It had all started so innocently, as these things do.
‘Felix is coming back,’ said Richard, looking up from his letter. ‘He says what’s the point of paying no income tax if the climate gives you writer’s block.’
‘Elizabeth says it’s because he can’t find enough women to screw,’ said Helen, putting down her letter. ‘The Irish must be more discriminating than the English after all. Good for them.’
‘Oh, never mind the reasons,’ said Richard. ‘They’re coming back, that’s the main thing.’
‘There’s no need to sound so jubilant,’ said Helen. ‘People would still like you even without your dreadful friend. You don’t need the contrast.’
Richard looked at her seriously. ‘D’you really dislike him?’
‘I despise him,’ said Helen. ‘That’s much worse. He’s like a greedy child grabbing all the cakes on the plate. I think it’s nauseating behaviour at his age.’
‘Does that mean we can’t have them to dinner?’
‘Not until the end of term. Unless you do the cooking.’
‘Of course I’ll do the cooking. Don’t want strychnine in the stew, do I? Anyway, Elizabeth would be very upset if you poisoned him. She loves him, you know.’
‘Poor cow,’ said Helen.
Sally put her head round the door. ‘What’s all the excitement?’
‘Felix and Elizabeth are coming back, that’s all.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Sally, disappearing. ‘They’re nice.’
People on the whole did not like Helen, which suited her quite well because it meant they left her alone. They sensed her impatience with them, her air of having better things to do with her time. Her painter’s eyes looked them over and assessed them and they felt themselves discarded. Helen moved on: tall and rangy, lean but large-boned, built like a cowboy, clad in denim, busy and preoccupied. Her hair was plaited or wrapped round her head; her tough square hands had short nails stained with paint. She had not worn make-up for ten years.
People who did like her, the few, liked her very much indeed. They valued her honesty, her loyalty, her integrity and her silence, which allowed them to talk.
‘You look wonderful,’ Elizabeth told her once. ‘Rather like a Valkyrie.’
Helen, who thought this was rubbish, laughed rudely. But she knew what Elizabeth meant. She did have a faintly Nordic air, with her blonde hair streaked with grey and her cold green eyes that frightened people away. When she laughed it was a surprise, gutsy and raunchy, displaying enviable teeth.
Now she sat in the smoky room with her colleagues while students brought samples of their work and the tutors commented. They were also supposed to check on the progress of theses and post-graduate plans, but the atmosphere was casual and relaxed. Tutors and students looked equally scruffy, and everyone smoked except Helen, who had given it up painfully five years ago and was still waiting to feel the benefit.
The first student brought in a triptych of blue, mauve, rust, gold and purple in big vague shapes as if hanging in space. Mike and Andy went to help him arrange them. The paintings were taller than all of them and filled a wall of the room. Helen liked them very much.
‘They look like a backdrop for Wagner,’ she said. ‘I think you could be a stage designer.’
The student looked pleased.
‘I quite like the idea of a narrative,’ said Mike. ‘You’ve achieved an effect of illusionary space. Those bands belong to either side of the line. And those edges are real.’
Andy lit a cigarette. ‘I can’t say I enjoy them,’ he said. ‘They’re very awkward. But that’s a good quality. Intriguing.’
‘The light catches them differently as you move them round,’ the student said. He struggled to prove his point and Mike went back to help him. They all studied the paintings in silence, then argued gently about which arrangement they preferred. Mike lit a cigarette.
‘What’s your thesis about?’ Helen asked.
‘Rothko,’ said the student, lighting a cigarette. ‘The interaction between his life and his work.’
Helen looked at the student, small and dark and thin, so talented but so young. How could he hope to understand depression and despair, whatever drove you to open an artery, so that when you were found, soaked in red, you resembled one of your own paintings. Sally had been three when Rothko died, drenched in his own blood, and Helen had just ended her marriage. Losing Carey, who seemed to her then the only man she would ever love, she felt that she and her daughter were emotionally huddled together in the draughty studio. It was a long time before she could forgive Rothko for deserting her when she needed him most, but she was grateful, too: the tears she shed for him released an avalanche of tears for herself.
Well, perhaps she had misjudged the student; perhaps he did understand. After all, when she had been his age, she had considered herself extremely grown-up. Aborting Carey’s baby had been the only choice open to her, left alone with Sally. It was barely possible to support one child, never mind two, and Carey was obviously going to be no help at all. But she had cried all the same for the child that would have been Sally’s brother or sister, and thought of her own blood and Rothko’s quietly flowing together, as if into the same river.
‘I didn’t think I’d get probation for this,’ said Richard’s new client, chain-smoking. ‘I thought I’d go to jail.’ She sounded almost disappointed.
Richard said, ‘Would you like to tell me about it?’
‘You know, don’t you? They’ve told you all about me.’
She was a small girl, hardly older than Sally, but without her robust strength. She had a mean, undernourished look about her, and an air of suspicion, like an animal that has learned to be wary of man. She was watchful as she smoked her cigarette, glancing sideways as if anticipating sudden attack from some unknown agent, who might leap through the door if she were not vigilant.
‘They don’t know all about you,’ Richard said. ‘Nobody does, except you. I’d like you to tell me a bit, if you want to.’ She frowned, stubbed out her cigarette and lit a fresh one. ‘Well, I took him, didn’t I? He was there in his pram outside the launderette and I just took him. I knew it was wrong. I didn’t even think about his mum.’
‘Were you thinking about your own baby?’
‘Oh, yeah. Course I was. That’s what they said in court. Supposed to get me off, that was.’ She smiled faintly at such a ridiculous hope.
‘Wasn’t it true?’
‘Yeah. Didn’t make no difference though, did it? It’s still wrong, what I done. I know that.’
Richard said gently, ‘Sometimes it helps to talk about how you feel.’
‘But you can’t do nothing, can you? I mean, I’ve had him adopted and that’s it. You can’t get him back, can you? So what’s the point of talking about it?’
Her name was Tracey and she was eighteen. Her parents had persuaded her to have her baby adopted and now she blamed them. She reminded him of girls he had taught, growing up too soon, wanting something of their own to love. He longed to help her and he felt inadequate.
At the end of the long day, he went back in the office for a cup of tea.
‘Your wife rang,’ they told him.
‘Which one?’ Inge wouldn’t give her first name and just called herself Mrs Morgan. It had become a standing joke in the office: Richard and his two wives.
‘The German one.’
Richard went back into his room and dialled. He wasn’t surprised; Helen hardly ever rang the office.
‘Inge?’
‘Oh, thank God. There’s something wrong with the stove. I can smell gas. Can you come?’
‘Ring the gas board,’ he said, ‘Inge, please.’
‘I have rung them, of course. But they won’t come till tomorrow. We could all be blown up tonight.’
‘Tell them you can smell gas,’ he said, ‘and they’ll come. They have an emergency service.’
‘They don’t believe me,’ she said tragically.
Richard was reminded of Matilda, who told such dreadful lies. ‘And every time she shouted “Fire,” They only answered “Little liar.”’ Something like that. His mother had read it to him. He had read it to his children. Perhaps that was where Inge had got the idea. The gas board were probably wise to her by now. If, in fact, she had ever rung them. If, that is, she could smell gas at all. But how could he take the risk? There was just a chance in a million that there was a gas leak and Inge and his children could all be blown up in the night. And the night he called her bluff would of course be the night it happened.
An endless chain of visits, false alarms, tears and recriminations stretched behind him like the apparitions in Macbeth, to the crack of doom, or so it seemed, and ahead as well, for the rest of his life. This must be what I think I deserve, he told himself, at some level anyway, or I would have learned to refuse by now. I deserted her, therefore I owe her a visit, unlimited visits. She was a good wife, she devoured me with her love, gave me children, cooked meals, cleaned the house, offered and demanded sex like the Kama Sutra, and I left her for Helen, because Helen didn’t need me so much, because Helen could manage without me and had proved it by doing so for many years. I ran away from Inge because I was exhausted and ashamed that I didn’t have enough left over to satisfy her at the end of the day.
‘Please, Richard,’ she said now, and he felt she had been saying it for ever. He glanced at his watch. A quarter to six. A journey from Stockwell to Camden Town in the rush hour, the time spent on talk, on tears, or just possibly on gas, even perhaps all three, then the journey back again – there was no way he could get home before eight. Helen would kill him. Today of all days. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ he said sharply, and rang off before she could thank him.
‘Oh, Richard,’ Sally said. ‘Not tonight. Not on Mum’s birthday.’ Her voice was always uncannily like Helen’s on the phone.
‘I know,’ he said, it’s a bugger but it can’t be helped, it’s an emergency. Tell her how sorry I am and explain about the gas.’ He was full of ignoble relief that Helen wasn’t home yet to receive this message in person.
Sally sighed. ‘She’ll never believe it.’
‘I know. I’m not sure I do either.’
‘Then why are you going?’
‘Because. In case.’
‘Honestly,’ Sally said. ‘You two.’
‘I know. I hope you’re learning from all this, what not to do. Have my flowers arrived?’
‘Yes, they’re lovely. But they won’t do the trick.’
‘They’re a start,’ he said. ‘Tell her I sent my love as well.’
He hated visiting the house, so he tried to avoid it, so Inge had to demand his presence. He understood this dreary cycle of events very well but was powerless to change it. Guilt made him a soft touch. He would have advised one of his clients to take a firmer line.
Everything about the house was unchanged, and visiting it made him feel that he was in a time warp, still married to Inge and having an affair with Helen. He felt alienated and yet it was also completely natural: that was what alarmed him. Because he had been making the same journey, under duress, for eight years, he could almost believe, when he was very tired, that nothing had changed and the trauma of divorce and remarriage still lay ahead.
Inge preserved the house and garden in a state of ritual disorder that began the day he left her. Prior to that, she had been everyone’s idea of a model hausfrau. He knew that the change was intended to shock but he still found it shocking. Clothes lay where they fell. There was grime in the bath and sink. The boys wrote messages in the dust on the furniture. The grass grew waist-high unless he cut it himself, although he had bought a motor-mower to make it easier for Inge, and the boys were big enough now to help. But they colluded with her. They liked the messy house and the unkempt garden; they felt comfortable not having any appearances to keep up. When they had nothing left to wear they went to the launderette with all their clothes stuffed into black dustbin liners; sometimes they took the sheets and towels as well. Inge cooked, and that was all. He never found out what she did with the rest of her time. The boys said she stayed in bed a lot, reading library books, drinking wine and taking pills her doctor had given her for depression, but how could they know when they were at school? Perhaps she only did that when they were there to see, so they could tell him about it.
He knew she was unhappy, even desperate, but he also knew she was doing it to punish him. He marvelled that she could be so persevering in self-destruction, that it could be rewarding enough, that she could find the energy to keep all this pain alive. On particularly crowded days when he was trying to fit in one more client, one more report, one more phone call, he even found himself envying Inge her free time. Miserable she might be, but at least she was miserable at her leisure.
In the early days of their separation he had implored her to get a job, but she told him she had no skills. Useless to point out that she could cook, drive, type and speak three languages: she countered with the indisputable fact that she was liable to burst into tears at any time and this made her unfit for employment. Now, of course, she could blame the recession and did not have to cry so often.
When he first moved out he had to visit her in order to see the boys, since she would not allow them under Helen’s roof. Now they were big enough to meet him at the office or a cinema or McDonald’s, but they still would not visit the house. He respected their loyalty to Inge but found it irksome and vaguely insulting. He took it to mean that they had not forgiven him for leaving them when they were little, but they denied this. ‘We sort of promised Mum,’ Karl said, ‘and you know what she’s like.’
Sometimes he thought the arrangement suited Helen very well. She resented his visits to Inge but she did not have to accommodate his sons, although she had always declared herself willing to do so. Her life was unchanged by their marriage: she lived in the same house with her daughter, taught at the same college, painted in the same studio. Richard was an addition to all this activity: from being a visitor, he had become a resident. Whereas he had to relate to two wives, support two homes, consider the needs of three children, as well as doing the same very demanding job. His life was transformed. Yet how could he complain about this when it was what he wanted, what he had chosen? He complained.
‘You don’t support two homes,’ Helen said calmly. ‘You support yourself and Inge and the boys. I support myself and Sally. That’s perfectly fair and reasonable. Of course it would be nice if Carey supported Sally too, but he doesn’t, what with Marsha and their brood, so there we are. You’re a luxury, my love. An optional extra.’ She kissed him, to take the sting out of the words. Teasing him was, he knew, her way of defusing her resentment of Inge’s demands.
‘I don’t think you’d like Carey to support Sally,’ he said. ‘You prefer to have her all to yourself.’
‘But I share her with you,’ Helen said. ‘You’re more of a father to her than Carey ever was. What does it matter who pays the bills?’
But it did matter and they both knew it. Money was power: the hand that held the cheque book ruled the world. Helen earned less than he did, roughly half his salary, in fact, plus occasional sales of paintings, but it was enough for herself and Sally, just about, whereas he was trying to do right by six people, which was impossible.
Sally stayed in his mind as he drove through the heavy traffic. He had always thought of her as an anxious child, watchful and eager to please. When they first met her eyes darted from him to Helen and back again, gauging their moods; a smile seemed to hover near her mouth ready to be switched on or suppressed, whichever the situation might require. It did not make her false: he never thought of her as less than genuine. But it meant that she had a curious lack of self and he found himself wondering who she was inside. It seemed unnatural for a child to think so much of others and modify her behaviour to suit them.
‘Sally’s too good to be true,’ he said to Helen one day on one of his visits.
‘Yes, I know. Aren’t I lucky?’ She smiled, ‘I expect she’ll rebel in her teens like everyone else.’
In a way he would have liked her to be more perturbed by her good fortune. One day he arrived early at the studio and called her name as he mounted the stairs, only to be met by Sally at the door with her fingers on her lips.
‘Ssh,’ she said, managing to sound both friendly and disapproving. ‘Mummy’s working.’
He sensed an alliance between them from which he might be excluded or in which he might be invited to participate. Sally, having observed the chaos of her mother’s life with her father, had appointed herself as Helen’s guardian or minder, even a sort of juvenile business manager, whose primary function was to smooth Helen’s path. They were two against the world, and in that sense he found the alliance very touching. But he also felt it was dangerous. He was conscious of desperately wanting Sally’s approval, yet he knew that she would feel for him whatever Helen wanted her to feel and it would be real. He saw an adult beauty and gravity in her face, but there were also glimpses of the child Helen had been before experience marked her. Helen, he felt, relaxed only when making love: lost in an orgasm, she let him into her private world, even opening her eyes at the last moment to admit him so that he could drown. Sally, he discovered, was delightfully ticklish and would giggle and shriek to the point of hysteria. She also liked to be picked up and carried high on his shoulders, trusting he would not drop her; then he felt she was able to shed her responsibilities. These were exhilarating times for both of them.
One day there was a moment of breakthrough when she said to him, ‘Mummy was very sad when Daddy went away.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I expect she was.’
There was a pause while Sally looked at him very seriously before asking, ‘Are you going to be my new Daddy?’
He said, ‘I do hope so.’
That night he said to Helen, knowing it was the right moment, ‘I want to marry you.’
‘But you’re married already,’ she said, unsurprised.
‘You know it was all wrong with Inge long before we met. I love you. I love Sally. I want us to be a family.’
‘What about the boys?’
‘I know. It’s a mess. But so is this. How can we live like this for ever, with me coming and going and telling lies at home? Inge must know something is happening, we have terrible rows. I’d like to be straight with her.’
‘I can’t handle the guilt,’ Helen said. ‘If you come to me, you’ve got to feel all right about it, or I’d rather go on as we are, or even break up.’
The words gave him a chill of pure horror and he realised she had become indispensable, more than a romantic dream.
‘Christ knows,’ she said violently, ‘I’ve been the deceived wife and I never fancied myself as the other woman. I don’t know how I allowed this to happen. And you’re too bloody nice to be in this situation.’
In those days they both still smoked and seemed to spend a lot of time lighting each other’s cigarettes and pacing up and down.
‘The thing is,’ Helen said, ‘I don’t ever want to live in a mess again. I want to love someone who loves me and I want to know the bills are paid and the house is clean and there isn’t going to be any drama. I want to get on with my work and come home to someone who’s really there, not drunk or stoned or in bed with another woman. All that sixties rubbish, I don’t ever want to live through that again.’
She had never spoken so openly about Carey before.
‘I want to leave Inge and live with you,’ Richard said. ‘And I want to leave teaching and get into the probation service. I really want to change my life. Will you help me?’
‘No,’ Helen said. ‘I don’t want to be blamed if it goes wrong.’
‘Then I’ll have to do it all by myself.’
She took his hand, ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s lonely. But I couldn’t leave Sally for you. How can I expect you to leave the boys for me?’
‘Will you think less of me if I do it?’ Her hand was rough and paint-stained; it felt very strong. Tough and square with short nails. He hung on to it as to a life-raft.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll just think I’m very lucky.’
He kissed her hand and found that it was wet with his own tears.
‘I do love you, Richard,’ she said. ‘You’re a good man and there aren’t very many around.’
She had not said that before, either, and he found it almost unbearably moving.
‘I’ll visit the boys a lot,’ he said, ‘and Inge as well, if she wants me to. You must be prepared for that. I want to make it as easy for them all as I can. I’ll never abandon them.’
‘I know,’ Helen said. ‘You’ll do your best to make it all right. But I think you’ll find it can’t be done nicely.’
When he told Inge he was leaving her, she let out a great primitive scream that went on and on like an animal howling in some death agony. It was a while before he realised that she was actually screaming ‘nein’ over and over again. The boys woke up and stumbled out of bed in their pyjamas to watch the scene with disbelief. Richard tried to pack but Inge clung to his legs, impeding every movement, and still the terrible screaming went on. He had never before heard such a sound come out of anyone’s throat. The boys started to cry and he tried to comfort them and take them back to bed. Then there was sudden silence. When he returned to Inge, he found she had cut her wrists and was making a bizarre and terrifying pattern of blood all over the sheets. He was totally horrified and unable to tell how serious it was, so panicked and called an ambulance. It was only while dialling 999 that it suddenly occurred to him that the German for no, if repeated three times, was also the emergency code, and that Inge had in fact been demanding the help he was now getting her, as if on some cosmic telephone.
‘Shit,’ Helen said. ‘Happy birthday. Great timing she’s got.’
‘He said he was sorry,’ Sally said.
‘I bet.’
‘He did. He was very upset about it. And she can’t know it’s your birthday.’
‘God, you’re naive. Of course she knows it’s my fucking birthday. She’s had eight years to find out.’
‘Mum. Now you’re being paranoid.’
‘And I don’t want any clever stuff from you. I’m not in the mood for jargon or compassion or any of that rubbish.’
‘I know,’ Sally said. ‘I’m sorry. Have my present. Have a hug as well.’ She laid a parcel on the table and put her arms round Helen.
‘God, I’m a monster,’ Helen said presently. ‘Of course he has to go. They could all be blown up. The fact that I wish they would be is neither here nor there. You and I know she’s lying and he knows she’s lying but he still has to go. I’m just tired. I’m sorry.’
‘Have a drink,’ Sally said. ‘Let me pour you a big birthday drink.’
Inge watched him coming at last up the path. She had been waiting at the window like an impatient child, willing him to appear, weaving spells, making bargains with God. None of it had worked. But now, in his own time, he was here.
She was reassured to feel her heart give its customary lurch, for if that did not happen, on what could she depend? Safe, like a seraglio wife, behind her veil of net curtain, she gazed at him greedily as he stood under the porch light. Because she saw him seldom, he looked strange but familiar in the way that film stars do, and weary, with smudges round the eyes like make-up. It was a look she treasured. But if she told him that, he would be amused, embarrassed.
He rang the bell, glancing at his watch. She waited for the boys to open the door; she was no longer in a hurry. The sooner he came in, the sooner he would leave. She looked down at his short curly hair, shiny with rain, at the damp collar and shoulders of his mackintosh. She felt such piercing love that she ached. At the same time she could not remember if it had always been so, or if she had gradually tuned her feelings to a higher pitch since he left her.
One of the boys went to the door. She heard Richard say hullo and the child’s casual voice answering.
‘Oh, hullo, Dad. Mum’s upstairs.’ Then a shout to her. ‘Mum? Dad’s here.’
Other women did not go on loving like this. Not for eight years. Oh, she had read about people who never got over things but she had not met any of them. Not someone like herself. Old people, bereaved and heartbroken perhaps, waiting to die, but never anyone of her age, nourishing a passion, lying in wait for one false move, so that she could pounce like a spider, regain her territory and smother her prey with love.
In the fantasy he would have climbed the stairs, found her in the darkened room, been overcome by lust for her body and flung her on to the bed to make love until they were both exhausted. Then he would have admitted he could not leave her again.
‘Inge?’ A faint edge to his voice. ‘Are you up there?’
She walked reluctantly, urgently, to the top of the stairs and looked down at him.
‘I haven’t got all night,’ he said, the tone gentler than the words. ‘Why are you upstairs?’
‘I was lying down,’ she said. ‘The gas gave me a headache.’ She thought how beautiful he looked, so tired and so concerned for her safety that he had come all this way when he could have refused. He looked up at her, his eyes that curiously light brown, almost yellow, a colour she imagined belonged to wolves, a colour the boys had luckily both inherited instead of her own boring blue. She gazed longingly at the corners of his mouth where she had often placed her tongue in happier days to tease him. It didn’t seem possible that all that passion could have disappeared for ever.
‘Well, I’ll go in the kitchen and have a look,’ he said. ‘Don’t come down if you’re not feeling well.’
There was a sink full of dirty dishes in the kitchen and a strong smell of gas. He checked all the connections as a formality but could not find anything loose; Karl came in while he was doing it and stood watching him with idle, detached curiosity, as one might observe a man digging a hole in the road. Richard felt the reproach of years (you deserted me, why should I care about you?) and wondered if this was merely in his own head.
‘Find anything?’ Tone of polite interest.
‘Not so far.’ Richard looked up, but his son’s face was without expression.
‘Why not strike a match?’ Karl suggested. ‘That might do it.’
Peter followed him into the kitchen. He too gave the impression of having nothing better to do with his time. ‘Mum’s been fiddling with the taps,’ he said helpfully. Karl glanced at him. ‘Well, she has,’ Peter added.
‘I’d better go and talk to her,’ Richard said, abandoning the search for the leak he had never really expected to find.
‘She gets awfully low,’ Karl said, ‘and we can’t cheer her up. Couldn’t you come round more often?’
‘She gets drunk,’ Peter said flatly, though the row of empty bottles was there by the bin for Richard to see.
‘I’m sorry,’ Richard said. ‘I know it’s difficult for you.’
‘Oh, we’re OK,’ Karl said. ‘It’s just her. She can’t sort of, you know, get it sorted.’
They were taller than Richard already. They had shaved parts of their heads and dyed the remainder orange and pink and made it stand up in spikes. They were a team. He felt the force of their unity as he looked at their blank childish faces.
We are survivors, that was the message he picked up, and no thanks to you, so don’t get sentimental with us, because we’re giving it to you straight.
‘If I came round every day,’ he said, feeling ill at the thought, ‘it still wouldn’t be enough. She wants me here all the time and I can’t do that.’
‘No, well,’ said Karl, shrugging. ‘That’s it. Cheers, Dad.’ He drifted out of the kitchen and Peter followed him; Richard thought they were oddly like liberal parents creeping tactfully away to leave the young lovers together. He was reminded of the countless evenings he had spent with Inge when they were both nineteen and she was babysitting for his tutor. Then they could hardly wait for the sound of the car driving away before tearing their clothes off; now, as the front door slammed behind his children, he felt a profound apprehensive chill at the knowledge that he and Inge were once more alone in the house.
He went back into the hall and shouted up the stairs, ‘Inge? I think it’s all right. But I’ll have to go in a minute.’
The hall was full of bicycles and dust and old newspapers; there was even, now he came to look more closely, the remains of a bread roll, green with mould, behind the umbrella stand. He marvelled yet again at her talent for creating such chaos: it seemed deliberate, subtly designed, like a film set. He could remember a time when this house, his house then, had been clean and tidy. He had helped; he had pulled his weight. But in those days Inge had cared.
Now she came down the stairs in a dressing-gown, which alarmed him. In the early days after their separation, she had often removed her clothes when he visited her, in order to tempt or reproach him, and the desolation of all that thin sagging stretch-marked flesh that he had once desired so strenuously made him feel unbearably sad for both of them. ‘I was going to take a bath,’ she said as she reached the foot of the stairs, ‘but then I remembered there is no hot water.’ She had washed off her make-up; she looked and sounded like a child. He felt he should have scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to bed, which was no doubt what she was hoping for, only he would have done it with promises of a drink of water and a story. He would have sat by the bed until she fell asleep and then he would have gone home with a lighter heart. Sometimes he felt that he truly might do any of these things, perhaps on his next visit, so potent was the spell she cast on him, which made him afraid to visit her at all.
‘You can turn it on again,’ he said. ‘It’s quite safe.’
She shivered; her dressing-gown was of light material. ‘I’m so cold,’ she said. ‘Come and have a drink with me.’
He followed her into the living-room where they had spent so many evenings together, not wanting to have a drink, not wanting to stay, but somehow swept along by the poignancy of their situation and the knowledge that it was all his fault. Inge poured whisky; he declined.
‘You make me feel guilty,’ she said, and he almost laughed. ‘You’ve come all this way and you look so tired. I’m wasting your time, I’ve given you this awful journey for nothing.’
‘It’s all right, Inge,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in both of us feeling guilty.’
To his horror she began to cry: large effortless tears welling up and spilling over, like a child being sick, without trauma or deliberation. ‘Oh, Richard,’ she said, ‘I can’t bear it. I love you so much. I miss you all the time. I know you think I do these things on purpose and you don’t trust me any more, but I’m so lonely, if I can’t see you I feel I’m going mad and I really don’t want to live.’
‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry. If there was anything I could do, I’d do it.’ It was a conversation they had had many times.
‘You could leave her,’ Inge said. ‘She could manage without you. I can’t.’
He mopped up her tears and she clung to him savagely. He held her for a while until she was calmer, and warm again; he poured her more whisky.
‘It’s impossible,’ he said. ‘You know it is. I care about you and the boys but I want to live with Helen. I love her. Forgive me if you can. I can’t change. I don’t want to hurt you but that’s how it is. It’s not your fault, it’s mine.’
‘I can’t bear the pain,’ she said.
He disentangled himself gently and got up. She followed him into the hall, clinging and embracing him all the way to the door. He was appalled by the nakedness of her emotion and yet it aroused his admiration and respect. He kissed the top of her head and promised to see her soon. Eventually he was able to escape into the rainy night.
On the night of the dinner party Sally watched from the window to see Felix and Elizabeth arrive. She was almost afraid to look but it was all right, he was every bit as wonderful as she remembered. She felt a shiver of delight at the sight of him, his face, his smile, his casual elegant clothes, the way he moved. Even watching him park the car was a thrill. How lucky Elizabeth was to be married to him: did she appreciate her good fortune?
She was watching from Helen’s room and had to go back to her own room to finish doing her face. She could hear the excited greetings downstairs, the raised voices, Richard’s warm welcome, Helen going down after they’d arrived and being cool and polite. Then they moved into the living-room and the sounds became fainter while she went on painting her eyes. Waiting for her heart to calm down.
‘It’s not that I love England,’ said Felix, it’s just that I hate abroad.’
In fact he did love England, and he was not ashamed of his love, but he thought it unwise to admit it, since that would mean sharing it. So he pretended he had come back because he hated foreign food and foreign weather and foreign language, pretended that all this antipathy had finally forced him to tolerate the shortcomings of his native land. In truth England was a beloved mistress, whom he had betrayed with foreign whores, but it was safer to pretend that she was a boring wife. Only Elizabeth knew that Elgar and Noel Coward and even (God help him) Winston Churchill brought tears to his eyes; and Elizabeth would never tell. He was assured of her smiling complicity whenever he told the familiar tale of tax exile, and eventual disenchantment with the expatriate life, and returning to take his medicine like a man. Patriotism and sentiment were not part of his image.
‘Well, it’s good to have you back,’ said Richard, pouring the drinks.
‘I think I missed Radio Three most,’ said Elizabeth. ‘The World Service didn’t make up for it at all. And you always get caught up with the other Brits, even though you swear you won’t. It’s really a very provincial way of life, with everyone gossiping madly about their neighbours.’
That must mean, Helen thought, that Felix’s affairs had been common knowledge, whereas in London Elizabeth had at least a chance of not finding out. ‘You both look very well on it,’ she said.
They had tried just about everywhere. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, seeming to promise the best of both worlds, had turned out like most compromises to be neither one thing nor the other, so near and yet so far. Turks and Caicos offered the perfect climate, but it went with a shortage of culture and a multitude of insects that ignored Elizabeth and bit Felix so savagely that he spent most of his time not on the beach but at the local clinic, having humiliating injections in the bum. Ireland had provided whisky, scenery and conversation, but so many soft days that Felix began to fear he might drown while walking down the street.
‘What about Andorra?’ Helen asked. ‘That might suit you.’
‘Come on, Helen, give them a chance,’ Richard said. ‘They’ve only just got back.’
‘Only trying to be helpful.’ Helen smiled at Elizabeth to show she did not include her in the helpfulness. Long ago the animosity between herself and Felix had resolved itself into a form of regular teasing such as siblings might enjoy. It was a way of pretending she did not really dislike him, a way of tolerating Richard’s oldest friend without embarrassing his wife.
‘You both look pretty good too,’ Felix said. ‘Crime and art must be flourishing. I may have to touch you for a loan if I don’t write something soon. I seem to have spent most of the money I went abroad not to pay tax on. God, what a sentence.’
‘I thought Tony Blythe was meant to keep you in idleness for the rest of your life,’ Helen said.
‘That was the plan, yes. But it’s come unstuck somehow. I think I’m bored with him, silly little sod. I might even kill him off, how about that? Inn at the Death I shall call it, about these two gays who run a hotel. Then he can go out with a bang and a whimper and I’ll have to write the great English novel. I’ve had enough of crime and Tony Blythe.’
‘Don’t be too hasty,’ Richard said. ‘He’s been good to you.’
‘How’s Sally?’ Elizabeth asked Helen, as if anxious to change the subject.
‘Fine. She’ll be down in a minute but she’s not eating with us, she’s going to a disco.’
‘She’s got into Sussex,’ Richard said, ‘so we’re rather proud of her.’
‘I’m actually quite frightened,’ Felix said. ‘If I don’t get another TV series pretty soon, I’m a ruined man.’
‘You always say that,’ said Richard, ‘but you keep going. I think you need the fright to make you work.’
‘Bloody masochism,’ said Felix. ‘What a ridiculous business.’
Sally came pounding down the stairs, wearing jeans and a shirt and silly shoes, with kohl round her eyes. She had never learned to walk lightly and Helen had given up trying to make her.
‘Hullo,’ she said, ‘nice to see you. How long are you back for?’
‘For ever, I think,’ said Felix. ‘We’re too old and decrepit to run away again.’
‘You speak for yourself,’ said Elizabeth, and everyone laughed.
Sally came round the sofa to greet them and they both kissed her on the cheek.
‘Well done about Sussex,’ said Felix.
‘Thank you.’ She blushed. ‘It’s only if my grades are OK, so fingers crossed. Well. See you all later.’
‘I’ll fetch you at one o’clock,’ said Richard.
She made a face. ‘I’m going with Maria and Jackie. They’ll walk me home.’
‘And I’ll wait round the corner so as not to embarrass you.’
‘Honestly. I’ll be OK.’
‘Don’t keep on,’ said Richard, ‘or I’ll fetch you at midnight.’
Sally laughed. ‘You are silly,’ she said fondly.
The front door slammed behind her. She had never learned about shutting doors, either, Helen thought, or tidying her room, but apart from that she was pretty near perfect. Helen hoped the great warm gush of soppy love she felt for Sally was not too obvious to everyone in the room.
‘My God,’ Elizabeth said. ‘What a beauty. Hasn’t she grown up.’
‘Well,’ Helen said, ‘you have been away three years.’
‘Time to eat,’ said Richard. ‘I can smell burning stew.’
Over dinner the conversation drifted to Inge, as Helen had known it would. She heard herself becoming strident.
‘In theory it ought to be better now the boys are older,’ she said, ‘but in practice it’s worse. Now Richard doesn’t have to visit her to see them, she has to keep thinking of other ways to get him to go round there. D’you know, one time she actually pretended there was a gas leak.’
She knew she shouldn’t have said it but she couldn’t stop herself. She didn’t look at Richard but she could feel his tension.
‘Don’t they have an emergency service?’ Elizabeth enquired mildly.
‘Of course they do but she said they wouldn’t come.’ Helen was surprised at the anger in her own voice about things she thought she’d got over.
‘I thought they had to come if you say you can smell gas,’ Elizabeth persisted, as if this were an ordinary conversation, entirely missing the point.
‘Maybe she’d pulled the same trick once too often.’ Felix looked up, ever alert at the prospect of a row. ‘What did you do, Richard? You didn’t go, did you?’
‘Of course he did,’ Helen said. ‘Inge snapped her fingers and off he went. On my fucking birthday, too.’
Richard said pleasantly, ‘With two kids in the house I didn’t have much choice.’
‘And was there a gas leak?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Helen. ‘Don’t be silly, Felix.’
‘I knew there wouldn’t be,’ said Richard, ominously calm. ‘But it’s not a risk you can take.’
‘So she’s got you over the proverbial barrel,’ said Felix with interest.
Richard said, ‘Well, she can’t do it every week.’
‘It must be quite flattering though,’ Elizabeth said.
‘She’s amazingly persistent, isn’t she?’ Felix said. ‘Eight years of unrequited passion.’
‘Is this a record?’ said Helen bitterly.
‘It’s not flattering,’ said Richard, with the air of a man at the end of his patience. ‘It’s embarrassing and inconvenient and rather sad.’
Felix went on looking impressed. ‘Nobody’s ever loved me that much.’
Elizabeth said sharply, ‘Unless you count me, of course.’ Oh God, Helen thought, now what have I started?
Felix smiled. ‘But I haven’t left you for another woman, have I, darling?’
Inge sat alone in a corner of the wine bar, drinking red wine and smoking a Gauloise. She had dressed herself up in some of her more exotic clothes from the second-hand shop: a mixture of velvet, satin, fur, chiffon and crochet in various shades of pink, purple, orange and brown, with beads and diamante. It gave her pleasure to make herself look as eccentric as possible, to attract maximum attention. She could feel people staring at her, but when she stared back rudely, challenging them, they looked away, embarrassed.
Smug little couples, most of them, out for the evening, flaunting their togetherness. She hated them all.
But there was a man sitting near the door, another failure like herself, alone on a Saturday night, and hoping to drown the shame of it in alcohol and the chance of being picked up. She stared at him. He was nothing special, but there was something, the short curly hair perhaps, or the shadows under the eyes, that reminded her, ever so slightly, of Richard. It was enough. It would have to be enough. She went on staring until he felt the strength of her stare and looked up. She smiled, despising him for being alone like her, and he smiled back.
She relaxed and finished her drink. It was only a matter of time, she knew from experience, before he got up and came over to her table. He would buy a bottle of wine and they would make small talk until they were drunk enough to desire each other instead of the people they had lost. Then she would take him home.
Sally needed the music. She needed the noise and the fights and the other people dancing. She needed to blot out Shakespeare and Chaucer and Browning and Thackeray and iambic pentameter and objective correlatives and dramatic irony. Sometimes she felt as if her head would explode with it all, but the music could wipe it away, could create a cool white space where nothing else was. It made her laugh that Helen and Richard probably imagined she was there just to dance and pick up boys. Helen had been right about her shoes, though; she had already had to take them off.
She thought how lucky Maria and Jackie were, not to have any of this pressure put upon them. In spite of all the talk about unemployment, Maria was going to work in a bank and Jackie was going to train as a hairdresser. They would soon be earning money and they would not have to study in the evenings. They did not feel their heads were being crammed to bursting point with useless knowledge like a force-fed goose.
If only I was a bit more academic, she thought, I’d find it easy; and if only I was a bit less academic, I wouldn’t have to do it at all. Not good enough for Oxford and Cambridge but not bad enough to be turned down by everyone. A solid Beta plus. It made her want to scream. Then she felt guilty because she was supposed to be grateful for opportunities that were denied to other people.
She noticed Chris standing by himself in a corner and watching her while she danced. He had on his wistful, hangdog look. It annoyed her, making her feel that she was meant to pity him. Why didn’t he understand that if he looked cheerful and sort of OK, maybe even ignored her a bit, she might fancy him again?
Eventually she had to sit down, get her breath back, have a Coke. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him coming towards her; not looking up, she saw his shoes arriving before she saw his face. She was intensely embarrassed. She felt everyone was watching her, feeling sorry for Chris, thinking she was a cow.
‘Can I take you home?’ he asked, but oh God, so humbly, adding, ‘I’ve got the bike fixed.’
‘My step-father’s coming for me.’ He had even cleaned his wretched shoes.
There was a pause. Surely he would go away now?
He said rapidly, ‘Why don’t I see you any more?’
‘You see me every day at school.’
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
She looked up then, reluctantly, and saw naked pain in his face. She felt terrible: guilty but angry too. She felt she had meant to make a quick, clean, merciful kill but had only succeeded in inflicting a messy injury which she would now have to deal with. The coup de grâce, to put him out of his misery.
She said, ‘I’m sorry, Chris. I can’t.’ And shut her eyes while he walked away.
Jackie and Maria came over to her as soon as he had gone.
‘Why don’t you give him a break? He looks really miserable.’
Sally shrugged. She was afraid the shrug would make her look heartless, but she couldn’t explain. Had Felix noticed her blushing when he kissed her? Did he think she looked grown up now? Would he still be there when she got home? She had dreamed of him for so long, with nothing to nourish the dream, that it was hard to believe he was finally back in her life.
When the man tried to kiss her, Inge froze, turning her head away. ‘No, don’t kiss me,’ she said urgently, for it was vital that he should not ruin everything, just when it was going so well. He hesitated, and she used the moment to slide her legs on to his shoulders, to make the kiss more difficult and sharpen the angle of penetration to give herself more pleasure. He fucked her harder then until she came, screaming, and saw him smile.
‘Suck me,’ she said. ‘Go down on me, please.’ She was afraid that because she had come, he would think it was all right for him to come and it would all be over too soon.
She saw a look of slight irritation cross his face, as if she had asked him to do something onerous, a burdensome chore such as emptying the dustbins when he was happily watching television.
‘I did it for you,’ she reminded him, for that was how they had begun.
He did it, making her feel he was doing her a favour, but she didn’t care, she wasn’t going to let him spoil her evening. She tried thinking about Richard, but it seemed like blasphemy, so she ran an old reliable blue movie instead and came quickly, sensing that the man was reluctant enough not to persevere for long. He surfaced with relief, breathing hard, as if he had been drowning, and fucked her again until they both came, one after the other.
Almost immediately, as if by mutual consent, they separated and lay apart in exhausted silence.
Inge dozed; she felt relaxed, almost happy, peaceful anyway, and tired enough, she thought, to sleep without pills for once. Presently she peered at the bedside clock; it said half past midnight. She couldn’t remember what time they had started but she knew they had left the wine bar at eleven.
Suddenly she was exhausted and wanting to be alone. She yawned ostentatiously but he didn’t take the hint. ‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘You’d better be going.’
He made a strange noise, somewhere between a moan and a grunt. ‘What? I was nearly asleep.’
‘Only my husband stays the night,’ said Inge, her favourite fantasy.
‘I thought you said you’re divorced.’
He had an unpleasant accent; all resemblance to Richard had vanished as soon as she heard his voice.
‘I don’t want you here,’ she said, lacking the energy to be polite. ‘I can’t sleep with you here.’
He looked at his watch. ‘Christ, is that the time? I’ve missed the last train.’
‘There are night buses. Or you take a cab.’ She was desperate now to be alone, to be asleep.
‘Can’t afford a bleeding cab, can I?’ He sounded like a grumpy child deprived of pocket money. ‘You’ve cleaned me out.’
‘Come on,’ she said, shaking him. ‘You’ve got to go before my husband comes home.’ They usually went pretty fast when she said that.
The man got up, but he moved slowly, annoyed and suspicious. Inge longed for him to go while she could still remember the pleasure, before irritation took over. She watched him dress, tried to concentrate on the good part of the experience, when suddenly to her astonishment she saw him go to her handbag and take a fiver from her purse.
‘What are you doing?’ she said, shocked.
‘I reckon that’s the least you can do for me, after all I’ve done for you.’
She leapt out of bed. ‘No. That’s all the money I’ve got.’ It was not quite true but no matter. ‘I have two children to feed.’
‘Better ask your old man then,’ he said with a kind of sneer. ‘If he ever turns up.’
They struggled over the money, Inge trying to snatch it from his hand while he held it just out of reach. They were like children in the playground. Then he got bored with the game, when Inge tried to bite him and kick him and knee him in the groin to make him give back her money. He hit her, not very hard, but enough to knock her off balance, enough to make her fall, so that he could run downstairs and out of the house. She heard him slam the front door. Lying on the floor with her face on the dusty carpet, she started to cry, more from outrage than pain. Then she reached for the phone. While she was dialling, she noticed the smell of herself and the man, a smell she no longer liked, and decided to take a bath as soon as her call was over.
‘No, I’ll be having a show in the autumn,’ said Helen, grateful to Elizabeth for asking, ‘but I can’t think about that now. Some bloody fool wants me to do the Seven Deadly Sins for him first. As quickly as possible. Can you imagine?’
It was after midnight but they were still drinking coffee and brandy.
‘Abstract?’ said Elizabeth doubtfully. ‘Won’t that be a bit tricky?’
‘It’s what they call a challenge,’ said Helen. ‘He’s a mad American called Jerome Ellis and he’s going to live in an oast house. He seems to want paintings by the yard. Magdalen introduced him to me and I loathed him on sight. He hasn’t a clue what my work is about but he says he likes my style, whatever that means. I think he imagines I’m a kind of interior decorator, only cheaper, of course.’
Elizabeth clucked sympathetically. ‘Can’t you turn it down?’
‘Not really. The van failed its MOT.’
The phone rang and Richard answered it. Helen knew there was only one person who would ring at a quarter to one.
‘Shame he doesn’t want the Stations of the Cross,’ said Felix.
Richard was saying, ‘Calm down, I can’t hear you. Now tell me again.’
‘Inge,’ Helen said, trying to convert fury into resignation before it choked her.
‘Are you all right?’ Richard was saying. ‘Ring the local nick. You’ve got to report it.’
‘Or a client,’ said Elizabeth.
Helen shook her head.
‘All right, I’m on my way.’ Richard hung up and turned to her. The look on his face begged her to understand. ‘Sorry, love, I’ll have to go. She’s hysterical. Some man’s beaten her up.’ His expression hardened as hers failed to soften, ‘I’m sorry. Can you fetch Sally?’
Helen heard herself saying, ‘Of course. She’s my responsibility, isn’t she? Just as Inge is yours.’
He turned away. ‘Sorry, Felix, Elizabeth. See you soon.’
‘Let’s have a drink one evening,’ said Felix, supportive, man to man. ‘I’ll ring you at the office.’
‘Hope she’s OK,’ said Elizabeth.
Helen could feel them both scoring the points she had thrown away. Richard went out and there was an uncomfortable silence. She felt herself branded as a bitch. Not for the first time, but it still hurt. If only Richard would get angry with Inge. All this saintly patience was very hard to bear.
‘Pity she didn’t get herself killed,’ she said, and meant it. What blissful relief it would be if Richard never had to go round there again. She didn’t stop to think who would look after the boys.
‘Oh dear,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Poor you.’
Now was the time, Helen thought, to be tactful, to play it down, to call it just one of those things and change the subject. Instead she chose to go into overdrive, just as one might choose to get drunk, a conscious decision, unwise but deliberate. She wanted to be sick, to make a scene, to spew out all the venom. Especially in Richard’s absence.
‘It’s typical, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Bloody typical. And he always falls for it. First she cut her wrists when he left her. Then she took an overdose when we got married. Then we had the gas board routine. Now she’s managed to get herself mugged. And round he goes each time.’ She was shaking; she poured herself another drink. The silence in the room alarmed her: they were waiting for her to go on. ‘Christ. After eight years, any other woman, any normal woman, would have found herself another man. And a job.’ All the years of Inge’s excesses spun in her head; she felt sick with rage.
Felix said mildly, ‘Shall I go and collect Sally?’
Reality, sanity, made a dim reappearance. ‘Oh, Felix, would you? I’m in no state to drive.’
‘I didn’t mean that, but you might like some time on your own with Lizzie.’
‘Thanks. I would.’ It was a new sensation, not pleasant, to feel gratitude towards Felix.
‘You’d better give him the address,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Oh – yes. It’s in the High Street. The Sick Parrot, it’s called. You can’t miss it. There’s a bloody great drooping bird in neon lights outside.’
‘Just like Inge really,’ said Felix, and she almost liked him. They all laughed and he left the house. Helen was shocked that she had forgotten about Sally until he reminded her.
As Richard was parking the car the front door opened; Inge had obviously been watching for his arrival. She ran down the garden path and flung herself into his arms, starting at once to cry. He led her back into the house and poured whisky for her; he did not want a drink himself. She was wearing a dressing-gown, which he hoped she would not remove, and she smelt unusually clean. He felt he had been comforting her for most of his adult life and yet he knew that was unfair: when he had loved her, she had been cheerful. He remembered that clearly. There was an open and shut case against him: his departure had destroyed her happiness. He was responsible for the wreck she was now. If Helen chose to condemn her for being feeble, that was simply a moral judgment and had nothing to do with the facts.
‘You should report him, you know,’ he said, thinking of this unknown stranger who had injured his ex-wife but far less severely than he himself had done.
She shrugged. ‘What for? I ask him in, I make use of him, then I throw him out, so he robs me and hits me. It’s fair. We both got what we wanted.’
‘Inge, this is crazy.’ There were no visible marks on her to indicate a struggle, but even if the attack had not taken place at all, the effect was the same.
‘I upset him,’ she said, almost with pride. ‘I talked about you. I always talk about you, I can’t help it, but they never like it. If they talk about their wives I listen and I don’t mind, but it doesn’t work both ways. It’s funny, how can they be jealous when they don’t even know me? It must be their pride. D’you think that’s it?’
‘I think you should stop picking up strangers who treat you badly.’
‘How can I, if you won’t come back to me? I must have someone, I can’t lie here masturbating for the rest of my life. Is that what you want me to do?’
‘Oh, Inge,’ he said helplessly.
‘Am I embarrassing you? Why don’t you like me to speak frankly, Richard? You know I love you. I’ll always love you.’ She got up and poured herself more whisky; he was alarmed at the speed with which she drank. ‘But I must have a man while I’m waiting for you to come back. If they treat me badly, it really doesn’t matter. They can’t hurt me the way you hurt me when you left. Not even if they kill me.’
He said, as if she didn’t know it already, just to be clear that they both acknowledged reality, ‘You’re just trying to make me feel guilty.’
‘Doesn’t it work?’ she asked in a curiously innocent, practical, almost child-like way.
‘Oh yes,’ he said bitterly. ‘It works.’
Helen said, ‘I think we made a mistake getting married, actually.’
Elizabeth was startled. She and Felix had left England shortly after the wedding, having taken credit for introducing them and seen them through all the mess of the separation and divorce. It was one thing for her to speculate in private as to whether they were happy; another thing to hear from Helen that they were not. She saw Helen noticing her shocked face.
‘Oh, not like that,’ said Helen, smiling. ‘I mean from Inge’s point of view. I think we should have just gone on living together.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Elizabeth felt a fool, caught out, wrongfooted. She tried to rearrange her expression, remembering that Helen had always had a knack of making her feel uncomfortable.
‘I wanted to,’ Helen said carelessly, ‘but Richard said getting married would make it more final and she’d give up. I think it was the last straw. She’s been much more difficult over the last three years.’
Elizabeth thought Helen sounded smug. Was the success of the marriage measured by Inge’s distress? ‘I suppose she’s very lonely,’ she said. She didn’t like to think about Inge too much, feeling she had ratted on her, following Felix so blindly as he endorsed everything Richard did.
‘Yes, of course she is, but we’ve all been lonely.’ Helen somehow made it sound like having a cold. ‘When Carey and I split up, I thought it was the end of the world. But you come to your senses eventually.’
Elizabeth hesitated, torn between honesty and tact. ‘I’ve always been afraid I might behave like Inge if Felix left me.’ She felt better once it was said. Like standing up to be counted. Like rows of extras calling out, ‘I am Spartacus’. Why should Inge be crucified all by herself?
‘Oh God, surely not,’ said Helen, looking shocked at this unliberated attitude. ‘Anyway, he never would. He knows when he’s well off.’
‘I hope so,’ Elizabeth said, meaning it. She could feel herself and Helen moving further and further apart from their original meeting point, like scissors opening.
‘If she’d only make an effort,’ Helen said, ‘try to get a job, even part-time, then she might meet someone else and she wouldn’t be lonely and she wouldn’t be such a bloody financial burden.’
But I could never meet anyone else like Felix, Elizabeth thought, no matter how many jobs I took. And if I met them, I couldn’t love them. Loving Felix is a life sentence. Maybe Inge feels the same about Richard. ‘I do see it must be very difficult for you,’ she said.
Helen poured herself another drink without offering Elizabeth one. ‘Well, I support Sally and myself and Richard supports Inge and the boys. There’s no shared money – in that sense we might as well not be married at all.’
‘I suppose it’s quite hard for her to find a job. I don’t think she’s worked since she was an au pair.’ Elizabeth was beginning to wonder how she had ever got into all this. She hadn’t even particularly liked Inge when she knew her and yet eight years later here she was defending her and upsetting a friend. It would be so much simpler just to agree. She wasn’t sure why she couldn’t do it.
‘God, she can cook, type and drive, and she speaks three languages. She’s more qualified than I am. Why does she imagine that having two children entitles her to sit on her arse for the rest of her life?’
It must be like stealing, or borrowing money, Elizabeth thought. You grow to hate the person you have injured, or the person who has done you a favour. It’s simply too much to go on feeling guilty or grateful. She poured herself another glass of wine and Helen said absently, ‘Oh – sorry.’
Felix would have to drive tonight, Elizabeth decided. She needed to drink if Helen was going to make her feel uncomfortable. She stared round the room, as the silence went on: it had hardly changed in the time they had been away. Helen had knocked down walls long ago, when she first bought the house, merging the hall with the living-room and creating an L-shaped space leading into the kitchen which Richard seemed to use more than she did, but it was still undecorated. The sofas and rugs were shabby from ten years’ wear and the few paintings of her own that Helen had hung seemed incongruous, too stark and professional for such an unfinished room. It looked as though Helen had just moved in and did not intend to stay. Elizabeth marvelled that someone so visual could care so little about her own home. Clearly all Helen’s energy went into her work.
They came out of the disco into the street and the comparative silence revived Felix as much as the fresh air. All the same, he regretted complaining about the noise: he was sure it would brand him as boringly middle-aged.
He said, ‘Richard’s gone to see her. Apparently some man beat her up.’
‘How awful. Poor Inge.’ Sally sounded genuinely concerned.
Under the street lamp, getting into his car, he noticed the purity of her profile, the healthy gleam of her uncreased skin beneath all the absurd paint. The cheap silly clothes could not disguise how lovely she was, but he caught himself thinking that dressed by him she would be really beautiful. He liked to take women over and change their image; he envied their potential. It would be fun to play Pygmalion to Sally’s Galatea.
‘Is Mum furious?’ she asked as they drove off.
‘You could say that, yes.’ He had found it exciting to witness Helen’s agitation; short of going to bed with her, which he knew, regretfully, would never happen, there was no other way he would ever see her lose control.
Sally said, ‘She thinks Inge does it all on purpose to get Richard to go round there. And she is awfully accident prone. But I don’t see how she could get someone to beat her up on purpose.’
Felix glanced at her swiftly, but she looked quite serious. Were the young really so naive? he wondered.
‘It must be awful for Richard,’ Sally went on. ‘I’m sure he feels guilty.’
It occurred to Felix that she was talking a lot, as if she were nervous. ‘D’you think he was wrong to leave her?’ he asked. It would be interesting to get a teenage view of the subject.
‘Well, he couldn’t stay with her, could he? Not once he’d fallen in love with Mum.’ She made it all sound very simple: obviously the young were still very romantic. ‘You knew Inge, didn’t you?’ she added after a pause.
‘Yes. Long ago. When they were first married.’
‘What’s she like?’
Felix thought about it: how to sum up all the hours, amounting to days, weeks, maybe even months of his life that he had spent with Richard and Inge, talking, laughing and getting drunk; loving Richard, lusting after Inge, then tolerating Elizabeth as an intruder, a passenger and, later, an umpire in the rows before the whole thing split apart. ‘Very intense,’ he said carefully. ‘Small and dark and thin and slightly mad, I think.’
Sally didn’t appear to notice the emotion in the pause. ‘I always imagine her like the Lady of Shalott,’ she said, ‘sitting there weaving and watching for Richard in the mirror.’
Felix liked the image and admired Sally for coming up with something so appropriate. He felt at once very tired and very randy, two states that for him often went together, and he wanted to prolong the evening, although he knew that nothing could come of it. He suggested they should stop at a nearby coffee bar and Sally agreed at once, sounding pleased and surprised. When he added, to cover himself, that he thought Helen wanted to talk to Elizabeth for a while, Sally said, ‘Of course,’ with a noticeable chill of disappointment in her voice that made him long to kiss her.
But the coffee bar proved only marginally better than the disco. A steady thumping beat with no discernible tune blasted out of the speakers and assaulted him; young people who looked as though they should have been in bed hours ago were sprawled at nasty formica tables in pairs and groups, smoking and attempting to talk to each other; a curious red glow from the lighting made everyone look as if they had spent too long on the beach. It was, Felix thought, the sort of place that would have made even Dante revise his ideas about hell.
‘Whatever happened to Mozart?’ he said. There seemed no point in trying to appear trendy or whatever the current word might be: his appeal lay in other areas.
‘I think he died,’ Sally said innocently, straight-faced.
‘Coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’
They sank down at one of the nearby tables into seats that Felix knew would give him backache if he remained too long.
‘Anything to eat?’
She looked shocked at the very idea. ‘No, I’m much too fat.’
‘God, you women and your weight,’ he said without thinking (Elizabeth was always attempting to diet). He caught her looking pleased to be called a woman and then trying to conceal her pleasure in case it made her seem gauche.
‘Don’t you like this sort of music?’ she said, meeting the problem head-on. ‘It’s number one.’
‘Is it really?’ said Felix.
‘I like Mozart as well,’ Sally said.
A waitress arrived, a badge pinned on her left breast announcing that her name was Shirley.
‘Two coffees, please,’ Felix said, deciding to be bold. ‘And could you possibly turn down the music?’ He achieved a fractional hesitation before the word music to register his distaste, but he thought the subtlety was probably lost on Shirley, who merely looked amazed and went away.
‘Well, it was worth a try,’ he said to Sally, adding, ‘Oh dear, my age is showing,’ because he knew it did not matter.
‘Mum plays the Rolling Stones sometimes,’ Sally said, placing him firmly in her parents’ generation and gently sending him up. They both laughed and something eased in their conversation: it shifted into another gear.
‘You must be very pleased about Sussex,’ he said, feeling at once more comfortable with her.
‘Yes.’ She traced a pattern on the formica with her finger nail and he studied her profile: she had a straight, blunt nose and a short upper lip. ‘Well… Mum and Richard are.’
Here was his chance to be understanding, a different sort of adult. ‘I see. Like that, is it?’
‘I am pleased, of course.’
‘But?’
‘Oh…’ A long sigh. ‘Feeling I didn’t really have a choice. Everyone expected me to go, so I’m going, and I know I’m lucky, and I’m grateful not to be looking for a job that isn’t there.’ She looked up at him, her eyes pure and child-like behind the ridiculous orange make-up. ‘Did you feel like that about Cambridge?’
‘Not really,’ Felix said. ‘I was excited.’ But not half as excited, he thought, as he now was about Sally’s mouth. It was a rather large, firm mouth that looked somehow also delicate, as if it had hardly been used, the lips unpainted and sprinkled with freckles. It was the same shape as Helen’s mouth, which he had always found extremely erotic. He imagined exploring it with his tongue, imagined it opening up to him, letting him in, then imagined it wrapped round his cock.
Their coffees arrived. Shirley put them down rather heavily, slopping them into their saucers, and went away. She had done nothing to moderate the music and Felix lacked the courage to ask her again. Once showed spirit, he thought, but twice was pernickety.
‘Well, it’s a bit special, isn’t it, Cambridge? I know Sussex is supposed to be very good but… the way you wrote about it, Cambridge sounded so wonderful.’ She stirred her coffee, rearranging the froth on top but making no attempt to drink it. ‘I’ve read all your books, you know. Not just the Tony Blythe ones, the early ones as well. I liked The Heartbreak Merchant best. Especially the part about him and his mother. It made me cry.’
She was behaving like a groupie and he was flattered. ‘Yes, I don’t think I’ve done anything better than that,’ he said, remembering. ‘But it was a long time ago.’
‘D’you prefer writing thrillers?’
Now she was interviewing him and the novelty of it reminded him how long it was since he had been interviewed. ‘No. But it’s a different sort of challenge. And it pays the bills. Not as satisfying as a straight novel though.’
‘Can’t you do both?’ Sally asked, elbows on the table now as she gazed at him as if he were the most fascinating man in the world. Felix felt himself warmed by her attention; he had not realised how deprived he was of adulation, much as a hungry man might not realise the extent of his hunger until he began to eat.
‘I’ve lost my nerve,’ he said truthfully, something he had previously admitted only to Elizabeth and Natasha.
Sally said, ‘Oh, Felix,’ in a tone of such amazed tenderness that it was all he could do not to kiss her. Then he realised it was the first time she had used his name as one adult to another. He saw from her face that she was aware of this too and a little silence fell between them as the music blasted out.
Driving her back to the house, he was aware what a short journey it was, how little time he had to consolidate or make a move, how they might never be alone together again. It seemed like fate – Richard summoned by Inge, Elizabeth and Helen having a drunken chat: he had a strong sense of urgency and predestination mixed with ordinary sexual excitement. But he was also aware of the ridiculous aspect of the whole thing, that he should be allowing himself to get into such a state about someone he had vaguely watched growing up for the last eight years. The bit of his brain that monitored his behaviour nearly all the time these days made a note of the fact that he had not lusted after someone this young since he was young himself. But it was not simple lust: there was a lot of romance and yearning and fantasy wrapped up in it. That probably makes it a male menopausal crisis, said this part of his brain severely. What, already? said Felix, pushing it away. But I’m only forty, for God’s sake. Elizabeth’s fifty-one. We can’t both be having the menopause at the same time, surely.
There was silence in the car after the easy conversation in the coffee bar. It reminded him of dinner parties where moving from the table to the sofa could ruin the whole thing. He had to be brave, summon up all his resources of age and experience, to plunge into a silence like this.
‘We should really celebrate your getting into Sussex,’ he said, before he lost his nerve. ‘Even though it’s not Cambridge.’
‘I’m not there yet,’ Sally said, sounding remote.
Neither am I, Felix thought, plunging. The cold-water swimmer risking a heart attack. ‘Would you like to have lunch with me one day?’ There was no time to be subtle: they were already at the house and he was parking.
‘Yes, I’d love to.’
He could hear her surprise and pleasure, and the effort she put into trying to sound casual. It made him smile, made him want to put his arm round her, but he thought it was too soon for that. He scribbled his number on a piece of paper and gave it to her.
‘Good, that’s settled then. Just give me a ring any time and I’ll take you out, OK?’
Now he was worried that he had made it sound too innocuous and she wouldn’t want to come, or worse, she would announce their plans as soon as they went in, because they were so innocent.
‘Won’t I be disturbing you?’ she said.
‘I hope so,’ he said, trying to sound as suggestive as possible, and then adding, to cover himself: ‘I’ll be only too relieved to get away from the blank sheet of paper.’
When Richard finally got up to go, Inge put her arms round him as she always did. ‘Richard, can’t you stay? Please. I don’t want to be alone.’
‘You know I can’t.’ It was awful to be asked, over and over again. ‘And the boys will be home soon, surely.’
She shook her head. ‘They won’t. They’ve gone to an all-night party.’
Defeated at every turn. ‘Oh Inge, they’re a bit young for that, aren’t they?’
‘I think so, but how can I stop them? They are big boys now, I can’t lock them up. If you were here, they would listen to you.’
He said, ‘Inge, this simply isn’t fair,’ and she took her arms away.
‘I know, but it’s true. They don’t want to stay in on a Saturday night and look at their mother crying. It’s a bore. They want to go out and have fun. I don’t blame them.’
‘I’ll talk to them,’ he said briskly, making for the door. ‘But now I do have to go.’
She followed him into the hall. ‘Couldn’t you ring her up and say you’re taking me to hospital? Or tell her the car has broken down?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ His shoulders and the back of his neck ached with tension.
‘It’s not so silly. Think of all the lies you told me when you were seeing her. All the times you pretended you had to work late. Can’t you tell her one lie for me?’
Rage mounted inside him with alarming force. He found he wanted to hit her as the unknown man had hit her, only harder and more often. He wanted in that moment to batter her swiftly to death and be done with all the suffering, hers and his. That must be how some of his clients often felt, though they could not always express it.
‘I wish you wouldn’t behave like this,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel very guilty and very angry. Is that what you want?’
‘I just want you.’ She seemed to be much calmer than he was. ‘But I’ll settle for making you guilty and angry if that’s all I can have right now.’
‘I’m going home,’ he said, opening the front door, I’ll ring you tomorrow.’
‘Promise?’
The urge to kill her now was almost irresistible. Terrifying. Although he knew he would resist it.
‘God, Inge, I’ve had enough for one night. Why do you always have to say things other people wouldn’t say?’
‘I’m honest,’ she said. ‘Don’t you tell your clients to be honest?’
He started to walk down the path to the car. ‘Take one of your pills now and go to sleep, OK?’
She called after him, in a conversational tone – as one might say, ‘Drive carefully’ or ‘See you soon’ – ‘I’m going to wait for you, Richard. No matter how long it takes.’
Helen saw them out. She was tired now and angry at being an object of pity because Richard wasn’t home yet. When she went back into the living-room, Sally was clearing the table. ‘Poor Mum,’ she said. ‘What a rotten shame.’
‘Yes,’ Helen said briskly, ‘I could have done without it.’ They worked in silence, side by side, piling the dirty dishes on to trays. Helen thought how sordid it all looked, now the fun was over and only the debris was left.
Sally said, ‘I wonder what would happen if Richard just said no to her.’
A wonderful, farcical thought. Pure fantasy. But it was strange to hear it from Sally and not inside her own head. It was an old thought for Sally to have.
‘With any luck she might try to kill herself again. And if she has enough practice she may just get it right.’
Sally hugged her, but Helen could see the shock on her face, quickly converted into amusement. They carried their full trays into the kitchen and Helen began loading the dishwasher. She remembered that she hadn’t asked about Sally’s evening. ‘Did you have a good time?’
Sally looked evasive. ‘It was all right.’
‘Was Chris there?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘He whinged a bit.’ Sally kissed her. ‘Don’t be nasty to Richard. I’m sure he feels bad enough already.’
How well she knows me, Helen thought. It was lovely to be with someone totally on her side even when she was wrong. She would have liked to talk to Sally, but Sally had heard it all before and she already looked white with fatigue.
‘Let’s do the marriage guidance another time,’ Helen said, kissing her goodnight, and they both laughed. Sally went up to bed and Helen finished loading the dishwasher. She was about to close the door and set the controls when she changed her mind and carefully removed a plate, which she hurled across the room. It smashed satisfyingly against the wall and she left the pieces where they fell, already feeling much better.
She didn’t speak when Richard finally came in, but let him undress in the dark. She half expected him to put on the light: he must have known from her breathing that she was not asleep. She had been thinking how she would feel if he had really been making love to Inge, as Felix had somehow contrived to suggest he might be, and she allowed her resentment at the imaginary offence to spill over into the silence. It was oppressive, like fog; it choked her and made her eyes sting.
He got into bed and lay apart from her. She sensed his exhaustion and longed to comfort him. But the urge to punish was stronger.
‘Will she live?’
‘Yes.’
‘Pity.’
The silence extended. How was it possible to treat someone you loved so badly?
‘Did she ask you to stay?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
If only he were not so unfailingly patient. If only he would lose his temper with Inge, about Inge. Then she wouldn’t have to get so angry with him, for him. She could be reasonable, play the whole thing down, put it in perspective. If only he would get angry with her too, call her a bitch. She was resenting all the things she loved him for. She had married a good, kind man because she was sick of bastards, and now she was blaming him for not being one.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said, turning over abruptly and hugging him. If they quarrelled, then Inge had won.
He put his arm round her. ‘It’s all right. Sometimes I just want to kill her.’
The words were what she had longed to hear but the tone was too calm. She wasn’t sure she believed him. ‘Oh please,’ she said with feeling, ‘let me.’ They both laughed and the tension was gone.
Helen was twelve when her father defected. That was how she thought of it, as a political gesture, or a bid for artistic freedom, like one of the Russian ballet dancers in the newspapers. Life with her mother was suffocating him, she could see that. It was having the same effect on her, too, but he didn’t offer to take her with him. She thought at first he might send for her later, when he had got himself settled; she told herself it couldn’t be easy for him finding somewhere to live with Mrs Watson and her three children. Her Auntie Maureen, she had been, living three doors along, but her mother made it clear she wasn’t to be called that any more. In fact she became known as ‘that woman’, only Helen felt silly calling her that just to please her mother. She had eaten jam doughnuts too often in her kitchen to be formal now.
Uncle Jim came round a lot at first. He was very tall and thin and had to stand with his neck slightly bent to fit under the ceiling. Her mother didn’t ask him to sit down. He wanted to talk about Auntie Maureen and sometimes he cried, which was very embarrassing. He kept saying if only she hadn’t taken the children, and Helen could see his point; she wanted to say if only they had taken me instead, but she knew it would upset her mother, who kept telling her they would manage, they had each other, and they didn’t need anyone else.
After a while Uncle Jim stopped coming round; even he could tell that he wasn’t welcome. Real aunts and cousins fell by the wayside, too, as they implied that some of what had happened might be Mother’s fault. Aunt Gloria, Dad’s sister, was banned from the house after she told Mother she had always been cold. Aunt Gloria was divorced, but she had remarried and she didn’t have children. Helen had always liked her because she looked like Dad and she smelt nice, but Mother said she was fast and it was typical of her to stick up for her brother no matter what he did: she had the morals of an alley cat.
Helen kept waiting, but Dad didn’t write or phone and he didn’t send for her. Her mother said it was because he was too ashamed. He must have sent money, though, because their standard of living didn’t change much. Helen wondered how long she would have to wait. She couldn’t believe that she would never see Dad again. She imagined him writing and Mother intercepting the letters. She tried getting up early so this couldn’t happen but there was never a letter when she looked and some mornings she overslept, so she couldn’t be sure. She wanted to write to him but Mother said she didn’t have an address.
She tried to think what it meant. She knew Dad had loved her because he had hugged her a lot, tickling her with his moustache, and told her she was his favourite girl, although she doubted that now that he had gone off with Mrs Watson and her three little girls. Of course they were much younger. Perhaps he didn’t like little girls so much once they started to grow up. Or perhaps she had done something to annoy him. It was hard to tell because they had not really spent much time together. He was a commercial traveller and often away. And he didn’t really talk, he just made jokes. If he had to run off with someone, Helen would have expected it to be someone he met on his travels: he had scarcely been at home enough to get to know Mrs Watson that well. It just went to show how wrong you could be.
She was so preoccupied with her own feelings that it was a long time before she realised that her mother was very unhappy. She had always been thin but she got thinner; her mouth made a longer, tighter line and she moved slowly, as if everything was a big effort. But she didn’t talk, either, except about everyday things like meals and laundry. In the evenings Helen did her homework and Mother sat in the other room, watching television. When she could put it off no longer, if she wasn’t going out with her friends, Helen would join her, and they would both sit in silence, side by side in separate chairs, staring at the screen. No one sat on the sofa where Dad used to sprawl with his feet up, ridiculing the TV programmes and drinking beer from a can. When she thought about it, her parents were so different it was extraordinary that they had ever married and she could think of no explanation other than sex, which made it all a great deal worse. They had no interests in common and they didn’t talk, so it must have been a grand passion and now it was over. That was what happened to grand passions: they didn’t last.
Eventually, with infinite daily pain, Helen admitted to herself the obvious truth that her father was not only not going to come back or send for her, he was not going to write or phone either. It was almost beyond belief but it was a fact. Or if he did get in touch one day, it would be too late to do any good. It took her years to accept this; every birthday and Christmas was a fresh trial of hope. She painted more and more, finding that was the only thing that could take her mind off the pain, the disbelief. She remained astonished that something so important could happen without warning and without aftermath, an event complete in itself, like sudden death in wartime, far away in a foreign land. A part of her had been amputated and there was nothing to be done about it.
Just before she went to art school, her mother showed her a letter from a lawyer saying that her father was actually dead. He had left enough money for her to finish her training, but still no message. She said nothing and it was months before she could cry. At art school she resolved to have lots of affairs but never to fall in love. When she met Carey she forgot her resolve. Her mother said Carey was just like her father and it would never work. When Helen got divorced, her mother said I told you so. They did not talk much after that. When Helen thought of her youth, it was the silence she remembered most.
Felix has invited me to lunch. It’s incredible. He says I can just ring him up at the flat where he works and he’ll take me out. God, will I ever have the courage?
Tonight was amazing. I heard them arrive and went into Mum’s room to borrow her earrings, so I could look out of the window. My heart gave such a thump when I saw him, I thought Mum would notice, but she didn’t, just went on about Elizabeth having put on a lot of weight. She’s always very intolerant of people who get fat, just because she doesn’t, although she doesn’t have to make any effort at all to stay thin and maybe they do.
It’s funny when you’ve had a thing about someone for years and they go away – you don’t know if you’ll still fancy them when they come back. They might have changed or you might have grown out of them. I was almost afraid to look but it was all right, Felix hasn’t changed a bit, in fact he looks better than ever, and I still fancy him rotten, I even think I might be in love with him.
The thing about Felix is he really looks at you and pays attention as if you’re important and he’s really interested in what you’re saying. Lots of parents’ friends don’t do that, they just say polite things but really they’re hoping you’ll go away soon so they can get on with their conversation, and that’s fine because usually you can’t wait to go off and do something more interesting and leave them to it. But Felix makes you feel you really matter. He’s got a sort of lived-in face that even looks a bit sad, but when he smiles it really lights up and you feel you’re the only person in the world. It’s a lovely feeling.
He kissed me on the cheek and said well done about Sussex. I know I blushed, I could feel it, I just hope he didn’t notice. I couldn’t think about anything except him at the disco and I was horrible to Chris but I couldn’t help it, he got on my nerves. I wish I hadn’t told Jackie and Maria about Felix because they keep teasing me.
Richard had made his usual fuss about fetching me at one o’clock but Felix turned up instead. I got such a shock and Jackie and Maria were really impressed, which was lovely. It was fantastic walking out of there with Felix and getting into his car, as if we were a couple. I was so excited I couldn’t think of what to say. Poor old Richard had to go and see Inge because some man beat her up. I felt a bit guilty that I was having such a treat only because they were having a rotten time.
Felix took me to a coffee bar and we talked. He complained about the music being too loud, which was a bit embarrassing but didn’t really matter. We talked about college but he kept staring at me as if he fancied me, which was fantastic. I felt he was really seeing me for the first time as somebody grown up. Then he told me he was scared of writing novels again instead of thrillers. I magine that – Felix being scared. I wanted to touch him but I didn’t dare. When we got home I thought he might kiss me, but he didn’t. He gave me his phone number instead, which is better really, because it means he wants to see me again and take me out. A kiss might have been just goodnight or goodbye. I do wish he’d kissed me though. When we went in together I felt as if he had, as if we had something to hide. I thought Mum might notice, I was in such a state, but she was in a filthy mood about Inge and Richard and that was all she could think about.
God, I hope Felix meant what he said about lunch. I’ll have to ring him up soon before I lose my nerve. It’s weird when you dream about something for years and suddenly it may be about to happen.
All week Richard had been looking forward to this evening. Felix was going to come round to the house for drinks and they were going out for dinner, a real chance to catch up after all this time. He was just leaving his office when the phone rang and they were telling him Tracey had taken an overdose and left him a note. He felt weak with shock; he said he’d go to the hospital at once. She was unconscious, so there was still a chance. He rang Felix at the flat, but got the machine. He rang Helen at home, but got Sally: Helen had already left for supper with Elizabeth. He gave Sally the message for Felix and left in a rush for the hospital, feeling a terrible sense of failure, praying that he would not be too late.
When Felix got to the house there was no Richard, only Sally in a pink dress, looking very pretty and very young, wearing hardly any make-up and playing Mozart. He felt as though he had walked on to a stage set, specially primed for his arrival. Suddenly he was very conscious that they were alone in the house and upstairs there were bedrooms full of beds. In an ideal world, he thought, in a fantasy, they would have been able to take full advantage of this, to go upstairs and get into one of the beds and make love instantly, without speaking another word. Instead, of course, he had to go into the living-room and make polite conversation.
‘Richard asked me to tell you he can’t make it,’ Sally said. ‘One of his clients has taken an overdose and he’s had to go to the hospital. He’s very sorry.’
Felix contemplated the chaos of Richard’s life and was thankful it did not resemble his own. ‘Poor old Richard,’ he said inadequately.
‘He said he tried to ring you,’ Sally went on, ‘but he got your machine. Does that mean you didn’t get my message either?’
‘What message?’ He was alarmed how much he wanted her, uncertain how far his desire depended upon her dangerous status as Helen’s daughter, Richard’s step-daughter. In a lifetime of adventuring, this was the most risky affair he had ever considered, emotional incest, potentially fatal, violating taboos of friendship normally regarded as sacred. It gave him a terrific adrenalin charge just to think about it. Perhaps she felt the same.
‘I rang about lunch,’ she said, blushing. ‘You said I should. I hate those machines.’
‘At least you had the guts to speak. You wouldn’t believe how many people just hang up. I can’t bear it when I get back and there are flashing lights and I get all excited about my messages and then it’s a great yawning silence punctuated by bleeps.’
They smiled at each other. He was aware of how childish he had made himself sound, and how much they were both smiling, goodwill overflowing everywhere. He did hope she wasn’t a virgin: he wasn’t sure he could face such a responsibility. Two or three clumsy lovers ahead of him would be fine.
‘This is nice,’ he said, indicating Mozart on the stereo.
‘I told you I could be civilised.’ Now it was like role reversal, with Sally trying hard to be grown up. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘No, thanks.’ He was going to need to be clearheaded. ‘I just had a couple with my agent. Poor woman, she did her best to motivate me, but it’s uphill work.’ He paused: the pink dress seemed demanding of his attention. ‘You look very smart.’
‘Do I? I was going out but it’s been cancelled.’
He didn’t believe a word of it and he was touched. Kids didn’t go out with each other dressed like that. She was dressing for him.
‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘As we’ve both been stood up, why don’t we have dinner together instead of lunch?’
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, sounding demure.
He took her to one of the clutch of restaurants he had collected over the years, near the flat for instant seduction (though he was not expecting that tonight) and also to minimise drunken driving, absurd expense and detection by Elizabeth or one of her friends. One could never be sure, of course, but by now he had half a dozen of these places that he thought of as safe houses but which were yet glamorous enough to gratify his companion. Sally, in any case, was too young to be fussy, and tonight they were actually innocent enough to afford discovery, though of course it was always better avoided. He found himself still taking refuge behind school and asking her about her set books, which seemed a pure enough topic, but even so there was a strong sexual undercurrent to the conversation, as if they were speaking in code or a foreign language which both could translate at will.
‘Othello’s a bit weird,’ Sally said. ‘I don’t really understand about jealousy. Why couldn’t he talk to her? It somehow spoils it that it was all a misunderstanding – like the letter going astray in Romeo and Juliet. I hate things to happen by accident.’
‘A lot of things do in real life,’ said Felix, thinking that this evening was one of them.
‘Yes, but not like that. It’s the same in Tess and I always feel it’s a cheat.’
‘You look rather like Tess,’ said Felix, still fascinated by her mouth.
‘Do I?’ She sounded pleased but embarrassed, and there was an awkward pause.
‘What about Vanity Fair?’ He was longing to get off these academic topics yet somehow unable to. He began to understand why he had never bothered with someone so young before: it was simply too much effort.
‘Well, it’s too long.’
‘Most books are. Except mine, of course.’
‘And it’s sad.’
‘Sad?’ He was surprised. ‘Most people find it amusing. Well – a good read, anyway.’
‘Yes, it is, in a way, but… oh, it’s so sad when Dobbin finally gets Amelia and then he doesn’t really appreciate her.’
‘He’d waited too long,’ said Felix, identifying with the poor sod.
‘Yes, but that shouldn’t matter – not if he really wanted her.’
God, the idealism of youth. ‘Oh, but it does. Timing is very important. It’s like catching the tide.’
‘If I really loved someone,’ Sally said, looking him straight in the eyes, ‘it wouldn’t matter how long I had to wait.’
‘If I really loved someone,’ Felix said, looking straight back at her, ‘I’d want them right away.’
Suddenly he had the feeling that they were having an important conversation. There was quite a heavy silence while they applied themselves to their food and wine; he could almost feel the weight of their thoughts. When Sally spoke again it was as if they had reached a different level of intimacy.
‘Did you mean what you said the other night – about losing your nerve?’
‘Yes.’ He never bothered to lie if it wasn’t essential. ‘Not very glamorous, is it? When you’re young you’ve nothing to lose, but later on, there’s everything at stake.’
She seemed to identify with that, leaning forward as if to touch him, reminding him with her body that they still hadn’t touched. He hoped he wouldn’t have to spend so much time getting to know her that by the time they finally did touch all the excitement would be gone.
‘But you’ll always have what you’ve done,’ she said, sounding envious. ‘I haven’t done anything yet.’
‘You’ve got it all ahead of you,’ he said, thinking how young she was.
‘But suppose I never do anything worthwhile.’
‘I don’t think that’s very likely. What d’you want to do?’
‘Well, I’ve always thought…’ She looked embarrassed. ‘Oh, it sounds awful saying this to you – I’d like to write but I’m not very good. I keep a diary but…’
‘That's a start,’ he said encouragingly.
‘Now you’re being kind. You must be sick of people telling you they want to write. I bet it happens all the time.’
‘Now and then.’ Millions of would-be writers swarmed before his eyes, accosting him at every turn, everywhere he went, and he saw himself with a machine gun, mowing them down and laughing. ‘Most of them don’t really mean it.’
‘I do, but I’m not sure I’m single-minded enough. There are so many other things I want to do as well.’
He smiled; he knew the feeling well. ‘Such as?’
‘Oh, just living. But when I say that to Mum, she says, “Well, it’s not a career.”’
Felix laughed; it sounded so much like Helen. Helen whom he would never have, no matter what he did, no matter how long he waited.
Sally said, ‘D’you want to write more than anything else in the world?’
‘Not any more.’ How long ago it seemed. ‘I used to, when I was young. Now I just want to be happy.’
‘Before they drop the Bomb,’ she said, as if she understood.
‘Before I get run over,’ said Felix, with deep anxiety at the knowledge of his own mortality. ‘In case I die in the night.’
In fact Felix loathed writing. Like acting, he thought, it was not a job for a grown man: pretending to be someone else. Unlike acting, it could only be done alone, in an empty room, so it did not even offer the consolation of sociability, though you did get to play all the parts. It was a sick profession; there was no doubt about that. No wonder they all talked about money: it was comforting to pretend to themselves and to others that was why they wrote. Too alarming to admit that they were addicted to sitting alone in a room facing the blank sheet of paper, making up stories about people who did not exist, people who were their other selves whom even the shrink could not tolerate, spinning a web of words from their own entrails until they went mad with the loneliness of it all and escaped to be interviewed on television.
At the same time it was the ideal life. Your time was your own; you were answerable to no one. You had the satisfaction of creation, and your work, when good (or lucky) enough, could keep you in idleness for years. People confided in you and lusted after you, because you had, it seemed, the combined allure of psychiatrist, magician and priest. It amazed Felix that you were not seen instead as someone who had been granted a licence to remain a child for ever, someone to be pitied as well as envied, because only children were allowed to live in a world of make-believe. Felix felt about his profession as he might about a woman he detested but with whom he was violently in love – alternately sickened and thrilled. He saw all writers, especially himself, as social misfits who could only exist in the world by withdrawing from it, as if into a secular monastery, from which they emerged at intervals to be reassured, flattered and paid.
Tony Blythe had come into Felix’s life almost by accident. After his first three novels, a university trilogy entitled Going Up, Up and About, and Coming Down, which were praised by the critics and made no money at all, he had come to an end of all possible postgraduate grants, dabbled in journalism, and married Elizabeth, letting her keep him while he wrote The Heartbreak Merchant, in which a lot of women fell in love with a man who treated them badly. This made a great deal of money, thanks to the tough bargaining of Felix’s agent, Natasha Blor: paperback, American and foreign rights rolled in, and in due course the film, with a script by Felix rewritten by a well-known playwright and further rewritten by the sister of the producer’s mistress. The critics all agreed that the book and the film were rubbish, and Felix was suddenly, by his own rather low standards, rich.
He was bemused by the turn of events. He had in fact thought of his first three novels very much as prentice work, salad days produce; but he had poured his soul into The Heartbreak Merchant, which he truly believed was a work of genius, though he agreed with the critics about the film. It was very pleasant to be rich, and for a year or two, or three, he was able to drift along doing interviews and taking expensive holidays and thinking about his next novel, until he finally had to face the fact that he didn’t have an idea in his head. Natasha was nagging him, ever mindful of her ten per cent, but Felix felt frozen in his success, like a fish in a block of ice. Everyone now expected more of the same: because he had done it once, he could do it again, that was how the thinking went, which could hardly be further from the truth. He had no idea how he had done it once and there didn’t seem the remotest chance of his doing it again. Besides, that was all there was: he had written about himself at university and about his marriage to Elizabeth and about screwing around and about his mother, and that was it. He had done it. Unless his life changed dramatically, there was nothing more to write about. He was a journalist masquerading as a novelist: his style had carried him through, but he had run out of material.
He was then thirty-two and beginning to panic, because he had grown rapidly used to the fruits of success and saw no way of replacing them when they had rotted away. Accustomed to poverty once, he found the prospect of returning to it, after being comparatively rich, quite intolerable. The terrible spectre of job-hunting danced before him: interviews leading to rejection (a blow to the ego) or to acceptance and regular hours (worse). Besides, what was he equipped to do except write or (God forbid) teach others to write? He was virtually unemployable and becoming more so all the time.
‘I did like that detective of yours,’ Elizabeth said idly one evening when they were watching a thriller on television. ‘Much more fun than this lot.’
‘Which detective?’ said Felix, who had stopped rereading his own work in case it turned out to be not as good as he thought.
‘The one in Heartbreak Merchant. When she’s on drugs.’
‘Oh yes. He was rather good.’ Felix glanced at Elizabeth affectionately. She had praised every other aspect of the book in immense detail: she must really think he needed cheering up if she resorted to praising minor characters like Tony Blythe. All the same, the idea took root, and next day he looked at one of his many copies of the book and found the relevant chapter. Elizabeth was quite right: Tony Blythe was a sexy, sardonic cop, destined for a book of his own; he had been carelessly tossed into the already rich brew of The Heartbreak Merchant back in the golden days when Felix’s imagination was fertile enough to be liberal with all his inventions.
He began writing with something like his original excitement. He wanted, while remaining uniquely himself, to achieve a blend of Simenon and Chandler; he wanted also to have fun. It seemed a chance to deal with sex and violence, death and depravity, without incurring disapproval. Tony Blythe, while basically the guy in the white hat, would have endearing human flaws such as a weakness for women and a tendency to thump people he knew were guilty. Felix swiftly got him out of the police force, after he framed some heroin dealers, and into more profitable pastures as a private investigator. Technically it was just as difficult as writing a straight novel, but it had the attraction of novelty and it also spared him from delving too deeply into himself, from being obliged to mine a seam that he feared was exhausted.
Still smarting from the annihilation of his film script, Felix began by having Tony Blythe investigate the murder of a film producer (the greatest problem being the multiplicity of suspects). Death on the Set was a success, and Felix, encouraged, killed off his agent, of whom he was actually quite fond, in The Ten Per Cent Murder, and moved on to exterminate his obliging bank manager (Death in the Red) and his accountant (Death Ledger) before turning his attention to his publisher (Murder Jacket). Elizabeth then fancied a holiday in France, so Felix wrote A Nose for Murder while they disported themselves in Grasse. It occurred to him that Tony Blythe was his passport to anywhere in the world on tax deductible expenses: drilling for oil (Death Rig) or lounging in the Caribbean (Murder Calypso).
A television series was under way, with scripts written by Felix, so he and Elizabeth made the decision to live abroad, wherever the fancy took them, away from British taxes and British weather. One or two Tony Blythe books a year was the plan, to finance the gypsy life. Unspoken but heavily present in the air between them was Felix’s dream of writing a worthy successor to The Heartbreak Merchant, something moving and significant, witty and incisive, a social commentary, a human document. In short, a masterpiece.
Nothing happened. He wrote less and less. They moved from one haven to another, diverted at first by the scenery, the customs, the language, the climate; buoyed up by the effort involved in setting up and dismantling a new home each time. Then they began to quarrel, because they were thrown back upon themselves, marooned in a foreign country without their familiar support system of theatres, cinemas, galleries and friends. They did not trust the natives, who were always so tiresomely foreign, and they did not trust the expats, who were never the sort of English people they would have chosen to know in England. So they clung together like siblings at an alien boarding-school, and inevitably started to fight. This alarmed them because it was not their way; it was not natural to them. They were used to diplomacy and evasion. Now there was nowhere safe to go to relieve the tensions of their relationship: they had not realised before how much they depended upon frequent retreat to achieve close harmony.
They could not discuss this new problem overtly, for they were not programmed for confrontation, but they made discreet sideways movements, crab-like, which they both understood very well, in the direction of England and home, gradually edging nearer as they had originally edged further away, and inevitably ended up in Ireland. Their letters to Helen and Richard were almost a signal of distress, a flare sent up on a dark night over the sea.
Once again in the car on the way home the atmosphere was as highly charged as it had been on the drive back from the disco. He thought it had something to do with the lack of space, with being together in a small dark place and looking out at the lighted world, as if they were in a tent or on a boat. He wanted to talk about something important, so he asked her if she saw anything of her father these days.
‘No, I haven’t seen him since I was little.’ She sounded sad but resigned, as if she didn’t expect to see him ever again. ‘I often think about him. Sometimes I hear one of his concerts and I try to pretend I can pick him out – you know, I think, now which viola is he? And I sort of imagine he sounds better than the others. It’s silly really.’
‘Would you like to see him again?’
‘In a way. But Mum might feel I was being disloyal and Richard might be hurt. Anyway, I hardly remember him. We might not get on. And now he’s got Marsha and all those children, he probably doesn’t think about me much.’
Felix said with feeling, ‘I should have thought he’d be haunted by you.’ At that moment they were driving past his flat and on a sudden impulse he pointed out the building to her. ‘That’s where I work. Top floor. Why don’t you ring the bell one day? Then you wouldn’t get that awful machine. I often leave it on when I’m working.’
‘All right,’ she said, very small, and he felt as if they were conspirators. There was a scent in the car that he now identified as vanilla; whether it was soap or perfume or simply skin, it was the essence of Sally and made him think that kissing her, making love to her, would be like eating ice-cream, a childish, nourishing, exuberant pleasure.
There were lights on in the house when they got back, so he drove past it and parked round the corner. It seemed very dangerous for Richard and Helen to discover them together unless they had agreed to tell the truth. And if they did, that could mean there was no future for them.
‘Thank you for dinner,’ Sally said, like a well-brought-up child. ‘It’s been a lovely evening.’ But he thought he heard a wistful note of disappointment or even frustration in her voice, and he was pleased. The more he could make her want him and keep her waiting, the less chance there would be of her rejecting him when he made his move; the less blame would attach to him if, God forbid, they were ever found out. It was vital to avoid a situation where he was pursuing her and she had the power: however flattered she might be, that could turn him simultaneously into victim and dirty old man, both unrewarding roles, to be avoided if at all possible.
‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘I feel as if we’ve only just met.’
‘So do I,’ Sally said, sounding relieved.
There was a long, tantalising silence.
Felix said, ‘Are we going to tell them about this evening?’
‘Why not?’
Could she really be so innocent or was she playing with him?
‘Sometimes it’s nice to have a secret,’ he said carefully.
‘All right.’
Now it felt like a bond or a pledge: they must be intending an affair or there would be no need for secrecy. He wanted to kiss her but still felt it was too soon and would make him seem like an eager schoolboy. Yet it was important to touch, to put his mark on her in some way, so he stroked her cheek and went on staring at her mouth as they said goodnight. But she looked at him with such longing that he changed his mind and kissed her lightly after all, abandoning his resolution. Her mouth was warm and uncertain; she was trembling and he felt his cock stir. She didn’t taste of the vanilla smell, rather of the wine and garlic they had both been consuming, but she felt so new that he was moved almost to tears.
‘See you soon,’ he said in his sexiest voice, and watched until she reached the house and turned to wave. She’s a child pretending to be a woman, he thought, as he drove away; eighteen is very young. He remembered how grown up he had felt at her age and how wrong he had been. No doubt she felt grown up too, and she would be equally wrong. He smiled tenderly to himself, as he tried to imagine what lie she might be telling. The first kiss, the first lie: all the other firsts stretched ahead of them. In a way it was almost a pity to begin. Though sexually impatient, emotionally he enjoyed anticipation as much as recollection. In a love affair or a new book, it was the same: while it was yet to be achieved there was the potential for perfection. And afterwards, you had to accept what you had made, with all its flaws, until enough time had passed for you to reshape it in your memory.
When he got home Elizabeth was alone, watching television and knitting. He was sorry: it would have been an extra pleasure to see Helen.
‘Poor old Richard couldn’t make it,’ he said. ‘One of his clients OD’d so I finally made a start on the new book.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ Elizabeth said without looking up.
‘Yes, I do feel rather pleased with myself.’
He poured himself a drink and sat beside her on the sofa. He felt comfortable in the warmth and security of knowing she was always there. Later on he would probably make love to her and think of Sally.
Helen hugged him and he showed her Tracey’s note: ‘Dear Richard, I’m sorry. I know you tried to help me but I don’t want to live. Please forgive me. Tracey.’ It had proved impossible to contact her parents and he had sat with her till she died. He blamed himself totally. It was his first death.
‘I knew she was depressed, of course, but I never picked up it was that bad.’
‘How could you?’ Helen said, kissing him.
‘If I can’t do that, I’m useless.’
‘But maybe something happened after you saw her. It’s not your fault, darling, believe me.’
They heard the front door slam and Sally came slowly into the room.
‘Is she all right?’
Richard shook his head.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’
‘I thought you were doing revision tonight,’ Helen said, looking at the pink dress.
Sally hesitated. ‘I was,’ she said, ‘but I went out with Chris instead.’
Later that week while she still had courage, she rang the bell of the flat. When Felix opened the door he held out his arms as if he had been expecting her and they kissed. She was shaking; she felt she had been waiting for him all her life. It was like coming home, that feeling of safety, of wanting to disappear into the hug, and yet it was also forbidden and dangerous, as if he were a stranger.
‘Oh, Sally,’ he said, ‘you’re so beautiful and so young.’
‘Please don’t send me away.’ She pressed her face against his shirt, breathing in the magical smell of him.
‘How can I? You don’t think I want to, do you? But you know this is crazy.’
She nodded and they kissed for a long time. She felt him harden and press against her, the way Chris had done.
‘If they ever find out,’ he said, ‘they’ll kill us.’
‘I know.’ She was very excited. ‘But you said I could just come round and you’d give me lunch.’
He smiled. ‘D’you want to go out or stay in?’
‘Stay in,’ she said. ‘Please.’
He stroked her face. ‘What have I done to deserve you? I’ll be very careful, I promise. You mustn’t worry.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s all right. I’ve had one lover already and I’m on the pill.’ She was afraid it sounded crude, and describing Chris as a lover seemed like an exaggeration, although it was true. ‘But if I’d known you were coming back I’d have waited for you.’
‘In that case,’ said Felix, understanding perfectly, and starting to undress her, ‘he doesn’t count.’