‘Thanks,’ said Ralph, composing himself. He leaned against the cupboards and drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘Which business is it that you’re learning?’
For a moment Francine couldn’t think of what he was talking about.
‘Oh, I’m sure you don’t want to talk about this,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s pretty boring.’
‘No, I’m interested,’ said Ralph. ‘I don’t know anything about the City. I just twiddle my thumbs on the Holloway Road all day writing things that no one’s ever going to read.’ He laughed, as if to himself. ‘Tell me what your company — what’s it called?’
‘Lancing & Louche.’
‘There you go! You’d never find Lancing & Louche on the Holloway Road. Tell me what they do.’
‘They’re financial,’ said Francine. Her thoughts writhed against the bent of the conversation.
‘What, an investment bank?’
‘That sort of thing.’ She looked around her as if she had lose something. ‘I think I’ve left my glass in the other room.’
‘Oh, sorry — let’s go and sit down, shall we?’
Francine headed gratefully for the hall. For a minute Ralph didn’t follow her, and when she looked back she saw him rubbing his face. He blinked his eyes fiercely several times, his eyebrows moving up and down as if in astonishment, and then turned to the oven and opened it. Sensing Francine standing there, he straightened up guiltily.
‘Look, I’ve got a confession to make,’ he said. ‘I know I said we’d go to a restaurant, but then I thought it might be nicer to have something here instead. What do you think?’
The news of a confession had set Francine’s heart thudding and it was a minute before she could understand the meaning of what he had said. When it came, the revelation was something of a disappointment. She was immediately gripped by the suspicion that he had lost interest in her, and didn’t want to be put to the expense or effort of taking her out. The sundry collection of clues which, when amassed, testified to Ralph’s odd and irrational character reinforced this conclusion; but vanity told a different story, and Francine shortly found herself more attracted to the idea that he wanted her all to himself, in a shuttered seclusion where developments could be allowed freely to unfold.
‘Oh, I’m not that hungry anyway,’ she said, weighing up the sacrifice of a restaurant’s glamour, with its opportunities for public appreciation and its tokens of private expense, against this new and uncertain plan. ‘Don’t go to any trouble on my account.’
‘But I want to!’ Ralph replied. ‘I mean, I already have, it’s in the oven — I don’t know if you’ll like it very much, that’s all. It’s only a risotto.’
His presupposal of her agreement to having dinner in his flat was held in the balance, Francine felt, by his already having prepared it. She had heard of girls beings asked to dinner and expected to help, or worse still to do the whole thing themselves. It was not what she had hoped for, but nevertheless Francine could see how Ralph’s behaviour could be construed as heroic when she described it to Janice and perhaps one or two of the secretaries at work. That it was ‘only’ a risotto was more unsettling, but her ignorance of risotto, combined with its admittedly exotic sound, left her no choice but to attribute his qualification to modesty.
‘I love risotto,’ she said, finding, as the word fell easily from her lips, that in fact she really did.
Six
The blind was up over the kitchen window and Ralph could see himself clearly reflected in it, a strange photograph of a private, incoherent moment into which he could gaze and fall. The tide of self-absorption began mounting again in his veins, as it had all evening, and when it drummed insistently behind his eyes he turned away from the window and began busying himself at the kitchen counters to drive it back down into the pool of his stomach.
It required a surprising effort of belief to remember that Francine was in the next room, waiting for the dinner he had said he would bring if she could just leave him alone with his mess for a few moments, and although he knew that the wine had no doubt dampened the ignition of thought and made him an obscure, heavy creature of uncertain impulses, his malfunctioning sense of contingency was lodged in a deeper place more resistant to immediate repair. It was strange to think of how he had travelled so steadily towards this evening with Francine, his destination the object of joyful anticipation, his means of conveyance sure beneath the friction of nerves; the certainty that time would bring it to pass, and that for once he had the heart for the journey, making him lower his guard against the inevitable intervention of other forces to disrupt his passage to happiness. And yet really there had been no other forces; it had all happened as he had hoped it would, except for the one thing that of course he hadn’t expected, the derailment of his own desires!
He had felt a kind of dark exhilaration at moments during the evening, an almost gleeful disbelief at the scandalous abscondment of his proper feelings, and yet his inability to experience the correct sensations in Francine’s presence revealed him to himself in the sinister light of dreams, where the sight of a familiar face is accompanied by the sudden recognition of an unglimpsed evil behind it. He had thought that he knew every channel of himself, the capacity of each vat of his heart and mind and the vacillating measure of spirits within them; but here was a vast, unpatrolled space, a great cellar to which he had rarely opened the door but where he now knew the debris of his disappointments was still stored. Such things he had thought incinerated, long since consigned to dust, but now he had caught the diluted stench of it all over him he knew the residue of his miseries still lived in him, leaking its deleterious perfume daily into his thoughts. Nevertheless, he had always regarded his wounds as things inflicted on him by other people, and it was odd to be spoiling something for himself. He supposed it had happened because Francine had expected him to lead her, had been unable to draw him away from his descent, until he had found himself wishing she would just go home and leave him to plunge back into his darkness.
She had been something of a disappointment to him, in fact; he could admit that now that his hopes for the evening had subsided. When he had opened the door and first seen her, he had had the impression of someone who shouldn’t have been there at all, someone so unrelated to his own life that for a moment it had seemed impossible that the drinks and dinner would still go ahead. It was her clothes, probably, a strange executive uniform which was as resistant to his sensibilities as armour and which made her presence at his door seem unnatural. He knew she must have just come from work, and yet he hadn’t been able to find enough in the personality of her job to fill its outward appearance, and he was left with a sense of her as a strange mannequin who had come to pose in his sitting-room. She was beautiful, of course, but her beauty could find no conduit through which to flow to him: it remained forcefully packed in her face, a disruptive presence.
Of course, he had made a complete fool of himself, spinning idiocies for conversation, capering with the mimicry of charm in the absence of all his better qualities. It had astonished him to discover that even so she was willing to shine for him. He had expected her to be filled with the skills necessary to find him out, blade-sharp with social acumen, but she merely went along with it all with an air of slightly dumbfounded acceptance, for all the world as if his madness was something of which he had mastery! Then again, perhaps the poor girl was only being kind in trying to normalize him; or perhaps, Heaven help her, she too felt herself to be on trial. In his mind he rose and regarded their situation from above. From a larger perspective, things hadn’t been so bad. They had drunk and conversed in a civilized manner, and now Ralph was going to serve dinner. He saw them eating it, their bodies cold and private beneath their clothes, his thoughts swarming at the glass of his eyes.