Iris and Raif are led to a table pressed up against the sill of a wide-open sash window. The air is so still that there’s no sense of where inside gives way to outside. Raif fears he might tip into the street so he holds himself with particular care. He appears to Iris as if he’s filled with dread.
The food takes an hour to come and while it looks charming – translucent pinks and greens – it tastes muddled. For the first half of that hour neither Iris nor Raif knows what to say. His foot is tapping uncontrollably and she is drinking faster than might be seemly. The people around them look young and at home. While Iris and Raif sit up straight, these others sprawl and wander about. The atmosphere makes Iris feel old and Raif somehow ashamed.
Then the conversation falls open. They look one another in the eye and say what they want to.
Tell me about your girlfriend.
We’ve split up. As he says it, he tries to recall how it came about.
I had no idea.
Iris flushes but tells herself it’s just the wine. She meant to say that she had no idea Helen was his girlfriend. But of course she had.
Her discomfort makes Raif nervous.
Girlfriend is a silly word, don’t you think?
Iris looks baffled. He starts again.
I introduced you – last autumn?
(The party where she first saw them together.)
Did you? I can’t quite remember.
With that she believes she has recovered her dignity.
I had no idea either, he continues. What you were dealing with.
You mean David? His MS, his infidelities or his stroke?
She sounds as if she’s telling a joke but Raif, who has no ear for jokes, hears pain. Before he can think about what he’s doing, he has reached across the table and taken her hand. He doesn’t let go.
They sit there in silence as if listening to the music that’s being played two floors below.
Are you about to ask me to dance?
Yes.
Keeping hold of her hand, he leads her downstairs to the basement club but it’s so full that they hover in the corridor, wondering what to do. The beat is too rigid for any kind of dancing they might attempt but Raif is determined. In the end he draws her towards him as if about to waltz and sets off in a slow revolve.
Is he prompted by the memory of the couple they watched dancing in The Blue Iris? Have they haunted him too? His gesture seems all the more powerful to her for being an echo of that moment. It’s as if he’s repeating something from their slight history.
kissing
What do others make of this shy middle-aged couple dancing in a basement corridor? She is small but stately and he has grace to match. They are serious people, you can tell, who are doing their best to let down their guard. Even so, they have buried their heads.
A group emerge from the club, and Raif and Iris find their way in. A song comes on that she loves and she winds her way into the crowd, trailing one hand behind her, which Raif fails to take. He doesn’t follow but she isn’t discouraged. Dancing makes her feel as if she’s escaped herself and at the same time is more herself than ever. She catches sight of Raif leaning against a wall watching her. His gaze is so new.
He’s happy just to stand there watching her dance, which makes her think that she has found someone with whom she can be her true self. Only that phrase has its echoes. With David I can be my true self. With Adam I can be my true self. She stops dancing and asks Raif if they can leave.
As soon as they’re in the street Raif draws her to him again and they kiss and for that moment there is no qualification or comparison or sense of repetition. Kissing one person is never like kissing another and the first kiss will always be itself – terrible or electrical, awkward or melting. For Iris this kiss has the same certainty as their dancing. For Raif it is something he recognises but has never encountered before. They remain in each other’s arms until a couple of boys push past and snigger.
We’re too old for this, says Iris.
Raif says exactly what she hopes he will.
No, we’re not.
At the entrance to the underground, Iris gathers her courage.
The girls are staying with their aunt.
Can I see you home?
(It’s the other side of the city from where he lives.)
Yes, she says. Why not?
The train is crowded and they have to sit opposite each other. Fixed in place by strangers as they move further into the night, they look and look. No wonder they can’t stop smiling. But the train comes to a stop in a tunnel and the warmth Iris has been enjoying concentrates into a terrible heat. Her guts curdle and she tastes acid in her mouth. She remembers this.
There had been a flicker on the platform – the same sensation that prompted her to leave the station the day Raif came to see the cloud mirror – but she refused it. She’d been feeling so good, her senses turned up, the so-so food seeming delicious, the wine delicious, the shy dance in the corridor one of the great erotic moments of her life, only now she’s stuck on a train with a man she might become trapped with. In a small space she can’t get out of.
Raif has his own sources of anxiety and while this is not one of them, he understands. He sees Iris clench her body as if she’s about to burst out of herself. Her eyes are shut, her hands are gripping her dress, her legs are drawn in. She wants to make herself into a knot but must do this discreetly as the worst fear is that people will notice. They will see what she contains. Nothing. Her greatest fear is that at her core there is nothing. Was that her grandmother’s fear too?
He wills her to open her eyes and when she does, he holds her gaze. She lets the fear and horror pass out of herself because he is inviting her to share it with him. He doesn’t speak or smile or reach out but he holds her. She tries not to think about the fact that David rescued her on a train in a tunnel too. Over the years her panic occasionally returned, something David took as an insult. Hadn’t he cured her? If she became anxious he would detach himself and become just another stranger, a person she ought to protect from such mess.
The train starts to move and just like that, everything is alright. Perhaps it’s not the closed door or the tunnel that frightens her but the idea of nothing moving, of not moving, of being unmoved. At the next station Raif guides her out of the train and into a cab. He holds her all the way home and follows her in, at which point she starts to panic again.
I think I have a migraine coming.
What do you need?
I’ll take my pills, some water, get some sleep. I’ll be fine.
Raif has noticed that she’s shaking.
Why don’t you get into bed? I’ll bring you some water.
She goes up, wondering why she lied.
He knocks on the door.
I thought something warm might be better so I made honey and lemon. Let me know if it needs adjusting.
Raif’s modest care touches her. If David had done such a thing, he would present it with a flourish and demand applause. She would have to declare it perfect and he’d be angry when she did not directly recover.
Raif closes the door and goes to the bathroom. Like the rest of the house, it’s too small for what it must contain but whereas every other room he’s seen is tightly ordered, this one is in chaos. There are two dresses thrown over the side of the bath: black (too wintry, Iris had thought) and white (she’s tired and would look washed out). There’s a tangle of tights on the floor and a pair of glossy high heels that he cannot imagine her wearing – though the thought of her doing so stays with him. On the shelf beneath the mirror is a heap of cosmetics. He treads on a hairbrush and spots a puddle of the grey nail polish she’s wearing congealed on the side of the bath.
Wanting to do something for her, he puts the lids on her lipstick and creams, and untangles the tights and arranges them on a chair beneath which he places the shoes. He puts the hairbrush in the bathroom cupboard, trying not to scan the shelves. This unexpected access to knowledge of
her feels like a dangerous gift.
What is it she needs? She looked at ease on the dance floor, which he had not expected. And her dancing was full of skilful intricacies: the tilt of her head, the roll of her hip, her wrist angled just so. But then there was the sudden agony she felt when the train stopped and how hard she worked to control it.
He wonders if she’s asleep and if he should leave and what is a migraine exactly? He goes downstairs, sits on the sofa and looks about him. There are folders stacked on a narrow desk. For want of something to do, he looks at them. There is one labelled Work and another labelled House, a third, The Girls. The fourth says David. Raif thinks of himself as the kind of person who would never open such a folder but he can’t ask her about David, who although still alive is so out of reach that he occupies the same realm as Liis. Raif opens the folder. It’s empty.
Upstairs, Iris is trying to have a migraine or at least to sleep. She’s uneasy about pretending to be ill but she wants so much to leave her panic in the past and not have it contaminate this next beginning. She pictures Raif opening cupboards and looking through drawers, and is ashamed of this thought, and then relieved when she hears the front door open. He has had the good sense to leave without saying goodbye.
daylight
The next morning Iris wakes up feeling many things. She’s proud of the dancing, astonished by the kissing and horrified by her panic on the train. She gave in to herself so easily. And suggested he come home with her when she hadn’t meant it. Or had she? Getting ready to meet Raif, she had prepared for sex while telling herself that they were just going to have dinner. She put on music loud enough to prompt the neighbours to bang on the wall, shaved her legs, oiled her skin and put a lot of thought into her underwear. Desire and panic have brought her back to her body, which she’s done her best not to think about for years. They seem like one feeling and were she to follow them to their source, she might discover that they are. She has anyway a sense of imminent turbulence as her forties tip into her fifties.
When she sees the tidied bathroom, her dresses and shoes, she’s embarrassed and then touched. Raif had been so tactful (she hasn’t retained anything he said) and he behaved as if her migraine (panic) were perfectly reasonable.
He phones mid-morning.
I was worried about you.
I’m fine.
Your migraine?
The pills saw it off.
I’ll come to see you this afternoon.
Raif is speaking with firmness. His modesty means that he is hesitant but also resilient. And this morning he feels as potent as he did when he crossed the room to speak to Liis for the first time. He doesn’t think of Liis when he looks at Iris but it is true that he has been drawn to another calm surface when what really attracts him lies beneath. But Iris is not a frozen lake. She’s a dry structure, her layers formed under pressure and difficult to erode. Raif is bemused, frightened, moved and aroused; perturbed by her invisible children, envious of her sick husband and determined to secure himself in relation to her somehow.
*
He arrives at two o’clock, bringing a bunch of pale irises in bud. She pretends he’s the first man to do this because David (or Adam) would have been upset if she had not. Raif sees through her badly performed surprise and laughs.
I can’t be the first person to have given you irises.
You’re not.
He doesn’t mind but wonders if he ought to.
She makes tea and they sit opposite one another. What now? Iris feels as if she’s trying to open a tightly folded piece of paper.
I asked you to come home with me and then—
Raif almost drops his cup.
No, no, I suggested I see you home.
We meant the same thing, though.
She sounds calm but looks past him.
On the train, I panicked. It wasn’t a migraine. I told myself it was but it wasn’t.
There’s no need to explain.
I wasn’t unwell. I was panicking.
You don’t like the underground?
It’s difficult. Yes.
She tells herself she is claustrophobic, the layer of explanation at which her mind sensibly stops. She will not ask why the panic always starts when she dares to feel fully alive and does not know that this sensation is fullness and not emptiness – it is everything rather than nothing. He knows what she’s going to say – that this is too sudden or too soon – but what she says is
I scared myself. How much I wanted—
He quickens, anticipating the word you. How much I wanted you.
How much I wanted to—
They are caught in a slab of light. No music, just teacups and dust and weary faces. He tries to think of something to say that will return them to the night before.
How much you wanted to dance?
No, she says, still looking past him. How much I wanted to fuck.
She says it to prove it to herself and it works. Her body is determined. Raif makes a small sound, less than breathing out, as he locks into this desire. He builds no sentences, forms no thoughts.
Iris starts to unbutton her dress, which is the one she wore the night before. He counts the buttons – twelve. She undoes six and stretches herself in the armchair so that the dress falls away. He can trace one side of her from shoulder to breast and the length of one thigh.
She sits back. Her body requires a familiar arrangement, the one established when she and David first met. Will he know not to move towards her?
Raif wonders if he should undress too. It doesn’t worry him to be naked. He’s never had much expectation of his body. But he does nothing. Iris will determine what happens next because he, too, is following familiar steps. He looked to Liis for direction. The more obliquely it was given, the more it excited him to interpret what was required.
But this is not some candlelit bedsit or corporate flat. They are two middle-aged people trying to persuade themselves into sex on a Sunday afternoon. What now? Iris gets up and leaves the room.
Raif decides that he is being invited to go and find her. She has drawn the curtains in the bedroom and is naked now but under the covers and turned towards the wall. He takes off his clothes. As soon as he’s beside her, she pushes his hand from her waist to between her legs. There is the flare of first touch but what then?
He’s stroking her vaguely, wondering how she prefers this to be done. He knows that there isn’t one way to do anything. Each woman is different, he reminds himself. I must learn about this woman. He wants to have her known so that he won’t have to feel so uncertain again. It hasn’t occurred to him that a body can be unlocked in different ways at different times and that someone’s desire is a puzzle their lover might go on solving.
When Raif met Helen he was deep in his grief. His world turned inwards and so when they fucked he went towards memory and fantasy and barely noticed her. He didn’t wonder whether the sex was good because he didn’t care. Now he feels more than he has in a long time and it scares him. He worries that he’s being clumsy and that he’s not staying hard. Iris thinks he’s being sensitive. His hesitation is matched by her own because her body seems not to know how to open. She wants this to be fear but knows it might be age. A response she has taken for granted is no longer there: not out of reach or misfiring in some way, just not there.
As soon as it becomes clear that they’re not going to have sex after all, they settle back into themselves. Raif draws Iris towards him and puts his head against hers while his hand lightly, solemnly, strokes the hair back from her forehead. She realises that she’s lost all expectation of tenderness and this makes her cry.
Raif’s mouth is against her ear so that she feels rather than hears the words.
It’s alright, my love. It’s alright.
These tiny vibrations carry their meaning into her heart and she believes him. It’s alright.
Raif could not explain to Ava what it is about Iris that draws him. He doesn’t want to impress her or rescue
her or even enchant her, he wants to listen.
They lie for some time as if asleep and then Iris, being thorough, tries to explain.
It’s probably because it’s been a while since … she begins.
Since you and your husband?
Yes.
A crack runs through this. Just after David moved out she bumped into Martin at another party. This time there were no lost keys. Nor were there spouses. Martin and his wife had decided to try a separation. Iris contrived to leave at the same time as Martin and he offered her a lift. She invited him in and they drank a bottle of wine. When she stood up he pulled her onto his lap, her body instantly agreeing as he shoved himself inside her. It lasted a couple of minutes and she saw him to the door as soon as he’d tucked in his shirt. They’d completed the evening they started all those years ago and would be indifferent to one another from then on.
What about you? she asks Raif. Was Helen the first person after your wife died?
Yes, he says, and he believes himself.
It is five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in May. A blunt light persists at the window but Raif and Iris prefer to remain beyond its reach.
a museum
The girls are dropped off by their aunt at seven. The windows are wide open and their mother is listening to music. Is this good or bad? She’s jolly and attentive and asks lots of questions but doesn’t wait for an answer. Something is pulling her away and so they follow her around.
Mum, do you think Dad would like a birthday card?
Why are you putting everything on the floor?
Or should we record a message. Like a video he can watch?
You need to put it all back.
Would they show it to him?
Would you?
Don’t pile those up. You’ll break them.
Would he listen?
Dad gave you that.
You’re not listening, Mum.
Are you listening, Mum?
Mum?
Every response is an effort. She’s drawn inwards towards what happened that afternoon, which was moving, alarming, mortifying and somehow so lovely that she keeps thinking she’s going to cry. It’s alright, my love. It’s alright.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 19