The Pretence

by Linus Peters

  “When I was a kid I used to go there with my family. My sister and I went for these long walks. Doesn’t rain that much. Not as much as you think.”

  I don’t know why I jabbered on like that. Far worse mistakes had been made. Maybe because it was a moment of realisation. The original Frances was mentioned much less now. In fact, we rarely spoke about anything that had occurred before we first wrote to each other.

  Barely a word was spoken on the way back to the hotel. The whole evening felt brittle and breakable, volatile in a way that we were beginning to experience more and more. The next day, on the journey back to London, she pretended to sleep most of the time. We arrived back at the flat as strangers. I mean, I think we both knew we couldn’t hold this thing together much longer, that the time had finally come, yet neither of us knew what to do about it.

  I don’t know why it came as such a surprise to me, but that evening, when I was emptying the garbage, I noticed some letters addressed to Francis Lock that had been opened, read and discarded. Nothing important, just a couple of charities Frances used to support asking for more donations, blurbs from a fringe theatre, an offer for a new type of credit card, but it fascinated me that she apparently felt comfortable enough in her role to open ‘her’ mail.

  I returned to the living room, sitting next to her as she watched a DVD of some period drama she’d recorded while were away.

  “I didn’t know you were getting mail here,” I said, approaching the subject as casually as I could.

  “Mm? ... Oh. Yes,” she replied, pausing long enough to realise I must’ve spotted it in the garbage. “Just junk. Charities mostly.”

  I really had it in mind not to say any more, but for some reason it started a thought fermenting away inside her and soon she turned and stared at me, the hint of an accusation on her face.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I was just wondering if you considered me not so nice, not so ‘charitable’ now?”

  I stared back at her, those blue eyes suddenly seeming like flint. I didn’t like the way this was going. Not one little bit. “Of course not,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  Again she went quiet. This was crazy. We couldn’t enter no-man’s-land. It would kill us both. We had to move one way or the other. And being the sort of person I am, it felt a lot more comfortable to go back to where we’d been before.

  “Everything’s just the same,” I said, rather lamely.

  Again she went quiet, and maybe that would’ve been it, maybe, having got that close and stared over the precipice, we would’ve both decided to step back, to appreciate what we had and held onto it. Yet just at that moment, the security intercom buzzer went.

  Perhaps because I was so preoccupied, it never occurred to me not to answer, that it could be a further complication.

  “Simon?” said a voice. “It’s Luca.”

  “Oh ... Hi,” I replied, immediately cursing myself for not thinking.

  There was a long pause while he waited for me to do what I naturally would do in these circumstances. Which was, of course, to open the door.

  “Just thought I’d call by.”

  I don’t know what my line of reasoning was. I guess I didn’t really have one. But suddenly I thought, ‘Well, why not?’ Maybe it was what we needed? Luca had obviously thought it through and decided it was time to make the gesture. Why not reciprocate?

  “Come on up,” I said, releasing the door. And then, as if my nerve immediately gave out, as if I had to give him some kind of warning, I added. “There’s someone here.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, reassuring me. “I won’t stay for long.”

  I walked back into the room. “Luca,” I informed her, as casually as possible. “He’s coming up.”

  She turned and gaped at me, all her previous thoughts replaced by fear. “What!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Why not?”

  She started to breathe heavily, like some trapped animal looking for a way to run. “I don’t want him here!”

  “It’s okay!” I said, wanting to convey to her that nothing could happen, nothing Luca could say would change the way I felt. There was a rap at the door.

  “Simon!” she cried in protest.

  “Trust me,” I told her.

  I left her squirming on the sofa and went to open the door. Luca standing there uncomfortably, looking almost risibly serious.

  “Come stai?” I asked.

  “Bene. Bene,” he said, both of us knowing she could overhear and sounding cripplingly self-conscious because of it. “And you?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” I answered, leading him through.

  Frances was up on her feet behind the sofa, as if she’d thought about running into the bedroom, but realised she was cut off, that we would’ve all collided in the hallway.

  “Look who’s here,” I said.

  There was a silence barely short of eternity, when everything around us seemed to collapse downwards and the circumference of the Earth must’ve shrunk by some ten per cent. She stood there, repeatedly forcing fear off her face with a smile that seemed to be somehow pitching and yawling, whilst Luca openly stared at her.

  It went through my head that he might laugh at the black-and-white thing. That he would collapse to the floor, shrieking with the absurdity of it, throwing open the windows and denouncing her to the entire street. But he suddenly let out a loud cry, threw his arms wide open and advanced upon her.

  “Frances!” he said, kissing her warmly on both cheeks. “My God, you look fantastic!”

  “Hi, Luca,” she replied, nervously releasing herself from his grip.

  “Look at you!” he told her, gaping with the same sort of sublime awe that some might reserve for the Statue of David or a particularly spectacular sunset. “Fantastic! ... Absolutely fantastic!”

  There was another long pause, Luca seemed not in the slightest bit embarrassed by his continued staring, but I thought it was time to attempt to bring some normality to the situation. “Coffee?”

  “Mm? Oh yes, please.”

  “I’ll get it,” said Frances, gratefully leaving the room.

  As soon as she was gone, Luca began to talk in an excited whisper. “My God!” he exclaimed. “I see what you mean.”

  I nodded my head, knowing that would be his reaction.

  “I’ve never seen such a beauty. What eyes.”

  “And she’s really nice.“

  “And the body. The way she walks – sex and grace.”

  Again I nodded, not altogether surprised he’d ignored my point. “And really nice,” I repeated. “Intelligent. Caring.”

  Luca shrugged, as if he couldn’t possibly know, and didn’t really care.

  “Believe me,” I persisted.

  “Okay!” he said, a touch dismissively, as if he couldn’t understand why I was pursuing that point. At that moment Frances returned to ask how he liked his coffee.

  I don’t know if it was because it was the three of us playing the game, or that, after what had happened earlier, this now seemed somehow inappropriate, but even though Luca only stayed for half-an-hour, it seemed to stretch on forever. Most of the time he had this stupid smile on his face, as if we were all party to a private joke that none of us could actually mention. Though to his credit, he only made one mistake. And that was only a minor one. Or so it seemed at the time.

  We were reminiscing. The way friends have a habit of doing when they admit new people into their circle. Talking about how we’d first met, fitting everything all together for her. For some reason he took it upon himself to mention the party where I’d met the original Frances. Not deliberately, he was actually telling her what a dull unsociable Englishman I used to be, the things he had to drag me to, and somehow trapped himself.

  “I had to make him go,” he said, blundering on, oblivious of the fact that this wasn’t the way the game was played,
and certainly not these days. “He wanted to stay in and watch something on television. And look what happened,” he said, turning and smiling benevolently at us both. “How it turned out.”

  She went very quiet after that. Probably because she was worried what he was going to say next, that he might drag us even further into trouble.

  “Er, well, you’ll have to excuse us, but we’re both a bit tired,” I said.

  “Oh yes. Of course.”

  He kissed Frances goodnight, lingering just a little too long over it, and I walked him out of the flat and down to the front door.

  “You lucky bastard!” he kept whispering, as we descended the stairs. “She is so beautiful!.”

  “And interesting, and intelligent, and very pleasant to be with,” I again persisted.

  “Lucky bloody bastard!”

  He walked off into the night, still muttering ‘bastado’, and I ran back upstairs, suddenly feeling elated. Partly, if I’m honest about it, because of his unashamed adoration for her, but more because it seemed as if we’d just closed ranks, stood to-toe against our first outside intruder, and won.

  I grabbed hold of her, ignoring her troubled expression, lifting her up in the air and kissing her.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she cried, bursting into laughter.

  “Have I told you how much I love you today?”

  “No,” she replied truthfully.

  “Well that’s because they’re still counting.”

  “Who are?”

  “The little people who do this kind of thing. All computers have overloaded. Now they’re using the old-fashioned method - fingers and toes. Not one hand or foot isn’t being used. Even new-born babies in maternity wards have got little pink and blue ribbons tied to their feet to show they’ve been counted.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said, which was her usual reaction when I went off on one of my silly tangents.

  “Some are suggesting the inclusion of cloven-hoofed animals - eight to a beast, it’s not to be sniffed at - though I think it in rather poor taste.”

  “What did he say?” she asked, tugging me back to reality.

  “That I was the luckiest bastard in the world.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No.”

  She looked a little thoughtful, almost as if she didn’t believe me.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’d just forgotten how Italian he was.”

  “Yes, a lot of those people from Italy are.”

  “You know what I mean. Everything’s about sex. Flirting. It’s never turned off. Not for a moment.”

  “He’s my best friend,” I told her simply. “A really good and caring person. I don’t know what I would’ve done without him.”

  She nodded her head, as if conceding the point, and said no more.

  For the rest of the evening everything appeared to be back to, what we’d come to regard as, normal. The two of us just slobbing out in front of the television, wrapped in each other’s arms, making a constant trail to the kitchen for various comfort foods. It was only later, when we went to bed and were making love, that it finally bubbled over, that my world was shattered yet again. And this time, I fear, beyond all hope of repair.

  I don’t know about you, but there seems to be a remarkable lack of bedroom vocabulary, words you can use when the big moment arrives. Most people seem to specialise in religious references, ‘Oh God! Oh God! Jesus Christ!’. Or as I heard once yelled much more eloquently in a film (foreign, of course) ‘Through Mary to Jesus!’ If it’s not that, then it tends to be ‘I love you’, irrespective of whether you do or not. In fact, I would guess that the most loved people in the world, or those that receive the most declarations, are whores. Which is something of an irony really.

  Failing that, what is there? Names, I suppose. Say your partner’s name over and over. If nothing else to prove you remember who they are. Which I guess is often my technique. And why I got into so much trouble.

  I was lying on my back with her astride me, getting more and more turned on by the fact that she was in control, that she was the one governing it and would decide when we reached the moment. .

  “Oh God! Frances!” I moaned. “Frances!”

  I guess I sensed a kind of something. A change in her rhythm, her movement, but in the middle of what was going on, how the hell was I to know?

  “Yes! Yes! Frances!” I called, not being able to hold on any longer.

  Suddenly she stopped, right in the middle of everything, just as I was beginning my climax.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, gaping up at her.

  “Shut up!” she shouted.

  “What?” I said, feeling utterly bewildered.

  “Shut the fuck up! ..... I’m not Frances! ... I’m Juliana.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The human race is but noise. There was silence before we were here, and there will be silence after we’ve gone. Everything else, the growing roar issuing up from us all, a baby’s cries, a victim’s screams, laughter, music, is merely a disturbance of that silence. Yet it’s always there. Waiting to sweep back in over us whenever it can, to engulf us repeatedly throughout our lifetimes. More so as we get older, as we grow weaker. Silence returns time and time again, till finally it claims us forever.

  The silence that fell upon Juliana and me was so dense it almost seemed to crush us. I guess she got off me, she vacated my naked body, though I don’t honestly remember. All I can recall is the two of us lying there in the dark, stretched out beside each other like corpses abandoned in a hospital.

  I suppose it was thoughtless of me. I should’ve paid more attention to the way things were changing. I mean, in those first few weeks, I truly believe she loved being called Frances, playing the part, stepping into the role, but somewhere along the line it had begun to grate. She didn’t want to be the recipient of residual glory, to rotate shadows with a past love, she wanted to be appreciated for who she was. Which is why you can hardly blame her for getting to hate the name of Frances so much that eventually it made her want to scream.

  And the irony was, I didn’t want her to be Frances either. Okay, I admit, in those first few weeks, there were times when I took a degree of comfort from being able to say that name again. Odd moments of excitement, almost panic, when I’d call out from one room to another, or whisper it into the dark, as if I wasn’t quite sure who would answer. But since then I’ve only played the game because I couldn’t see how to stop it. Because I was so scared of losing her.

  God knows how long it was before either of us spoke. I didn’t know what it meant, what the repercussions would be, and wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. I mean, was that it? Now that the spell had been broken, was I in bed with a total stranger? It may have been an unconscious movement, but I couldn’t help but notice that both of us had seen fit to reach down and cover up our nakedness with the duvet.

  “Do you want to know something?” I eventually asked.

  She took so long to answer, I didn’t think she was going to. “What?”

  “I’m so happy. Really.” Again silence surged into the room, sweeping all around us as if it was waiting outside the door for any opportunity. “Do you want to know why?”

  There was another long pause. “Why?” she finally asked, her voice as flat and low as the desert horizon.

  “Because at last I can get to know you. I can forget all about Frances and concentrate on.....“

  “Juliana,” she said, filling in my hesitation.

  “Juliana,” I said, making a point of saying the name as if I was embracing it, as if I was welcoming it to me. “I’m so happy,” I repeated.

  She made a kind of grunting sound, like she couldn’t see how I possibly could be.

  “I mean it!” I said.

  Yet again silence tagged us and I frantically began to grope around for something more.

  “It’s a nice name,” I commented, somewhat inanely, lo
oking to stall, to diffuse, the conversation. “Nicer than Fran---”

  “I’m going back to Amsterdam,” she suddenly announced, before I could finish what I was saying.

  I turned and stared at her, the glow of the street lights spilling in just enough to be able to make out the firm set of her expression.

  “What for?”

  “Simon!” she groaned wearily. “It’s over!”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You know it is.”

  “But I love you!”

  “You love ‘Frances!” she said, sneering at the name with sufficient venom to make me think she’d been waiting to do that for a very long time.

  “I love you!” I told her.

  “You don’t even know me!” she shouted, Luca’s words coming back to haunt me.

  Suddenly she bounced out of bed and turned on the light.

  “What are you doing?”

  She never replied, just threw on some jeans and a jumper, then began to pull her suitcases out from behind the wardrobe.

  “No!” I shouted.

  This was it, my worst nightmare coming true: that when the day came that the game had to finish, there would be no choice but for us to finish, too.

  I leapt up, standing in her way as she began to collect up her things, grabbing hold of her arm. “Juliana!” I said, already feeling more comfortable with that name, that it fitted her better than any other. “Nothing has to change! We can go on just the same.”

  “Are you stupid?” she said, practically spitting the words into my face. “You don’t know me!”

  “I do know you! I just don’t know about your life!”

  She tried to wrench herself free of my grasp, but I clung on. “Let go!”

  “No!”

  “Simon!” she screamed.

  I guess I should’ve seen it coming. She was that much out of control. I wouldn’t have trusted her with a sharp instrument , a razor or a knife, but I’d forgotten she carried a couple of weapons with her at all times. She tried once more to pull herself free, when I stubbornly hung on, she swung her free fist at me as hard as she could.

  It hit me high up on the cheek, and I have to say, with almost enough force to knock me down. I staggered back a couple of paces, gasping with shock, feeling blood trickling down my face.