A Stairway to Paradise

by Madeleine St John

  Then the weather became seriously cold; Barbara and Fergus, coming home from school, ran all the way from the corner and up the steps and she unlocked the front door as fast as she could and they tumbled together into the hot, hot house and shrieked with relief as they took off their coats and their scarves and her gloves and his cap, which he threw into the corner, and was told to pick up, and Barbara hung it on the top branch of the coatstand.

  And when Alex came home it was as dark as the shadow over his heart and as he went up the stairs to see his children, Claire in the kitchen thought, vaguely, Alex is getting older; Alex is slowing down. Poor old Alex.

  As it happened there was a poem (Anon., sixteenth century: another Tudor clergyman?) which having been quoted in one of the Sunday broadsheets was seen by both Barbara and Alex: perhaps even at the same moment:

  O western wind, when wilt thou blow

  That the small rain down can rain?

  Christ! that my love were in my arms

  And I in my bed again.

  So that they both—perhaps even at the same moment—stared into the void of their loss and were half-consoled.

  It was not long afterwards that Barbara heard, thanks to her elder sister, of some people living near Bath who were going on a three-month cruise and wanted someone to house-sit for them, starting early in March. There then she was when the small rain down did rain: far from her lost love and the bed they had shared; not far, but a little farther, from the anguish (Christ!) of his loss.

  Alex at about the same time had a drink with someone he knew at Macmillan, and over additional meetings on subsequent occasions managed to get himself commissioned to write a book on the black economy: all of his free time (except for the part which belonged to Percy and Marguerite) was thus taken up, and he fell asleep late every night too exhausted altogether to suffer the old torment of anguished, almost maddening, yearning.

  PART THREE

  22

  The black economy book was now almost finished; there were just a few loose ends to see to before the final draft.

  Alex, sitting on the daybed, was staring unseeing at the Caucasian rug. Funny to think that it was really because of Barbara that he had finally done what all journalists mean to do, and written a book. Men used to go out and explore the dark unmapped interior for less, he thought. And that—come to think of it—is what, after all, one could say I’ve been doing these last eighteen months: for the terra incognita of the world is all under our feet, these days; everywhere around us; it hides behind and beneath the allegedly known, the pattern behind the pattern: and there can be no end to it.

  He got up from the daybed…this bed is rather hard, isn’t it; I do hope you haven’t been sleeping badly…no, not at all: it’s fine…Christ! that my love were in my arms…and he looked out of the square window at the hawthorn tree.

  Why did I come in here, he thought; what did I come in here for? And he looked vaguely at the bookshelves again, as if to find a clue. Then he suddenly remembered what it was: he’d come in here to look up a word in the Shorter; and he took out the A–M volume and opened it at the beginning, because the word he wanted was abrogate.

  23

  ‘Tom, I’m home! Where are you—oh! Ah. Sitting in the kitchen. And you’ve stolen a march on me, I see. Yes please.’

  Serena sat down at the kitchen table opposite where Barbara had been. ‘What’s this?’ she said, seeing Barbara’s abandoned glass. ‘Been drinking gin with the help, have we? Tut!’

  Tom looked so stupendously sheepish that she laughed aloud. ‘Oh dear,’ she said.

  ‘Well—’ said Tom. ‘I mean, it seemed only polite…’

  ‘To be sure,’ said Serena. She took a swallow of the drink Tom had given her and got up. ‘I say, let’s go into the drawing-room, shall we?’

  They sat down on the sofa; Serena kicked off her shoes and curled up next to Tom. ‘Are the heavenlies around the place?’

  ‘No—visiting Simon, so I understand.’

  ‘Ah. Well then. Nice day?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Usual thing. You?’

  ‘A conference in Jessop’s chambers.’

  ‘Ah. The Meares thing, was it?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Go well?’

  ‘Pretty foul.’

  ‘Poor darling.’

  ‘But you’re the one who looks knackered. Everything okay?’ She stroked the side of his head. He had that weary, bemused look, and he was gazing through the window at some far-distant and possibly even invisible point, whether in time or space who could tell?

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Tom. ‘Hmmm.’

  She went on looking at him and stroking his head, still holding her drink in her free hand—the one with the terrific solitaire diamond engagement ring on it. It was a cracker, that stone, and that natty Van Cleef setting. ‘And how’s our Barbara?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ said Tom. ‘She’s always the same. She’s fine. She’s—yes. She’s—fine.’

  Serena laughed again. ‘You don’t fancy her, do you? Just a tiny bit?’

  Tom started. There was something about barristers: he’d noticed it often: they did tend to be disconcertingly, and sometimes even deplorably, direct. ‘I say, Serena!’ he protested. ‘Steady on.’

  She laughed some more. ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not sure I don’t rather fancy her myself.’

  Ye gods! Barristers! He shot her a look, so wonderfully compounded of dismay, disbelief, shock, and the suspicion that his leg was being pulled that Serena positively pealed.

  She put down her drink and put both arms around his neck. ‘I really do love you, Tom,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it funny? After all these years! I’d be so very sorry if you were to run off with Barbara.’

  ‘Oh, she wouldn’t have me,’ said Tom. ‘I’m quite safe; you really needn’t worry. Anyway, you know I can’t actually afford to. Not really.’

  ‘No, that’s true,’ said Serena. ‘So, look, do you think we might run to a long weekend away soon, once the babies have settled down at school? We might go to Paris, or Amsterdam, or that very flash hotel in the West Country that the Perelmans were telling us about, the one with the jacuzzis.’

  ‘Gosh, yes, rather,’ said Tom. ‘Perhaps there’s a hotel in Paris with jacuzzis, what would you say to that?’

  ‘Might that not be overdoing it?’ said Serena.

  ‘Oh, I think we can cope,’ said Tom.

  ‘All right, darling,’ said Serena. ‘I’m sure you know best. So we must really plan this properly. Do bring your work diary home tomorrow, will you? Now I wonder what that delicious Barbara has left for us to eat tonight, I’m famished.’

  ‘Er, I seem to recall there’s a fool,’ said Tom.

  ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ said Serena, and she jumped up and went into the kitchen to see what else there was and put it all on the table and telephoned Simon’s house to summon the twins. ‘Ooh, smoked salmon,’ she said, opening the refrigerator. ‘Goody.’ And she ate some immediately, licking her fingers, her terrific diamond ring flashing in the light.

  24

  ‘Barbara? It’s Andrew here—Andrew Flynn, we—’ God help him, there was surely no need to remind her who exactly he was, after— had it really happened? Or had he not, after all, merely dreamed that he had sat with her on Primrose Hill and then moments later felt, tasted, smelled, devoured and devouring, that golden-skinned fairy—was it not much too good to be true? God help him.

  ‘Yes. I know who you are.’

  ‘Right.’ A half second of that particular laugh, self-abnegating, self-exculpatory, nervous but not mirthless: a brief but complex sound which summed up an entire civilisation: not all those years’ residence in a foreign land could banish it from the repertoire. Hurry up now and say something. ‘Look, I just—how are you?’ Oh, that skin, that voice; her hands: had he not merely dreamed the whole thing?

  ‘Very well, thank you; and you?’

&nb
sp; ‘Yes, I’m very well too. I was just wondering—I tried to get you earlier, as a matter of fact—’

  ‘Oh, that was you, was it? I was upstairs, I heard the telephone but I couldn’t—’

  ‘No, of course not. No, it’s nothing desperately urgent, but I just wondered if we might do something together perhaps tomorrow night, I’m afraid I have to be away at the weekend, but—you wouldn’t feel like dinner or something, would you? If you’re free?’

  Oh, there it was: he hadn’t really thought of it seriously before: she couldn’t possibly be free, at twenty-four hours’ notice, just like that, just for him. Not that voice, that skin, those hands; not for him. How dared he ask? And she was saying nothing—there was a silence, a silence even of embarrassment, that sense of the quest for the right phrase, the right tone, the right, polite, gentle, unmistakably definite dismissal.

  Andrew: Andrew Flynn. Oh, don’t you see? Can’t you guess: don’t you know? It’s no good; it could not possibly be any good: can’t you see? Does it have to be said? And yet, how? Oh dear.

  ‘Well, I’m not quite—it’s a bit difficult: I may be tied up until a bit late, tomorrow.’ Another pause. ‘There’s a dinner party I have to do for someone.’

  Complete confusion. ‘Oh.’

  Poor sod. He doesn’t understand. Well, how could he. ‘Look, why don’t you—I mean, if you like—why don’t you come round at eightish and then we’ll see. Give me your number and I’ll telephone you if I have to put you off. But it should be all right.’ It’s a bit of a mess but now that we’ve got this far I can see that the best thing to do is to sort it out asap. ‘I mean, if you like. Or we could leave it till next week. As you like.’

  What’s she trying to tell me? What is she saying? Only one way to find out. ‘Yes, well, if you’re sure—I mean, if you think—’ because I can’t now endure the idea of waiting until next week; I really must know: ‘I’ll come round at eightish then, and we’ll see what you’re in the mood for—will that be all right? Are you quite sure?’

  ‘Yes, Andrew. I’m quite sure. As long as you don’t mind—sorry I can’t be more definite.’

  ‘No, that’s quite all right. Well, till tomorrow night, then.’

  ‘Yes. Goodbye.’

  She hung up as soon as he’d had time to stutter his own valedictions, which might have been protracted.

  She stared out through the french windows at the trellis and the tree-top beyond it, waving in the evening wind. I could go to the cinema, she thought; there might be something at the Everyman I want to see: where did I put that program? It’s probably in my bag, along with pretty well everything else. I’ll go and look. But she didn’t; she went on sitting, staring, staring, and thinking, until long after the film at the Everyman had started.

  25

  Claire and the children were coming back on Saturday, so if he, Alex Maclise, were really going to do the unthinkable, really going to go and see Barbara, there was only tonight, and it was getting too late to drop in on a woman you’d yearned after, lost for ever, seen by chance, been teased by—coldly, heartlessly—by whose memory you were now even more maddened than once you had been: now that she was so evidently no longer yours: might never have been: too late.

  Or there was tomorrow night.

  And that would be it.

  And it was unthinkable; preposterous; it was a delusion of his maddened imagination that it was even theoretically feasible. As long as he could live through the next twenty-four-odd hours then he was safe; he would come out on the other side, the same dull stony place he’d inhabited before last Saturday night, safe: safe from his present madness.

  The thing to do was to get on with one’s work. The book still lacked a really satisfactory title: there: all a person really needs is an almost intractable problem to chew over. Alex began to chew.

  There was a moment on Friday night, a crucial, wavering moment when Fate, her expression impassive, stood stonily in front of him waiting, daring him, implying (so one might have fancied) that either decision would be equally disastrous: a moment, crucial, wavering, almost sickening, when he might have left the club and gone straight to Belsize Park, have taken his chance, have exposed himself to whatever horror of rejection, ridicule, scorn might be implied in her behaviour at the party and afterwards: when he might have at any rate declared, with whatever result, his terribly reawakened passion. The moment—Fate watching, waiting, almost (but derisively) smiling—passed; he was safe. It was only much later, when the danger was entirely behind him, that he asked himself whether the ignominy which he had settled for was not, after all, the greater: but the question was now academic; one could therefore dare, now, to ask it.

  The question did not, as it happened, remain academic. There was another message from Claire on the answerphone when he got home that night. It seemed there was some problem or other with the car; she and the children would not be returning, after all, until Sunday.

  He had been given an apple, iridescently crimson without, which might or might not be poisoned; he sat, and began to contemplate it.

  26

  ‘These are for you.’

  ‘Oh, Andrew.’ Oh, Andrew, what have you done—no: what have I done? God forgive me.

  It was a very big bunch of roses: it was actually three bunches all wrapped up together. They weren’t (thank God for that at least) red, but they were an awfully dark shade of pink. Like lipstick. A faintly bluish, faintly decadent pink. They were beautiful. She just stood, looking at them, drinking them in. Well, they deserved it. Then she looked up at him. ‘Come in,’ she said, and they went inside.

  She left him in the large room and vanished, returning with a vase and a half-full bottle of white wine which she put on the table. ‘Do sit down,’ she said. She vanished again and reappeared holding two glasses. ‘Perhaps you could pour us a drink,’ she said, ‘while I put these in water.’ She did it properly, removing the leaves at the base of each stem and splitting it.

  Andrew sat quite silent, on a wicker armchair, watching her. She was sitting at the table; when she’d finished the flowers she moved the vase to one side so that her view of him was unobstructed, and then she slightly raised her glass to him and drank.

  ‘How are you,’ she said. ‘It’s been an age—what—two days, I think—since we last met: do tell me all your news.’

  He laughed. ‘Oh, I’ve nothing much to tell, I’ve had my head stuck inside a couple of learned journals most of the time—I’ve got rather a lot of work to do before the start of term.’

  ‘Where are you, exactly?’

  ‘King’s.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Handy for the river, you know, if it all gets too much.’

  ‘That’s true. Can’t you swim?’

  ‘Of course. But I’ve always understood that the water’s so polluted that even if you don’t drown you’re bound to die of some kind of poisoning.’

  ‘Now, that shows how long you’ve been away: didn’t you know? It’s been cleaned up!’

  ‘Gosh, really?’

  ‘No trout yet, but that may come.’

  ‘Blow me down.’

  ‘Why did you come back?’

  He started slightly, unsure of her meaning; she saw his confusion. ‘I mean,’ she amended, ‘to England? I mean, if you hadn’t even known the Thames’d been cleaned up, then—the place has such a bad reputation these days, after all. I wondered why you’d come back.’

  ‘Ah.’ He ought to have understood. ‘Yes. Well, there was this job. I’d always meant to come back if the right thing came up, and it did. So—’

  ‘That was lucky.’

  ‘Yes, it was. At least, I thought so. But then—well, then, when I’d got it, Janet—my wife—came along and told me she wouldn’t be coming with me. So then I didn’t feel quite so lucky. Especially when I realised that, of course, Mimi—that’s my daughter—silly name, it’s a nickname really—would be staying behind too. Sorry, I’m sounding awfully pathetic, aren’t I.
Shall we go out and have some dinner? And talk about something entirely different?’

  ‘No, yes, all in good time. You see, you don’t sound at all pathetic. It’s just very very sad.’

  ‘Yes, it has been. It was.’ He paused for a moment, as if deliberating, and shifted slightly in the wicker chair. ‘But actually— after I met you—it’s the strangest thing, but suddenly it seems like something which happened long, long ago. I—I think—well, I—’

  ‘Andrew.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Andrew, I must tell you something. That is, I must say something.’

  He looked at her doubtfully. ‘Must you really?’

  He looked so sweet saying that; she almost wished she could say, no. ‘Yes, truly. You see—about the other night—’

  He was looking down at the floor: it was dreadful to be saying what she was now saying, but it had to be done.

  ‘You see—I’ve been just a little loopy this past week.’

  ‘Loopy?’

  ‘Yes, loopy. Something happened, it’s quite unimportant, but I haven’t been quite myself. I’m not usually so—well, what’s the word. Let’s just say that what I did was an acte gratuit.’

  ‘Yes, all right. But actually I don’t believe there’s any such thing.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No, it’s a behavioural impossibility.’

  ‘Yes, well, I think that’s just my point, really. I mean, having performed one, I think I can agree with you, it’s a behavioural impossibility. Which I can have no intention of repeating.’

  ‘I see. Well—I—you wouldn’t rather I went, would you?’

  She had begun to realise, dimly, and now saw more clearly that he was a treasure.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. I mean, if you can bear to be with me—if you can bear with me—please forgive me.’