Brief Lives (15 page)

I bought the flat the following day, and as soon as I had done so a certain desolation fell on me. It looked so empty, so abandoned. Fortunately I found a nice woman who had set up as an interior decorator, and I handed the whole thing over to her, simply telling her what I wanted. She was
nice, but she was slow. Evening after evening I went round to the flat to find it devoid of any activity, just a few dust sheets on the floor and wires sticking out of the walls. This made me very restless and even frightened to go back to Gertrude Street. It was a fine late autumn, but a cold one: people foretold a hard winter, as if in punishment for those astonishing days of summer. There was a café on the corner and I tried to eat a meal there, but I felt self-conscious, was aware of the dark night outside, and of the lights of the cinema, where crowds gathered. I became nervous of the dark. I told myself that this would pass as soon as I got into the flat, but the evenings were wretched. As soon as I could I got into bed, but I did not always sleep. My energy left me: I was permanently tired. I haunted the flat as if it did not belong to me, as if I were asking permission to occupy it. Men turned up eventually, cheerful noisy creatures for whom I ran to the café to buy tea and coffee. Gradually the walls became white, gradually the washing machine and the cooker were installed, and then I was not needed even to run to the café. Clouded milk bottles accumulated on the step, and there was a smell of crisps and hamburgers. It was better once I had been to Peter Jones and bought dustbins and kettles and tea towels. I wanted everything to be new. Even then the flat did not satisfy me as I had imagined it would. In my mind I had got to the stage of renouncing Drayton Gardens and planning to move on; perhaps I could do better somewhere else. When the grey carpet arrived and was laid I found that I had chosen too dark a colour. But by then the main work was completed. All I had to do was await the curtains and covers and then I could move in, with the new furniture—comfortable, undistinguished—ready to be delivered on the day I took possession.

I was standing in the empty flat one evening, a cold
evening, already misty, with an orange street lamp shining through the window, when the doorbell rang. I hoped it might be a neighbour, perhaps the woman I had noticed at the entrance, but it was Charlie, in his dark overcoat, with Owen’s briefcase in his hand.

‘I tried Gertrude Street,’ he said, stepping over a roll of superfluous carpet. ‘And then I thought you must be here. This is a pleasant room, Fay. Show me round, if you’ve got a moment.’

He murmured appreciation in all the rooms and I began to warm to the task once more. Sometimes it only wants a little whisper of approbation to set one on one’s way. I was at that moment excessively grateful to him.

‘Would you like a cup of tea, Charlie?’ I asked. ‘I’m sure the men have left some, although they seem to drink it all day.’

‘That would be fine,’ he said, examining the doors. ‘Will you get all your stuff in here? It’s much smaller than Gertrude Street.’

‘Oh, I’m leaving everything. I shan’t want much. Anyway, it’s all ordered.’

He felt the radiators. ‘Beautifully warm, at any rate.’

‘Do you like it?’ I asked him.

‘Very much.’ He drank his tea in one swallow and put his cup on the window-sill. ‘You’ll want Owen’s briefcase, I suppose? I’ve removed everything relevant. Not that there was much. He left his files more or less in order.’

There was a pause. I held my breath, wondering how much he knew. But it appeared that nothing was to be said, whatever Charlie knew or did not know.

‘If the briefcase is of any use to you, Charlie, please keep it. It was my last Christmas present to Owen. I really don’t want to see it any more.’

‘I should like to have it, my dear. I’ll take it back with me then, shall I?’

I nodded gratefully. That, I thought, was the end of the affair, but he seemed reluctant to go. With the minutes that passed a very slight awkwardness could be felt, but only, apparently, on my part. Without Julia, Charlie seemed more resolute, more purposeful.

‘How is Julia?’ I asked.

‘Oh, she has her difficult days, you know. But we survive, we survive. She needs company, mostly. So do go round, won’t you? She was saying the other day that she hadn’t seen you.’ He kissed me then, and I stood in his arms, astonished. It was only kindness, I told myself, although it did not feel like that. There was certainly no excuse for anything else. Yet instinctively we moved away from the light of the street lamp and into the empty bedroom, where he kissed me again. Now there was no room for doubt. Neither of us said anything.

After this he left, still without reference to what had taken place. I put my hand to my throbbing cheek, and stood in the flat, uncertain, but not uneasy. In fact I laughed. It was only a gesture, I thought. He was an opportunist, like most men. Nothing would come of it. Indeed, I did not want anything to come of it. And yet I was not indignant. I was, if anything, amused; I experienced a lightening of the heart. I felt newly capable. But not deluded. I was grateful that a man had found me attractive, pleased that it should have been Charlie, whom I had always liked; nothing more. What more could there be? Like Julia, my day was done. I was a woman in late middle age, no candidate for romance. Even my mind, normally so naïve and sentimental, no longer lent itself to fantasies and self-indulgent imaginings. I told myself that I had had my share of love, and I was able
to acknowledge that it had disappointed me. There is an age at which not telling the truth is fatal and I had reached that age. If I still looked forward hopefully to some experience that remained vague in outline, if I still dressed with care and was fastidious about my appearance, I was nevertheless quite resigned to spending the remainder of my life alone. I even took a certain pride in the prospect. No more unwelcome hopes and disappointments, no more wild anticipations, brooding let-downs. I was of an uncomplaining disposition, had never nagged or belaboured my husband, was good at disguising my cares. It seemed to me a better thing to suffer than constantly to accuse. Yet all this good behaviour, if that is what it was, had left me a little sad, a little passive, and that occasionally seemed to me unfair. But I put such thoughts out of my mind when they occurred and on the whole they did not bother me unduly.

Looking back I am impressed by two things. Firstly, that we moved instinctively out of the light of the street lamp and into the darkness. And secondly, that so slight a pretext should have set me thinking about myself in a way that I had not done for years, if ever. Idle conversations with Millie, when we were girls, had left me untouched, unstirred. I had had no other confidante. All I knew was that on certain summer evenings I felt a pain of longing which no one person—or no one that I knew—could assuage. This pain had its origin, perhaps, in my nature as a woman, dreaming, passive, so far unexamined. I felt none of this longing, this nostalgia, as I walked home to Gertrude Street that evening. On the contrary, I felt alert, slightly cynical. Thus does Nature prepare us for the practicalities. I felt no guilt, no concern for Julia: I had already decided not to see her again. In any event I knew how she regarded me, as almost someone of the servant class. I felt free of her, free of
everyone. A lifetime of freedom seemed to stretch out in front of me.

Then nothing happened for three weeks. The curtains were hung, the loose covers fitted on to the chairs and sofa, the bed made up. It looked very pleasant, but for some reason it did not gratify me. I ordered newspapers, contacted the laundry, made an appointment at the hairdresser’s, yet failed to feel at home. I suppose I was lonelier than I had anticipated. And there was so little to do after the big house that time passed very slowly. The woman whom I hoped would be my neighbour had not acknowledged me again; the porter was surly. The weather was too cold for me to spend much time out of doors, and I soon had little need to go to the shops more than once a day, sometimes not even once. I always woke in the dark, long before I needed to get up. Certain evenings I sat in the sitting-room without bothering to put on the lights, looking out at that street lamp. I was perplexed that I was not able to comfort myself more, now that there was nothing to torment me. The prospect of this sort of life continuing indefinitely caused me the occasional intake of breath. My good sense told me that I was fortunate, that I had no possible cause for complaint. Nevertheless, I could not help noticing that nothing pleased me.

I was sitting by the window, in the darkened room, one evening, when Charlie came the second time. Already I felt embarked with him. He handed me a parcel, and said, ‘I brought you this. I thought it had your name on it.’ It was a flowered Victorian cup and saucer, gilt rimmed, capacious and confident. I loved it. ‘How is Julia?’ I asked. He looked at me with a certain amusement, showing a side of himself not naturally seen. ‘You know Julia,’ he said. ‘She is my wife. She will always be my wife.’ I felt disappointed, as if
this heralded the start of something that could only be nefarious and was thus signalled from the outset. ‘Why are you here?’ I asked him, almost antagonistically. ‘You know why,’ he said, and took me in his arms.

That was all that he said, but possibly not all that he felt. The collusion was avoidable, and it did not occur to me to avoid it. I never made claims for it in my own mind, although it was real enough, and seemed right enough at the time. Yet shame, and a kind of irritability steal upon me even as I write these words. Adultery is not noble. Adulterous lovers are not allowed to be star-crossed. Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary are not really heroines. Even when there is real love, authentic love, it is not the sort in which one rejoices. That night I began a long training in duplicity, in calculation, in almost continuous discomfort, but also in confidence and expectation and effectiveness. Years did not diminish any of these feelings: they constituted my apprenticeship.

ONE TRIES TO
make light of these things, for to make anything else of them is somehow unseemly in the circumstances. I look back now in amusement, surprise, and only occasionally despair at my love affair with Charlie, which was a love affair, although fatal words were never spoken. We were a recreation to each other, and this made the time we spent together permissible. How could it hurt? Whom could it hurt? Only one person was thought of as a victim, and her name was only pronounced airily, socially, normally. ‘Julia says she never sees you these days.’ ‘Yes, I must go round.’ But I could not quite do this. I telephoned instead, concerned myself with her health, her needs. ‘I’m not quite defunct, you know,’ she would say. ‘But I dare say I’m too dull for you now. That’s why I never see you.’ This saddened me, the necessary deceit. But that in any case was part of my involvement.

He was a good-looking man, tall, broad, well set-up, perhaps putting on weight, as I was. We reconciled each
other to growing old, for this was the last thing that would happen to either of us. He came to me on Saturday afternoons or looked in on his way home. Retirement, which was looming for him, would pose a problem about which we declined to think. We both assumed that the affair would end when that happened, when he had to take his place as Julia’s full-time companion. With me he demonstrated a levity which I would never have suspected; in Onslow Square he was always resigned, mild, tactful. His nature was, I think, reserved, quiet, not given to confessions or complaints. His enormous control suited us both well, keeping me within bounds when I might have been tempted to be foolish. He never mentioned his marriage; this was, in a way, honourable of him. I understood discretion had been professionally bred into him. As far as I was concerned I was his permitted luxury, after a lifetime of endurance. I think he loved Julia. She was his wife; she was innocent. And he respected the conventions.

I never got a job. He was my sole occupation. Not knowing when he would be able to visit me kept me alert, presentable; time no longer hung heavy. Each day I would prepare for him. I took my bath and changed after I had made a cup of tea, and on the whole I was quite happy to sit in the darkened room, looking out of the window. When I heard the car door slam—and it was a door I never confused with any other—I would draw the curtains and light the lamps. Sometimes days went by in this dreamy fashion. The tension of the waiting tired me and it was almost with relief that I would realize I was free to turn on the radio or the television, eventually to go to bed. On occasion I was surprised by a terrible sadness. This I did not fully understand. I would catch my breath in amazement: why so sad? I had what few women of my advanced age could lay claim
to: a man who did not bore me and who never made me suffer. For he never did make me suffer; my unhappiness, of which I was barely conscious, had to do with a certain disappointment. I had been a conventional wife, and now I was a conventional mistress, docile and agreeable, little treats always to hand. I felt a certain pride, a boldness; I was not pathetic. I could hold up my head. I grew older more or less successfully, refused to dye my hair, chose my clothes with a new care. I would try to dress up for him until I realized that this was the last thing he wanted. I made him feel younger, for which he was grateful. He was amused, indulgent, overwhelmingly fond. The cup and saucer he had given me became his cup and saucer. I would serve him coffee in it.