There’s no real equivalence, between my situation now and my situation then. I’m genuinely happily married to Patrick and given the chance would not even seriously consider throwing in my luck with a stranger I have nothing in common with. The little hunger of wasted opportunity only gets expressed in my fantasies, which contrive themselves in spite of me. No green lane, no gate into a wood. He’s a gas engineer in the fantasy, of course. He comes to my house to mend the boiler. At first we pretend we don’t recognise each other. I show him the problem and hover discreetly while he takes the front of the boiler off and crouches to look inside. He asks me to hand him a spanner from his toolbox; when he takes it from me he touches my hand with his.
I wish he wasn’t a gas engineer. It sounds too much like a scenario from one of those funny sixties pornographic films, where the milkman or the postman is served up to the bored housewife amid all the conveniences of her own kitchen. But I’ve tried giving him other, outdoor, professions, and I didn’t believe in them, they had no connection with the real man.
When he stands up to tell me there’s a problem with the regulator, he steps towards me and begins to kiss me. It’s then I see that what we did together has had consequences, for him. It has made him rather reckless, sexually. He has learned the audacity to reach across, through all the mess we make with thinking and talking, through to the body and the body’s truth.
I have to be careful not to believe in this. It is only a dream.
EXCHANGES
TWO FRIENDS ARE walking together round the new British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum. These women look interesting. One is fine-boned, small, with crinkled black hair pinned up; she’s wearing a green dress and a mohair cardigan. The other is taller and more awkward; her red hair is shoulder-length with a fringe. She has put gold-rimmed glasses on to look at the exhibits, but obviously doesn’t like wearing them, because when they stop to talk she takes them off and dangles them dangerously on her finger. Once she drops them with a clatter but they are OK.
The new galleries are very hands-on; you can make a chair, design a coat of arms, identify porcelain. The women try on a crinoline over their clothes, they take turns to walk up and down in it.
— Oh, it’s nice, see how it swings, it’s very light.
— Wouldn’t you just clear space?
— You could have a man inside, said one. — Imagine.
The women are at that age which on the outside is ambivalent: young and not-so-young are difficult to disentangle, in good clothes, in a good light, after a good life of the privileged kind of work that doesn’t weather or wizen you. Inside, though, these years register for the women themselves, inexorably and determiningly as a clock ticking. There’s a year when you’re thinking anything could still happen, reproduction-wise (this either makes you hopeful or cautious, depending on what you want). Then there’s a year when you think you never know (after all, Cherie Blair had one). And then there’s a year when you think it isn’t any way going to happen now, not without an improbable Old Testament miracle or the intervention of some crazed Italian doctor. These women are both, in fact, at this Old Testament stage, although they can both get away with looking as if they might not be.
One of them — Louie, the taller one with red hair — is a mother: she has two daughters. The dark one, Phil, is not. You can’t tell this from looking at their bodies either, not from the outside: both are trim and slender. Perhaps you might guess, though, that Louie is the mother. Although she’s more awkward than Phil, and probably thinks she’s not as attractive, she’s less self-conscious about parading up and down in the crinoline in front of other visitors. That might come from seeing herself reflected in the eyes of her daughters, who will love her or think her absurd however she tries, so that she doesn’t need to try so hard. (In the early days of motherhood, she wouldn’t have put it as positively as that: it felt sometimes as though she’d been taken out of her own possession and become no more than a rag doll for her daughters’ entertainment. But now the girls are fifteen and twelve, and she’s recovered, somewhat.)
In the museum café they talk unstoppably, as they always have done since they first got to know one another at college. They used to talk about men, with intensity and absorption: the rage against men was almost as stimulating as the sexual excitement men generated. Now all that’s eased off. Sometimes Louie grumbles about Duncan, her husband, but the fervour’s gone out of it. Once you’ve been together with someone for twenty years there’s no excuse for hanging on with them if you think they’re so awfuclass="underline" and of course she doesn’t really think Duncan’s awful, she supposes that she even loves him dearly, these days, underneath it all. Phil, on the other hand, has only been with Merrick for five years, and she’s still tender about him and defensive, so that she won’t reciprocate when Louie makes sniping remarks about his sex. Talking about men was more fun when Louie was really, really, planning on leaving Duncan, or at least having an affair with someone else; and when Phil was in the throes of a tormenting love for a no-good community activist who made her do things in bed that frightened her.
Now they talk about all kinds of other interesting subjects. Work, of course: Phil is a designer for a publisher, Louie works from home as a translator. And then about writing, painting, politics, parents. Phil’s mother is very frail and may have to go into a home. Louie took her girls on the march against the war in Afghanistan. Both friends have, separately, seen the Auerbach exhibition: both were moved and disturbed by the monastic absolutism of his pursuit of truth. Louie confides in Phil (at tedious length, she fears) about the terrible struggle she is engaged in with her older daughter Ella, over Ella’s attitude, over whether she’s allowed out on her own in town, over what time she’s supposed to come in if she is allowed out, and so on. Louie has noticed that when she begins to complain about Ella, Phil’s expression tightens slightly: as if she is not completely, absolutely, on Louie’s side.
When they have finished looking round the galleries Phil and Louie both go back to Phil’s flat; they are hosting a meeting of their creative writing group there that evening, and Louie is staying over. Duncan is going to look after the girls (for once). Merrick is away (he is a rep for a wine company and often has to travel abroad).
Phil has been in this same small flat for years (from long before she knew Merrick): in the same period Duncan and Louie have moved three times, once with each promotion Duncan has had at the newspaper. Phil has a gift for making a place inviting: the shelves are piled with collections of books and objects, there are cushiony corners for reading. Everything promises retreat and solitude and concentration. Louie has never, in truth, liked any of her own houses as much as she likes it in here.
— I’ve brought you a present, says Louie. — I got this in the museum shop when you weren’t looking.
Phil feels inside the paper bag: then she turns a strange face on her friend.