Married Love (21 page)

What was she doing here? Mockery sprang up savagely again from where she had suppressed it after they met and got on so well (first time Ozu at the BFI, second time dinner at a French place in Hornsea High Street, third time lucky) – at herself, for having advertised, which she’d never thought she’d do. Now she drowned in shame at the idea of the sprightly words she’d used in her own description, so wincingly anxiously calculated to lead to just this moment.

Oh well never mind.

The sheet was twisted into a rope underneath her – that
clean
sheet badly tucked in, and the clean duvet and pillowcases, had let her know he too had been planning, when he suggested she come round for early supper at his place. He had advertised too. Now, careful not to wake him, she got up out of bed, wrapping herself in his cotton throw although she wasn’t really afraid of his seeing her. Her body was all right, still straight and slender; it was in your face and hands that your age showed first, and you couldn’t hide those away. Still, she was out of practice; it might be rash to parade around naked as if she thought she was twenty. The bathroom light wasn’t consoling, when she shut the door behind her and turned it on. She avoided her own eyes, and used his flannel – why not? since he’d been in there – to wash between her legs.

When she came out again he hadn’t moved from where he lay face down in the bed. She couldn’t help feeling sidelined; as if this oblivion was what he’d desired and she’d been merely the passage through to it. Her clothes were dropped on the floor where he and she had stood fumbling together, taking them off; recovering them, Linda carried them through into the living room where they had eaten (something nice but faintly risky, indigestible, squid-ink pasta with mussels and cream), sitting side by side on the sagging chaise longue because the table was impossibly heaped up with iMac and papers. It was dark now – it must be almost ten o’clock. She put on the sequence of garments chosen in such anticipation for taking off, comical as running a wedding video backwards. At first while she was dressing, she thought that she would
let
herself right away out of the flat, take the Tube home, leave him a note. They might meet up again, or they might not. Her heart wouldn’t break, she was safe, its muscle toughened after the years of accumulations from two long relationships, one short marriage (no children).

When they removed to the bedroom they had left IKEA lamps switched on behind them; by their light now Linda, lingering, dressed but in bare feet so that she made no noise, sandals looped across a finger, bag on her shoulder, moved about his room in his absence as if she was moving inside the shape of his mind. She found on the shelves books that he’d written, quite a few, with decent academic publishers. So, he must be fairly successful in his field; though she knew, because he’d told her, that he worked to some extent in the shadow of one of the big innovative thinkers, following up the Professor’s hunches with his meticulous research. Perhaps he got serious grants for his fieldwork studying North American and Australian rock art. Perhaps the Bloomsbury flat was part of some fellowship deal.

He had talked a lot about his work; but he had seemed to be interested in hers, too – she was an art therapist, working with clients with mental health problems. They had seemed, over the dinner in Hornsea six weeks ago, to have so much in common. She had built up a whole tall, hopeful, dreamy, precarious edifice out of their common ground while he was away, in defiance of her usual fatalism; she had invented some convenient simulacrum of him, as it seemed to her now – a twin for herself, to fit her need. Luckily, out of some good instinct
of
self-preservation, she hadn’t announced her happiness to anyone among her friends.

It wasn’t the sex that had spoiled it.

Something had happened – a drop in her hopes – just before she made the move that saved them from the zoetrope; he had spun its tin drum for her, so that the tiny horses circled in their endless wave of movement, legs clenching and then releasing, kicked back behind. Now, afterwards, while he slept and she was left alone, there was time to think. She fingered through the recollections for whatever was concealed at their centre, little nub of ice. Cold, getting colder, coldest – there!

Was that all? Such a slight thing, in passing.

She had been so moved, thinking of his life’s work. In the restaurant the rich smells of meat and wine had seemed to suffuse what he described; visionary animals looming out of torchlit darkness. He had been lucky, he said, getting special permission to have his twenty permitted minutes in the caves at Lascaux; they were closed to visitors now, after the discovery of micro-organisms growing in there, caused by the presence of too many people. He had told her that the latest thinking, based partly on the practices of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, was that the paintings may have been the product of induced shamanistic hallucinations, projected on to the rock and marked out there. And he had said that for the people who painted Lascaux, the rock face may have seemed only a skin stretched between them and another order of reality. For all those weeks he was absent in South Africa, these possibilities had
seemed
to have some kind of promise for her. She had spoken about the cave paintings to the clients she worked with in her art classes; some of them were susceptible to visions. Sharing his ideas around, she felt the same secret excitement as when she was a teenager, weaving certain names into her conversation.

And then this evening, as she crouched in front of the zoetrope, peeking through its slot while he spun it for her, he’d explained its trick. His voice had had a giggle in it, of boyish pleasure at debunking sentimentalities.

— It’s like the hallucinations the cave painters saw. You can reproduce those visions in laboratory conditions. It’s just neurons firing, telling you something’s happening when it isn’t. I’m not a neurobiologist, but it’s something to do with the causal operator, interconnections between the frontal and inferior parietal lobes. Makes you feel you’re in the presence of something other: the ineffable. When you aren’t. There is no ineffable. It’s just a trick of your own mind, deluding itself.

Linda hadn’t protested — but isn’t there another order of reality? What was the point? Who wanted to appear sentimental?

How small. Just that. One of those tiny twitches in conversation that, unbeknownst to the speaker, tear fissures in the moment, out of which power and pleasure drain. How disappointing. She had seen then that he had his trouser belt pulled tight at a point too high up on his waist, as middle-aged men do; it made her vulnerable, noticing. The bones dried out, the sinews hardened. He had told her in the restaurant that after they closed
Lascaux
they’d built a replica of parts of the original cave for visitors to enjoy; imagining a plaster rock face, electric torchlight, ersatz exclamations, she had said she’d rather not see it at all. When she was younger, she had not been vain, but had trusted her appearance to be quietly itself, not beautiful: narrow face, coffee-coloured skin, bushy black hair (some Malay in there somewhere, some Portuguese). Nowadays, in the mirror at the centre of the familiar surround of her own dressing-table – pots and bottles, souvenirs, draped scarves and beads – only her face was not unchanging. Mostly she accepted the changes. Occasionally they anguished her, seemed abysmally sad, irrevocable as if a bottle had slipped out of her hand to smash.

Outside the tall uncurtained windows of the flat, trees moved in the square: clotted, massy darkness against purple-lit sky. She ought to go. There was no need to leave a note for him. She didn’t want to argue with this man about neurobiology; no one changed their mind, ever, in those kinds of argument. But if she stood there watching the trees for much longer, then he would wake up and wrap himself in the cotton throw, come out to stand in the doorway behind her: everything would be more complicated. Because the arguments themselves were only a skin stretched across darkness. She remembered the horses in the zoetrope, drawing in and throwing out their legs, over and over, in the two opposite impulses, systole and diastole. And how because the movement was unending, she had put out her hand to find him.

MY FRIEND ROXANNE
was from the Homes. Roxanne chose me for her friend, I didn’t choose her. She had always been on a different table, with the naughty girls: she had been one of the naughtiest. I don’t think we’d ever even spoken, until on the day we began Junior Three she put her grubby furry pencil-case on the desk beside mine and sat down there as calmly as if it had been prearranged between us. At first I thought it was a joke, which would end in my humiliation, so I wouldn’t look at her. The teacher thought this too, she noticed us uneasily. We were new to her class, but it was a small school, the teachers knew all the children, they knew that girls like Roxanne weren’t meant to be friendly with girls like me.

But Roxanne didn’t get up to any of her usual tricks. When I put up my desk lid to put my new books inside the desk, she didn’t knock it down on my head. Usually when the teacher was talking Roxanne twitched in her seat like a trapped cat, sitting on her hands to keep them
from
straying, her head twisting around to see what the boys were doing every time there was the sound of a scuffle or a muffled protest. Now she gazed at Mrs Hazlehurst, seeming to soak up every word she was saying. Mrs Hazlehurst was choosing the ink monitor and the milk monitor; she was telling us how hard we had to work, if we wanted to pass in two years’ time the examinations for free places in the grammar schools. Roxanne volunteered for everything, holding her arm up straight above her head and tensed and still, although she wasn’t chosen. When it came to playtime she gripped on to me as we filed down the corridor to go outside, not painfully but determinedly; she wasn’t going to let me go. I was afraid of her and hot at the idea that the others were watching us. I had had a couple of friends in Junior Two and of course they would have expected us to go on sitting and playing together, although our friendship hadn’t been passionate. As Roxanne marched me past them they seemed already faint and pale, as if they belonged to the weak past.

— What do you play? Roxanne demanded.

— I dunno. Whatever the others are playing.

— That’s boring. Come on. We’ll think of something else.

The boys’ playground was on the left and the girls’ on the right; they were deep concreted pits between very high stone walls. The girls’ playground extended on one side into a covered area underneath the school building, supported on iron pillars; we called this the shed, and when it rained it was our shelter. Roxanne led the way in here,
still
hanging on to me as if she was afraid I might run. It was an eerie echoing space, almost dark at its far end where the big bins were and the padlocked grey-painted doors into the boiler room and the room where the caretaker kept the broken desks and blackboards. We sat down on the low wall in front of the bins. Everyone outside was still standing around in awkward groups, not sure how to begin yet in the new hierarchy, with a new top class and new Junior Ones arrived from the infant school. Roxanne was inches shorter than me; I was tall, and clumsy with what my mother called puppy fat. I also had two big white front teeth like spades, which I had hated ever since they intruded their way into my mouth; I tried not to open it and show them. Roxanne’s lithe little brown-skinned body made the boys call her a tomboy, although close up to her I realised that this wasn’t right, she didn’t have the boys’ animal carelessness, she was too intently conscious of herself. Her red cotton dress was skimpy over her barrel chest, I could see her quick breathing. The skin of her face was very thin and fine, drawn tight over the bone beneath, and her head was round and neat as a nut: she was one of those children disconcertingly printed with a set of grown-up features, too finished and expressive. Her dark, silky, curly hair was cropped short.

— What do you want to play? she said, turning on me with intensity. — A pretending game. You can be whatever you like.

I shrugged.

— What do you like best? I’m good at making up these games. If you give me an idea, I’ll make a game.

— Horses, I said, trying to think of something. — I like horses.

I thought she was going to give up on me. I was a very conventional child, I knew I was. I saw a flicker of exasperation. Horses! Horses didn’t mean anything to her. They didn’t really mean much to me either; I had read some pony books, that was all. With an effort that was almost a visible shudder she pulled herself back on track.

— Horses, she said. — All right. We’ll try that.

She closed her eyes. The life of her eyes was extinguished for a moment but through their lids I could still see her thoughts darting. When she opened them again they were full of resolution.

— All right. Pretend we’re horses. Wild ones. Take your hairband off. You have to shake your mane like this. There’s a wicked farmer who’s trying to catch us and sell us. We have to reach the island where we’ll be safe from him, but there’s a dangerous river we have to cross to get to it.

She jumped to her feet then and snickered and tossed her head and stamped her foot. She seemed to me miraculously horse-like. I took my hairband off and put it safe in my pocket, then we galloped around the playground, pawing and whinnying, throwing back our heads and shaking our hair; when we spoke we changed our ordinary voices into a kind of breathy neighing. At first I felt like an idiot and I only did it because I didn’t dare disobey Roxanne, who had thought up the game especially for me. I saw my old friends watching, from the
sidelines
as usual. The others had started playing their own things, which some of the popular Junior Four girls were organising. These popular girls weren’t used to the sight of Roxanne and me together, they stared and whispered, drooping their arms round one another’s necks, which was a thing I hated. I thought they were like witches when they hung together like that, as if they only had one body, all thinking the same thoughts, always disapproving of something. A teacher had read us a story once about some old witches who shared one eye, taking turns to clap it into their foreheads. After a few minutes of the horse game, I began to forget about everybody. I didn’t exactly stop knowing that we were in the real playground, pretending something, but a different life welled up from inside me and took possession of my body, so that I could feel the romance of horse-being overwhelming my prosaic self.