I think she realises this too, for she suddenly bites her lower lip, half closes her eyes, and her face is all an ominous quiver again.
What to say? I am bereft of inventiveness. It seems to me that the best thing to say is the truth. Perhaps it will be a way of getting me neatly, honourably out of all this.
(How wrong can you be?)
“Shall I tell you who that perfume belongs to? It belongs to Michael’s research student. Gabriella.”
She gives me a fierce, astonished, even more accusatory look.
“Her!”
“I can explain,” I say (feeling surprisingly guilty).
So I tell her about the events of that morning when I found myself a coerced passenger in Potter’s car. How I pocketed the perfume. Though I don’t tell her how I stalked the corridors of the Library, on a spring day, looking for a girl less than half my age (dressed in kittenish black), with ideas in my head as fantastical and concocted as the scent in my pocket.
All of which produces another convulsion of forgiveness-seeking, another welter of tears.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. And you did it because of me. You’re— But I know about Gabriella. Of course I know about her. I know about them bloody all, don’t I?”
And then, as the tears subside, she begins to tell me, without announcing it, the full story of her life and hard times with Michael Potter (M.A., Ph.D.), beginning at the beginning, with that encounter, long ago, in a room in a university.
I listen. I fetch Kleenex. I make tea. We switch to something stronger. Dry sherry. College reserve. The academic tipple. The rain still thrums. My sitting-room is not furnished for intimacy — commiserative or otherwise. No sofa; two huge and dumpy armchairs which engirdle and engulf their occupants. A room meant, presumably, for learned, man-to-man debate, with much puffing and waving of pipes. We sit islanded from each other, Matthew’s Notebooks, like an impotent arbitrator, between us.
And it was her fault, you see. She thinks it was all her fault. (She has this way of being at fault.) It was even her job, at the BBC, that gave Potter his eventual entrée into real-live mediadom. But it would never have happened the way it did — she is sure of it — if they’d had a kid. Or two kids. She used to see famous names pass through the studio doors — more than once, it seems, she saw Ruth Vaughan passing through the studio doors — but what she wanted most then was a child. It wasn’t his fault. His machinery wasn’t faulty. (Or underused.) It was something wrong with her. Several tries. Several tests. Then, at last, by a fluke, it happens. She gives up her job to be a mother. But the thing is born prematurely and dies within hours, and it seems there won’t be a second chance. And within months Potter is messing around with a former colleague of hers, a TV producer called Lena (“Legs-up Lena”) — his new career is about to begin.
And she is left only with years of pretend marriage; of feeling that if she hadn’t walked through Potter’s door all that time ago with her notes for her long essay (chivalric nostalgia!), her life would have been a different thing; and of feeling, all the same, that it’s her fault, she is the one to blame — so much so that she even submits to this mad and self-recriminatory degree of ignominy, this exorcistic climbing of my staircase, as if she is returning full circle, to walk through the door again, to try to put it right.
The gas fire fizzes. John Pearce’s clock chimes — five, six o’clock. Her face is a smudged, reddened mess — she has first sobbed, then leaked tears. It makes a pitiable contrast with her dressed-to-kill outfit, as if one part of her is a discarded doll, the other an unmasked human being.
But something is happening as she speaks. Her face seems slowly to reassemble. Or rather, a new face, a face I have never seen before, seems to appear, as if something, some layer, some sad accretion, has been rinsed away. It is an extraordinary thing this, like watching some rare natural event, to see another person loom out of themselves.
She folds her legs beneath her on the chair (I’m not sure now that they don’t have verve), one hand clasping her ankles. She has abandoned her shoes. Her high heels, my grey socks, lie like the litter from some previous intimate encounter on the worn carpet. We are like young people. Provisional people. These college rooms. These conversations that have no end. As if we have gone back in time and this is us now, beginning.
It could have been her. It could have been us.
And now she has stopped. Now she wants to know about me, how it was with me. She wants to know about Ruth.
But how do you begin? I can’t find words. Something is happening. Something is stuck, struggling inside me. Something is turning completely around, inside-out — and she, now, is the calm, re-embodied one, watching me dissolve.
She gets up. She comes and stands by my chair and takes my hand. I don’t know if her intention is to lead me, there and then, into my bedroom or merely to kiss me sweetly, briefly, and say something sad, wise and conclusive. But I resist the tug of her hand. I don’t know if this hurts her, but she draws her hand away as quickly as I draw mine, as if it’s her mistake — all her fault again — then she moves away to the window, her back towards me. She says nothing, but her back — her whole person — is eloquent.
I get up. I go to the window. I stand beside her. It is possible, by an effort, not to touch. There flashes through my mind a whole course of events — a whole fairy-tale prognosis — that I will only institute later (though, tell me, was it necessary to have been jerked back from the gates of death first? Do only ghosts have initiative?). I will give her the Notebooks. I will send her back to her husband. Oh, the true, chaste knight, a true Sir Galahad! She is Potter’s wife; Potter is her husband. Potter, with the Notebooks, will become the happy scholar again (happy researching other people’s spiritual crises). And when Potter becomes the happy scholar again, the man she once married will be given back to her. Hey presto! The wizard Merlin — ha!
The rain still teems down, but there is a faint gleam in one corner of the sky. The cobbles in the court and the tiles on the rooftops opposite have a pewtery glaze.
And children? Children can be adopted. Substitutes can be arranged. What is so important about this flesh-and-blood thing? This damn flesh-and-blood thing?
“It’s going to stop,” she says. The air from the open window is cool on our hot faces. “Then I won’t have any excuse, will I?”
I try not to look at her. I still have this mutinous erection.
“But I’ll go now if you want me to.”
Someone, hooded by a raincoat, dashes, feet slapping, across the court.
“Life goes on, Bill,” she says. That old trite truism.
“Go when it stops,” I say.
But maybe it won’t stop. Maybe the gleam is a false gleam, and the rain will go on all night. All night! Yet, even as I think this, the gleam spreads and brightens, the rooftops glisten and, as if someone has closed a tap, the full pelt of the skies becomes a sprinkle.
“Bill—?”
It’s a full, hard embrace with nothing restrained or disguised about it. It lasts maybe fifteen seconds, and it’s she who breaks off first.
She walks across the room. She retrieves her shoes. She doesn’t glance at the papers on the coffee table. She looks so different from the woman who walked in. She takes her coat from the hook on the door, opens the door. She pauses, her mouth half open as if to say something, but the door is already shut when I say, “It hasn’t stopped yet.”
I hear the cautious click of her high heels descending the worn and uneven spiral stairs — it’s not easy, you have to be careful. I think of her dressing, preparing for this. I look down on to the court. It seems amazing that these buildings have been here for centuries. It seems amazing they should be here at all. I watch her cross to the main gate, but she is all but hidden by her umbrella. A black, man’s umbrella. She doesn’t look up.