer,’ said Richard as he shared out the last of the wine between their glasses.
‘In fact or emotionally?’ she said, knowing that she could tell him anything but determined not to bore him with anything he did not want to know.
‘Emotionally.’
‘I fell in love, I thought, with the glamour of Fin’s sadness and all his need,’ she said, looking down at her smeared plate with a kind of self-disgust she had not recognized before. ‘And all too quickly I discovered that neither was quite what it seemed – or at all glamorous.’
‘Fin?’
‘That’s what everyone calls him. His mother, who suffered from serious folie de grandeur, had him christened Godolphin and he shortened it as soon as he realized what she’d done to him.’
‘Poor blighter.’
‘Perhaps.’ The rekindled anger was too hot in her to be concealed. ‘I must say I’ve occasionally wondered why he didn’t shorten it to God, which is how he appears to see himself.’
‘Aha,’ said Richard, grinning at her. ‘Bossy, is he?’
‘You could say so.’ Suddenly ashamed of moaning about her husband to someone who had never even met him, Irene quickly added: ‘What about you? You didn’t go into any great detail about your wife when you were talking about your marriage at lunch last week.’
‘No, I don’t suppose I did. She’s gorgeous to look at, even now, and very clever. But she’s got a tongue like razor and she uses it.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s the question I often ask when she’s being particularly cutting. Personally I think she regrets having refused to have children in order to pursue her career. But she’s always denied it and pretends that it’s a colleague, friend, or – more often – me who’s making her angry.’
He looked at Irene for a second, letting her have a glimpse of the hurting human behind the mask of success and superiority he usually wore. Then he laughed and the mask slid back into place.
‘As you know, I’ve never minded paying for sins I have committed, but I’m damned if I’m going to take the blame for things that aren’t my fault. When she lams into me unjustly, I let her have it all back with interest. That, of course, makes her even more vituperative, and so it goes on.’
‘But you are still together, aren’t you?’
‘After a fashion,’ said Richard, turning down the comers of his mouth in disgust. ‘I don’t always go home. Don’t let’s talk about that now. It’s too depressing. You and I have left them both behind for the moment, and for now it’s the two of us again as it always should have been. Let’s just enjoy that while we can.’
Irene sat with her chin in her hands, watching him and wondering if he could have altered as much as he seemed to have done.
‘Did you ever think about me in between?’ she asked at last and saw him smile, not the usual mocking or polite widening of the lips, but with a kind of half-private, self-conscious pleasure that reminded her vividly of her own feelings whenever she had let herself indulge in fantasies of the life they might have led together.
‘Yes. When things got particularly lurid with Clottie, I’d half comfort and half torment myself with how life might have been if I hadn’t accepted your dismissal that day.’
‘My what?’ Irene sat up and spoke much less languorously.
‘Your dismissal.’ He raised his fine eyebrows. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about: the time when you turned me down in those astonishingly disdainful tones that still make me shudder whenever I think of them.’
‘But you never asked me for anything. What on earth are you talking about, Richard?’
‘Of course I did. I invited you to come to Dartmoor with me. Don’t you remember that? You can’t have forgotten something so important.’
‘No, I haven’t forgotten, but it was just a try-on, wasn’t it? A kind of joke?’
‘I told you some friends had offered me the loan of a cottage on Dartmoor for the week before Christmas and asked you to go there with me. I described the log fire in the sitting room and the sheepskin rug in front of it and told you how amazing it would be to make love to you there. A bloke could hardly have been any clearer, Irene, if he’d written a placard six feet high and paraded it up Oxford Street shouting through a meagaphone: I want Irene; I want Irene.’
She could not say anything, just looked at him, her mind back in the dank, smelly corridor outside the changing rooms of the little local authority swimming pool most of the students had used at the time in an effort to keep fit and slim. It struck her that it had been an odd choice of place in which to proposition anyone, both of them dripping with chlorine-smelling pool water and clutching inadequate, hard, greyish-white towels around their shivering bodies. Perhaps he really had been in earnest. It was an extraordinary thought.
‘Don’t you remember what you said then?’ he asked.
She shook her head, although she did remember perfectly well, just as she remembered trying so hard to look and sound as sophisticated as she possibly could.
‘You said that you had better things to do than let me use you to enhance my reputation as a stud,’ he said, sounding more acerbic than at any time since they had met again in his rubber-planted office. ‘And then you added that if you’d fancied me it might have been different, but since you didn’t there wouldn’t be much in it for you.’
‘You minded, didn’t you?’ said Irene slowly, surprised by her breathlessness. She took a moment to make sure it would not sound in her voice. ‘My God, you were serious. It never crossed my mind or I wouldn’t have …’
‘You didn’t know?’
She shook her head and felt a coil of hair bursting its pins apart. Putting up a hand to stuff the pins back, ramming the ends against her skull, she said: ‘I thought you were teasing me, sort of setting me up to make a fool of myself. I am sorry, Richard.’
‘So you should be. It took me months to get over it. And then I heard – far too late, after you’d buggered off for ever – that you’d told that friend of yours – Maggie, was it? – that you were half dead of unrequited love and doing your best to make sure it didn’t show and put me off. I could have slaughtered you. If I’d got my hands on you I probably would have. You made me hellishly unhappy, you know.’
‘Oh, Richard, I can’t tell you … Hell! No, I won’t let you make me feel guilty, especially not after all this time.’ She smiled. ‘After all, you were known as a stud and you did trail your conquests about. Everyone warned me, and they teased me too. “He’ll drop you like a hot potato as soon as you’ve given in. He won’t want you if he thinks he can have you too easily.” That’s what they all said and since I knew nothing whatever about anything I believed them and acted accordingly.’ More of Irene’s hair came down and she put up both hands to repin it.
‘Do that here and I won’t answer for myself,’ Richard said with mock savagery and called for the bill.
‘What do you mean? It’s so heavy it will push the pins out. I’m just pushing them back.’
He laughed. ‘I thought you were about to let down your hair and shake it at me. We’ll save that, shall we? Until we get back to the hotel at least.’
‘Yes,’ she said after a silent conversation with her irritatingly obtrusive conscience, ‘I suppose we’d better.’
‘Good.’ He stood up and thrust his credit card at their waiter, standing over him in obvious impatience throughout the production of the slip. He signed in the flamboyant writing she remembered well and ushered her out of the restaurant.
It had taken them twenty minutes to walk there from the hotel, but they could have been back in much less time. Irene felt his hand under her elbow, urging her on as they walked faster and faster. She was not sure how they were going to make themselves wait to say or do anything else until they reached the hotel. In the end they did not. As they were passing the end of a dark street that led deep into the Jordaan, Richard pulled her into the shadow of a house, stood her up against the wall and kissed her, pushing her face up with his thumbs hard under her chin.
‘God! I’ve waited for this.’
She felt her whole body soften, longing to be gathered up and taken over and made to forget the bitter, wasted years. Clinging to what was left of her self-control, she touched his face and, when he withdrew, said breathlessly: ‘All this caveman stuff, Richard. We don’t need it. We’re far too old.’
‘Need has nothing to do with it, and I don’t feel old at all,’ he said before kissing her again more lightly. ‘You’re making me feel about eighteen again. I haven’t wanted anyone this ferociously for years, decades. It’s wonderful.’ He moved away, grabbing her hand. ‘Come on.’
By the time they were in his room at the hotel, Irene had stopped thinking about trying to be self-controlled, amused and middle-aged. As he kissed her again, standing just inside the door and trailing his fingertips up and down her back, she found herself in a state she had entirely forgotten. It struck her that if they did not get their clothes off and start touching each other she would probably scream. She said as much and heard him laugh.
‘Come on then,’ he said and started to unbutton his shirt.
As she saw one of the buttons fly off as he tugged impatiently at it, she had a sudden, horrible memory of a passage about ‘three-button love’ in Madame Bovary. She pushed the thought away and concentrated on taking her own clothes off as gracefully as possible.
Relieved to be under the bedclothes, hiding her stretch-marks and dimples, she realized that she had lost most of the impetus that had sent her there. But she smiled for Richard and reached up to kiss him as he leaned over her.
She soon recognized his technique as masterly as he began to repair the damage her inconvenient memory had done, stroking her, kissing her, talking to her and asking no questions. For a moment she thought that it was going to work and relaxed under his hands. He smiled and let them move more insistently, telling her she was wonderful, talking about the times they had shared in the past when they had understood each other, about his memories of her, about the longing that had resurfaced as soon as he read her play and recognized so much of her in it.
She could not concentrate. All sorts of other memories and ideas kept occurring to her. The excitement had gone completely, although her body was responding to what he was doing. She could not forget herself even when she felt him begin to make love to her.
It was then that all her muscles began to stiffen. She bit her lip. Richard stopped moving and, propping himself up on his hands as though he were doing press-ups, looked down at her.
‘What is it?’
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said, mortified by her lack of desire. ‘I know this is awful and I’m not doing it to tease. God forbid! It’s just that I’ve sort of gone off the boil and now I can’t get it back. But don’t mind me. You go ahead. You know, enjoy yourself.’
He pulled away at once, saying impatiently: ‘Don’t be idiotic. I want to make love with you – you – not entertain myself with a dummy.’ He laughed. ‘You can buy them here, you know.’
‘What?’
‘Inflatable women, designed for all sorts of nefarious purposes.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No, I’m not actually,’ he said, smiling in a friendly way that she thought was remarkably generous in the circumstances. He pushed a strand of her long hair away from her face with surprising gentleness. ‘They’re part of the other Amsterdam, which is quite different from ours.’
‘You mean you’re not angry?’ said Irene, despising herself for the childish question as much as her lack of sexual sophistication.
‘Of course I’m not. It’s not an unknown phenomenon, you know.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘Arousal at the thought of making love and de-arousal at the reality. Don’t worry about it. I rather think that you’re a good bit less experienced than I’d realized. Am I right?’
‘I don’t know why that should make me feel that I ought to apologize,’ said Irene, feeling more like herself and sounding tougher too. ‘Yes, I suppose I am. There hasn’t been anyone but Fin and it’s some time since …’ She saw that she did not need to finish the sentence.
‘Well, there you are then. That explains it. And there are no bones broken. It was all a bit precipitate. Silly of me, really; I should have thought. But since the tension was starting to split all the atoms in the air between us, I couldn’t stop myself. D’you want a drink? The minibar’s got most things.’
‘Actually, if you don’t mind, I think I might nip straight back to my own room.’
‘I hope you brought a teddy bear to cuddle.’
When she saw that he was laughing at her, she pulled a pillow from behind her head and hit him with it.
‘I may be inexperienced, but I’m not eight,’ she said indignantly.
‘Or even eighteen any longer. I shouldn’t have let you brush me off then. It’s all quite as much my fault as yours. The great seducer getting his timing completely wrong all over again. Would you like me to switch off the light while you get dressed?’
She produced a laugh of her own then to show her appreciation of his friendly voice and hoped that she had not damaged the chances for her play. At least he did not sound at all humiliated by what she had done. It came to her that the one thing Richard might not be able to forgive was humiliation. It also occurred to her, surprisingly in view of what she thought she had felt for him, that he would not be above taking revenge for that in any way he could.
Producing a series of furious, silent instructions to herself, Irene collected her clothes from the tumbled heap on the floor, got them back on, thanked him for dinner with as much dignity as she could manage, and found her way back to her own bedroom. There she leaned against the locked door and breathed deeply, covering her face with her hands.
‘You fool,’ she said into them. ‘You unutterable fool. What on earth were you thinking of?’
Sex, answered her conscience drily. Or quite possibly lust.
‘No, I wasn’t. It’s what I said to Helena. I wanted to put myself right with my own past. No wonder it didn’t work. It wasn’t Richard I wanted at all, or love or even just sex; it was an idea of myself.’
What she did want, very much indeed, at that moment was to talk to Helena, but it seemed unfairly late to ring her.