“Did I tell you I love your mouth?”
“Several times.”
She stubbed the cigarette out and sat back.
“Do you know why I cried just now? Because I’m going to marry him. As soon as he comes back, I’m going to marry him. Because he’s all I deserve.” She sat leaning back against the wall. The too-large shirt, a small female boy with a swollen, hurt face, staring at me, staring at the bedcover, in our silence. “I’m a nympho.”
“It’s just a phase. You’re unhappy.”
“I’m unhappy when I stop and think. When I wake up and see what I am.”
“Thousands of girls do it.”
“I’m not thousands of girls. I’m me.” She slipped the shirt over her head, then retreated under the bedclothes. “What’s your real name? Your surname?”
“Urfe. U, R, F, E.”
“Mine’s Kelly. Was your dad really a brigadier?”
“Yes. Just.”
She gave a timid mock salute, then reached out a brown arm and took my hand. I sat down beside her.
“Don’t you think I’m a tramp?”
Perhaps then, as I was looking at her, so close, I had my choice. I could have said what I was thinking: Yes, you are a tramp, and even worse, you exploit your tramphood, and I wish I’d taken your sister-in-law-to-be’s advice. Perhaps if I had been farther away from her, on the other side of the room, in any situation where I could have avoided her eyes, I could have been decisively brutal. But those gray, searching, always candid eyes, by their begging me not to lie, made me lie.
“I like you. Really very much.”
“Come back to bed and hold me. Nothing else. Just hold me.”
I got into bed and held her. Then for the first time in my life I made love to a woman in tears.
She was in tears more than once that first Saturday. She went down to see Maggie about five and came back with red eyes. Maggie had told her to get out. Half an hour later Ann, the other girl in the flat, one of those unfortunate women whose faces fall absolutely flat from nostrils to chin, came up. Maggie had gone out and wanted Alison to remove all her things. So we went down and brought them up. I had a talk with Ann. In her quiet, rather prim way she showed more sympathy for Alison than I was expecting; Maggie was evidently and aggressively blind to her brother’s faults.
For days, afraid of Maggie, who for some reason stood in her mind as a hated but still potent monolith of solid Australian virtue on the blasted moor of English decadence, Alison did not go out except at night. I went and bought food, and we talked and slept and made love and danced and cooked meals at all hours, sous les toits, as remote from ordinary time as we were from the dull London world outside the window.
Alison was always female; she never, like so many English girls, betrayed her gender. She wasn’t beautiful, she very often wasn’t even pretty. But she had a fashionably thin boyish figure, she had a contemporary dress sense, she had a conscious way of walking, and her sum was extraordinarily more than her parts. I would sit in the car and watch her walking down the street towards me, pause, cross the road; and she looked wonderful. But then when she was close, beside me, there so often seemed to be something rather shallow, something spoilt-child, in her prettiness. Even close to her, I was always being wrong-footed. She would be ugly one moment, and then some movement, look, angle of her face, made ugliness impossible.
When she went out she used to wear a lot of eye shadow, which married with the sulky way she sometimes held her mouth to give her a characteristic bruised look; a look that subtly made one want to bruise her more. Men were always aware of her, in the street, in restaurants, in pubs; and she knew it. I used to watch them sliding their eyes at her as she passed. She was one of those rare, even among already pretty, women that are born with a natural aura of sexuality: always in their lives it will be the relationships with men, it will be how men react, that matters. And even the tamest sense it.
There was a simpler Alison, when the mascara was off; she had not been typical of herself, that first evening; but still always a little unpredictable, ambiguous. One never knew when the more sophisticated, bruised-hard persona would reappear. She would give herself violently; then yawn at the wrongest moment. She would spend all one day clearing up the flat, cooking, ironing, then pass the next three or four bohemianly on the floor in front of the fire, reading Lear, women’s magazines, a detective story, Hemingway—not all at the same time, but bits of all in the same afternoon. She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.
One day she came back with an expensive fountain pen.
“For monsieur.”
“But you shouldn’t.”
“It’s okay. I stole it.”
“Stole it!”
“I steal everything. Didn’t you realize?”
“Everything!”
“I never steal from small shops. Only the big stores. They ask for it. Don’t look so shocked.”
“I’m not.” But I was. I stood holding the pen gingerly. She grinned.
“It’s just a hobby.”
“Six months in Holloway wouldn’t be so funny.”
She had poured herself a whisky. “Santé. I hate big stores. And not just capitalists. Pommy capitalists. Two birds with one steal. Oh, come on, sport, smile.” She put the pen in my pocket. “There. Now you’re a cassowary after the crime.”
“I need a Scotch.”
Holding the bottle, I remembered she had “bought” that as well. I looked at her. She nodded.
She stood beside me as I poured. “Nicholas, you know why you take things too seriously? Because you take yourself too seriously.” She gave me an odd little smile, half tender, half mocking, and went away to peel potatoes. And I knew that in some obscure way I had offended her; and myself.
One night I heard her say a name in her sleep.
“Who’s Michel?” I asked the next morning.
“Someone I want to forget.”
But she talked about everything else; about her English-born mother, genteel but dominating; about her father, a stationmaster who had died of cancer four years before.
“That’s why I’ve got this crazy between voice. It’s Mum and Dad living out their battles again every time I open my mouth. I suppose it’s why I hate Australia and I love Australia and I couldn’t ever be happy there and yet I’m always feeling homesick. Does that make sense?”
She was always asking me if she made sense.
“I went to see the old family in Wales. Mum’s brother. Jesus. Enough to make the wallabies weep.”
But she found me very English, very fascinating. Partly it was because I was “cultured,” a word she often used. Pete had always “honked” at her if she went to galleries or concerts. She mimicked him: “What’s wrong with the boozer, girl?”
One day she said, “You don’t know how nice Pete is. Besides being a bastard. I always know what he wants, I always know what he thinks, and what he means when he says anything. And you, I don’t know anything. I offend you and I don’t know why. I please you and I don’t know why. It’s because you’re English. You couldn’t ever understand that.”
She had finished high school in Australia, and had even had a year doing languages at Sydney University. But then she had met Pete, and it “got complicated.” She’d had an abortion and come to England.
“Did he make you have the abortion?”
She was sitting on my knees.
“He never knew.”
“Never knew!”
“It could have been someone else’s. I wasn’t sure.”
“You poor kid.”
“I knew if it was Pete’s he wouldn’t want it. And if it wasn’t his he wouldn’t have it. So.”
“Weren’t you—”
“I didn’t want a baby. It would have got in the way.” But she added more gently, “Yes, I was.”