‘It doesn’t bother me at all, you know that. I’m not the one who lies awake.’ She spread a cloth on the table and filled two glasses. ‘Just a few things of my own, that’s all I ask. I don’t like charity.’
And the men at the ballroom? What did she call the drinks they bought her at their clubs? ‘You’re not in all that much,’ he said.
‘It’s not my fault if you won’t come with me.’
‘Can’t afford to come with you, you mean.’ His words thrust like a tongue toward an aching tooth. His fingers traced his inside pocket, the photograph symmetrical with his heart.
‘Don’t, don’t. You’re hurting yourself.’ She carried a glass to him. As he took it, she laid her hand on his within the concealed rectangle. ‘You can’t be both a civil servant and a painter. Don’t try for so much or you’ll lose everything,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave the flat to look after itself for tonight. Our room is ours.’
‘Do hurry,’ she said, ‘I’m so tired.’ Deflated, he lay back. In a minute the moonlit sheet over her breasts was rising and falling like surf. He inched to sit up. His side of the bed was a scribble of shadow like paint scrawled in fury. Perhaps this might be meaningful on canvas. Bedroom Scene, The Marriage Bed—but he couldn’t express their marriage. She had been a civil service typist; as she’d passed him, glanced and smiled, his pen had come erect between his fingers; the next time she passed he had sketched the memory. When she came to look he’d said ‘I’d like to paint you.’ ‘That would be nice,’ she’d replied, ‘but not nude.’ Baulked, for she had destroyed his dream, he’d postponed the offer through months of clumsy dancing in ballrooms where smoke billowed to meet clouds of false stars, of hands across club tables at one in the morning; seeking to possess her, he’d foregone the rushing skies, the stretched clouds, the combed and recombed grass, which met at his easel and poured into his brush, and he’d suffocated. When they emerged from the cramped registrar’s he’d found he couldn’t paint. On the wedding night she’d cried out; briefly he’d possessed her. Yet before the honeymoon was over he’d yearned for something more; he’d gazed from the hotel at rumpled trees, humped hillside walls where the girl from the photograph might have stood and smiled. ‘Don’t forget to give in your notice,’ he’d reminded his wife. ‘I’ll keep you.’ Perhaps thus he could possess her. But his walks possessed the breasts of the hills, the splayed thighs of the valleys. Then one night he’d been whipped home by a storm and had found her gone. An hour later she’d slammed the front door, gasping happily, thrilled by the leaping rain, and had halted at the sight of him sunk deep in a dark chair. She’d stroked his hair; rain coursed down their merged faces like tears. They’d gone upstairs to find the house was cracked; rain dripped somewhere. They couldn’t afford the repairs, and at last they’d agreed before a landlord’s card bulged and distorted by the trembling globes of a new rain: this flat, close to the country as she’d said, closer to the raw red sign of the ballroom round the corner as he’d thought. He slid down the bed to mould himself to her, but she was still asleep. He turned over. The moonlight fell short of the wardrobe, where his suit hid the photograph. The cupboard of books was held within skins of sleep which weighed on his eyes; next to it, his easel was a dusty blackboard. As he drowsed into sleep, he thought the cupboard opened.
‘Wear your nice suit today,’ she said. ‘I like to see you in it.’
‘All right, for you.’ The sunlight slid from cars and coated leaves with light; it might become a painting. He collected pens and wallet from the table by the bed and followed her into the living-room. As he entered she drew the table-cloth across a brilliant sheet of pressed sunlight and pinned it down with bowls of cereal; through the sheet he’d seen its carved legs, shaped as by caresses. ‘If you think we can’t afford furniture,’ she mused, ‘I could always go back to work.’
‘I don’t think that’s called for.’ Shaped as by caresses. His hand stole beneath the cloth and touched the wood. Slowly, exquisitely, his fingers traced the curves. He saw the leg braced on the wall, the taut skirt. His wife picked up her spoon; it blazed at the edge of his eye. Unlacquered, her hair glowed. Suddenly ashamed, he reached out and stroked her knee.
‘Not when you’re eating, please,’ she said. ‘Your hands are greasy.’
At the door he realized that he couldn’t go back for the photograph; if he did his wife would know. Instead, he looked up at the window through the leaves piled like her hair. The pane was white as an empty canvas; within, a figure shielded her eyes and waved.
When he came home that night his mind was covered with sketches, erased lines, sheets half-torn and reassembled with conjecture. He’d imagined the tree-lined street washed by headlamps as the girl had seen it, staring down, perhaps for a last glimpse of whoever had abandoned her — the unknown hand on the camera shutter no longer holding hers. In the lunch-hour he’d sketched on the back of a form, but the sketch had lacked a sight of the reality. ‘Don’t lay the table yet,’ he told his wife as he veered into the kitchen, ‘I have an idea I want to get down.’ The people in the flat below were across the city when the girl had screamed and fallen, but they were sure that she had been abandoned; a drained husk, perhaps she’d thought that she might float toward the empty landscape. He set up his easel before the window. The room seemed more cramped than he remembered; he would have to sit on the bed. He projected the girl on the pane, but she refused to pose; her foot poised on the sill, the weighted falling sun shone through her skirt. That wasn’t what he wanted. Already the street-lamps were raw wounds on the night; a tree shed a leaf like a flake of skin. If he could see her perhaps be would be able to persuade her to pose. He crossed to the wardrobe and felt in the pocket for the photograph. There was no pocket. The suit was gone.
You did that on purpose, said his nails biting into the wood. The sun sank and touched the black horizon. He tramped into the kitchen. ‘So you got rid of my suit,’ he said.
‘You don’t think I wouldn’t ask you first?’ Behind her head a curtain swayed like a skirt. ‘It’s only at the cleaner’s. You’re an artist — I’d have thought you’d care how you looked.’
‘So that I’ll get on, I know. I didn’t think you’d go behind my back.’
‘If there was anything in it you wanted I’m sorry, honestly I am. I couldn’t find anything.’
‘Nothing I haven’t already got.’
‘This table really is too small, you know,’ she said. The cruet came down hard on the clothed glass. She knows! it exclaimed. Or had she fumbled it rather than thumped it down as a protest? No, he was sure she had the photograph. She withdrew herself from him by sleeping, then she stole his souvenir. The carved leg pressed his. ‘I like the flat as it stands,’ he told her. ‘It welcomes me.’
As he stood before the cupboard plates chattered in the kitchen. No doubt the girl had washed up for her lover; perhaps they’d eaten at two in the morning, their hours based on their shared rhythm, not imposed from outside — the sort of life he meant when he yearned to be bohemian. Arms about each other, they’d tire together when at all. He opened the cupboard door; he would find a book which might suggest a detail to extend across his empty canvas. In the shadows the titles were dim. He knew each by its place. He touched the tip of a spine, and a finger flattened beneath his own.
He wasn’t menaced; he didn’t recoil. Instead he reached up and brought the glove to his face. It glimmered white on his palm. The fingers were stiff, perhaps starched. He held it by the knuckles and let the fingers rest arched on his hand.