Fictional Lives

by Hugh Fleetwood

  It was all, he thought as he sat in his compartment, very very strange. Still, he didn’t feel the panic he had been stricken with when imagining what Fraser and Lucinda might do, or become, to each other—he had no cause to; if something had happened between them the fact of the matter was that he, as it were, had won—and however much he fretted he was nevertheless able to tell himself, with almost complete conviction, that ultimately the only important thing was that tomorrow Lucinda would be here. If he still felt disturbed tomorrow, he was sure she would be able to set his mind at rest.

  *

  He spent most of that night worrying about more down-to-earth things—such as whether, though he had no doubt he would love Lucinda all the more when he saw her in the flesh, she might not be disillusioned when she saw him; or whether, after two days in the country, she might not become bored—and by six o’clock was up, shaved, and ready, hours early, to go to the airport. It promised, he saw from the window, to be a beautiful day.

  *

  The plane was on time, the passengers didn’t take unduly long to collect their bags and pass through customs, and Lucinda was neither the first nor the last of these passengers to emerge into the arrivals hall. She came out surrounded by a group of elderly check-jacketed men carrying golf-bags, and though Andrew had no real idea of what she looked like, as soon as he saw her he knew who she was; as she immediately knew who he was. They smiled at each other tentatively, ruefully, in the manner of a couple who have been living together for years, and want to apologize for a separation that had been long over-extended; then, the final barrier passed, they shook hands. Lucinda raised her eyebrows as if to say ‘Well here we are, this is it, though I can’t quite believe it still’, and Andrew, taking the larger of her two cases, murmured shyly ‘Welcome to London.’

  Exchanging glances—in order to be sure that each was feeling as amused, as happy, and as afraid as the other; afraid of striking, at the start, the wrong note?—but without another word passing between them, they went, Andrew hesitantly leading, in search of a taxi.

  By the time they had reached the flat however—where, Andrew planned, they would stay either until late afternoon, if Lucinda wanted to sleep for a while, or where they would stay just long enough for her to take a shower, have some breakfast, and prepare herself for the last leg of the journey, to the cottage—the ice, if with great caution on both sides, had been broken. (‘I feel as if I had just stepped into a room crammed with delicate objects, where one false move could bring the whole lot crashing down.’ ‘I feel more that I have just started some new story which, unless I get the beginning absolutely right, is never going to work.’ ‘It better had—I didn’t come all this way just to be a couple of lines, then torn up and thrown away.’ ‘Did you have a good flight?’ ‘Yes. I was sitting next to some woman who was convinced the plane was going to crash. Every time there was the slightest movement she said “Oh God, Charlie, what’s happening?”’ ‘Who was Charlie?’ ‘I don’t know. She was alone.’) And by the time Lucinda had had her shower and her coffee—she didn’t want to sleep now; she was eager to get to the country as quickly as possible—Andrew was feeling, though still intensely nervous, even happier than he had hoped he would feel; happier than he could ever remember feeling. Often in the past he had had the sensation of burning with a deep rich flame, as if lit from within by a golden autumn sun. Now he had the sensation of blazing, as if lit, from both within and without, by a dazzling mid-summer sun.

  The dream, he told himself, had become reality….

  Lucinda was not exactly as he had pictured her. For one thing, though she had said in one of her letters she was tall, she was in fact very tall; far taller than he had expected. For another he had decided that everything about her would be, in the fashion of some nineteenth-century heroine, somehow exquisite; almost, he recalled with a shiver of embarrassment, and a self-deprecating wince—polished to the point of preciousness. Whereas there wasn’t, in the actual living person, a trace of preciousness; nor, he told himself with relief, of ‘the exquisite’—with all that that word implied in terms of over-refinement, artificiality, and uselessness. She was rather a big-boned, if slim girl, with large practical hands, a wide mouth, and grey direct eyes. Her blonde hair, far from hanging sleekly, silkily from her head, was a thick heavy mane tied loosely at the back of her neck by a twisted elastic band. Her voice, though quiet, wasn’t in any way, soft, or weak, or studied. And her manner, which he had wrong-headedly conceived of as being slightly dreamy, not to say verging on the mystical (the manner of some only half-human goddess, who floated an inch or two off the ground), was instead as practical as her hands, as generous as her mouth, and as direct as her eyes.

  But in spite of all these minor discrepancies (though if Lucinda had been as Andrew had pictured her he would probably, he realized with another shiver of embarrassment, not have been able to bear her), she was just as wonderful in her entirety as he had wished her to be; if not more so. And when, that evening, the two of them, without either seemingly making a conscious effort, moved into each other’s arms as easily and naturally as Lucinda had moved into the cottage—she had fitted the place, and it had fitted her, as if she had lived there all her life—he told himself that not only did he love her; but that whatever difficulties they might have in the future, of whatever nature, he would never be separated from her again; even if it meant travelling to the ends of the earth. He had found his companion….

  So passionately and frequently did Andrew tell himself this over the next few days, and so totally at one did he feel with Lucinda, that it never occurred to him the girl might not feel the same. What was more, there was no reason why it should have occurred to him, since Lucinda seemed as happy and contented as he was. They really were, Andrew thought, like a couple who had always known each other, and had merely been separated for a short, and now inconsequential period.

  However, at the end of their first week together (a week during which they had wandered round the village, gone for long walks, visited some neighbouring towns and villages, listened to music, talked, and spent a good deal of time in bed), while Andrew was as much in love with Lucinda as ever, and she, he was sure, with him, he became aware that occasionally, when he glanced at her, he would find her looking thoughtful, or even worried; and aware, too, that the dazzling sun by which he felt himself lit was becoming, if only imperceptibly for the moment, obscured by a mist. And realizing why this mist had risen within him, he guessed the cause of Lucinda’s thoughtfulness. They both in fact had the same source; and that source was—it had to be—Fraser.

  They hadn’t, not once, mentioned the man. He might never have existed; or they might never, before Lucinda had arrived, have known a soul in common. This silence had been, on Andrew’s part, half a conscious decision—he hadn’t wanted anything ugly to intrude upon his bliss—and half an unconscious decision; he had at times simply forgotten Fraser, so enraptured had he been. But now, he told himself, he could forget about him no longer, and must face the truth; however ugly. Because having been bottled up for so long, the vapours of suspicion were beginning to escape.

  Even then, though, it was another three days before he could bring himself to do it; and he would have put it off still longer if it hadn’t seemed to him that Lucinda was looking increasingly worried; and that the constantly thickening mist was starting to obscure not only the brightness of his sun, but also its warmth.

  He did it one evening, over dinner, and he tried to sound light-hearted; saying ‘Oh, that reminds me, what did you make of Fraser?’ But almost as soon as he had done it, he knew he shouldn’t have; sound light-hearted, that is. For Lucinda, sensing his uneasiness, took advantage of it, and became evasive herself. She smiled, said casually, ‘I told you in my letter, he gave me vertigo and struck me as being dangerous,’ and then went on to talk about what they were going to do tomorrow.

  Which, Andrew felt, was more appalling than the story of a brief affair with the man would have bee
n. That would have stung him, hurt him; but would also have enabled him to tell himself that it was of no consequence; that it was over. But that Lucinda should so refuse to meet him at all, so attempt to dismiss him, could only mean that what was worrying her was too terrible to tell; and was, furthermore, not a thing of the past. It was a thing very much of the present. And of the future, too? Yes, he thought miserably. Of the future….

  He respected the girl’s reticence of course, admired her for it, and loved her all the more for it; she clearly wanted to spare him what he had come to think of as ‘the horror’. And he forced himself to smile back at her, suggest they take a bus to the coast in the morning, and then go on to discuss the possibility of bathing. But as he did he couldn’t help shivering; and telling himself that however much he should continue to respect Lucinda’s desire to sort out by herself whatever had to be sorted out, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to. He was afraid, very afraid, that he would feel compelled—either tonight, or tomorrow—to return to the subject. If only so he could help her to bear her burden; or if only to know the worst, and not imagine that worst to be more dreadful than it obviously was.

  In the meantime he would start to regret that he had raised the matter at all—if he hadn’t, unnatural though it might have been, and frightening for a while, eventually the mist would have cleared, and Lucinda’s worries died down—and continue to regret that having raised it, Lucinda hadn’t given him some sort of satisfaction; hadn’t told him something—anything—less disturbing than nothing.

  In fact he managed to hold his tongue for another two days. Then, feeling that the mist had become a fog, and was indeed chilling, and that he would be driven mad by Lucinda’s now very curious efforts not to appear worried, he gave up the struggle.

  This second conversation—if the first had been a conversation at all—took place on the edge of a wood he had wanted to show Lucinda; a beech wood he had always loved, on the top of a hill with a view of fields and hamlets, a distant cathedral and the sea. And it was in part the very beauty of the place—especially on this June afternoon, with the sky blue, the larks singing, and the trees rustling and silver and bright—that made him suddenly determine to come to terms, once and for all, with the ugliness of his thoughts; and made him equally suddenly, as he was holding Lucinda’s hand, plop down on a grassy mound, look up at the tall shining girl in whose hair he had threaded flowers, and say, with an earnestness and mournfulness he couldn’t disguise, ‘Will you please tell me about Fraser.’

  He thought, for a moment, that Lucinda was once again going to fob him off with a smile—a light ‘Fraser? What do I know about Fraser?’—and decided that if she did he would tell her of all his doubts and fears and suspicions, and beg her to comment on them, or deny they had any justification, one by one. But (seeing this decision on his face?) Lucinda did not smile—at any rate she checked the smile she had been about to give—and remained motionless, gazing over his head at the trees.

  He had to squint to see her, for she was standing against the sun.

  She waited for a long time before she spoke; as if her words were clothes, and she had to choose which ones to pack before setting off on a journey. Finally however she was ready; she had selected her outfit.

  ‘I’m probably asking too much of you,’ she said, still standing, still gazing at the trees. ‘In fact I’m probably asking the impossible. But you must try to give me what I want.’

  She paused then; for so long that Andrew carefully, as if afraid of disarranging her neatly packed case, made himself murmur ‘I will if I can, but I don’t know what you do want.’

  ‘You must try,’ Lucinda went on eventually, without apparently having heard him, ‘not to ask me for a month. Just for a month. At the end of a month I’ll tell you everything. I promise.’

  Andrew stared at her as best he could, and didn’t move until she slowly lowered herself onto her knees, took a flower from her hair, and started, distractedly, to weave it into his own brown English thatch. Then he took one of her hands, and kissed the palm.

  ‘Why?’ he whispered.

  Lucinda looked up at the trees again; and again was silent for a long time.

  ‘Because I can’t help feeling that if you do ask me you’re going to put everything in jeopardy.’ Another pause. ‘No, you’re not. We are going to put everything in jeopardy. Or just—everything is going to be put in jeopardy.’

  She sat down beside him, and looked now into his eyes. She looked steadily, unblinkingly, with a greater seriousness and simplicity than Andrew had ever seen; with such seriousness and simplicity that he couldn’t, after a few seconds, bear her gaze any longer, and lowered his head.

  Lucinda stroked his hair; he squeezed the hand he was still holding; and both of them spoke, very quietly, at the same time.

  Lucinda said ‘Please, Andrew.’

  Andrew said ‘I’ll try.’

  Then neither of them moved for a while; until, as if they had been rehearsed, they rose together and started to walk, slowly, into the wood.

  *

  Andrew did try, for the next ten days; and Lucinda helped him by studying maps with him, reading about various countries with him, and generally trying to distract him with endless talk of where and when their first trip abroad should be. (She also, frequently, asked him to advise her as to what she was going to do with her life. ‘I can’t just be your travelling companion, can I?’ ‘I don’t see why not. I’d pay you well, and it’d be more interesting than most jobs, I think. Unless there is something else you specifically want to do. In which case you should do it.’ ‘That’s the problem. I don’t think there is. Or if there is, I don’t know what it is. I mean eventually I want to have a child or two; only that’s something else, isn’t it?’) But though he tried, and though Lucinda did everything in her power to take his mind off Fraser—even saying in desperation one morning ‘Look, let’s just go away tomorrow. Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just leave’—Andrew knew that he was going to fail; that Lucinda had asked the impossible of him.

  Because just as, a few months ago, Lucinda had come to obsess him, so now Fraser came to obsess him. He felt that the man was continually walking by his side like a baleful ghost; accusing him, threatening him, and standing between him and Lucinda. Fraser ate with them, Fraser was present at their discussions, Fraser lay in bed with them—and with every second that went by Andrew found it harder and harder to avert his eyes from his haunting presence. And the more he stared the more he was certain that, behind Fraser, Lucinda was slipping away. If he did wait a month, he told himself, by the time he finally struck down that ghost Lucinda might have disappeared completely. She had said that if he pressed her he might put everything—by which she clearly meant their relationship—in jeopardy. But by not pressing her, Andrew became convinced, he was putting it in far greater jeopardy. He was even ensuring its end.

  Lucinda herself must have realized this; because at the end of those ten days, when he did return, for the third and last time, to the subject of Fraser, in spite of her previous pleas for silence she was ready, without any hesitation now, to meet him.

  She didn’t hesitate; but she did lay her arms over the atlas she had been looking at, she did lay her head on her arms—and she did look, and sound when she spoke, defeated….

  ‘I met Fraser that first time, as I told you—and as he told you. The day after he called me and asked if we could meet again. We did. We met three more times after that. Then we both knew we mustn’t see each other any more. Otherwise we would have betrayed you. I don’t mean by that we would have gone to bed with each other—though we probably would have—but that we would have betrayed our friendship, our love of you, and the trust you had placed upon us. In other words I was afraid that if I saw Fraser again I was going to fall in love with him. And I mean fall, almost literally. The only trouble was that Fraser had already taken that step—had already fallen. Or had already clung to me, to stop himself falling. If you see what I mean.
We didn’t see each other again, though we spoke on the phone a couple of times. Eventually I knew I had to get out. Because even though I hadn’t actually met you, I loved you. And I didn’t want to love someone else. So I bought my ticket and sent you that telegram. I called Fraser to say goodbye, and he said he would wait for six weeks in San Francisco—just in case things didn’t work out between the two of us. He said that if I wasn’t back within six weeks he would leave for the north.’

  Quietly, Andrew murmured ‘Is that all?’

  ‘No, that’s not all. And there’s no point in being coy about this, or pretending that I’m just being vain. If I don’t go back within six weeks Fraser won’t leave for the north. He’ll kill himself. He didn’t say that, he didn’t imply that, he didn’t even hope I would understand that. But he will, I know. As you must know if you’re close to him. He’ll kill himself because rightly or wrongly he saw me as either his last chance, or his first chance. Probably both. I told him I would write to him, to let him know one way or the other. I haven’t yet.’

  Andrew closed his eyes. ‘And when you do, what will you tell him?’

  Then at last Lucinda did hesitate; and her voice, when she replied, was even quieter than his.

  ‘I don’t know. I dare not write.’