The Very Thought of You

by Rosie Alison

  Her husband recognized the portrait at once, and it moved him, even though he had never liked Elizabeth.

  “Keep it there,” he said, “to remind us of the past.” They did not mention the picture to Thomas, not knowing what his reaction would be.

  The Nortons did not see Thomas very much any more – nor did any of his old friends, because he hardly ever came down to London after the war. His Regent’s Park house had been half destroyed in the Blitz, so he had sold it to a developer in 1946, unable to face its renovation himself.

  As Thomas grew older, he only really felt comfortable in Yorkshire, and so he settled there permanently – continuing to teach at Ashton Park, where a girls’ boarding school was established soon after the war.

  Every September, he would watch as a new group of eightyear-old children arrived in the Marble Hall with their freckles and pigtails and school trunks – before emerging four years later as reflective girls who would tilt their heads to one side and frown slightly before answering a question.

  There were always so many children passing through his life now, each year a fresh generation to be moved by – but Thomas did still sometimes pause and wonder what had become of those first children he had known, those who had been evacuated to his house during the war. Too many of them had vanished from his mind, like footprints in the sand.

  50

  London, 1957

  Anna sands entered an anonymous hotel lobby in Holborn. A brash chandelier cast an unnerving fare onto muted green walls, and she was half-aware of the reflected glare of a polished floor, with shimmers of light unsettling her balance.

  Her partner was thirty years her senior, ageing, balding, with a thickening waist and a grizzled beard. Three weeks earlier they had met at the Frankfurt Book fair, where both of them were guests at a raucous party in a baroque hotel bar. There was a crush of publishers with cigarettes and wine glasses, and when a mutual colleague introduced them, she had to repeat her name twice in all the noise. He was the sales director of one of the bigger publishing houses – self-confident, determinedly low-brow – while she was a junior editor at a literary imprint.

  At first, she only talked to him out of politeness, and hardly listened to his questions. He was overripe, his body going to seed, a heavy man who liked to drink and smoke. She was a firesh-looking twenty-six-year-old, with a girlish face but a woman’s body.

  She was about to move off when he insisted on buying her a drink. As he handed her the glass, she saw a flash of tenderness in his eyes, and he called her “my dear”. That was always the giveaway – their connection was made.

  Ten days later he rang her office and asked her out to lunch, at an Italian restaurant near the British Museum. They sat at a corner table and played with their food while talking about Graham Greene’s novels and his understanding of odd love.

  He had been married for twenty-five years, she for three. She felt herself growing wet as he studied her face. When he reached out to hold her hand, she was afraid to raise her eyes to his in case they welled up.

  He had already chosen the hotel, within walking distance of their lunch. It was raining and the pavements were slick – people walked with their coat collars up and their heads down. They shared his umbrella and he steered the way.

  There was discomfort for her as they checked in, and the neat brunette receptionist was careful not to meet her glance. Anna wanted to say, I am a decent educated woman with a husband at home. But she did not want to leave either. He was more at ease with the procedure.

  They reached their room and closed the door behind them.

  For the first time they were alone together. It was a moment they had both hankered after, ever since she had accepted his lunch invitation.

  He took off his jacket and smiled at her in a way that was ribald and wry, but tender too, and vulnerable. Their eyes locked into each other as they reached forwards to kiss. Then he held her tightly wrapped in his arms.

  She undid his tie, then his shirt, and saw the grizzled hair on his chest. She rested her head against him and felt his pleasure at this yielding.

  The uncovering of her breasts was a moment of excitement for him; she knew that she hid their size beneath her clothes. “Look at you!” He said, and she sank once more into his arms, feeling self-conscious for a moment, until he led her to the bed and their lovemaking began.

  Later, when they dressed, neither of them knew if there would be a second time. As they parted, he looked into her eyes with sentimental kindness, and told her she was lovely.

  She had no umbrella, and her hair was dishevelled with rain by the time she reached her office. It was late, too late, and she invented a spurious meeting with an agent to satisfy a curious colleague. She could not concentrate on any of the manuscripts before her.

  After work, riding home on the underground to her husband, Anna sat down on an empty seat and tried to stop herself shaking. What was this transgressive streak in her, she asked herself. She was scared, and close to the edge, and could not flathom why she felt this need for intimacy with men old enough to be her father.

  She loved her husband Jamie, who was dark-haired and attractive, and successful in every way – in his spontaneity, in his friendships, in his creative life as a radio producer. His boyish vitality spilled over into every moment of his day: whether he was running for a bus or charming a receptionist, there was always a bounce, a smile, a dash about him which captivated anyone he ever met.

  For two years now, they had been trying for a child without success. The doctor had told them there was nothing wrong with either of them – that they must be patient and relax, and a child would come.

  But Anna feared it was all her fault. In the intimacy of their bedroom, she could feel her husband’s desire and yet her own body would not respond with an answering release. She could not understand why, nor did they discuss it.

  Yet that night, as her lithe young husband made love to her, she did come for him – but only by closing her eyes to think of the ageing sales director with his crumpled face and grizzled body, and his sentimental eyes.

  “I love you, my darling,” Jamie said afterwards, as they lay together. He stroked her inner thigh, a place he loved to rest his hand.

  “I love you too,” she said. And the word love unleashed a shudder of confused guilt right through to her womb.

  51

  London, 1964

  Children had arrived in the end for Anna. She was a mother now, with Ason and daughter. Every Friday to Monday, she would stay at home in Bayswater, playing with her children, hanging their washed nappies on a rack over the bath, and taking them for walks in Hyde Park. But midweek she would still set off to her old publishing house in the West End.

  On those days, she would emerge from Oxford Circus station and make her way through Soho knowing that she was lucky and blessed – or so it would appear to anyone watching her as she swung along the streets in her skirt and boots and coloured raincoat. Here she was, a young woman in her prime of life, with children at home and a husband at the BBC, setting off to work with a face which could engage anyone she passed on the pavement.

  Just before 9.30 she would arrive at the Georgian building which housed her publishing firm, a literary imprint founded by a Viennese émigré. It was her job to find firesh voices which might uncover new emotions for the reading public. Every Wednesday the company held an editorial meeting in which they would discuss the latest submissions.

  But in the last few weeks, something strange had been happening to Anna: she could no longer read. Her in-tray was spilling over with unread manuscripts as she struggled with her mental block. All week she had been staring at the same piles of paper, and secretly crying. She went for walks to disguise the tears, then returned to the stack of unread novels, facing once more her word-blindness.

  It seemed as if the link between words and their meanings had somehow been severed, until all she could see was neat rows of black marks. Just ink – just the shape of ink. Sh
e sat at her desk, quietly stringing paperclips together, not knowing how to stop this unravelling. Soon every part of her life was infected.

  “You’re not listening,” said her daughter, as Anna crouched on the stairs at home and stared at the wall, not hearing her questions. Instead of playing with her children, she just sat still and watched them. Their washing piled up.

  When Jamie returned home, she would cook supper like an automaton. Sitting down to eat with her husband, his voice came to her as if from an ill-tuned radio.

  Every day, she continued to brush her teeth, and lay out the breakfast things, and walk the children to nursery. She put money in the machine to buy her Tube ticket and heard the clunk of the coins falling down the chute. She followed safe routines which might keep her on a steady track, but secretly she was gone, off and away into a silent place with no gravity, where all you did was float and look.

  She began to see things in trance-like, subaqueous colours. The world came to her as a flicker of disconnected details, raindrops on a car roof, chewing gum on the pavement, a stray white hair on a man’s navy coat, her own hands chapped and red in the cold weather. Sometimes the world seemed to be breaking up before her, scattering into bits, a rainstorm of fragments which would not fit together.

  There were still moments when the faces of her children broke through to her. How could she not respond to those small hands reaching out to her, that electric current of love, when she returned home from work and they ran forwards to greet her? But her helplessness when facing their expectant eyes made her buckle sometimes, so fearful was she of letting them down.

  She could not sleep. She feared her nights, when darkness only intensifled her claustrophobia. She was trapped inside her own mind, stuck in an endless loop of repetition, and the empty hours stretched away as she tried to lie still, to trace inward circles, any soothing pattern that might hypnotize her away from her own consciousness. But she could find no release from the kaleidoscope of her own ever-multiplying thoughts.

  Thoughts of love. Of her failure to love her husband. Could she ever love anyone, or even desire them? She would lie there awake while Jamie appeared to sleep so soundly beside her. Jamie, who was her husband and used to find her attractive, even love her. How could it be possible that their marriage was failing?

  In their courtship they had gone for walks in the park, and looked at each other fondly across tables at Italian restaurants. They had laughed together at the theatre, and queued for tickets to the Proms, sharing all the rituals of a young couple in love, and so she had thought – this must be it. She took it on trust from his desire, his urgency, that this was love. He had chosen her, and so she followed his lead and hoped that her buried feelings would surface soon.

  But a part of her had always been a little afraid of him. She would watch him as they walked down the street and suddenly it would strike her, Jamie is too good for me, too handsome, too perfect. Sometimes she tried to take their bond on trust, but other times she felt like an impostor who would soon be found out – that one day Jamie would look at her and think, Why did I end up with this woman?

  Their marriage had at least been blessed with children. Sometimes, when she went to rouse her son and daughter for breakfast, she could not bear to wake them, but stopped to watch their sleeping faces: Joe’s arms thrown behind him onto the pillow, his mouth slightly open; the stillness of Amy’s eyelids, and the tendril of fair hair which fell over her ear. And then the wonder of their waking eyes – that unquestioning love in their faces, that assumption that she was their mother, and that they were depending on her.

  Why am I falling apart? she asked herself. With so many blessings – her children, her husband, her work – she should be happy. But it was as if a depth charge of buried grief was shaking all the foundations of her carefully constructed defences, pulling her downwards into her own quicksand.

  Her thoughts turned obsessively to her childhood, and her absolute, unquestioning adoration of her mother. She still cherished her memories of their last day together in London, shopping, eating ice cream in the roof-garden café. But had their wartime separation been necessity or choice on her mother’s part? There were those cheery but infirequent letters, then just one visit before her death. She could not help blaming her mother for being so careless. Why had she not hidden herself away in a shelter?

  If you lost your mother too young, didn’t that cripple your courage to love? Had she not been cut off at the roots? These were the thoughts which tugged at Anna. Perhaps she had resisted her childhood pain for too long, hiding it away in a box. But she could not flathom why all this forgotten life was now rearing up and unsettling her. It was an odd self-pity, a retrospective grief that she had not been loved as she loved her own children. More, she felt guilty that her unhappiness was now creeping up on Joe and Amy too.

  She might fall asleep at six only to be woken, exhausted, by the alarm clock at seven. Then she had to get the children ready for nursery, smiling and cheerful, and set off to work, kissing her husband goodbye.

  “I’ll be out late tonight,” He said.

  “Oh,” she said, hoping it was not obvious that she knew why he would be out late.

  “There’s a performance of a new play by a dramatist we might want to commission. I would’ve asked you too, but the children hate us both going out—”

  “It’s fine, you go,” she said.

  Later, when he returned home after making love to his BBC researcher, he found his wife slumped at the kitchen table beside an empty bottle of wine. He took her to bed and she kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  She did not seem to mind about Jamie’s lover. But why did she not mind? It did not make any sense. She began to drink every evening now, after the children had gone to bed. When Jamie wasn’t watching. The wine gave her a gentle oblivion, but then she would wake up at three in the morning, and the insomnia would drain her again.

  One lunch hour she drifted onto Oxford Street, and found herself wandering past Broadcasting house, home to her mother’s wartime life. Beyond the traffc and fumes of Marylebone Road, she felt the pull of Regent’s Park, with its wide open lawns and empty paths.

  But the sudden quiet of the park only sharpened her overwrought senses. Even though she was hardly looking, she felt as if she could register every leaf on the tree before her, and every vein in each leaf. Like the veins in her hand and neck. The sky before her was open and infinite, and she thought she could feel the weight of the stars beyond, even in clear daylight. Everything was out there and upon her: the constellations singing and her pulse ringing and every leaf on every tree calling out for attention. Enough, enough, enough, enough.

  She closed her eyes and covered her ears, and sank to the ground underneath a chestnut tree, where the grass was sparse and the shells of old conkers lay half-sunk in the earth. There she hunkered down and wept, until her body started heaving, her face pressed against her knees.

  A retired doctor was walking his dog in the park, a wiry man slightly stiffened by arthritis.

  “Can I help?” He asked, when he saw Anna.

  She looked up.

  “No, thank you.” Her face retreated back into her knees.

  He sat on a bench nearby and threw a stick for his Labrador to fetch. Anna sensed that he was still there and raised her eyes again.

  “Are you sure you don’t need any help?” He asked. Then he stood up and pulled out a folded white handkerchief for her.

  It was at that moment that it hit Anna, a pain so deep inside that it reached back twenty years: the white handkerchief given to a child who could not cry. Mr Ashton’s handkerchief, pulled out to comfort her on the day she had lost her mother.

  She looked up at the stranger and saw a creviced face, thinning grey hair, dark serious eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Keep it – I hope it helps,” He said, dipping his head. “I have a drawer full of these at home—”

  Then he was o
ff after his dog, his arm raised to her in a backwards wave.

  He left her folding up the handkerchief. Then she picked herself up and began walking through the park, along paths, past playgrounds.

  Something in her shifted as she allowed the thought of Thomas Ashton to surface in her mind; he had always been there, hidden inside her, she realized. She hadn’t seen him for over twenty years – he must be past sixty now. But she began to admit to herself that there was a part of her still pining for him, however ridiculous that might be. That nobody else could quite fill the hole in her heart because it was a shape made when she parted from him all those years ago.

  She did not even know if he was still alive, or whether he would want to see her. But she at least wanted to try and visit him. And in the days that followed, she began to unscramble the patterns of her past in the light of these submerged feelings for him.

  She remembered how hard she had worked to win her place at Oxford. Was it not to fulfil his hopes for her? She had arrived there with a green bicycle and a new set of clothes, all ready for love. But nobody there seemed able to reach her. By the end of her first year she had lost her virginity to a smooth lanky boy who had wooed her with chat about Albert Camus and L’Etranger. Yet she did not know how to feel at ease with him, and the relationship soon stalled.

  She had found it so hard to form any bond with young men. Even when she met and married Jamie, her own lack of desire had confused her. He was so appealing and yet she had felt so remote from him. She longed to be held, but Jamie could not give her the embrace which she craved – he was too much her own friend, her own equal, it was like a sexless sibling relationship. So when they made love, she closed her eyes and sought out other images to ignite her feelings.

  Lurking somewhere in her mind had always been the thought of Thomas Ashton. She remembered that look of care in his eyes, and a part of her wanted to imagine him as a lover. Forbidden thoughts, even in the privacy of her own mind. Yet she had divined the force of his feelings for Miss Weir, and she retained a sense that nobody else could be quite so tender, so passionate, so fixed in love as Thomas.