by William Boyd
“So they chose the other one.”
“I was there right up to the blastoff. In case something went wrong with him. But it didn’t.”
“That’s sad.” I felt full of love for him then.
He made a resigned face. “And now the Americans go to the moon,”
“So you can speak Russian?” I asked, trying to change the mood.
“Oh, I’ve forgotten most of it…but it was a long time, you know, to be there, to be so obsessed with one thing, and then not getting it….” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “When I came back to Egypt, nothing was the same, I couldn’t settle. I had to leave the air force.” He turned and smiled. “I saw an advertisement, looking for ‘instructors.’ So here I am fighting someone else’s war.”
“Don’t you have a home?”
“I have a small flat in Alexandria. My cousin’s living there just now.” He stood and hitched up his swimming trunks. “It’s not really a home. That’s why I’d like to buy this place.”
“Well, you should buy it. If it’d make you happy.”
He came round the table and kissed me.
“Hope. Clever Hope. It’s not so simple. I don’t think one old beach hut can make me happy.”
In the night, very early in the morning, before dawn, someone came to the door to wake him. I heard them talking softly for a while, then Usman got dressed. There was a mission to be flown at dawn, he said. They had to go now to be briefed. An UNAMO column, he said, heading for the marshes and river systems in the north. I was still half asleep when he kissed my cheek and said goodbye.
“When you come back, Hope, next time. I’m going to buy that beach hut. We’ll stay there.”
I left the hotel for the run back to Grosso Arvore a few hours later. Just as I was turning onto the road that led past the airport, I heard the rip of jet engines and saw six Migs take off, two by two, afterburners orange, and climb up and away into the misty blue air of the morning.
THE COSMIC DAWN
Hope feels sorry for Usman and his lost dreams of space flight. She too has seen those photographs of the home planet shot from high above our misty atmosphere. She can understand his longing to be up there in the infinite blackness, spinning through the vacuum of space at five miles a second, looking down at the blue-and-white ball.
To watch the raspberry colors of a cosmic dawn. See the furry haze of the fragile biosphere. Check out the moonrise and the moonset, climbing rapidly like a bubble in a glass of water, falling like a Ping-Pong ball off the edge of a table. Observe the vast spirals of plankton blooms in the oceans, hundreds of miles across. Count the sixteen sunrises and sunsets you see every twenty-four hours as you orbit the beautiful planet…. Maybe he might have gone farther out and had his eyes lit by earthshine, or—who knows?—seen the earthrise itself, blue and lazy over the sallow moon surface, like those American astronauts he so envied.
Usman’s dreams were out of this world. They could be hard to live with.
Hope made a plan. She would watch John in secret, covertly, over a weekend to see what happened. So she telephoned, said she was coming home and then, late on Friday evening, rang him again to cancel. An important meeting, interviewing Winfrith’s replacement, her presence required. John said he was sorry; he had been looking forward to her coming.
So she took a train up to London, hired a car and drove to one of those anonymous large hotels off the Cromwell Road and booked herself a single room.
On Saturday morning she drove to their street and parked. She saw John emerge from their flat, alone, and walk to college. She watched the college, almost uninterrupted—she had to eat and relieve herself—until seven in the evening, when he went home. He did not leave the flat again that night, and had no visitors.
She was up early enough on Sunday morning to see him returning from the news agent’s with the Sunday papers. She felt strange to be spying on him in this way, to be looking at a person you know intimately as others see him. Facets of John’s appearance that had grown familiar now seemed singular again: his neutral, unfashionable clothes, the tight fit of his jacket, his wiry driven-back hair. When he walked he rolled slightly from side to side, almost a swagger. He smoked constantly.
The afternoon was bright, cold and crisp, but warm in the sun. At about three, he left the flat with a ragged bundle of newspapers and a notebook. He walked to Hyde Park. He sat on a bench and read for a while and then jotted something down in his notebook. Then he wandered down to the Serpentine and strolled around, stopping to gaze at the last intrepid boaters of the year and the model yacht enthusiasts.
He looked pale and thin-faced and, despite her resolve and her anger, she felt a pity for him grow in her, almost enough to make her run over and say, hello, it’s me, I came up unexpectedly…. But not quite enough. She hung back and watched him until he went home, stopping on the way to buy food. She sat in her car outside the flat until ten and then returned to her hotel. She telephoned him.
“Hi, it’s me,” she said. “How are you?”
“Fine, fine.”
“Have you tried to call? I’ve been out.”
“Ah, no. I was just about to.”
“Telepathy.”
“Yeah. Must be.”
“Are you all right? You sound a bit…down.”
“No, actually,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“What’ve you been up to?”
“Read the papers. Went for a walk in the park.”
“Nice day?”
“Yeah. Coldish.”
“Funny to think of you in London, doing these things, without me.”
“Just a walk in the park.”
“Miss me?”
“What? Yes, of course.”
“Why don’t you come down this week? Wednesday, Thursday?”
“I might, actually.”
They talked on in this way for a while and then said good night. She thought he had sounded depressed, even though he denied it. She decided to wait one more day and telephoned Munro to tell him, making some excuse about a dental appointment.
The next morning she was outside the flat by eight, sitting in her car, munching a sticky bun and drinking coffee out of a plastic cup. By ten o’clock there had been no sign of John and she began to wonder if she might have missed him. Perhaps he had gone to work especially early? Perhaps he’d slept in? After some thought, she decided to ring the doorbell, just to see if he answered. There was an answer-phone device at the main door. Their flat was on the fourth floor. John would not see her even if he leaned out of the window.
She left the car and crossed the road. As she approached the front door she heard her name called. She stopped abruptly, her shoulders hunching automatically with guilt. She turned. It was Jenny Lewkovitch. Hope told herself not to be stupid: this was her front door; after all, what could be more natural.
“Hi,” Jenny said, smiling. “I forgot you lived round here. For some reason I thought you lived in Notting Hill.”
“No,” Hope said, as she rummaged in her bag for her keys. “Number forty-three.”
“I’m looking for a cheese shop,” Jenny said. “Supposed to be an amazing cheese shop near here, isn’t there?”
Hope pointed. “Bute Street. Three along.”
“Great.”
There was a pause. Hope could not think of anything to say. She felt her face grow hot.
“Well…” Jenny said. “See you later. Are you going to that college do? Saturday?”
Hope opened the front door.
“No. I’ll be in Dorset.”
“Oh, well. Say hi to John. See you.”
She left. Hope closed the door and stood in the dim hall, feeling absurdly foolish. She had been unbelievably tense and awkward, she realized. God knows what Jenny had thought. She sorted through the mail, picking out their letters. I have to go up now, she told herself, this is ridiculous. If he’s here, I’ll say I’ve had to come back for a meeting.
She ran up the stairs.
“Hi,” he said. “Thought I heard you.”
Hope felt cold. She felt a tightness travel up her spine to constrict her scalp.
“Miss Punctuality,” she said. “Who’s that?”
But she didn’t need to ask. Now she knew who XXXXX was.
“I needed somebody,” he said, flatly. “You weren’t here.”
“Jesus Christ. All my fault.”
“She’s not happy. Bogdan’s…he wants to leave her. And I was miserable. Christ, you know how miserable I’ve been.” He seemed to poke and prod at his face, as if it were going numb. “What can I say? All these clichés. Me, her, a moment. A kiss. So fucking banal.”
The thought of Jenny Lewkovitch kissing John made her want to vomit.
“I don’t even like her particularly,” he said. “Don’t particularly fancy her.”
“That’s meant to make me feel better.”
“It’s not a…grand passion. It was just something that happened. We fell into it.”
“Our bed.”
“Don’t do the bitter sarcasm number, please.”
He looked down at his hands on the table.
“Everything’s going wrong,” he said in a quiet voice. “Everything. I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “It’s contemptible. Inexcusable. I’m weak. I’m a liar.” He shrugged and looked at her. “Now you’re here, I’m baffled at myself. I can’t understand what made me do it. Now you’re here.”
Hope thought of that moment in the park yesterday and of her upwelling of sympathy for him. She pushed her chair back and went round the table to him. He tensed as she approached. Even then she wasn’t sure what she might do. From somewhere came the urge to hit him.
“Life’s too short,” she said, and bent to kiss his cheek.
They talked about it. Hope confessed she had been watching him for two days. He was unsettled by that news. He said he would never have expected her to be quite so devious. Hope said she would never have expected him to have an affair with Jenny Lewkovitch.
They went for a walk and had a meal in a restaurant. They tried talking about other things, then they acknowledged to each other that they were trying to talk about other things and so talked about the affair a bit more.
The day progressed with a strange lethargy.
Of all the emotions that Hope experienced, the most bizarre was a sense of disappointment. Disappointment that he could have betrayed her with someone so ordinary, so mundane as Jenny Lewkovitch. She recalled their encounter at the front door. Her awkwardness; Jenny’s breezy, brazen calumnies. The cheese shop…the chitchat…she saw again Jenny’s small face, her funny, pointed chin, her fringe, her bulky artisan’s clothes. She tried to imagine, from a man’s point of view, what there might be about Jenny Lewkovitch that could be described as sexually attractive. She failed. Perhaps it was simply a matter of mutual need and mutual opportunity?…But how dull, she thought, and how disappointing. And in any case where does that leave me?
By the evening of that slow day John’s mood began to change. During the afternoon he had made an effort, had looked closely at his behavior and taken responsibility for the consequences of what he had done. As it grew dark, Hope sensed him beginning to withdraw into himself.
At half past six he switched on the television and settled down to watch a quiz show, notebook in hand.
“Why are you watching that crap?” she asked.
“I’m interested in them.”
“Game theory? Again?”
“Ah…yeah. Sort of.”
She let him watch. She went into the bedroom and changed the sheets. Shouldn’t he be doing this? she thought, allowing herself to feel a little bitter. Shouldn’t he be slightly more aware of my feelings? Surely this job was one for the adulterer, not the adulteree?…Then she told herself to calm down. The whole plan, she reminded herself with some irony, was not to pretend it hadn’t happened but to get its importance—its lack of importance—in perspective….
She stuffed the sheets into a plastic bag. She wouldn’t have them laundered, she thought, she would just throw them away. An expensive symbolic gesture, perhaps, but no less satisfying for all that. And she—
“Hope?” John called from the sitting room.
She went through. He was still watching the quiz game intently, with the volume turned so low as to be almost inaudible. He glanced at her, then back at the screen. She waited patiently.
“I’m all ears,” she said.
“I think…” He paused, eyes still on the game. “I think we should stop all this.”
“What? Television?”
“This farce.”
“I’m not with you.”
He stood up and switched the television off.
“Us. The marriage,” he said. “I can’t take any more of it.”
John moved out. She didn’t throw him out, exactly, but at times she consoled herself with the thought that she had. In fact she left him in their flat and went back to Dorset, assuming he would be gone when she next returned.
Before she left she telephoned Bogdan Lewkovitch and said she wanted to talk to him. He suggested they meet in a café near South Kensington tube station. He was waiting there when she arrived. It was a dark, old-fashioned-looking place, with cracked oilcloths on the table and run by a staff of stout old ladies. They drank milky coffee from scratched glass cups.
Bogdan was a large man with fair, untidy hair and, oddly for someone of his age, he still suffered from acne; he always had a few pink spots on his neck and jaw beneath his ears. He had a brisk and direct manner and often caused inadvertent offense in the college. Hope liked him. While they talked he ate three pastries, triangular sticky cakes studded with nuts as big as gravel.
“It’s about John, isn’t it?” Bogdan said, almost at once, munching.
“Yes.”
“What can I tell you? Each day he’s different.” He picked some crumbs off the table with his forefinger. “That’s part of the charm, of course.”
He told her that John’s work on turbulence had started well but he had moved on too quickly. Conclusions he had drawn from a study of fluid dynamics he had then tried to apply more generally to all types of discontinuities. But here the sums did not quite add up. Those promising avenues were revealed as dead ends. Lucid and attractive formulae generated prolix answers of babbling complexity.
“And so he got very depressed, for a while. Which is natural. We could all see it. But then,” he winced histrionically, “we all go through that. That kind of frustration.”
Bogdan said that the first really bad sign was when John started working piecemeal, almost at random, on other topics—irrational numbers, tiling, topology—“even the dread world of physics attracted him for a week or two,” Bogdan said, with a sarcastic smile.
“And now he’s back on game theory,” Hope said. She told him about the quiz show.
Bogan said that, initially, John’s work had been astonishing. He had read a paper that everyone regarded as completely novel and exciting. The trouble was, Bogdan said, there were no laws of trespass in the world of science. Many people were working simultaneously, all over the world, in John’s area. All types of turbulent, discontinuous phenomena were being analyzed: weather systems, economic markets, radio interference. John was not alone, he said. He ordered more coffee.
“But the cruel irony is,” Bogdan said, “that those first months of work John did on turbulence seemed to have opened doors for the others, but not for John. He’s like…you know, a guy who invents an engine that runs on steam but finds out that James Watt reached the patent office first.” He shrugged. “Happens all the time. Even when you’re dealing in nothing but abstract ideas—concepts.” He
snapped his fingers. “Someone on the other side of the world comes up with identical proofs.”
“So. John’s got so far but can’t go further.”
“Yeah, and it’s killing him, I guess. It would kill me. You see, he thinks someone else is going to snatch the prize.”
“What can he do?”
“Nothing. He just has to accept it. We all tell him, but you know, I think that’s what’s causing his problems.”
Hope frowned. She wasn’t sure if this explained why he had slept with Jenny.
“I bumped into Jenny the other day,” she said. “How is she?”
Bogdan was eating. He swallowed and swilled down some coffee and then told her, with some eagerness, that they were thinking of getting divorced.
“I’m seeing someone else,” he said. “In Birmingham. I’m very happy with her.”
“Oh. Great.”
“But, you know, I’m worried about the children, et cetera, and all that.”
Hope said she understood.
“And Jenny,” Bogdan said. “I think maybe she has a lover here in London. But I don’t know who.”
For an instant, malice prompted her, urged her to try for a small revenge, but she resisted. Instead she told him vaguely about her troubles with John and how they were going to separate for a while. There was no one else, she said, it was a question of warring temperaments. They both felt that some time apart might be the answer. Hope wrote down her telephone number in Dorset and gave it to Bogdan. She asked him to keep an eye on John.
“Let me know if things get worse,” she said.
“Oh, sure. I see him every day. I’ll call you.”
They left the café. It seemed very bright outside after the brown gloom. Hope flinched as a bus thundered by. Bogdan kissed her farewell and reassured her once more.