Hear my old Dad licking his chops in the background? — she is no goddess of loveliness, but a human girl, all right. If she were not he would not pine after her as achingly as he does. It is their very humanness he covets, the salacious old rip.
Neither of them brought nightwear, and Helen, excitingly to Adam, has on Adam’s shirt that he wore yesterday, pale blue, like his undersized pyjamas, with a faint white stripe. She is still looking at him strangely, with a strange surmise. The small, square room is shoddily furnished with things that over the years since it ceased to be his have migrated to here from elsewhere in the house. There is the old-fashioned high bed, two bedside lockers painted a sickly shade of chocolate brown, a spindle-legged table, ditto, bearing a china basin with matching jug and a speckled oval shaving mirror on a wooden stand; there is a straw-bottomed chair and, on the floor at the foot of the bed, a brassbound mahogany chest with SS Esmerelda inscribed in neat poker-work on the lid. Some old things of his remain, too, a glue-encrusted model aeroplane on a stand, a faded poster of a football team pinned to the wall, a hurley stick standing in a corner like the long leg-bone of some fleet creature. The floor is of rough-hewn pitchpine beams that have driven a splinter into many an unprotected toe. The window opposite the bed is shaded with a muslin blind, and the room is filled with a powdery white effulgence that seems to slow everything down a beat; there is the musty smell of sleep.
“I was awake,” Adam says. “I went downstairs. Did you hear the train?”
Helen’s frown deepens and she tilts her head to one side and looks at him hard, as if she thinks he is teasing her and is cautioning him to stop. What colour are her eyes? They must be blue, yes, dark blue and deep as the Grecian sea itself. Her head is an exquisite, cream-and-gold inverted egg that sits on its pale length of neck as on a plinth of polished stone. She has cut her hair in a new fashion, close to the skull in countless imbricated layers like flakes of gold leaf; he is not sure he likes it in this style but would not dare to say so. In the matter of his wife and the things she does or does not do he feels he is standing astride the hub of a great steel disc that is spinning at an immense speed and that at the tiniest ill-judged action on his part will begin to wobble wildly and a second later fly off its spindle with terrible shrieks and clangs and send him flailing into darkness and irreparable damage. “You were here, not downstairs,” she says, more in puzzlement than contradiction. “You were here, with me.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
She gives an odd, dry laugh. “Is that so?” Her tone too puzzles him; she must still be half in a dream. One naked foot has kicked free the hem of the sheet; he notes the heel’s callused rim and his already smitten chest seems to open and let something fly out, like a bird out of a clock, love’s desperate cuckoo. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says. “I’m sopping.”
When she steps from the bed the tails of the blue shirt open briefly in front and he catches a glimpse of her russet fleece. He wants to touch her, to detain and hold her. There is a grain of sleep at the canthus of her left eye, the one that has a slight and captivating droop. She brushes past him and as she goes to the door he is treated to a brief view under the shirt-tails of two pale half-moons of pendent, glimmering flesh. He imagines licking that fleck of hardened gleet from the corner of her eye with just the very tip of his tongue. Sopping?
He kneels on the side of the bed and leans deeply forward on his hands as if prostrating himself in prayer and buries his face in the still-warm nest in the bedclothes where until a moment ago his wife was sitting.
The tiny bathroom is wedge-shaped, narrowing from the door to where the handbasin and the single small window are, which makes the place feel all the more cramped. Half the space is taken up by an enamel bath the size of a sarcophagus with a chipped rim and brown and yellowish-green streaks running down from the taps. Over the bath there is a giant geyser, also enamel-plated, also chipped, which long ago ceased to function but which no one has thought to have removed. The first time Helen came to stay at Arden and was unwise enough to take a bath here she stood up and cut her head on the sharp edge of the brass spigot that sticks out under the hole where the pilot light used to be. That was before she was married to Adam. Married. The word stops her, as it always does. It has to her ears an antiquated and faintly indecent ring, like one of those innocent-sounding words in the old plays, swive, or fig, or mutuality.
The window looks down on a field of thistles and, farther on, a circular dark wood that seems to huddle around itself in fear of something, and over which now the morning sun is pouring in vain its somehow heartless cheer. When she is outside she can never seem to locate that field, or that wood — how is that? — not that she would spend much time searching for them. It is just another of the place’s many small but exasperating mysteries. She is a city girl and finds the countryside either dull or worrying, or both.
She hikes up the shirt she is wearing by grasping a handful of it at the front and lowers herself on to the lavatory like, she thinks, a big white soft hen getting ready to lay an egg. The antique lavatory seat is a mighty frame of varnished, maroon-coloured wood that reminds her of the collar of a work-horse — but where would she ever have seen such a thing? — and feels cold and sticky at first and then warm and stickier still. She listens in mild dismay to the splashings and ploppings going on underneath her. She is sure she can be heard all over the house. She plants her hands on her bare knees and gazes straight ahead of her at nothing. White light glows on the patch of pale-yellow wall in front of her. She hears from below scraps of the life of the house going on, people talking, a door opening and shutting, a dull thud that could be anything; the dog barks, three unemphatic woofs; that door again, banging this time; light steps on the stairs; a brusque, back-and-forth rattling as someone riddles the cinders in a grate. Why is it that people heard from afar like this, in distant rooms on other floors, always sound as if they are doing things — confiding, fighting, striking loud deals — far more interesting than the mundane things that they are really engaged in?
It seems old Adam is going to die, the doctors say so, and everyone except Ursula has given up hope. It is strange to think of him not being here any more, at Arden; strange to think of him not being anywhere. What is it like to die, she wonders, what is it like to be dead? Is it like anything? Like being under an anaesthetic, perhaps, with the forgetful anaesthetist gone home and all the lights in the operating theatre turned off and the doors locked and the last squeaky footsteps fallen silent down all the long corridors. She is not sure what she is meant to feel about this coming death. She knows the old man lusts after her — lusted, now — she has seen him eyeing her when he thought she was not noticing, has seen how he puts his head back, running his nails through the underneath of his beard, and how that white patch of skin between his eyebrows creases as if he were in faint pain. It gives her the shivers to think of it now. Yet he must have been handsome, once, beautiful, even, with that narrow brow and those deeply indented temples, the sharp nose and the large, slightly slanted, glistening black eyes. He is nothing like his son — how can the two of them be so different? But she would not have wanted to be married to old Adam, and not just because he is dying. Why, then? Something uncanny in him; something cold.