THERE WAS someone else, of that I was certain, or at least certain that something had changed in our relationship. It isn’t easy to date this transformation. I’m not particularly jealous. Suspicious yes, but not possessive. I wasn’t suddenly seized by the idea that horns had sprouted from my temples. The feeling that I was a cuckold grew on me, slowly, with stealth and subtlety, then all at once burst forth into conscious conviction, a conviction that shaped itself into words during the course of a fleeting glance through a window.
I could see her, or rather I could see her reflection, a shop window opposite our flat acting as a mirror. She was standing beneath our apartment, the door to our dwelling just to her right. Just to her right as I saw the scene inverted in the glass frontage of Derek’s Traditional English Fish & Chips. The door actually stood to her left. She stood there, as rush hour traffic thundered along Essex Road, in her typist’s uniform, like some small erect commander of a siege. Her black stiletto shoes polished and perfect. Her black stockings straight and tight and trim. Her short black skirt drawing my gaze, or rather what her short black skirt partially revealed and largely kept hidden drew my gaze. Her black jacket well tailored and set off against a white blouse, which since I knew she’d trained as an art historian brought to mind Bridget Riley. Indeed, we’d met and moved in together during our first term at university, so I’d been living with her as she pursued these studies. Over her shoulder a shiny black handbag. The black handbag, a deeper black against her black jacket, bringing to mind Rothko and Malevitch paintings. I’d never shared her enthusiasm for abstract art. She’d never shared my ardour for her work as a secretary, work that enabled me to pursue my postgraduate studies in English. Work performed on the never never, on the understanding that once I had my doctorate I’d become the breadwinner and she’d get to follow up her interest in the minimalist painter Frank Stella at an accredited academic institution. When we were in our early twenties she’d planned to take her doctorate at the Courthold, but as the years passed this scheme receded as an immediate possibility, until it had been diminished to a mere hope – a kind of alchemical transmutation but, like so many of our youthful expectations, done in reverse.
He had his back to the traffic, so that what I saw reflected of him was a pair of broad shoulders and the back of his head, which was topped by a shock of silver hair. His hair made me think of Andy Warhol. She didn’t share my taste for pop art. She considered pop imagery vulgar. She sought cosmic vibrations from canvas (I refer to paintings not tents, although that said, she was fond of camping holidays in the wilds). She did not – as she put it, and she often put it in this manner to me – seek confirmation of what she already knew from art. She did not like banality and she particularly hated banality in art and to her pop art was banal. She insisted the prices paid for Warhol’s output (she favoured denigrating it with the term throughput) would gradually fall until his works became worthless. According to her Warhol’s success was a temporary blip, a fluke of fashion, he was no master.
I put down the eighteenth century translation I was studying – Grobianus; or, the Compleat Booby. An Ironical Poem in Three Books. Done into English by Roger Bull, Esq. – and pushed up the window. I’d forgotten, or at least I’d learnt to forget, why I’d chosen eighteenth century translation as my specialised area of study. It had been a foolish move, foolish at any rate in one who had aimed to complete his doctorate quickly (in say three or four years) and thus end his dependence on another, making her instead dependent on him. At that point in time, if time can be said to have a point, my studies had stretched over seven years and would stretch out for a few more with much ease and little trouble. When I’d begun these studies I’d been interested in languages. Making English translation my speciality gave me an excuse to learn other tongues. I liked using my tongue, I wanted to lick time and this was time consuming. Looking back With hindsight and coming face to face with my lack of foresight, I see my chief mistake or blunder or error or fault or whatever, as opting for the eighteenth century. The sixteenth century, even the seventeenth century, might have proved more manageable and would have certainly been less intractable. Too many translations had been published in the eighteenth century and not enough had been lost to posterity to bring the total down to reasonably orderly proportions. The British Library was filled with eighteenth century works written in various languages and translated into English (and much else besides written in both English and a great many other tongues).
All I gained for my pains as I pushed my head into the foul outside air was the sting of traffic fumes in my throat, eyes and nose. He was disappearing into the pharmacy beneath our flat and while no longer a bloodless image, all I saw of him was a pair of broad shoulders and the back of his head. She too was revealed – but revealed is too strong a term, since I’d known her intimately, indeed cohabited with her, for the best part of ten years – as palpitating flesh and blood. What I saw of her was no longer inverted, although the image reaching my retina had been reversed. She had her back to the street and was opening the door that gave access to the stairs that led up to our flat. She disappeared, or at least she disappeared from my field of vision. Our dirty brown, fume stained, flimsy front door closed behind her. A door that reminded me of Gary Hume’s art. Neither she nor I liked our front door. Neither of us liked the paintings it brought to mind. Neither of us liked Essex Road. We liked Islington and would have opted for Upper Street or somewhere close to the canal if we’d been able to afford it. To return, however, to our front door (a door that she had just opened, walked through and closed), in referring to our front door I’m speaking in the plural, by which I don’t just mean her and me or me and her – I’m also thinking of the couple who live in the flat above us, and not just the two adults (Brian and Brenda) but also their two small children (Scott and Harris).
Had I withdrawn my head from where I held it in that indeterminate space that was both outside our flat and above the street, I’d have heard her footsteps on the stairs as she made her way up to the first floor. The stairs creaked, or at least three of them did, the first three of the second flight. Or rather those were the only stairs that creaked on the two flights that led up to our rooms. There was another stair that creaked on a third flight that led from our modest abode to the turning for a fourth flight that provided access to the top floor flat. With my head outside the window I didn’t register the protests of the three creaking stairs that undoubtedly groaned beneath her stiletto heels as she made her way up to our quarters. I know full well that those stairs creak with a predictability that is monotonous but I didn’t hear their moans on this occasion. I’d often listened for the creak of those three stairs, particularly when she’d been out late without me. The groan of the stair on the third flight, the fourth creaking stair if you count from the bottom to the top of our building, I didn’t care for – and I had a particularly strong dislike of being disturbed by it at night. It was a stair that went unsounded by her feet, except for those rare occasions when we made social calls on our upstairs neighbours Brian and Brenda. I didn’t hear her key turn in the yale lock of the unmorticed door that when I say it was ours I mean it belonged solely to me and my wife – was solely ours, that is, in terms of use (obviously as tenants we didn’t own it, possession may be nine tenths of the law but legally this door was the property of Mr Hunt, our landlord). Until my wife entered our front room I’d not been able to hear any noises coming from inside the building. The roar of traffic on Essex Road had prevented me from registering the click of her stiletto heels as she entered our flat.
I’d hoped to see his face but he’d not emerged from the pharmacy during the time it took her to get up the stairs. I had, however, seen four number 73 buses and felt thoroughly poisoned from the fumes they and a number of other diesel-driven vehicles which passed by my window had belched. I withdrew my head from the window and closed it. That is, I closed the window. Native English speakers do not at present talk about closing their heads and besides, I try to keep my mind open. At least I consider myself to have an open mind, open – at any rate – within certain limits. My wife had thrown down her handbag and removed her jacket before entering the room. They’d be in the kitchen; she always left her jacket and handbag in the kitchen when she came in from work. She was still wearing her stilettos and the kitchen floor bore scars from the heels of these shoes, and not just this new pair which she’d only bought the previous Saturday but also the pair that she’d thrown out after purchasing this replacement footwear. My wife also had a pair of red stiletto shoes that had damaged the kitchen floor. The red stilettos lasted longer than her black stilettos since she never wore them to work, reserving them for evening wear. She also possessed a pair of white stilettos which she’d had for a very long time and wore chiefly but not exclusively when we made love, since this greatly pleased me.
“Is he married?”
“Who?”
“He.”
“Who?”
“The guy you were talking to in the street.”
“You ought to know as well as I do that Frank is widowed. He’s been our landlord for more than two years.”
“I only saw the back of his head and he looked, well he looked different.”
“Make me a cup of tea.”
I kissed her and she sat down. I stood for a few moments staring at the flimsy material of the short black skirt that covered the top of her legs. We’d been together for ten years and I still found her attractive. Indeed, I found her very attractive, very attractive indeed. I took in the black stockings covering her shapely legs. Shiny black stockings. As I took in the burnished black stockings I wondered what he was like. The fact that I had a rival merely added fuel to the flames of my passion. I’m not the jealous type and when we made love we often inflamed each other with intimate words. We had a number of shared and long-standing fantasies involving threesomes. We’d often had sex in public places, places where we might be seen by other people. Indeed, I knew that at least one of my wife’s friends had watched us making love. It was when we were still undergraduates in Norwich, and living together in a big bedsitter room.
Katie, my wife’s best friend from school, had come up from Canterbury to stay for the weekend. Katie slept on a battered imitation black leather sofa that the landlord supplied as part of the furnishings. The plastic cover was ripped and yellow foam showed through, so it was permanently covered with a white blanket. On Sunday morning, when we thought Katie was soundly asleep, we’d made love. She’d woken and watched us. My wife, at that point she was still my future wife since we didn’t get married until after we’d graduated, suspected we’d woken Katie and got confirmation out of her as they walked to the train station later that day. I’ve always regretted that I didn’t accompany them since at that point Katie didn’t have a boyfriend. My future wife, my girlfriend as she was then, had snogged Katie several times when the two of them were in their mid-teens and they’d even talked about becoming girlfriends. There were no secrets between my wife and her friend, so Katie was ordered to divulge the thoughts and fantasies that had passed through her mind as she’d watched us making the beast with two backs on a feather soft double bed. As she’d watched Felicity sitting on my face with my tongue darting between Felicity’s legs, Katie admitted that she’d really wanted to come over and suck what she described as my big blunt cock. Seeing how excited I became when I was told this, my wife (or future wife as she was then) encouraged Katie to indulge in fantasies about a threesome. Katie eventually agreed that we could go down to see her in Kent for a monster sex session, but the visit was cancelled when she started seeing a boy called Graham, whom she later married. At that point both of them were studying politics at the University of Kent.
I knew Felicity hadn’t had a bad day at the office, she smiled – even troubling herself with the effort of making the smile appear coy – as I gazed down at her. If she’d had a bad day she would have told me I looked stupid with my mouth open, or picked up the paper, or told me to hurry up and get her some tea. Felicity had changed, or if she hadn’t actually changed, then she had grown younger and changed back to her old sweet self. It wasn’t that Felicity was vicious or mean but sometimes her work made her short-tempered – well it was a combination of the temporary office work that no longer seemed temporary, and the fact that she was not getting on with the real business of her life, her researches into minimal painting. It was a long time since she, a long time since we, had graduated from the University of East Anglia.
“What is it?” Felicity asked me.
“You’re different.”
“I’m eight, no, nine hours older than when you last saw me.”
“More like nine years younger, you’ve changed.”
“For the better?”
“For the better.”
“Are you jealous?”
“You’re seeing someone else, who is he?”
“I’m not interested in other men.”
Then it dawned on me, or rather, what was going on half dawned on me. When I mentioned Katie’s name Felicity laughed but I knew I was on the right track. She was seeing another woman. I looked at the hem of Felicity’s skirt and then I looked at her face. I was trembling with emotion but the emotion was not anger. I felt happy, I felt very very happy. I put my arms around Felicity and told her everything would work out, that we would work it out, that I had worked it out. I told Felicity that this was what I’d always wanted. She was to phone her girlfriend right away, invite her over. I looked at the hem of Felicity’s skirt and wanted to wrench it up but I restrained myself. What I wanted to do – and I wanted to do this far more than simply wrench up Felicity’s skirt – was sit on a chair. I wanted to strip off and sit naked in a chair and watch Felicity and her girlfriend make love. I’d look at Felicity and her girlfriend, drink them in with my eyes. I’d get off on Felicity and her girlfriend getting it on. As I watched them – or so I thought or imagined – I might even touch myself. These touches would be gentle enough to qualify as caresses. Nothing so vigorous that it would bring forth pollution. I wouldn’t spasm or spend what I was now determined to save, at least not until Felicity had brought her girlfriend to complete submission. Then I would get up and, and, and spurt into the other woman’s face. That was what I really wanted, what I really really wanted, and to get it I had to wait. And not just wait, but wait and wait and wait.
Felicity was reluctant to make the phone call, she did not want to make that phone call, she told me to ease up, let her break it to me gently. I stopped up my ears, refused to listen, until eventually she did my bidding. She sent me out of the room, made the call, then told me her girlfriend – how I relished those words her girlfriend (or as she put it “my girlfriend”) at that point in time, if time can be said to have a point. I could hardly wait but wait I must and wait I did, not just the full hour casually mentioned after she’d made the phone call but an extra fifteen minutes on top. The prospects I saw opening up before me during that wait carried my imagination off into infinite spaces. I imagined her, the girlfriend, her tight bodice cracking with vivacity, her desperation to suck my thing as I waggled it provocatively in her face. But the girlfriend, the other woman, she was, she was, she was . . . Well, she was shapely but not my type. I knew and still know many men who find her attractive but I am not one of them. I’d known Felicity’s girlfriend since boyhood and she’d long been my rival for family affections. When I saw Felicity’s girlfriend, when she walked through the door of the front room in which I stood expectantly awaiting her, the mask of fantasy fell away. I would not, I could not, engage in an unnatural relation with my mother’s daughter, my father’s pride and joy. She came into the flat and shortly afterwards she left with Felicity. She left with Felicity and a bundle of Felicity’s clothes under her arm. In the interval I did not speak but you could hear the silence vibrate.