CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

HELEN HAD KNOWN that Albert was not telling the whole truth about his torment. But this knowledge was not available for reflection or elaboration. It was locked away. There was a knowledge of Albert, of their marriage, their entire life, which had always been locked away, from day one, from that first evening when he had driven her to her political meeting and then disappeared to his concert. That obscure part of themselves and her awareness of it had to be there to make the marriage they had possible; equally, it had to remain locked away. It was one of the conditions of life that one did not question. ‘One does not question,’ Albert had written for one of the conference papers she had presented for him, ‘the mental processes of visual-image perception that moment by moment construct the world around us, even though experiments have shown how fallible those processes can be. One does not question them because to do so would mean chaos.’

Helen had wondered, standing at a microphone to read this out to a respectful academic audience, whether Albert hadn’t simply found another of his indirect ways of telling her something. She had always felt that he was speaking to her in riddles through his work, that his work in fact was primarily addressed to her. Or rather: it was the need to tell her things without speaking to her directly that made his work possible. And because the method was indirect she was also invited not to understand, or to lock away her knowledge in some file that could never be opened: in any event to go on unquestioning, even to speak his words for him at prestigious conferences as if they had been meant for others. The important thing was that the two of them must never really speak. To do that they must know what they mustn’t speak about. Helen was good at this. If she hadn’t been, their marriage would not have lasted. ‘Every behavioural stability’ – she had read out Albert’s conclusion to those New York professors – ‘indeed all functioning interrelationships, are thus predicated on falsifying systems of perception, interpretation and communication, of which the language in which this paper is written is but one.’

Albert loved, Helen had sensed during the ensuing applause, to leave an audience with a conjuring trick that saw both himself and the arguments he had just advanced vanish in a puff of smoke, the moment of maximum intellectual brilliance coinciding with the most drastic self-effacement. Only she was left behind, at the podium, ready to take questions with an embarrassed smile, as she had been taking questions for months now from this irritating American. ‘You are doing this for me, Helen,’ Albert had whispered in the dark of their last night. ‘You don’t know how grateful I am.’ They were arm in arm. The familiar tension had reached its climax. The web they had woven was at its tightest and most fragile. His voice was tormented, seductive. He was leaving her behind. The syringe was ready for his effacement. To have her do it was an act of brilliance. It would be the first injection he had ever let her give him. ‘Helen, Helen, Helen,’ he whispered, ‘what a beautiful completion.’

For you, she muttered through the long nights that followed; for you, dear Albert, but not for me. Her husband’s death had not been a completion for Helen. It was pure loss. It had seemed beautiful, but only as it happened, only as fulfilment of his wish, to die in her arms, at her hand, in the fortress of their marriage, to complete and end his own story as he wanted. And he had wanted it urgently. But afterwards she knew it was a terrible mistake. Albert’s torment was not the torment of the cancer sufferer, she forced herself to realise. It was not the ordinary fear of a slow agony. There were years of life in Albert. I knew that, and I still did as he said. I pretended not to know. I didn’t ask him to explain. I didn’t demand to know what he was afraid of.

Why?

While Albert was alive Helen had been able to pretend. Or rather, she hadn’t been able to do otherwise. But now he was gone, the mechanism was breaking down. Day by day the old complicity was decaying. There are moments, now, when Helen seems unable to put one foot in front of another, at the clinic, on the street; some crucial lubricant has dried up, she can’t move. She remembers his embrace slackening, she feels his cheek against hers, turning chill. Why had he wanted to die? Why by my hand? With Albert’s death, a buried knowledge began to moulder. This is something you can’t just cremate and scatter. She must go back over things. Why else would she have started talking to Paul?

Yet out of habit Helen could not finally arrive at the place that she and Albert had learned to avoid so well. ‘The strongest complicity,’ Albert had written apropos of climate change, ‘is the complicity of shared denial.’ There were things Helen undoubtedly knew, things she physically felt – why she and Albert had come together in the first place, why they had lived their whole lives abroad – and she would circle around those things; it was impossible not to, given the gravitational pull they exercised; but she would not plunge and explore, she would not dig them out and name them. So she had chosen, in effect, to discuss Albert with the one man whom she could not really speak to, not openly, because of course he would write down whatever she told him. Then her life would lose its secret sense, the uniqueness their strange marriage had conferred on it; then she would stand naked before her son, whom neither she nor Albert had spoken of at all in the days when his death was decided.

So rather than tell everything with candour, she had insisted that Paul give up his writing project, that he pay attention to her not to Albert, that he see the excitement and superiority of a life of service: her life, not Albert’s. If nothing else, she would win that old debate at last. She had teased the biographer with intriguing details and simultaneously discouraged him; she had made him curious and told him his biography was pointless. She had fostered mystery without giving him the key to understand. What were Albert’s abstract and tortured considerations, she had hinted, beside the smile of a destitute boy returning from death’s door, a girl with hepatitis recovering her bright cheeks? And she had used her body too, what charms remained. Why fret over the dead man when there is still some mileage in the widow?

She had definitely done all that, even if it wasn’t planned. She wasn’t a calculating woman. The man’s ingenuousness encouraged it. And his blundering. Paul had absolutely no idea. He was a naïf. But she had never expected the American to agree, to capitulate even; she hadn’t expected she would have to hear his drawling, gravelly Yankee voice say: ‘Hey, by the way, Helen, I want to accept your invitation. You know? I’d like to go and work with you somewhere remote, if it’s really a prospect.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

They were eating lunch. Helen had gone to the clinic that morning but the dust storm had deterred the sick. There were few patients. Helen was at a loss when the flow of suffering was interrupted. She had wandered around the clinic for a couple of hours, visiting the bed cases assigned to her, trying once again to talk to Than-Htay. The boy was not recovering. The infection had responded somewhat to the drugs she had found for him, but his vitality had not returned. Not quite sick enough to be given a bed, he drifted around the clinic like a ghost, hovering in doorways, sleeping in the shade in the courtyard, nibbling a chapatti in the canteen.

Normally such a case would have been discharged to his family, but Than-Htay had none. He was still not speaking Hindi. He didn’t try. If told to sweep, he held the broom between limp fingers as if he had no idea what it was for. His eyes were luminous, but vacant. Asked to help unpack a van and sort some boxes, he simply stared. He too was locked away somewhere, Helen thought, in the realm of some trauma she would never fathom. Albert would have got in there and found out. Sufferers knew at once that Albert could be told things. They understood he would not try to heal them or wake them from their trance; so they told him things, they let him film them. They understood he was just looking; he wouldn’t take their precious pain away. It was curious that he never filmed me, Helen thought. He made no videos of the way his wife bandaged an ankle, or swabbed clean a sore. But his eyes were always on me. It was Albert’s gaze made everything possible, Helen thought; even when the eyes mocked.

Towards midday she had come home in a taxi through the swirling grit. The wind was rising. ‘I’ll be on night duty later,’ she explained. ‘I’ll take the afternoon off.’

Paul kissed her cheek at the doorway and smiled. The man was more chivalrous than she had imagined, more ordinary. They sat down to eat the food Lochana had prepared and he said: ‘Helen, I accept your proposal, if you really meant it. I’d like to get involved with your work for a while. I’ve decided to drop the book. I want action.’

Helen was wiping her mouth and her hand folded tight around the paper napkin. ‘You’ve changed your plans?’ She wasn’t used to men who came round. ‘Just because you spent a night in the widow’s bed?’ She smiled sardonically. ‘It was hardly a mythical experience.’

‘Nothing to do with the night,’ Paul said. Frowning, he poured sauce on his rice, dug in his fork, ate. With his mouth full, he said: ‘I went to see Dr Bhagat this morning. Maybe that decided me.’

‘Ah.’ Helen raised an eyebrow. ‘Interesting?’

Paul swallowed, wiped his mouth, looked at her. ‘He said he hadn’t thought Albert was really ill but all the same he wasn’t surprised by his death.’

‘Oh.’ Helen looked away at her food. ‘How … paradoxical.’

‘Quite. In fact, he asked me what was written on the death certificate. As cause.’

‘To be honest I wouldn’t know.’ She pushed her plate away, stood up and went to open a cupboard. Casually she added: ‘I had Kulwant write it.’

‘Ah. Kulwant.’

‘So you could ask him. If you’re interested.’

Paul knew it was a provocation and let it pass. He hesitated: ‘Anyway, as I was leaving … well, I decided, enough is enough. You know? I need to do something different, as you suggested. I need action, real living, not abstruse ideas.’

As she turned back to face him, a rush of emotion tensed Helen’s throat. This she hadn’t expected: a man who agreed with her. She came to sit down, picked up her fork again, tried to smile. ‘Actually, I had been thinking it was probably a mistake to have invited you. You’re too used to the easy life, in the end.’ She looked straight at him now. ‘Aren’t you, Paul?’

That made him laugh. ‘Very probably!’ He dug in his fork again. ‘But now I need to get my hands dirty.’

‘Doctors do their best to keep their hands clean,’ she murmured.

‘I’m not expecting to do open heart surgery, Helen.’

‘And Albert?’ Suddenly, her voice took on a little-girl’s squeal of scandal. ‘You want to abandon Albert! After all the fuss you’ve made, bothering me all these months? His ideas were not abstruse.’

Paul was perplexed. Again he had to wait till he had swallowed before speaking. ‘Listen, Helen, I’m not getting anywhere with the book. It’s time to put it aside. For the moment I need air.’

Helen seemed almost contemptuous. ‘You won’t find much of that in Bihar in the monsoon season.’

‘Bihar?’

‘There’s a kala-azar epidemic. If you read the papers you’d have seen. They’re calling for trained aid workers. I was thinking of volunteering.’ She shook her head. ‘You don’t even know what kala-azar is, do you?’

‘I’m eager to hear.’

‘It’s ugly. A mosquito-transmitted infection. Fever, lethargy, swollen spleen, the lips and eyes bleed. It’s truly horrible to look at, smells atrocious, and kills.’

‘I’ll come,’ Paul said.

She kept her face over her food. ‘Because you need air?’

‘That’s right.’

Helen was completely thrown. ‘And your little lady? I’m afraid her name always escapes me. I can’t be as exciting as her, can I?’ When Paul smiled wryly, she cried: ‘You’re far too narcissistic ever to stop writing!’

‘Hey, Helen!’ Paul complained. ‘Don’t try to dissuade me now I’ve made up my mind. I want to change. I’m excited about that. Let’s leave the woman question out of it.’

She stood to boil water for coffee. Did the man suppose she would tell him everything about Albert as soon as he claimed to have given up the book, perhaps after he had worked beside her for a month or two to ‘prove’ it? Was it a ploy? But she knew Paul was not that kind. He is pushy, she thought, but he’s not a creep. Helen has known creeps.

The teaspoon trembled as she transferred coffee powder from jar to cup. Has Albert’s death bound her or freed her? Can she really be bothered with this man? Or any man. Albert had never been pushy; but he was awfully seductive. Day after day Albert drew you in, until something quite grotesque seemed reasonable. ‘Let’s go and lie down, love,’ he had said that evening. He had been drawing her to the bed. He had been agitated for months. He had been anxious, excited, distracted, distant. She had never asked why. Then, suddenly, he was calm. He was hers again. He was decided. And he had known she wouldn’t insist on knowing why he wanted this. ‘I just want it to be you,’ he repeated. ‘I want to be yours. To finish. I’m finished, Helen, done. It’s what I want. Please.’ He had showered carefully so he needn’t be washed. He had dressed properly so she needn’t dress him. ‘This will bind us forever, and free us both,’ he whispered. She made no comment. ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said. He had led her by the wrist.

‘Let’s go and lie down, Paul,’ Helen muttered when they had finished coffee. ‘There’s nothing else to do in a dust storm.’

Paul had spent the previous night in her bed, in the James’s marriage bed. The two had made love rapidly and wordlessly. She seemed to take a purely physical and perfunctory pleasure in it all. For Paul it was unusual to feel that his libido was not centre stage driving the performance; it was as if he were being pulled, prompted, not exactly against his will, but in response to something beyond it. Helen made all the moves, showed him what she needed. He was almost obliged to be passive, a passive actor. Afterwards, it seemed nothing had really happened, everything was still to be decided between them.

Now, as yesterday, Helen didn’t want the light. She drew heavy curtains over the drama of the churning dust in the street. Yet she wasn’t shy or ashamed. It was her face showed her age, not her body. Naked, she pushed herself blindly against the younger man, pressed her nose into his neck, her breasts against his chest. He tried to calm and caress her, to have the woman relax and respond; but today every contact, every sound and smell, was turning her back towards Albert. The tension built. Paul couldn’t understand it. The woman was frantic.

‘I can’t!’ Helen eventually cried. ‘I want to, but I can’t!’

She turned away. After a long silence, she said quietly: ‘So now I suppose you can get up and go, Mr Journalist.’

‘My name’s Paul,’ he said. He kept a hand on the small of her back.

‘For a busy man like you, this must be so much wasted time.’

‘I’m moved,’ he said quietly. ‘And curious.’

‘About Albert.’

‘About Helen.’

‘Liar.’

‘Okay. About Albert and Helen. And about us.’

She let him stroke her. Occasionally a limb twitched. She was tense beyond control.

‘How can you betray your pretty girlfriend just like that?’ Helen suddenly demanded.

Paul didn’t reply. It was a non-question.

‘Not that I don’t know all there is to know about betrayal,’ she added.

After another silence, he asked: ‘So when do we set off to Bihar?’

‘You’re too fat,’ she muttered.

He laughed. She was lying with her back towards him and he pinched her softly at the waist. She didn’t respond.

After a few minutes, Paul withdrew his hand, lay on his back. He found himself calm and not at all worried about the future. It was unusual. He was giving up a big source of income. He would follow Helen and watch how she went about her work in Bihar. He would learn and change. I’ve finally escaped my life, he thought. Lying quietly, he heard the wind banging a door. Someone was shouting in the street.

She turned brusquely. ‘I betrayed Albert a dozen times,’ she said harshly. ‘More. Don’t imagine that’s the problem. As if I’d never made love to anyone else.’

‘Helen,’ he said.

Their eyes met.

‘I didn’t hide it either. There’s nothing exclusive about sex. Our marriage went much deeper than that.’

‘You’re an unusual woman,’ Paul told her.

She stopped. ‘So, now you can change your mind again and write your book.’

‘Betrayal is always a good selling point.’

‘Ahhhhhhhhh!’ Helen shrieked. She turned away from him and let her voice yell from the bottom of her belly: ‘Ahhhhhhhhh!’ Then again and again: a powerful, inarticulate howl. Then it became a moan, lower and sadder. Face to the wall, she pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them and moaned. Eventually, after a couple of minutes’ quiet, she told him, ‘Go away. Just go.’

There was no question of Paul’s going.

‘Go!’

He knew she didn’t want him to.

In a coquettish voice, she eventually said: ‘You’ll get bored with me. I’m too old.’

He said nothing.

‘I can’t add to your brood of abandoned children, you know.’

‘Surely a point in your favour.’

‘You’ll get bored!’ she shouted. ‘You’ll be fed up with miserable villages and dull ignorant peasants and fetid smells and filth and people dying dying dying all the time, helpless people with nothing to hope for buzzing round you like flies, always wanting something, always with their hands out, begging begging begging. Always always always.’

She had exhausted herself.

‘If you haven’t got bored all these years,’ Paul asked quietly, ‘why should I?’

‘You’ll start studying spiders!’

‘Ha. I don’t think so.’

‘Or arranging theatricals for lush little girls.’

‘That’s a little more tempting.’

‘So you can smell their spicy young bodies and feed off their blind young energy.’

She lay rigid, disoriented. Why had she said such an ugly thing? She clutched herself fiercely, dug her nails into her sides.

Paul saw and yet felt perfectly calm. It was uncanny; usually a woman’s unhappiness would make him anxious and guilty. But not today.

Then once again she whirled round and now a fist came down on his chest. ‘Damn you!’ she shouted. She punched him hard. ‘You’re making me say things I never even thought before. Damn you. Go! Get out!’

He pulled himself into a sitting position and grabbed her wrists. She was screaming. ‘Albert is here beside me! Always! There’s no room for you! No room!’ Her face was thrust towards his, eyes and mouth straining. He was enthralled by the intensity of it, excited by his own calmness.

And now the phone rang.

They were both still. Helen’s body relaxed. He felt the tension go out of her. She was pleased the phone was ringing. She got up and hurried round the bed and out of the door. He watched her move, tall and pale in the shadow. Even naked she had a sort of mature reserve.

‘Hello?’ she answered. She was in the sitting room, out of sight. Paul reached for his trousers and, without thinking of asking permission, lit a cigarette. He felt pretty good. Who would have thought this when he came to India, when he took the taxi to the crematorium, planning his book? He was going to change his life.

‘No,’ he heard her saying. ‘I’m sorry. God. No, I don’t know. I wish I could help.’ Helen went on and on repeating these formulas. She had no idea. No, it wasn’t a good time to come round. No. She was on night duty tonight. Soon she’d be going back to the clinic.

‘Kulwant,’ she announced, returning. ‘Jasmeet has run away from home. His daughter. Apparently she took a lot of money.’

‘The dancing girl?’

‘Ex-dancing girl.’

She looked at him. Paul saw she was herself again.

‘Sorry about the hysteria,’ Helen said.

‘No problem. I’m paying you back by smoking in your bed.’ Paul smiled. He tapped the ash out into the top of the cigarette packet. ‘Surely the girl is old enough to leave home if she wants to.’

‘He’s a protective father,’ Helen said. ‘They’re Sikhs.’

She went to look out between the curtains. The dust storm was blowing hard. The silhouettes of the buildings opposite came and went. ‘He wanted me to give him the phone numbers of some other people Albert had got her doing things with. His theatre thing, whatever it was. He’s afraid she’s run off with one of the boys. But I don’t have any numbers.’

‘They’ll be on his phone,’ Paul said.

‘I don’t have it.’

‘No laptop and no phone? He must have left them somewhere.’

‘I couldn’t care less. Let her run off with the boy. She’s a flirty, empty-headed little thing and they want to marry her to some dull, devout fellow in pharmaceutical sales. Obviously she runs away.’

Helen came back to the bed and sat down with her back against the bedstead, her arms folded. After a moment or two she told him in an even voice: ‘You made a mistake, by the way, how you were going about the book.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘You’d have been fine if you’d started where I told you. With his brother’s death.’

Paul lifted his eyes.

‘I’ll tell you a story,’ she said.

‘Go ahead.’

She looked at him. What was she trying to achieve? She frowned: ‘Just before we went to Kenya, right at the beginning, Albert took me to see his parents. It was the only time I met them. We’d married without telling people, in a registry office. Albert said the only way to do something his father might object to was to present the man with a fait accompli. He was rather scared of him, I think. Anyway, they lived in a big house on Headington Hill, wealthy outskirts of Oxford, and as it turned out his father was charming, rather gallant, not at all worried about us marrying or moving to Africa, not at all interested actually. He talked about his research the whole time. He was an expert in dominants and recessives and terribly concerned that I understand exactly what was at stake. We talked for hours. But his wife, Albert’s mother, fussed, interrupting all the time. She was a tiny woman, really very pretty for her age. Albert kept ruffling her hair – he was much taller than she was – he kept saying, “Don’t worry Flower, Helen will look after me. Kenya’s okay.” She was older than his father, I think, by quite a few years. He called her Flower and she called him Bumble. I found it sickening. Albert and I never called each other anything but Albert and Helen.’

Paul closed his eyes. He enjoyed listening to her very English accent. It had a hard, exciting edge.

‘Anyway, in the afternoon, when his parents were both out, Albert showed me his brother’s and sister’s old rooms. He had to search for the keys, because they were kept locked. He’d obviously waited for the parents to be away on purpose. Well, Amelia’s room was bright with fresh flowers on the dresser beside a portrait photo. She wasn’t very pretty, nothing like the mother. More like a female version of Albert. There were her books, an old stereo system, a hockey stick. That sort of thing. She was a lot older than Albert and he hadn’t been close to her. She died when he was only about, what …?’

‘Fourteen,’ Paul said.

‘Right.’ Helen paused. ‘But John’s room was a shock. When we opened it dust sifted off the top of the door and swirled up from the floor. The curtains were pulled to, it was dark and stale and there were clothes spilling out of drawers, books open on the floor, cobwebs everywhere. It must have been shut ever since he died, seven or eight years before. Even the bed was unmade and thick with dust; I touched it and there was spidery fluff on my fingers. Then Albert showed me a photo on the bedside table; it was the only thing in the room that had been wiped. It was Bridget, the girl John had gone mad about. A real looker. Albert said: “There, I’ve shown you,” and closed the door again.’

‘Strange.’

There, I’ve shown you. No sooner had Helen spoken the words than she heard Albert’s quiet voice saying them again. Despite the heat, she shivered.

‘Still,’ Paul said, ‘all this hardly matters now I’ve decided not to write the book. Does it?’

Helen looked at his thick chest on the sheets. Who was this man to her, if not Albert’s biographer?

‘About what just happened,’ she began.

‘Forget it.’

‘No, I’m not apologising.’ She hesitated. ‘I just want to explain. Because there’s something that … that has been driving me mad, to be honest, and that makes all this … with you … so difficult.’

‘Spit it out,’ he smiled.

With unexpected promptness, Helen said: ‘Albert and I didn’t make love for the last … maybe, five years.’

‘Ah.’

‘That side of our life stopped. Or rather, he stopped. We never made love in this bed, for example. Never.’

She sat with her arms folded, rocking slightly against the pillow.

Eventually Paul asked: ‘But isn’t that normal, maybe, in a long marriage? I can imagine there’s a moment when you just lose interest. I mean, in sex.’

She didn’t answer.

‘I stopped making love to my second wife right after the honeymoon. I can never understand how we managed to have a child.’

Helen shook her head. ‘It was important for us.’

‘His illness?’ Paul suggested. ‘I don’t suppose prostate cancer encourages sex.’

Now she laughed bitterly. ‘Kulwant says the first thing most men do when they’re diagnosed is grab a new woman. To prove they’re still alive. For some men it actually jump-starts a stalled libido.’

‘How interesting. So maybe he did that and felt guilty.’

‘Albert never felt guilty, because he never did anything. If anything, it was that that tormented him. Not doing anything.’ She faltered. ‘He became more and more tormented towards the end. His work sort of broke up into a dozen odd projects. He rushed off to ashrams and came back frustrated and angry. There were all kinds of ailments. There were nights and nights when he didn’t sleep, always in the bathroom, days he wandered about aimlessly.’

Paul was perplexed. ‘What did he say when you asked him about it? The sex. Lack of.’

‘I didn’t ask him. At first, I wondered if it wasn’t some kind of experiment, to see how I’d react. Albert was capable of that.’

‘So how did you react?’

‘I waited. I concentrated on my work. I tried to read what he was writing, hoping to understand. But he had almost stopped writing these last years. Aside from notes in other people’s books. Once he said that to complete a whole sentence from initial capital to final full stop seemed a form of violence, a trap to catch flies.’

‘Where would that leave Proust?’ Paul joked.

She shook her head. ‘God knows how he was supposed to teach in school if he didn’t believe in writing whole sentences.’

‘Could it be, like Gandhi, he’d started thinking celibacy was necessary, for his task?’

‘Albert hated Gandhi, he hated the idea of the crusade, of being good for a purpose.’

After a while Paul tried: ‘Perhaps he’d got wind of these betrayals you mentioned.’

‘But he’d always known!’ She shook her head back and forth as if to fight off an unpleasant idea, then said: ‘I told him. Maybe I even did it to excite him. Partly.’

‘Out of my repertoire, I’m afraid,’ Paul acknowledged. ‘I thought I was coming here to write about a genius anthropologist and his angel, aid-worker partner.’

‘Don’t be an idiot!’ Helen said sharply. Then she went on: ‘Albert wanted me to be larger than life. He said since I was around death all day, it was understandable I had lovers.’

‘Kulwant was one of them?’

‘Now and then. But Albert knew. He knew it was nothing. God, he knew Kulwant was an idiot. You can see that for yourself. A nice idiot, but an idiot.’ Helen banged her head back lightly against the wall. ‘I wondered if it could be to do with the trial. It began right after that. It stopped, I mean. Sex. We should have been celebrating. He was acquitted, his reputation was saved. For what that’s worth. We were travelling again. Albert loved travelling. Oh why?’ Helen suddenly raised her voice and shouted the word. ‘Why? Why did he do that to me? Why?’

Paul said nothing.

‘I defended him to the hilt in Chicago.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t want help.’

‘No, he was grateful. I could see he was.’

‘Perhaps he wished he had fucked the girl.’

‘You would say that. But he would never have done it.’

‘You had lovers. He might have …’

‘Other people did things,’ she said sharply, ‘but not Albert. He lived to be near me living.’

‘Admiring and mocking your busy life.’

‘That’s right.’ She nodded, paused. ‘In a way he sucked blood from me.’

‘And you got upset when he stopped.’

Helen was shaking her head slowly from side to side. In a low voice, she murmured: ‘Albert took himself away from me. In his mind. I don’t know where. The last six months were awful. Just at the very end he came back, and I was happy. He had been so tormented. I think it was his sense of failure. His father had been such a success, with work, with women, with family; his brother had had the courage to slash his wrists. That’s how Albert saw it. He was capable of seeing suicide as a positive thing, a victory, a ceremony. He was obsessed by ceremony. At the very end, he began to talk of love again, of being fused together. Us two. Our marriage was his masterpiece, his destiny. It was art, a story, a trajectory. And I was so happy he’d turned back to me.’

Helen groaned. ‘He died in my arms. Our faces were together. I could feel his breath on my face. In the end, I lay all night beside him. I remember the exact moment when the breath stopped coming, when his arms went limp. I felt him go. I saw it. I saw it. Like someone leaving the room. I got up and laid him out. If I could, I would have cremated him right here with our own furniture, I would. I would have done it. I would have gone with him if I could. Believe me. Like some stupid suttee. Sometimes I wish I had. God, I wish I had.’

‘Helen.’ Paul opened his mouth to say more, but she fell sideways onto him and across him. She deliberately lay across him. All at once he found his face pressed against her stomach. ‘Bite me,’ she was saying. ‘Bite me till I bleed. Please.’

Paul recognised the same wildness as when she had tossed the flowers over him the previous evening, the same falseness. Obediently, he opened his mouth and felt her skin sink into his mouth.

At the same moment there was a ring at the door.