He remembered distinctly the twenty minutes he waited for her in his car. He nearly drove off without waiting; he was sure anyway she wouldn’t come. He sobered up in the presence of so many reminders of his real life: the petrol smell from the leak in the fuel pipe he had to take in for mending tomorrow; Naomi’s incorrigible clutter of tissues and beads and apple core and headache pills on the dashboard; the girls’ perfumes still lingering from when he’d given them and their friends a lift into town earlier (all dressed up, as he had put it to them, like a parcel of whores); the dried mud lozenges fallen off Toby’s football boots. His middle age was rich and flavorsome and sustaining as a mulch; he couldn’t quite believe in himself sitting there still hoping for this quite other thing that ought to belong to youth: dicey, raw, stupid, intoxicating. He felt as if he had just discovered in himself — after all the reassurance of the sober years — an addiction dangerous as gambling or alcohol.
After the sex, when he was trying out for the first time the orange of her hair against the muddy skin of his arm and noting the incipient vulnerable sore at the edge of the lips he had sucked on, he asked Linda what she did for a living. She told him she was headmistress of the adolescent unit at the psychiatric hospital. At every turn she was powerful, more powerful than he would ever have chosen for himself; she was not the sort of woman he would ever have approached. Again he was scared and felt he was in deep water.
* * *
AND HE WAS. She was deeper water than he had ever entered, and she closed over his head. Now, when they had been together for years and looked as settled as any other married couple (their oldest child was ten), he was still in a state of perpetual exhilarated anxiety about her. He feared so many things.
He feared of course that she would go off with another man. She was not really beautiful. Filled out by a lesser spirit, her face and figure could have been merely freckled and worthy and worn and proletarian: she sometimes made him think of Walker Evans’s photographs of farmers’ wives in the American dustbowl. She was knobbly and skinny rather than smooth; the end of her nose was prone to redness and soreness; she was one of those women who can look spectacular or can look dreadful, if they put on the wrong clothes (and her taste was not infallible, nor did she much care what she wore). But men (some men, enough men for him to fear) liked her. Leggy and gangling, black mascara on gingery lashes, the first signs of aging (she was forty-five now) naked on her face, she held court: at work or at home, where there were always visitors, usually male visitors. She said she liked women, but she didn’t have many women friends.
He didn’t know quite how consciously she held out to her admirers her promise of something they thirsted for, some heady mix of mothering and bossing and sex; standing at the kitchen table with her old faded apron tied around her, serving out like beneficent Ceres to guests and to the children the casserole Graham had cooked and the vegetables he had prepared; sitting up late into the night talking over the problems of some young colleague whose marriage was falling apart until Graham came downstairs in his pajamas to check on them; dressed in her black suit (which did look good on her) with her battered briefcase stuffed full of disordered papers for a case conference to decide the destiny of one of her forlorn or desperate adolescents. He didn’t actually think she liked sex all that much: he believed he had caught fleeting and quickly concealed expressions of disgust on her face at certain crucial moments (which didn’t stop his liking sex terribly, needily, with her: in fact her disgust came to be almost, disturbingly, part of what he liked). It was not sex Linda liked but the intoxicating aura of sex and its power to change things; how could he be sure it would not come into her head one day to kneel down before one of these admiring men and offer herself, just to see what happened?
He feared, more absurdly but perhaps even more powerfully, that she would go into a convent. She had been brought up by a mother who was superstitiously Catholic (and criminally irresponsible, Graham thought, when he heard tales of Linda and her sisters with one particular lascivious uncle in their teenage years). Although she had gone through the inevitable revolt and now talked the languages of social services and psychotherapy rather than theology, he feared that some deep-laid child-absorbed dream of cold floors and sore knees and wood-faced Madonnas weeping real tears waited concealed, and would break out and recapture her just as Graham thought himself safe from the other men (surely he’d be safe from them when she was fifty? fifty-five?). She had only spoken about going into a convent once, when she asked him how it worked — Can you be chaste again? Can you be married and everything and go through all that and then just be given a clean slate? — but ever since then he had been watchful for a certain look, a rapt look of absorbed and even complacent spirituality, like the expression on the face of the Virgin in a Murillo ascension as she is levitated decorously out of reach of mere mortals. He imagined himself left desperately behind, one of the crowd who gape upward, grabbing uselessly for a last swirl of drapery.
At this moment particularly he feared she might die. She had had two replacement valves in her heart since she was twenty-six (her first husband was the Sikh surgeon who had done the operation), and took Warfarin to keep her blood from coagulating; she had a little machine that looked like a briefcase to do her own blood tests every day, so she could regulate the levels of the drug herself. (Graham nursed a continuous dull ache of accusation against the doctor who trusted her to do this, taken in by her appearance of exceptional and imperturbable competence, blind to the casual extravagance she actually lived by.) Her health in general was not good; she worked too hard and was prone to stress and infections, although she had surprising reserves of energy. For several weeks now she had been looking ill; her translucent skin was greenish-white and dull, her hair was lank, her eyes could hardly lift themselves to meet his. He had tried to come into the bathroom once and been sure before she slammed the door on him that she was vomiting into the toilet, although she denied it afterward and shouted at him to stop hassling her. The trouble was that all this was exactly the behavior he would expect of her if there was something seriously wrong.
But he did try to stop hassling her. His lifework was to keep his fears concealed, and he flattered himself that he did a very good job. She would never know the lengths he went to in order to make her happy: not only by looking after the children so she could work, and taking care of the housework because it bored her, but also how he tried to spare her the burden of his absorption in her. He even — hardest of all — worked at his pots sometimes, even pretended to be crusty at being interrupted, even booked extra afternoons for Daniel to go to nursery so he could get on with some commission, even left the door of his studio open in the house so she could be reassured that he was busy and had forgotten her by the cold mineral smell of the clay that had once been so sweet and stimulating to him. With her complete lack of taste in art, she couldn’t see what to him was self-evident: that his familiar, his talent, that slim young gift he had once possessed to conjure still shapes out of the motion of the air, had left him, slipped out one dark midnight without any fanfare. Or a whole crowd of familiars: ambition, contest, pride in his work, hunger for praise, the aspiration toward the next and finest piece. That whole noisy party had quietly decamped and left nothing but their rubbish around a dead fire. He didn’t care: so be it. He only cared that Linda shouldn’t know.
He didn’t think she knew. Anna, their ten-year-old daughter, knew, or knew something: perhaps not all that grown-up stuff about fame and talent, but knew at least like him that if one loved Linda one had better hide it. Anna, who was dark and dainty, used to sew her mother presents and leave little notes about the house: Linda laughed at them and left them carelessly lying where she found them. It was little stout imperturbable red-haired Katie that Linda took her pleasure in: Anna’s lugubriousness (she had called it that to Graham) exasperated her. So Anna stopped following Linda around, into the kitchen, into her bedroom, into the bathroom. (“For goodness’ sake! Is there something you want?”) She took on a transparent bright concentrated look that reminded Graham of the little mermaid who walks on knives in the Hans Christian Andersen story: it made him especially careful to be kind to her and treat her with a kind of grave respect, as between equals. She was rewarded for her concentration: now Linda patted her hair and called her “my big girl.” But recently he and Anna had exchanged involuntary quick glances, when they heard the lock pushed across on the bathroom door, or when Linda left most of her supper pushed to the side of her plate, or when she put Daniel hastily and disgustedly down on the floor for pulling her hair with sticky fingers, which she used to love.