Ralph moved away quickly. Squashed fruit and bruised bits of vegetable lay trampled on the pavement, strangely ghoulish and unidentifiable, like the detritus of a serious operation. His foot slid on something pulpy and yielding, squelching beneath his shoe and oozing out around the sole. He limped along a few paces despairingly, trying to scrape it off against the kerb. It came away in smears, and by the time he managed to get rid of it he saw that he had spread it over rather a large patch of concrete. He looked around, embarrassed, and then walked awkwardly on as if nothing had happened. Moments later, recognizing the foolishness of his growing discomfort, he stopped at another stall and bought a bag of apples. The bag was made of brown paper and he had to hold it underneath to prevent it from giving way. He moved on, encumbered, through the nervous sunlight. As he approached the end of the small street he saw a well-dressed oriental girl bending over a large rubbish bin as if she had dropped something in it which she wanted to retrieve. She was exceptionally graceful, Ralph thought, fragile and luminous in that way Eastern girls were. People were looking at her as they passed. For a moment he thought ridiculously of offering to help her, but as he drew near he saw to his horror that the girl was clutching her belly with one hand and holding the other to her chest, while neatly depositing long ribbons of mucus and vomit into the bin. Her narrow shoulders shook slightly beneath her tailored jacket. He hesitated as a double wrench of pity and selfishness twisted in his chest. The girl would be grateful for kindness, he knew — she was alone, after all, sick and far from home! — but as he stood there the scope of the city seemed to unfold and chide him, bidding him to keep to himself, to go about his business in its common parts, its streets thick with souls, and then return directly to what was his, to what he knew. He permitted himself to walk past her. Later, walking back in the direction of the lock, he imagined himself stopping to help the girl, his arm strong around her convulsing shoulders, a handkerchief produced to smooth over her glistening lips. She leaned weakly against him, her eyes filled with tears and gratitude. He strained guiltily to return to her, but his legs carried him stubbornly on.
Once, a few years before, he had stopped to help an old woman who had fallen over in the street. It was late and he had come upon her lying on the dark pavement with her skirts around her waist, her mottled legs veined and appalling in the street light. She had smelt unspeakable as he bent down, the awful stink of cheap beer and neglect, and when he tried to pull her skirt down over her legs, fumbling with it ineptly in a parody of male adolescence, she had opened her bleary yellow eyes and watched him helplessly, as if he were an assailant.
‘It’s all right,’ he had said awkwardly. ‘You’re going to be all right.’
She had not been wearing underwear, and her flesh had looked both wizened and bloated, androgynous somehow, identifiable as female only by the bloodless lips of her genitals. A trail of ooze glistened over the tops of her thighs; and Ralph had felt a sudden surge of aversion, not physical revulsion exactly, but more of an intellectual certainty that there was nothing here for him, that to stay would constitute a defection from hope, from aspiration, from the business, the responsibility, even, of being himself. The street had been deserted, he remembered, and there was no one to see him as he left her there, scarcely believing what it was he was doing, and walked slowly on his way while her mute eyes burned at his retreating back.
He stopped at a stall and began fingering cloth, not knowing what he was touching. Some girls were laughing near by and there was something in the sound which caught him and made him look up. Francine Snaith was standing no more than ten feet away from him, with a girl he did not know but whose voice he recognized from the telephone as that of her flatmate. A bolt of surprise stunned him and he drew back slightly, instinctively shrinking from an encounter. Francine was holding by its edge a piece of red silk — a shirt, he could see — while the animated stallholder waved his hands operatically, never taking his eyes from her. Ralph watched her face in profile, drawn by it into something approaching a trance. Her unconscious features welcomed his eyes, proclaimed themselves the property of appreciation, and as he travelled over the pearly surface of her skin, the symmetry of its ridges, the dark pool of her hair, he felt oddly as if he were touching her. She carried an aura of astonishing clarity about her which made everything else appear blurred, as if she were at the focal eye of a camera constantly trained upon her. The stallholder took the shirt by its other edge and they held it between them with an intimacy which struck Ralph as almost painful. Finally he nodded his agreement, and the tranquil surface of Francine’s face broke and made a smile. She dropped the shirt, opening a leather bag which hung from her shoulder and extracting a single note. Her activity buffeted him with waves of troubled longing. The stallholder folded the shirt carefully — caressed it! — and Francine took it, saying something to the girl beside her. She closed her bag and looked up. He had been so intent on observation that he had forgotten she could see him. Suddenly her gaze was upon him and their eyes collided before either could contrive to look away. Far from giving him the advantage of preparation, Ralph found that his minutes of secret gazing had rendered him awkward and detached. For a moment he could do nothing but look. Francine’s face was blank, and the thought that it was consciously so, that she was deciding whether or not to recognize him, flashed upon him during dreadful seconds. Finally, before it was too late, he found himself again and waved his hand. At the signal she hesitated momentarily, as if trying to place him, and then smiled her open acknowledgement.
‘What a surprise!’ he called out as she approached him, pronouncing the words rather too loudly in his determination to be the first to speak. He cursed himself for yesterday’s peremptory telephone message. If only he had known, how much better it would have been to have left things to chance! He felt heavy with the guilty scent of his desire, a desire no response had aired, in which he had been left to steep, and which now emanated a rank odour of rejection which shamed him as keenly and publicly as if he were unwashed.
‘Yes,’ said Francine, reaching him. Her eyes were downcast, and it was a moment before she revealed herself to him. He examined her shyly again in disbelief, as if looking for some mistake in her face which might release him from his giddiness. She looked very calm, not with the suggestion of relaxation or dullness, but rather as if animation did not occur to her. There were no traces of it on her skin, and it struck him as he watched how carefully she held herself that she was surprised by her own beauty, that her custody of it, her refusal to wear it out with base uses, was a constant responsibility. The surprise of her eyes when finally she looked at him almost took away his breath.
‘How are you?’ he said.
‘I’m fine.’
She was wearing a jacket too thin for the cold, and he noticed fondly how her hands had crept within its sleeves for warmth.
‘Good.’ There was a pause, and Ralph felt a terrible blankness envelop his thoughts. For a moment he could seize on nothing which would deliver them from the oncoming silence. ‘I always make the mistake of coming down here on a Sunday,’ he said suddenly, to his own relief. ‘I forget what it’s like. Each time I swear I won’t do it again, and every week I find myself back here elbowing through the crowds.’ He gestured vaguely, like a man doing magic tricks.
‘I like it.’
There was another pause which almost took Ralph to the brink of his endurance as he waited for some sequel to qualify this bleak statement of their differences. Over Francine’s shoulder he could see the other girl waiting, shifting irritably from one leg to the other. She caught his eye and gave him a sudden, encouraging smile. Francine was gazing downwards again. Her eyelashes were so thick and dark against her pale cheek that he wondered clumsily if they were false.