As someone liberal enough in the old days, who certainly hated any kind of physical threat, I find it difficult to understand the depth and breadth of this violence within me: at Marcus, at Ross, at the world generally perhaps. Even on a philosophical level my reactions may seem extreme, for one can say that, in any case, an end is implicit in even the greatest happiness and to have had such at all, even as briefly as I had, is to have had a sufficient share, in a world where many have none. One could argue that quality, not duration is the significant thing in love. But I can’t argue that, not at all, not for a moment.
And the question remains: why, once reasonably human, am I living up a tree now, back in a savage state, worse than an animal in that I seek vicious retribution, no matter how long it takes, certain that I am right? The only way to account for the strength of this anger, perhaps, is to remember the depth of that earlier peace.
Two
‘Bom Dias!’
The vague old man who ran the lifts in the Avenida Palace Hotel bade us good morning as we came down from my bedroom that afternoon.
‘“Bom Dias” indeed.’ I turned to Laura afterwards. ‘It’s nearly four o’clock.’
That was the first time we made love, in August, almost a year ago in the heavy, gilt-decorated room I had in the old belle-époque hotel, at the bottom of the Avenida da Liberdade, Lisbon’s Champs Elysées, which ran straight through most of the city, like an arrow, down into Pombal’s magnificent eighteenth-century town by the waterfront, with the hills all round, climbing into the summer winds, where you could follow the breeze up in street lifts, ancient trams or along steeply rising cobbled alleyways.
‘Shall we have some tea?’
‘Shall we walk?’ I said.
‘It doesn’t matter what.’
The city was an open invitation. We had no appointments. Clare was at home with her grandparents in the suburb of Cascais. Laura looked at me, still with bedroom glints in her eyes as we passed through the lobby, and I had that sudden sharp feeling, in the pit of my stomach, of youth, when age doesn’t push any more, at least, and there is no end to things in the air.
The hotel was being redecorated that summer. There was a smell of paint everywhere downstairs and sawdust where they were cutting out the wood from an old cloakroom, carpenters sawing away like animals in dark corners.
‘The Retournados,’ Laura said. ‘There were nearly a million of them, ex-colonials back from Angola and Mozambique: the government put them up for months in all the luxury hotels in town. Now they’re “refurbishing” them.’
‘A million of them?’
‘Well, the lucky ones. Four in a bed, I suppose.’
‘The beds are big enough.’
‘Yes.’
We remembered. We’d had lunch that day in the great panelled dining-room, with its mirrors and canopy of chandeliers, on the first floor, the lifts just down the corridor outside, the old man off duty, so that no one had seen us go upstairs afterwards. Not that they’d have cared one way or the other, I fancy. The Portuguese, I’d found in over a month’s stay in the country, had a classic restraint, a politeness in almost every matter; the last people in Europe, it seemed, with such old-fashioned virtues.
But perhaps the old liftman not being there made things easier for us, in our own minds at least, for we were both of us old enough ourselves, with similarly formal backgrounds, to remember all such ancient prohibitions.
Laura wasn’t a prude. She just had a lot of out-of-date manners. She liked to do things in an acceptable way. Despite, or more likely because of, her obvious beauty, she presented a cool anonymity to the public. She tended to hide in the light of the world, her face immobile; her stance, her walk or gaze things calculated to deceive; so that they would not draw attention, at least, either to her body or her soul.
In private, with her parents, her friends — or with me in bed — she was something different. We all are, of course. But with Laura this change, though not schizophrenic, was much more extreme. There was a natural barrier in Laura, which Clare’s fate and her husband’s death had helped increase, between the public and the private person. She could be very formal, even cold on the surface. So that when I’d first met her, more than a month before, she had struck me as the last person in the world I was ever likely to sleep with. Yes; before I knew her, she seemed far too haughty and beautiful for me. She was, I imagined, one of those idle Tory women living abroad, remittance women in the sun, on permanent holiday, rich enough, no longer young, probably divorced, with loud-voiced horsey friends back in the English shires, one of the skin-deep people herself, all floating on gin and tonic.
When I first saw Laura, three pews ahead of me in St George’s Anglican church with Clare fiddling strangely at her side, I thought she was someone merely decorative, those wisps of blonde hair down the back of her neck too carefully tended, with a spoilt child in tow that she had not bothered to bring up properly. Even her name — ‘Mrs Kindersley’, when she was introduced to me at the church’s sardine barbecue afterwards — seemed a perfect suggestion of old upper-middle-class hauteur, impregnability, respectability, foolishness.
But Laura wore all these marks of her tribe as mere camouflage. They were not her real colours at all. When you knew her you found everything different in her mind: strange furniture in what had seemed, on the outside, so conventional a house. And when you loved her, it was different again, for her clothes were formal too, even her casual ones: pleated skirts and blouses — and when she took them off, as she had an hour before, there was another landscape, other attitudes which one could never have anticipated.
She had said, quite suddenly half way through lunch, just after we’d done with the mountain trout and the vinho verde, her hands neatly in her lap, leaning across to me with a look of amused confidentiality, ‘Afterwards, Peter?’
‘What?’
‘Make love.’ She paused. ‘Won’t we? Upstairs. Where better? Don’t you —’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten most of the tricks though.’
‘So have I.’
But we hadn’t.
Her face was very long as she lay flat in the light from the bedroom windows. The shafts of afternoon sun, slanting on her cheeks seemed to exaggerate the natural distance between her eyebrows and jawbone, just as, in this position, it emphasised the slight turn up at the end of her nose, the equal snub at the tip of each breast. Her long body angled across the sheets, toes almost poking through the brass rails at the end, she had an air of vastly settled comfort about her that afternoon — nothing feverish at all, as if she’d just found exactly the right spot in a garden and was sunbathing there. Her lovemaking had the same calm: no rising storms, no vast passions or alarms, simply a firmness, a clarity, something open-eyed where she did not want to forget herself but rather, to remember everything.
Laura, I soon discovered, had a great gift of sharp consciousness. Continually alert behind her cool façades, anxious to invest something in every waking moment, it was sleep she feared. Once you had fallen through her outer reserve, and, beneath that, the layers of the familial or the workaday, when you fell into Laura most truly herself, you were in a continually busy place, a mind always on the move, ever concerned with sights and thoughts and tastes, kingdoms in the sun. She was something of a daylight atheist, I suppose, for the nights were different. Then she fussed and cried in the dark, accused herself of non-existent crimes, murmuring incoherently about her earlier life in Africa, for sleep she feared — the dreams, the panic it brought.