‘It was,’ said his wife. ‘And for me too. His students used to love to come and talk to me. If they had a little problem it helped them to confide, you know.’
I reflected that she might enjoy other people’s problems, particularly those of young people who are still tender enough to trust. No doubt she had designs on whatever problems I might have. As if in answer to this the hot hand grasped mine even more tightly. I felt a slight desire to escape.
‘Yes, the secrets I’ve heard. Of course it was the girls who wanted to talk. Their love affairs. They were all in love. Most of them with Martin.’ She smiled. I watched as the smile faded. ‘The weekends are the worst,’ she said to my surprise. ‘Nobody comes. And there’s not a sound from the street. I hate it here.’
‘Darling,’ her husband pleaded.
She ignored him. ‘What do you do at weekends, Claire?’
‘Well, I don’t like them much either,’ I said, startled into honesty. ‘On Saturday evenings I have a meal with my friend Wiggy …’
‘Your boyfriend?’
‘No. Wiggy is a girl.’
‘Why is she called Wiggy? Is there something wrong with her hair?’
‘Her hair is fine,’ I ploughed on. ‘And on Sunday …’
‘Oh, Sunday!’ The hands were now clasped reminiscently, for which I was grateful. ‘When I was well we always went out on Sundays. The Compleat Angler for lunch, and then a drive. The car had to go, of course. No point in keeping it in the centre of town. And Saturdays too. We used to go looking for things for the flat. I see you are admiring the lamps.’ I realized that her eyes had never left my face.
‘My parents used to do that,’ I told her. ‘Before my father got ill. He …’
Her hands flew to her face. ‘Oh, don’t tell me about illness. It’s life I want to hear about. Life!’
‘Darling,’ interjected the husband. ‘You’re getting tired.’
‘Yes, I’m tired,’ she said gratingly. ‘But I haven’t heard anything about this young person.’ Not surprising, I thought, since she had expressed no interest. ‘You can tell me anything, you know,’ she said, clasping my hand again. ‘Come again. Come on Saturday. Bring that friend of yours with the funny name.’
I disengaged my hand with difficulty. Martin—I was now disposed to think of him as Martin—moved forward and rearranged her pillows.
‘I’ll get your infusion,’ he said. ‘And then you must sleep.’
‘Yes,’ she said, exhausted. ‘I must sleep. Goodbye. Until Saturday. Don’t forget.’
‘Did she mean that?’ I asked Martin, as he shut the door quietly behind him.
‘Well, yes, she did. She sees so few people. It would be a kindness … Of course you are under no obligation …’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’ll come on Saturday. I’ll bring Wiggy. If that’s all right with you.’
‘Most kind. And now I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me. Cynthia will want her drink. And then I’ll have to get her settled for the night …’
‘Of course. I understand.’
‘Until Saturday, then.’
‘Goodnight,’ I said.
At that stage I had no intention of returning on Saturday. Let them find some other form of entertainment. I felt particularly bad about introducing Wiggy’s name into the conversation, if conversation was what it had been. She had enough trouble dealing with me. I knew she would rather have stayed at home than sat through those artificial evenings out which looked likely to become a ritual. She would keep these up as long as I did. There was no way she would welcome the idea of sitting by a solipsistic stranger’s bed. Unlike me she had a companion.
Out in Weymouth Street, the evening only slightly darkening at nine o’clock, I felt lonely, ejected from the intimacy of countless bedrooms. Not that this particular bedroom had impressed me. What had impressed me was the fact that the woman had felt confident enough to be slightly rude to her husband. That was the sort of confidence I could never acquire, since I should never marry. I knew this suddenly, out on the pavement in Weymouth Street. I raised my eyes to the Gibsons’ windows, but they were now dark. I decided that Cynthia Gibson was both sentimental and malicious: sentimental because of her hot hands clinging to mine, malicious on account of her husband on whom she was dependent but who insisted on treating her like a child, or like the invalid she was. It had been the frustrations of a healthy woman that had come through to me.
And the stifling comfort of those paradoxically comfortless rooms! The careful lamps everywhere, the cluster of milk-glass vases on the console in the hall! He would have been the collector in those days when they motored round waterside towns and villages, she the signer of cheques. That they were wealthy was in no doubt, but I sensed that the money must be hers. They were not old, but they were elderly; he might be forty to her fifty, or even fifty-three. That would account for her acerbity, as if the poor fellow could be credited with a capacity for infidelity. She was probably the only woman he had ever known. As a young man he would have been excited by her, by her hot little hands, her air of authority. And by her money, which had entitled her to put a high price on herself. She had no doubt discerned the erotic potential in a shy young man, had teased and flattered him into a state of excitement, under the watchful eye of an experienced mother. I was making this up, of course, but it struck me as entirely feasible. She would have been thirty-five to his twenty-five when they met, and it would have been a white wedding, never mind the flattering expertise with which it had been anticipated. ‘Life!’ she had said, in tones of ardour and despair. Something harsh had broken through, the first sign of authenticity in that whole strange scenario. I felt as if I had spent an evening at the theatre, but had not much appreciated the play, perhaps had not understood it. For once I was conscious of my own lack of experience.
I knew only simple transactions, in which there was no room for connivance or complicity, certainly not subjection, submission. Maybe the time had come for me to learn these higher or lower arts. Martin Gibson’s appeal to me was in this category. His wife had shown me that. The strange visit had taught me this particular lesson. There are no accidents. Everything is connected.
The light had gone, the evening was under way. In Wigmore Street I found a café, went in, and ordered a toasted sandwich and a cappuccino. What did those people eat? Something refined, no doubt, in the best possible taste. I licked a crumb from the corner of my mouth, paid the bill, and left. My meal had taken twenty minutes. When I reached home the flat seemed to me a haven of plain dealing, the hardwood floor a guarantee of straightforward behaviour. For a moment I wished I was the sort of girl my mother had been. Then I went to bed, determined to put the evening out of my mind. In this I partly succeeded.
On the following day I was hardly surprised when Martin Gibson came down the stairs into my basement. The cautious steps could surely announce no other.
‘Good morning,’ I said, with possibly a slight edge to my voice. ‘What can I do for you today?’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing. I came to thank you for your visit.’
‘Not at all.’
‘It made such a difference to Cynthia,’ he went on. ‘She sees so few people.’
‘So she said.’
‘She’s talked about it, you know. She was quite thrilled …’
‘How long has she been ill?’
‘Two years, slightly more.’
‘And she doesn’t go out at all?’
‘No, not any more.’
The slight animation faded from his face; he looked haggard and handsome. ‘So if you could come on Saturday? With your friend? Just for half an hour or so.’
That morning, as I walked to work, I had been aware of the first truly fine day in a spring of predominantly grey skies. I wondered how I might fare if I were condemned to view it through the shrouded windows of that awful flat.
‘I’ll come,’ I said.
His expression lightened at once. I think he was q
uite unaware that I might have other plans. Besides, I had no other plans. And it was so long since I had seen gratification on another’s face that my decision seemed to be quite rational. At the same time I knew that I had left simple rationality quite a long way behind.
Five
Wiggy was not best pleased with the evening I had in store for her, but had evidently decided that I needed consoling, indulging. In fact we were both in need of diversion, or perhaps development, in the direction of something more serious. Her life was no more satisfactory than mine was, although she never complained. As for myself, I was perhaps in search of significance—not that I knew what that should be. One thing was certain: I was not destined for the happiness of a settled life, whether or not I longed for it: I was not one of the elect. ‘Oh, for a closer walk with God,’ the radio had moaned at me on the previous Sunday, when I was about the business of clearing my mother’s effects out of the flat. Indeed, I had thought. One would venture a few criticisms, of course, if admitted to the Presence, a few reminders of broken promises. The lion does not lie down with the lamb, one would observe; swords have manifestly not been beaten into ploughshares. And what was my Father’s business, exactly? To judge from the Old Testament it was about being angry. In which case how had such a Father had such a charming Son?
This was not for me. I was resigned to the laws of this rough world. I would take my chance, and with it the penalties, for there are always penalties. I had spent that morbid Sunday wondering if simple happiness were available to all and had come to the conclusion that it was not. One had to make a determined bid for it, and I did not quite know how this was done. Friends of mine who had married young had revealed that they were no strangers to triumphal calculations and this had puzzled me. I was no romantic, but part of me wanted the process to be effortless. Instead of which I had taken the only options I thought I had, and had considered myself secure against disappointment. The disagreeable element in all this was that I knew nothing would come of such manoeuvres, invigorating though they were. I returned every time to the status quo ante, whereas those same friends seemed to move quite easily into further stages of maturity, leaving me on the outer margin, waiting for my life to begin. Needless to say, this awareness was concealed, though not always from myself. In my former circle I was the entertainer, a role which I had adopted, and which was, I knew, appreciated. Yet it was surely no accident that I rarely saw those friends now. My role was becoming harder to sustain. If my way of looking at the world was hazardous, it was, by this date, largely unalterable.
As always my mother’s life was the standard by which I measured my own, although I had learned disaffection from my father. I had concluded that happy families belonged in some mythic category, together with promises that had not been kept. Even in the fairy tales which I had read greedily as a child I had been disturbed by the absence of pity, by the slyness and guile that was regarded as quickwittedness. Many years later I realized that I had taken this creed as my own, yet my innocent mother had thought it suitable for a child. Presumably the more subversive message had passed her by when, as a child, she had read the same stories. One speaks of unawakened women as virtuous, though this may not have been their intention. In my mother’s case both were true. She never wavered in her purpose of making our lives as agreeable as possible, even after my father had changed from a courteous companion to an intractable and self-absorbed invalid, not seeing that it was owing to her excellent care that he had lasted so long.
The only uncensored feeling I ever discerned in her was unconscious relief when he died. Even this she failed fully to register, and therefore experienced no guilt. She resigned herself gratefully to her pastimes, pictures and books, and to myself. It was I who was guilty when conscious of the disparity between her life and my own, though I think—I hope—that she remained in ignorance of this. In truth my black heart had had few occasions on which to manifest itself. But I had only to picture my mother and her girlhood friend, their heads together, wandering through the summer evenings, to feel unworthy. Yet even they had been subject to change. Marriage had transformed my mother into a woman, although she remained a girl at heart. Marriage had put an end to the blamelessness of those evenings, which she was never to know again. The same may even have been true of her friend. I no longer thought it odd that they had not kept in touch. Both would now have been conscious of concealment, of secrets no longer to be shared. I thought my own methods were healthier. For me concealment meant distance. Perhaps it was time I took another holiday.
I had suggested to Wiggy that if we looked in on the Gibsons at about six o’clock we could escape after at most half an hour on the pretext of dinner. This seemed to me more satisfactory than a later hour, when Cynthia Gibson would no doubt be tired. I had noted her sudden slump into exhaustion from my previous visit. Had I stayed longer, I knew, she would have become febrile, querulous. I remembered her husband’s assiduity in marshalling me out of the room. Looking back to say goodbye I had been shocked by the sudden deterioration in her appearance, her colour faded, her mouth bitter, set in a grimace which may have been habitual. Therefore I was relieved, for my own sake, as well as Wiggy’s, when the door was opened by a robust-looking girl in a white coat, the nurse, presumably. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Good timing. I was just about to leave. Your visitors are here, Cynthia,’ she called. ‘I’ll just see if she wants anything, then I’ll make myself scarce.’ She laughed pleasantly, revealing dazzling teeth. Had I been ill I should have found her presence reassuring. Nothing could conceivably go wrong in the presence of those teeth.
But I was not ill, and I wondered if it were entirely in order that she should be wearing earrings and that the white coat should be open over a blouse and a pair of pin-striped navy blue trousers. I wondered this again when she returned to the hall, took out a comb, and stationed herself in front of a small and no doubt venerable mirror. She was good-looking in an uninteresting sort of way, with large blue eyes and regular features. The white coat came off and was hung in a cupboard.
‘Sue, darling,’ came a cry. ‘Don’t leave me without saying goodbye. After all I shan’t see you until Monday.’
The nurse, Sue, presumably, gave us a conspiratorial wink, and said, not much lowering her voice, ‘She’s been like that all day. Restless. Fortunately you’ll be a bit of a distraction. Only don’t stay too long, will you? And remind Martin to give her her pills. I’m coming,’ she carolled. ‘Ready or not.’ It was evidently her job to coax and tease, to provide affectionate banter, even to flirt. She would, throughout the day, be the unfortunate woman’s sole companion. I felt equally sorry for them both.
At first sight all I could see of Cynthia Gibson was those greedy little hands clasped round the nurse’s neck, disturbing her recently combed hair. Therefore it was not really surprising to see the nurse stroll over to a dressing-table confected out of some antique table and a nineteenth-century looking-glass in order to put herself to rights all over again.
‘Good evening, Mrs Gibson,’ I said. ‘It’s Claire Pitt; do you remember me? And this is my friend, Caroline Wilson.’
‘Of course I remember you. You bad girl,’ she added. ‘You told me you were bringing another friend.’
‘No, no. Caroline is called Wiggy. That’s probably what you remember me saying …’
She took no notice of this. ‘Martin,’ she called out. ‘Bring the champagne. I want Sue to have a glass before she goes.’
‘You shouldn’t,’ I protested, for form’s sake.
‘I’ll let you into a secret,’ she said, leaning towards me and releasing a wave of scent. ‘Tomorrow is our wedding anniversary, Martin’s and mine. That’s why we’re celebrating. We always do.’
‘Show them the photographs,’ said Sue, favouring me with another wink.
‘I will, I will. Now give me a kiss and go. Which boyfriend is it tonight?’
‘The ironing, in fact. See you Monday. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’ At this point
a spectral Martin appeared in the doorway with a bottle of champagne and several glasses held between the fingers of his left hand, like a bouquet.
‘Give Sue a glass quickly, Martin. She’s in a hurry. Where on earth had you got to? I was beginning to think you’d gone out.’
This was to be the pattern of our entire visit. We sat on either side of the bed, ignored, while various items of what actors call business were performed for our benefit. After Sue had left, it was, ‘Come round to this side where I can see you both,’ but in fact either the sight of us did nothing to stimulate her interest or she had forgotten who we were and why we were there. It was difficult to maintain the fiction that my previous visit had so thrilled her that she could not wait to see me again. If anything she was more interested in Wiggy, who wore her usual polite pleasant expression. I was proud of her; I always knew she would not let me down. Cynthia Gibson sensed this and asked Wiggy what she did. Without waiting for an answer she reached out and felt, indeed fingered, the stuff of Wiggy’s skirt. ‘Pretty material,’ she said. ‘I had something like it once. Martin! Where are you?’
By dint of valiant effort and a good deal of social expertise I managed to tell her that Wiggy and I were best friends, that we always met for dinner on a Saturday, that we were delighted to have looked in, in my case to renew acquaintance, in Wiggy’s case to meet someone whom I had described as fascinating (this was true though not quite in the sense she might have expected), that we were sorry to make this such a short visit but that restaurants always got so crowded on a Saturday that we must be on our way … I could see that she was not much interested in this but I felt I had to furnish the silence, or what would have been a silence. Her husband, as before, had retired to a dusky corner of the room. I need not have bothered. I realized that he was there as audience, while Cynthia’s role was to divulge information, about herself, mostly. It was clear that she was used to doing this, had behaved in this manner all her life. If Martin were audience we were little more than props, brought in to express appreciation. It was true that she was unfortunate; what was interesting was the fact that her will was intact. She was entitled to ignore what did not please her, which included anyone whose interest in her was less than her own. The mute husband, unnecessary now that the champagne had been poured, was witness to what she no doubt thought of as her enormous popularity.
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