From the room where people were dancing to what sounded like South African township music (so the craze for that had come round again, had it?) there came a crash, a scream, voices raised in laughter, consternation, reassurance. Graham was in the garden talking to a young colleague from the College of Art he’d bumped into unexpectedly. Mark Elstree was a painter whose work Graham particularly disliked. He had been holding forth only the other day to someone about the defeat for visual meaning in an art that depended upon explanations in words and about a generation of painters who couldn’t draw; so it was strange that meeting him at the party Graham had been pleased to see him and to be seen there. Mark stood out rather stylishly against the background of ethnic dresses and collarless shirts; he had his hair shaved close to his well-shaped skull (because it was receding, Graham suspected) and was dressed in a suit with narrow lapels and a tie whose knot he had pulled half undone. Tentatively he offered Graham a share of his joint.
— I don’t know if you’re interested in this.…
Graham, inhaling under the night sky, could smell — mingled with the pot and the smoking torches — green things again, earth.
— So how do you know the Marshalls?
— My wife works for them, as a matter of fact.
— But she’s not here?
— No, she didn’t feel well this afternoon; she seems to be developing a sore throat.
— They’ve got some incredible stuff. Not exactly my style, though.
— Not exactly my style either. For all their impeccable political correctness, there’s an unmistakable aura of heaped-up booty, isn’t there?
Mark laughed delightedly at the sky. Plunder.
He seemed genuinely respectfully interested in what Graham thought; although it was perfectly possible that out of earshot in another conversation he might have condemned him as an old dinosaur or lightly dismissed his work as catering for the craft-fair end of the market.
— Caftans and Cabernet Sauvignon.…
A woman in a white dress and bare feet stepped out through the French doors and came toward them, carrying something with concentration in her hands. Graham guessed she was drunk from how she stepped out across the gravelly path and the flower bed as unfalteringly as if they were carpet. A few people crowded in the door behind her. He thought she must be coming for Mark, and he moved himself just very slightly out of her trajectory, smiling the avuncular smile.
She didn’t smile.
She was dressed to attract attention: her white dress was unbuttoned down to between her breasts and slit up to her thighs, pinched in at the waist with a wide elastic belt. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a tangled bird’s nest of curls; it was too dark to see its color, which was bright orange. But other things he could see — skin of that slightly blemished luminous paleness, long complicated ears, bony boyish shoulders and big hands — suggested the type and the orange hair along with it. He could see even in the dark that she wasn’t exactly beautiful. She wasn’t curvaceous enough, really, for the revealing dress; but on the other hand she carried it off with confidence; she walked in it as though she were a priestess involved in a rite or had a part in a play. She was actually — this is probably what Graham thought, that first look — scary, formidable. He would probably have avoided her if she hadn’t been heading straight for him: not for Mark, it turned out, but for him.
She held out to him whatever it was she had in her hands.
— Apparently I’ve broken one of your bowls. They tell me it was yours.
Her voice was drunken, too: not slurred but challenging.
She was carefully carrying a pile of five or six huge jagged pieces of thin pale glazed pot. Graham felt Mark glance quickly at him, perhaps to see how he took the loss of his work. He didn’t recognize the broken pieces in the slightest, had had no idea the Marshalls owned anything of his. (Should he have been more polite about their taste?) He took the pieces from her in dismay.
— Never mind about the bowl. You shouldn’t be carrying these nasty things around. You’ll cut your hands to ribbons.
— I’m an idiot. Forgive me. It was nice. You won’t believe me, but really I had looked at it and thought, There’s one real, good, pure, true thing. You’ll think I made that up, though.
— Thank you. Thank you retrospectively for the bowl that’s gone. And believe me, I had forgotten it existed, until you put an end to it. Let’s see your hands.
He was pulling out his handkerchief to wipe her hands if she was bleeding: suitably avuncular, he thought (she was his wife’s age). She sank to her knees on the grass in front of him and embraced his legs, resting her face against his thigh so that he was looking down into the bird’s nest of hair.
— I’ve come to do penance, she said. What can I give you to make up for what I’ve done?
There were cheers from the people crowded in the French windows. Mark laughed, pushing his hands boyishly in his trouser pockets with the unmistakable slight excitement and bravado of sexual envy. I don’t get women breaking my pictures, he said.
— This is the one great advantage of ceramics, said Graham.
— Now he tells me.
— I could sleep with you tonight, she said. I’ve had a row with my husband anyway. He’s gone home to his mother. That’s the kind of marriage we have.
— Well, said Graham, looking down at her bemusedly. It was only one bowl. Though I’d have to say, it looks as though it might have been a good one. I’m sure we could come to an arrangement.
An idea that he would like to see that tangle of hair nestled against his thigh under different circumstances stirred in some deep chamber of his thoughts.
— Or I could dance with you, she said muffledly. For starters. I’m Linda, by the way.
— Don’t mind me, old man, said Mark. I’d hate to get between you and a lady’s penance.
Graham flattered himself he did a passable township jive. He helped Linda up and wiped her hands, which were indeed bloody from one long but shallow cut across the ball of her left thumb, which he tried to tie with his handkerchief (afterward he found her blood on his trousers where she had embraced him, and he tried to soak them, which was how Naomi got suspicious and the whole thing came out). He followed her into the room where people were dancing, slightly apprehensive that he might be expected to jump around a lot, but she hung herself languorously around his neck so that they moved in a slow waltzlike counterpoint to the poignant happy-time music.
He was very discreet. These were his wife’s friends. He made his courteous farewells and left the party early, but Linda followed him out twenty minutes later as he had suggested she should and he drove her to her home, where they had sex in her marital bed under a reproduction of a Robert Doisneau photograph of adolescents kissing beside the Seine. (He had had in the years since then — discreetly, again, discreetly — to gradually filter out the worst of the pictures and things she brought to the house they moved into together.)