Infidelities (5 page)

‘So’ the girl said, and there again, Elisabeth could hear, was the sun in her voice and all the blue water. It came from a long, long way away. ‘Here we are …’

She shook two cigarettes from the packet she was carrying, passed one to Elisabeth and flicked open her lighter.

‘You live around here?’

‘I used to.’

The tiredness was everywhere, in the bones around her eyes, in her fingertips, in the weight of the paper cigarette she held. She could lay herself down right here, right now, in the street.

‘Used to, eh?’ the girl said. ‘But not any more. Great place to “used to” live,’ she said, ‘I reckon.’ She shook her head, took a drag of her cigarette. ‘Yeah, I know that feeling of “used to …”’

A great cheer sounded then, the band finishing their set, and clapping and whistling.

‘You know …’ Elisabeth started to say – but couldn’t finish. There were the windows of her flat, lit up against the dark.

‘I do know, darling,’ the girl said. ‘I know. The same for all of us, right? The same fucking lovely thing.’ She put her head back, her face upturned to the sky, to the moon as though it were the sun and she was letting it warm her and Elisabeth did the same, put her face up that the moon might shine upon her in the same way. Only she couldn’t see the moon here, it was London. She’d been alive for a very long time.

‘Let’s stay here for a bit,’ she said, and the girl nodded. ‘I’m okay with that. I’m good for ten minutes.’

Ten minutes is all I need
, Elisabeth thinks now. And she pointed to her flat, the house, the beautiful tree outside. ‘I used to live right there,’ she said to the girl, pointing to the lit-up windows, to the white tree, and the elation rushed through her again like a beautiful drug. The rest of it could wait. Everything that was coming. The hospital.
The music. The telephone and the calls and the things she needed to do. Telling Edward that there would be no more tests, that part was over, that she had decided to do this last bit on her own.
Ten minutes
. The flowers were there in the tree, she could see them, each one flocked home for her return. Time yet before they would be fulfilled with the promise of their own blossoming, would fall to the ground and be finished for another year.
Time now
, Elisabeth says to herself, in the bedroom, to the open sky. For now it was as though the same blossoms one by one would detach themselves from the branches and in a great flock would simply fly away.

At a dinner party a few weeks ago I saw my old friend Clare Revell and we immediately fell into a conversation about words and feelings. The night before I had watched the film
Melancholia
by Lars Von Trier and I told Clare that I had been irritated by its ‘lack of rigour’ – is the expression I used, that old line, meaning, in this case, I said to her, the way the film seemed pulled together, affecting as it may have been but pulled together out of many different bits and pieces, using movie stars, particular kinds of characters, film homages and so on, to make it seem important, and all of those moments given gravitas and unity by the same few bars from Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde
– the famous few, at that – played over and over and over again.

‘But I don’t agree at all,’ said Clare – I think that is how the conversation kicked off proper:
I don’t agree at all
. ‘Why shouldn’t a story be made of bits and pieces?’ she said. ‘And what do you mean by “lack of rigour” anyway? That’s just a fancy way of saying someone doesn’t do things
according to the way you do them, that you don’t like their approach. I felt
Melancholia
was a great film, actually—’

‘You
felt
?’ I said. ‘What’s the point of you telling me what you
felt
? I want to know what it is about the film that made you have that response – of a “feeling” towards it. I want you to give me a reason why it’s great – not just some old “feeling”.’

Clare laughed then, showing her gums in that pretty, sexy way that I think Tolstoy used when he drew an image of the little princess in
War and Peace
and describes her in terms of that particular physical configuration, ‘she had a short upper lip and showed her teeth very sweetly when she smiled,’ he writes. I’ve always found those kinds of smiles pretty and sexy – surprising somehow – and fun. Blame it on that dear old Russian if you want to. Then Clare took off her jersey and settled into her seat, because this was the discussion beginning fully now; we’d just laid out the opening of things and now we could fully get into the subject and its ideas.

I looked over at my husband in the corner of the room, and then at the other guests. They were all happily talking and engaged. Clearly no one was going to notice or mind if Clare and I got deep into some private, esoteric conversation about feeling and reason that, in a way, didn’t belong at a party like this – a cocktail party, really, but with a buffet and music that might lend itself later to dancing – that would shut everyone else out, like a portcullis coming down, ‘No Entry’, our fancy kind of talk. I had a sip of my wine, and Clare began.

‘There’s something I want to tell you about,’ she said, ‘that happened to me years ago when I was still a student. I was reading semantics and philosopy as you know, and it was all Roland Barthes and Irigaray and Deleuze and Guattari. Books like
Language and the Text
– do you know that book?’

I shook my head. I knew of the book but I hadn’t read it, and Clare went on to describe it in brief, ‘all about signs and the signified’ she said, and told me how important it had been to her, that particular title, as a young woman, when she was learning who she was, who she was to be. She’d been thinking about all of this, she said, because she’d just finished reading the new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, and that book began with a character reading an inspirational book by Barthes,
A Lover’s Discourse
. In fact, that information was ‘the way in’ to Eugenides’ novel, she told me, which she had also loved. In fact, she said, she’d even written an email to Jeffrey Eugenides telling him how much she’d enjoyed his latest work, and he’d ‘pinged an email straight back’, telling her how delighted he was that she’d liked it.

‘And all because of a book by Barthes being at the beginning of it,’ Clare said. ‘Reminding me of a whole period of my life.’

The story, proper – I’ve used that phrase before, I know – as she started to tell me (we’d both topped up our glasses of wine by now and were fully and cosily settled, like two cats, is how I thought of it, into our chairs – though my husband told me much later that night, before we went
to bed, that throughout the entire period of the evening, while we’d all been having those pre-dinner drinks, I’d in fact been sitting in the most vulgar way possible, with my legs wide open so that everyone could see right up my skirt), began all those years ago when Clare was a young woman at the LSE and studying semiotics with a woman who I will call X, who is a leader in her field, the author of seminal texts about meaning and perception, language and the body, ‘high, high theory’ as Clare put it. ‘These were impenetrable books,’ she said, ‘that I desperately wanted to read and understand because I fancied her rotten.’ She stopped for a second, then laughed out loud. ‘For me,’ she said, ‘the books, the reading … It was all about sex and love and feelings and wanting her to fancy me and not the world of words, of ideas, at all!’ She laughed again, showing her teeth. ‘I just wanted to kiss her! Nothing to do with books! And I felt like a fraud because I was supposed to be understanding all this theory and learning from it. Signs and the Signified. I was supposed to be her student and she my tutor – and I felt like a charlatan, an impostor, because really it wasn’t about what she was teaching me. It was about bodies and sex.’

‘Wow,’ I said. She’d given such a clear definition of things.
Writing and the Body
– that was a book I’d read and found very influential at university, myself, by Gabriel Josipovici, and it covered the same kind of ground. ‘I see exactly why you’re telling me this off the back of what we said about
Melancholia
,’ I said. I think I said that then. Because we were having, Clare and I, that particular delicious
feeling you sometimes get when talking with someone, about the conversation actually being about several things at once – the primary subject having been about that film, and how it had caused both of us to express quite opposing views, and then this other very different, narratively oriented conversation that had come out of that, all about bodies versus language and what had happened to Clare with a glamorous older woman when she was a student. And what had happened? I was interested, you see, in finding out more on that subject of whether or not the feelings that coursed through any response to anything, whether a film by Lars Von Trier or the story Clare was presenting now, might have value and be of interest.

I was sitting there, as my husband told me later, with my legs wide open and thinking about that – while all the time holding fast to all my ideals about the real artist being someone with a unifying vision, the kind of person, in other words, who wouldn’t need to rely on the famous bits from
Tristan and Isolde
– the bits that everybody loves anyhow – to make the audience believe that what had been created was meaningful and somehow righteous, in the aesthetic sense, well made and fit for purpose, beautiful that way.

And there was Clare, just the opposite, who’d told me on a previous occasion that – and she was adamant that she was not being post-modern at all – she always cried in the bit of the film of
Mary Poppins
when the old crippled woman comes out into the twilight and Mary Poppins sings ‘Feed the Birds’ to her. So yes. We were different, she
and I. We were different, all right, and I was intrigued, I was coming to realise, over the course of our discussion, by the rigidity of my own views that seemed so dull, somehow, me sitting there in my black tights and my high heeled black shoes, my short black skirt – what a trip! – next to this free and open-minded intellectual with her pink gums and white teeth and a story to tell …That had a river in it, she went on, and a bridge, and the cold air of midwinter on her exposed skin, on her throat and face and, when her shirt was unbuttoned, on her breasts, a story braced with coldness, December in London, a chill wind coming off the Thames, the ‘freezing’ and ‘exciting’ qualities of the day.

For there she was in the story, too, wild and free. Fancying the pants off this extraordinary-sounding older woman and – ‘What was she like?’ I kept asking Clare. ‘Like, physically? Tall? Fair?’

‘Oh, yeah, all of that,’ said Clare, right back. ‘She was amazing’, and she kept returning to that phrase of how much she fancied her: ‘I fancied her rotten,’ she repeated.

For that reason, I never got a real portrait of X for the purpose of writing this, something I would have liked, actually, to have been able to create a portrait of that woman in the Henry James way of showing character that is not the Tolstoy way but more uptight and detailing all the moral qualities of a person before you get anything of the physical, like you always get with Tolstoy straight away, the physical, you read about that first. Instead I’m left just with that ‘tall’ and ‘fair’ of my own here – enough
to make X a Valkyrie, I suppose, to keep the Wagner theme live, more a daughter of the god Wotan than an earthly Isolde – and Clare said she was having classes with this woman every week and loving the classes, of course, just sucking in every single thing about signs and signifiers, and going off and doing all the reading in between, reading that Barthes book and Lacan and Foucault and everyone, and all because she was in love with this person, X, and this was the only way, through reading the books X had read and had written about, those many texts of hers, Clare could get close.

‘Finally,’ Clare said, ‘after all this, after all the tutorials and the flirtation – because I knew she was flirting with me, using the books, her
texts
, to flirt with me – so, finally …’ And this is what I thought Clare said … ‘We had a day together.’

Finally we had a day together
.

As I say, that is what I thought she said. The next part of the story depends upon me writing it like that – faithfully, but with a sense of drama, of narrative fulfilment – in the way I heard Clare say it, that ‘Finally’ performing its trick, you see. ‘Finally we had a day together.’

Clare knows she looked great that day. She was wearing a leather jacket and a shirt that she loved. ‘It was from Flip’ – I know I’ve got that part exact. ‘And it was beautiful, beautiful cotton,’ she said. When I asked her more details about that later – when we went on to talk about the importance of the feel of the clothes you wear on top of your body, that first layer of clothing and how that
makes you feel when you are with someone you fancy, how you remember every detail – she said it was a pale blue shirt with a thin, thin yellow stripe, ‘a fine stripe’, Clare said, putting her thumb and forefinger together to show how very fine it was. ‘It was quite preppy—’

‘A Connecticut shirt,’ I interpreted. ‘Like the boys wear there, on the Eastern Seaboard.’

‘Yes,’ Clare said. ‘And it was made of, as I said, this beautiful cotton and I know I looked great in that shirt. I knew I looked just great.’

So, and again I say it,
finally
, there she was. Dressed as she was – and it was ‘illegal’. Clare kept using that word. ‘It was illegal,’ she said. For them to be having this day together, time out, a whole day, first having lunch, somewhere in Soho and then walking around London, the two of them, in term time, and on their own … And they’d ended up on Westminster Bridge kissing – with the air cold, it was freezing on Clare’s exposed skin, from where this woman had unbuttoned her shirt right there on the Bridge, had unbuttoned that pale blue and yellow stripe cotton beneath her leather jacket in order to touch her breasts as they kissed. December and a thin cold wind was blowing across the Thames and there they were, these two women, a young woman in a leather jacket and a rather gorgeous sounding boy’s shirt and a sophisticated and should I write splendid older woman? (I want her to be splendid, so keep it in), a beautiful tall older woman, her teacher. Yes, ‘tall’ and ‘fair’, and they were kissing, they couldn’t stop and X had put her hand
inside the boy’s shirt, ‘and she groped me, she was groping me!’ Clare said.

She took a handful of the soya nuts she’d been eating and crunched them all down. I saw the flash of those wild and lovely pink gums, those white teeth. She laughed, and I did. We both laughed.

‘So you see what I mean?’ Clare said. ‘It was illegal! For me to be with my teacher this way, for her to be doing that. She was my teacher and I was loving it, kissing her and being kissed, being felt up. I was in love with her, I wanted to run off with her … And all of this happening on Westminster Bridge in the cold, in December, we were kissing, it was wild, and then suddenly she pulled back,’ Clare said. ‘She pulled away from me and asked me, “Do you read
Feminist Review
?”’

‘What?’ I said. And then, ‘Wow.’

‘I know,’ Clare said. ‘“Do you read
Feminist Review
? ”’

‘I don’t even know
Feminist Review
,’ I said. ‘I mean. I’ve never read it. I’ve heard of it but—’

‘I know,’ Clare said again, back to me. ‘And I hadn’t read it either – but I wasn’t going to tell her that …’

‘So,’ I said. ‘What did you do?’

‘Well I went,
Yeah
,’ Clare said. ‘I said, “Yeah, a bit. I know
Feminist Review
.”’

‘And—’

‘Then she said to me – and remember the cold air, it was on my face, on my skin, my shirt was still unbuttoned, my jacket was open to the December air—’

‘And the river flowing beneath you …’ I said.

‘Sure, the river. And it was cold. It was bloody cold, and a second ago we’d been kissing and she’d been feeling me up, and then – get this, okay? This is the part of the story I’ve been wanting to get to – she said to me, after I’d said that, yes, I knew
Feminist Review
, she said that, well, could this be a scenario?’

‘Hah!’ I said.

‘I know!’ Clare replied.

‘Because what does that even mean, right?’ I said.

‘I thought the same thing! What is that, a scenario?’ Clare grabbed another handful of the soya nuts and chewed and crunched and swallowed them so quickly it was as though ravenous hordes were chasing her.

‘Well I think it has a capital letter, for a start,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know … what it is. Do you know now?’