His glass was empty and he poured more wine into it. He never saw Belinda now, hadn’t seen her for two years actually. She had tried to be his friend, he supposed, but he had messed it up, unable to stand the sight or sound of her, really, everything she did without him hurting him. She had said that had upset her more than anything else. It made him laugh. He laughed now, the sound ghostly in the empty flat. At least she didn’t see Stephen either, pretty much the only good thing to have come out of that time. Not that Stephen cared, of course, but it would have made Ralph’s main achievement of the last two years — never thinking about Belinda — that much more difficult. He was thinking about her now, though, he could feel himself doing it. He drained his glass and held the bottle once more at its rim. His hand shook, and the two glass lips chattered against each other loudly. At the sound, a quite unstoppable feeling of fear began to steal over him. He had worked so hard to compress all of that, to hammer it down and keep it somewhere out of sight, but here it was springing up in all its large, noisy mockery, and for a moment he couldn’t remember how he had ever managed to crush and contain it. He tried to think of something else — Francine, that was right — but everything around him suddenly seemed so foreign and far away that he could not place himself within it. A great shiver shook him as spools of memory began to unreel messily across his thoughts, scenes hurtling by in the gallop towards the blackest part of himself, the only thing he ever thought of as true and yet it was so fantastic, so easy to deny — as they had both denied it! — that he thought he had cut it off for ever, that he would never go there again. He clenched his fists on the table and felt something burn at his eyes, so hot and dry that it seemed wrung from the tight and boiling ball of his heart. His misery struggled and was born; and when it did so everything seemed to stop, to accept the impossibility of going on, as if he had some place in the world where he reigned, a small place where he could say the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow if he didn’t want it to.
The doorbell rang, and Ralph jumped in reflex as the loud voltage pealed through him. Its alarm dispersed slowly into silence, and it was a while before it reconstituted itself in his thoughts. Francine was at the door. Everything seemed foggy and submerged, and he stood up heavily, realizing that he felt quite drunk. He set off down the hall, his footsteps loud as earthquakes in his ears.
Five
Francine stood outside Ralph’s front door and used the delay between her ringing the bell and his answering it to make some last-minute adjustments to her appearance. She unbuttoned the jacket she had been forced by cold to fasten during the walk from the Tube station — she had compared the two styles several times during the day, before the large mirror in the ladies’, and had concluded that the open front was more flattering — and inspected the blouse beneath to make sure it had not been deranged by its period of enclosure. It was slightly flattened and she plucked at it expertly until it hung in a more becoming fashion, casting as she did so a keen eye over the glimmering vista of her stockinged legs. They appeared undamaged by their journey, but she craned her head and twisted first one leg and then the other to afford her a view from behind, just in case. She had debated bringing a set of different clothes in a bag to work so as to change into them at the end of the day and thus appear more casual, but when she considered that the tailored suits and high-heeled shoes she wore to the office revealed her to her best advantage, the necessity of travelling directly from the City to Ralph’s flat appeared to provide the perfect excuse for remaining in them.
The street was quiet and motionless, and in the absence of its activity Francine felt the thin, freezing night air penetrate her clothing and touch her skin. Ralph was taking a long time to answer the door. The thought of his panic pleased her, but in view of the fact that she had lingered shivering at dark shop windows on the way to ensure the expiry of a full half hour beyond the time on which they had decided, she had expected him to be straining with anxious readiness for her arrival. She turned on her heel in irritation so that her back was to the door — he would certainly get the message when he finally decided to open it! — and wearily assumed an aspect of contemplation towards the street. It was really very cold now, and she knew that the pale skin on her nose and chin tended to become inflamed in such conditions. The thought kindled a flame of indignation at her predicament, and she had just turned to ring petulantly a second time when she heard a sudden thunder of footsteps and the rattling of locks as the door opened.
The hall behind him was dark, and Ralph seemed different standing there from the person Francine remembered. In the grey illumination of the street lamps his face looked severe, almost unfriendly, and there was something complex in his unfamiliarity which sent a tremor of aversion through her. For a moment he didn’t say anything at all, and without his direction Francine found herself unable to act. Experience had created the expectation that her reception would be a warm and windless affair, a meteorological certainty brought about by the constant current of her attractions, and she naturally shrank from the coolness of Ralph’s greeting.
‘Hello,’ he said finally, still standing in the doorway as if he had no intention of permitting her to progress beyond it. A strong instinct informed Francine that things were not proceeding in the correct way.
‘I thought you weren’t in,’ she said. Her voice twanged unkindly in her ears, forgetting its recent lessons in intonation, but the sight of Ralph made her feel horribly as if she didn’t care what he thought. In fact, the situation was growing every minute less acceptable — why was he making her stand there in the cold, looking at her with that rude expression? — and had the rejection it implied not compelled her to endure it for the purposes of investigation, she felt sure she would have turned around that minute and gone home. All at once, as if sensing their arrival at the threshold of an impossibility, Ralph, although apparently at the expense of some effort, underwent the necessary transformation.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, the pale plate of his face breaking into a smile. He turned and switched on the hall light. ‘I was on the phone when you rang the bell and I couldn’t seem to get away — sorry, do come in.’ He stood back to allow her in, his cheeks suffused with colour as he ran a hand over his hair. ‘Sorry, you must be frozen — sorry, come in. How are you?’
In the light of the hall, Francine felt the situation returning once more to dimensions she recognized. She looked at Ralph and was alarmed to notice a curious dark stain on his lips, like blood. He smiled again reassuringly, ushering her with his arm towards an open door on the right.
‘It’s just through there,’ he said. ‘Go ahead.’
Her inability to comprehend it, as well as Ralph’s belated restitution of the appropriate behaviour, encouraged her to forget what had just happened. She followed his directions and found herself in a large, warm room glowing with lamplight. Its welcoming atmosphere exerted an immediate improvement upon her spirits, and she even managed to summon some enthusiasm for the thought of how flattering the gentle light must be to her complexion.
‘I’ll just get you a glass of wine,’ said Ralph from the doorway. ‘Make yourself at home.’
He disappeared and moments later she heard the proper sounds of the kitchen, the thump of cupboard doors and the clink of glasses. The room was really quite elegant, and although Francine thought the presence of heavy curtains and shelves full of books and what looked like second-hand furniture a bit old-fashioned, still it had a kind of authority which she judged to be pleasing. The floor was wooden — a feature she knew from magazines to be fashionable, and for which she awarded Ralph credit, notwithstanding the fact that she secretly thought the effect somewhat miserly — and there was a fireplace at the other end with a mirror over it. She immediately crossed the room and stood in front of it to see if the ordeals of the interlude between her last reflection in the office toilets and her arrival here had wrought any unwanted changes. Surprisingly, she actually looked improved by the exercise, and she peered more closely, suspecting the dim light of concealment. Magnified, the image was still pleasing and Francine regarded it with satisfaction. She had never known her appearance not to be well behaved, but she was wiser than to let this consideration relax her discipline of it.