‘I love you, Chloë.’
Dark-haired and slim, not tall, Chloë dismissed her looks as ordinary. But in fact her prettiness was touched with beauty. It was in the deep blue of her eyes, her perfect mouth, her profile.
‘I hate doing this,’ she said. ‘It’s horrible. I know it is.’
He shook his head, not in denial of what she said, only to indicate bewilderment. She had chosen the time she had—the middle of the night, as it had been—because it was easier then, almost a fait accompli when he returned from the night school, easier to find the courage. He guessed that, but didn’t say it because it mattered so much less than that she didn’t want to be here any more.
The muted colours of the clothes she was wearing were suitable for a bleak occasion, as if she had specially chosen them: the grey skirt she disliked, the nondescript silk scarf that hadn’t been a present from him as so many other scarves were, the plain cream blouse he’d never seen without a necklace before. She looked a little different and perhaps she thought she should because that was how she felt.
‘Where are you going, Chloë?’
Her back was to him. She tried to shrug. She picked a glass up and turned to face him when she reached the door. No one else knew, she said. He was the first to know. ‘I love you, Chloë,’ he said again. ‘Yes, I do know that.’
‘We’ve been everything to one another.’
‘Yes.’
The affection in their relationship had been the pleasure of both their lives: that had not been said before in this room, nor even very often that they were fortunate. The reticence they shared was natural to them, but they knew—each as certainly as the other—what was not put into words. Prosper might have contributed now some part of this, but sensing that it would seem like protesting too much he did not.
‘Don’t,’ he begged instead, and she gazed emptily at him before she went away.
He heard her in the bedroom when she finished with the Hoky in the hall. The telephone rang and she answered it at once; a taxi-driver, he guessed, for Clement Gardens was sometimes difficult to find.
Exhausted, Prosper sat down. Middle-aged, greying a little, his thin face anxious, as it often was, he wondered if he looked as disturbed and haggard as he felt. ‘Don’t,’ he whispered. ‘For God’s sake, don’t, Chloë.’
No sound came from the bedroom, either of suitcases and bags being zipped or of footsteps. Then the doorbell rang and there were voices in the hall, hers light and easy, polite as always, the taxi-man’s a mumble. The door of the flat banged.
He sat where she had left him, thinking he had never known her, for what else made sense? He imagined her in the taxi that was taking her somewhere she hadn’t told him about, even telling the taxi-driver more—why she was going there, what the trouble was. There had been no goodbye. She hadn’t wept. ‘I’m sorry,’ was what she’d said when he came in from the night school more or less at the usual time. His hours were eight until half past one and he almost always stayed longer with someone who had fallen behind. He had this morning, and then had walked because he felt the need for fresh air, stopping as he often did for a cup of tea at the stall in Covent Garden. It was twenty to three when he came in and she hadn’t gone to bed. It had taken her most of the night to pack.
Prosper didn’t go to bed himself, nor did he for all that day. There hadn’t been a quarrel. They had never quarrelled, not once, not ever. She would always cherish that, she’d said.
He took paracetamol for a headache. He walked about the flat, expecting to find she had forgotten something because she usually did when she packed. But all trace of her was gone from the kitchen and the bathroom, from the bedroom they had shared for two and a half years. In the afternoon, at half past four, a private pupil came, a middle-aged Slovakian woman, whose English he was improving. He didn’t charge her. It wasn’t worth it since she could afford no more than a pittance.
All day Chloë’s work had been a diversion. Now there was a television screen, high up in a corner, angled so that it could be seen without much effort from the bed. People she knew would have put her up for a while, but she hadn’t wanted that. Breakfast was included in the daily rate at the Kylemore Hotel; and it was better, being on her own.
But the room she’d been shown when she came to make enquiries a week ago wasn’t this one. The faded wallpaper was stained, the bedside table marked with cigarette burns. The room she’d been shown was clean at least and she’d hesitated when this morning she’d been led into a different one. But, feeling low, she hadn’t been up to making a fuss.
From the window she watched the traffic, sluggish in congestion—taxis jammed, bus-drivers patient, their windows pulled open in the evening heat, cyclists skilfully manoeuvring. Still gazing down into the street, Chloë knew why she was here and reminded herself of that. But knowing, really, was no good. She had been happy.
It was the second time that Prosper had been left. The first time there had been a marriage, but the separation that followed the less formal relationship was no less painful; and in the days that now crawled by, anguish became an agony. He dreaded each return to the empty flat, especially in the small hours of the morning. He dreaded the night school, the chatter of voices between classes, the brooding presence of Hesse, who was its newly appointed principal, the hot-drinks machine that gave you what it had, not what you wanted, the classroom faces staring back at him. ‘All right?’ Hesse enquired, each guttural syllable articulated slowly and with care, his great blubber face simulating concern. In Prosper’s dreams the contentment he had known for two and a half years held on and he reached out often to touch the companion who was not there. In the dark the truth came then, merciless, undeniable.
When that week ended he went to Winchelsea on the Sunday, a long slow journey by train and bus, made slower by weekend work on different stretches of the railway line.
‘Well, this is nice,’ her mother said, flustered when she opened the hall door.
She led him into the sitting-room he remembered from the only time he had been in this house before—the prints of country scenes on the walls, the ornaments, a bookcase packed with books that Chloë said had never been read. The fire was unlit because this morning the room was sunny. A black-and-white dog—reluctant when it was shooed out of the french windows—smelled as it had before, of damp or of itself. A Sunday that had been too.
‘Oh yes, we’ve been well,’ Chloë’s mother said when she was asked. ‘He has a new thing now.’
Metal-detecting this turned out to be, poking about with a gadget on Winchelsea beach, which was the best for this purpose for miles around. ‘You’ll have a cup of coffee? Or lunch? He’ll be back for lunch.’
Prosper had always known she didn’t like him, an older man and not a type she could take to: he could hear her saying it. And now he’d caught her with a curler in her wispy grey hair, forgotten, he supposed. He watched her realizing, a nervous gesture, fingers patting one side of her head. She left him on his own and came back saying she was sorry for deserting him. She offered sherry, the bottle almost empty.
‘He said he’d get some more.’ She poured out what there was, none for herself.
‘I don’t know where she is,’ Prosper said. ‘I thought she might be here.’
‘Oh, Chloë’s not here.’
‘I wondered—’
‘No, Chloë’s not here.’
‘I wondered if she said anything about where she is.’
‘Well, no.’
He wondered what had been said, how it had been put, presumably on the telephone. He wondered if they’d been told more than he had himself, if they’d been glad, or at least relieved, both of them, not just she.
‘He’ll be back soon. He wouldn’t like to miss you.’