The Pillow Friend (39 page)

“What did?”

“You know how it is when you look at someone, and your eyes meet, and suddenly for the first time you really see each other? That's how it was: we saw each other. After that—well, I suppose if I'd had you waiting at home for me I would have gone home and tried to forget it. But there was nobody waiting at home for me, or for her. Maybe, if Alice wasn't such a—a direct person I could have—”

“Alice? Alice Keremos was with you in that restaurant tonight?”

He frowned. “You saw her. You saw us together.”

“No. I saw—I didn't recognize her.”

She saw him realize that he could have avoided this confrontation; could have lied his way out of it. Before he could make some disastrous attempt to recant she asked the most painful question: “Are you in love with her?”

“God, no! Don't even think it. Not like I love you. This is nothing at all like that, and it doesn't affect my feelings for you, it honestly doesn't. You're my wife. I don't want that ever to change. This is something different. It's—” His eyes met hers with a gaze she could only think of as completely candid, and he said in a rush, his voice slightly lowered, “I don't know what it is, only I can't control it, and I can't walk away from it. Not yet. Please—” He put out his hand and she caught it and held it tightly.

Lunch with Alice cast her into misery. She had expected to meet her friend, not her husband's lover—or, rather, she had not considered that the first might be subsumed by the second. But Alice, withdrawn and nervous, chain-smoking, told her that she didn't feel comfortable discussing her relationship with Graham. Agnes could think of nothing else she wanted to talk about. Her own relationship with Graham perhaps, perhaps the pillow friend—but not with someone who'd demarked her own emotions with a No Trespassing sign.

Publishing gossip kept them going throughout part of the meal, who was thinking of changing jobs, who was in love, who was getting divorced, or sacked, or promoted. She hoped Alice might help her find a new job, but she said she knew of nothing going. Alice asked about the funeral and her family, expressing concern, and although she had meant to keep as aloof as Alice, after a couple of glasses of wine the need to tell someone was too much for her, and the story of her mother's double life came spilling out. Alice responded with as much sympathy as anyone could have hoped for, but much later, at home, Agnes began to cry, overwhelmed by the feeling that she had betrayed not only herself but her mother.

Gray had told her that he was not ready to give Alice up; the implication was that someday he would be, but only if their affair was allowed to run its course. He didn't elaborate and he didn't press her at first, but one night he said he'd like to spend an evening with Alice.

She had been expecting it and had planned her words and her manner. But now her mind was as blank with terror as if he had trained a gun on her.

“Oh! Sure. What night? Will you be coming home?”

“Yes, of course! I thought Friday, unless you'd rather it was another night?”

“Friday would be fine. I might go out myself.”

“Well, of course, you must do what you like—oh, my love, don't look so miserable! You mustn't worry. There's nothing to worry about, I promise you.”

That night they made love for the first time since her return.

She had been thinking about it before they went to bed. She had been thinking that it had been a long time—too long—and that if they left it any longer they might get completely out of the habit of making love. She had been thinking that she might feel less abandoned, and less jealous of Alice, if Gray made love to her first. She took a bath in scented oil and got into bed naked, feeling embarrassed, certain he would comment, but he only looked up from his book to ask, “Aren't you going to read?”

“Not tonight. You won't read long?”

He sighed. “No.”

He kissed her when he turned out the light, but chastely, and did not respond to her tentative advances. She wasn't feeling sexy anyway—her wish for him had been more preventative than passionate—so she did not persist, and soon fell asleep.

She was awakened some time later by the pleasant sensation of having her breasts gently fondled and kissed. For a brief, dream-fuddled time she thought she was back in Texas, in bed with the pillow friend, but as he parted her legs and moved on top of her she recognized her husband's body, and the different darkness of their bedroom. He slipped inside her slowly and easily, finding no obstruction. He lay heavily on top of her and, once inside, scarcely moved. It was not his usual mode of lovemaking, but she enjoyed the sensation until she began to wonder if he had fallen asleep. She began to thrust upward with her pelvis, and after a little while she felt him respond, and a sluggish, sexy rhythm developed. As she became aware of the changes in his breathing and muscular tension which foretold the approach of his climax she realized her own was upon her. For the first time in their marriage they came together. Lying there afterward with his weight on top of her, holding him in her arms, she felt very close to him, sure that everything would be all right.

It was harder to hang on to that thought when he was out with Alice and she was home alone, but she tried. Over the next few weeks she often called on her fading memory of that close, warm feeling for reassurance.

She started writing a new book, a fantasy about two American children sent to stay with an aunt in London and having magical adventures, and although it felt rather forced and schematic to her, it helped to fill her days. She also applied for jobs she saw advertised in
The Bookseller
and
The Guardian,
but received no positive responses. The days grew longer and the weather more reliably warm. Soon school would break up for the summer holidays. She didn't know what would happen then. Would Gray continue to divide his spare time between his two women, or would Agnes and Gray go away together to Scotland, as they'd planned last year?

One evening, out of the blue, he said something about her mother's schizophrenia. They were in the lounge, the television on but disregarded, the remains of a takeaway Chinese dinner scattered around.

“What?”

“Isn't that the term for someone with a split personality? Or—no, I'm sorry, I'm behind the times. It's not split personality anymore, is it. It's Multiple Personality Disorder. Did she have more than two?” He looked at her, waiting for an answer.

Her mouth was very dry. “I don't know. I never thought about her like that. I never even knew, until after the funeral.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Didn't I?”

“You told Alice.”

“Alice told you?” She'd imagined that Alice's niceness about Graham—her refusal to discuss her lover with her lover's wife—would extend to a refusal to discuss her lover's wife with him.

“She mentioned it. She assumed I knew, of course.”

“You mean you talk about me? You and Alice?”

“What do you think we do, jump on each other and fuck like bunnies every time we meet? Of course we talk.”

“About me.”

“Not particularly about you.” He got up and switched off the television. “It just came up. We were talking about her nervous breakdown, in fact, and the fact that
her
mother was always considered unstable; we were talking about mental conditions being passed down in families. That's not important. I'm just curious why you felt able to pass this information along to her but not to me.”

It hurt, the image of them discussing her, the thought of Alice telling him everything she'd ever said to her. On some level she'd still believed that Alice was her friend and that they'd get back together again once this business between her and Gray had played itself out.

“Why couldn't you tell me?”

She glared. “You didn't ask!”

“Oh, I see, it's my fault for not being sensitive enough.”

“I didn't have a chance to tell you. It wasn't easy, I was still trying to come to terms with it myself when all of a sudden I'm landed in the middle of this thing about you and Alice, and after that, that's all we ever talked about. Our marriage. Your feelings. Her feelings. Our future. There was never any space to talk about my mother.”

“Keep your voice down. I don't want the neighbors knowing our business.”

“If you'd cared—” She couldn't go on. There were tears in her eyes and tears in her throat, choking her.

He looked disgusted. “It's impossible to have a rational conversation with you when you're like this.”

“Like what? What do you mean?” She was sobbing, but got the words out.

He began to gather up the plates and cartons from their dinner, taking himself away from her. “When you're irrational. Not like yourself. When you cry. Premenstrual, I suppose.”

His parting shot stunned her. She didn't go after him; their argument shrank into insignificance as she realized she hadn't had a period since she came home.

She'd been on the Pill ever since her first pregnancy scare in college, more than ten years. Much too long, probably. But she hadn't taken one since she'd been in Texas. She'd forgotten all about it during that timeless time in the woods, and when she remembered again, back at home, she didn't know where she was in her cycle. It had been too long, she would have to wait until she got her next period, and that hadn't happened.

In the morning she walked down to the chemist's and bought herself a home pregnancy testing kit. It was expensive, but simpler and quicker to use than she'd imagined. Within an hour she was staring at the pink circle that confirmed her pregnancy.

She went for a walk that afternoon, needing to get out of the house and do something with the excitement churning inside her. It was an excitement that was at least three-quarters fear. She knew Gray would react by seeing her pregnancy as her way of pressuring him, her way of pulling him back from his adventures with Alice. It seemed odd to her now, but they had never discussed having children.

She had walked up Harrow hill, past the school and through the churchyard to come down the other side, thinking vaguely of catching the train and riding out to walk in the countryside she thought existed at the end of the Metropolitan line. It was a warm, close day, intermittently sunny, and she was sweating slightly from exertion. She was aware of her own faint, familiar body odor, of traffic fumes, dog turds and an indefinite moist green smell. As she came over the brow of the hill and started down, a cloud passed and the sun blazed out. She raised her head and saw, beside the path that wound down before her, a tree. She had to stop and look.

It was a horse chestnut tree, one of four she walked past every time she came this way to the station. In the autumn the path was littered with conkers, and with children gathering them or throwing them at each other. Just now the tree was in full leaf, dark green and spreading a canopy of shade all around it. It was magnificent. She felt as if she had never seen it before, as if she had never really seen a tree before, how alive it was, how beautiful and mysterious. She was aware of a connection between herself and this tree, a connection among all living things. All at once she understood something about life. And then, as suddenly as it had come, it vanished. Something remained—an awareness of having touched something—but the understanding itself could not be grasped. When she tried, later, to write it down she could only produce rather obvious metaphors about blooming and bearing fruit, the sort of clichés she felt embarrassed reading, let alone writing.

But the memory of the tree stayed with her. She knew at that moment that she wanted the baby. She wanted it more than she'd ever wanted anything.

She said nothing about her baby to Gray. It was so fragile now, only a cluster of cells, it might so easily be lost, she couldn't risk his anger. Time was on her side; the longer the pregnancy, the more inevitable the baby. And she found she liked having a secret from him; it was some compensation for Alice.

He spent more days and nights away from home once his summer holiday began, but she minded less than she'd expected. She had something else to think about. One rainy night, rereading the pregnancy book she'd bought so long ago for Caroline's pregnancy, she realized she'd made a mistake in thinking she was just now six weeks pregnant. Medically, pregnancy was not reckoned from conception (the date of which might not be known) but from the first day of the last period, and she didn't know when that had been. The last one she'd marked in her diary had been April 27, which was the day she'd left London for Houston. She remembered that it had been a few days early, and found herself recalling the drip, drip, drip of blood from the horse's severed head in her dream. She remembered the embarrassment of asking for the ladies' room at the funeral home. And after that? She leafed through the pages of her diary. Between the 28th of April and the 23rd of May was a stretch of unmarked pages. Looking at them—so many of them!—made her feel frightened. It was hard to believe she had been away as long as that, and that most of that time, nearly three weeks, had been spent in Marjorie's—in her mother's—house in East Texas, without electricity, without human contacts, without food. With a box of crackers, a crate of wine, and the pillow friend. But she must have had another period somewhere among those blank pages, in that house among the pine trees, although she could not now recall it. She must have. Otherwise, she was eleven weeks pregnant, and Graham could not possibly be the father.