He paused and I handed him my pack of cigarettes and put an ashtray on the floor beside him. He put aside his pipe, now extinguished, and took a cigarette, which he lit, inhaling deeply, then exhaling and aiming a couple of smoke rings up at the ceiling. He was one of those men who knew how to do that, like Errol Flynn and those other actors whose moustache he had copied as a young man and kept. He had combed his hair back with water, a clear parting through his thick hair. He lay there in silence, thinking. I decided to give him a prod, just in case:
‘Poor Beatriz,’ I said. ‘I still can’t see that she did anything deserving of punishment. On the contrary, she seems to have been an affectionate, loyal young woman.’
He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at me rather haughtily, as if I’d said something impertinent.
‘You don’t see because we haven’t got there yet. If you’re going to be impatient and prejudge the situation, we’d better just drop the whole subject.’ I raised both my hands, palms open, as if surrendering or as though to protect myself, meaning: ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ or ‘Truce, truce’ or ‘Take no notice of me.’ Again, in that gesture so characteristic of him, he tucked his thumb under his armpit like the tiny riding whip of a British officer, and added: ‘Of course, when we do get there, you, like her, will doubtless consider it to have been nothing, mere nonsense. You’re perhaps expecting something dramatic or terrible. Possibly even a crime, like in the movies. Well, it’s nothing like that. Just a lie and her vengeful, no, her impetuous subsequent revelation, far too many years later, when she would have done much better to keep it to herself. The tenuous facts of married life can also be very serious. And there are hundreds of such facts, so many that people often overlook them, because otherwise the relationship would collapse. I’m not one of those people. Well, I’ve overlooked others, like everyone else, but not that one.’
‘Tell me then, go on. Don’t worry, I’m not going to prejudge anything. I have no reason to, no right.’
He lay down again, feeling reassured, and it was then that I saw the smudge of a face, or someone’s head and shoulders, through the glass panes of the door, and because the panes were frosted I couldn’t make out who it was. When Muriel had summoned me to his side of the apartment, there had been no one else at home. The children had gone to a swimming pool, Flavia was out shopping and running various errands, and Beatriz had left as soon as she’d had breakfast without saying where she was going, certainly not to me. From Muriel’s supine position on the floor, that face lay outside his field of vision, that pink stain, which was not pressed against the glass, but a step or two away, so as not to attract attention or in the belief that it would remain undetected. But I could see it from where I was sitting at the desk. I wondered if that person could hear us, the doors were closed, but not completely; it was possible. I wasn’t sure whether to warn Muriel of that ghostly, distorted presence. ‘He’ll stop talking at once if I tell him,’ I thought, ‘and I still won’t know the story, and he may never again be in storytelling vein. I mustn’t risk it.’ When I looked harder at the pink smudge, I seemed to recognize the oval of Beatriz’s face, which I had seen once before through glass, except that then her face had been squashed against it and the glass had been clear, and her eyes had been tight shut while someone fucked her from behind: it hadn’t been me on that occasion, but the two memories combined and filled me with sudden shame — for Van Vechten in the Sanctuary and for me in my cubbyhole — so much so that I may have blushed. ‘Even if it is Beatriz,’ I thought, ‘there’ll be nothing new about Muriel’s version of events, nothing that he hasn’t flung in her face a thousand times for eight long years, it will be an old wound, if it is a wound.’ She had even admitted her guilt on that night of prowling and pleading, my first act of espionage: ‘I’m so sorry, my love, I’m so sorry I hurt you,’ she had said, and she had perhaps been sincere, or was it just a ploy? ‘I wish I could turn back the clock.’ That’s what we all wish sometimes, my love, to go back, have our time over, to change what that time held, all too often we’re the ones who decide what time holds and who determine how time will see us once it’s gone and has been definitively relegated to the past, and yet, as it’s happening, we can’t see it and can’t, therefore, picture it. In the end it will become an immutable image, full of hasty, random, twisted lines, and that’s how it will always appear to our eyes, or to the one eye in the back of our head, maritime blue or midnight blue. I decided not to warn him, not to tell him about the smudge, the face, the stain.
‘No, you don’t have the right,’ said Muriel, ‘but you won’t be able to help yourself. You will make a judgement, even if you don’t pronounce it. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, what is it that you keep looking at?’ He had noticed that I kept staring to my right, at the door.
‘Oh, nothing. There are a few books over there that need putting back on the shelves. You know what a fiend I am for order. I’ll just go and tidy them up. Sorry.’
I got to my feet and went over to a small revolving bookshelf to the left of the door, where Muriel, who was something of a bibliophile, kept a few of his favourite first editions, or ones signed or inscribed by the author. The bookshelf was on a lower level than the glass panes I was looking at, but my excuse worked. As I walked past the door, the figure on the other side immediately retreated or disappeared briefly from view. I was pretty sure it was Beatriz; she must have come in without our noticing, and when she heard the murmur of our voices, she must have stopped to see if she could glean something of our conversation. I pretended to put the books back on the shelves and then returned to my place at the desk. A moment later, I saw the pink smudge reappear, like an unfinished pastel portrait.
‘For heaven’s sake, leave them be.’
‘Sorry. Do go on, please. What happened? What fault did she commit?’