That night she was in his room again. And a few months later, at the first opportunity, he had had her invited to a conference in Paris. It hadn’t been so difficult. Borders were crumbling. The world was taking on a different configuration. His world too.
One taste of Paris and Ariane was certain she didn’t want to go back. He had prodded Simone into helping. She had come through as she always did. Favours had been called in, papers arranged. And on a wintry day, Ariane had urged him out of the city to see this house, the house of her dreams she had called it. He had paid her rent for a while. But soon enough, she was earning her own keep. She had been well-educated, scientifically educated, as Jan had told him from the start. Her father had been a chemist. Her mother at that time was still teaching in a school on the outskirts of Moscow. And Ariane had languages, French as well as English and her native Russian.
No doubt, in these last years, there had been a slew of other saviours. He had no illusions on that score. She was too beautiful and avid a woman for any single man. But she had kept up with him. Made time for him. And he was more than grateful for that.
Stephen stretched out his hand to touch the silk of the nightie. It fell towards him, floated on the water, caressing his skin. He stood to hang it back on the rail. In the wall mirror he could see his torso straining. Could see something else as well. He stared down at the erection in disbelief. That hadn’t been there for some time. And through the opaque shimmer of the fabric it looked huge. Too big. He didn’t want to touch it, didn’t quite know what to do with it.
‘Stephan?’ He heard a knock at the door and Ariane’s voice. ‘Have you fallen asleep?’ The door opened and she gazed at him with a little smile. ‘I see you have missed me, after all, my friend.’ She put out her hand to him.
Later, in bed, after the repeated tussle and greed of their mingled bodies, he felt oddly buoyant, as if some bright, multi-coloured balloon had lifted him out of a mire into a stratosphere of blue traversed only by the most limpid of clouds.
As sleep tugged at him, he thought of Tessa again. He hoped she was having a good holiday, basking in the sun, that she would come back renewed. He asked her to forgive him.
-5-
__________
Tessa woke up in a hotel bed that wasn’t her own. The walls were covered in pale yellow brocade. A walnut escritoire on spindly legs stood in one corner. Sunlight peeked through shutters and fell in mellow stripes on a deeply piled carpet. She stretched languorously, touched the pillow next to hers. There was a note. From him.
She looked at the flowing scrawl of the writing, so like the man.
‘Bonjour ma belle Anglaise. Don’t forget. Lunch at one at the Brasserie Lipp.’
Tessa smiled. She lay back into the pillows and remembered. Remembered everything.
They had walked past the Assemblée Nationale with its great stone figures, along the Boulevard St Germain, then down boutique-lined streets and across the Pont de la Carousel. They had paused to look at a view which only that morning had left her devoid of emotion and now filled her with excitement. Then they had strolled through the grand square of the Louvre and stopped for a drink in a café tucked inside its ornate columns. As if by some juggler’s magic of inner and outer, one side of it gave onto interior sculpture gardens while the other flanked the Pyramid.
On the way Ted had told her about some of his favourite bits of the city - the ones they weren’t passing; the ones he had a special feeling for because they marked a childhood year in the city with his mother, way way back in the late forties: the steep and raucous market in the narrow Rue Mouffetard; the menageries on the right bank of the Seine with their doves and strange fish and hens and kittens, all overlooked by the turrets of what could have been his knightly castle; the street smell of plump round apple doughnuts which still made him salivate.
She had liked his evocation of his childhood. She could see him as a small boy in neat short trousers and bruised knees, his head a tousle of blond locks, his eyes a mischievous blue as he looked up at the woman who was his mother. Stephen never talked about his childhood. Maybe that was why he wouldn’t talk about children of his own. She had a sudden happy memory of all those articles she had read on sperm and the comparable superabundance of those of men born in the forties.
After that they had walked along the softly illuminated paths of of the Tuileries Gardens where the earth was starkly white and pebbly beneath their feet. It was growing chill and when she had shivered, he had put his arm around her as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do. When he had stopped under a tree and turned to kiss her lightly, that too felt good, right, a little affectionate step on the road to something. Or not. Somehow, it was easy. It didn’t matter. He made her feel, she didn’t know quite how, and maybe it was later, that they were both old enough to know there was no necessary destination. Journeys were there for their own sake. Little snatches of a different life, intense with their own sounds and smells and sense.
It had been so long since she felt like that - at once desired and protected and adventurous - that the tears had suddenly bitten at her eyes and she had inisted on waiting in the lobby while he collected his messages and made phone calls. Then there had been dinner. He had spent a good moment considering the restaurant. He wanted something to suit his wry and secretly romantic Englishwoman, as he had then named her, who obviously didn’t like this city as much as he did.
‘I’m getting to like it better every minute,’ Tessa had noted and he had parried, ‘So the evening won’t have been wasted.’ And they had looked into each other’s eyes then and both smiled in a shared expectation which wasn’t yet knowledge.
The restaurant was airy and white and had thick priestly candles on each of its tables. There were windows overlooking the river and every time a boat went by, they were flood lit, so that Tessa had begun to feel she was on a movie set, which was fine now, since someone else seemed to be handling the script. He had, he told her, gone for atmosphere rather than food, though the food seemed more than adequate and the wine delicious, if not quite so delicious, for her, as the quality of his attention.
They exchanged few facts and more stories. She learned, in passing, that he had been twice married and now long divorced, probably to the relief of all parties since good relations on the whole prevailed. Names of children and step children dotted his conversation as erratically as they seemed to drop in and out of the Malibu beach house, the ranch (yes, he said, there really was one and with horses) and the apartment in San Diego.
She had the sense that he spent his life whizzing from place to place. And the intimation that he probably kept his women happy enough because there was so much of him to go around. What he told her was that he was impossible to live with because he was never there and somehow wives expected you to be, which was fair enough, but didn’t work for him. Not now, not anymore in any case. He was getting on and there was too little time left not to fill it best as one could.
She had told him that in comparison, she was the world’s most boring person, that she had lived in two English towns in the whole of her life, but that she liked her work and was good at it. And that was always new. She had told about the current crop of books she was editing and they had exchanged anecdotes about authors and about Cambridge, which he knew a little, particularly the Laboratory of Molecular Biology where he had once visited Stephen, amongst others. She hadn’t wanted to talk about Stephen then, hadn’t prodded him.
Nor did he question her directly about anything more personal than she was prepared to reveal. She was pleased at that, decided he was a man of tact.
Later, they had walked along the river and he had asked her if she would like to come back with him. She had liked. She liked it even more afterwards. She had forgotten what it was like to be with a man. A new man who seemed to know more about her than she knew herself. A man with rippling limbs and deft hands, who make her feel desired, desiring, alive.
She didn’t think of betrayal.
She wasn’t giving him anything that Stephen wanted. Morality was such a tedious and barren schoolmistress and she was too old for school. She felt too, that though she was now launched on an adventure rather different from the one she had first intended, this one was somehow fitting, an adequate counterpart to Stephen’s.
But on the whole, she didn’t think very much. She simply let vitality course through her.
He had undressed her slowly and smiled. ‘White, I knew it.’
‘Don’t you like white?’ She had felt shy, feared that she would fail him.
‘I love white,’ he had whispered and kissed her. ‘And I’m going to make you love you too.’
He had.
Tessa rolled out of bed, a hum on her lips. She turned on the bath tap and watched water stream onto glistening porcelain. There had only been one moment when she had wanted to stop him. When he had expertly and automatically tugged on a condom, she had wanted to stay his hand, say, ‘No. I don’t mind. Please.’
Ted’s child.
She hadn’t, of course. Couldn’t find the words.
Gone were the days, Tessa thought as she washed and dressed and didn’t for once check for new creases in the knees she now hated, when she might have been accidentally impregnated. Now one had to say, make an issue of it. Raise the spectre of decisions. And the future. Yet he would never have to know if it happened. And it could happen. Why not? It was possible. She suddenly felt anything was possible.
She wondered if she could say it to him, tell him she was clean, healthy and if he was, then why not? No, she didn’t know him well enough. But it was only really because she didn’t know him well enough.
When she left the hotel to tackle the streets, they felt far less romantic than her recent memories. She decided to go to the Musée d’Orsay as Ted had recommended. It was a way of keeping up a link with him in his absence. She imagined him striding through the gates stopping to smile at an attendant, then greedily absorbing the pictures.
But when she reached the first room off the main concourse she forgot him. All her attention was taken up by a man escorting two small girls who held on tightly to his hands. They were twins, blonde and ringleted and bewitching, each one wearing a different brightly coloured toque and each one listening raptly as their father spoke. Tessa could barely turn her eyes away to look at the pictures. It was not only the children: it was the look on the father’s face as if his little girls had descended from a special place to be put in his care and he had somehow to preserve that specialness lest they vanish.
She scolded herself for her sentimentality, sensed it was part of the cloud she was walking on which might at any instant brew storms. But she felt it all nonetheless. She also felt, as she absently followed them from room to room, that she was in danger of becoming one of those mad woman who impulsively kidnap infants only in order to smell the talcum powder on their bottoms.
When she finally focussed on canvasses, all she saw were peach tinted women holding babies, a mass of plump and luminous flesh. Mary Cassatt. Had Ted guessed she suddenly wondered. Was that why he had sent her here rather than the Louvre?
She lingered in the room and considered for the hundredth time the different ways there were of having babies. You could have them with men, which seemed to be the simplest, most efficient way, but could also prove the most difficult. You could have them with science, which posed as Stephen had so emphatically told her, some risks. But then everything in life had a risk attached. Or you could have them in a way which was also socially useful - a kind of redistribution of wealth: you could adopt. But for that in England, she needed her husband’s cooperation, so she was back to point one. A vicious circle.
She had read of bold single women who had travelled to distant countries - India, China - and after years of preparation, come home with a child. Perhaps that would have to be her way. Yet again, though, she would have to confront Stephen, charge him with his double life. Whichever way she turned, this husband who had become a stranger, stood in her path.
He was probably at the conference now, Tessa thought. Maybe he would see Ted and they would face each other not knowing one particular item they had in common. For some reason, the notion made her vengefully happy. But she didn’t want to search Stephen out now. Not yet. She felt a little like someone who was slowly beginning to recover from a long illness and is suddenly newly awake to colours and scents and sensations. She wanted Ted’s strength to flow into her, make her vigorous. Then she would face what had to be faced.
After the exhibition, she went shopping. She hadn’t shopped so much in years. A displacement activity, the women’s magazines said, while the ads opposite offered sumptuous titbits for consumption. Displacement of what? Would she shop more and more the less and less possible it became for her to have a child? Would she become a menopausal shop-lifter as she crossed over from one age into the next, stealing to fill the void of hormones and love?
Tessa put it out of her mind. For today, for now, she was shopping because she was in Paris and soon she would see a man who noticed what she was wearing. That was certainly reason enough.
Punctually at one, after a rapid change in her own hotel room, she was sitting in the Brasserie Lipp decked out in a new dress, the smoky colour of Paris rooftops, and with a hint of raindrops in its clinging texture. A moment later, she saw Ted fling open the door and dash in. Once again she was filled with an impression of boundless energy. It seemed to flow into her, shore her up.
‘Hello there,’ he brushed her lips, surveyed her. ‘Grand. Is it new?’
She nodded, flushed a little.
‘For me, I hope.’
‘Especially for you.’
‘Good. And this is for you.’ With a teasing smile he handed her a small packet wrapped in glittering paper.’
She opened it quickly. ‘Ysatis. How lovely!’ She sprayed a little on her wrist.
He drew her hand to his nose and sniffed. ‘Mmm… Guess it’s for me too. We’ll have to find something which is just for you.’
‘This will do just fine.’ She considered him, slightly at a loss as to what to say next. So she babbled. ‘Do you know, I once edited a book on smell.’
He chuckled.
‘Yes, really. If I remember correctly, it claimed that smells influence us biologically. Musk, ambergris, civet, I think it was - all those glandular secretions from animals - are apparently incredibly close to human testosterone. In one experiment by some perfume consortium, they found that women who sniffed musk developed shorter menstrual cycles, ovulated more often and found it easier to …’ She clamped her hand to her mouth, realising where her chat had led her.
‘Conceive,’ Ted finished for her.
There was silence for a moment. Tessa stared at the table in mortification. Now he would recognize the failure that haunted her.
‘You don’t have any children.’
She heard the flatness in his voice. It wasn’t a question.
‘Is it that easy to tell?’
He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been with a number of women, Tessa. I’m not exactly a stripling.’
‘Of course.’ She couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes.
‘And you want a child?’
She nodded, was about to flee from the table when he put a staying hand on her wrist.
‘It’s hardly a perverse desire, you know. Nothing to be ashamed of. Altogether natural.’
Tessa stared at the consoling bluntness of the long fingers on her arm.
‘Though these days, it gets a little hard to locate the natural - particularly in my line of work. What with test-tubes and donor eggs and donor sperm and surrogacy… there are miracles everywhere. Virgin births by divine medical intercession. What will you have?’
Tessa looked up in disbelief, only to see a suited waiter at their table. She stifled a giggle.
‘A glass of white wine would be nice.’
‘Bubbly?’
‘Why not?’
She wat
ched him as he conferred with the waiter, liking his garrulous ease, liking the way he discussed the menu, suggested dishes to her. So unlike Stephen, she thought, and put the thought away.
He turned back to consider her. ‘You know, when I was a boy, my mother used to tell me a whole lot of fairy tales. I think she made them up, because I never managed to read them anywhere later. There was one particular one I never forgot, all about a brave knight and his lady in some great fortified castle in a remote French region. They were desperate to have a child, a boy, of course, though a girl would have done. But the years came and went and never brought a child. So the king consulted the wise man of the court, an old chaplain, all clad in black I guess, and the chaplain suggested fervent prayer, offerings and above all that the knight and his men join a crusade and make their way to the holy city.
‘And though he was loathe to leave his lady and his castle and his dogs, the knight went.’
‘The very evening of the knight’s departure, the chaplain brought a young man, a troubadour, or perhaps he was a wandering scholar, to his lady’s quarters and told her that she was to entertain the young man until the moon was again full and do everything that he bade her. It was God’s will. So the lady, noting that the young man’s locks were as dark and rich as her husband’s had once been, did as she was told.’
The waiter brought their food, salad, large slabs of buttery sole. But Tessa was more intent on Ted’s narrative. She urged him on. ‘And what next?’
Ted grinned. ‘And after a year or so, when it was rumoured in the castle that the knight and his remaining men had been seen in the region, the Chaplain rode out to welcome them and announced to the knight that the Lord had chosen to smile on his deeds and answer his nearest wish. A son had been born to his lady some three moon’s back and his hair was already as fiercely dark as his father’s. Needless to say, there was great jubilation in the court and they all lived happily ever after. Though of the wandering troubadour nothing was ever heard again. Even the good lady rarely thought of him.’
The Things We Do For Love Page 7