The café filled up, the doorway crowded with people sheltering, others queuing at the counter. Katherine heard the staccato summons of her mobile phone, a sound she hated, although originally she’d chosen it herself. A voice that might have been a child’s said something she couldn’t understand and repeated it when she explained that she couldn’t, and then the line went dead. So many voices were like a child’s these days, she thought, returning the phone to her handbag. ‘A fashion, that baby telephone voice,’ Phair had said. ‘Odd as it might seem.’
She nibbled the edge of her florentine, then opened the spill of sugar. The light outside had darkened and now was brightening again. The people in the doorway began to move away. It had rained all night the other time.
‘Nothing again?’ Phair always enquired when he came in. He was concerned about what had been so arbitrarily and unexpectedly imposed upon her, had once or twice brought back hearsay of vacancies. But even at his most solicitous, and his gentlest, he had himself to think about. It was worse for Phair and always would be, that stood to reason.
Her mobile telephone rang again and his voice said that in his lunch hour he’d bought asparagus because he’d noticed it on a stall, looking good and not expensive. They’d mentioned asparagus yesterday, realizing it was the season: she would have bought some if he hadn’t rung. ‘On the way out of the cinema,’ she said, having already said that she’d just seen La Strada again. He’d tried for her an hour ago, he said, but her phone had been switched off. ‘Well, yes, of course,’ he said.
Six months was the length of an affair that took place because something else was wrong: knowing more about all this than Katherine did, the man she met in the afternoons said that. And, as if he had always been aware that he would, when a little longer than six months had passed he returned to his wife. Since then, he had retained the room while this reunion settled—or perhaps in case it didn’t—but his belongings were no longer there. The room looked bigger, yet dingier, without them.
‘Why do you love your husband, Katherine? After all this—what he has put you through?’
‘No one can answer that.’
‘You hide from one another, you and he.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you afraid, Katherine?’
‘Yes. Both of us are afraid. We dream of her, we see her dead. And we know in the morning if the other one has. We know and do not say.’
‘You shouldn’t be afraid.’
They did not ever argue in the room, not even mildly, but disagreed and left it there. Or failed to understand and left that too. Katherine did not ask if a marriage could be shored up while this room was still theirs for a purpose. Her casual lover did not press her to reveal what she still withheld.
‘I can’t imagine him,’ he said, but Katherine did not attempt to describe her husband, only commented that his first name suited him. A family name, she said.
‘You’re fairly remarkable, you know. To love so deeply.’
‘And yet I’m here.’
‘Perhaps I mean that.’
‘More often than not, people don’t know why they do things.’
‘I envy you your seriousness. It’s that I’d love you for.’
Once, when again he had to go, she stayed behind. He was in a hurry that day; she wasn’t quite ready. ‘Just bang the door,’ he said.
She listened to his footsteps clattering on the boards of the stairs and was reminded of the old woman saying she had recognized Phair’s. Phair’s lawyer would have asked in court if she was certain about that and would have wondered how she could be, since to have heard them on previous occasions she would each time have had to be on the landing, which surely was unlikely. He would have suggested that she appeared to spend more time on the communal landing than in her flat. He would have wondered that a passing stranger had left behind so clear an impression of his features, since any encounter there had been would have lasted hardly more than an instant.
Alone in the room, not wanting to leave it yet, Katherine crept back into the bed she’d left only minutes ago. She pulled the bedclothes up although it wasn’t cold. The window curtains hadn’t been drawn back and she was glad they hadn’t. ‘I didn’t much care for that girl,’ Phair said when the two policemen had gone. ‘But I was fond of her in a different kind of way. I have to say that, Katherine. I’m sorry.’ He had brought her coffee and made her sit there, where she was. Some men were like that, he said. ‘We only talked. She told me things.’ A girl like that took chances every time she answered her doorbell, he said; and when he cried Katherine knew it was for the girl, not for himself.
‘Oh yes, I understand,’ she said. ‘Of course I do.’ A sleazy relationship with a classy tart was what she understood, as he had understood when she told him she could not have children, when he’d said it didn’t matter, although she knew it did.
‘I’ve risked what was precious,’ he whispered in his shame, and then confessed that deceiving her had been an excitement too. Risk came into it in all sorts of ways; risk was part of it, the secrecy of concealment, stealth. And risk had claimed its due.
The same policemen came back later. ‘You’re sure about that detail, madam?’ they asked and afterwards, countless times, asked her that again, repeating the date and hearing her repeat that ten to seven was the usual time. Phair hadn’t wanted to know—and didn’t still—why she had answered as she had, why she continued to confirm that he’d returned ninety minutes sooner than he had. She couldn’t have told him why, except to say that instinct answered for her, as bewilderment and confusion had when first she’d heard the question. She might have said she knew Phair as intimately as she knew herself, that it was impossible to imagine his taking the life of a girl no matter what his relationship with her had been. There was—she would have said if she’d been asked—the pain of that, of their being together, he and the girl, even if only for conversation. ‘You quarrelled, sir?’ the tall policeman enquired. You could see there’d been a quarrel, he insisted, no way you could say there hadn’t been a disagreement that got out of hand. But Phair was not the quarrelling sort. He shook his head. In all his answers, he hadn’t disputed much except responsibility for the death, had not denied he’d been a visitor to the flat, gave details as he remembered them. He accepted that his fingerprints were there, while they accepted nothing. ‘You’re sure, madam?’ they asked again, and her instinct hardened, touched with apprehension, even though their implications were ridiculous. Yes, she was sure, she said. They said their spiel and then arrested him.
Katherine slept and when she woke did not know where she was. But only minutes had passed, fewer than ten. She washed at the basin in the corner, and slowly dressed. When he was taken from her, in custody until the trial’s outcome, it was suggested at the Institute that they could manage without her for a while. ‘No, no,’ she had insisted. ‘I would rather come.’ And in the hiatus that followed—long and silent—she had not known that doubt began to spread in the frail memory of the elderly woman who in time would be called upon to testify to her statements on oath. She had not known that beneath the weight of importance the old woman was no longer certain that the man she’d seen on that wet evening—already shadowy—was a man she’d seen before. With coaching and encouragement, she would regain her confidence, it must have been believed by those for whom her evidence was essentiaclass="underline" the prosecution case rested on this identification, on little else. But the long delay had taken a toll, the witness had been wearied by preparation, and did not, in court, conceal her worries. When the first morning of the trial was about to end, the judge calmed his anger to declare that in his opinion there was no case to answer. In the afternoon the jury was dismissed.