AH, THE SNUG LITTLE HIDEAWAY with its cushions and its inscrutable Buddha, dim lights like scalloped stars in various niches, and the gleam of the fire on the red-brown leather upholstery. So warm, so mischievous. Winter was almost upon them. Yet the glow of the fire and that boyish smile on his newly shaven face, smiling the smile of infancy and boyhood and puberty and manhood, eating the nuts, the salt occasionally on his lips like a bit of frost which he licked as he would have licked her hands gladly. How long was it? He probably had forgotten. A party, a chance thing had brought them together again. Ah, that first time. Vertigo at the top of the staircase in a ponderous London club with portraits everywhere of gouty faces, faces bespeaking lust and disgust, and how they whispered though they were strangers. “Swift as the lightning in the collied night,” she had said to him. Such a peculiar thing to say, but he saw it as an anthem. Now he was telling her that he had learned a proverb; it was this, that the eyes are in the fingertips. He had learned it in the Far East; he often went. He worked all over the world designing hotels and airports and helicopter launches, and he employed God knows how many, but he still had a boyish quality and was saying, “Is that dress new?” as if they had met just yesterday or at most last week. There wasn’t a trace of bitterness in his voice or in his eyes, the grey eyes with the tenderest flinch. He had probably quite forgotten how it had ended, forgotten the late-night calls, the mad curses she had visited on him, the cold rodent glances he gave her when they met once at a summer party. He was conscious again, as if for the first time, of her radiance, this woman in a black dress, composed and at the same time reeking wildness.
Of course much was concealed. There was behind that composed face of hers, with its high patch of blush, another being, in some ways more beautiful, in some ways more ugly, and certainly more hungry, sucking him in, drawing him in, in, in, if only for the moment, if only for that hour while they were together. He would have whisked her away anywhere, given her anything; he was her slave through and through.
What was he telling her? Yes, how he had learned to ski and how exhilarating it was, a new thing, and now he had two hobbies instead of one: his boats and the ski slopes. Oh yes, and he had named his boat after a saint. He did not say if she had crossed his mind in the intervening years, but she must have, an image now and then: a thread of vexation about the bitter bilious letter she’d sent to his home and which was read, oh yes read; and the nicer moment too, at a house party, at dusk in a grand house, all the ladies weighted with jewels, and catching sight of someone just like her with a flower in her hair, a bit of bougainvillea picked off a tree; or being alone in a strange city and looking out onto a harbour with its necklace of lights, lights glinting—so many eyes stuck into the mountain of night—and wishing she would appear by his side. Oh yes, he would have thought of her, not often, but at those tenderest of moments when he forgot work and forgot ambition and put aside the little gnawing dream he had to run the world and listened to his truer self.
She too had, of course, remembered him, but gradually stamped upon it, foot upon foot, grinding it zealously into any piece of earth or street she stood upon, burying it, burying him, clothes, shoes, braces, wallet, and all. He had come in dreams, always retransported to her original terrain, always alone, on a wall or a headland or standing on a pathway under a tree, a priestly figure waiting to chastise her, not quite welcoming her, but not dismissing her either.
“Did you ever dream of me?” she asked lightly, in a bantering way.
“All the time,” he said in the softest of voices. Now, what did that mean? What was he saying? Were they good dreams, bad dreams, crowded dreams? In those dreams were they united, or were they apart, like those Japanese figures on a plate in which the lovers are perpetually divided by cruel waters? She also wanted to ask if, when he dreamt of her, he saw her in her happy guise, all aglow, or with a pulpy, tear-stained, supplicant face. It meant so much to her to know that little thing, the consistency of the image of her that roamed his mind. She didn’t ask. How had she spent the summer? In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: “Is there someone new?” The old entanglements of course remain like milestones and can be countenanced, but someone new can make an upheaval. That someone new might be the one to put a sledgehammer to those milestones, reduce them to rubble.
She was telling about her holiday, the grandeur of it, a bay of course, yachts, canny people who talked always of hobbies and resorts, things they could share out in the open, never talking about the things they had in their vaults, their jewellery, or their money, or their savage secrets. She was describing it: her own little bungalow, a personal maid called Lupa, who became so devoted to her that when she scrubbed the floors and made the bed and stacked it with a compilation of pillows and sausage-shaped chenille cushions, she lingered. Then what did Lupa do next? She took to washing the faces of the flowers outside, washing each as if it were a baby’s face, first with a damp cloth and then with a less damp cloth and then with a dry cloth, pulling off dead leaves as she went, putting them into a pile, and then getting a dustpan to shovel up the dead leaves, sweeping slowly, slowly, reluctant to go.
What she did not tell him was that on one of those days, during one of those several sweepings, she had shed tears, many tears. They had simply gushed out of her in a huge flow, like blood. Were they for him? Partly. But they were also for life, its heartlessness and her qualms about losing something incarnate in herself. Lupa, who was hovering, saw these tears, crossed, and stood in front of her, pulling down the lower lid of one of her own eyes to emphasize that she understood. Maybe she was saying that it was no joke to be a maid, irking to be fated to work for people who spoke only three or four words and these three or four words were Breakfast, Immediately, Iron, Wash. The moment had etched itself. There were three urns with plumbago flowers, water making fretful shadows on a bit of white wall, a lizard clinging to it, inanimate as a piece of jade. The maid was disappointed in her, yes, truly; tears were for the starving, not for ladies who had bowls of fruit to gorge from and a four-poster ornamented with porcupine quills.
HE DID NOT HAVE TO ORDER THE NEXT DRINK. They came quietly, surreptitiously, the previous undrained glasses carried away. What a lovely time she was having, almost as enchanting as the first time, except that she was a little braver now and a little warier and much more assured and determined to tell him those lighthearted tales about her travels, about seeing men one night chase a butterfly because it was not lucky, and stamp on it, and then a drive home through lonely countryside with all the houses shuttered up, the jalousies closed to give the appearance of dollhouses, the inmates asleep, and the mountain itself girdled in white mist; like a presence it was, so that one thought of a Santa Claus roaming about. Then she found herself describing the beautiful painting, red and gold, the colours still seeming moist, seeming to seep, though it was centuries old. It was the Last Supper, the faces at the table grave, shrewd, and austere, and not necessarily devout, and then a distance away—the supper table was outdoors—a woman with half-torn garb, also red but muddied; a prostitute on the ground with a baby in her arms. Had someone thrown her out there, or had she come back to supplicate, or had she chosen that position for herself in order to debase herself in front of those grave, shrewd, austere faces? Or was it that at last she had given up because disease had struck her?
IT WAS NOT WHAT HE AND SHE WERE SAYING that mattered, it was what they were thinking. They were merely skimming the surfaces of the years, hiding all the urgent parts of themselves, she hiding the vengeances that indeed she had conceived because she had been jilted, and he believing that she had betrayed him with that bilious letter. She would insist that her betrayal was because of his betrayal, and so on. Tit for tat. Maybe that was why she thought of that painting, that above any other, a woman cast aside by judicious men. Luckily he was not able to read her thoughts, because he had begun to describe a hotel in Thailand where he had recently stayed. He went on about the beauty, the harmony, the uncanny way in which people served without seeming servile.
“You can get anything … anything,” he said, conveying his own amazement.
“Even love?” she said, picking up the cue. He smiled. He had wanted to get her to that word and had achieved it so easily, so insouciantly had he steered her to it.
“Love … you have to bring yourself,” he said in a teasing way. It only took a minute, or was it five minutes, to tell her that he was going back there soon and he was going alone and nothing would please him more than to take her and to show her the city. For one who was not overly lyrical, he went on about the flowers, flowers in the trees, flowers in the drinks, and then the flower-coloured floating dresses that the women wore. The streets she could picture too, narrow and with little vehicles, little tuk-tuks, that people travelled around in, and of course the vivid colours and the all-prevailing courtesy. Yes, it would be charming and she knew it. He would be at his best. They would meet there. He would meet her off the plane, he in a light suit, a different suit, and help her into a car, or maybe one of those little tuk-tuk machines, but probably a car, and point out things as they drove along, then take her to the hotel and up to a suite that was spacious, and they would stand in that big room, timid, timid as flowers, virgin lovers in that land of flowers, everything ordained.
Every bit of her wanted to say yes. Her eyes said it and the eyes at the tips of her fingertips said it and the flesh at the back of her throat ached at the thought of these new sensations. It was a place she had always wanted to visit, as if self-discovery awaited her there. The women, she believed, had something to teach her. A vein of patience perhaps. It beckoned. She was awakening. The image that floated into her head was a field of grass overwhelmed by wind, each blade veering in the same direction, powerless. He was taking out his diary. It was an invitation to take her own out, because after all she was a busy woman too. His touch on her knee was like a little electric shock, but pleasant. If only they could go, there and then. If only he stood up and he carried her off.
Yet her answer was firm. She knew what she must say. The little beads of ecstasy in her throat were turning to tears, salt tears. It came back in a blinding guttural flash, the pain when he had left, the savagery of it, his deafness to her pleas, his refusal even at Christmas to answer a telephone call, his forgetting her address, the address at which he had called in daylight and in dark and had once flung clay up at her window; he had forgotten that address, simple as it was. How she hated these thoughts rearing up in her, but she had no control over them; they consumed her. It was not that she hated him; she did not hate him, but that old grudge, like a bit of flint in the ground, had come up to confront her. His eyes were so soft, his face so pale and gentle, his manner so suppliant that she longed to say yes, yes.
“It’s not possible,” she said, but in a tone of voice so suggestive and so laden with innuendo that it really was saying, “There is another whom I cannot leave.”
“Even if you tried?” he said, his eyes smarting now because he couldn’t abide the merest rejection. Also, he was taken aback.
“Even if I tried, it wouldn’t be possible,” she said, and a whole landscape of flowers and silk saris and tuk-tuk machines passed before her like dizzying images seen from a speeding train. He leant over to the table beside them and took the plate of nuts and began to eat ravenously. She wanted to take his hand and tell him why. It would have saved everything. She put her hand on the sofa and at that moment he drew back his, his white fingers curling away from hers like the tail of a white mouse receding into wainscotting. He had come with this gift, this offering, these days wrenched from his life, and she had spat on it. He looked around as he always did when he became irate and said they hadn’t done a damn thing to the room in years, they hadn’t even given it a lick of paint.
“Let’s have another drink,” she said.
“You can have one,” he said as he rose, adding that he did not see why he should sit around and have her tell him why she did not want to go away with him. She must redeem it, she must. She jumped up and saw that he was cold now, disapproving, like those disciples in the painting.
“But you see why I can’t go,” she said openly.
“No, I don’t see,” he said, even more irritable.
“Because I would have to come back … We would have to come back,” she said, no longer afraid of her emotions, no longer raving about bays and bougainvillea, but reaching right down to the root of the love or the lingering love that was there, hauling him out of himself, shedding the lies and the little pretences, forsaking the wobbly balustrade that had been theirs.
“We’re getting carried away again,” she said, and shook her head soberly to make him understand. He felt it. His hand on hers now so gentle, like condensation, a hand which she longed to hold on to forever, a keepsake. Never were they so near while also being on the brink of parting. But they were parting properly, decently, as they should have done years ago, and now she loved him in a way that she had not loved him before.
OUTSIDE, THE LIGHT WAS UNSETTLING insofar as it was still bright, but all the streetlights had come on. People in cars, people walking hand in hand, posters on the facings of cable boxes, torn faces, torn half-faces, the red glow of the traffic signals in the distance like heated moons, drivers with set jaws taking issue with God, a white-shirted waiter listlessly hailing a cab, and in the park now—because she had gone in there—the treetops all close together, snuggling, whispering, the hexagonals of light beneath them, haloed by both leaf and drizzle. There was a drizzle that pattered onto the leaves and onto her face, and the fallen leaves bristled like taffeta as she stepped over them.
“What now, what now?” she asked, and walked with pointless vigour, unable to exorcise the sight of him in his old tweed overcoat, moving away from her, somewhat downcast, somewhat melancholy, but not showing the full hurt. That overcoat must be ten or fifteen years old. She was touched by the thought that he had not bought another, something more plush. Only love makes one notice a thing like that, love, that bulwark between life and death. Love, she thought, is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.