Tonie is used to Christopher, used to his voice and appearance, to the reedy sound he makes, to the precision of his bachelor tastes, to the sight of his long, narrow form among other forms she knows. For years she has watched him go off to his lunchtime organ recitals at St John’s, his medieval recorder evenings, his private views. Yet she has never, until now, put all those things together. She has never added him up.
‘Fair enough,’ she says.
‘There simply isn’t the infrastructure here for members of the department to be carried. We don’t have the resources.’
‘I get it,’ she says.
Tonie has been associated with the English department for eight years. In that time she has seen people argue, flounce out of meetings, cry openly in corridors. She knows that emotion is a possibility here, as it is not elsewhere in the university or, indeed, the world. As a result the departmental discourse relies heavily on its bureaucratic origins. The grey walls pulse with rampant sensibility: only the rules stand in the way of a general outbreak of unconstrainable feeling. Now that Christopher has invoked this discourse, it would be perfectly acceptable for Tonie to shout at him, to weep, to storm back to her own cheerless office with its view of the car park; it is, perhaps, what Christopher expects and requires her to do.
She looks at his pleated silk lampshades, at his mohair cushion covers.
‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘Thanks for the honeymoon. I enjoyed it.’
She laughs quietly, turns to go.
He stiffens in his chair, offended. ‘As I say, I’m always reasonably available. And obviously, if any question is urgent I’ll answer it.’
She laughs again. Once, she was Christopher’s senior in the department, when he was a junior research fellow with a neck so slender his collars gaped around it. And he fawned on Tonie in those days, hungry for scraps of approval. It is this version of himself, she sees, that haunts him. He wants to exorcise it, to gouge it out of her recollection. He doesn’t realise how many things have happened to her in the intervening years, how little she has considered him. He doesn’t know how sad she suddenly finds it, that he should have spent his prime struggling to ascend through the ranks of a second-rate university, with only distracted mothers to impede him.
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ she says.
Outside, in the corridor, she realises that her arms are full of files. She looks down at them. They are hard, blank-faced, with metallic spines. She is holding them against her chest. For a moment she can’t think what on earth they are.
XVIII
Thomas wakes up. He has been dreaming. In the dream he and Tonie and Alexa were in some kind of shopping mall in a foreign city. It had long, grey, sinister concrete walkways as broad as motorways. There were layer after layer of them, travelling downwards into the earth.
Thomas and Tonie wanted to buy clothes for Alexa. They left her somewhere and found a small shop. The shop was full of light: its walls and ceiling were all glass. Thomas began to look at the clothes. They were very beautiful. He found a dress that was like a meadow of flowers, and another that was made of pieces of white cloud. There was a flowing garment like a Grecian tunic, composed of milk. Tonie had her own ideas, but every time Thomas found something she forgot them. She seemed to know that all of a sudden he had a special power of discovery. She waited to see what he would come up with next. From the rack he pulled a long-sleeved dress made from the original canvas of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. At its cuffs and hem were flames that flickered palely in the daylight. They agreed that this was the supreme find. It was for Alexa: it seemed to contain something of her spirit, some essence of her they recognised but had forgotten, as though it had been present at the moment of her birth but had been obscured or diluted over the years by Thomas and Tonie themselves. Now that they had chosen, Tonie volunteered to go and retrieve Alexa. She left Thomas alone in the shop. She vanished into the vast grey intestine of the shopping mall. He wondered then why they had abandoned Alexa in this strange place. He had no idea where she was or what had become of her. What had he and Tonie been thinking of? The irrationality of it spoke to him through the dream. He strained and strained to understand why they had committed this irresponsible act. At last he realised that it was because this was a dream. The realisation immediately woke him up. It seems that it requires faith to dream. Once you have lost it the dream comes apart in your hands.
He lies awake in the darkness. It is so thin, so insubstantiaclass="underline" he feels as if he is falling through it, plummeting outwards or downwards. The universe yawns around him. He seems to see its infinite distances, its rashes of stars. The bed is like a tiny precipice on the edge of it. His contact with material things feels thread-like and minimal. It is the irrationality of the dream that has caused him to feel this. His own belief in his life seems in that moment incredible to him. Why doesn’t he cling to the edge of the bed in terror? Why doesn’t everybody? And Alexa, Tonie — what are these people to him? What are these relationships, these convictions, these codes of conduct? This forest of objects, dark now and indistinct — what is their significance? How can he have chosen them, the armchair, the chest of drawers, the dark ornaments on the mantelpiece in their darker ponds of shadow, when the universe was yawning just to the side of them?
The clock ticks steadily on the bedside table. After a while, Thomas goes back to sleep.
XIX
For the forty-five minutes that the doctor is late for the appointment, Howard thinks he is going to die.
The nurse is there, moving around the room. The sky at the third-floor hospital window is blank. Her white form glimmers: it creases and unfolds as she bends and straightens, nodding in the light like a white flower.
‘Would you like anything?’ she says. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
Her face comes near. It is painted: her youth is under the paint, as though some great sorrow has compelled her to inter it and don her painted death-mask.
‘Yes, please,’ he whispers. ‘Tea would be very nice.’
She goes away. Then she is there again: he hears the teacup rattling in its saucer. When she puts it in front of him he sees her pale forearm. There is a mark on it the size and shape of a coin. It is dark red, livid, like the mark of a brand on her bland flawless skin.
‘You’ve burnt yourself,’ he says.
‘I did it with the iron,’ she says. ‘That was silly, wasn’t it?’
He imagines her ironing, piles of white sheets, her nurse’s uniform. He sees the deadly steel tip nosing its way through the whiteness. It is terrible, the thought of her soft skin.
‘Please be careful,’ he says. ‘You must take care of yourself. We should all take more care of ourselves.’
She moves about, tidying, her eyes gently lowered. There is paint on the lids.
‘The doctor won’t be long,’ she says.
Howard watches the clock on the doctor’s wall. The second hand lurches trembling around the face. Claudia is parking the car. She dropped him at the front, not knowing they would bring him up here. He sees now that they should have stayed together. He sees that it is a trap. He has been lured from his family, his house, his car, his wife, by a trickster who has waited all this time, who waited by his cot and by his childhood bed, waited through the years in doorways and stations and city streets, in fields and on foreign beaches, in hallways and hotels and the passenger seats of cars; and lately, waited in the darkness of the garden, beneath the apple tree, for Howard to be alone. Claudia waved through the glass as she drove away. He remembers how confusing it was to be standing by himself in the grey entrance area. He was born in this hospital. It was as though Claudia had returned him here to be reabsorbed; as though she had driven away with his name, his identity, his actual life, and left his casing, his body, here, from whence it had come, like an empty bottle being returned to the brewery.