Infidelities (15 page)

‘No,’ Helen says aloud, because ‘details’, remember? Louisa’s rule? Every detail had to be there but every detail also had to be true. And what is true is that there was no fish, no excuse, no other reason than what’s already written. He’d arrived, to be with her, that’s all Helen needs.

‘It was as though you’d been waiting for me,’ she has written.

And—

‘I’m sorry to come up on you like this —’

He might have said.

She’s written that, that he said that.

But actually she has no memory of what he said, that moment when he got to her, what she might have said, because all she’s aware of is that he’d come straight to her from where he’d been, came right up close to her, was so close, and she was going to put her arms about him, she was going to press her face against the side of his warm neck, breathe in the scent of him, feel the warmth of his skin. And so it may have been that he thought she was someone else, that he came down to meet her because he thought she was another woman, not her, and said to her then, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’m hopeless without my glasses. I
see I’ve made a mistake,’ and so also it may have been that she has written that she said to him, ‘It was as though you were waiting for me’ – these things don’t matter. Now that she’s sitting here with the pen, the paper. She realises she has no concrete memory of anything to write down at this part of the story other than to record his scent, the golden colour of him, of his throat, of his arms. He was wearing a soft, dark green shirt, the sleeves pushed up to the elbows, and a vest, a fishing vest … But are these the kinds of details that matter, Louisa? Do they add up at all? Helen is doing the best she can, but this was not necessarily how the story was supposed to go. Only that he was a stranger, was the idea in the first place, and that this might be how something could start, between a man and a woman, that she could imagine, could make up … Which was why she could even think about writing any of this in the first place. Changing the names, probably, and a few other things. She could only think about writing a story called ‘Infidelity’ that Richard might read because the dramatic content of it would be invented, fiction. Because otherwise what happened to her that morning of the first day of her marriage doesn’t make a story at all, does it?

Does it?

She can write that down. That when he said, ‘I’m sorry to have come up on you like this —’ she replied, ‘What?’ She could write herself saying that to him, that word,
and the way every second of their meeting was like every second articulating itself within the vast spread of time, and her imprisoned within each one.

‘What?’

And details such as his tanned arms, the soft shirt. Is that the ‘little itty bitty important stuff’ that Tennessee Williams always made to be the centre of his work, the way Louisa says? Little monologues, scraps of dialogue enough like Sam Shepard has little scraps of dialogue, but then he writes big speeches too.

Or change the whole tone of the story altogether: What about doing that? That she’d been about to turn around and head back to the house when she saw him. Because anyone who’s fishing from the bank loathes disturbance, we know that by now. And so Helen had been about to go back to the house, back the way she came, but then his voice had called out to her, ‘Hi!’ and he’d waved at her – so there, more details there, realistic details, more
dialogue – he was simply calling out to her, he didn’t mind about calling out at all.

It could have been like that, too.

‘Hi!’ he called out to me, in a friendly voice, Helen writes, but has to cross it out. The story is in the third person, remember? That has to be part of it. ‘When I release you into fiction, I release you into the third person, past tense ONLY,’ Louisa had said, writing ONLY in capitals in the air again. ‘No stream of consciousness. No I-do-this and then-I-do-that … I want you to interrogate your details,’ she’d said. ‘I want you to be rigorous about them. I want your readers to read EVERY word along the line – like Lawrence says we must do – the sentence must LIVE along the line. None of that skimming, summative yeah-yeah-I-get-it kind of story. I want your readers following every one of your sentences, every detail, every single word.’

But what about repetition? Helen worries about that like she worries about the role of the author in a story. She’s been worried about repetition from the very first class when they did a workshop exercise based on one sentence, and they had to rewrite it in five different ways, but when she brought it up, that repetition might be boring for the reader, Louisa had just put her hand towards her, palm outwards, and said, ‘Virginia Woolf, Helen.’ Helen is thrilled and inspired by most of the things Louisa says, the way she says them. That writing may as well be the same as living for someone like Louisa, that there may be nothing whatsoever dividing the two – this is an idea that’s
never occurred to Helen before she started taking this class. It would never have occurred. She decides then that she must understand from her teacher’s remark that repetition is okay if the writer is aware of using it for reasons of rhythm and shape. And what’s more, repetition, as Louisa has reminded her, can be part of writing as it is part of life. Still, there are some readers who are not like Louisa, who might get bored with it, mightn’t they? Helen is aware of this dilemma, and continues to worry about it, about different kinds of readers and their expectations of a story – even though she also knows, and even without Louisa here to show her, that her own story cannot move on, can only … enlarge … is how she thinks of it, if she does go back and around, re-approach what happened that day long ago, come at it from different angles … And come at it again. Because it was surely an event, a narrative event, the meeting that took place between her and that unknown man all those years ago, but it’s also lacking … ‘authorial push’ – another phrase from Louisa that seems relevant here. As in, ‘For godsake, that wrecks a story completely, knowing some author is there in the background, fiddling and planning and scheming and pushing the whole thing along.’ So maybe what Helen is doing here is all right, after all? Letting everything just hang?

All she knows is what she’d known then: Only, Yes. Yes and yes and yes. Anything.

‘Stop! Don’t go!’ he’d called, had he? Had she made to turn? ‘I’m coming to you, there’, and she had waited for him, just as he said. She watched him getting closer and closer and when he arrived she could smell the warm, deep smell of him, the tang of his sweat from running, could see the softness of his shirt, the brown tan of his arms, and—

‘Wait right where you are,’ he’d said when he was just a few feet away and when he reached her, he put out his hand, not to shake her hand but to touch her wrist, encircle it with his fingers, like a bracelet or a cuff and she was utterly, utterly unafraid.

‘It was as though you’d been waiting for me,’ she might have said then. That might have been the moment. When she wanted to put her arms around him, put her face up against the side of his face, let him bring her down with him on to the soft bank.

Helen picks up her pen, lets him encircle her wrist again with his fingers. When he’d touched her, she’d felt the jolt of it.

‘You’re in the cottage,’ he said. ‘Up at River Lodge. You’re staying there, aren’t you? Isobel told me, I live there …’ He gestured with a nod to somewhere in the distance, beyond some trees. ‘Isobel is my housekeeper, too,’ he said. ‘She told me you were staying for a week or so, with your husband. I was going to come along to introduce myself, to say hello. But then, just now … You see, I thought you were someone else.’

Lightly, lightly he held her wrist and it was the most natural thing in the world.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ Helen said to him.

‘Exactly,’ he said.

And he leaned in then, towards her, and she reached towards him … And, what? Was she going to kiss him then? Was he going to kiss her? What was going to happen now? That he leaned down towards her, and that she reached up, she put her face up to his face … And she’d thought, Yes. And yes and yes … Will she write that down? Even though they had never met each other before? That he’d only come for the way he did because he thought she was someone else? Even though they didn’t know each other and were complete strangers, still there was this moment of him leaning down towards her and …

For the story, she means. For the story. That she broke from him and ran, and ran and ran and she didn’t look back, all the way home to the little house, and arrived there, back where she’d started …

Because how can the story be a story now, with that sentence – ‘She broke from him and ran away …’? If she doesn’t have them hold each other, this thing happened to
both of them, come upon them with great force and now they can’t stop it … That he would lean down towards her and she reaches up to him and she kisses him. He kisses her. If she doesn’t make this moment of them together the start of something dramatic, a confrontation, an embrace, the idea of something momentous beginning, adulterous and powerful and dangerous, and only writes instead about what actually happened that morning, all the details of it that she’s put in – then the title is wrong, isn’t it? ‘Infidelity’?

The story was always to be a real story, a proper story, always that had been her plan. There was to be a woman meeting a man, a stranger, on the first day of her marriage, as had happened – and okay, so perhaps he thought she was someone he already knew … That’s all fine, that can all stay in. But then, from that, there was something else, an episode that she would imagine that would make the whole thing into fiction, fiction, all made up. So she might start with her morning, from all those years ago, when she went out alone and with barely any clothes on, dressed only to go swimming in the river, to go into that beautiful river, the ‘devastating’ river, was how she described it … So she would start with that. And then … And then … She would write something different, create an event, an affair, no, not an affair, more of an encounter that took place between a man and a woman one summer’s morning, something intense and physical and yes, it would be emotional, too … How a new bride was unfaithful on the first day of her marriage. How she could
be unfaithful, how she had somehow prepared herself to be: ‘Because the next thing she knew, her eyes were open and there was light coming in through the slit between the curtains, through the partly opened window she could hear birdsong, and she was up and dressed, but no shoes on, no underwear.’ Remember? So the story might go on from there, but not to this – this other version. How call this ‘Infidelity’, this thing she’s written down here? How infidelity for her theme and content, the very idea behind her story, when nothing, nothing happened at all?

Only that nothing in her life had ever matched it. Not later, when she would hold her firstborn in her arms, or her second and third and fourth, not when she turned, over and over as she would turn, to her husband, in love and desire and comfort … Nothing would ever happen to her again that would take such strength, every second of strength in her, in her will, not to yield, and to be able to so break, and run. Nothing else had come close. In all her adult years of planning and striving and thinking, in her long lifetime of being with herself, knowing herself, watching over herself, being so careful with herself, never had this woman, this Helen, had anything come upon her with the same sense of utter shock, of complete and startling unknowingness that yet held for her no fear but was only something she wanted. As though everything else was secondhand, everything in some way planned or imagined or prepared for, her marriage, her children, her life, everything created, like a story, to be thought
through and interrogated and organised in advance, and intuited or imagined or already foreseen – only this, a few seconds with a stranger, his fingers encircling her wrist like a bracelet … That … detail …

‘It was as though you were waiting for me,’ she said.

It came from somewhere else.