We came into London during the evening rush hour, and after leaving the motorway it was a slow and tiresome drive to Hornsey. You took me to my house, and parked the car outside. I could see the fatigue in your eyes.
“Would you like to come in for a few minutes?” I said.
“Yes, but I won’t stay long.”
We unloaded my stuff from the back of the car. I was watching to see some sign of Niall, but if he climbed out of the car he did so without my noticing. I let us into the house, closing the front door quickly, just in case. It was a senseless precaution, because he had had a key for years. I picked up the small stack of mail waiting for me on the hall table, then opened my room door. As soon as we were inside I closed the door quickly and bolted it, the only way I could be sure of keeping Niall out. You noticed this, but said nothing.
I opened a window at the top, and pulled back the half-drawn curtains. You sat down on the end of the bed.
You said, “Sue, we’ve got to sort this out. Are we going to go on seeing each other?”
“Do you want to?”
“I’d like to—but not with Niall hanging around.”
“It’s all over, I promise you.”
“You’ve said that before. How do I know he isn’t going to turn up again?”
“Because he told me that if I talked to you about him, so that you know what he thinks he’s losing, then he would accept that.”
“All right … what’s the great sacrifice?”
“I told you last night. Niall is an invisible too.”
“Not that again!” You stood up and moved away from me. “I’ll tell you what I think of all that. The only invisibility I’m aware of is this damned ex-boyfriend who follows you around. I’ve never met him, never seen him, and as far as I’m concerned he doesn’t exist! You’ve got to get rid of him, Sue!”
“Yes, I know.”
“All right, we’re both tired. I want to go back to my place and get some sleep. We’ll probably feel different in the morning. Shall we meet for dinner tomorrow evening?”
“Do you want to?”
“I wouldn’t suggest it if I didn’t. I’ll telephone you in the morning.”
On that, after a brief kiss, we parted. I watched you drive away, and had a superstitious feeling I would not see you again. It felt as if we had reached a natural end, one which I had been incapable of preventing. I was helpless in the face of your doubts about invisibility. Niall had undermined everything.
I returned to my room and closed the door, bolting it behind me.
I said, “Niall, are you here?” A long silence followed. “If you’re here, please tell me.”
His absence unnerved me as much as his invisible presence. I walked around the room, thrashing my arms about, trying to find him in case he was staying silent to intimidate me, but at last I was sure I was alone. I opened my suitcase and hung up my clothes, making a heap on the floor of the ones that needed washing. There was no food in the place, but we had stopped for lunch on the way and I was not really hungry. I changed my clothes, putting on jeans and a clean shirt. Then I remembered the pile of mail, and sat on the bed to go through it.
In the middle of the stack of envelopes was a picture postcard.
XIX
The postcard was unsigned, but I knew the handwriting was Niall’s. The message simply read, “Wish you were here,” and underneath was an X. The picture was a modern reproduction of an old black-and-white photograph: a quayside in SaintTropez with a large warehouse in the background. I tried to decipher the postmark, but it was smudged and illegible. The postage stamp was French: the green head of a goddess, France Postes, f. 1.70.
It was undoubtedly from Niall. He never signed his name, and anyway I knew his handwriting. Even the X was flamboyant.
I opened the other letters, skimming through their contents, barely registering them. When I had finished I tipped the envelopes into the wastebasket. The picture postcard lay on the bed.
I still had the bruise on my thigh where Niall had kicked me; I was still slightly stiff from the blow on my back. I vividly remembered the rape, the car with the engine running, the unpacked clothes, the bar of soap dropped on me in the night. I had seen Niall, had spent most of the previous afternoon with him.
How could he have been in France?
The postcard with its derisive message, its showy anonymity, denied everything I had experienced in the last few days.
Either Niall had been following me on my holiday with you, or he had been in France, where he had claimed from the outset he was.
Was I imagining everything?
I remembered the decision I had taken: Niall had to be in France, otherwise I was accepting the madness of the invisible world. I had wanted to act on that, but Niall had appeared in England.
Throughout our trip I had felt the fear of madness, the uncertainty of his visitations. I looked to passers-by as if I were talking to myself; you never saw him; he could rape me while I made love to you and you never knew. He entered and left rooms without my seeing the door open, he was in the car and not in the car, sitting behind us, invisible to us both.
But there were odd and authentic details: his being out of breath after we climbed the hill behind Malvern, the rasp of his pubic hair as he raped me, the clarity of those suspiciously close phone calls, the smell of Gauloises cigarettes in the room and on his breath.
The postcard was an objective disproof of this. It was there, and it had been mailed. It arrived in the impartiality of a bundle of letters.
I tried to think of explanations for the card, however wild. He had bought the card in England, and talked one of his friends into posting it to me from France. But where would you come across a card like this in England? Perhaps he had found it in a shop somewhere, and thought of sending it to me as a way of disorienting me? Niall was capable of something like that, but it was overelaborate. Maybe he had indeed traveled to France when he said, sent the card, then returned? But why? It was implausible, too much trouble to go to when he had other ways of distracting me. And I was still sure those phone calls had come from London.
Anyway, I had seen him. He looked like someone who had been trailing us, unshaven, pale, wearing dirty clothes. He had seemed realistic in every way, bar the madness that kept him out of the real world.
Again the idea of madness. Was it me?
Had I imagined him into existence, an embodiment of guilt, or of my past, or of my conscience?
If I could make myself invisible to the world, was I equally capable of summoning another presence into visibility?
Had I produced Niall out of my unconscious, a visitation of what I wished on myself, what I expected, what I most dreaded?
As I sat there, these turbulent fears whirling through me, I realized I had slipped without noticing it into invisibility. My cloud had intensified because of my terror. I pushed the postcard under the covers of the bed, out of sight.
My invisibility-curse or talent, whichever it might be—was the only area of my life of which I was certain. I knew what I was, and what I could become. It might be my madness, but it was all mine.
I walked across the room and opened the long wardrobe door. I stared into the mirror inside. My reflection came back at me: my hair was untidy, my eyes were dilated. I swung the door to and fro, trying to confuse the image, trying to make myself not see—but I was always there. I remembered the trick Mrs. Quayle had played on me, concealing a mirror so that in my surprise I failed to see myself. Only Mrs. Quayle had believed in my talent more than I did.
Both Niall and you eroded my self-confidence, in different ways: Niall by his behavior, you by disbelieving. I had thought that by bringing you into the world of the invisibles you would see me as I really was, and by understanding would show me the way out of it. Niall, for converse reasons, held me back, or tried to. You were each the complement of the other, suspending me between you.