“Katherine— I wasn’t expecting— I— What can I get you? Tea? Coffee? Hot soup? A towel?”
She gives the room a long, prying, but distinctly hesitant glance. I have ushered her in, my initiative: she is the inveigled innocent — play it that way round. I think what she takes in first are the notes and the photocopy on the coffee table. Then that there are no obvious mementos, photographs (they are all in my bedroom). Then what she takes in are my socks.
“Ah — I’m sorry—”
But the socks seem to rescue her from incipient loss of nerve. The socks — limp, grey flags of discouragement though they must be to anyone bent on erotic manoeuvring — are in fact the unenvisaged trigger to the afternoon’s proceedings. It occurs to me now that if I had not removed my socks and hung them to dry on the mantelpiece, I might not be sitting here, in this quasi-afterlife, trying to recognise my former self.
“It’s all right,” she says, moving towards the fire. “I need to dry off myself.” She gives the skirt of her dress a little pluck and shake, though it doesn’t look wet to me. “Besides — I like a man with bare feet.”
She reaches out and fingers the socks — a strange combination of the sensual and the housewifely.
“They’re dry, you know.”
And it’s at this point, as she turns (catching me, perhaps, eyeing her from behind), that our eyes truly meet for the first time. And I can see in hers that she suddenly realises that the chemistry she is trying to induce might just, after all, be there. The gaze sharpens, brightens. Perhaps she won’t have to force it, feign it; perhaps she isn’t beyond it, past it. And certain things are on her side: this gushing veil of rain; the little orange hint of the gas fire; this innocuous man, all by himself, caught drying his socks.
Ah, yes, my dear — the Idylls of the King. Published, as you no doubt know, in the year that Darwin published his Origin of Species. At one and the same time these hapless Victorians had flung before them the spectre of their derivation from monkeys and Tennyson’s misty and moated chivalric nostalgia. But the latter, as you doubtless also know, was only a wistful cloak for a study of the perils of sexual freedom.…
She takes the socks from beneath the ashtray and toys with them, running a hand inside one and spreading her fingers.
“This is awful of me, isn’t it, butting in like this?”
She smiles. Then makes her move.
“Are those your notes on the Pearce manuscripts?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s a copy of the original?”
“Yes.”
“May I—?”
She picks up the photocopy, my socks still twined round her fingers. This is the first time I’ve allowed anyone — excluding Potter — to look at the Notebooks. I don’t know what portion of Matthew’s agony she briefly alights on.
“Michael is pretty upset that you won’t let him help you. You know that, don’t you?”
I say nothing.
“Pretty upset. You know what he’s like.”
There’s a sort of plea for corroboration in her eyes.
“I know what he’s like.”
“But you’re determined, aren’t you? You’ve made up your mind.”
She flicks through the photocopy as if riffling through a magazine. It seems somehow sacrilegious. I experience a passing urge to grasp it back — as if she means simply to appropriate it and make off with it. I have a sudden, bleak vision of what my life might be like without these — distracting — notebooks.
“I have,” I say.
She puts the photocopy back on the coffee table.
“And there’s nothing that would persuade you?” She seems to take a deep breath.
She holds up the socks fastidiously, one dangling from each thumb and forefinger, like incriminating articles.
“Nothing?”
I go to take them. I know it’s the wrong move.
“Nothing?” she repeats as I grasp them, and she doesn’t let go. Her face is transformed by a strange, unlovely effort. It’s as though, out of sudden, reckless confidence or out of sheer nervous impatience, she has decided to dispense with whatever further preliminary manoeuvres she may have planned and go full-tilt at the thing.
She pulls me, by the socks, towards her. I am not going to play tug-of-war. But before I can disengage, she lets go of one sock, grabs my free hand with her free hand and jams it against her left breast. My crumpled sock is inadvertently trapped between my palm and her dress. Beneath both, I can feel something lacy, scratchy. The breast is soft and warm.
“You know why I came here, don’t you? It’s not the manuscripts, it’s—”
I pull my hand away. Perhaps I even take a virtuous step backwards. Her face seems about to undergo some further extraordinary transformation. To fall apart, perhaps. She spreads a hand (no longer possessed of a sock) across it, as if to hold it together.
“Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Bill. I—”
Her throat is suddenly clogged with wordless gulps. She peers helplessly through her fingers.
“I’m truly sorry. Oh God. I wouldn’t have done it if — I mean — I mean — I wouldn’t have done it, anyway, if — if—”
But then tears start coming in great wrenching eruptions. She leans towards me. I drop my socks (I have them both now, one in each hand). Quite possibly, the pencil is still behind my ear. I step forward, put my arms around her. I feel her palm pressing on my back, her breasts on my ribs. A wet cheek on my cheek.
It’s strange, we are doing now, almost involuntarily, what a moment ago had been the object of intense, abortive machination. What’s more, I have this erection, a stiff, indomitable erection, and, though I try to be careful, she must feel it.
It’s her turn to pull away. “I think — I think I need that towel you were offering.”
And, trying to prevent me from seeing her face, she blunders first into my bedroom, then into the bathroom.
I don’t know what to do while she’s in the bathroom. I should make tea? Pour brandy? (I haven’t any brandy.) Say soothing things through the door, like some penitent seducer? I don’t know what will happen when she emerges. She will have regained a fragile composure and wish to leave? She will be minus her dress?
I pick up my socks, think of putting them on; then, as if putting them on would signal some sort of insensitivity, drop them again. I look at my notes strewn on the coffee table. I look at my bare, white feet. To be honest, for much of the preceding encounter, I have felt oddly like a mere manipulated dummy. Now I have the sensation (it’s not comfortable — it’s like some anaesthetic wearing off) of being dragged out of a state of suspended animation.
And I have this obstinate, towering erection. My body seems constructed around it.
A full minute passes. The plumbing (not medieval, but not up-to-the-minute) sings. I think: what state is my bathroom in? What horrors of male squalor? What scum in the bath?
But I quite forget one thing. When she comes out, she is neither composed nor naked. Her eyes are dry and puffed; but, rather than softened by a look of contrite, mustered dignity, the face is alert, suspicious, vaguely vindictive. It conveys a new sort of bewilderment, as if she, now, is the victim of some trick.
I smile imbecilically. What now?
“Well, you’re a sly one, aren’t you, Bill? But your visitors should be more careful — leaving their perfume in the bathroom.”
This takes me wholly by surprise. But, in the circumstances, it is absurdly proprietorial, absurdly accusatory — not to say wildly imaginative.