‘Why do those films always make the world look like it’s perfect?’ Tonie asks him.
He ponders her, the baby in his chair: is she friend or foe?
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I sort of see what you mean. We’re editing out all the mess, aren’t we? People don’t realise that just out of shot there’s a car park and a big line of hotels — not to mention other film crews all going for the same thing and getting in each other’s way. Sometimes it’s a nightmare, getting what you want and keeping out what you don’t.’
‘Terribly difficult,’ Claudia agrees.
‘But why can’t you show it as it really is?’ Tonie says. ‘What’s the point?’
He frowns, puts his hands in his pockets. ‘People don’t want that sort of reality. And it isn’t my job to give it to them.’
‘Then you’re just a liar,’ Tonie says, but the room is noisy. She isn’t sure he’s heard her.
‘Hasn’t your wife had a baby?’ Claudia asks him. She says the word ‘baby’ as though it’s a big treat, something to reward him for having done so well. Tonie is surprised: she didn’t think Claudia knew this man. She is certain he doesn’t know Claudia’s name. He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space.
‘— six months old,’ he is saying. ‘I’ve barely seen her because of the filming. I think I’ve spent —’ he calculates ‘— one fortnight at home in the whole six months, you know? But that’s what it’s like to have a vocation. It’s hard, really hard. But that’s how it is. You have to make sacrifices.’
Claudia looks almost tearful with sympathy, as though she were nothing to do with the person Tonie once witnessed screaming out of a top-floor window at Howard that she had bolted the door and wasn’t going to let him into the house, because Howard had promised to be home that night by a certain time to help her with the children, and had either broken the promise or forgotten it. Tonie thinks about Howard, considers him. In her mind he is suddenly very small, like a doll. He is ringed by destiny: he has become representational. Everything he has done and been has been compacted into this tiny figure, emitting the squeak of life. She sees him being moved as though by an invisible hand around a toy kingdom. She sees he could be dashed away in an instant.
She leaves Claudia and pushes through the room. Later she finds herself talking to a man who makes coffins. He is threadbare, hippy-looking, with long grey hair. He makes the coffins by hand, out of wood from sustainable sources. He arranges natural funerals, in accordance with the wishes of the family. Tonie learns about the diversity of these wishes, their sources and outcomes. By now it is almost sexual, her desire to be penetrated by a question, but nobody asks her one. Instead she learns about the woodlands of Sussex and Kent, the tensile properties of the chestnut tree. There is African music playing, loud. Half of what the man says is blotted out. She watches his mouth moving. He glances at her frequently: he can tell she is untouched, disengaged.
Suddenly Claudia is at her elbow, listening. She nods her head as the man speaks; she asks questions. He becomes aware of her, turns the stream of information in her direction. She is a more gratifying audience than Tonie. She asks about the coffin made of English oak. She asks about the ultra-sustainable willow model. Her interest is genuine, the man can tell. Tonie watches in consternation. Has Claudia gone mad? She feels suddenly that she was brought here to witness Claudia in an act of betrayal. It is the ineradicable quality of her dependence — on Howard, on men — that is being exposed tonight. Claudia puts a hand on the man’s arm. She is bright, transactional, faintly tragic in her fur collar.
‘Do you have a card?’ she asks him.
‘As it happens I do,’ the man says, producing one from his back pocket. ‘Are you anticipating a — passing?’
For an instant Claudia looks both startled and mesmerised, like a snake being charmed out of its basket: her face is lit up, her mascaraed eyes unblinking. She takes the man’s card and puts it in her handbag.
On the way home, there is a feeling of constraint between them. It is clear Tonie did not enjoy the party. And Tonie feels, suddenly, that she does not know Claudia at all. She is aware of Claudia’s body, her hands with their rings on the steering wheel, her atmosphere coming at her across the dark. But her knowledge of this entity — Claudia — has been marginalised. They turn left and right through deserted roads. At Montague Street Tonie gets out, and Claudia drives away.
XIII
‘Do you ever hear anything about Clare?’ Tonie asks Thomas.
‘Who?’
‘Clare. Clare Connelly.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason. I just think about her sometimes.’
‘Do you?’ He seems astonished. He seems to find it astonishing, not that he doesn’t think about Clare but that she does. Yet once they talked about her all the time.
Tonie laughs. ‘Don’t you ever think about her?’
They are in the kitchen. It is late at night. Thomas is putting things away. She watches him, the way he holds each object — the pepper pot, the butter dish, the saucepan with the chipped enamel lid — while he establishes where it belongs. There is nothing automatic about it. It is as though male pride forbids him to acquiesce in the order of things. He has to consider the saucepan and then decide himself where it ought to go.
‘The honest answer’, he says, ‘is that I haven’t thought about her since the last time I saw her.’
She realises that he is pleased that he hasn’t thought about Clare. It pleases him, to detect this shallowness in himself, this simplicity. In fact, she can’t exactly say that she herself thinks about Clare. It is more than that: Clare is a place in her mind she touches in passing, sometimes intentionally, sometimes brushing against her by accident. Tonie feels a kind of nostalgia for her, as she might for a particular song that fits like a key into the lock of time and lets the past come rushing out. The intricate Clare-ness of Clare unlocks her memory of the first weeks with Thomas in just the same way. In those days Thomas talked about Clare constantly. He wrestled with the moral problem of her while Tonie watched in wonder and admiration. So it’s strange — isn’t it? — that now he doesn’t think about her, can barely remember who she is.
‘That’s so — weird,’ Tonie says.
During that winter he would meet Tonie clandestinely by the river in Putney, where he lived at the time, and they went for long walks in the dark. Camouflaged in shadow they walked and walked beside Richmond and Kew, beside the silent swift-running water, passing and re-passing the riverside bars and restaurants without ever going in, though secretly Tonie wanted to. She wanted to sit with Thomas in the warmth, at a candlelit table. She wanted his full attention, which on the muddy towpath in the dark she was not sure she ever got. But she never suggested it: she realised he would find it inappropriate. Instead they walked for miles in the cold, talking all the time. When they talked Tonie had the sense of something big and bounteous nearby, as the sea can be sensed when it is still just out of sight. Sometimes, overcome by excitement and emotion, she would turn to Thomas and try to kiss him, and her lips would bump against his chin or his ear as he averted his face. He would not kiss her, because of Clare. He would not be unfaithful. Tonie believed that she had never in her life seen someone behave honourably. She could barely breathe with the exacting thrill of it. She was electrified: she was driven out of her wits, as with other men she had been by passion. Except that to see passion subjugated to honour was a thousand times more tormenting. After three weeks of this, Thomas had a conversation with Clare and moved his possessions out of her flat. For a while she phoned, her voice high-pitched and distant-sounding in the receiver when Tonie answered it, and Thomas sometimes met her for lunch. Then one day he said that Clare had decided to put an end to the conversations and the lunches. She did not want to talk to Thomas any more. She found it too painful.