The Passage of Love

by Alex Miller

  He went up the steps and sat beside her. He was shocked by her appearance. ‘How did you manage to become a scrawny bag lady in four months? Jesus, Lena! You look fucking terrible. What have you done to yourself?’

  Her smile was the slow tired smile of someone who was exhausted, a woman at the end of her strength. She had a sketching pad between her feet and had been drawing. A pencil lay on the pad. She didn’t seem surprised to see him.

  She laid her hand on his. ‘I knew you’d find me. I’ve been waiting for you.’

  When he didn’t say anything, she said, ‘I’m glad you came.’

  He could smell the staleness coming off her.

  She said, ‘Do I disgust you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Give me your hand.’

  He helped her to her feet. He could feel the bones of her back under his fingers.

  In a matter-of-fact voice, as if it was neither here nor there, she said, ‘I’m pregnant.’ They stood on the stone steps in that ancient Italian town looking at each other, neither of them speaking. He said at last, ‘I don’t know how to talk to you. This is not you. Pregnant? You’re sure?’

  She touched her belly. She looked down at herself. ‘You can leave me here if you want to.’ She looked at him. ‘It might be better in the long run.’

  Her grey eyes were ringed by fatigue, her skin unwashed, her forehead tight and wrinkled. ‘You’re a stranger,’ he said.

  She said quietly, a touch of sorrow or regret in her voice, ‘I suppose you and I have always been strangers.’

  He said, ‘We’ll go to England and get you to a decent doctor.’

  She steadied herself, her hand on his arm, while she reached down and put on her shoes. ‘I don’t need a doctor. I’m not ill.’

  He watched her struggling with her shoes. Where was the beautiful, interesting young woman in a blouse and smart grey skirt who’d opened the door to John Morris and him that first day at the Red Bluff house? He said, ‘If you’d married one of your own mob, this wouldn’t have happened.’

  She bent and picked up the plastic bag and the small case. She looked at him. ‘Are you jealous?’

  ‘Of course I’m fucking jealous. I can’t believe what you’ve done to yourself. Why? Why have you done this? Whatever it was you and I had, you’ve smashed it.’

  She had left the damp-looking sketchbook and the pencil lying on the wet cobbles. He picked them up. ‘Don’t you want these?’

  She glanced at them. ‘It was a silly idea,’ she said.

  He took the case from her and put the sketchbook and pencil in his coat pocket. She put her arm in his and they walked down the steps together. He felt physically sick. Shaken. Bewildered. Angry. He couldn’t look at her. ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked her. ‘We’ll fetch your things.’

  ‘I’m not staying anywhere. You’ve got everything there.’

  ‘Jesus!’ He caught a whiff of her. ‘How long since you had a bath?’

  She said, ‘Leave me here, Robert. I’ll manage.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you!’ He held her arm tightly. ‘Just don’t make me say anything else!’ People going by looked at them. He stared them down. ‘Bastards!’

  They went to his pensione and Lena had a bath and went to bed. He sat by the bed and watched her sleeping. She looked like a child, small, alone, lost and confused, her pale eyelids trembling, her lips slightly parted. She was in his care. A wave of tenderness swept over him. He would write at once and tell Martin and Birte he had found her. They were his family now, these three people.

  In the morning they took a taxi to the railway station. He bought tickets for Rome and they sat side by side in the waiting room. She leaned back against the wall and went to sleep. He wrote a postcard to Martin and Birte—on the other side of the card was a coloured picture of Perugia taken from the air. He marked with a small X the square where he’d found her.

  Dear Martin and Birte,

  I found her where the X is. She isn’t very well, so we’re going to England where we’ll see a doctor. It isn’t anything to worry about. I hope you are both well. We’ll be home soon. The weather is already cold here.

  With love from us both to you two,

  Robert and Lena

  29

  On the landing at the top of the stairs he set down her things and his suitcase. He waited for her to come up the last flight. She came up and stood beside him, an asthmatic wheeze in her breathing. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. She nodded and coughed and said huskily, ‘Thank God we’re here.’

  He put the key in the lock and opened the door. He stepped back to let her go in first, then he picked up their bags and followed her. They were in a small unlit entrance hall, with coat hooks and a box with shoe polish and rags. He found the light switch. They went into the passage. The door to the kitchen was open, sunlight coming through the tall narrow window and falling on the table in the centre of the room. There was a green vase with an artful arrangement of leafless twigs. On the left a door stood open to a bedroom. They went into the bedroom and he set their things down. She sat on the side of the bed and breathed. The sun was streaming through two large double windows, falling across the multi-coloured eiderdown on the bed and touching Lena’s hair, which shone a dull bronze. He went over to one of the windows and looked out. The long front garden with its lawn and clipped hedge below, then the leafless horse chestnut trees along the street, a drift of smoke from the smouldering leaf piles in the gutter, the sharp familiar tang of the burning leaves in his nostrils.

  He said, ‘When I was a kid we used to raid these trees for conkers. We came from the estate in a gang and threw our sticks up into the trees and grabbed as many conkers as we could before we were chased away by a gardener or one of the ladies.’

  She said, ‘I’ll go and have a shower.’

  He turned from the window and looked at her. She was grey and exhausted. ‘It might be a bath,’ he said.

  She got off the bed and stood looking at him. ‘I haven’t got anything clean to put on.’

  He went over and opened his suitcase and took out a t-shirt and handed it to her. ‘It’ll come down to your knees.’ They were no longer a married couple. They were two people persisting. He felt as if they were on a great mound of rubble. It was a bombsite from his childhood. He couldn’t imagine that they could ever restore what they’d had and become again the people they had been. He would write to Martin and Birte. He should tell them the truth.

  She said, ‘Don’t look at me like that.’ She turned away and went out of the room, holding his t-shirt in both hands. A moment later he heard a door close.

  He listened. The house was silent. He might have been alone. He was in England again. The familiar accents of the people had shocked him. He feared that he might be taken for one of them. His old self lurking in him just below the surface. His parents and his young brother going about their lives only a suburb or two away, just the other side of Bromley, believing he was on the other side of the world, his sister gone long ago. He put his things away in the chest of drawers and the wardrobe. He didn’t touch her things. He went out and investigated the rest of the flat. At the end of the passage was a large room that smelled of pine air freshener. He stood just inside the door. Two easy chairs and a couch covered in red and green floral fabric, two small round tables set at the sides of the couch and chairs, cut-glass ashtrays on the tables, a cheap lacquered sideboard against the wall with a large, empty cut-glass bowl in the middle of it. The room felt as if it had never been occupied. He turned around and went down the hall and into the kitchen. There was a telephone on the bench by the sink, a table with an oilcloth cover against the wall and two white-painted straight-backed wooden chairs, a dead clock on the wall, the sun shining through the narrow window onto the oilcloth. There was a faint smell of fresh bread but no sign of bread.

  Lena stood in the doorway, wearing his t-shirt. She was pink from the
heat of the bath. ‘Don’t look at me!’ she pleaded. Her elbows and knee bones were sticking out, her thighs hollowed. She said, ‘I’m going to have a sleep.’

  He felt a rush of emotion and followed her into the bedroom and helped her to get into the bed, leaning over her and kissing her forehead. He tucked her in. She reached for his hand and gave him a tearful smile. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had a sleep,’ he said. He drew the curtains and went out, closing the door of the bedroom behind him.

  There was a note half concealed under the telephone. He picked it up and read it. Welcome to the Tree house. Please help yourselves to ripe fruit in the garden. The landlord, whose name was Donald Tree, had stamped the notepaper with a purple tree.

  Robert left the house and walked to the high street. He bought tea and bread and vegetables for soup. When he returned, the landlord was in the hall downstairs. Robert said hello to him and he smiled and said, ‘Do call me Don, please.’ He was tall and very upright with a neatly clipped reddish moustache. He had an air of concerned authority about him and looked as if he’d spent his life in the military. Robert said, ‘My wife’s picked up something on our travels and I think she should see a doctor.’

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope, dear chap,’ Don Tree said.

  ‘Lena suffers from the occasional asthma attack. I think she’s got just a bit rundown from all the travelling we’ve been doing.’

  ‘Understand you perfectly, Robert.’

  Robert envied Lena the reality of her Australian identity. His own reality in England was a flimsy, make-do structure and he feared it would break down and this man would sense his Council estate origins. He could hear Donald Tree’s tone modulate subtly: Ah, so you’re from the Downham Estate. Robert hadn’t realised quite how vulnerable he would be in England to his old childhood insecurities. He wished he was a bolder and more determined person and could laugh at these things. But he couldn’t.

  Lena was still asleep when he looked in on her. He closed the door softly and went into the kitchen and made vegetable soup. While the soup was simmering he had a bath. The sun was going down and was no longer shining into the kitchen. He put the light on and ate a bowl of soup and two slices of fresh bread. He sat there staring emptily at the darkened window and he realised he was exhausted. He couldn’t finish the cigarette he was smoking and butted it in the ashtray. He got up and went into the bedroom.

  Lena didn’t stir when he climbed into the bed beside her. He fell asleep at once then woke abruptly into the deep silence of the night. He looked at his watch. It was eleven-thirty. He’d only been asleep for two hours. He drifted into an anxious half-sleep, then woke again, the dread in him that he was going to be sucked back into a life on the factory floor. Was that to be his true fate? In the dark, alone with her beside him, he was taken by the fear that he really belonged with his old schoolmates, the conker hunters, the ones who’d stayed behind. Here he was, inside one of the houses along the very street of their raids, as if the real hidden reason for his unwilling return to England had been decided by a force greater than himself, a force that would fling him back into line and set him down firmly, once and for all, so that he could never again make a break for it. You made your leap and you lost! Was this what they would say of him when they found out he’d returned from Australia empty-handed and defeated? The night was endless. His fear was endless. He had no answer for anything.

  In the morning he got up and made a cup of tea and took one in to her. She turned and looked at him. ‘You slept for more than fifteen hours,’ he said.

  She said, ‘My mouth’s dry. My breath must be awful.’

  He set the tea on the bedside table. ‘Sit up and drink this.’ There were wrinkles and dark purple shadows under her eyes.

  He went over to the windows and opened the curtains. ‘Another fine autumn day.’ He sat on the side of the bed and drank his tea. Neither of them spoke for some time. He said, ‘We have to talk about things.’

  ‘This is the best cup of tea I’ve ever had,’ she said with feeling. ‘It’s so good to be in a real bed.’ She reached across to him with her free hand and took hold of his arm. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I didn’t know where I was when I woke up just now. I really did think I was dreaming when you came in with the tea.’

  ‘Don’s given me the name of their family doctor. He’s offered to give us a lift there in his car. He seems like a decent bloke.’

  ‘I’m not ill,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to see a doctor. I’m just pregnant. It’s not an illness. Please don’t make a fuss.’ She withdrew her hand.

  ‘You can’t dictate your terms,’ he said. ‘You’re going to see a doctor and that’s that. Just imagine if you had an asthma attack. You’re already weak as a bloody kitten. There’s not an ounce of flesh on you.’ How long would he be able to hold back? He looked at her. ‘You’ve had some kind of a breakdown. I suppose it was brought on by your mother’s sudden death. But whatever it is, we have to get some professional advice.’ The idea of living with her made him feel sick and cheated. ‘I’m just trying to be reasonable.’

  She said with fierce determination, ‘You’re not going to tell me how to behave! I’m not here to be told how to behave. I know how to behave. You’re not my mother.’

  A dog was barking in the garden. Don was calling to the dog.

  Robert wanted to grab her by the throat and shake her. He said, ‘I don’t deserve this. You’re going to have to tell me about it sooner or later. I deserve to know.’

  She set her empty cup on the side table and lay down.

  He said, ‘Was he a white man?’

  She looked at him coldly. ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘I just want to be ready for the unexpected,’ he said.

  She didn’t say anything and turned to face the wall.

  Someone was laughing downstairs. A woman’s voice. The dog barking, Don calling to it, teasing. The sounds of a happy family.

  Lena’s voice was muffled by the blanket when she said, ‘It was just something we did. Being on the boat was another world. You wouldn’t understand.’

  He waited.

  After a while she said, ‘I really don’t want to talk about it. I might have another little sleep, if you don’t mind.’ She pulled the blankets up close around her chin.

  He said, ‘I’m going out.’ He stood up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To get a job.’

  ‘You don’t need to get a job. I’ve got enough money for both of us.’

  ‘I’m getting a job,’ he said. ‘You do whatever it is you’re doing, and I’ll do what I’m doing. Okay? And maybe we’ll get around to talking sense to each other sooner or later. And if we don’t get around to talking sense to each other, then I guess we’ll each go our own way with it, but I’m not going to sit around relying on your money and doing nothing while I wait for you to get better.’

  She said, ‘I need you. I don’t want you to leave me.’ She started to cry.

  He stood looking down at her. Maybe she was going to say she was sorry. He was waiting for it. He knew he couldn’t go back to Melbourne without her, but he couldn’t see how he could go back to Melbourne with her either. If he told Martin everything, maybe Martin would dislike hearing such sordid stuff about Lena and would think less of him. And if he kept the truth from Martin, well, maybe it would eat into their trust. He took his white shirt from the chest of drawers and went out to the kitchen and ironed it.

  When he came back into the bedroom she was sitting up. She had a notebook and a pen and was writing.

  He went over to the wardrobe and changed into his shirt and put on a tie and then got into his three-piece wedding suit.

  She said, ‘You look amazing. Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to present myself at the University of London appointments board and see what happens.’

  He stood a moment in front of the mirror adjusting his tie. It w
as his wedding tie. Dark blue with small white polka dots. He felt strong and confident. ‘What you’re wearing makes all the difference in this country.’ He turned around and walked to the door then paused and looked back at her. ‘Promise me you’ll behave till I get back?’

  She said, ‘I’m sorry for the mess I’ve made of everything.’ She looked like she might cry again.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll work something out. It’s going to need a bit of time. We can go back home when we’re both good and ready; till then we’ll make do here.’ He went out the door. She called, ‘Good luck!’

  30

  The young woman who interviewed him at the University of London read the Melbourne dean’s letter—which advised that he would be granted a pass degree in the New Year if he decided not to undertake his fourth year. She said, ‘Australian? But you’re really English, aren’t you? You’re one of us.’

  He smiled. ‘I guess I’m both,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps neither.’

  She looked playfully disapproving. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘you’ll always be one of us, Mr Crofts.’ As if to be anything less than one of them would have been slightly shameful of him. She handed the letter back to him and said he should go and talk to the people at the Japanese Trade Commission. ‘They’re looking for an English graduate to do some market research for them. Their offices are in Marble Arch. Do you think you can find your way?’