She raised her eyebrows, blew some air into her cheeks, trying to give her face the one expression it could never naturally assume — a stupid, deceived cast.
Blinded by these men? Could it ever have been so? Was she really one of those women who are natural camp followers, taken and used everywhere, only to be discarded at the final battle? I didn’t think so.
There was a simpler explanation. She had been as close to Henry and the Colonel, as involved, as it’s possible to be. She had given them every truth about herself. But she didn’t really know them at all. So the passion was maintained — on mystery, on things that could never be counted. In my case, where there had been gross expectations and disappointment, she had come to know everything about me, so that we fell apart.
“If you ever do get out of here what will you do? What do you want — something in Holborn?” It was a rhetorical question; I knew she’d never be sorting cables on the fourth floor. The risk would have been too great with anyone who had been so directly involved with Henry. I supposed, if she did get back, they would give her some money and help her to find a small flat. Already I saw her as a burden, as someone I might have to remember Christmas cards for, wilting away like a poor cousin in Kensington. But perhaps she might decide to go to Israel.
“Or go to Israel?”
“No. Not that and not Holborn. I can get out of the whole thing now. I can do that at last.”
“I’ll go to the Consulate library tomorrow morning, get a proper message through to London. Then we can decide.”
“You surely won’t get near the Consulate. Or the library. They’ll have the place surrounded.”
“We’ll see. We’ll think of something.” I didn’t know what, for she was right.
“Yes,” she said easily, “let’s think about it tomorrow.”
The heat, with the whisky, had made us sweat. I got up and poured some more. There was nothing else to do. The apartment smelt of rotten lilac, powder and tobacco — curtains of different steaming smells as one moved across it. My face was burning, pumping with blood; and my heel had started to throb. I gave Bridget what was left in the bottle.
“You always dress out here like an Arctic explorer, Peter. Why is it?”
I looked at her, wondering if she had introduced this old sartorial theme with the same sexual innuendo behind it that we had understood so readily years before. But her expression was no more than tired inquiry; she seemed to have quite forgotten its earlier implications. I was annoyed at thinking differently. For me she was a woman who had come to mean exactly what she said; there were no overtones with her now. It was all precise words; and the words would support us as long as we used them officially, kept them to the professional matters in hand. They would bear no real weight.
Yet her remarks about my dress reminded me — as something dead but otherwise intensely real in a museum — of the life they once had: a talisman still capable of stirring desire. She had used those same words once, with feeling, and they would do now as encouragement for any woman.
“I’m hot, that’s all. I’ll take a shower and lie down. I’m exhausted.”
“Don’t eat any of the food.” Her voice trailed casually after me as I left the room. “It’s all bad, I’m afraid.”
She had tucked her legs up beneath her on the sofa, shoes spilled on the floor, kness bent double like two delicate ivory ornaments, Bhuddist carvings beneath the dark hem of her skirt which had risen up her thighs. She was sitting in a way she never used to — except when we were alone together, high up in Garden City, the windows open, waiting for the evening. An unthinking remnant of our intimacy had survived at least, I thought, but only as a formality, with no more meaning than the chivalry we mimic in shaking hands with a stranger.
I let the shower play over my face and through my mouth, spitting out water and saliva and the taste of whisky every now and then in white-flecked oily globules which ran slowly in the rushing stream along the bottom of the bath, before gathering speed in the current and spinning furiously into the whirlpool of the drain.
I almost fell asleep on my feet looking at the liquid cone of water, and I would certainly have dropped off had I been taking a bath. But I wanted to stay awake.
The drawing-room was empty when I got back, towelling my hair, just wearing my pants, and I went along the corridor to the bedroom we’d been in. The door was half open, light shining through into the darkness beyond. Bridget was in the huge bed, beneath a single sheet, arched on her side, facing me. She opened her eyes.
“I’m sorry.” I let the towel fall around my shoulders. After the long rush of cold water I felt a moment’s chill run down my back and shuddered. “I’m going on the sofa. Goodnight.”
I had my hand on the door ready to close it. “Shall I close the door?” But already, in asking the question, I had opened the door slightly, moved a fraction into the room.
“Come in. Close the door.”
She pulled the sheet back as I walked towards the bed.
Of course, I said to myself, if we hadn’t drunk so much, been so tired, it would never have happened. It was a combination of despair, drink and exhaustion which had made our bed for us that night, I thought. But I thought wrong.
She wanted me as much as I did her: we were equally dedicated to the idea. Now that there were no overtones, no emotion, no backlog of frustration and no future to the business, we could give ourselves to each other with the same uncluttered vehemence as we’d done on the first occasion we’d met. There was nothing perverse in it; it was purely self-seeking. We took to each other with the sharpest sort of appetite — that of perfect strangers.
No sixth sense warned us that the future might be sour, the next morning or a month hence. We didn’t have that sort of future and we knew it. No debts would have to be paid, nothing lay in wait for us; no days over the smelly summer river, arguments over coffee at the Semiramis, or lies with dinner at the Estoril; no plots, misunderstandings; no tears or departure; no Usher and no Henry — no one to manipulate the slight events we might try and shape our lives with. There was no more of that life to shape. The professional, the personal, exploitation was at an end.
I had arrived in a country years before where nothing was as it seemed, a territory defended everywhere against trust, and I had come now to a broken barrier at the end of a smashed and empty landscape, a deserted customs post — to a point where no one stopped or chased you; where you simply stepped over the border and walked away.
She must have gone very early. I had woken once in the night and seen her leave the room, the long naked back and widely-spaced legs moving in clear silhouette towards the shaft of light in the corridor, sharply isolating the narrow rectangle between her thighs.
And then I had woken a second time, abruptly with a headache in the darkness, the place beside me empty, and I had stayed where I was, waiting for her to come back as before, eager for her again. But I knew within moments that this time she had really left.
I moved fretfully around the apartment, wondering what she had taken with her, looking for some evidence that would tell me she had gone, and where, perhaps, and why. But there was nothing; a few of her clothes in the wardrobe, a sleeveless white dress I’d remembered her in, some soiled cosmetics on the dressing table, a small pile of underwear on the bathroom floor.
Not London, she had said. And not Israel. She was simply getting out of it all. But where? I almost began to miss her — that infection of sex, as if she and I had, after all, a future. There was a surge of bitterness, a moment’s fierce resentment that I had lost her once more and would now have to start the search for her all over again.