During dinner, which Stephen had bought ready-cooked from a local Italian restaurant, the girls talked to him about their school. He allowed them a little wine and they giggled a lot and clutched at each other when they fell about. They prompted each other through a story about their headmaster who looked up girls’ skirts. He remembered some anecdotes of his own time at school, or perhaps they were other people’s time, but he told them well and they laughed delightedly. They became very excited. They pleaded for more wine. He told them one glass was enough.
Charmian and Miranda said they wanted to do the dishes. Stephen sprawled in an armchair with a large brandy, soothed by the blur of their voices and the homely clatter of dishes. This was where he lived, this was his home. Miranda brought him coffee. She set it down on the table with the mock deference of a waitress.
“Coffee, sir?” she said. Stephen moved over in his chair and she sat in close beside him. She moved easily between woman and child. She drew her legs up as before and pressed herself against her large shaggy father. She had unloosened her plaits and her hair spread across Stephen’s chest, golden in the electric light.
“Have you found a boyfriend at school?” he asked.
She shook her head and kept it pressed against his shoulder.
“Can’t find a boyfriend, eh?” Stephen insisted. She sat up suddenly and lifted her hair clear of her face.
“There are loads of boys,” she said angrily, “loads of them, but they’re so stupid, they’re such show-offs.” Never before had the resemblance between his wife and daughter seemed so strong. She glared at him. She included him with the boys at school. “They’re always doing things.”
“What sort of things?”
She shook her head impatiently. “I don’t know… the way they comb their hair and bend their knees.”
“Bend their knees?”
“Yes. When they think you’re watching them. They stand in front of our window and pretend they’re combing their hair when they’re just looking in at us, showing off. Like this.” She sprang out of the chair and crouched in the center of the room in front of an imaginary mirror, bent low like a singer over a microphone, her head tilted grotesquely, combing with long, elaborate strokes; she stepped back, preened and then combed again. It was a furious imitation. Charmian was watching it too. She stood in the doorway with coffee in each hand.
“What about you, Charmian,” Stephen said carelessly, “do you have a boyfriend?” Charmian set the coffee cups down and said, “Of course I don’t,” and then looked up and smiled at them both with the tolerance of a wise old woman.
Later on he showed them their bedroom.
“There’s only one bed,” he told them. “I thought you wouldn’t mind sharing it.” It was an enormous bed, seven foot by seven, one of the few large objects he had brought with him from his marriage. The sheets were deep red and very old, from a time when all sheets were white. He did not care to sleep between them now, they had been a wedding present. Charmian lay across the bed, she hardly took up more room than one of the pillows. Stephen said good night. Miranda followed him into the hall, stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek.
“You’re not a show-off,” she whispered and clung to him. Stephen stood perfectly still. “I wish you’d come home,” she said.
He kissed the top of her head. “This is home,” he said. “You’ve got two homes now.” He broke her hold and led her back to the entrance of the bedroom. He squeezed her hand. “See you in the morning,” he murmured, left her there and hurried into his study. He sat down, horrified at his erection, elated. Ten minutes passed. He thought he should be somber, analytical, this was a serious matter. But he wanted to sing, he wanted to play his piano, he wanted to go for a walk. He did none of those things. He sat still, staring ahead, thinking of nothing in particular, and waited for the chill of excitement to leave his belly.
When it did he went to bed. He slept badly. For many hours he was tormented by the thought that he was still awake. He awoke completely from fragmentary frightful dreams into total darkness. It seemed to him then that for some time he had been hearing a sound. He could not remember what the sound was, only that he had not liked it. It was silent now, the darkness hissed about his ears. He wanted to piss, and for a moment he was afraid to leave his bed. The certainty of his own death came to him now as it occasionally did, as a sick revelation, not the dread of dying, but of dying now, 3:15 A.M., lying still with the sheet drawn up around his neck and wanting, like all mortal animals, to urinate.
He turned the light on and went into the bathroom. His cock was small in his hands, nut brown and wrinkled by the cold, or perhaps the fear. He felt sorry for it. As he pissed his stream split in two. He pulled his foreskin a little and the streams converged. He felt sorry for himself. He stepped back into the hallway, and as he closed the bathroom door behind him and cut off the rumble of the cistern he heard that sound again, the sound he had listened to in his sleep. A sound so forgotten, so utterly familiar that only now as he advanced very cautiously along the hallway did he know it to be the background for all other sounds, the frame of all anxieties. The sound of his wife in, or approaching, orgasm. He stopped several yards short of the girls’ bedroom. It was a low moan through the medium of a harsh, barking cough, it rose imperceptibly in pitch through fractions of a tone, then fell away at the end, down but not very far, still higher than the starting point. He did not dare go nearer the door. He strained to listen. The end came and he heard the bed creak a little, and footsteps across the floor. He saw the door handle turn. Like a dreamer he asked no questions, he forgot his nakedness, he had no expectations.
Miranda screwed up her eyes in the brightness. Her yellow hair was loose. Her white cotton nightdress reached her ankles and its folds concealed the lines of her body. She could be any age. She hugged her arms around her body. Her father stood in front of her, very still, very massive, one foot in front of the other as though frozen mid-step, arms limp by his side, his naked black hairs, his wrinkled, nut-brown naked self. She could be a child or a woman, she could be any age. She took a little step forward.
“Daddy,” she moaned, “I can’t get to sleep.” She took his hand and he led her into the bedroom. Charmian lay curled up on the far side of the bed, her back to them. Was she awake, was she innocent? Stephen held back the bedclothes and Miranda climbed between the sheets. He tucked her in and sat on the edge of the bed. She arranged her hair.
“Sometimes I get frightened when I wake up in the middle of the night,” she told him.
“So do I,” he said, and bent over and kissed her lightly on the lips.
“But there’s nothing to be frightened of really, is there?”
“No,” he said, “Nothing.” She settled herself deeper into the deep red sheets and gazed into his face.
“Tell me something though, tell me something to make me go to sleep.”
He looked across at Charmian.
“Tomorrow you can look in the cupboard in the hall. There’s a whole bag of presents in there.”
“For Charmian too?”
“Yes.” He studied her face by the light from the hall. He was beginning to feel the cold. “I bought them for your birthday,” he added. But she was asleep and almost smiling, and in the pallor of her upturned throat he thought he saw from one bright morning in his childhood a field of dazzling white snow which he, a small boy of eight, had not dared scar with footprints.
To and Fro
Now Leech pushes his legs out straight till they tremble with the effort, locks his fingers behind his head, cracks them at the joints, chuckles his deliberate, dirty chuckle at what he pretends to see in the middle distance and bats me gently behind the head with his elbow. Looks like it’s over, what would you say?