‘You can’t say that,’ she says.
‘Can’t I?’ He swirls his drink around. ‘Why not?’
She wonders whether he is going all the way back to York tonight, whether he will sit on the train and feel the particular weight of his visit, as the fisherman returning home feels the particular bodies of the fish he has caught. There is no reason, in fact, why he can’t say whatever he wants to her. It is too late — isn’t it? — for loyalty, for compunction, for guilt. The time for these things is past. There is only any point in saying what is true.
‘No reason,’ she says. She composes herself. ‘So what’s your interest in Wilfred Owen? Where does that come from?’
‘I was in the army.’
She smiles. Vaguely, she doesn’t believe him. ‘That too.’
‘I joined when I was still at school. It was a way of getting sent to university.’
She is surprised. He has fooled her. She mistook him for a typical eccentric, of the academic type. But in fact, none of the academics she knows are anything like him at all.
‘And then — what — you didn’t go back?’
‘I had to go back for a while. I was sent to the Middle East. After that I was discharged.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘And what was it like? The army.’
He looks at her coolly. ‘It was all right.’
She images him with other men, a male-only place, something clarifying about it; a disentangling from women that might bring with it a capacity to see them whole.
‘Did you like the other men?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you learn how to shoot a gun?’
He smiles his slow, mocking smile. ‘Of course. Do you find that exciting?’
She smiles back. ‘Not particularly.’
They sit and look at each other. After a while he reaches out his hand and touches the rim of her glass.
‘Would you like another?’
She shakes her head, slowly. ‘I have to get home.’
He looks so disappointed that she almost laughs. His sincerity is a kind of event. She wants to tell someone about it, but he is the only person there.
‘What a pity,’ he says. ‘Do you really?’
It is clear that he is completely unfamiliar with the idea of home as a set of responsibilities, a scheduled place, like work. Yet there is something about him that makes her feel secure. She is reluctant to leave, as the students were reluctant to leave the lecture hall. He appears to have no other ties. He seems to exist only for her. She has his full attention.
‘I do,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’
Outside in the dark street he stops and turns to her. He puts out his large white hand and rests it flat against her clavicle.
‘You’re very delicate,’ he says. ‘I want to know what it would be like to overpower you.’
‘I’m not easily overpowered,’ she says.
‘Aren’t you?’
He presses with his hand. With his other hand he covers her eyes. He walks her backwards across the pavement until she feels a wall behind her. His hands are very warm. Through the slits in his fingers she can see him. He bends and kisses her throat.
‘I can’t do this,’ she says. ‘Someone might see me.’
He kisses her mouth, the skin beneath her ear, her throat again. She laughs. His hand is firm on her chest, fixing her to the wall.
‘Just a minute more,’ he says. She feels his teeth biting gently at her neck.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she says, laughing, blindfolded.
She feels him smile. His lips brush hers, moth-like. She takes his wrist and moves his hand from her eyes. She frees herself from him, moving out into the pavement.
‘I have to go home,’ she says.
A taxi rounds corner and she hails it. It swerves to the kerb and he opens the door for her and she gets in.
‘I’m going to the station,’ she says. ‘Do you want a lift?’
He shakes his head. He raises his hand to her in farewell. She looks back at him through the window. He is striding away down the pavement. She glimpses his face under a street light, chiselled, eternal, like a face in a church, a face on a silver coin.
*
The house smells of decay. Tonie goes through the rooms, sniffing. It is stale-sweet, nauseating, like the smell of the care home her grandmother lives in, like the smell of the dead men’s suits that hang in the charity shops on the High Street. She only smells it when she isn’t expecting to. It confronts her among her possessions and then it vanishes, nowhere to be found.
Lately she has been troubled by horrible dreams. They soil her all day with the feeling of dirtiness and unease. They are the dreams of a lunatic. What is it, this black river that runs like a sewer through her sleep? Mostly she dreams about animals. She probes their dumb panic, their cheapness of life and death. Last night she dreamt of a man spearing birds with a garden fork. He wore a parkkeeper’s uniform. He was putting twigs and debris into a municipal wheelbarrow. He was so lumbering and methodical, walking around the silent park. He speared an owl that was sitting on the grass, then a bird with a long neck and beak like a cormorant. He carried each one to his wheelbarrow on the tines of his fork while they looked around with bright, bewildered eyes.
In the mornings she stands at the window, looks into the street. She wants to see concrete things, continuation, people getting in their cars to go to work, the blue or grey of today’s sky. She sees a man at the window opposite, bare-chested, leaning his tattooed arms on the sill to smoke a cigarette into the new day. Down below, the big, distracted lady bursts out of her front door, as she always does at this time, and charges off up the pavement with her arms full of bags. One after another her children come out behind her, following in her wake like ducklings following their mother upstream.
Tonie opens and closes her drawers, looking for clothes. The smell comes out of the third drawer. Formaldehyde, hospitals, rotting bandages. Years ago, the smell of the dirty-grey plaster cast when they took it off her arm. She remembers it, the dead-looking arm underneath, both her and not-her; the realisation that her body was separate from herself, that it could die. And afterwards the faltering sense of space, a rift in the air, something not there that had been there before.
She dresses, like an actor assembling a costume. Head of Department: tailoring for responsibility, black for rebelliousness. She gives thought to this, to her appearance, her part. Today she wears unconventional shoes, a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt under her jacket. She lets her hair go frizzy and wild. She puts things into her satchel, looks at her watch. At this hour of the day each minute is an entity, solid. They cross her consciousness like stepping stones cross a river. She has to be careful not to lose her footing. Upstairs she creeps into Alexa’s darkened room to kiss her sleeping form goodbye. When she does this, it is as though her parents are watching her. They observe her movements with the same upright bafflement as they might watch a foreign art-house film. The smell rises from Alexa’s bed. Later, when Tonie opens the airing cupboard, it billows out at her from the clean sheets and pillowcases. She smells it on her coat; sometimes she smells it on her food. She tries to give it a name: futility, mortality, meaninglessness. It represents the loss of illusion. Down in the kitchen she says to Thomas,
‘Have you noticed a strange smell?’
He thinks about it. ‘What of?’
Death, she thinks. Wasted time. Rotting beliefs, sending out their stench.
He is reading Kobbe’s Complete Opera. He turns one of its thousand pages, wafer-thin, like the pages of the Bible. ‘There was a smell, but I traced it.’