She made the appointment, hung up, and sat still, wondering why she felt so excited — so … well, almost conspiratorial. There was nothing underhand about it — was there? And then she remembered that she had met him before years ago, and that the natural thing would have been to remind him of it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
She laid on the crew for 8.30 a.m. at his home. It didn’t make her very popular, because camera crews don’t relish early starts any more than, say, actors; but the funny thing was that Maggie, the worst getter-upper on earth, rose that morning willingly and cheerfully. If 8.30 was the only time Joel Langham could manage, due to a dayful of lectures — so be it.
She sat in the sun in her little car outside a rather imposing old house behind the Finchley Road, looking at her face in the driving mirror and afterwards, more closely, in the mirror of her compact. It seemed to her that she looked better at thirty-five than she had at twenty-five. (As indeed she must have done — at twenty-five she’d been bush-haired, sack-line dressed and etiolated, fighting ol’ daybed in Port Harcourt.) ‘I now look as if I know who I am, at least,’ she thought.
She was early. Why had she come so early? The crew would not arrive for half an hour. She sat behind her wheel, oddly reluctant, for all her eagerness, now the moment of meeting was upon her. She would feel a complete fool if he recognised her. But surely he wouldn’t.
But he did. She saw it in his face the moment he opened the door. And she would, as they say, have known him out of thousands. There was an immediate small shock of mutual recognition between them. It had the effect of a frisson, exacerbated by the fact that he was in the process of shaking her hand and the motion of it stopped abruptly without his releasing her.
‘I’ve seen you somewhere before.’
‘On screen, probably.’
‘I don’t think so. I have a feeling of knowing you behind the face.’
Later, Maggie was to compare her feelings from this time forward until she left the house with those of a long-term prisoner pacing his cell for the ten thousandth time who, reaching the door, finding it mysteriously open, is too frozen with incredulity and even fear at first to walk out into open air, normality and freedom. Later still, she would think of it as more closely analogous to a fledgling that has reached term in its cramping egg, and whose struggling beak and wings and feet force the claustrophobic shell to crack and fall away.
In a certain sense, she was a 35-year-old virgin. But virgin or not, she was a mature adult — her reactions were not those of a tremulous young girl to the onset of her first sudden deep affinity. She had lived through all those years, she had observed other people, she had read and acted in plays and all this and more had taught her what love was supposed to be like and how people in love were supposed to feel and behave. So that when she looked into this already-familiar face, realised that he was actually no more than moderately good-looking in a tall, beaky, bespectacled, professorial way, yet at the same time sensed a profound meaning for herself in everything about him — she could not avoid the implications. She could not help sensing at once her own dangerous vulnerability.
She took instant refuge in a theatrical cliché — ‘wildly attractive, my dear!’ She was still able, at that stage, to pretend to herself that she would say this, lightly and gaily, to Tanya. What she would not say to Tanya was that he was green. Green as grass. That feeling of being looked out at from some well-fortified inner world, the self-knowingness, the gentle eyes and hands, yet with a sharpness, a strength… And suddenly she remembered that she had once offended Tanya by remarking, only half in fun, that Joel made her think of the Mekon in Dan Dare — the egg-headed, pea-green Mekon… The ludicrousness of this thought tickled her unexpectedly and she gave a laugh, strangled at birth, but out before she could stop it, a laugh that had in it a measure of pure happiness.
‘What’s so funny?’ he asked without truculence, taking her coat.
‘For a moment you looked — green.’
He turned to stare at her comically. ‘Green!’
‘It must have been the light,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Through the trees.’
‘“A chance light meaningless shines” — and I am green. Unless you meant metaphorically. Come through.’
He led her across a square hall and into a large, high-ceilinged living room at the back of the house. She paused fractionally in the doorway. One glance was enough to tell her something she hadn’t even thought about until this moment, but already it had its fundamental importance. There was no woman here. The room was all male, all intellectual, all green, green, green, with its evidence of music loving and book loving, brain-work and lack of obvious show. The colours had a quiet, thrown-together look, infinitely pleasing to her eyes, like himself. The remains of breakfast on a tray was unselfconsciously reposing on a small table in front of the open french window. Beyond was a small garden with a fork stuck into a half-dug flowerbed.
She stopped. ‘Oh, look — a robin!’ she whispered, pointing.
Joel turned and looked, and they stood together in silence until it pleased the robin to fly off.
Later she was to remember what Tanya had written in her letter: Aren’t all one’s truest and deepest emotions just rubbishy-trite? A bloody little Christmas-card robin perched on a gardening fork! Yet when they turned back towards each other, they were both smiling; some inevitable initial barrier had been painlessly crossed, or rather — had simply dematerialised. All at once they were at ease with each other. Maggie almost forgot the Tanya connection. She sat down beside the table and touched the handle of the knife.
‘You haven’t finished your breakfast,’ she said. ‘I interrupted you, coming so early.’
‘Don’t worry about that. Would you like anything? Coffee?’
‘I had one before I left home, thank you.’
‘So have another.’
‘Will you join me?’
‘Have we time?’
‘Perhaps we ought to do a little preliminary chatting.’
‘All right.’
He sat down in a wing chair facing her. Because she wanted so badly to stare at him, she turned her head and looked instead at the garden. The sun was shining all over it. He obviously loved it and worked in it often. Perhaps he’d been out there already this morning — the soil where the fork was stuck looked freshly dug. He must, she thought, be one of those most admirable beings, an early riser.
She allowed herself another quick glance. She had not noticed what he was wearing; now it was important because, imagining him in the garden in old clothes, she had felt herself so full of a sort of fascinated tenderness (a professor — in wellies!) that she needed an antidote. Now he had on a grey hopsack suit, button-down shirt and blue university tie. Out there in the garden, earlier, he must have glanced at his watch, stuck the fork into the earth and hurried in to wash and change. Because she was coming. It made her feel almost sick with some incomprehensible emotion to realise that she had already, in advance of their meeting, had a direct effect upon him.
A linen napkin lay crumpled on the tray. He had put it there when she rang the doorbell. She looked at it, positively savouring the realisation that she longed to pick it up and put it to her face.
‘Well? Let’s do our chat. How many questions are you going to ask me?’
With an effort she recalled what she was doing there.
‘Unfortunately not many. The whole story, including the women, will probably be cut to no more than two or three minutes of screen time.’
‘Good God!’ he exclaimed. ‘My life’s work condensed into an Oxo cube! It hardly seems worth it.’
‘That’s the way we have to work, I’m afraid. It’s news, not documentary or feature.’
‘Three minutes…’ he mused. She watched his hands tapping the arm of his chair and remembered Tanya saying they held magic. She could well believe it. She remembered the time when she had been so hungry for love and the freedom to express it that she had longed to kiss
and caress everyone she saw… Something of that longing, so long dormant, rushed back to her, but the urges were more exclusive now.
‘Well, I suppose one must aim to encapsulate, in that short time, the boredom and loneliness of urban domestic blight. Under equivalent conditions, men turn to drink. Woman are often afraid of the — grossness of alcohol. Pills seem more refined.’
‘How widespread is it?’
‘Are you going to ask me that on camera?’
She liked his knowing the terms of her trade. ‘Yes.’
‘Then do you mind if we don’t rehearse? I think I’d do better spontaneously. Like most teachers, I have a horror of repeating myself before the same person. I’ll keep it brief?’
‘Well! That’s the end of the chat, then.’ She tore her eyes away and looked once more round the room. ‘This is a very pleasant flat,’ she said with a good imitation of casualness, though every detail was a clue to him and thus vitally interesting to her.
‘Yes, I was lucky. I took it as I found it.’
‘How long have you been living down here?’
The moment it was out, a spasm of shock turned Maggie rigid. She actually clenched her jaw and shut her eyes for a second, which was as long as he gave her in which to hope he had not noticed her gaffe.
‘Two years. How did you know I used to live up North?’
One of the symptoms of love is that one does not willingly lie, and Maggie had, over the years, lost her early skill as a dissembler. She gazed at him like a guilty child, unable to think of a word to say. Suddenly his face, bland and quizzical a moment before, snapped into a frown.
‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Margaret Macrae.’
‘Wait a minute. You’re not Margaret at all. And you’re not Macrae, or you weren’t. You’re Maggie — Maggie Something — Robertson, that’s it! You’re Tanya’s friend, and that’s where I met you before — that day in Sheffield.’
There was a silence. Then Maggie said, ‘I didn’t think you’d recognise me.’
‘But you weird girl! Why didn’t you tell me on the phone that we knew each other? Come to think of it, you must know me pretty well, by report.’
Maggie felt her head might burst from the pressure of the hot, shamed blood in it. She couldn’t have managed the whole thing worse if she’d tried. Now she was caught in a trap. She must either betray some essence of Tanya’s confidence, or embark upon an endless string of lies.
‘I’m sorry. I really don’t know how to explain.’
‘Do you still see Tanya?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it, by any remote chance, she who suggested that you interview me?’
To hesitate would make it worse.
‘Yes, it was, as a matter of fact. You see, she’d heard that you —’
‘That I’d — what?’
‘Moved to London. Changed universities.’
‘Is that all she’d heard?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I just wondered if she’d heard about my divorce.’
After a moment, Maggie replied carefully, ‘If so, she’s said nothing to me about it.’
‘I don’t see how she could have heard about it, actually. It wasn’t in the papers. Unlike her wedding,’ he added with a sardonic note in his voice.
They fell silent. What must he be thinking? thought Maggie frantically. He’ll think Tanya sent me to spy on him. He might, with the irrepressible vanity of men, think she’s still in love with him, that she’s waiting breathlessly to feast on all the details I shall bring away from this encounter. I must let him know that she’s no longer interested in him. I must be able to tell her truthfully that I didn’t betray her in any way.
She opened her mouth to embark upon some more or less doctored version of the truth when he interrupted her.
‘You know, this is really quite extraordinary,’ he said. He was peering at her closely through his glasses, as if she were some object of intense scientific interest to him. ‘You have a kind of — well, I don’t know how to express it. A kind of legendary quality in my personal filing system. Until that day, you’d been a name without a face. Then you got a face, but still you didn’t have a real identity. As a matter of fact, that day you were rather in the way.’
‘Yes, I was well aware of that.’
‘If we let you feel it, I apologise.’
‘A little late for remorse on that score!’
He gave a little snort of laughter down his nostrils, like a horse’s sneeze. Hardly a thing of charm in itself, but it delighted Maggie. She realised that she had a basic awe of him because he was an academic, and Tanya had said he was brilliant. The fact that he was capable of what amounted to a giggle, albeit a strictly masculine one, enchanted her.
‘At all events, subsequent to our meeting you took on quite gradually a firmer and clearer reality, over the period when I was still … with Tanya. She talked a good deal about you.’ He paused, still gazing at her. ‘I’ve suddenly realised, I mean this second, why I, who am probably the most private person you’ll ever meet, don’t mind that you know so much about me. It’s because you don’t have an advantage over me. I know a lot about you, too.’
‘What do you know?’
‘May I tell you? It’s all, as you said, long ago and far away.’
‘Go on.’
‘I know about your career, and your love-affair, and your marriage, and your quarrel with Tanya.’
She sat feeling as if he were undressing her and trying not to be clear in her head about how deeply she was enjoying it.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t decided yet.’ Then something occurred to her. ‘The quarrel… How much did she tell you about that?’
‘Ah. As to that, she was rather vague. Although I was left in no doubt that she was profoundly hurt by it, and by the long breach which resulted, all the time you were abroad.’
A silence fell. Now she had no desire to turn her eyes away, but stared back at him, free to do it because he was staring at her.
‘You’ve changed a good deal,’ he said.
‘I’ve grown up.’
‘You’ve become more adult-looking, of course. But also there’s a veneer… Rather a pity. But I suppose inevitable. Have I changed?’
‘Not much. You’ve gone grey.’
He passed his hand over his head rather self-consciously, and then said something that startled Maggie.
‘Tanya once told me her hair was grey under the dye. Is that true, or was she just being dramatic?’ A belated surge of loyalty to Tanya stiffened Maggie’s face. He saw it at once and said, ‘Sorry, that wasn’t a very generous thing to say. But, as another who has been close to Tanya, I’ve no doubt you must have suffered from her dramas as I did.’
‘There’s something I really must make clear to you about Tanya —’ Maggie began.
Just then, the doorbell sounded. They both started.
Joel rose. ‘That must be your crew,’ he said. He looked at her from the door. ‘We’ll continue this conversation anon,’ he said drily.
The interview went smoothly. Happily, she’d done her homework and prepared her questions in her usual methodical way, leaving nothing to chance. Joel gave an impeccable interview. All the time the crew were there, Maggie felt them as intruders, and she sensed that Joel, too, was waiting for them to leave. Yet the break in her strangely intimate conversation with him restored her consciousness of her vulnerability. Even while longing to be alone with him, she feared it.
Nobby, the cameraman, gave her the thumbs-up; the gear was unplugged and folded away. They were due at another story on the far side of London in an hour.
‘Coming with? We could drop you at the office on our way —’
‘No thanks, Nobby, I’m mobile.’
The crew departed. Maggie stood in the middle of the room while Joel saw them out. Her heart was beating urgently, yet she felt strangely lax and will-less. She had to force he
rself to look at her watch as he returned.
‘Do you have to leave straight away?’
‘I — I don’t know. May I ring the office?’
He gestured to the phone on his desk. To use it she had to sit on his chair, a wide wooden one with a worn leather inset seat. Dialling, she wondered how much of the furniture in this room dated back to Tanya’s time, whether familiarity and association would invest it with the same importance for Tanya as it seemed to have now for Maggie, seeing it for the first time but wanting to touch everything because it was his.
Mac informed her that the first pill-popping wife was laid on for 10.45. In Dulwich. Dulwich! It would take a good hour to get there, more if there was traffic…
‘Well? What about that coffee?’
She turned with a bright smile, which masked a suddenly-born determination.
‘I’m afraid not. I must be off.’
She thought he would try to persuade her, but instead he just nodded. She crushed down irrational, overwhelming disappointment. Press me to stay! Just some polite formula… That’s all I’ll need. But he stood silent, waiting for her to get up and go past him into the square hall where he’d hung her coat… She found she needed some incentive to move. She was simply sitting there helplessly. The coat. Yes. She would let him help her on with it and that would involve his touching her. She jumped up gauchely, hunted for her bag, found it, and preceded him into the hall. The front door loomed before her, a symbol of parting. Once it closed behind her, there seemed no earthly reason why they should ever meet again.
He didn’t help her on with her coat. He simply handed it to her, and watched while she slipped it on unaided. The silence between them was stretching to unnatural lengths.
‘Thank you very much for agreeing to —’ she began, holding out her hand.
The Warning Bell Page 34