“A thousand years ago cats used to come to this hill, because it was their meeting place. They would come and discuss their business, and then they would go away. This was their place, and it still is. But they don’t mind us.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you,” she said, and kissed me for the first time.
It was ten minutes before I looked up again. Only two cats were left. I pulled my arm tighter around Alice and thought how simply and unutterably happy I was.
“Was that all true?” I asked, pretending to be a child.
“No,” she said, and smiled. “It was just a story.” She pushed her nose up against mine and nuzzled, and our heads melted into one.
At two o’clock I realized I was going to have to go home, and we got up and walked slowly back to the road. I waited shivering with her for a minicab, and endured the driver’s histrionic sighing as we said good-bye. I stood on the corner and waved until the cab was out of sight, and then turned and walked home.
It wasn’t until I turned into our road and saw that the lights were still on in our house that I realized just how real the evening had been. As I walked up the steps the door opened. Nancy stood there in a dressing gown, looking angry and frightened.
“Where the hell have you been?” she said. I straightened my shoulders and girded myself up to lie.
I apologized. I told her I’d been out drinking with Howard, lying calmly and with a convincing determination. I didn’t even feel bad about it, except in a self-serving, academic sort of way.
Some switch had been finally thrown in my mind, and as we lay in bed afterward I realized that I wasn’t in bed with my girlfriend anymore. There was just someone in my bed. When Nancy rolled toward me, her body open in a way that suggested that she might not be thinking of going to sleep, I felt my chest tighten with something that felt like dread. I found a way of suggesting that I might be a bit drunk for anything other than unconsciousness, and she curled up beside me and went to sleep instead. I lay awake for an hour, feeling as if I were lying on a slab of marble in a room open to the sky.
Breakfast the next morning was a festival of leaden politeness. The kitchen seemed very bright, and noise rebounded harshly off the walls. Nancy was in a good mood, but there was nothing I could do except smile tight smiles and talk much louder than usual, waiting for her to go to work.
The next ten days were both dismal and the best days of my life. Alice and I managed to see each other every couple of days, occasionally for an evening but more often just for a cup of coffee. We didn’t do any more than talk, and hold hands, and sometimes kiss. Our kisses were brief, a kind of sketching out of the way things could be. Bad starts always undermine a relationship, for fear it could happen again. So we were restrained and honest with each other and it was wonderful, but it was also difficult.
Being home was no fun at all. Nancy hadn’t changed, but I had, and so I didn’t know her anymore. It was like having a complete stranger living in your house, a stranger who was all the worse for reminding you of someone you once loved. The things that were the closest to the way they used to be were the things that made me most irritable, and I found myself avoiding anything that might promote them.
Something had to be done, and it had to be done by me. The problem was gearing myself up to it. Nancy and I had been living together for four years. Most of our friends assumed we’d be engaged before long; I’d already heard a few jokes. We knew each other very well, and that does count for something. As I moved warily around Nancy during those weeks, trying not to seem too close, I was also conscious of how much we had shared together, of how affectionate a part of me still felt toward her. She was a friend, and I cared about her. I didn’t want her to be hurt.
My relationship with Nancy wasn’t completely straightforward. I wasn’t just her boyfriend, I was her brother and father, too. l knew some of the reasons her eating was as bad as it was, things no one else would ever know. I’d talked it through with her, and knew how to live with it, knew how to not make her feel any worse. She needed support, and I was the only person there to give it. Ripping that away when she was already having such a bad time would be very difficult to forgive.
And so things went on, for a little while. I saw Alice when I could, but always in the end I would have to go, and we would part, and each time it felt more and more arbitrary and I found it harder to remember why I should have to leave. I grew terrified of saying her name in my sleep, or of letting something slip, and felt as if I were living my life on stage in front of a predatory audience waiting for a mistake. I’d go out for walks in the evening and walk as slowly up the road as possible, stopping to talk to the cat, stroking her for as long as she liked and walking up and down the pavement with her, doing anything to avoid going back into the house.
I spent most of the second week looking forward to the Saturday. At the beginning of each week Nancy announced she would be going on a team-building day at the weekend. She explained to me what was involved, the chasm of evangelical corporate vacuity into which she and her colleagues were cheerfully leaping. She was talking to me a lot more at the time, wanting to share her life. I tried, but I couldn’t really listen. All I could think about was that I was due to be driving up to Cambridge that day, to drop work off at a client’s. I’d assumed that I’d be going alone. With Nancy firmly occupied somewhere else, another possibility sprang to mind.
When I saw Alice for coffee that afternoon I asked if she’d like to come. The warmth of her reply helped me through the evenings of the week, and we talked about it every day. The plan was that I’d ring home early evening, when Nancy was back from her day, and say that I’d run into someone up there and wouldn’t be back until late. It was a bending of our unspoken doing-things-by-the-book rule, but it had to be done. Alice and I needed a longer period with each other, and I needed to build myself up to what had to be done.
By midevening on Friday I was at fever pitch. I was pacing round the house not settling at anything, so much in my own little world that it took me a while to notice that something was up with Nancy, too.
She was sitting in the living room, going over some papers, but kept glancing angrily out of the window as if expecting to see someone. When I asked her about it, slightly irritably, she denied she was doing it, and then ten minutes later I saw her do it again. I retreated to the kitchen and did something dull to a shelf that I’d been putting off for months. When Nancy stalked in to make some more coffee she saw what I was doing and seemed genuinely touched that I’d finally got around to it. My smile of self-deprecating good-naturedness felt as if it were stretched across the lips of a corpse.
Then she was back out in the lounge again, glaring nervously out of the window, as if fearing imminent invasion from a Martian army. It reminded me of the night I’d seen her standing by the window, which I had found rather spooky. She was looking very flaky that evening, and I’d run out of pity. I simply found it irritating, and hated myself for that.
Eventually, finally, at long last, it was time for bed. Nancy went ahead and I volunteered to close windows and tidy ashtrays. It’s funny how you seem most solicitous and endearing when you don’t want to be there at all.
What I actually wanted was a few moments to wrap a present I was going to give to Alice. When I heard the bathroom door shut I leapt for the filing cabinet and took out the book. I grabbed tape and paper from a drawer and started wrapping. As I folded I glanced out of the window and saw the cat sitting outside in the road, and smiled to myself. With Alice I’d be able to have a cat of my own, could work with furry company and doze with a warm bundle on my lap. The bathroom door opened again and I paused, ready for instant action. When Nancy’s feet had padded safely into the bedroom, I continued wrapping. When it was done I slipped the present in a drawer and took out the card I was going to give with it, already composing in my head the message for the inside.