The Circle (8 page)

And as the party came to a kind of ending, as the people began to leave, she found herself next to him. He was wondering (these were the first words she’d heard him say) how he was now to get back to his Northern suburb. And Lena had a car. So that absolutely without choice, or without deliberation, she found herself leaving with him; to catch up the last tube across London. A functional and impersonal offer that she made drunkenly and he accepted without strangeness.

They went out together into the cold night. With a high clear sky, inhumanly bright and pointed with stars. Everywhere was silent except for the notes their feet knocked out of the path. Even in the car they spoke very little. He had a low, nervous voice she discovered.
They took a wrong turn out of Danny’s lane, found themselves waiting by a level-crossing in the silence.

The gates were up and a lorry stood in front of them, its engine still running. Inside a lighted signal-box on the other side of the rails a man was reading a paper.

Somewhere to their right a bell broke the stillness. And the train, whatever train it was, rushed by them; a long rush of heavy black metal; went violently by without slackening speed as they watched, with twenty or thirty trucks rumbling after. Then the gates lifted. And they moved peacefully away, the lights picking out an unexpected rabbit in the stalky grass at the side of the lane. Until they found the right road; and the cats’ eyes followed one another back into the town. Two headlights shone from behind and a horn sounded. Lena reached up to adjust her mirror, and the surface flashed briefly. And they ran down the slope into Hampstead hill.

And she drove back up the hill through the darkness with that smile singing in her blood, and a cold determination to make nothing out of it.

It was like, she remembered now (but she was younger then), when she’d taught for a term at a boys’ secondary modern school, the only female member of staff, it must have been her first job, and the whole place pulsed with her sense of the sexuality in the air about her. She had let herself enjoy that: why not? It
was innocent enough. But there was one boy in particular, a lovely wide-eyed boy in one of the third forms that travelled on the same bus to school and she’d felt some. Discomfort about him. A very similar mixture of sexual stimulus and absurdity as she felt now. And every morning they sat next to one another on the same seat, and she tried to talk normally. Wondering if the boy knew. If he knew and enjoyed what he knew; and at last her sense of some complicity between them made teaching his class impossible (her discipline was very bad anyway) and when she left at the end of the term and he gave her a box of chocolates she was almost afraid to open it, in case it contained some kind of schoolboy ridicule. (So old she’d felt then at 21.) But they were real chocolates and she remembered him, and his wide-eyed offer now with a sort of guilt; at how little she had given back to him; but fear. That her own feelings were observed and mocked.

It was hard to remember.    What they said to one another on long days of drifting about from tatty bookshop to the sea-front; or sheltering from the rain in Greek cafés drinking bitter coffee over stained tablecloths.    Only the drift, the open drift of their day she remembered. He was free: because he was young. To spend a day wandering; it hardly bit into his working week. And she went with him, at elaborate cost; arranging. The illusion of the same state. They were as unencumbered as children.

So what did they talk about? She remembered. Only certain tones of voice. And talking of what poet? had he dropped his voice as he did to say –that’s such a beautiful poem—moving her: with the certainty that
behind the drift lay a structure of feeling. That it was intense, particular, and like her own: curiously locked with the intoxications of the word; the music of the still heard words on the pages of books.

Once driving back through the dark through the Sussex hills he had fallen asleep and she drove round the curves slowly watching him astonished, at his perfect abandon. Enjoying that. As she drove him asleep through the darkness, as the lights of the car picked at the high trees and the night creatures crossed the roar under her wheels. Fields and people asleep in their homes and Eli asleep at her side as she drove through the curving down darkness. Until the lights of the sea town came into view and he awoke; like a cat without blur; to catch the sight of it.

When she and Eli met at Old Street: they had gone to hear a Russian poet give readings from Mayakovsky and a friend of Eli’s read some translations of his own. She knew she couldn’t take in the Russian through her ears alone; she hoped the translations would work. But mostly she wasn’t certain what she hoped. Sitting nervously drinking with them all in the sleazy pub over the road, the dirty red plush and tassels and the
brass-handled
pumps all part of the same drunken
strangeness
; and among these people her own sense of oddness disappeared; she could not have put an age to the garrulous black-bearded poet from South America, or the white-faced woman in the big red hat. She liked them. She liked London. She was: happy.

Afterwards: walking round the dirty city streets together. Into the tube in a sort of daze, not talking much; taking coffee at last somewhere off the Charing Cross road. Too late now for trains back home. She
knew then the conjecture that was set up between them. Ferociously, miserably, she thought of Ben; his
phlegmatic
face observing her departure saying (of her new white top) did she think it was sexy? And her own evasion: it was a bad purchase for that.

They phoned Danny from the station explaining. And his voice, blank and non-committal said: of course no problem. And from Danny’s she phoned Ben; had a long cheerful call to him. Not mentioning Eli. Mainly because he was there, listening.

Danny and his wife were sleepy but hospitable; they set about finding two sets of bedclothes without
comment
, arranged two rooms for them two floors up. Next door to one another and out of hearing (she thought). Said goodnight. It was past two.

And now they mounted the stairs together and she could imagine clearly enough what might come next, the curling out of his young body towards her. Her own receiving of it. But she wasn’t sure. How she felt and what she intended. Until two landings up it was
suddenly
clear as a knife in her brain that she didn’t want anything
precise
to happen; and her feelings settled into anxiety. That perhaps it was already too late to prevent.

She went to the lavatory to think about it. Was she then indulging a sort of diseased and disgusting fantasy? That the possibility of making real what she had so often thought filled her with such apprehension? Was it in any case, she wondered hopefully, an entirely
private
piece of imagining?

It was lovely in the bathroom. Cool and clear and green, and she undressed slowly and looked at herself in the long mirror; and said you silly bitch, it’s vanity. It’s vanity will keep you chaste. Or fear. She was washed clean, scented. No
cap
,
anyway she reasoned.

Eli was sitting on her bed.    Reading.    And now it
had to be admitted that what she felt was alarm. Had she, then, given some earlier signal? Would he look up and hold out a hand, and if so what? Else could she do?

He looked so young. And she remembered
suddenly
the only sexual experience of her own youth that filled her with shame.

It was a young teacher, and she was his first girl. They’d started to make love many times, teased and frustrated, in public doorways, late at night, always somewhow in the open air. And the first occasion they had to go further was in his sister’s flat, a squalid early evening opportunity, with baby-sitting the lame excuse. With the telly blaring, he lay on top of her. Inexpert, fiddling with zips and buttons, and at last she had to help him get his trousers off, and then she saw. How small he was. The slightness of the hips like a bird or a chicken, and the penis that lay limply between his legs.

Why should she think of that? Coming in to find Eli, reading on her bed? When he heard her enter he stood up, a bit awkwardly, their eyes meeting and moving oddly. Perhaps he too was reading for her expectations? And perhaps with the same alarm? So she said nothing, stood there, looked at him. He was very young, and very proud. And she wondered: do I look like a
lecherous
old woman? She bit her lip.

And he was gone. She went and sat where he had on the bed, the warmth of his body still in the blankets her whole body bathed in a light perspiration as though she had just escaped from an enemy. She was shaking all over. With cold.

For the first time in the weeks since she had known him he did not figure in her dreams.

Ben was back early. She hadn’t yet made any food or bought much in from the shops and she watched him poke in the empty pantry, and come out
empty-handed
.

They quarrelled then; but later lying in his arms in bed he said, thoughtfully: It wouldn’t make any difference, you know. If it made you happy. I wouldn’t mind.