And he sat down by her, and then said quite suddenly and intimately, as though perfectly at home with her after so many years of silence, ‘Oh, Lord, my darling Viola, what a dreadful, dreadful surprise. I don’t think I shall ever recover.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Kenneth,’ she said, as though she too had discovered exactly where she was. ‘One gets over these things quite quickly. I feel better already, don’t you?’
‘Why, yes, I suppose I do,’ he said. ‘I feel better now that I’m sitting down. I thought I was going to faint, standing there and looking at you. Didn’t you feel some sort of slight tremor?’
‘It’s hard to tell,’ she said, ‘when one’s sitting down. It isn’t a fair test. Even of tremors.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘no.’
Then they were silent for a moment or two, and then she said, very precisely and carefully, offering her first generous signal of intended retreat, ‘I suppose that what is odd, really, is that we haven’t come across one another before.’
‘Have you ever been back here before this?’ he asked.
‘No, never,’ she said. ‘Have you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I have. And if you had been back, you might have seen me. I looked for you.’
‘You’re lying,’ she said quickly, elated, looking at him for the first time since he had sat down by her, and then looking away again quickly, horrified by the dangerous proximity of his head.
‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I came here, and I looked for you. I was sure that you would come.’
‘It’s a safe lie,’ she said, ‘like all your lies. A lie I could never catch you out in. Unless I really had been here, looking for you, and simply hadn’t wanted to admit it.’
‘But,’ he said with conviction, ‘you weren’t here at all. I came, but you didn’t. You were faithless, weren’t you, my darling?’
‘Faithless?’
‘You forgot me quicker than I forgot you, didn’t you? How long did you remember me?’
‘Oh, how can one say?’ she said. ‘After all, there are degrees of remembrance.’
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What harm can it do to tell me now?’
She moved a little on the seat, away from him, but settling at the same time into a more comfortable pose of confidence, because she had been waiting for years to tell him.
‘I suffered quite horribly,’ she said. ‘Really quite horribly. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it is,’ he said.
‘Oh, I really did,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you. I cried all the time, for weeks. For at least a month. And whenever the phone rang, I started, I jumped, like a fool, as though I’d been shot. It was pathetic, it was ludicrous. Each time I answered and it wasn’t you I would stand there listening, and they would go on talking, and sometimes I would say yes or no, as I waited for them to ring off. And when they did ring off I would sit down and I would cry. Is that what you want me to say?’
‘I want to hear it,’ he said, ‘but it can’t, it can’t be true.’
‘It’s as true as that you came to this place to look for me,’ she said.
‘I did come,’ he said.
‘And I did weep,’ she said.
‘Did you ever try to ring me?’ he asked then, unable to resist.
‘No!’ she said with some pride. ‘No, not once. I’d said I wouldn’t, and I didn’t.’
‘I rang you, once,’ he said.
‘You didn’t,’ she said, and became aware at that instant that her knees under the table were trembling.
‘I did,’ he said. ‘It was just over a year ago, and we’d just got back from a party – about three in the morning it was – and I rang you.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘oh, God. It’s true, it’s not a lie, because I remember it! Oliver went to answer it, and he came back saying no one was there. But I immediately thought of you. Oh, my darling, I can’t tell you how I’ve had to stop myself from ringing you, how I’ve sat there by the phone and lifted the receiver and dialled the beginning of your number, and then stopped. Wasn’t that good of me?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘if you knew how I’d wanted you to ring.’
‘I did write to you once,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t bring myself to post it. But I’ll tell you what I did do: I typed out an envelope to you, and I put one of those circulars from that absurd poetry club of mine into it, and I sent it off to you, because I thought that at least it might create in you a passing thought of me. And I liked the thought of something from my house reaching your house. Though perhaps she threw it away before it even got to you.’
‘I remember it,’ he said. ‘I did think of you. But I didn’t think you sent it, because the postmark was Croydon.’
‘Oh,’ she said, weakly. ‘You got it. Oh, Lord, how alarmingly faithful we have both been.’
‘Did you expect us not to be? We swore that we would be. Oh, look, my darling, here’s your lunch. Are you still eating cheese omelettes every day? Now, that really is what I call alarming consistency. And I haven’t even ordered. What about some moussaka? I always used to like that; it was always rather nice, in its own disgusting way. One moussaka, please.’
After her first mouthful, she put down her fork and said reflectively, ‘From my point of view, at least, the whole business was quite unnecessary. What I mean is, Oliver hadn’t the faintest suspicion. Which, considering how ludicrously careless we were, is quite astonishing. We could have gone on forever, and he’d never have known. He was far too preoccupied with his own affairs.’
‘You know,’ he said, ‘all those continual threats of separation, of ending it – that was really corrupt. I feel bad about it now, looking back. Don’t you?’
‘How do you mean, bad about it?’ she said.
‘I feel we ought to have been able to do better than that. Though, come to think of it, it was you that did nearly all the threatening. Every time I saw you, you said it was for the last time. Every time. And I must have seen you six days in every week for over a year. You can’t have meant it each time.’
‘I did mean it,’ she said. ‘Every time I said it. I must have meant it, because I finally did it, didn’t I?’
‘You mean we did it,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t have done it without my help. If I’d rung you, if I’d written to you, it would have started all over again.’
‘Do you really think so?’ she said, sadly, without malice, without recrimination. ‘Yes, I suppose you might be right. It takes two to part, just as it takes two to love.’
‘It was corrupt,’ he said, ‘to make ourselves live under that perpetual threat.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but remember how lovely it was, how horribly lovely, each time that one relented. Each time one said, “I’ll never see you again … all right, I’ll meet you tomorrow in the usual place at half-past one.” It was lovely.’
‘Lovely, but wicked,’ he said.
‘Oh, that sensation,’ she said, ‘that sensation of defeat. That was so lovely, every time, every time you touched me, every time I saw you. And I felt so sure, so entirely sure that what you felt was what I felt. Lord, we were so alike. And to think that when I first knew you I couldn’t think of anything to say to you at all; I thought you came from another world, that we had nothing in common at all, nothing except, well, except you know what; I feel it would be dangerous even to mention it, even now. Oh, darling, what a disaster, our being so alike.’
‘I liked it, though,’ he said. ‘I liked breaking up together. Better than having it done to one, better than doing it.’
‘Yes, but more seriously incurable,’ she said. And silence threatening to fall once more, she said quickly, ‘Anyway, tell me what you’re doing round here. I mean to say, one has to have some reason for coming to a place like this.’
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I was looking for you.’
‘You are a liar,’ she said, smiling, amazed that even here she could allow herself to be amuse
d; indeed, could not prevent herself from smiling.
‘What are you doing here, then?’
‘Oh, I had a perfectly good reason,’ she said. ‘You know that false front tooth? Well, yesterday morning I broke it, and I’ve got to do a programme on television tonight, so I went to my dentist and he made me a temporary new bridge, and I had to come round here to the laboratory to pick it up.’
‘Have you got it in?’
‘Look,’ she said, and turned to face him, smiling, lifting her upper lip.
‘Well, that’s convincing enough, I guess,’ he said.
‘You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,’ she said. ‘I bet you haven’t got as good a reason as me. Mine is entirely convincing, don’t you think? I mean, where else could I have had lunch? I think my reason clears me entirely of suspicion of any kind, don’t you?’
‘Any suspicion of sentiment?’
‘That’s what I meant.’
He thought for a moment, and then said, ‘I had to call on a man about my income tax. Look, here’s his address.’ And he got an envelope out of his pocket and showed her.
‘Ah,’ she said.
‘I came here on purpose,’ he said. ‘To think of you. I could have had lunch at lots of places between London Wall and here.’
‘You didn’t come here because of me; you came here because it’s the only place you could think of,’ she said.
‘It comes to the same thing,’ he said.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ she said firmly. She felt creeping upon her the familiar illusion of control, created as always before by a concentration upon trivialities; she reflected that their conversations had always followed the patterns of their times in bed, and that these idle points of contention were like those frivolous, delaying gestures in which she would turn aside, in which he would lie still and stare at the ceiling, not daring to touch her, thus merely deferring the inevitable. Thinking this, and able to live only in the deferment, for now there was no inevitable outcome that she could see, she said, eating her last chip, ‘And how are your children?’
‘They’re fine,’ he said, ‘fine. Saul started grammar school. We were pleased about that. What about yours?’
‘Oh, they’re all right, too. I’ve had some dreadful nights with Laura recently. I must say I thought I was through with all that – I mean, the child’s five now – but she says she can’t sleep and has these dreadful nightmares, so she’s been in my bed every night for the last fortnight. It’s wearing me out. Then in the morning she just laughs. She doesn’t kick; it’s just that I can’t sleep with anyone else in the bed.’
‘What does Oliver say?’ he asked, and she said, without thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t sleep with Oliver any more,’ and wondered as she said it how she could have made such a mistake, and wondered how to get out of it. But fortunately at that instant his moussaka arrived, making it unnecessary to pursue the subject. Though once it had become unnecessary, she regretted the subject’s disappearance; she thought of saying what was the truth itself – that she had slept with nobody since she had slept with him, that for three years she had slept alone, and that she was quite prepared to sleep alone forever. But she was not entirely sure that he would want to hear it, and she knew that such a remark, once made, could never be retracted, so she said nothing.
‘It looks all right,’ he said, staring at the moussaka. He took a mouthful and chewed it, and then he put his fork down and said, ‘Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, what a Proustian experience. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that I’m sitting here with you. It tastes of you, this stuff. Oh, God, it reminds me of you. You look so beautiful, you look so lovely, my darling. Oh, God, I loved you so much. Do you believe me – that I really loved you?’
‘I haven’t slept with anyone,’ she said, ‘since I last slept with you.’
‘Oh, darling,’ he said. And she could feel herself fainting and sighing away, drifting downward on that fatefully descending, eddying spiral, like Paolo and Francesca in hell, helpless, the mutually entwined drifting fall of all true lovers, unresisting. It was as though three years of solitude had been nothing but a pause, nothing but a long breath before this final acknowledgement of nature, damnation and destiny. She turned towards him and said, ‘Oh, my darling, I love you. What can I do? I love you.’ And he, with the same breath, said, ‘I love you, I all the time love you, I want you,’ and they kissed there, their faces already so close that they hardly had to move.
Like many romantics, they habitually connived with fate by remembering the names of restaurants and the streets they had once walked along as lovers. Those who forget forget, he said to her later, and those who do not forget will meet again.
(1968)
4
A Pyrrhic Victory
They grew more and more tired as they climbed the hill, and although it was past two o’clock and there was no reason why they should not sit down and eat their lunch, nobody suggested stopping. Anne was exhausted: her head ached with the sun, she felt both sick and hungry, and her feet and ankles were bleeding, scratched by the coarse, twiggy plants that bordered the narrow track. A cloud of insects followed her, biting from time to time. The passion flower that Charles had picked for her so gallantly from the tree outside the grocer’s was wilting in her hot hand: she remembered how Hannah had laughed at him for picking it, and she discreetly let it drop. Charles, who was following, trod on it without noticing. He was carrying the lunch, and his hands were full of paper packages, so that every time she stumbled or scrambled up a steep patch she had to manage for herself, although he reached out chivalrously and ineffectually to help her. It made him look silly, to reach out and achieve nothing but a gesture. She wished he would not do it, she needed not to think him silly.
She wanted so much to sit down, and to make the others sit down, but she was afraid to suggest it in case they should laugh at her, or leave her there and go on without her. Once she had admitted she was tired, she would have to give up the climb, in order to preserve an appearance of free-will. She did not want to betray her weakness, and if she spoke, weakness of some kind would be forced upon her: either she would be the first to give in, or she would have to admit how much she needed their company by going on after confessing that she was exhausted. So she said nothing. She went on walking, and hoped that they would at least stop when they reached the top of the hill.
Johnny and Hannah were walking on yards ahead, showing no signs of fatigue: remembering the night before, she wondered how on earth they managed to walk so fast. They had all made themselves very sick on a horrid mixture of Vino Aleatico and Liebfraumilch, a mixture in which the crudity of contrast had struck even her innocent palate, as well as her stomach: she had spent the night leaning over the wash-bowl, trying hard to dissuade Charles from holding her hand, and she had gathered from Hannah that she and Johnny had suffered much the same in their room. And yet here they all were now, striding up hillsides as though they were in the best of health and condition. Did the others find this kind of behaviour natural? Was it only she herself, at seventeen and straight out of school, who reacted with such amazement, with such bewildered admiration? And who was it who had set this ridiculously high standard they were all so sternly reaching for?
She supposed that it must be Johnny. Hannah and Charles both had their lapses from the general level of high, gritty grace, they both had impulses which the other two, and indeed even she herself, in Charles’s case, derided: Charles had his flower-plucking, hand-holding tendencies, and Hannah, for example, an occasional excess of literacy in unfamiliar languages, which the others found for some unrevealed but unsurprising reason ludicrous. And as for Anne herself, what was she but an airy mass of loopholes? So full of holes was she that there seemed at times to be no fabric: she had not been able to take anything without some inner protest, not the hitch-hiking by night, nor the allocation of bedrooms, nor the rash expenditure of money, nor the excessive mixing of excessive drink, not this high, insurmountable hill. Her
whole self rebelled at everything they did, and yet somehow, with immense effort, she managed to keep her mouth shut and do it.
Her body kept telling her that she could not go on any longer, borne down by sickness, hunger and heat, but she did not listen, though at times she thought that the strain of continuing in all this foreign, unfamiliar landscape would make her simply drop down dead or unconscious in protest. It was an initiation, she knew that, into more than the facts of what she had for the first time done: this emotional state itself would be with her, on and off, forever, this sense that at any moment she would cease to bear it and cease by some stroke of simultaneous dissolution to exist. Throughout her life it would recur, as she would continue to put herself deliberately into situations which were foreign and intolerable, and as she would continue, wearily, without pleasure, but with determination, to tolerate them. These three people here, and the place itself, and the speed, and all those other people and places extending before her, she would accommodate them or die, and sometimes she felt that dying was the easier, the more likely of these alternatives.
It was Johnny, of course, who demanded the speed, who set the standards, who was himself the foreignness she fought against in person. He was the only one who had never exposed himself: he had got in first, he had been playing this wandering game for two whole years before they had met him, he was the real impregnably negative American thing itself. Everything he spoke of, dollars and railroads and bars and baseball, was so strange to her that her mind ached with the effort to contain it, and she knew that she would show white gleaming scars, cracked and seamed for life, after the stretching of this encounter. He had arrived at some point so far from anything she had ever known, he was so perfect an example of what (though she could not distinguish what) he clearly was: and she knew that at the very least she would have to go far enough after him to see, however indistinctly, the true nature of his features, which were at present dim with distance.
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Page 6