by Kirsty Gunn
‘Okay, so if I’ve got this straight, you’re telling me …?’
*
It’s all detail, Helen thinks now. The way Richard’s nose crinkled, as she’s just written. The fact that he’s always worn glasses for driving. Her organised life with him and the children, though keep the stuff about the children to a minimum, they weren’t part of this story. Except that Lizzie was big enough now to start secondary school which is why Helen can be writing in the first place and Ella two years ahead of her, and then Rose, and David about to finish school altogether … But no. This wasn’t about family, it was about the first day of her marriage. ‘Infidelity’. The title had come to her, like it might not just be a short story but a whole collection of stories. A cycle of stories, even, with a theme running through them about the kinds of secrets people have, the quiet, secretive things they do. So, ‘Infidelity’ it had always been. Not ‘Richard’. ‘Infidelity’ from the start, with Helen waking alone on the first morning of her marriage and the river there, just outside the gate, like a long bone running through the centre of the story and giving shape to it and structure, and meaning something, yes, it was crucial to this narrative, to the way events played out, because as she started to walk upriver that morning, walking along the bank to find the perfect place to dive in and have her swim, Helen turned a bend and there ahead of her in the distance she saw someone, he was fishing.
Or he had been fishing, and had already put down his rod.
Or he wasn’t fishing. He’d never been fishing.
It doesn’t matter. The only thing that is significant here, that counts for anything as far as Helen’s writing project is concerned, is that the minute he saw her he started coming towards her.
*
It occurs to Helen now that she might have opened the story at this point: With a man fishing on the riverbank, who was drawing in his line and at that moment saw a young woman walking in his direction. Or, that he saw her and then pulled in the cast, laid down the fly rod he’d been holding on the bank and started towards her. Because from the beginning, she could write, it was as if he knew her. The way he came to her with such purpose – at first in the distance, but within seconds getting closer and closer, near enough that she could see the kind of man he was, exactly, his build, his age, his character, and that for her, for Helen, in those moments as she watched him, though it shocked her, a stranger coming for her that way, she wasn’t frightened at all.
‘It was as though you’d been waiting for me,’ she said to him, seconds later, when he was by her side.
‘I know,’ he replied.
*
But wait. Helen stops, puts down the pen. Not that.
‘Go back to the beginning,’ Louisa says, and that’s what she’s done. ‘The morning, when she stepped out into it, felt new minted’ – that was the sort of story it was supposed to be, and she’s finished that section, it’s done. As organised and sorted as her linen cupboard, she might say, and that was exactly as it should be, too. So don’t start thinking now about another order of events, changing the content that way. Because she was always to start with something that was real, was supposed to be real – the memory of a strange morning by the beautiful river and a moment that she had entered into, fully, all those years ago. Like taking off her dress and going into cool water. That was to be the story’s centre, always, its beginning and its heart. Then, the plan was, she would add to it, put something in that would turn the whole thing into fiction – a confrontation, a kiss. Call it ‘Infidelity’. There would be an embrace, an affair, something dramatic and passionate … Something. She’s taking classes in creative writing, for goodness’ sake. Not ‘It was as though you’d been waiting for me’, as she’s just written, not ‘she wasn’t frightened at all’.
*
Well, they’re there now, those phrases, so just leave them for now, for the sake of moving the story along, and let it be enough to write that she saw him clearly, this unknown man, saw him for the first time when he reached the place where she was standing on the riverbank. Then she can describe: A tall man, well built, slightly overweight, slightly stooped. Dressed in fishing gear – though he carried none of that with him when he came. Helen had just been standing there, watching him get closer, and closer as he came towards her. She remembers there was the texture of the grass under her bare feet, some mud. She was, after all, right by the deepest part of the river, at a place where she might swim. The water, as she stood there, ran along beside her all in a piece, inviting her in, and seconds ago she would have taken off her clothes and walked into the slow, lovely current.
And ‘embankment’ …
What a word that is, a wonderful word. She might think more about that, ‘embankment’, and its position here, in the story. That would be a useful thing to do. More useful at this point than trying to work out whether this scene or that should feature, or when exactly she is planning to have her story veer off into the imagination. Think instead about that detail of her standing upon the embankment – as though the embankment might hold her in place for a while, stop her going forward. Helen realises she’s starting to see the whole story more and more as a construction, actually, made up of her memory, of what happened that morning, and of the words she’s using to describe it, of further words. So, the river. Embankment. This man who’d been further upstream, he might have been fishing. These are all important words. Yet the words are getting in the way of what she wants to tell, too, in the story, as though holding up the direction of it, where it should be going, and instead exposing something else within – as though exposing of herself – like wearing nothing beneath the cotton dress, and no shoes and already her feet were in slippers of mud, her long bony feet coated in it, as she stood on the embankment watching him come towards her. And, ‘embankment’, again. See? She wants to stop the story right here with that word. It is a beautiful, beautiful word. It rises up before Helen like a bed and all she wants to do is lie down. To put her arms around this man she’s never seen before in her life, to breathe in his warmth and scent, put her arms around him and let him bring her down.
*
She stops writing. What is happening? For none of that is to be in the story. Only what is real, remember? What actually happened, and then add something, and an ending. That’s what she’s supposed to do. Start with the memory of what happened and go on from there: That he came towards her as though he recognised her, as though she were someone he thought he knew. Though he didn’t know her. Though they were strangers to each other, strangers. Still, there she was. There he was. And he had been fishing, hadn’t he? Hadn’t she seen that first? A figure silhouetted slightly against the light – against the golden, printed glint of it. Helen knew enough about fishing to know that if he had been casting he must have already brought in his line, laid down his rod, to have come so quickly towards her after he’d seen her. Or if he hadn’t been fishing he’d just been waiting for the moment she would come around the bend and then he would start heading towards her, straight away. Thinking about it, Helen decides, the story might be better if he had indeed been fishing. It makes his presence there on the riverbank more credible, doesn’t it, at that hour of the morning? That makes it more real? She could write that it was because he was fishing that they were both so quiet, why they didn’t call out, one to the other. ‘Hi there!’ or ‘Are you our neighbour at River Lodge?’ Something like that, noisy chatter, conversation. Because to be quiet beside the water, it was how one went about it. Fishing required quiet and stealth. She’d learned all that from Richard, from her father. She liked fishing, fly fishing from a bank. Off a little boat, sometimes. She liked all the talking about it, about flies and weather and the time of year. So yes, that could have been why he came to her. To let her know in advance there was a fish there, a big salmon lying in a pool, so would she please be very, very quiet or else go away. That’s it, Helen thinks. Obviously he must have set aside his gear so that he could come down the embankment to tell h
er –
‘No,’ Helen says aloud, because ‘details’, remember? Louisa’s rule? Every detail had to be there but every detail also had to be true. And what is true is that there was no fish, no excuse, no other reason than what’s already written. He’d arrived, to be with her, that’s all Helen needs.
‘It was as though you’d been waiting for me,’ she has written.
And—
‘I’m sorry to come up on you like this —’
He might have said.
She’s written that, that he said that.
But actually she has no memory of what he said, that moment when he got to her, what she might have said, because all she’s aware of is that he’d come straight to her from where he’d been, came right up close to her, was so close, and she was going to put her arms about him, she was going to press her face against the side of his warm neck, breathe in the scent of him, feel the warmth of his skin. And so it may have been that he thought she was someone else, that he came down to meet her because he thought she was another woman, not her, and said to her then, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’m hopeless without my glasses. I see I’ve made a mistake,’ and so also it may have been that she has written that she said to him, ‘It was as though you were waiting for me’ – these things don’t matter. Now that she’s sitting here with the pen, the paper. She realises she has no concrete memory of anything to write down at this part of the story other than to record his scent, the golden colour of him, of his throat, of his arms. He was wearing a soft, dark green shirt, the sleeves pushed up to the elbows, and a vest, a fishing vest … But are these the kinds of details that matter, Louisa? Do they add up at all? Helen is doing the best she can, but this was not necessarily how the story was supposed to go. Only that he was a stranger, was the idea in the first place, and that this might be how something could start, between a man and a woman, that she could imagine, could make up … Which was why she could even think about writing any of this in the first place. Changing the names, probably, and a few other things. She could only think about writing a story called ‘Infidelity’ that Richard might read because the dramatic content of it would be invented, fiction. Because otherwise what happened to her that morning of the first day of her marriage doesn’t make a story at all, does it?
Does it?
‘What?’
She can write that down. That when he said, ‘I’m sorry to have come up on you like this —’ she replied, ‘What?’ She could write herself saying that to him, that word, and the way every second of their meeting was like every second articulating itself within the vast spread of time, and her imprisoned within each one.
‘What?’
And details such as his tanned arms, the soft shirt. Is that the ‘little itty bitty important stuff’ that Tennessee Williams always made to be the centre of his work, the way Louisa says? Little monologues, scraps of dialogue enough like Sam Shepard has little scraps of dialogue, but then he writes big speeches too.
And that he said, ‘I saw you from up there, from a distance.’ She can write that.
And that she said to him, somewhere, amongst all the other sentences, but maybe have it appear much later, ‘It was as though you’d been waiting for me.’ Maybe that? Though she’s not sure she should have herself ever saying that to him in the story. Or if she does, maybe later. Maybe put it in much, much later …
Or change the whole tone of the story altogether: What about doing that? That she’d been about to turn around and head back to the house when she saw him. Because anyone who’s fishing from the bank loathes disturbance, we know that by now. And so Helen had been about to go back to the house, back the way she came, but then his voice had called out to her, ‘Hi!’ and he’d waved at her – so there, more details there, realistic details, more dialogue – he was simply calling out to her, he didn’t mind about calling out at all.
It could have been like that, too.
‘Hi!’ he called out to me, in a friendly voice, Helen writes, but has to cross it out. The story is in the third person, remember? That has to be part of it. ‘When I release you into fiction, I release you into the third person, past tense ONLY,’ Louisa had said, writing ONLY in capitals in the air again. ‘No stream of consciousness. No I-do-this and then-I-do-that … I want you to interrogate your details,’ she’d said. ‘I want you to be rigorous about them. I want your readers to read EVERY word along the line – like Lawrence says we must do – the sentence must LIVE along the line. None of that skimming, summative yeah-yeah-I-get-it kind of story. I want your readers following every one of your sentences, every detail, every single word.’
*
But what about repetition? Helen worries about that like she worries about the role of the author in a story. She’s been worried about repetition from the very first class when they did a workshop exercise based on one sentence, and they had to rewrite it in five different ways, but when she brought it up, that repetition might be boring for the reader, Louisa had just put her hand towards her, palm outwards, and said, ‘Virginia Woolf, Helen.’ Helen is thrilled and inspired by most of the things Louisa says, the way she says them. That writing may as well be the same as living for someone like Louisa, that there may be nothing whatsoever dividing the two – this is an idea that’s never occurred to Helen before she started taking this class. It would never have occurred. She decides then that she must understand from her teacher’s remark that repetition is okay if the writer is aware of using it for reasons of rhythm and shape. And what’s more, repetition, as Louisa has reminded her, can be part of writing as it is part of life. Still, there are some readers who are not like Louisa, who might get bored with it, mightn’t they? Helen is aware of this dilemma, and continues to worry about it, about different kinds of readers and their expectations of a story – even though she also knows, and even without Louisa here to show her, that her own story cannot move on, can only … enlarge … is how she thinks of it, if she does go back and around, re-approach what happened that day long ago, come at it from different angles … And come at it again. Because it was surely an event, a narrative event, the meeting that took place between her and that unknown man all those years ago, but it’s also lacking … ‘authorial push’ – another phrase from Louisa that seems relevant here. As in, ‘For godsake, that wrecks a story completely, knowing some author is there in the background, fiddling and planning and scheming and pushing the whole thing along.’ So maybe what Helen is doing here is all right, after all? Letting everything just hang?
She doesn’t know anything. She’s put down her pen.
All she knows is what she’d known then: Only, Yes. Yes and yes and yes. Anything.
*
‘Stop! Don’t go!’ he’d called, had he? Had she made to turn? ‘I’m coming to you, there’, and she had waited for him, just as he said. She watched him getting closer and closer and when he arrived she could smell the warm, deep smell of him, the tang of his sweat from running, could see the softness of his shirt, the brown tan of his arms, and—
‘Wait right where you are,’ he’d said when he was just a few feet away and when he reached her, he put out his hand, not to shake her hand but to touch her wrist, encircle it with his fingers, like a bracelet or a cuff and she was utterly, utterly unafraid.
‘It was as though you’d been waiting for me,’ she might have said then. That might have been the moment. When she wanted to put her arms around him, put her face up against the side of his face, let him bring her down with him on to the soft bank.
Helen picks up her pen, lets him encircle her wrist again with his fingers. When he’d touched her, she’d felt the jolt of it.
‘You’re in the cottage,’ he said. ‘Up at River Lodge. You’re staying there, aren’t you? Isobel told me, I live there …’ He gestured with a nod to somewhere in the distance, beyond some trees. ‘Isobel is my housekeeper, too,’ he said. ‘She told me you were staying for a week or so, with your husband. I was going to come along to introduce myself, to say
hello. But then, just now … You see, I thought you were someone else.’
Lightly, lightly he held her wrist and it was the most natural thing in the world.
‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ Helen said to him.
‘Exactly,’ he said.
And he leaned in then, towards her, and she reached towards him … And, what? Was she going to kiss him then? Was he going to kiss her? What was going to happen now? That he leaned down towards her, and that she reached up, she put her face up to his face … And she’d thought, Yes. And yes and yes … Will she write that down? Even though they had never met each other before? That he’d only come for the way he did because he thought she was someone else? Even though they didn’t know each other and were complete strangers, still there was this moment of him leaning down towards her and …
But instead she did not reach up.
She broke from him and ran away.
Though it’s not what she’d intended.
For the story, she means. For the story. That she broke from him and ran, and ran and ran and she didn’t look back, all the way home to the little house, and arrived there, back where she’d started …
Because how can the story be a story now, with that sentence – ‘She broke from him and ran away …’? If she doesn’t have them hold each other, this thing happened to both of them, come upon them with great force and now they can’t stop it … That he would lean down towards her and she reaches up to him and she kisses him. He kisses her. If she doesn’t make this moment of them together the start of something dramatic, a confrontation, an embrace, the idea of something momentous beginning, adulterous and powerful and dangerous, and only writes instead about what actually happened that morning, all the details of it that she’s put in – then the title is wrong, isn’t it? ‘Infidelity’?