When I got home Nancy was sitting in the living room, reading.
“How was your meeting?” she asked.
“Fine,” I replied. “Fine.”
“Good,” she said, and went back to scanning her magazine. I could have tried to make conversation, but knew it would have come out tinny and forced. In the end I went to bed and lay tightly curled on my side, wide awake.
I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard a low voice in the silence, speaking next to my ear.
“Go away,” it said. “Go away.”
I opened my eyes, expecting I don’t know what. Nancy’s face, I suppose, hanging over mine. There was no one there. I was relaxing slightly, prepared to believe it had been a fragment of a dream, when I heard her voice again, saying the same words in the same low tone.
Carefully I climbed out of bed and crept toward the kitchen. Through it I could see into the living room, where Nancy was standing in front of the main window in the darkness. She was looking out at something in the street.
“Go away,” she said again, softly.
I turned round and went back to bed.
A couple of weeks passed. Time seemed to do that, that autumn. I was very immersed, what with one thing and another. Each day held something that fixed my attention and pulled me through it. I’d look up, and a week would have gone by, with me having barely noticed.
One of the things that held my attention, and became a regular part of most days, was talking to Alice. We talked about things that Nancy and I never touched upon, things Nancy simply didn’t understand or care about. Alice read, for example. Nancy read, too, in that she studied memos, and reports, and boned up on the current corporate claptrap being imported from the States. She didn’t read books, though, or paragraphs even. She read sentences, to strip from them what she needed to do her job, find out what was on television, or hold her own on current affairs. Every sentence was a bullet point, and she read to acquire information.
Alice read for its own sake. She wrote, too, hence her growing interest in computers. I mentioned once that I’d written a few articles, years back, before I settled on being a barely competent graphic designer instead. She said she’d written some stories and, after regular nagging from me, diffidently gave me copies. I don’t know anything about fiction from a professional point of view, so I don’t know how innovative or clever they were. But they gripped my attention, and I read them more than once, and that’s good enough for me. I told her so, and she seemed pleased.
We spoke most days and saw each other a couple of times a week. She delivered things to me, or picked them up, and sometimes I chanced by Sad Café when she was sipping a cup of tea. It was all very low key, very friendly.
Nancy and I got on with each other, in an occasional, space-sharing sort of way. She had her friends, and I had mine. Sometimes we saw them together, and performed, as a social pair. We looked good together, like a series of stills from a lifestyle magazine. Life, if that’s what it was, went on. Her eating vacillated between not good and bad, and I carried on being bleakly accepting of the fact that there didn’t seem much I could do to help. So much of our lives seemed geared up to perpetuating her idea of how two young people should live that I somehow didn’t feel that I could call our bluff, point out what was living beneath the stones in our house. I also didn’t mention the night I’d seen her in the lounge. There didn’t seem any way of bringing it up.
Apart from having Alice to chat to, the other good news was the new cat in the neighborhood. When I glanced out of the living room window sometimes it would be there, ambling smoothly past or plonked down on the pavement, watching movement in the air. It had a habit of sitting in the middle of the road, daring traffic to give it any trouble, as if the cat knew what the road was for but was having no truck with it. This was a field once, the twitch of her tail seemed to say, and as far as I’m concerned it still is.
One morning I was walking back from the corner shop, clutching some cigarettes and milk, and came upon the cat, perched on a wall. If you like cats there’s something rather depressing about having them run away from you, so I approached cautiously. I wanted to get to at least within a yard of this one before it went shooting off into hyperspace.
To my delight, it didn’t move away at all. When I got up next to her she stood up, and I thought that was it, but it turned out to be just a recognition that I was there. She was quite happy to be stroked and to have the fur on her head runkled, and responded to having her chest rubbed with a purr so deep it was almost below the threshold of hearing. Now that I was closer I could see the chestnut gleams in the dark brown of her fur. She was a very beautiful cat.
After a couple of minutes of this I moved away, thinking I ought to get on, but the cat immediately jumped off the wall and wove in figure eights about my feet, pressing up against my calves. I find it difficult enough to walk away from a cat at the best of times. When they’re being ultra-friendly it’s impossible. So I bent down and tickled, and talked fond nonsense. I finally got to my door and looked back to see her, still sitting on the pavement. She was looking around as if wondering what to do next, after all that excitement. I had to fight down the impulse to wave.
I closed the door behind me, feeling for a moment very lonely, and then went back upstairs to work.
Then one Friday night Alice and I met again, and things changed.
Nancy was out at yet another work get-together. Her organization seemed to like running the social lives of its staff, like some rabid church, intent on infiltrating every activity of its disciples. Nancy mentioned the event in a way that made it clear that my attendance was far from mandatory, and I was quite happy to oblige. I do my best at these things but doubt I look as if I’m having the time of my life.
I didn’t have anything else on, so I just flopped about the house for a while, reading and watching television. It was easier to relax when Nancy wasn’t there, when we weren’t busy being a Couple. I couldn’t settle, though. I kept thinking how pleasant it would be not to feel that way, that it would be nice to want your girlfriend to be home so you could laze about together. It didn’t work that way with Nancy, not anymore. Getting her to consider a lie-in on one particular Saturday was a major project in itself. I probably hadn’t tried very hard in a while, either. She got up, I got up. I’d been developed as a human resource.
My reading grew fitful and in the end I grabbed my coat and went for a walk down streets that were dark and cold. A few couples and lone figures floated down the roads, in mid-evening transit between pubs and Chinese restaurants. The very formlessness of the activity around me, its random wandering, made me feel quietly content. The room in which Nancy and her colleagues stood, robotically passing business catchphrases up and down the hierarchy, leapt into my mind, though I’d no idea where it was. I thought quietly to myself that I would much rather be here than there.
Then for a moment I felt the whole of London spread out around me, and my contentment faded away. Nancy had somewhere to go. All I had was miles of finite roads in winter light, black houses leaning in toward each other. I could walk, and I could run, and in the end I would come to the boundaries, the edge of the city. When I reached them there would be nothing I could do except turn around and come back into the city. I couldn’t feel anything beyond the gates, couldn’t believe anything was there. It wasn’t some yearning for the countryside or far climes: I like London, and the great outdoors irritates me. It was more a sense that a place that should hold endless possibilities had been tamed by something, bleached out by my lack of imagination, by the limits of my life.