She spoke very softly, very gently. He would always remember the tone of her voice and the tips of her fingers brushing his knuckles, inside the woollen gloves she had just pulled on. Later, when it was all over, he would think: at that point, if at no other, she must have loved me. Then, if at no other time.
“We’ll go to where we went before.”
She pulled off her gloves again and unzipped her bag and fumbled for cigarettes. “Shall I light one for you?”
“Yes please.”
He hardly ever smoked now but he wanted her to touch him again. He could not wait until they got to the field.
As winter set in, Colin waited every week in the street outside Isabel’s house. It was not necessary for him to ring the doorbell. She never kept him waiting for more than a minute, and it gratified him to think that she must listen for the sound of the car.
“Take me to meet your father,” he said. “He need not know that I’m married.”
“I’d rather not tell lies.”
“There’s no need to lie. There’s no need to say anything about it. You shut me out of your life,” he complained. “When you aren’t with me, do you ever give me a single thought?”
Her dark almond eyes flickered over him. Her face remained impassive, unimpressed. “You have all the woman’s lines, Colin. Have you noticed that?”
Once or twice he had glimpsed the elderly man in the doorway, wearing spectacles and a bulky handknitted cardigan. He would wave a hand limply and forgetfully to see his daughter off, and then withdraw into the house.
Then, between the great yellow orbs which flanked the gate, she would turn to him the paler luminous oval of her face; not smiling, not speaking, she would slip into the seat beside him and their evening would begin. These days she wore a belted beige trenchcoat pulled in at the waist, and a long brown woollen scarf. Her hands when she lit a cigarette were often blue and mottled with cold. I will buy her some sheepskin mittens, he thought, at Christmas.
They did not go much to the field now. They were afraid of the car sinking in the mud. They had taken to getting further away from town. Colin would drive to the motorway intersection, slot them between the lights of other cars, and put his foot down. For miles and miles ahead the wet black road gleamed under the orange lights. Wrapped in their numb silence, their eyes on the tail-lights ahead, headlights reflected in the rear-view mirror, they were locked into the process of the road; parts on its conveyor, diminished to its function.
He would pull in at the service halt. They sat on padded seats of turquoise plastic, facing each other over the litter of stained paper cups and scraps of cellophane ripped from sandwiches.
“It’s so sordid,” she laughed. “It’s so properly sordid. Like a film.”
“I shall get a night from somewhere,” he said. “I’ll get some petrol in the car and we’ll go—drive up to Manchester, get a decent meal and find a hotel. I’ll come up with something. Just give me time.”
“Give me time,” she said mockingly. “That’s the anthem of the married man. Give me time while I make my excuses, give me time while I sort out my head. Just another week, just another decade, just till my wife understands. Be reasonable, give me time, just till my children grow up, give me time. And what do you suppose time will give to me?”
“Before the winter’s out,” he said, “things will be different. I told you that first night that I’d leave her. Give me—no, no, you’re playing games. If I left her you’d laugh in my face.”
“You’ll never leave her,” she said. A ginger-haired woman moved between the tables, whisking cigarette butts into a waste bag, her white face set in lines of ineradicable fatigue. She watched them with pale bitter eyes.
“She wants us to go,” Isabel said.
“Drink your tea. Then we’ll go.”
“It’s like treacle. It’s the end of the pot. It always is at this time of night.”
She leaned forward and tears dripped into the cup and splashed onto the table. She got up suddenly, thrusting her chair back, and strode towards the door ahead of him, fastening her coat and looping her scarf around her neck. He was afraid of the clenched set of her mouth. The rain had stopped; he saw them hurrying, reflected in puddles, ghost-white flitting among the petrol pumps and headlights. She put her foot on a sodden mess of paper and slime and skidded to her knees. He ran behind her and picked her up. Holding her tightly by the waist he steered her towards the car. In her seat she unbuttoned her coat again and pulled up her skirt, rubbing at her grazed knees and picking at the shreds of her tights. She sobbed and sniffed, fumbling for a handkerchief. He reached across her and fastened the seatbelt in her lap, making the soft nonsensical sounds of comfort he used to his children.
“You must take me to your house. We can’t go on like this—”
“I’ve told you, no. Her voice shook. “No, no, no.”
“What is it, love? What’s upsetting you?”
She turned and looked at him, for a second, as if she had never seen him before. “Whatever is wrong in my life,” she said, “might have nothing to do with you.”
“But has it?” She turned her head away. “Perhaps I’ve done you an injustice. Perhaps you do feel—”
“Oh yes, I feel,” she said harshly. “I took a training course to educate me out of feeling. I’m not paid to feel. But still I do it.”
“Then it’s your job that’s getting on top of you.”
“I don’t know.” She took a deep breath.
“And your dad. Your home. Caring for him. Perhaps it’s that.”
“I see you have your theories. Just leave off, Colin.”
“Leave off? Leave me alone, you mean.” He was angry. “You want to have me around when it suits you, you want to talk about your work, you want to put the burden onto me. You burst into tears, then you say leave off.”
“I’m sorry if I upset you.” She lifted her face. “See, I’m not crying now.”
“I worry about you.” He touched her hair tentatively. “You’re getting thin.” Suddenly he saw it. “You need me, don’t you?”
He did not ask, what for? She seemed vulnerable in her distress, naked; he rushed to cover her with willing assumptions.
“How shrewd,” she said.
“You need to pack in this job. You need a husband. You need a proper secure home.”
“And you’re offering?”
“Isabel, give me something back. I’m human.”
“Sure.”
“You go on as if you hate me. As if there were some enemy in your life, and it’s me.”
“It’s not you, Colin.” She spoke slowly. “I don’t hate you. I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Well…what is there to be afraid of?”
She began to laugh, a low-pitched and merciless chuckle. Or perhaps to cry? She is unpredictable, he thought; mad. Perhaps her period is coming on; I must keep a check. She pretends to be hard, to be casual, but everyone knows that women can’t have casual affairs. She and I are equal now. But still—though the question was settled in his mind—her laughter made his skin crawl; as if there were some deep derangement in the situation that she meant to cherish alone.
“I hardly like to explore my own mind,” she said softly. “I think I imagine things. I hope I imagine them. There are connections I make between events in my life, between people, and I hope they’re not real connections. I tell myself it would be too much coincidence. But coincidence is what holds our lives together. That’s why you always get it in books.”
“Do you have to be so cryptic?”
“It would be pleasant to be a victim: a victim of circumstance. If there were no patterns in our lives, we would have no responsibility. I would like to think that events were entirely random. It would be comfortable.”
“I can never see a pattern. Perhaps I can’t see the wood for the trees. Stupid saying, that. I only…I didn’t want to bandy platitudes. I only wondered if you loved me.”