Could she come round? Of course. What about tomorrow, supper. But he at once acceded when she said couldn't it be today, this evening. He thought he should ask, are you all right – something must be bothering her. I'm all right. They were not two people who needed to or would press further on the tightrope of a telephone wire.
His mother put her palm over her mouth.
He waited for her – apparently to recover herself. It's an ambiguous gesture, it can hide laughter, shock, many conditions incapable of being conveyed. Embarrassment. But she was not embarrassed. Too many simple intimacies brought about by the incapacities of illness had existed between them for either to be embarrassed by anything, since.
– This has come from Adrian. -
He took the letter. Almost to himself, frowning in reproach – He hasn't gone and fallen down in one of his digs… -
She did not allow herself to look at the son's face as he read, slowly turning the two pages, and turning back to the first, as she had, to read again. If she has her habits of careful comprehension as a lawyer, as a student of scientific data in relation to experience on the ground he has his instinctive discipline of reassessing what are presented as the facts.
He could not say to her what was ready on his tongue: I thought he'd broken a leg or something, after all, nearly sixty-six, isn't he, climbing about in excavations. But no doubt, like himself, a young man accustomed to taking chances in difficult terrain, that would have been something she could have expected might catch up with retirement age.
The real circumstance made it impossible for the son to be (what she had counted on) objective; she became primary, there in front of him, his mother, threatened by that other primary, his father. He tried: retreated from the instinct to get up and embrace, make her, let her cry, and asked about the woman. As if his mother could find support in the familiar procedures of the court. Evidence.
– This's the woman you hired to go around with you, the guide you wrote was so excellent, not the usual boring windbag, not intrusive? -
– Yes. She was that. -
Not giving any come-on. To an old man. But he did not ask.
– The Norwegian. -
– The Norwegian. She was tactful, naturally we expected to have meals and so on with her along, but sometimes she would make it clear – some excuse, telephone calls, reminders of a private life somewhere – that she'd understand we'd want to be by ourselves, say, for dinner. -
From the father's, Adrian 's side, what would be the attraction. First, what type of woman, what does she look like. – Is she pretty, beautiful, I mean what is there about… -
– How can I say. I'm a woman. I don't see what a man sees, you might see. Dark-haired, shapely plump but only in the right places, very intelligent. There's something I never understand, she has all the time that smile, the archaic smile that's characteristic of those ancient Greek statues, you know, the young men – what are they called, Khouroi? Adrian and I saw them once in Athens. Or was it a Roman museum. Even when the three of us rested somewhere with our eyes closed against the glare, stretched out on our chairs, whenever I happened to open my eyes there was this smile. Closed eyes, smile. -
– Irritating. -
– No. I thought it rather enviable, really. If I'd had to earn my living taking strangers about repeating the same information and listening to the same comments – what's a new way to say beautiful, disappointing – I don't think I could maintain that smile. And it was discreet. -
– And Adrian? -
– What about Adrian. -
– Did he ever say – anything – about her? -
– You know how he would naturally remark on the beauty of a woman, someone among our friends or yours we'd met. But I don't think he saw her as a beautiful woman. He would have said something… when we talked of what luck it was we'd found a Scandinavian, typically competent and friendly but keeping a distance. -
And now Lyndsay did not smile but gave a burst of breath, cutting herself off.
He still held the letter and began to skim it again, while half-handing it back to her.
Neither of them wanted it; it lay on the low table where the child's game was set out.
– So that's all changed. Just in the time they went off together? The car and the adobe hut. Two weeks? -
– A few days more. I was going to meet him at the airport this coming Saturday, his postponed date to come home. -
– Ma (he reverted to the childhood address, once grown up he and his sisters, most often, called their parents as the parents preferred, by their names)… Ma, what are you thinking of doing. -
She said nothing and neither did he. The lively frolic of an exchange between Nickie and Primrose's cousin sounded from the kitchen.
– I've come to you. -
– But I can't know how you feel. He's my father, that's not the husband, the man, your man. -
– Are you angry with him. – As his mother's son.
– I suppose I am. Of course you are. -
– No, no, not angry. No right to be angry. -
If she had said something that might lead to doubts about his mother's own record, she quickly covered with a succeeding generalisation. – We don't own one another. Men and women don't. – If there's no barnyard hen there's no barnyard rooster.
No embarrassment to say (as if the father were dead) – He's always loved you so much. Any of us could see it. And so I suppose you… Sometimes we could be quite jealous. -
She would not know whether it was when 'we' were children (not loved enough) or whether he was contrasting his own life with a woman.
Look, this isn't the unbelievable of someone radiant with emanating danger, it's an ordinary human situation, if painful. Clear from the letter the one who loves once too often is in pain, too, although he can bury it in the body of his Norwegian. Lyndsay is a lawyer and lawyers' vocation is to deal with everything that has a legal status between birth and death. Rights. Lyndsay can divorce Adrian if she wishes, she has the conventional grounds, she knows exactly how you go about it although she's long left that level of legal practice behind for the higher ones of civil rights and constitutional law. Or she can leave him to pursue this given phase (love, sexual imperative is always a given), unplanned for retirement; wait. He doesn't seem to want, to be considering, a divorce, finality, in that letter. It's some sort of appeal – for what?
The mother and son understand this without discussion.
It is too soon, too raw, to receive the different answers there must be. And that's really the mother's necessity, the choices can't be of the same preoccupation, inevitability, to the son. He has left home, twice. He has his own life to live: that convenient cop-out of other intimate responsibilities. The generations can't help each other, in the existential affront. They are no closer than his awkwardness in a chair, might have been about to embrace her but clatter means the pair from the kitchen are bursting in upon them.
Lyndsay. Lyn. He's always loved you so much. The son could bring himself to witness that, not the kind of thing one says to a mother. Out of a soap opera, but not when it comes from him. He doesn't watch soap operas he reads trees and watercourses.
She does not reply to the letter at once. Reply? What does that imply. This happens and you do that. She did not call the hotel in Mexico City; perhaps he was expecting her to. Voice to voice if not face to face. She gave herself time, which was, supposedly, giving him time. To come home and say, as she knows one could, The affair's over. Weeping, as she had been. Whether for its end or for the betrayal it was of being loved so much. The more days she let go by before writing the letter that formulated and reformulated – crossed out, abandoned, and coming again into her mind (only in court, allowed no distraction, ever, did what he had made happen to her have no place), the more he would feel that he had her acquiescence, some sort of acceptance, her understanding he could not make a decision just as she could not, beyond his writing in his letter that for the time being he was simply staying on, visiting sites with his lover.