In Portugal certainly, living out in the marvellous light and heat of Cascais by the Atlantic with her parents for a year, she had found what she needed: long dazzling afternoons in their big garden overlooking the bay with Clare, or days down on the beach swimming, constantly involved with her daughter: activities in any case which left her exhausted by bedtime, so that there would be few moments in the dark to fill …
Laura clutched me on the bed then, the only time she hurt. She said ‘Since Willy went, and Clare, too, in another way, I’ve had this thing about not sleeping, as if I at least have to remain fully conscious. Do you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘To stay alive. If I sleep — I mightn’t.’
‘It’s a fear, naturally. Especially since you sleep alone.’
‘It’s as bad sometimes as not putting your hand out under the bed as a child.’
‘Yes.’
‘I want to stay awake, all the time.’
But she didn’t that afternoon. She drifted off ten minutes later, in my arms, before going out like a light, released at last from fear, at peace. Loving thus was one part of our content.
But there was living, too, the whole city outside the bedroom window: the summer wind, always from the south, whipping the rubbish along the mosaic pavements beside the cafés on the downtown boulevards; the ferry klaxons out in the bay, sliding into my own dreams as I dozed beside her then; or on other empty afternoons when we returned to my bedroom — the great white cruise liners, indolent dreams which materialised in the harbour in the space of a siesta, between lunch and tea. The city had been a marvellous promise for me in any case right from the start. Now, with Laura, its gifts were guaranteed.
She said when she woke, startled, surprised that she had slept, ‘I’ve survived …’
Most things discourage us from love these days. The omens and confirmations are commonplace: it will not survive, it will crack up on the rocks of liberation, impatience, infidelity, so that we embark on it half-heartedly in any case, if at all in middle life.
Laura had had her chances since Willy’s death, she’d told me, vague hints from London friends and other less subtle approaches during her year in Portugal. But they had not convinced her of anything. She felt a great fatigue about all that side of life: it hadn’t tempted her at all, lying fallow as she had, with Clare absorbing all her energy.
I must have been simply lucky, I’d thought, in my timing, in meeting Laura at a moment when things began to stir in her again. Or was it, in fact, something special which we had for each other? One tends to play this sort of idea down nowadays as well. It seems presumptuous to imagine there is anything so unique between two people, especially among the middle-aged; especially with me, who had seen a first wife go and lost several other women since.
I’d loved well enough, but the knack of permanency wasn’t there. In twenty years I’d gone through three women, that was the fact of the matter, and I’d told Laura so one afternoon a few weeks before when we’d gone down with Clare to the little beach at Cascais.
We’d had lunch under the canopy on the Palm Beach restaurant terrace, set right over the sand Clare playing near the small frothy waves almost immediately beneath us.
‘Yes,’ I’d said to Laura, the prawns dismembered on our plates, gathering the soiled paper napkins up. ‘It seems like blind man’s buff, looking back on it: me and women.’ I made the point lightly, flippancy a ready balm to failure.
‘Surely it was your job?’ Laura asked. ‘That intelligence work you told me about in Egypt, America. You were living all sorts of lies then. And so were these women you were with too, apparently.’
I nibbled at a last bit of prawn. ‘Perhaps. Though that’s a convenient excuse. It was probably just me.’
We were hovering on the brink of love that afternoon. We were likely to think the best of each other in any case. So I put myself unduly at a disadvantage, wanting Laura to forgive my past as well as love me now. Age only sharpens the plays we bring to courtship. After forty we know too well how best to present what’s left of us.
But Laura understood all this that afternoon, I think. She was nearly forty herself, after all. She leant across, taking the soiled napkins from me, touching my hand at the same time.
‘Every failure, or success, is both people, surely? One as much as the other. Each of us is to blame — as much as we are not to blame. I don’t see men and women as unequal at all in such things.’
‘If you bothered to count up the score, though: men —’
‘Well, if you’d killed your first wife, or the other women, that would rather tip the balance, certainly. But otherwise you can’t run things on a profit and loss account between people.’
She paused, tidying up the paper plates before looking out over the deep blue sea.
‘Do you have — secrets?’ she said at last, still gazing out at the ocean.
‘Professional secrets?’
‘No. Wife-beating, drink?’ She picked up the nearly empty wine bottle, offering it to me gently. The sun was just beneath the canopy now, settling down in the sky for a blazing afternoon. ‘You peep through keyholes?’ she went on shading her eyes. ‘Read other people’s letters. What is it?’
‘Worse. I tend to be possessive.’ I poured myself a last glass.
‘Ah! The heavy paterfamilias?’
‘I’ve not had children.’
‘Perhaps that’s why. The women were everything.’
‘Possibly.’
I looked down at Clare then, playing in the sand beneath us, or rather obsessed with it, running it endlessly through her fingers, from one cupped hand into another, then back again. As I watched she stopped suddenly before starting off on another manic pursuit, spinning a plastic bucket round by its handle, with great dexterity, on the very tip of her index finger.
I said, ‘With you there’d be children, wouldn’t there? Clare’s half a dozen in one.’
I was rushing my fences. But age as much as youth can have its sudden fevers, its imperatives. The sky was lead-blue all the way down to the horizon. And yet the sea glittered, the waves capped with froth, for there was still that summer wind from the south, flapping the canopy gently above us. The breeze cooled my cheeks.
One day all this would be lost to both of us: the marine vision, the soft airs, lunch in summer. The cliché struck me forcibly, of loss, an end of things. Pain came then, just as strongly as hope arrived two weeks later as we left the lobby of the Avenida Palace Hotel. Laura must have seen it in my face.
‘We’d share the burden, you mean?’ she said, looking down at Clare. ‘Or do you want to marry me?’ she added brightly, almost mockingly.
‘Both. They’d go together wouldn’t they?’
‘Marriage?’ She looked at me quizzically, suddenly serious.
‘Well, that’s too grand, perhaps. Sounds too formal. I suppose — I’m too old,’ I went on, backing out, piling up the excuses. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh don’t be! Not at all. That’d be fine. If you think —’ She leant across, pausing.
‘What?’
‘Clare is more than a handful. A big commitment — to me, I mean.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘You see, I think she can get better, with a lot of love, attention, effort. Oh, not the child psychologists, the quacks. We’ve tried that. Just me.’
‘Or us. You said it was Willy dying that had put her back so much.’
Laura smiled. ‘You can’t just pick new fathers up off the street though, can you?’