I was disappointed by this proposed line of inquiry, and couldn’t hold back from saying so. ‘How’s that going to help us find out what Lawrence was up to in 194z?’
‘Perhaps it won’t, Michael. But perhaps that isn’t the real mystery in any case.’
‘What are you suggesting, exactly?’
Findlay got up from his armchair and sat beside me. ‘I’m suggesting,’ he said, laying a claw-like hand on my thigh, ‘that the real mystery is you. And I intend to get to the bottom of it.’
∗
Kenneth said: ‘Miss, you don’t happen to know where my bedroom is, do you?’
Shirley shook her head sadly and said: ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’
Kenneth said: ‘Oh,’ and paused. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll go now.’
I thought about Findlay’s description of me: ‘one player who sits so uneasily with the others that you wonder whether he hasn’t wandered in from a different drama altogether’. It seemed oddly perceptive, suddenly exact about the way I tended to feel when contemplating the Winshaws. This evening, for instance …
Shirley hesitated, a resolve forming within her: ‘No. Hang on.’ She gestured with her hand, urgently. ‘Turn your back a minute.’
Kenneth turned, and found himself staring into a mirror in which he could see his own reflection, and beyond that, Shirley’s. Her back was to him, and she was wriggling out of her slip, pulling it over her head.
… leaving Findlay’s flat, catching the Number 19 bus, feeling the characteristic lowering of the spirits as I returned to South West London; arriving home. All this mundanity, my too familiar surroundings, made his narrative and the mad, gothic horrors towards which it gestured seem like a grotesque fantasy …
He said: ‘J– just a minute, miss.’
Kenneth hastily lowered the mirror, which was on a hinge.
Shirley turned to him and said: ‘You’re sweet.’ She finished pulling her slip over her head, and started to unfasten her bra.
… Did they have the same worries that I had, these absurd people? Did they have the sort of feelings I would even understand? It wasn’t enough to say that they came from a different walk of life. It was more extreme, more final than that: they belonged to a different genre of existence altogether. One which actually horrified me …
Shirley disappeared behind Kenneth’s head.
Kenneth said: ‘Well, a – a handsome face isn’t everything, you know.’
Continuing to hold down the mirror, he tried not to look in it, but couldn’t resist taking occasional glimpses. With every glimpse, his face registered physical pain. Shirley put on her nightgown.
… and one which over the last few years had almost caused me to lose, I now realized, any sense of life as it ought to be lived. Had almost killed me off, in fact, or at least put me to sleep: bringing on a paralysis from which I might never have recovered if it had not been for that knock on my door: if Fiona had not appeared, to unfreeze the frame …
Kenneth said: ‘All that glitters is not gold.’
She emerged from behind his head, her body swathed in the knee-length gown, and said: ‘You can turn round now.’
He turned and looked at her. He seemed pleased.
‘Cor. Very provoking.’
I turned off the television. Kenneth and Shirley dwindled to a pinpoint of light and I went into the kitchen to pour myself another drink.
Every time I went in there, now, and saw my reflection in the window, it reminded me of the night she had first come round, asking for my name on her sponsorship form and having to repeat herself again and again to make me understand.
And here was the reflection again. But if you looked beyond it, what did you see? Nothing much. Dreamer though I was, I did not have the power of Cocteau’s Orpheus, who could pass through liquefying mirrors into unimagined worlds. No, I was more like Kenneth Connor – and always would be – forcing myself not to look in the mirror at a gorgeous, terrifying reality disclosing itself only a few inches behind my back.
Except that last night I had seen a new reflection: only briefly, because I had had to close my eyes to the beauty of it, and yet it had been so vivid, so real, that I looked for traces even now, scarcely believing that the window itself could have no memory.
… Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir advantage. Trots fois …
Fiona had called round with a small fuchsia cutting which she proposed to add to the ever-expanding forest of greenery which now covered most of the available surfaces in my flat. She was wearing an old jumper and a pair of jeans and she didn’t want to stay for a drink or a chat: she wanted to get to bed, even though it was only about eight o’clock. It had been a long day at work, apparently, and her temperature was up again. In spite of this she seemed to be finding excuses for not leaving right away, making a point of checking up on the condition of all the plants even though I could sense that her mind wasn’t really on it. It felt as though there was something she wanted to say, something important. And then when we got into the kitchen, where the lights were bright, and I was asking her if she was sure she didn’t want a beer or a gin and tonic or a vodka and orange or something, she suddenly leaned back against the fridge and asked if I would do her a favour.
I said yes, of course I would.
She said: ‘Do you think you could feel my throat?’
I said: ‘Your throat?’
She tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling and said: ‘Just touch it. Touch it and tell me what you think.’
If this was the beginning, I thought, if this was how the whole business was going to start up again, then it wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Not at all. Any sense of control over the situation had drained out of me: I felt as though I was plunging to earth, and I walked towards her with the tread of a sleepwalker, my fingertips outstretched until they came into contact with the pale skin at the base of her neck. From there I traced a slow line, sensing a film of fine, downy hair as I touched the soft ridges of her throat. Fiona remained perfectly still, and perfectly quiet.
‘Like that?’ I said.
‘Again. To the left.’
And this time I came upon it almost at once: a small obstruction, a ball of hardness about the size of an olive lodged well beneath her skin. I stroked it, then pinched it gently between forefinger and thumb.
‘Does that hurt?’
‘No.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What did the doctor say?’
‘Nothing. He didn’t seem very interested.’
I took my hand away and stepped back, searching her blue-green eyes for clues. They stared back neutrally.
‘Have you always had it?’
‘No. I noticed it a few weeks ago.’
‘Is it growing?’
‘Hard to say.’
‘You should go back to the doctor.’
‘He didn’t think it was important.’
I had nothing else to say: just stood there, as if rooted to the spot. Fiona watched me for a moment and then folded her arms and hunched her shoulders, withdrawing into herself.
‘I really am tired,’ she said. ‘I must go.’
‘OK.’
But before she went I put my hand against her neck again and we slid into an embrace which was clumsy at first, but it didn’t matter, we persisted, and by the end we were clasping each other tightly: I clung to her silence and, closing my eyes to our reflection in the kitchen window, pictured a knot, made from the threads of her wordless fears and my famished longing, which would hold fast against the very worst that the future might throw at us.
Dorothy
To hug someone, and to be hugged, now and again, in return: this is important. George Brunwin had never been hugged by his wife, and it was many years since he had taken a mistress. None the less, he regularly enjoyed long, rapt, tender embraces, stolen, more often than not, in darkened corners of the farm which he had once been pleased to call his own. The latest willing object of his advances was a veal calf called Herbert.