It was a harder thing for Arnold to have an excuse to collect Evelyn from Vera’s house if his daughter went there after school. Polly always fetched her because she was usually back from the shop before Arnold was home from work. There were only two days of the week when Arnold was home earlier, and these only rarely coincided with the days that Evelyn went to Vera’s house. Nevertheless he prepared himself for the occasion when it did happen, that he could leap in and offer to collect Evelyn from Vera’s. He didn’t feel it was something he could just volunteer to do, he had to have a good reason. And so when the time came he picked his moment carefully and said he had to go out and buy a new ink cartridge. That was the kind of modern emergency that fitted the situation perfectly, one that every poet and academic knows – the empty ink cartridge and the dissertation to print out by tomorrow. They sold his cartridges at a place on the main road that didn’t close till 6.30. ‘I’ll pick Evelyn up on the way back, if you like.’
‘OK,’ said Polly, mildly surprised, ‘if you don’t mind.’
‘No, I don’t mind.’
And he drove straight to Vera’s house.
He had only been there once or twice before, and hadn’t taken much notice of it then, but now he studied it in every detail. He took in the frontage, rather similar to his own house, Victorian red brick, stained glass in the front-door window, tasteful curls of art nouveau in the side panels. The glass in the windows was dimpled and crisp. There were net curtains, which Arnold thought rather odd. His generation had done away with net curtains, so he had assumed. But here were net curtains, greyly opaque, such as his grandmother used to have in her windows, from which she observed the world as though from inside a muslin bag.
There was a short front garden that had been pounded into submission by the pouring on of pebbles. In a wooden tub an olive tree was trying to grow. A garishly yellow and orange plastic tricycle sat crookedly on the pebbles. Unmistakably a family house, even without the tricycle – there was an aura of the siege, of a household under the constant bombardment of its children’s demands.
He pressed the bell, which worked. Vera answered the door and didn’t immediately register his presence, saying hello without looking who she was speaking to, assuming him, he supposed, to be his wife. She did a kind of double-take, and her face immediately brightened, her eyes dilated and doubled their fullness. ‘Oh – hello, it’s you.’
She couldn’t hide or deny her pleasure in seeing him.
‘Hello again. Can I come in?’
‘Of course,’ she stepped back from the door, and he passed her closely as she held it for him, almost as if she was expecting a kiss, the kiss of a husband home from work, the polite friendship kisses that had become commonplace now, and which provided Arnold with endless opportunities for awkwardness (to kiss or not to kiss, one cheek or two? Lip or no lip?). But he passed her without making physical contact, though he had to mention her hair – or should he? She had put it up. It was piled on the top of her head now, with some stray strands hanging down. The whole neck was revealed.
Since their initial exchanges he felt he had gained permission to make slightly personal remarks about her appearance. He had made the suggestion about her hair several times, and she had always come back with some riposte, some reason for not wearing her hair that way.
— Why don’t you ever wear your hair up?
— Why – do you think it would cure my headaches?
— It might do. But it seems strange, when you have grown your hair long, not to do things with it.
— Oh, so you are saying I’m strange?
— No, not at all. It’s just that your neck – you should show it off more.
— Oh no, my neck is too long. People would laugh at me.
They had talked about make-up. Vera never wore any because she had sensitive skin. She had never in her life worn mascara or eyeshadow. Not even when she was a teenager, when all her friends were obsessed by it. Arnold said that she didn’t need it.
— I can’t imagine you with make-up. It would look wrong.
— Another way of putting what you just said would be – it might make you look quite nice.
— But you already look quite nice.
— Angus is always trying to persuade me to wear make-up. He buys it for my birthday. He once bought this stuff for my eyelids. It was like a bottle of ink, with a paint brush. I said, what am I supposed to do with this? It looks like something to lacquer shoes with. He said I should paint it on my eyelids. And so I tried it, but it was ridiculous. Without my glasses I couldn’t see to put it on, so he tried doing it for me, but I couldn’t keep my eyelids still for long enough, and he didn’t have a steady enough hand, and the stuff kept dripping. When he’d done it I looked like a zombie. And then my eyes became inflamed and I couldn’t see for the rest of the day.
These were the sort of things they sometimes talked about. He loved to hear her criticize her husband, which she would only do indirectly. She said he was frustrated in his job, because it was a nine-to-five job with an hour-and-a-half commute each way, which meant he felt he didn’t see enough of her or the children, and this sometimes made him sour and grumpy when he was at home.
Half-past six was his time for returning home, though quite often he could be as late as seven. But he was never, ever, home before half-past six. Arnold had memorized this fact. It was half-past five when he arrived at the house to collect Evelyn. A whole hour before the nine-to-five man was due home from work.
Arnold decided not to say anything about Vera’s hair, not immediately. She had not been expecting him to call, so she couldn’t have done it for his benefit. Nevertheless he was excited by the possibility that she had responded to his observations about her. He passed through the narrow hall with its tide of shoes and wellingtons and turned right into a rather dowdy lounge-diner. The last time he had seen this room it had been prepared for visitors, swept and dusted, with toys back in their boxes, DVDs back on their shelves. Now he saw it in its raw state, with its litter of childhood. The table still carried the trash from the children’s tea – smeared plates, spilt juice, flakes of food on the floor. The room had an air of defeat about it. He sensed the presence of a slightly more argumentative family than his own, of children who answered back, who had bedtime tantrums, who had the upper hand in the household’s power struggles. It became immediately apparent when Vera went to call the children, who were in the playroom at the back of the house watching a DVD. There were loud cries of protest. Arnold followed behind and saw a small group of children gathered on the carpet before the glow of a large, cumbersome television.
‘Daddy, it’s nearly finished, can we watch to the end?’
He had almost forgotten Evelyn was in the room, and was startled for a moment to see her face down there among the other childish faces. He didn’t say anything but looked at Vera. There was nothing he wanted more than to stay. He wanted to stay for as long as he could, and hoped she was thinking the same.
‘It’s got about ten minutes to run,’ she said, ‘I could give you a tour of the house.’
They left the children. Arnold took one last glance at them, making sure they were settled. There were four of them. Vera had two more children, one older, one younger than Irina. They all got on very well together. Everyone noticed it, commented on it, how well they got on. Evelyn was becoming like a new sibling for them. What struck him at that moment was how uninterested in him they seemed. Apart from Evelyn, none of them had acknowledged his presence at all, even though he was a rare visitor to the house. When he tried to remember his own childhood, the entrance of strangers into the house had always been a cause of excitement and fear, of awe – who were they, these visitors? What were they doing, why had they come? What did they know? What powers did they have? For these children nothing seemed remarkable. He was something slow and colourless by comparison to the more vivid reality of manufactured narrative that absorbed them now.
Back in the lounge-diner, for the moment an adult domain, he and Vera inhabited what seemed a far more solid and logical world. He wanted to say something about the children, about how horrible it was that the television captured them so completely, but he was aware of how thankful he was for it, for the invisibility it conferred on them. And anyway he wanted them both to forget about the children as quickly as they could.
‘We’ve been wanting to decorate this room for ages, but I don’t see the point until the kids have grown up a bit. They’ll ruin it as soon as it’s done.’
From there they went upstairs. The same scuffed quality to the walls of the stairwell, wallpaper torn aside as though someone had tried to turn it, like the page of a book. A dent in the plaster. On the landing there was no decoration at all. Walls had been stripped in preparation for paper that was never hung, but scribbled on with pencils and crayons instead. Bare floorboards. A heap of dirty washing piled by the bathroom door.
Vera led him through into a bedroom. The atmosphere in here was very different. The room had been decorated in dark blue, the bed was plump and neat. There was a sense of crowdedness of things, but of a careful order as well. Arnold noticed a row of ties hanging on the back of a chair. A desk was by the window with a big, out-of-date-looking computer on it. They suddenly seemed to be in a separate world from the children downstairs.
‘This is where we sleep,’ said Vera, with a slightly embarrassed hesitation in her voice, as if she was suddenly not sure why she had brought Arnold here. Arnold’s attention was drawn to another corner of the room, where a sewing machine sat, identical to the one he had first seen her working on, at his own house, the one that still occupied a corner of his lounge-diner. Alongside it was the older black and chrome one she had brought to a sewing evening. The lives of the husband and wife here seemed represented like two fighters in a boxing ring, occupying opposite corners. Was that a reflection of their relationship, Arnold wondered, poles apart, adversaries? But the sewing machines bothered him because they were also a reminder of Vera’s friendship with his wife. Their presence halted any thought he had that Vera had brought him in here so that they could make love, even though at that moment he had to use all his reasoning and willpower to hold himself back from reaching out and touching her. Nevertheless the privilege of being admitted to this sanctum, the place where the object of his fascination slept, albeit with the nine-to-five man, was intensely thrilling to him.
Vera looked exquisite to him at that moment. She was wearing the simplest of clothes, jeans and a dark blue T-shirt with a neckline low enough to be revealing when she bent down. Tantalizing glimpses were given when she picked a stray toy off the floor, of smooth, deepening skin, white inner fabric. But then she was gone and he was following her back onto the landing. The house seemed to go up and up. There was another staircase, a short one that led to a mini-landing which opened onto another bathroom. This was ancient, with a copper boiler, and a white enamel bath on clawed feet. The silver taps were encrusted with white crystals. Yet there was an intense brightness about the room, a freshness despite the agedness of everything.
They visited other rooms, went up more stairs, finally they were in the attic, which was one of the children’s bedrooms, and here they made love.
He reached out and put his hand against the side of her neck. He felt confident that his touch was desired and would not be rejected. She had brought him up here for no other reason than to be as far away from the children as they could be, to have the longest amount of warning if they were interrupted – all those staircases to clump up. He could see in her face that she was waiting for him to do something, the eye contact was prolonged and meaningful. She looked a little afraid, knowing that they had reached a boundary and were preparing to cross. She almost seemed to wish there were more stairs to climb, that her house went up and up for ever. But they had reached the top. They were crushed in beneath the low attic roof. And he reached out and touched her neck, placing his hand on the side of it, in a gesture that was reassuring, gently affirmative, encouraging, as if she had been a frightened child, or he was seeing her off on a train. And she held his gaze as his hand rested there. He could feel her pulse in the palm of his hand. And she lifted her hand and placed it on top of his, cementing the grip.
He had always imagined that, if this moment were ever to occur, something would hold him back, some moral force – guilt, a sense of wrongness, fear for what he was putting at stake, and if not that, then Vera’s religious sense of right and wrong would prevail and prevent anything happening. But in reality, those forces proved to be as weak as a baby’s hand, and Arnold suddenly became aware that what he had been doing in all these weeks of chatting with Vera and complimenting her on her looks and talking about her neck, was laying the ground for precisely this to happen.
They kissed, and he remembered how complicated the procedure seemed when performed with a near-stranger. He didn’t know her mouth and their teeth clashed. She put out her tongue at the wrong moment, so that it was left hanging in the air, before he went back and took it in his own mouth. There was no taste in her mouth other than the taste of her. She put a hand to his crotch. The sensation of being touched there by her knocked the air out of him. He was becoming so solid he had to wriggle slightly against the sudden ache, and had to free himself of his own arousal, in order to let it gain strength. Her hand against his jeans pinched lightly at the stiffened length as though gauging its thickness. His hand went to her abdomen and stirred the fabric at her waist, untucked her and went inside. The warmth of her skin was slightly cloying, she felt softer than he’d expected in one so slim, it seemed she had no skeleton, no edges. He pulled back from her and lifted the T-shirt higher, exposing her white bra. He suddenly became aware that he would do anything to have her breasts revealed to him. Their disclosure seemed, in that moment, like the greatest goal of his life; he would have done anything to guard and maintain the privilege that had, out of nowhere, come to him, of witnessing the moment. If a child had run into the room he couldn’t have stopped himself. He would have killed someone. He was that closed off from things. At the same time, he wanted to hold back that moment of disclosure for as long as he could, knowing it could never happen in quite the same way again. It was the moment, as much as the thing, that contained the beauty.
His breath went away again when they were uncupped. He couldn’t help but utter, barely audibly, the single word, ‘Jesus’, because they seemed to him miraculously perfect. He was aware that she was making a mewling sound as he put his lips to her tightened nipple and sucked. Her mouth was at his ear, her tongue travelling along its grooves, voice filling it. His mouth tugged at her, extended her, she snapped back, there was a taste of something on his tongue. In his mind he pictured her neck, her long neck, her swan’s neck, her Alice in Wonderland neck coiling like a serpent, like a serpent, coiling down on him. She had found a way through his clothing and her fingers had lightly touched his cock, then slowly began to take a firmer hold. He wanted to cry like a baby. He felt helpless, as though his body had come undone and she was fastening it. He felt as though he was bleeding somewhere. Then he felt powerful, gigantic. He could have kicked a door down.
And then they were finished. They had reached a point where they could go no further, not without risking everything. High up in the attic of the tall house they felt as though their children were trapped at the bottom of a well, but even so, they might come tumbling up the stairs at any moment on some spontaneous expedition. A form of sanity returned to the two adults and settled on them and they adjusted themselves, tucked themselves away, buttoned themselves up. Still breathless they hugged and kissed in a reaffirming way, at the top of the stairs. At the landing they kissed again, telling each other, by so doing, that they didn’t regret what they had done on the floor above. Only when they came towards the stairs and passed the open door of the master bedroom did they break off contact, became separate and distinct again. Arnold experienced a sense of exertion, as though he had been running, or climbing. He felt as though he had rescued Vera from a crumbling building. He felt as though she, in turn, had rescued him. He felt like they were survivors of some unimaginable disaster, that they had saved each other, and were returning to their old life as if reborn, ready for anything.
The children amazed him by showing no sign that anything had happened; they were just as he’d left them, in the gaze of the television, even though their DVD had finished, and they were watching something else. It seemed impossible that what they had done upstairs had not wrought some change in the world beyond them, but everything was the same, nothing had been affected. Even Vera was back to the woman she’d always been on the ground floor of the house – sensible, polite, serious. But he could still see the flush on her skin, the fullness of her eyes, as though she’d been crying.
As he took his daughter out of the front door which Vera held open for him she was all practical, polite primness. He looked at her carefully for any sign of regret, and she gave him a smile of intense warmth as he passed, a momentary glimpse of her upstairs face, that lasted barely a second, but which was enough to signal she had no regrets about what had happened.
He held his daughter by the hand as he walked her to the car. The feel of her hand in his was terrible, for what his own hand had so recently been doing. He felt he was passing the essence of his wrongness from his hand to hers, that he had infected her with his own vileness, that she was permanently marked with it, yet he couldn’t avoid holding her hand, because he couldn’t reject normal contact with her either. And at the same time, the feeling of rebirth stayed with him. It was a feeling of exhilaration that was so strong he was shaking, and had trouble driving. When he spoke he had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth, and his daughter laughed at him, because he was talking nonsense. He was so exhilarated it was all he could do to prevent himself from telling his daughter what he had just done, he was overspilling with the joy of it, he wanted to share it, to relate it. At home, the same with Polly, he wanted to tell her what had just happened, not as a confession, but in order to let her know how he was feeling, to share the joy of the experience. But the sane part of him placed its restraints on his behaviour. He understood quite plainly how badly he had behaved with Vera, and he understood how that behaviour would be seen by others. But from that point on he felt as though there were two of him living parallel lives, the part of him that cared about and loved his family, and the part of him that loved Vera, and he was able to separate one from the other with an ease that surprised and worried him.
The wrongness of what he had done seemed nourishing. And he wanted more of it. He wanted to do it again and again. He wanted to do nothing but that thing he had done with Vera. He could not stop thinking about her. Not even for a moment. It was as though she had written herself onto him.