‘You were an intense actor. You left yourself nowhere to go. I like you still.’ She hesitates. ‘Stiller, I mean.’
She looks the same but as if a layer of healthy fat has been scraped from her face, revealing the stitching beneath. There is even less of her; she seems a little frail, or fragile. She has always been delicate, but now she moves cautiously.
As we talk I recollect having let her down, but am unable to recall the details. She was active in my mind for the months after our ‘holiday’, but I found the memory to be less tenacious after relating the story to a friend as a tale of a young man’s foolishness and misfortune. When he laughed I forgot — there is nothing as forgiving as a joke.
However, I have often wished for Florence’s advice and support, particularly when the press took a fascinated interest in me, and started to write untrue stories. In the past few years I have played good parts and been praised and well paid. However, my sense of myself has not caught up with the alteration. I have been keeping myself down, and pushing happiness away. ‘Success hasn’t changed you,’ people tell me, as if it were a compliment.
When we say goodbye, Florence tells me when she will next be in the park. ‘Please come,’ she says. At home I write down the time and date, pushing the note under a pile of papers.
She and I are wary with one another, and make only tentative and polite conversation; however, I enjoy sitting beside her on a bench in the sun, outside the teahouse, while her eight-year-old plays football. He is a hurt, suspicious boy with hair down to his shoulders, which he refuses to have cut. He likes to fight with bigger children and she does not know what to do with him. Without him, perhaps, she would have got away.
At the moment I have few friends and welcome her company. The phone rings constantly but I rarely go out and never invite anyone round, having become almost phobic where other people are concerned. What I imagine about others I cannot say, but the human mind is rarely clear in its sight. Perhaps I feel depleted, having just played the lead in a film.
During the day I record radio plays and audio books. I like learning to use my voice as an instrument. Probably I spend too much time alone, thinking I can give myself everything. My doctor, with whom I drink, is fatuously keen on pills and cheerfulness. He says if I cannot be happy with what I have, I never will be. He would deny the useful facts of human conflict, and wants me to take antidepressants, as if I would rather be paralysed than know my terrible selves.
Having wondered for months why I was waking up every morning feeling sad, I have started therapy. I am aware, partly from my relationship with Florence, that that which cannot be said is the most dangerous concealment. I am only beginning to understand psychoanalytic theory, yet am inspired by the idea that we do not live on a fine point of consciousness but exist in all areas of our being simultaneously, particularly the dreaming. Until I started lying down in Dr Wallace’s room, I had never had such extended conversations about the deepest personal matters. To myself I call analysis — two people talking — ‘the apogee of civilisation’. Lying in bed I have begun to go over my affair with Florence. These are more like waking dreams — Coleridge’s ‘flights of lawless speculation’ — than considered reflections, as if I am setting myself a subject for the night. Everything returns at this thoughtful age, particularly childhood.
One afternoon in the autumn, after we have met four or five times, it is wet, and Florence and I sit at a table inside the damp teahouse. The only other customers are an elderly couple. Florence’s son sits on the floor drawing.
‘Can’t we get a beer?’ Florence says.
‘They don’t sell it here.’
‘What a damned country.’
‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’
She says, ‘Can you be bothered?’
‘Nope.’
Earlier I notice the smell of alcohol on her. It is a retreat I recognise; I have started to drink with more purpose myself.
While I am at the counter fetching the tea, I see Florence holding the menu at arm’s length; then she brings it closer to her face and moves it away again, seeking the range at which it will be readable. Earlier I noticed a spectacle case in the top of her bag, but had not realised they were reading glasses.
When I sit down, Florence says, ‘Last night Archie and I went to see your new film. It was discomfiting to sit there looking at you with him.’
‘Did Archie remember me?’
‘At the end I asked him. He remembered the weekend. He said you had more substance to you than most actors. You helped him.’
‘I hope not.’
‘I don’t know what you two talked about that night, but a few months after your conversation Archie left his job and went into publishing. He accepted a salary cut, but he was determined to find work that didn’t depress him. Oddly, he turned out to be very good at it. He’s doing well. Like you.’
‘Me? But that is only because of you.’ I want to give her credit for teaching me something about self-belief and self-determination. ‘Without you I wouldn’t have got off to a good start …’
My thanks make her uncomfortable, as if I am reminding her of a capacity she does not want to know she is wasting.
‘But it’s your advice I want,’ she says anxiously. ‘Be straight, as I was with you. Do you think I can return to acting?’
‘Are you seriously considering it?’
‘It’s the only thing I want for myself.’
‘Florence, I read with you years ago but I have never seen you on stage. That aside, the theatre is not a profession you can return to at will.’
‘I’ve started sending my photograph around,’ she continues. ‘I want to play the great parts, the women in Chekhov and Ibsen. I want to howl and rage with passion and fury. Is that funny? Rob, tell me if I’m being a fool. Archie considers it a middle-aged madness.’
‘I am all for that,’ I say.
As we part she touches my arm and says, ‘Rob, I saw you the other day. I don’t think you saw me, or did you?’
‘But I would have spoken.’
‘You were shopping in the deli. Was that your wife? The blonde girl —’
‘It was someone else. She has a room nearby.’
‘And you —’
‘Florence —’
‘I don’t want to pry,’ she says. ‘But you used to put your hand on my back, to guide me, like that, through crowds …’
I do not like being recognised with the girl for fear of it getting in the papers and back to my wife. But I resent having to live a secret life. I am confused.
‘I was jealous,’ she says.
‘Were you? But why?’
‘I had started to hope … that it wasn’t too late for you and me. I think I care for you more than I do for anybody. That is rare, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve never understood you,’ I say, irritably. ‘Why would you marry Archie … and then start seeing me?’
It is a question I have never been able to put, fearing she will think I am being critical of her, or that I will have to hear an account of their ultimate compatibility.
She says, ‘I hate to admit it, but I imagined in some superstitious way that marriage would solve my problems and make me feel secure.’ When I laugh she looks at me hard. ‘This raises a question that we both have to ask.’
‘What is that?’
She glances at her son and says softly, ‘Why do you and I go with people who won’t give us enough?’
I say nothing for a time. Then follows the joke which is not a joke, but which makes us laugh freely for the first time since we met again. I have been reading an account by a contemporary author of his break up with his partner. It is relentless, and, probably because it rings true, has been taken exception to. Playfully I tell Florence that surely divorce is an underestimated pleasure. People speak of the violence of separation, but what of the delight? What could be more refreshing than never having to sleep in the same bed as that rebarbative body, and hear those familiar complaints? Such a moment of deliverance would be one to hug to yourself for ever, like losing one’s virginity, or becoming a millionaire.