Such Visitors (19 page)

Miranda Wharton did not agree with the widely held opinion that it is a foolish thing for those in the same profession to marry. She had heard all the pessimistic theories many times: the endless shop talk, the narrowness of vision, the rivalry, and believed them to be nonsense. Indeed, she and her husband Jim, who had been married for seventeen happy years, were proof of their inaccuracy.

Miranda and Jim were both teachers of English, though it has to be said that their special periods were divided by a century. For a couple of years they had even taught in the same university, with no ill effects. They rarely discussed their work at home – not a conscious decision, this; it was just that Jim seemed keener to talk about canoeing (a long-time hobby) and Miranda was too busy with running the house, experimenting with Italian cookery, and being a conscientious mother to their fifteen-year-old daughter, Sally.

As far as they could tell, there was no rivalry between them either. Friends sometimes put this – the most obvious of the assumed disadvantages – to them. How had Miranda felt, they asked, when Jim was made a senior lecturer? Delighted, Miranda had replied laughingly, and meant it. She herself, at present Writer in Residence at a college in Southampton, was much in demand to lecture all over the country on the Romantic poets and, her real love, Thomas Hardy. Her many published papers had received acclaim in academic circles: she enjoyed the writing, she enjoyed the lecturing – in a word, she was more than happy in her work. Jim was equally satisfied with his post in the university, though continually incredulous at the shockingly low standard of literacy among his pupils. ‘They can't construct a simple sentence, let alone an essay,' he sometimes grumbled to Miranda, and often contemplated the
return to being a school teacher so that he could try to inculcate the
basic principles
of English into their heads at an early age. He vaguely kept an ear open for some suitable post at a school, but so far nothing had come up. So life for the Whartons continued on its contended way, their good fortune appreciated by both. That was a subject often discussed: not smugly, heaven forbid, but with gratitude to God for their blessed lot. (They were both practising Christians, though had to travel fifteen miles every Sunday, now, to find a church with a 1662 service. Not for them the bastardised language, and all that embarrassing hand-shaking, of the misguided New Way to attract worshippers.) In a word, and without wishing to seem complacent, Miranda Wharton often thought that she and Jim must be one of the luckiest married couples of their acquaintance.

One Tuesday morning in mid-May, Miranda sat alone in a first-class compartment of an inter-city train bound for Bristol. She was to speak at a college of adult education about The Dark in Hardy's Poems, a talk she had given on several occasions and which had gone down very well. To be honest, she would have preferred to talk about the
light
in his poems: that would have taxed her harder, meant something to struggle with. But The Dark had been especially requested, so the only challenge would be to make it sound as fresh and vibrant as the first time she had given it.

But for the moment she was thinking neither about the dark nor the light in Hardy, but about the wisdom of Tom Stoppard. The night before, the Whartons had gone to London to see
The Real Thing
– a trip to the theatre, with a modest dinner afterwards, was a treat they afforded themselves once a month. They were both much impressed by the play, decided to see it a second time. Jim loved the famous cricket bat speech – marvellous stuff, he declared: Stoppard was wizard at enlightening the ordinary. Who else had ever before pointed out that a cricket bat is sprung like a dance hall? ‘“
What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats”,'
he quoted, chuckling, on the way home.

Miranda, although she did not mention it to Jim, was more taken by another speech. She had tried to remember it, but
was annoyed to find, later that night, she could only recall a few words – something about politeness. Henry's explanation to Annie about not wanting anyone else had given Miranda what she called her entry-into-a-cathedral feeling: goose pimples, and a tingling down the spine. And then, this morning, she had left the house extra early so as to have time to stop in at the bookshop on the way to the station. Jim hadn't noticed her premature start, but all the same she felt curiously guilty, as if she harboured a secret whose nature she did not quite understand.

She had bought a copy of the play, finished it by Reading. After that she tipped her head back, letting her eyes glide over the rapid fields emerald with early May, lilac trees buxom in cottage gardens, clumps of flame-yellow broom. She had found the passage, read it several times. It had made her cold again – physically, excitingly cold. She picked it up again – for the last time, she told herself. The words, by now, she had almost by heart:

‘
This extract has been removed due to copyright issues
'.

‘Someone else's possibility,' Miranda repeated to herself. Her heart was beating against the hum of the train. She had never experienced any such thing, but she thought she could imagine it.

Shortly before arriving in Bristol, Miranda found herself indulging in a moment of rare self-assessment. She looked down at her skirt, her jersey: the one, khaki twill, the other white cotton. She had never dressed in order to be anything but comfortable – the world of fashion was a remote one in which she had no interest or aspirations. But this sudden, critical look at herself brought a twinge of dissatisfaction. How, today, in her workmanlike beige and white, would she strike a stranger, a
possibility,
striding down the train? Not very forcibly, she thought.

To double check, she looked at herself in the small mirror of
her powder compact. The slight, scornful smile caused a surprising amount of wrinkles at the corners of her pale mouth. She moved on up to the eyes, preparing herself for further disappointment. Jim had once told her that it was the mischief of her pretty eyes that had first drawn him to her. Where had all the mischief gone in middle age, she wondered? And were they still pretty? Striving for honesty, it was hard to say. She snapped shut the compact, ran her hand through her thick, bouncing hair which seemed to lead a turbulent life of its own. She wondered if the habitually vain were ever immune to the truth.

Miranda sat on the narrow bed in the sliver of a room that had been assigned to her with little ceremony. Its walls were whitewashed breeze block. The light was a single central bulb with a raffia shade shaped like a coolie. As always, Miranda wondered who could be behind such design. What was he like, the architect who woke up one morning and decreed that whitewashed breeze block and a ceiling light would be agreeable for students and visiting lecturers? She was familiar with such places, having stayed in them all over the country – jerry-built buildings, circa 1960, with their miles of sour neon lighting, and cheerless lecture halls where chairs screamed on synthetic floors. But she had never managed to become impervious to their ugliness.

She flipped through the typewritten agenda. The conference was to last three days, although her own visit was to be brief. Her lecture was at eight p.m., after supper: she would return home on an early train tomorrow. She observed that many subjects, popular at such gatherings, were to be lectured upon by a dozen experts she had never heard of. And then, curiously, she saw the name of Ivan Whiteham-Jones, described in the programme as the definitive writer on Elizabethan literature. What on earth …? It seemed, even more peculiar, he was to give a talk on Messages in the Modern Novel and How to Detect Them.
Quite
outside his own subject. Perhaps, thought Miranda, Mr W-J found, like her, the need for money meant that the quality of an audience could not always be a consideration.

Ivan Whiteham-Jones was engaged to speak today, at four p.m.
Now,
in fact, Miranda realised, looking at her watch. Even now the eminent man was in some lecture hall enchanting an audience of aspiring writers. Miranda had watched him with admiration on many occasions on the television, and had read every one of his books. But she had never had the opportunity to hear him lecture. That chance had now gone. It was time for tea. Annoyed with herself, Miranda left the room.

In the canteen, she found rain slashing against the vast plate-glass windows with all the viciousness of storm waves against a pier. Miranda sat alone at a table, drinking tea from a plastic beaker. All round her, dozens of mature students enthused about Ivan Whiteham-Jones. His lecture had been a great success, it seemed.

‘I was so carried away I never took a note,' confessed a nearby grey-haired woman. She patted at her crocheted jersey as if to calm the excitement of her skin that the lecture had caused her. Lucky Mr W-J, Miranda thought. He could now go home.

She saw him at the end of a long queue, waiting for tea at the canteen, and the vast room responded lightly. Back to her, she could see his concentration on a tray of doughnuts was interrupted several times by congratulations. In acknowledgement, he nodded politely, untouched by the appreciation. Miranda found herself critical of the cut of his trousers, the dreadful diamond pattern of his lambswool jersey, the rubber soles of his clumsy shoes. Other people's clothes usually made little impact on her. Why was she so perturbed by Ivan Whiteham-Jones's lack of sartorial instinct? And another question: why, like her, had he chosen to ignore the special room for lecturers, and come to the canteen?

Ivan Whiteham-Jones turned, eyes upon his tray of tea. Miranda could now quite clearly see his face, familiar from television – dark eyes, hair falling over his forehead, extraordinarily beautiful mouth. A small quickening, she felt, and stirred her tea. Her eyes followed him to a far corner of the room. He sat at an unoccupied table, drank gloomily, studied the agenda. His air of preoccupation was plainly designed to deter students from eagerly seeking further advice.

At six-thirty in the large hall, Miranda found that she and
Whiteham-Jones were placed next to each other at a long table on the platform, both part of a panel to answer random questions from the students below. Yellow-grey light squeezed through the high, prison-like window. The audience itself was a little blurred, as if seated in mist. Their waves of earnest anticipation rustled between the walls of the ubiquitous breeze block. They scrutinised scraps of paper on which they had composed very long and serious questions.

Ivan Whiteham-Jones shook Miranda's hand. Smiled. Mockingly? It was so quick a smile Miranda could not be sure.

‘Glad I've been put next to the star turn,' he said. ‘I've always wanted to hear your Hardy. Delighted to meet you.'

There was no time for Miranda to convey her own delight. The chairman was on his feet, clearing his throat, polishing his hands.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,
writers all,'
he began, with the professional tact of one bent on raising the fee for next year's conference. Twenty minutes later the questions began.

‘Could anyone on the panel be so kind as to tell me if publishers would prefer us to send in our work double-spaced on A4 paper, or would it go against us if we wrote on a small size? You see, I can never get used to an A4. It hinders the
flow,
somehow, I find.'

The questioner had a chestnut rinse and a melon-pink tracksuit. She was plainly a veteran conference-goer, not afraid to get the whole thing off to a good start with an apt question. For a moment she basked in sympathetic murmurs all round her. Then she took up her pencil, poised to record the answer she was about to receive.

Miranda noticed the chairman looking with unconcealed desperation along his panel of experts. It was as if he had hoped the opening question might have started on a higher level… though experience had taught him how obsessed with practicalities these mature students could be. Ivan Whiteham-Jones obligingly caught his eye. At the same time, W-J's clenched fist gently bounced on Miranda's hand, signal of some private joke. Having come all this way, I for one am prepared to enter into the spirit of the thing, he seemed to say. In a trice, he was on his feet, and dealt masterfully with the problem of the typing paper most likely to succeed. Having
eloquently put the worried lady's mind at rest, he sat down again, turned to Miranda. Her heart was beating ludicrously fast. She met his smile.

The questions finally over, members of the panel were shown into a room of yet more whitewashed breeze block, though here there had been some attempt to enliven the walls with abstract paintings, the work of past students. A long table was laid with sullen salads, hard-boiled eggs humped under lustreless mayonnaise, pallid pink meats faintly mottled and thinly sliced, bowls of tinned fruit: the kind of food not enhanced by overhead lighting. Miranda had no appetite. She found Ivan at her side, holding out a glass of white wine.

‘Grab something to eat and let's make for that corner,' he said.

Miranda chose a slice of stale French bread, a minuscule packet of butter in gold paper, and a sliver of cheese.

‘I suppose you're off any moment,' she said. ‘I'm sorry I missed your lecture.'

‘No, I'm here for the night, in fact. Appointment nearby, in the morning. So at least I'll be able to hear yours.' He gave a brief, restless smile. ‘You didn't miss anything not coming to mine – not my normal subject, as you can imagine. But I had to be here anyway, so I did it as a favour to Jack.'

He nodded towards the chairman, who, far, far away among the other lecturers, poked at his food, sipped his wine, laughed politely under the vicious white lights.

They sat on low chairs of acrylic tweed, their plates on a lower table between them. Miranda knew she would remember for ever the feeling of the scratchy stuff behind her knees, and the geometric patterns on the plates.

‘I was supposed to have rung my wife an hour ago,' Ivan was saying, looking at his watch, ‘but I couldn't find a telephone that worked.' There was purpose in his voice.