Green Iris

 

 

She thought: After a certain age, most women are with a man. She thought this on the night after she met Helen. She thought it philosophically. (Resignedly.)

Of course, war had changed things a little. Those droves of men, young and old (whom the gods loved died young or old) greedily swept away in the fire and mud of the trenches. But even so, even when a woman wasn’t, now, in any physical actuality of marriage or relationship, still, generally, she was with one or other of them. She was planning how he might be had. Yearning after him—even if he was only a memory. The inconsolable widows in their black, broke suddenly out of the chrysalis and were dancing again, in their bright dresses. Cinderellas among the princes.

But this was worse, anyway. Helen was married, and Helen’s husband had survived the war, was alive and still youngish, and extremely there.

 

March

Sabia Cobb met Helen Driver at a party in Wootton Street. Who was giving the party Sabia was unsure. She hadn’t very much wanted to go, but a young man had asked her to. Usually, if she thought him harmless, she tried to go about with the occasional young man. It was only prudent. Or so Sabia believed.

This young man was called Marcus, and he drove Sabia to a tall house, folded in a grey March evening mist. Upstairs the party raged. Someone was always winding up the gramophone, and dance tunes came bleating out of it. Glasses and people clinked and glittered.

“Oh look, there’s Driver,” said Marcus, sounding contemptuous, which might mean he was impressed.

“Whose driver is that?” asked Sabia, annoyingly.

“No, Edmund Driver, the writer. He’s not bad, they say. I’ve not read him. But an absolute swine, I’ve heard. He only comes to a party to make clever remarks, and then turns everyone into caricatures in some book.” (Marcus himself was at the edges of the publishing business. No doubt such nasty caricatures, or similar ones, were of indirect benefit to him.)

Sabia was not interested. She drank her sticky blue cocktail slowly, and looked round under her eyelids.

Marcus had been too young for the war. Surely it wasn’t this that made him look so unfinished—like a half-boiled egg. If so, that did not apply to Sabia, who had also been too young, properly to understand. Now in her twenties, she might herself be wise enough, yet still felt she understood very little.

Why, for example, was she really here at this party?

Then she saw, with her serpent’s gaze, Helen.

“Who’s that woman?”

“Which? Oh—don’t know.”

“Her dress is wonderful.”

“Is it?” he said. “The rest of her is pretty good too, I’d say. But no, she isn’t young. Well over thirty. Still, modern enough. And well off.”

Sabia, who hadn’t really noticed at all Helen’s long, slender green stalk of a dress, did now see the flash of a wife’s slave rings on her left hand.

Then Marcus wanted to dance, so Sabia said she was too tired. And in a while, he went off somewhere or other.

And then Sabia glided, as she herself amusedly thought, like a panther through the thickets, and arrived where Helen was. Helen was not drinking a cocktail. Someone had found some whisky, and she was drinking that. Three men had surrounded her, and Sabia wondered which was the husband, for how alike these men all were, in their black and white. Sabia eased herself between two of them, who good-naturedly allowed her to do so.

Sabia said brightly, “Oh Daphne, how are you?”

The four of them turned, and looked at her, blank.

“Oh, dear,” said Sabia, her face falling. “Am I mistaken?”

Helen laughed. She didn’t seem put out. She didn’t really look, Sabia thought, as if anything could ever irritate her very much. Nor would she take much notice of it. Her face was so smooth, only the tiny faint pencil-sketched lines to either side of her mouth, and at the edges of her eyes.

No one however was going to enlighten Sabia. Or draw her in. Of course, she was not really in their class. She had a foreignness, an exotic quality that, carefully smother it as she did, was still somehow audible to certain people across great distances of money, accent and clothing.

Sabia pretended confusion. She slunk away as she was supposed to.

Presently, sitting on a couch with some others, she watched Helen drift out of the room. She was now on the arm of another man entirely. But Sabia paid him little attention.

“I love that woman’s dress,” she tried again, more successfully with these female companions.

“Yes, it’s gorgeous, isn’t it? From Paris, probably. That’s Helen Driver.”

“Oh—her husband’s the writer, isn’t he?”

“Edmund Driver. He’s divine.”

Edmund Driver, the Divine Swine.

And Helen, perhaps late of Troy.

 

A few days later, Sabia saw the most recent of Edmund Driver’s books for sale. She walked into the shop and bought it, thinking there went her wine-and-cigarette money for the week.

The novel was called The Last of Us, a strange title. “Clever,” presumably, as Marcus had said.

Sabia read it slowly in the dull March light, or beneath the rosy lamp, trying to find traces of Helen. But it was a book, of course, about men, their preoccupations and dilemmas, their masculine values. One woman did dominate the book, but she was an object, a Being, not really a person, remote, unreasonable, unfathomable and cruel. (Sabia supposed, if she herself had written a book, the male characters would be like this Woman in Driver’s novel. Sabia didn’t understand men, or rather, they didn’t interest her enough for her to try to understand them. And so, she could only display them as empty icons, just as the Woman-being was. But also didn’t this imply that Edmund Driver, along with most men, probably, had no grasp of—therefore no true interest in—women?) But anyway, the Woman was not Helen. Not physically—nor surely in any form. The Woman was in her twenties, her hair was (foreignly) black, she was voluptuous and impossibly beautiful.

Helen was tall and slender, white-skinned and fair-haired, the hair short, with what seemed a natural wave. She was in her thirties. She was beautiful—but not like the creature in the book.

Helen was beautiful like—well…like what?

Sabia began to try to think what Helen was like. Jokingly to herself, Sabia called her Helen of Troy, but Helen’s looks weren’t classical either.

I suppose, thought Sabia reluctantly, she has a Helen-beauty.

So it was quite serious, then. Oh, yes.

 

The following week, Marcus telephoned.

“You still type, don’t you, Sabie?”

She said she did. Marcus asked if she would be willing to type up some stories a pet aunt of his had written.

“Is her writing readable?”

“Horribly so,” said Marcus gloomily. “She wants to publish, but I don’t think it’ll be on somehow. But she’ll pay you.”

He said this bluntly. Marcus knew Sabia often supplemented her precarious finances with typing work.

Sabia agreed, and three days after received a large and ominous package. A glance at the stories filled her with nearly insane despair.

She pulled the cover off her typewriter and placed the machine on the dining table of her flat, arranged the ribbons, the manuscript, pens and pencils, then decided she must at once go out.

In flight down the street, she knew she would now waste the day, wandering about in escape; anything rather than return to the threatening machine and the pile of auntly stories.

She had always been this way. Always confronting her duty and promptly running away from it.

Sometimes she even did what must be done—eventually. As, eventually she might dust the flat, or cook herself a Proper Meal.

Walking through the drizzle, between the wet-newspaper of the buildings and glistening, dead-looking trees, Sabia thought of Helen.

On the dust jacket of Edmund Driver’s book, there had been a tiny fragment of information about the author, written small, like a secret. He had been born in Buckinghamshire, fought in the war, survived, and was married. There were no children, or not apparently. Now he lived in London.

Sabia began to see that really the Drivers were quite traceable. They were perhaps even in the telephone book. It was often surprising who was.

In the afternoon, following a cheap English lunch at the Corner House, Sabia went home. She pointedly ignored the typewriter and waiting stack of manuscript, and instead began to seek the Drivers’ number.

“The Driver Residence,” finally announced a maid on the other end of the line.

“Yes,” said Sabia. “Is Mrs Driver there?”

“Who may I say?”

Sabia invented a name. The name didn’t matter, after all she wasn’t going to speak.

Soon Helen picked up the receiver. “Hello… This is Helen Driver. Hello?”

Sabia smiled, and cut them both off from each other.

You are a bad woman, Sabia Cobb. Playing games on the telephone. What silly moments of spurious control—but it was no good chiding herself now.

“Hello,” said the voice all the way from Troy, on and on in Sabia’s brain. “Hello, hello.” And what shall Sabia do now?

 

It was no longer a chore. Sabia’s fingers skimmed over the clacketing keys, typing out the Aunt’s Tales, a kind of failed Jane Austenesquerie set in Cheltenham.

“Good lord—that was quick,” said Marcus, when she told him, also over the telephone.

“I do type quite fast. I’m quite a good typist.”

“I know. She’ll be ecstatic. Expect the cheque soon.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Well, I owe you a lunch as well, Sabie.” Drifting apart from her now, since seeing he had no “chance” with her, the rewarding lunch was offered with the correct amount of aloof patronage.

“That would be lovely, Marcus. Actually, what I’d really like—”

“I’m not buying you a hat,” squeaked Marcus.

(Sabia wondered which girl it was—or was it another aunt?—who had reduced him to such curious apprehension.)

“No, I’ve got some hats, thank you. What I’d like would be a lot more work. I mean, something more steady.”

“Well, I hear offices are still wanting—”

“I don’t want an office job, Marcus. I just need something to pay the rent. I was thinking—you’ve seen I can type all right. Would it be possible to get me introduced to some authors who need a quick, efficient typist?”

“Most of them already have long-established typists, Sabie, little old ladies with cobwebby buns—and they won’t trust anyone else with their precious junk. Or they type their own manuscripts—and a very dreadful mess they make of it, most of them, too. Odd animals, writers.”

“Actually,” said Sabia coolly, “at that party the other night…that author—who was it—Edmund Something—Drover—”

“Driver. Edmund Driver.”

“Oh yes. Well I heard someone mention Mr Driver? wanted a typist. At the time, it didn’t occur to me, and of course, I don’t know him. But if someone could introduce me—”

Marcus said stuffily he wasn’t sure. He had heard Driver was, as well as being “clever,” stand-offish and arrogant.

“I’ve met him myself a couple of times. He wasn’t too bad really, but it depends how he’s feeling, it seems. They’re very temperamental, I find, writers. Worse than the theatrical profession, I’d say.”

From what she had seen of him, Sabia had gauged that Marcus liked to do favours. They gave him a sense of power. For everything he was able to grant, one day he believed he would reap a return. He seemed to forget how feckless and ungrateful everybody was.

“I’d be so grateful, Marcus.”

“I’ll tell you what. A chap I know—Conranne—he knows Driver a bit. I’ll get him to have a word.”

Sabia, obviously, had no reason whatever to think that Edmund Driver was in sudden need of a typist. No one had said anything of the sort at the party. But intuitively, she wished to approach her goal (Helen) through the auspices of Helen’s husband. The male ruled in any household he occupied. To try to circumvent him would be madness, and all approaches must first be sanctioned by him. Her only real hope, however, had been to meet Driver and try to persuade him she might be useful. Sabia, from long experience of these men she did not ever understand, or try to understand, knew even so that she was often adept at persuading them to things. Perhaps her very distance helped her, or her, as she thought, serpentine silences. She had seldom gone far wrong. She had never even truly been accused of being what she was—a woman fascinated only by women.

Now, she also knew she must be quiet, and not insist, to Marcus, on meeting Driver. She would have to settle for the outside chance that:

1) Marcus would remember to ask this Conranne.

2) Conranne would remember to speak to Driver.

3) Driver coincidentally might need, against all odds, someone to type his work.

“Thanks, Marcus. I do appreciate it.” Sabia put the telephone receiver back on its cradle, and walked to the window. Across the dingy street and the roofs, she could see the tops of Manorcourt Park. The mists were clearing, and by a stretch of the imagination, narrowing her eyes, the bare trees already had a look about them of new green.

 

April

The weather changed, and April weather came, just as it was meant to. Pale limpid greens overran the watercolour surfaces of London, glimmers of iridescent turquoise shot through shadows in flashes of glassy rain, while the March sky shed its skin like a snake to reveal a body as blue as an eye.

Sabia stood looking at all this, now, and knew, as the month swelled, something was sure to happen, as nearly always one does in spring (usually quite wrongly).

When the telephone rang, she wasn’t surprised. Not surprised when she heard the deep, unknown masculine voice, which said, “Miss Cobb? This is Edmund Driver. I’ve been led to understand you’re a first class typist.”

Sabia laughed. That shouldn’t matter. He would think her elated at getting the work.

He said that his accustomed typist had a bad cold. It had apparently happened before and laid her up for a month or more, and he had a book for which the publishers were waiting.

He would be very pleased if Miss Cobb could come to see him at the house in St Giles Grove. Then perhaps they could arrange something to suit them both. “Bring your own machine, will you,” he said, “we don’t have one here. Take a taxi. I’ll cover any expense.”

He had a musical voice. He was Being Charming. She recognized it infallibly, for she was Being Charming too. They both wanted something.

They agreed this afternoon would be best.

When she put down the receiver, Sabia felt at once as if she had just gulped a glass of good champagne too fast. The Angel of April had smiled upon her, the saint of women in love.

 

 “Your speed’s truly impressive,” he said. “And you seem able to read my handwriting perfectly.”

“It’s very readable handwriting,” she said.

“Yes. I don’t know why. I’m pretty careless with everything else.”

Sabia glanced at him quickly, and away. Her gambit was to look lucidly composed, yet impressed, and a little shy. She was very effective at this stance, having mastered it years before.

The room they were in was entirely pleasant, as was the whole house.

She had known, from the address, that this was a wealthy mildly historical area. St Giles Grove lay beyond Regents Park and driving through the greening avenues, and out among gracious high garden walls, with their floods of incipient laburnum, and the dove-coloured buildings sheltering half-seen in waking coppices, Sabia felt an ancient nostalgia for the beauty of architecture, the illusion of pagan woods. One expected a blue thread of offering smoke to rise any second between the trees.

The Driver Residence stood in Aspersedge Road, tucked away behind its walls, and surrounded by a garden of massive limbs and leafy boughs. Birds were springing everywhere, singing wild madrigals. The house was a creamy faded pink, and had also-faded bluish shutters by the windows, as if it thought it were in France.

Sabia was shown up at once to Edmund’s study.

“Here, let me take that,” he said, coming over to lift the heavy typewriter from her clutch. “They should have got someone to carry it up for you.” He meant his servants, the parlourmaid who had opened the door.

On the first floor, the study had long, open windows to a little balustraded balcony that overlooked the garden below. Sunlight drenched the garden, the busy electrified birds, and showed a gardener with his assistant, tying off daffodils and attending to shrubs.

Ice-yellow curtains fluttered at the long glass doors. You could smell hyacinths still persisting in pots, and the aroma of fresh coffee another maid had just brought for Sabia.

He drank some of the coffee too.

“I can’t stand tea,” he said, “even in the afternoon. Wretched stuff, it works on me like cocaine. Coffee never does anything much at all. I suppose I’m perverse.”

Sabia smiled. Admiring him, as he would expect to be admired. On the shelves, his seven novels in their Emblem editions, and then in various other foreign forms, made a dazzling display. Sabia, dazzled. Presently she was able to admit, “I’m afraid I’ve only read one of your books. The latest. The Last of Us.” And to his uneasily off-hand and studied, “Oh. What did you think of it?” she replied, “I don’t think I understood it all. But I think it was one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read.”

He was good-looking. She hadn’t noticed at the party, barely did so now. But looks were also a reference point, and might not be ignored. They too would temper how he was, and what he might expect or demand in the way of female homage.

He was between—what?—thirty-four and thirty-six, thirty-seven. She couldn’t be quite sure, for from some angles he looked older, nearly severe, with the strokes of grey that were beginning just above his ears in the dark brown thickness of his hair. His eyes were blue. Nothing unusual there. Rather dark blue, perhaps. He was well-dressed in a casual, almost untidy way. Not enough to be insulting or slovenly, more an attempt (maybe deliberate) at the carelessness he had boasted, the perverseness. Did he equate these things with vanishing youth? When he looked up like that, yes, just now, he did look much younger.

His hands were well cared for, but stained with ink. He saw her see this, and told her that his pen had begun to leak, but it was the pen he must always have, to write with, wasn’t that childish? But that was how he was, so he used the pen still, and it ruined his hands and his clothes.

“But I thought you’d finished your book.”

“Yes, that book is finished. But when I can, I always start another one fairly soon after.” And then he sat on the side of the desk and said, thoughtfully, “It’s as if I can’t stop. The writing. I rather resent it, in a way. Is it a gift or a curse? Does it enslave me?—Yes. And if I’m not writing, Miss Cobb, I’m unlivable with.”

When she positioned herself at the typewriter to demonstrate her ability, Sabia was for a moment nervous. But he might like that. So she said, “I feel very nervous.”

“But this is just a formality. George Conranne already sang your praises to high heaven. He said you’d typed up something for one of Marcus’s authors, and a more perfect typescript he had never seen.”

Sabia stared an instant. She thought: What now would she owe Conranne—who she had never met—let alone Marcus the half-cooked egg.

But she began to type, and passed the test anyway; tapping fluently and exactly, covering several pages before Driver said to her, “I’m sorry, do stop now. I was frankly mesmerized, I think, watching you. I have to say, you’re much quicker than Agatha.” Then, reaching out for what she had typed, and reading it, “And no mistakes. None.”

Sabia didn’t make mistakes. She had learned in many ways never to make mistakes. She trusted herself, mostly, to excel in every public area of her precarious and skill requiring existence.

Then she heard Helen’s voice (Helen of the Hello, the Trojan telephone with Sabia concealed inside it), talking softly through the bird trills in the garden.

“That’s my wife.”

“Oh, yes,” said Sabia, politely interested.

Driver moved to the balcony windows. He called down to invisible, omnipresent Helen, “Darling, I’ve magically found a wonderful typist. Aren’t I lucky.”

“Yes, darling,” called Helen. “But you always are.”

How false the exchange sounded. What a stage-husband said to a stage-wife. And back again.

Most women talked like this to the men in their lives. Most women were stage-wives, stage-girlfriends, stage-lovers. It began, Sabia thought, when they were stage-daughters of five or six.

Driver started to moot Sabia’s fee. This was soon agreed. He said, “Do you prefer to work at home, or here?” I’d really prefer you to be here. Agatha can’t stand it, mind you, typing on the premises. I think I make her jittery, but also I keep bothering her with corrections, and changes I want to make. Would that worry you?”

“No, not at all. That’s what I’m there for, isn’t it, Mr Driver.”

“Oh, Miss Cobb.” Playful. “You really are heaven sent.” Flirting with her. She flirted back just a very little, only with her eyes and the corners of her mouth. He was irresistible, of course.

Outside, Helen was telling her gardener that something wasn’t right with that bush, it must be seen to.

It was arranged Sabia would come to the house every day at ten o’clock, and work through until about five. When she said, in answer to his question, that she would take the tube, he told her she would do no such thing. She must have a taxi every day, both arriving and departing. Also, she must lunch here.

He said, “Helen will see to it.”

It kept seeming she was about to meet Helen. But this didn’t happen. Nor did he want Sabia to begin work that day. He sent her away soon after that (by taxi, in accordance with his Word). He had lost interest, Sabia thought, quite suddenly. She wished she’d had an excuse to go into the garden, where Helen was, but that was stupid, there was none. Opportunities could be made later. So much had already been achieved.

Taxied back across London to her flat, Sabia found herself unaccountably annoyed with Edmund Driver. A reaction no doubt to making up to him, or to his wealth, or to his ridiculous poses and his Charm.

 

Sabia came to the house in Aspersedge Road each day except Sunday. On Saturdays she finished work at noon, and left, lunchless, presumably to get on with her life. At weekends the Drivers Did Things. They went away quite often, too, even in the week. He still kept a house in Buckinghamshire, “by a river,” a large house with sloping lawns, where people stayed, and Edmund held court and Helen moved about in ice-cream coloured dresses. All this Sabia deduced, from shards of conversation that broke off the Drivers’ main stem and fell into Sabia’s ears, to the accompanying clacket of her typewriter.

She hardly saw him after the first interview, although she was told (the maid) that he checked her work each night. (Sabia had wondered who disturbed it.) He was also apparently out a lot, and when in, closeted in his study. The maid had showed her, the first day, into what had been allocated as a Typing Room, another pleasant chamber, but downstairs, and rather tucked away. It had pale walls and a high white fireplace shut by an old-fashioned screen. One narrow French door gave onto a corner of the garden, but it was closed off by a pine tree and a laurel, and no one seemed to come there. Instead, voices floated from far off, both out of the house and in off the shrubberies.

Helen was endlessly visited by friends, women, and one elderly man, some relation it seemed; she referred to him as Frederick. These people, burnished of voice, the women red-lipped and in tulip frocks of yellow and crimson, flitted or stalked across distant vistas of the wide house. Sabia glimpsed them over a sweep of hall or dining room. Glass winked, both in hands and paned across the eyes of the mummifying Frederick. Helen too was endlessly seen—for a moment here, a moment there.

Helen looked like no one else. She did not even resemble her handsome husband, as handsome women sometimes did, let alone grace him with a feminine opposite.

Helen seemed to Sabia to belong to none of this, not to the big house, nor the larger one in Buckinghamshire. That was her main quality, perhaps, her unbelonging. This, and her removedness from all things. She had a wealthy woman’s slight manners, far less courteous than Driver. She was uninvolved, always. Listening to the chatter of others, her eyes slightly lidded over, like a cat that watches a bird, and can’t be bothered with it really—an instinct that no longer means very much, even should the cat spring and the spring end in someone’s death.

Was she dangerous, then? That was, carelessly and uninterestedly and uninvolvedly dangerous?

To Sabia, seeing her an instant, now here, now there, over and over, peculiarly Helen came to seem a normal part of life. (As one even partly gets used to the moon.)

But Helen and she had not, in this house, exchanged a single word.

And there really hadn’t been any chance of “opportunities.”

Like an awful little cog that ran round and round unheeded, barely needed, in the middle of the mechanism of the house, Sabia was left outside—or more correctly inside—everything else. Inside, yet totally left out.

At lunchtime, Sabia would get up and walk across to the other room the maid had shown her. And here she would find quite a nice lunch laid for her—eggs on spinach, or a cutlet, or sole in lemon sauce—even cheese and a sweet, and always coffee. It was as if the Least They Could Do was make sure this poor downtrodden little creature had a decent meal.

But Sabia, who could go for days on toast, a sardine, or some apples, pitched in greedily to the lunches. She had the instincts of a squirrel, to store against an always-approaching winter.

It was still spring, however.

Though April was almost gone.

One morning, typing diligently Edmund’s latest clever, Helenless novel, Sabia heard a slight sound behind her, and thought the maid had come in for something. But Sabia’s instinct, also, was usually to look behind her.

There in a shaft of the eleven o’clock sunshine, stood Helen. Sabia noticed incongruously that Helen’s frock had a neckline cut like sharp petals. That, and the sun on her dark gold hair, and her eyes—an April blue. Nothing else.

“Hello,” said Helen of the Hello. “It’s Miss Cobb, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Mrs Driver.”

“Look, I wonder if you could do me a great favour. Mr Laudelay wanted me to copy out something from this book,” (she held the book in her hand), and I haven’t time. But I don’t want him to feel let down.” (Mr Laudelay was Frederick.) “They get these fancies, don’t they, the old,” she added. “I suppose I’ll be just the same. So, could you? I mean type it? You seem to work so fast, it should only take you a few minutes. Am I asking too much?”

Sabia wanted to smile at Helen’s smiling mask, her uncaring diffidence-that-was-a-lie. Her ideas of not having time in that timeless state of the rich and looked-after.

Sabia wanted to say, “Fuck his book. I’ll type out the Bible for you if you like.”

She said, “Of course that’s all right. It won’t take long.”

Then Helen came and set the book beside her, directly on the growing pile of her husband’s manuscript. She opened the book and showed Sabia the requested page. The text was a poem.

Helen smelled of cologne and sandalwood, and the linen of her dress. She was warm, yet cool. Her shadow fell across Sabia and eclipsed everything. Then she moved away. (Naturally, Helen didn’t appear to recall “meeting” Sabia before.)

Sabia finished the page she had in the typewriter, removed it and put it aside. She typed out the poem from the book.

This was a sort of fake ballad, meant to be perhaps of mediaeval aspect. The kind of thing Keats and Tennyson did much better.

It began:

I would I were with Edmund now

That summer leaves are green,

I would I lay in Edmund’s bower

And Edmund’s arms between.

The curiousness of the name, that it was the same as Driver’s Christian name, alerted Sabia. But to what, though?

As she typed the rest of the despairing ballad-poem, she remembered meeting Edmund Driver on his driveway, pun unintended, the previous Thursday evening. He had just been driven (again, pun redundant) from Richmond, where he had lunched with some editor or other for some reason or other.

As with his typing, Edmund had to have his driving done for him. It was Helen who could drive, not he, Helen who swept them off in the dusk, or on Saturdays, manoeuvring the large silvery car as if it were only one more exactly fitting garment. But now, Helen elsewhere, the chauffeur managed the car.

“Miss Cobb,” Edmund said, getting out.

He stood there in the April evening, smiling at her as Helen did not ever smile, male and decided: Sabia was yet one more of his (minor) possessions. He knew, obviously, she thought him impressive, liked him, did her very best to please him.

“About the book,” he said—there could be only one, his—“I haven’t been worrying you over any alterations, because you just don’t make any mistakes.”

Sabia beamed, became shy, looked away.

“I’ve begun to feel,” he said, “it was only poor old Agatha’s bad typing that made me think I ever had to alter what I’d written. I must be insecure. Where my work’s concerned, I thought I was rather the opposite, a boor, actually, too sure of himself.”

He meant, of course, only in his work. “Now I’m wondering in fact, no doubt also arrogantly, how many things I’ve mucked about with simply because they looked awry with Agatha’s purple pencil typing corrections all over them.”

Then he’d gone into the house, and Sabia had walked out to find her waiting taxi panting at the kerb.

Having finished the poem, it took less than five minutes, Sabia got up and went to the cloakroom to wash her hands before lunch.

As she was walking back across to the Lunch Room, Helen appeared again, in her petal-cut dress—the hem of the skirt echoed the notching of the neckline.

“I left the copy you asked for in the typing room, Mrs Driver.”

“Yes, thanks,” said Helen. Dismissive. “Oh, is that where we put you for your lunch, all on your own?” As if much went on in her house that Helen never knew about, as very likely it did.

“Why don’t you come and have lunch with me?” said Helen. “For a change. Madge was coming over but she’s cried off. Come on, I hate eating alone.”

 

There was a lot of well-cooked solid food. Sabia, now, didn’t eat very much. She was concentrating on Helen Driver.

They had wine, a very good white, and then a red that was of quality but which Sabia found too heavy.

Helen talked to Sabia. This was unlike what generally seemed to happen, all those views of compulsively chattering women, and old glassy Frederick maundering on in a pontifical way, as Helen sat cat-like, lazy-lidded, listening.

“How do you pronounce your first name, Miss Cobb?”

People seldom asked this, they made their own decisions. Sabia had been called, variously, Sabb-yah, Saarb-ya, Sub-bee-ah, and Sa-buyer.

She told Helen how she herself pronounced her first name.

“It’s unusual,” said Helen. “How did it come about?”

“I don’t know,” said Sabia.

“Really? Don’t you?” Helen, quizzical, not believing her, waiting an instant to see if she would change her mind and own up, then saying, “Freddie would love your name. I must tell him. I mean Frederick Laudelay. Did you know he was a poet?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t.”

“Oh yes. Out of fashion now, poor old thing. Hasn’t published anything for years. He probably never will now. He’s very bitter about it, but pretends not to be, which isn’t good for him. That poem you kindly typed out—that was by one of Frederick’s former lovers. He found it by chance in the library, but the book’s Edmund’s, and he refused to let Freddie have it. Edmund isn’t mean, of course. Just unrealistic sometimes. Sometimes one must give things up. Don’t you find that’s so?”

Sabia looked straight into Helen’s eyes. They had altered their colour and were now grey. Just as her hair altered, a fair blonde in electric light, gold in the sun, almost bronze in shadow. A metamorphosing woman, Helen.

“I’ve only really talked to Mr Driver once, when he gave me the job.”

“Oh, did I mean Edmund?” said Helen, rather confusingly. She looked quizzical again. “But you’ve talked more often than that, surely. He always wants to fuss with the typescript.”

Sabia quickened slightly, as she had when Helen said her husband was “unrealistic.” She didn’t like him? No, she did not. Although she loved him, was proud of owing him. This was often the case.

“No, he seems quite happy with this book.”

“Does he? Well, that’s good.” Helen lit a cigarette. Then pushed the box across to Sabia. “Help yourself. May I call you Sabia?”

“Please.”

Helen said, “What do you think of Edmund’s books?”

“I’ve only read one. I thought that very fine.”

“Yes. Which one?”

“The Last of Us.”

“Yes,” said Helen again. “Would you like to read more?”

“Oh, yes,” said Sabia, looking calmly inspired. “I intend to.”

“He’s got several spare copies of most of them. Why don’t you ask him? The bookshops charge far too much and libraries are hopeless.”

“I will, if you think that would be all right.”

“He’ll soon tell you if it isn’t,” Helen said. “Frankly, he can’t stand Freddie. He lets me have him to visit, but on tolerance only. I feel sorry for Freddie. You remember what I said about his lover? A man, of course. Freddie’s a pansy. Which I suppose is all right when you’re young and beautiful, but can be rather dire when you’re over sixty, as Freddie now is.”

Sabia found that now she was watching Helen. That was, watching.

Helen said, “I can never understand it, myself. Oh, I have nothing against it, not like Edmund, providing they’re discreet. But to desire one of your own kind. It’s beyond me.”

Sabia said, quietly, “I remember a man once saying that a woman should find it easier to understand how one man might have feelings for another man, since women themselves fall in love with men.”

“Oh. That’s rather clever. But not true. I don’t understand at all.”

Sabia thought: Does this mean your feelings for men are also false? Or does all this mean you sense from me something, and are really saying: I can’t understand a man fancying a man, let alone a woman fancying a woman?

Sabia said, “Well, you’re very nice to him.”

“To Freddie or to Edmund?”

“I meant Mr Laudelay.”

“Yes. I said, I feel sorry for him. But I don’t feel sorry for Edmund at all. Does this mean I’m not nice to him? Do you think that?”

Sabia felt her eyes widen, the deer in the presence of the predator.

She said, “Mrs Driver—”

“Helen. Try that.”

“Thank you. Helen, I really can’t know anything about how you are with Mr Driver.”

“But you seem to know so much. Oh yes, my dear Sabia. I’ve seen you. As you go by all the doors. Glancing, looking in, like a lovely little lost waif astray in the forest, and every one of our rooms becomes a lighted cot, attracting your wondering eyes.”

She is dangerous, Sabia thought, just as I suspected.

But what is she really saying? Keep off—come in?

“It’s a very beautiful house, Mrs Driver—”

“Helen.”

“And I can’t help admiring it. Or your elegant friends. Or you. But I hadn’t realized I was staring, or you thought I was impertinent in my interest, and I apologize. I’ll try in future not to look at anything.”

Helen laughed. A platinum voice, clean and modern.

“Oh dear. Will you arrive in blinkers?”

“If necessary. I need the work. I don’t want to offend you. You’ve been kindness itself.”

“Have I? Surely not. Relegating you to that little room for your lonely little lunches, never even speaking to you until today.” Helen paused. She drank off her glass of Vichy water, and stubbed out her cigarette in an aquamarine ashtray.

“We must do this again.”

Sabia got up.

Helen got up. They were nearly the same height, across the breadth of the table. Though not quite the same build, Sabia’s figure was a little fuller.

Helen said, “What did you think of the poem?”

“The—oh. I’m sorry. I hardly took it in. I’m afraid I’m like that when I type. It seems to use another part of my mind. It isn’t like reading, for me.”

“I see. But did you notice the name?”

Sabia waited. She said, “You mean the man addressed in the poem, Edmund?”

“The fact that it’s the same name as my husband’s,” Helen explained carefully.

Sabia recoiled. Suddenly she had seen what was going on. It was quite funny, in a disgusting and awkward way.

“Well, yes. Is that significant?” asked Sabia, balancing on this new inrushing tide.

“I don’t know,” said Helen, “is it?”

“I suppose,” said Sabia, reasonable, “it’s an old name. Mediaeval, perhaps.”

“It goes back at least to the tenth century,” said Helen coldly.

The parlourmaid came in. “The car’s been brought round, madam.”

“Oh fuck,” said Helen.

No one batted an eyelash. She walked straight out, only saying to the maid in passing, “Tell him he needn’t wait, I’ll drive myself.”

 

Helen Driver thought, so much was now obvious, that Sabia had wormed her way into the house because of Edmund.

It was Edmund Sabia was interested in, inclined to. And any of her subsidiary interests, in the furniture, the friends, or the wife, were dependent on her main theme. Which was that of a spare woman in rabid pursuit of another woman’s husband.

Sabia was both cunning and naïve, as she herself had always known. Now she had been naïve, of course.

She could see it plainly enough, since Helen had virtually spelled it out. (Probably the poem was a ruse.)

Helen perhaps even had recalled meeting Sabia at the party in Wootton Street. That then had been Sabia’s ploy, pretending to know Helen, in order to ingratiate herself and so approach her true goal. (Did Helen also recollect the voiceless telephone caller?)

Failed in first attempts, the wretched little bitch (Sabia) had somehow got some crony or still-malleable ex-swain (Marcus, Conranne) to put her case as a needy typist to Edmund himself.

Now here she was. And Helen had finally called her in, to show her her game was known, to warn her, frighten her. If such a little monster (Sabia) were capable of being warned or frightened, let alone forbidden.

Sabia considered how she came here always alluringly well-dressed and deliriously groomed. Sabia thought about how she always behaved towards Edmund. Her intent displays of admiration, and shyness. Her flirting eyes. Even that meeting on the drive, on Thursday—had Helen somehow glimpsed it from an upstairs window?—must have seemed quite coquettish.

In order to obtain Helen’s proximity, Sabia had played up to Driver as a matter of course, and now Helen took the wrong play for earnest.

What else would she have said, if a servant hadn’t walked in and the car been ready?

In other circumstances, it might have been an opening for Sabia’s real suit. “But Helen, I don’t want him—I want you—” But there too a barrier had already been firmly placed, of obscuration if not utter veto. Helen couldn’t “understand” male mutual desire. And this might well mean (usually it did), to Helen, a woman who liked women was, as most of English society thought, an outcaste, whose persona ranged from the hysterically ludicrous, to the status of seventeenth century witch—for whom burning was too good.

So again Sabia, what now, what now?

If I had any sense I’d run. Make some excuse perhaps, a sick relative, or a chance-of-a-lifetime trip somewhere. Anything. Just get out.

Certainly, she didn’t care about finishing his bloody book.

And the money had been all right, and the lunches useful—but cash and food could be gained elsewhere. She had managed adequately up until now.

But Helen.

Yes, that was the problem.

This itch now, not only of lust, but of ethical frustration.

Then again, one knew the dangers of casting oneself at an unwilling target.

However, not every possibility had yet been tried.

 

May

 “Yes.”

“Mrs Driver—May I explain? I’m so sorry I wasn’t there last week. A friend of mine was taken ill very suddenly. She doesn’t have anyone—so I’ve sort of had to step into the breach. I didn’t have the chance to telephone you before—my friend isn’t on the telephone. But I’m at home now.”

A silence.

Helen said, “I see.”

Sabia thought: She really believed she’d got rid of me. Is that why she agreed to take this call? Couldn’t believe it could be me?

Then:

“Edmund is very angry, you know,” said Helen, icy, remote.

“I’m sure Mr Driver’s furious. And I’d understand if he didn’t want me to come back. I feel very bad about this, even though it wasn’t my fault exactly.”

“A whole week,” said Helen.

“Yes. But Mr Driver may have seen, I’ve only a small section of the manuscript left to type. I could do that in one or two days, if I came up a little earlier, and left a little later. I can work right through—lunch isn’t necessary.”

“My God. How quick you are, aren’t you,” said Helen, with the lightest contempt.

“Yes, I’m very quick, Mrs Driver. And under the circumstances, I shall of course want to reduce my fee.”

Helen said, “You’d better wait. I’ll go and ask him what he wants you to do.”

Sabia waited. They made her do this quite a while.

Then the voice, when it came on, was no longer Helen’s, but again the maid’s. The maid told Sabia to come in tomorrow; the taxi would be at her flat at around nine-fifteen, the usual time.

 

Sabia wore a dark grey dress and coat, at odds with the season, which rampaged in all sparkling directions through Regents Park and over the sacred hills and woods of St Giles Grove.

Her face was powdered pale, the bright mouth like a bright beacon. She looked tired, delightful, young.

Luck was in (or out—it would depend). Helen was breakfasting still, alone in the almond-pink and scarlet morning-room, and through the open French windows came a squeak of birds and the scent of roses.

Helen wore a dressing-gown of greyish satin. She was already bathed and exquisitely made up.

“Sit down,” said Helen.

Sabia took one of the striped chairs.

Helen was pouring herself more coffee, offering none.

“I asked to see you, because I wanted to thank you,” Sabia said.

“Don’t bother.”

“I must. I really do feel bad about letting your husband down.”

“Oh.”

Sabia thought: What she’s really saying is: I thought you’d had the sense to stay away. What do you want now, you little horror?

And I am saying: He is nothing to me. Look into and through me and see.

“Well,” said Helen.

Sabia lowered her eyes. She said, “May I confide something to you Mrs Driver?” Mrs Driver (no correction back to Helen now, it seemed) gazed out of her windows.

Is she truly so indifferent? So untroubled… If she were, would she have run up her colours last week?

“My friend,” said Sabia, with a little proper difficulty, “her name is Albertine… I’ve known her years. What happened was—pretty awful. She wasn’t ill, exactly. I’m afraid I lied about that. She got hold of some pills. She took an overdose.”

Helen after all glanced at Sabia. Not herself looking up, Sabia felt the white flash of that face upon her, the visiting moon.

“It was a failed love-affair,” admitted Sabia, solemnly.

“That happens.” Perhaps to reinforce earlier matters, Helen added, “Men let women down.”

“I expect they do,” said Sabia. “But Albertine wasn’t let down by a man. Her lover was another woman.”

The silence then—went on. And eventually Sabia looked up, and Helen was still staring at her, her lips slightly parted, her eyes gleaming—with what? Surprise? Derision?

Sabia said, “I’ve found all this rather unbearable. I’m sorry I didn’t telephone sooner, but I wasn’t in a fit state myself, really. I was having to look after her, and in a way, I couldn’t think what on earth to say to you, let alone your husband. I hate lying,” said Sabia, all desperation. “And yet, to tell you the truth—that I have that sort of friend—”

Helen was raising her eyebrows, her expression changing. For a moment she looked amused. Then sombre.

“Well,” she said, “I have a friend like that, too, don’t I. Frederick. But I begin to comprehend how trying all this was for you.”

Sabia lowered her eyes again.

To pretend her heart was racing with nerves was now unneedful. It was. These were normally crucial moments.

She sat dumb, letting Helen speculate. Sabia dared say nothing else. But she had left the entry point she intended, the chance. To go further would be stupid.

When she once more looked up, Helen had, once more, turned away.

Not Helen, but Helen’s hands, seemed a little uneasy. They fluttered here and there, to the cigarette box, the coffee-pot, the revers of her dressing-gown. She, the rest of her, seemed what Sabia had hoped for—thoughtful. But thought might lead anywhere, of course.

(Then again, Sabia was practiced. She had played part of her hand, yet knew that allegations based on such a slender thread as Albertine would be simple enough, usually, to evade. How terrible it was, however, Sabia thought, with a strange sudden shock of overview, always to be aware the object of love might, at any moment, become the instigator of your doom.)

“Well, Sabia, don’t worry about this. Let’s put it behind us. In which case, maybe you should go along now. I’m sure your typewriting machine has been missing you.”

A tiny imp leapt in Sabia’s brain. People who spoke to her like this always caused the imp to leap. But that was about all the imp could do.

Love though, does not always forgive. Besides, I’m not in love with her. In fact, I don’t even like her much.

It’s only her. That turn of her head, for example, what she’s doing now. The altering colour on her hair. And oh, her skin.

She isn’t going to take me up on what I’ve shown and offered. Her reaction would have been something quite other, if she were at all interested. (Like the others who have been.) Or interested in me, or the chance I’ve placed there on her plate, with the toast crumbs and the smears of butter.

Sabia left the morning-room and went along to the Typewriting Room. The sight of the machine and piles of manuscript, both to do and completed, appalled her. What was she still doing here? Of course, not to be suspected, she must now affect the agreed end. Hurry up and finish then. And after that be off, shaking away the dust of her shoes upon the groves of St Giles.

 

Sabia thought about Albertine as she typed.

She had used Albertine so often before, that this being had become almost real. What a life she’d led too!

Sometimes Albertine (as recounted to Sabia’s women) was entangled with another woman who drove her mad. Sometimes she was herself desperately obsessed with a woman. Now and then she attempted suicide—never successfully, of course. Even in her fictive state, Sabia found her too handy, ethically to be able to see her off.

By raising up the spirit of Albertine, a Lesbian, in conversations, Sabia had now and then brought her own affairs to fruitful concordance. As in the reply, “Oh, the poor woman. Yes, Sabia, I see, I see. Well, you know, these things between women happen, don’t they? Even I…” etc:—etc: Or, the dialogue, spurred by Albertine, might take a nastier turn, always the risk: “Good God—you associate with this person?” And once or twice, even: “Does this mean, Sabia, that you yourself—?” At which, naturally, a prompt denial had to be made. Sabia? Heavens, no. She too had been alarmed to discover Albertine’s true nature. Indeed, the friendship would have to be curtailed. But one felt so dreadfully sorry for her, the wretched outcaste, totally beyond one’s mental grasp, condemned and damned to her peculiar life.

Sabia realized she had mistyped a line.

This rarely happened.

It didn’t disturb her too much. She ripped out the paper and threw it in the basket.

Helen hadn’t responded, and would not.

Sabia put a new sheet of paper in the machine, and returned to her automaton-like task.

 

A week passed. Sabia was still typing at the house in Aspersedge Road.

Something irritating had happened. After all this while, the mostly unseen Edmund had suddenly appeared in the Typing Room during Sabia’s occupancy, late one evening, about six, his hands full of paper.

“Miss Cobb—I’m glad I caught you. Look, you’ll think me diabolical—but could you possibly add these two chapters in? And this. I realize it will mean some re-typing…but you did say you wouldn’t mind it. I’ve been too lax with myself, and quite frankly the other day I had to face up to it. The book needs those extra elements. Am I asking too much?”

Sabia smiled, she was aware, rather unwillingly.

“Yes, of course, that’s quite all right. It’s what you’re paying me to do, Mr Driver.”

There were two long chapters. And three more now had to have revisions, which would mean typing them completely all over again. Sabia had an image of being trapped here forever as this man continually re-vamped his work. No wonder Agatha fell prey to prolonged colds.

“But, one thing, Mr Driver—your original typist—isn’t she well again by now, and won’t she—”

“Agatha? God preserve me from Agatha. No, Miss Cobb, I’ve been meaning to speak to you, in fact. Agatha has—I’ve been rather unkind and put her out to grass.”

“Really.”

“I don’t mean to be a beast, but when I think what I’ve suffered with her, and her purple pencil, over the years. But you are perfect.”

She must respond. The air grew heavy with the requirement. “Thank you, Mr Driver.”

He was sitting on the corner of the table by then, looking at her. Charming her, determined to have his way.

“Try Edmund,” he said. As his wife had done. “And may I call you Sabia?” He said it the same way Sabia herself did. Helen must have told him. And what else?

Sabia felt a strong if momentary wave of fear. She didn’t know what to do, and had a sense of being—literally—caught. This was idiotic. If she didn’t want to say No directly, then she could merely abscond, as she had before, and this time for good.

During the days since her return, she had seen nothing of Helen at all. Helen had been out all day, at her dressmakers, buying a hat, lunching with friends. (For the pieces of servant-talk still dropped around Sabia.)

Now Edmund Driver, holding her eyes with his dark blue ones, that had a look of summer thunder, angry behind the blaze of evening, put an envelope on the pile of new manuscript.

“It’s a bribe,” he said. “Please take it.”

“That isn’t-”

“Yes it is. I’m difficult, and I know it. To please me?”

She was so accustomed to it, with him, and with others, she Gave In, lowering her gaze. Probably he thought she blushed, but it was only the westering sun touching her face.

After he had gone, she reviewed why she had to stay.

Helen had deduced there was something “odd” about Sabia—the sort of oddity that meant Sabia wouldn’t be trying to scale the walls of Edmund. And so Helen felt free to resume her external life. But also, Helen could not be sure Sabia was anything more than a young woman with her earning to make—unless, of course, Sabia, having failed to inveigle Helen, immediately abandoned such a lucrative job.

I will give it another week. That should make it safe, see all these revisions done for him, and anything else he dreams up. On this occasion, when I leave, I will take my typewriter home with me. Smuggle it out, if I must, disguised as a baby.

And if he still wants to go on after that, I’ll say I have to go abroad. A cousin’s marriage. Something.

 

During the remainder of the week, Helen was often in the house again. She was always poised, like an actress on a stage, inside the “lighted cots” of her rooms—the drawing room with yellow curtains, the striped morning-room and plush dining room. Once there was a scattered, chattery garden party out on the lawns, the noises of whose tea cups and female laughters splashed over into the Typing Room and clashed with the rhythm of the typewriter.

Coming out that evening, at half past six (she had frequently stayed later, striving to finish, like a person in the Greek Hell, her apparently unfinishable chore—Edmund had added yet another stack of handwritten pages) Sabia met a young woman in a costly, short-sleeved dress and flattened crescent-moon of a hat, weeping into her gloves.

“Oh,” said the young woman, as if meeting Sabia were the last straw. Probably it was. She fled away along the hall, and then Frederick Laudelay emerged down the staircase, with half his hand closed into a book.

“Good evening,” said Frederick. “You must be Sabia Cobb.” His glasses glowed, hiding his weak old eyes. “That was Sissy Fairsmith. I mean Niobe-All-Tears.”

Sabia nodded.

“She is upset,” said Frederick.

Sabia made a move toward the distant door.

“Helen,” said Frederick, removing his hand from the book, and looking at it in surprise, as if he had just retrieved it from a lion’s jaws, “she can be so very bitchy.”

Sabia stood there, erecting a porcelain face at him.

“She accused Sissy of making up to Edmund. Sissy’s always had a thing for him of course.”

He moved slightly and the light left his glasses. She saw plainly he was old and wilting and cindery, and unusually malevolent.

“It’s not as if,” said Frederick, “Helen cares. A soulless woman, really. I like your name, Sabia,” he said, fixing his magnified eyes on her. “Is that how you say it?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a foreigner, aren’t you,” said Frederick, leering now with unrewarding teeth.

“Excuse me, Mr Laudelay, I must go and get my taxi.”

Not disappointed a moment, he refused to be put off.

“And what do you think of Edmund then, Sabia?”

She said nothing, already moving away.

“He has such a way with women,” said Frederick Laudelay. “And I’d say you were rather his type.”

“Goodnight,” called Sabia from miles off, obviously not hearing what he said.

When she reached the front door, she thought: I’ll come in tomorrow, and that’s the end of all this.

She was glad to see the taxi was waiting for her. Since her return, it was often late (and in the morning too early, as if maliciously misdirected.) She had been afraid the taxi would not be there and Frederick would come crawling after her along the drive.

As she was carried homewards, she thought of the heroine in The Last of Us, and of the half-glimpsed heroine of the book still being typed. Dark-haired, unboyish. So unlike fair, slender Helen of Troy.

It was hot for May, and getting indoors, Sabia pushed up her windows. There was nothing much to eat. She found a bottle of wine and opened it, and sat in the window seat.

A reddish-golden heat-light hung down on the street below, and through the folds of it she saw another taxi pulling round and stopping, and then Edmund Driver getting out.

Sabia rose and stepped back from the window.

She stood in the middle of the room, motionless, until she heard the sound of the bell.

It would be best not to answer. That was what would be best. Pretending not to be in. Or, if he had seen her come in, pretending to be in the bath, or asleep. Or deaf. The bell rang, and rang.

Sabia went to the door, not knowing why she must, really, so much pretense perhaps, play-acting, in the end you just couldn’t any more decide which role you had taken on.

The man who stood there was tall and dark but not Edmund Driver, although he did bear a slight resemblance to him.

“Oh—I’m sorry. I must have the wrong flat. Mr Dickens—”

“One floor up,” said Sabia.

 

The next day was Saturday. Only half a day. The last. The last of us.

As Sabia was typing the final page, Edmund Driver walked into the room. His hands were empty of paper.

Sabia sat straight up like a performing dog.

“Mr Driver. I was coming up to see you before I left.”

“And you are. Seeing me, I mean. Also, my name is Edmund. For a wonderful typist you do have an awfully bad memory.

Sabia did not lower her eyes. She looked directly into his face. And she thought: Now suddenly I see, the women in his books—no, they’re not remotely like me—they are the female physical counterparts of him—of Edmund Driver—his anima in written form.

“Everything is done now, Mr Driver. Including the last batch of changes, which is good, because this morning I received a letter from my cousin. She has a house in the south of Italy—she wants me to go over, some family thing. But I do want to. And I really can’t say no, any way, you see.”

Edmund Driver looked at her.

Sabia found she must say something more.

“I’ve enjoyed working on your book so much. Edmund. And your wife has been very kind. And I regret letting you down that week when—when my friend was taken ill.”

“Stop lying,” he said. “It won’t work.”

Sabia sat there. She said, “I beg your pardon?”

“I can tell,” he said. “After all, that’s my trade. Think about it, Sabia. I study and observe people. I know you’re lying. Do you even have a sick friend, let alone a cousin in Italy?”

She knew better than to bristle with affront. She stayed still and unspeaking, letting him play out his song.

He sat down on a chair across the room. Not once did he take his eyes off her, as if she might vanish in a puff of smoke if he did.

“I realize this is my fault, Sabia. I’ve expected too much and been a damned nuisance. Wanting to change this, that, and then change it again. But perhaps you could see the improvement? I hope so.”

She said flatly, “I don’t really read what I’m typing when I type. It’s a different process.”

“Yes, Helen told me something like that.”

Oh, they really had discussed her then. What else had Helen said?

Driver said, “If you’ll consent to stay on, do a bit more for me, I’ll pay double. Will that be any use?” Sabia kept very still. “Well,” he said, “a bit more than double, then.”

“No, Mr Driver. It isn’t that.”

“Edmund. And of course,” he said, “you must have more time off, more time to yourself. Take a holiday. But not for a day or so, perhaps.”

She thought, ridiculously: He isn’t at all like the man who got out of the taxi. And then: Is that man upstairs called Charles Dickens?

But then she pulled herself together, seeing how her brain was trying to escape in the only way it could, over its own wooded hills, and leave her witless to deal with this.

“Perhaps,” Sabia said, “we can come to some arrangement. But I do need time off.”

“Of course you do. You’ve been working like a slave, for God’s sake. And I am impossible, and a monster not to have seen.”

The near noon light came in from the garden, slimly, Mayishly green today, although May, like March and April, was sliding off into the past. It would be June tomorrow, summer. Thick jade leaves and lingering blue-white mornings, and the longest day when, as late as eleven o’clock, sometimes even at midnight, faint rifts and traces of light still lingered in the dark.

She could see her now. The woman behind Driver’s immaculately masculine face. The woman smiled at Sabia, courting her with indomitable and demanding eyes.

Sabia felt shaken. It was because she had tried to resist the blast, had not merely, comfortably, given in to it. Sway, bend, bow, don’t break. That was the advice you gave a young tree. Till now.

She thought: I will have to escape. Perhaps I will have to move to another flat. All right, I shall move. That’s easy.

She thought: What has Helen said about me?

Edmund Driver said, “But you’ve finished everything? That’s marvelous. Look, why don’t you come and have some lunch. I’m having it on the terrace. Beautiful weather. Come on, and we’ll sort out a new arrangement.

Sway and bow. Give in, quick!

“Thank you, “ she said.

She sounded cold and resistant

But he laughed, probably at the uselessness of any protest, and they walked out of the single French door, past the secluding pine, into the luxuriant vistas of the garden.

 

June

London burned in the green flame of June.

Sabia and Edmund walked by the Serpentine.

She vaguely thought: How did this happen? How am I here?

But there was too much noise—the cries of children, the traffic from the roads, the loud glitter and breakage of sun on water and the roar of leaves at a sudden gust of fiery air.

In the tea-shop, they made him coffee. So, thought Sabia, astonished, have I.

“Would you like strawberries?” he asked. “Yes, you would.”

She had strawberries.

Afterwards they strolled along the smoking pavements. Paused in some other place of trees.

“I’d better be getting back,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Wish I didn’t have to, but there’s this bloody awful dinner we’re going to. Helen’s idea.”

“Yes.”

“You look sad. Is that because I have to leave you now?”

No, Sabia said, it’s because I have left me already. She didn’t say this aloud.

She smiled at him, and said, “What do you think?”

“I think you’ve been tremendously good about all of this. And I am very sorry. You must be one of the nicest girls on earth.”

“You make me sound cheap,” she heard herself say. “And as if you’re tired of me.”

“No—I didn’t mean anything like that. My God, you know I didn’t. Don’t you, Sabia?”

“Yes.”

“Oh hell, I’ve upset you. I’d do anything not to.”

“No, I’m not upset.”

“Monday,” he said. “Can I see you then? I can’t till then.”

“What do you think?” she said again.

“I think I must kiss you. At once.”

And there in the shadow of the tree, the flare of sunny lawns far off, another country, and this one hidden, his mouth on hers. How decorous he was, still. She had been kissed once or twice, importunately, by men, crushed and penetrated by their mouths. Edmund didn’t do this. Even so, even so, he kissed.

“I wish I was younger,” he said.

“Then I’d be too young.”

“I’d have waited for you.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I hadn’t met you then.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Christ, Sabia. Yes I’m sure.”

Back on the terra firma of cement, he found her a taxi, and put her into it, the fare already accommodated.

Driving away, she thought: Well then. As if something had been achieved, like finishing typing something or dusting the flat. Or leaving school. Except she hadn’t left anywhere or anything. It wasn’t “done.” It was still there, all about her.

She would dream of him tonight. She always did, now. Curious dreams in which he was striding along in half darkness and she was running after him, but only because she wished to get past. Or else they were riding on a bus, and it was out of control, and no one—the dream bus was always full of people—no one at all minded the mad career or anticipated the crash. No, not even Sabia.

When they’d had lunch on the terrace, that May Saturday, above the garden in St Giles Grove, the talk between them had been rather stilted, or rather, organized. And Sabia was reminded of that stage-husband-and-wife exchange between Edmund and Helen, which she had first heard when she arrived there.

Now it was stage-employer-and-servant.

But no, not really. It was more the stage-king who noticed the stage-commoner, singled her out—before the orchestra had quite launched into its best tunes.

She considered afterwards that perhaps she had been prepared to say and promise anything, since she was intending to escape so soon, and so thoroughly, with the hostage, her typewriter.

Edmund swiftly arranged an extravagant fee for her continued services as his typist. He had reassured her that really, now, the typing of that particular novel was concluded. He hoped, when she finally read it, she would see that it had benefited from his extra care, and her patience. As if it had been a joint venture. As if she hadn’t merely typed the manuscript. Then he said to look at the laburnum beginning to come alive, wasn’t it glorious, and exotic in its own way. And Helen didn’t like it, never had. Helen liked more space in a garden. She was always prepared to chop something down, and they had argued over that, especially over her attempts to “open the views” in Buckinghamshire—great oaks which had stood for hundreds of years. But they did anyway. Argue, he meant.

No one was about. The maids had seen to the food, a hot-weather lunch with salad and cold meats and icy Hock, then left them to it. To what?

“I expect you regret not having a garden,” he said, “now summer’s coming. Or don’t you care about gardens?”

“I like them,” she said. “Other people’s.”

“You’re lazy,” he said. “I suspected as much. Industrious women always are, in every other area but the one in which they excel.”

“You’re saying a woman will only really do what comes easily to her.”

“Am I? Yes, probably. Is it true? You tell me.”

“I expect so.”

He said, “Helen is a genius at running a house, or a party, that sort of thing. This includes how she herself looks, and what she says. She can wind anyone round her wrist and wear him for the evening or the weekend.” He stopped there, having given Sabia the list of what Helen could do easily and well and therefore did, and leaving unsaid and gargantuan all those other things which (by one’s own inference) one must assume she couldn’t, didn’t and wouldn’t.

And Sabia thought: Yes. Helen has told him that I am Not As Other Women. And he’s thought: I don’t believe that. Or, if she is, this young woman will be different with me.

That was it, wasn’t it?

Helen now believed Sabia to be quite safe, and decidedly to be avoided. And Edmund believed Sabia either nothing of the sort, or a challenge to his maleness. Now either way he must do more than Charm, he must Conquer.

Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Not exactly like this. Somehow, it had been eluded.

It didn’t matter, Sabia thought rigidly, sipping the cold Hock. Soon I’ll be gone.

They had also discussed her Holiday. She must take at least a week off, even though he had been preparing a collection of short stories all this while, and would be enormously pleased if Sabia would, after her week of peace, come back and type them. Of course, he would pay her during the Holiday as well, as if she were still coming in. Sabia said he would not need to do this. Edmund said he would need to do this.

He said that Helen had gone up to Buckinghamshire for the weekend—to fell more oaks? He himself wasn’t going. He had to meet someone from Emblem on Sunday, but really anyway, this weekend they’d invited all the most bloody boring people in the world (friends of Helen), including the brainless Cicily Fairsmith and Laudelay, whom he simply couldn’t stand.

“I don’t mind what he is,” Edmund said, watching a brand-new butterfly flicker through his laburnum tree like a fleeting glance. “It’s his eternal parasitic self-pity that I loathe.”

Then Edmund looked away from the butterfly, and Helen and the weekend, and his loathing, and said, “What I’d like, Sabia, this evening, is to meet you and take you to dinner somewhere.”

“That isn’t necessary,” said Sabia.

“No, perhaps not. Or only necessary to me. Will you?”

She turned and looked at him again.

The light was harsh along one side of his face, showing every crease and crack, scarring him forty years of age and more. The other side of his face, more dimly lit, was nineteen.

His eyes were very beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful eyes Sabia had ever seen in either sex. Glimpsing, like the butterfly, the Anima looking out at her.

She had to make out she was susceptible, but not too much so. After all, the excuse stood ready to hand.

“Mr Driver—Edmund—you are married.”

“And you’re not the kind that goes about with married men.”

“No I’m not.”

“But, with men at all?”

This habit of directness, a writer’s wicked and dangerous gambit. How dare he.

But he had cornered her, had he not?

“What do you mean, Mr Driver?”

“Edmund. What I mean is, are you repelled by men?”

“Sometimes.”

“I don’t mean that, Sabia.”

“Then no, of course not.”

“No, I didn’t think you were that type. My wife got the impression that you didn’t take to men, much. But I think she was trying to put me off. Something she’s usually keen to do.”

“I told her about a friend of mine,” said Sabia firmly, “and obviously I shouldn’t have done so. My friend is not me.”

“Good.”

“However, Mr Driver, I do think we should end this conversation now. Yes, I will type up your work. But no, I don’t want to go to dinner with you.”

“Although you aren’t repelled by men.”

“If you were free it would be different.”

“Free,” he said. “As in Free of Chains.”

“If you want to put it like that.”

“I’ll arrive by taxi to fetch you,” he said. “Seven o’clock?”

“No.”

“Seven-thirty then.”

What was she to do? (He was on his set course, and would take no notice of denials from the one she must pretend to be.) Should she rush home and lock herself in her flat—even run away to some acquaintance, begging for shelter? (Who, precisely?) Sabia recalled how, seeing the man she’d taken for Edmund emerge from the taxi, she had finally opened her door.

If she managed to refuse him, whatever the perfect excuse of his marriage, he would begin to think like Helen, because naturally he had taken women, as he wanted them, often, often. He could always do it. He could do it now. Unless Sabia was—and he knew she was not, for she was not that “type,” he had seen how she looked at him—an outcaste witch who must be burned or drowned.

“All right,” she said.

Sabia knew she was not sensibly giving in. No longer bending, bowing. No, now she broke. She snapped in half, and one piece of her fell away. She saw it falling, as if from a high window.

 

She took the typewriter home with her quite openly. She told him she had promised a friend (not Albertine) she would type up some letters. She would, of course, do this at her flat.

Then, when she was indoors, Sabia wondered if she should just go out and walk about the city until nine o’clock say, or ten. Surely, he wouldn’t hang about that long, lying in wait by the front door.

But all the while she played with this fantasy of avoidance, Sabia was taking a bath, dressing herself in an evening frock, powdering her face and colouring her lips, brushing her hair.

She stood looking at herself critically in a long mirror. The long, low-backed dress of silky green reminded her a moment of Helen’s dress, that night at Wootton Street. But the dresses weren’t really alike. Helen’s of course, had cost a lot of money.

They would dine together. Then what? He would expect to sleep with her. That was inevitable, if she allowed herself this first leap from grace. Then, again, she would refuse. Her grounds were much safer here. She would see him—how could she resist—but nothing else. To give more was beyond her. Then there might come to be a row, and in the end he would tire of her.

Sabia was certain not many had put him off. Was he so predatory and unscrupulous?

Sabia caught herself thinking this: That it would be pleasant enough to go somewhere opulent on this summer night, escorted by a well-off, handsome and attentive man. It would be delightful to fit, for once, into the uneasy scheme of life. For even that evil sorceress, who tried to steal another woman’s husband, was not ultimately unforgivable, by a male world.

And Sabia sank her head in shame and despair. And put on her silky jacket and high-heels, and sat smoking a cigarette waiting for the bell to ring.

There was an anecdote in his book, the one she had just typed for him. Sabia lied when she told people she couldn’t read what she typed as she typed, a convenient lie, since it made her unanswerable to their delusions, or some of them. Sometimes—quite often—she could and did read the text before her. Only boredom and aversion clouded it from sight. The substance of Edmund Driver’s novel had been lost on Sabia accordingly. But certain passages stood out like burning flambeaux.

One of these was the episode of the Doll.

It was recounted very tidily, almost as a short story inside the bulk of the book. No doubt it had a bearing on later sections of the novel, but missing so much and so much, Sabia had found no connection.

A character, his name had been William, met a woman at a dance and found her ravishingly beautiful. In the facile way of such stories, this vision consented at once to William’s courtship, and indeed, the next morning he and she were breakfasting together in a room of a lavish hotel. Thus, across the eggs and coffee, he saw the mirage of the night was gone. Unbathed, her hair a mess, make-up-less and wrapped in a sheet, he found her reprehensible and actually revolting. William’s response to the shock was romantic and masculine. Having evaded his Nemesis, and flying homeward on the train, he formulated the idea that the woman he had woken up in bed with had no longer been the woman of the night before. What he had first met had been a doll (as in the ballet, Coppélia), formed in the woman’s idealized image, and sent out to lure men in her stead.

This tale of an unmasked Cinderella presided over Sabia’s last cigarette.

 

Where Edmund took her was discreet—it would be essential that no one meet them there who knew him with Helen. But he was practiced. The restaurant gave all that away, as future venues would do also, lost in its glamorous mellow haze of candlelight.

She danced with him on the little space of floor. He said the floor was rotten, too polished. The irony of that missed him, this cunning user of words.

Afterwards, going home to her flat in another taxi, he took her hand, the first physical intimacy, everything else had been only phrases, looks.

“I want to come in with you, Sabia. To talk. I promise, nothing else. Will you trust me?”

“No,” she said. But he gave a low laugh. And undoing and pulling back the hand of her glove, he kissed her palm.

She thought: He expects solely flirtation from me now, so any protest I make will be useless.

Sabia was light-headed, from the hot, tindery London darkness, from the small amount of wine she had drunk, from the terrible, even horrible, silliness of this interesting adventure.

She had no idea how to keep him out now, of her flat, her life.

But when they were standing outside her door, he took both her hands and looked into her face. “Poor angel. You really are a sweet girl. You do know I’ll behave myself, don’t you?”

And, as always now, she saw the Woman behind his eyes, the Woman saying to her, “You really know, my dear, the moment we get inside the room, I shall throw you to the earth and spring upon you.” But irritably Sabia thought: Oh, the hell with it all. Let him then. And pushed open her door.

However, Edmund did not insist on anything. Once inside he simply walked about her sitting-room, staring at her pictures and picking up her books, apparently puzzled that she had an existence beyond him. He drank the coffee she made and told her it was very good, wherever she had got it. Helen never managed to get coffee he really liked. And then he talked for an hour about a play someone he knew had written, and then he said it was “on” and would she like to go and see it with him.

“You know I can’t,” said Sabia.

Ah, how implausible it now sounded, her denial. She almost laughed herself.

He didn’t laugh. He said, “You must. Christ, Sabia, if you knew how miserable I’ve been all year, until you came along.”

“Don’t you say this to everyone you woo?” she said.

She savoured the words, and thought, pleased with herself—yes, pleased—How much like a Real Woman I sound.

And Edmund said, “I’m no saint. But I’m not a total bastard either. I’m not, Sabia. But you—you just shattered my defenses.”

“Did I throw a stone? The first one, perhaps.”

He smiled. “And that little sharpness only disarms me more.”

Then he crossed the room—they had been decorous in how they sat, so far apart—and he drew her up, and kissed her with the first of his intent and impassioned, sensual yet courteous kisses.

Hanging there backward (it seemed to her) over his arm like a spent garment, focussed solely on the mouth moving upon hers, Sabia was indifferent, not even afraid, not even ready to fight, let alone pretend anymore. Yet her heart escalated, if only from smotheration, she clung to him, if only to keep her balance.

When he’d gone, she emptied the ashtray and rinsed the coffee cups routinely, took off her make-up and cleaned her teeth. Naked, as she preferred, she got into her bed, and lay looking up at the ceiling, hearing London settling to its black early morning half-sleep, like a fretful lion.

 

Soon it was daylight, and then it was other daylights, days and evenings, and they met for lunches, and walked in the park, and Edmund and she went to see the play. They ate dinner together; sometimes he came up to her flat, and he would kiss and kiss her there, kiss her until she sleepily forgot whom they both were. Until she thought they were an ordinary pair of lovers, chaste, mostly indifferent, she heterosexual and he unmarried.

She couldn’t think why this happened. But again, possibly, it was just the make-believe she had always had to perpetuate, viciously catching her up at last.

How do I get out of this? she wondered sluggishly, sometimes when she was with him, often when alone.

I must really do it.

She was like a fly caught in a web, drowsy with the spider’s venomous cocktails. Not uncomfortable. Nothing, really. She couldn’t be bothered to escape.

And she didn’t.

She kept on with it.

And so did he, unflagging, not tired yet of her Moral Objection to gratifying him fully. So she asked herself if, finally, the only course to take would be to give herself up to him sexually.

Then he would possess her, and so, victory won, become inevitably bored, as he must have done so many times before. Unless that particular boredom were only a myth invented in novels, and in all stories ever told or written.

Then, to her utter amazement, Sabia found herself seeking advice, in a clean little partly-hidden clinic, in the matter of contraception, pretending now she was married, and that her spouse had been prevented from claiming her as yet due to strange circumstances of his work, and journeys abroad, and stressing the complete unsuitability of her becoming pregnant at this time. She wore, for this charade, a wedding ring, having long ago bought herself a second-hand one, for other, quite unlike, purposes of illusion. However, the advice and help were duly forthcoming. Sabia went home with Safety in her bag. But naturally, she was still not ready, still not ready yet to face what she would have to.

All this while she hadn’t, of course, returned to the house in St Giles Grove. She had foreseen that Edmund would say what he had, that Sabia would, after all, be better typing his manuscripts at her flat (away from Helen and all her works). Sabia had gone along with this, since she must have had no interest in Helen, Edmund being her only reason for hanging on at the house.

In fact, she hadn’t now any interest in Helen. The idea of Helen filled Sabia with alarmed disgust. Discovering Helen had been the cause—of all this.

Meanwhile, he did not give Sabia any work, although he continued to pay her…as his typist.

One evening, Sabia had at last nerved herself to it. She spoke to Edmund, from their embrace.

“This must be unbearable for you. Let me make you happy.”

He let her go then, and regarded her for some while. Then he told her again how very sweet she was. Then he suggested they go away. “Let me take you to Italy. That was where you wanted to go before.”

His generosity in rewarding hers—as if canceling it (barter)—enraged her.

“No,” she said. “Let’s just—why not here?”

“Oh, darling,” he said. “Every reason. This is your home. And this is London.”

He’s mad, she thought. Deranged. He is afraid that making love to me in London, even in England, perhaps even anywhere in Britain or her provinces—India, say—will be like having sex together in Helen’s drawing-room under the eyes of the servants.

She wanted the sexual act achieved and over with. But it was no use saying that.

She wanted him to be bored and herself abandoned. And must not say that, either.

“Where in Italy?” she asked. She sounded sternly brisk, she thought. Then heard herself over. She had sounded—dazzled—again.

 

Sabia was turning out of Oxford Street when she bumped, literally, the crowd forcing a collision, into Frederick Laudelay.

“How lovely,” said Frederick, maleficently happy. “Sabia! Most fortuitous. Do let me take you to tea at this dainty quaint place I know.”

Sabia said she was late for an appointment, and so, must decline.

Frederick would have none of this. (Like Edmund?) Limpetesque, he attached himself to her, taking her arm, walking her along through a succession of less crowded streets, until they were in a square with gardens and some shops.

“Mr Laudelay—I really must get on.”

“Just a little tea—do say yes. I’m at a loose end. Been stood up by some bloody editor who promised me lunch and never remembered to come. That’s how they value me, now,” he added bitterly, his eyes moist with self-pity.

“But my—someone is waiting,” Sabia said. No one was.

“And who’s that?” inquired Frederick, refocusing alertly on her like a rather priestly praying mantis.

Sabia said, “Someone I’m typing for now.”

“Male, or female?” asked Frederick, with two distinct emphases, showing Sabia was snared either way. A female must now apparently imply a Lesbian, a male—Edmund Driver.

She had left Edmund only half an hour ago, refusing a taxi, having some shopping to do. Could Laudelay detect Edmund’s expensive smell on her?

“Helen told me,” said Frederick, standing with her as if they might never move apart, “you’d fled Aspersedge Road. Whatever happened?”

“I’d finished typing the book.”

“Really? I thought one never could, with Edmund. He’s always redoing it, like Penelope unpicking her embroidery. Peculiar name isn’t it. Aspersedge— Oh, the aspersedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing. Did you find that?” Sabia, disturbed by these weird flights, compressed her lips. “It is a withered, dreadful marriage they have. Dreadful. Poor Helen, she has so much to regret. But also, of course, she does nothing to help herself, and really she doesn’t deserve any help. A barren, acid woman. A cruel and spiteful woman.” He glanced idly at the facade of a shop—a tea-shop—perhaps the very one with which he had threatened Sabia. “Probably they suit each other, she and Edmund. Would you say?”

“They seem all right.”

“All right? Right, Sabia—they are entirely unright. Come, now.”

Sabia said, “I’m sorry, Mr Laudelay, I have to go—”

He looked at her, bleakly. “Lucky you. Somewhere to go to.”

She wondered if anyone, ever, had been seduced into a moment’s fatal pity for him.

She thanked him (for what?) and walked quickly away.

When she glanced back, from the entrance to the tube, there he still stood, brooding and alone, desiccated under heartless sunlight.

 

 “You see, you may have to travel without me. I wish to God it didn’t have to be like that. Maybe it won’t. If you do, I’ll join you in a couple of days at the most.”

She looked at the collection of papers and money Edmund had given her—like some dossier—dazed.

“You’ll be all right, Sabia, won’t you? You said you’d travelled before.”

“Yes.”

Not like this, she thought.

“It’s Helen,” he said. “She is being difficult. She wants to go to Nice. She wants to fly to France. I hate flying, all that noise—I’ll get out of it somehow, and then I’ll come on. And we’ll be together, without interruptions, at last.”

Sabia smiled, a facial reflex, thinking of the train journey across the edge of Europe. Mountains, lakes, towns, tunnels. And with regular meals in the dining car, with a sleeper. With everything paid for.

But she thought: If I go, I may not ever come back. He doesn’t realize—or does he? Better than setting me up in a flat in London, to establish me in a ruinous old house in Tuscany?

He had told her, it was Conranne’s house. A villa, with gardens, on a hill among hills.

“Have you stayed there before?”

“Once. With Helen. When we were first married. It’s pleasant. No amenities, of course, but lots of olive trees, and wonderful local wine.”

Sabia didn’t know if she were glad. Was it a Holiday? She thought, probably, despite the proviso of his missing the train, and his giving over the dossier to her, he would meet her at the station, and travel with her, and then it wouldn’t be a Holiday. In the sleeper they would act out the first scenes of the last pretense, which would set her free.

She dreamed she was on the train, galloping through the Pyrenees or Alps or God knew where, and Edmund, now a chic, black-haired woman, sat beside her, holding her firmly in place with both hands. The carriage was otherwise empty, and perhaps the train, which also lacked maybe even a driver.

Edmund had told her to allow for an absence of a month at least. Sabia organized her rent and her flat, and told a succession of recommendeds she wasn’t going to be available to type their manuscripts, with the result that Marcus rang her up, complaining that he had tried to help and she’d “let him down.”

“You have helped. I’m so busy now, that’s why I can’t take on any more.”

“Is that all?”

“What else would it be?”

“You’re not—seeing someone? Someone you shouldn’t?”

“I’m not seeing anyone, Marcus.”

Marcus grunted.

“You should be careful.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why say it?”

“Well—I do know, Sabie. I mean, you’re treading quite a dangerous path.”

“Which means?”

“This is difficult.”

“It must be.”

“Driver,” blurted Marcus.

She was tempted to say again, “Whose driver?” But instead, said, “What do you mean?”

“Be careful,” said Marcus.

“Of what, and why?”

“Oh stop it, Sabie!” barked Marcus.

She put down the receiver.

Sabia asked herself if possibly she liked this “treading dangerously” in a normal danger. But she wasn’t sure if she liked it. Actually she thought she would prefer all types of things to the absurd scenario which now went on. And yet, she was powerless (wasn’t she?) to end it, till it had run its course.

Therefore, she prepared as she must, and at the end of June, she was waiting at the station, in a dress and jacket for which Edmund had given her the money, and with some small pieces of luggage for which he had also found the money, and with the dossier of papers that gave her access to other lands. With too, her contraceptive protection, and her irrational decision to do what Edmund would like. It seemed not that important to her. She thought she wouldn’t mind it that much. Less than she had once or twice minded an assault by some unwanted lover of her own gender, one who had been real for her.

And yet too, she had the recurring image, as she waited for Edmund to come striding across the station forecourt, late but imminent, that in Italy she might simply run away, and lose herself among the sunburned, shadowy groves. However, she had entertained such fantasies before, usually when she was entirely trapped. And she looked round and round for her traveling companion, like any anxious, urgent woman, standing alone before the prospect of several great black snorting trains, with a boat to Bologne somehow inserted between them.

 

The heat was extraordinary. At first one thought it wasn’t to be borne. But then you got used to it, and opened like a sunflower.

The house lay at the top of a flight of hills, like steps. From it fell away valleys dustily gleaming with silvery yellow olive trees, and dark garlands of figs, with farms that had russet roofs and crushed amber walls just like the villa. Hills rose again beyond all the valleys. After sunset, in each brief luminous dusk, they became a dark blue more convincing than the sky.

A balcony opened off the main bedroom, which seemed to hang in space over the unquiet valley, out of which rose up the scent of oil and tamarisk and thyme, and the bleating of goats.

No one at the villa could speak English, or only a word or two. Sabia had no Italian. They communicated, she and the people there, by signs and wordless calls and exclamations. Restful.

Instead of English food, there came spaghettis and heaps of glistening rice beaded by olives, sausage, ducks’ eggs and terra cotta kraters of dark Chianti.

Sabia walked along dusty roads, railed with poplars, that led up and down through the valleys, with the villa nearly always in sight, but high up and far away. She lay in the garden arbour and slept after lunch, tranced by the rasp of crickets.

Sometimes she did wonder why she was there, and then, inevitably, when Edmund would turn up. (She could remember times like this in childhood—the adult guardian—relative or teacher—delayed or absent, and so being at liberty. Precarious, borrowed hours.)

For he hadn’t arrived at the station, and in the end she had boarded the train avidly alone, as he had warned her she might have to. Rushed away then, through sea-divided landscapes, which soon altered to a larger more theatrical backdrop that never seemed to her quite believable, Sabia gazed into forested chasms and at sunlit lake surfaces, and forgot Edmund Driver. She became very good at forgetting him. Even sleeping on the train, in the starched, harsh, initialed sheets, even pushing out into the swirl of other stations, where finally someone pre-arranged met her with a large black car, even during all this, or because of all this, Sabia slipped further and further away from everything which had caused her to be there.

She had so often (always?) acted out a role, and now, framed by such magnificent and almost convincing scenery, here was simply another role for her. That of a pampered woman cut adrift and quite alone, a rich woman in a romantic villa, a Tuscan mansion, whose ceilings rose half a mile above her head, whose cool blue and blazing yellow rooms might at any moment summon up the ghost of a Dante or a Medici.

It was very easy to let go of all responsibility. After all, Edmund would eventually arrive, and then she would have to do whatever had to be done. So why not eat the emerald figs, and drink the wine. Why not watch the young kitchen girl, brown as a deer, washing her firm rounded arms in a bucket by the outdoor pump. And the two white dogs from the farm, playing, and the turpentine-blue lizard that lightened over the red wall.

At night, stars littered the sky like white embers carelessly dropped, but it never caught fire until next morning. Let that be a lesson to her. There was always time.

 

July

Sabia was sitting in the garden of the villa in Tuscany. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, the summer furnace of the sun swinging slowly on across the hills, leaving a long ash of shadow in its wake.

Sabia sat quite mindlessly, as she sometimes found that she did. This would be how an animal would exist, she would think, a cat, even one of the villa lizards. In an indifferent awareness of all things, the sky, the sun, the garden with its crimson roses and tenuous vine, the smell of the pasta left over from lunch, caught in pockets among the flowers and herbs. Aware of faint movement in the house, the fat cook, and the maid, and the boy making a slight unthreatening clatter from the yard—and below, vast spaces down the hill beyond the plant-pierced wall, a car creeping round continually on the pale splits of the roads.

She watched the car through her serpent’s eyes, unblinking.

She watched the car a great while, and it meant absolutely nothing to her.

And then, gradually, one flimsy filament at a time, she came to understand what a car was, and that this one was the very one which had brought her up to the house on the hill. And now, here it was again, and it must be Edmund who was now in the car.

Sabia stood up. She shook back her hair and smoothed the skirt of her frock across her hips, and licked her unpainted mouth. She picked up the hat she had brought out to protect her from the sun and didn’t bother with, and held it. As if she, not he, was now to go somewhere.

Then, the oddest idea. That when the car reached the gateway, which she could see quite clearly through the tangled roses, it would draw up. And out of it would step, not Edmund, but Helen.

Why Helen? Also, if Helen, would this be fascinating, a second chance? Or only a deep embarrassment? Or a worrying scene of some kind… But it wouldn’t be Helen.

Then the car drove in through the gateway, and kept on up towards the house.

Sabia thought she would lie down again in the arbour, and make out she was asleep.

It was her way of putting off the inevitable. After all, let Edmund come into the garden, kiss her awake like the Sleeping Beauty. She wondered, the over-turning afternoon deep purple on her closed lids, if she would remember Edmund, or be startled at how he had changed during the week or so she hadn’t seen him.

Then she heard a man’s footsteps on the path.

A darker shadow fell across her. Nothing else. There was to be no kiss, then. Sabia pretended to wake.

Shading her eyes, and looking up, she saw she had indeed totally misremembered Edmund, who was no longer like Edmund at all, but like another man she’d never met in her life.

“Miss Cobb? I’m George Conranne.”

“Oh,” she said. “Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Your house here is very lovely.”

He blinked at her.

“I know you were expecting Edmund,” he said. She waited. “Edmund told me—something about it. You’re not going to have to mind.”

He was about Edmund’s age. He did have a look of Edmund too, as if they might be distantly related, and perhaps they were.

The garden was now blurred by its combined dimness and brightness. A bird fluted and burst across from tree to tree, like a hurled weapon.

“I think we should go inside,” Conranne said.

“Why?” said Sabia.

“I have to tell you something. I think I’ll manage it better in the house. Please, do come in.”

Sabia got up again. She walked back along the picturesque and broken path with him, between the tan flowerpots, and where the small statue was, of a nymph, she thought, wet now with shade.

Inside the house at once a chill fell, but it was a sensory illusion—in a few moments the marbled room would seem as hot, or worse, than outside.

Conranne poured her a drink. Of course, these were his drinks, just as it was his house.

She wondered if she had also become Conranne’s, sold on by Edmund, who wasn’t there.

What had happened? He’d got cold feet, he’d changed his mind, flown in the roar of engines to France with Helen, and sent this man to explain and buy—or coerce—Sabia off.

No, it wasn’t that.

Sabia sat down on the carved wooden chair by the window. She looked at the paved stone segments of the floor, but didn’t slip off her shoes.

Conranne also looked at the floor.

“You and Edmund,” he said. And then, nothing.

After a while, Sabia said, carefully, “Can’t he get away?”

“No, he can’t get away. Oh, shit,” said Conranne, with anger. “I thought I could manage this. I can’t. I’ll just have to tell you. Did you love him?”

As if it were pre-arranged, Sabia knew.

She said quietly, from a circle she seemed suddenly to have risen up into, about three feet below the ceiling, “Did I love him?”

“He’s not—able to be loved anymore,” said Conranne. He downed his drink. “He’s dead. I’m sorry. There it is. He’s dead and she is, and there you have it.”

Sabia couldn’t move.

She said, “Do you mean Helen?”

“Yes, yes. Edmund and Helen.”

The boy appeared in the doorway (an actor mistaking his cue?), stared at them and swiveled, hurrying away.

Conranne took no notice.

He poured another drink. Sabia considered what she should do. What did one do? Think.

I have to be stricken, shocked—but I needn’t cry—not everyone cries. I want another drink of this nasty sweetish whisky—or no, I still have most of the one he gave me.

She sipped the whisky. But wait, she hadn’t sipped it—she could not move yet. The slightest effort, and the glass would slip out of her nerveless fingers. They felt nerveless. Perhaps that was the best thing to do, it would speak volumes, and louder than words—

But Sabia found her nerveless hand had grown into the glass which it couldn’t lift to her lips, nor let go, either.

Conranne was bending over her.

“Do you want to hear what happened?”

No.

“Yes,” Sabia said. Or the part of her still fastened up towards the ceiling, that said it.

Conranne nodded, so she must have said the right thing.

“Helen shot him,” said Conranne.

He may have said something else before, which she hadn’t caught. Then he was saying other things.

Sabia thought: Is he lying?

She thought of Helen, showing always the reverse of her own coin, cool, indifferent, uninvolved—and yet crazily on guard and jealous. Sabia thought of herself, flirting, not with a lover but with Normalcy—more dangerous than any man—and being swept up by the normalcy-that-was-so-dangerous and run away with, everything out of control.

Was that it?

“Walked up to him and shot him point blank,” said Conranne, really rather a bad actor (worse than the cue-mistaking boy). But then the dialogue was awful. So trite and melodramatic.

“Why?” Sabia’s voice. (It must be, no other woman was in the room.)

“She made it clear. Helen. She left a letter. I think the gun—that was from the war. She killed him, then herself. Women don’t do that. English women like Helen, don’t do that. Not like here. They’re always doing it, here. But not Helen. But she did.”

Sabia found her head had drooped over. Now her hand brought the whisky kindly, sympathetically to her mouth.

She drank the whisky. How sweet and thick it was.

What had Helen’s suicide letter said? You have betrayed me again, and I have had enough of it—all these women. Or this one woman.

Sabia thought perhaps Conranne had told her some of what the letter had said, but she didn’t take it in.

Then he was saying something along the lines of she must stay here as long as she wanted. It would be better if she didn’t go back to London, not for a little while. The police were involved, naturally. Various people had guessed, linked her name to Edmund’s. Not too difficult, Conranne supposed bleakly. Conranne mentioned in turn the names of the guessers, which included Marcus, and Frederick Laudelay.

“That one,” said Conranne. “Laudelay, bloody queer—I think he made damn sure he drove Helen mad with it all. But Laudelay was—well, her official spy, if you like. He was always on the case. Every time Edmund started something—even if he hadn’t—oh, I’m sorry, Miss Cobb, but I expect you knew you weren’t the first.”

“Yes,” Sabia said.

She got up, surprising herself, and dropped the glass on the stone floor as an afterthought. Or only a clumsiness. Something.

Conranne glanced at it. Oh dear, she’d smashed his glass.

Sabia said, “When did it happen?”

He told her but she didn’t hear, and she knew she couldn’t ask him to repeat it, not then, nor later, at the dinner they attempted in the twilight (when moths came to the candles), or later still, when she had packed her bags and asked him instead about the express which would return her towards England.

“Really, you mustn’t travel yet. He wouldn’t have wanted you caught up in—”

“Yes, I must. I won’t get caught up.”

“You’ve been awfully brave.”

“No.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Can I help—in any way—are you all right for money?”

No, she said. But then realized she had said Yes.

At midnight she stood on the bedroom balcony, and looked at the stars wobbling, obviously insecurely pinned to the night sky. Breezes brought drugged almond scents from the valley, and distant song from the worlds of other lives.

What do I feel? What shall I do? Who was he? Who am I? Has something happened? What?

Sabia thought of Helen, in one of her ice-cream gowns, marching in on Edmund, in the study—perhaps the dining-room or garden, shooting him point-blank with the service revolver, as in a film, then herself—but it was not convincing. Sabia knew they were still alive, unless of course she had, in the first place, simply imagined them into existence, and all the rest of it.

 

Winter

A girl with curly, mousy-blonde hair sat down, in a great flailing of gloves, scarf, coat, in the seat opposite.

Sacha looked at her. The girl was no stranger, but Phyllis Wanderton, who shared the little office with her at Drye and Lewis.

“I ordered us the welsh rarebit,” said Sacha. “Is that all right?”

“Yes, that sounds nice and hot.”

“It’s nice and cheap.”

They smiled, complicit, young women on a budget.

Outside, on no budget at all, the first generous snows of this northwards country town were fluttering down and down.

“Old Bert says it’ll last until Christmas,” said Phyllis, of the fey Greek-mythological name. “And then vanish just in time to stop there being a white Christmas day. Isn’t that mean.” Perhaps she meant God, or only the weather, or Old Bert even, the doorman, who also saw to the coal fires kept meagerly and smokily alight in every office.

Phyllis had been shopping, so Sacha had come on ahead to the Kettle on the Hob, where they “perched” for lunch.

Phyllis suddenly produced a horrifying doll from a box. It had pink plastic skin and distressing eyes that opened and closed maniacally. It looked like a religious fanatic.

“I got this for my niece. What do you think?”

“Yes,” said Sacha.

“I think she’ll like it.”

“I’m sure she will.”

“The dress is satin, or a bit like that.”

“Yes.”

“But I’ve still got a lot of shopping to do. You’re so lucky, not having anyone. Oh! What am I saying? Sorry.”

The doll was put away and they relapsed into a domestic silence, waiting for the food, staring out, chins on hands, into the Antarctic beyond the window.

They shared two rooms, a kitchen and bathroom, at the top of Gate House, once gracious but now all in flats. When Sacha had appeared, Phyllis had been trying for several weeks to find someone to share and help her with the rent, after the previous sharer had secured a husband and “gone off.” Both Phyllis and Sacha maintained thereafter a fiction of frugality, which sometimes was abandoned in an orgy of chocolates or expensive tea. “This is the room you’d have,” had said Phyllis, that day still in her dressing-gown and slippers, showing Sacha the big front room, past which the traffic would start to veer at six in the morning. But also Phyllis…had a certain look. Without being pretty, she was succulent, strong, with plump muscled arms from tennis. “Oh, the men in this house,” she soon said, “I can’t stand them. I wish they weren’t allowed to live here, I really do.” And later on, when Sacha remarked that she would have to write and tell her friend Albertine, in London, about the lucky find of the room, and how Albertine herself was having so much trouble with her close woman companion, Phyllis had said, “Oh, you mean…like that?” “I’m afraid so.” “Oh,” had said Phyllis. “Well, I don’t mind that, you know. I mean, it’s innocent enough, isn’t it. Not like what men get up to. Do have another biscuit.” And Sacha had smiled, as if it were quite innocent, correctly predicting naughty little games ahead, such as might be played in a school, late night exchanges of confidences, and cuddles that could, and indeed would, lead anywhere.

Phyllis was part of that oblivious underground of women who thought what they did was nothing, that their distaste for men sprang from maidenly virtue not sexual antipathy. Usually a day evolved when abruptly they woke up, and hastily married some unfortunate male, whom they then scorned, bullied and nagged into enormous distance, and so enjoyed the unmolested and Perfectly Normal remainder of their lives.

Knowing exactly what she was not, and that she was “innocent,” Phyllis didn’t get jealous either.

So, it was quite all right for Sacha to go on looking under her lids at the woman in the corner, whose clothes she must be admiring.

She was definitely not the Kettle’s usual customer, wrapped in furs and smoking cigarettes that left a faint costly marker on the air. And surely those were pearls that were her earrings.

Her hair, short and severely combed, was a very dark brown, almost black. And her eyes a dark, leadenly-glowing blue. She had drunk a cup of coffee. She seemed to be waiting for someone, or something. But nothing had happened.

She was like Edmund, Edmund’s Anima, who had stalked fatally through his novels, at least the two Sacha had read when she was still called Sabia Cobb.

It had been curious really, the newspapers, where they knew of and mentioned her, always got her name quite wrong. She’d been called, variously, Sabine Colbourne and Sabina Court, and, more nearly apposite to one of Sabia’s true, even then, former names, Sabina Cohen. But she had merited only a small splinter on the whole. The crime of passion was firmly centered upon Edmund and Helen, the glamorous and the damned.

“Helen gave him enough rope,” Frederick Laudelay was reported to have said. “She asked him endlessly to stop, and he promised her he would. But he was like an opium addict. He couldn’t. So then she let him go as far as he wished. He was planning to run off with this girl to France. To Helen that was the last straw. That was when her nerve snapped.” (Such a lot of clichés—and the destination wrong—had Frederick really said all this?)

There dashed over Sacha (who had altered her name to Sacha Cope on the train from London) a wave, a shudder of horror.

“What’s up? Is it the rarebit?” asked Phyllis, in her schoolgirly-motherly tone.

“No, just chilly.”

The woman who was Edmund Driver’s Anima got up abruptly and walked out through the room, out into the white storm of the day. The snowflakes consumed her.

Sacha wondered if she had imagined the woman, or if Edmund were haunting her. For she had seen the Anima, in human form, once or twice. Yes, even on the boat from Bologne, gliding back over the calm sea, when the Anima had stood on the deck, a tall, powerfully-svelte figure, with Edmund’s hair minus any grey, and Edmund’s eyes.

Perhaps they did haunt you, the ones you didn’t care about, the ones you were most likely, otherwise, to forget.

“What’s up?” Phyllis, again.

“Nothing. I think I’ve got a cold.”

“Oh poor you. Let’s get some whisky—hot drink tonight. Oh, but I was going to say, just come across to the florist’s for a minute.”

It had been easy to get out of London. Sacha-still-Sabia took what she needed, in the suitcases Edmund had bought her for Italy, and her typewriter in its case. She sold her paintings, some clothes, and the books she couldn’t lug with her. She left the rent unsettled, and no notice given, no forwarding address. She was, at this, already adept enough. This sort of thing.

When they had paid for their lunch, Sacha and Phyllis walked, arm in arm (innocent), across the square, and peered in at the florist’s window.

“I just fancied those,” said Phyllis, “to brighten up my room. In this weather. Something that’ll last.” She had forgotten, standing there, evaluating, that Sacha might have a cold. Phyllis usually quickly forgot things.

Sacha stared in at the icy glass. Past the Christmas tree and holly, and the model sleighs, a heap of funeral wreathes lay waiting on the floor.

“What do you think?”

Did Phyllis want to buy a funeral wreathe? If so, for whom? Stop it Sacha.

“I don’t see—”

“No, look there. That’s it.”

It was a stone bowl of irises, evidently fake, made from waxed paper, Sacha thought, coloured a rich unlikely violet indigo, with wild yellow eyes of flame, like the Jabberwocky.

“Egyptian Iris,” read out Phyllis. “I wonder what that means. But—oh, look at that. Just look.” She pointed.

Sacha gradually saw that one of the unreal irises had become even more unusual, and was turning a curious acidulous lime-green at the edges of its petals—obviously turning, because the one behind it, now she did look, was bright green all over, even its fiery eyes, which were now the shade of unripe lemons.

“That can’t be meant to be like that,” said Phyllis. “It gives the game away, doesn’t it? Something must have gone wrong. Something in the dye, or where they’ve put it. And how could you be sure? No, I don’t like that then after all. I mean, if that happens, it won’t look real, will it. Not like the others. I mean it looks impossible.”