The Light of Evening (18 page)

It was in his study, which had become his habitat; it was where he took his meals, listened to music, did his exercises with dumbbells that he had sent away for, and wrote as he said but always put those writings in a strongbox, lest she read them. The fire was lit and a stack of logs lay in a wheelbarrow that he had just wheeled in.

The book he held was covered in the same ocher wallpaper as that in their bedroom. He read aloud and with conviction. The story concerned a man with fever, in the hold of a ship, visited by a woman and presently declaring his passion for her, saying that if she were but a savage maid and he a strong hunter, they could fly to the wilderness where there were great trees and bunchy grapes. Throwing protocol aside, the man confessed of a warm love to come, a life of blood and heart such as she had not had with her husband.

He asked her what she thought of it. It was not for her.

“Why was it not for her?”

“It has no life,” she said awkwardly.

“In what way?”

“It’s too generalized … great trees and bunchy grapes … that’s not how …”

“You mean that’s not Hans Castorp,” he snapped back.

“I mean it’s not Hans Castorp,” she said, and with infinite meticulousness he removed the wallpaper and there on the dust jacket was his name in handsome lettering and a photograph of him as a much younger man, so earnest and studious, a young man filled with great and poetic endeavor and she looked from the photograph to him and back again, saying the same inept thing, “God help us … oh, God help us,” and he stood, not stirring, not moving a muscle as she tried to undo her mistake, the very attempt so cringing, so cretinous, his eyes seething with murderous grief.

Shadow and half-shadow as they walked between the line of trees, moonlight spilling down and slashes of it on the path, silvering the tree trunk and path where they walked and halted, each surprised to find the other abroad at so late an hour. She had gone out by the back kitchen door and he, as she reckoned, must have left by the door that led to the potting shed. Then passing on, as strangers might. If ever there was a moment for reconciliation it was there, it was then, the softness of the night, the trees in their spring vesture and the sighing of the leaves, not like winter’s brawl.

She carried on up to the fence, climbed it, and looked beneath to where the sheep lay in their shifting slumbers, a stream from somewhere trilling happily along and seeming to say the same thing
—
Irrawaddy, Irrawaddy … Irrawaddy.

Scene Five

a love affair.

It happened that she had come across a small advertisement in the back pages of a magazine, in which readers were invited to apply for the job of reading manuscripts. To her surprise she was accepted and so began her working life, a connection to the outside world, the world of letters, through which she now sought deliverance.

How she flung herself into her new endeavor, the excitement of opening the envelope, counting the pages, expecting the selfsame transports and mesmerization as she had found in the great Russian novels, intrigues, masked balls, thunderous skies, irresolute love, duels, but mostly they were tales of forlorn, lackluster lives not dissimilar to her own and as a consequence her reports were a little crisp, sometimes even condescending.

Then one morning, enclosed with her check there was a short note from the managing director of the publishing house, saying that going through the warrens of his office and his endless dreary correspondence he had chanced on a few of her reports and what a breath of fresh air they were
—
a new sharp intelligence, nervous, feminine, strangely personal, and yet not afraid to get out the chisel. For two guineas a time she was giving the company more than their money’s worth and he simply had to thank her. She did not reply, sensing in it some attraction.

He wrote again, said his curiosity was aroused as to who

this person could be and before many months an intimacy had started up.

It’s evening and I’ve come back to the office, all the corridors dark and deserted, tons of manuscripts, tons of torn-up paper and the stale smell of the scent of the secretaries. I drove down through a shower and then came out of Albany Street across a clean line drawn straight across the road where it had not rained at all. I stopped and got out to see what direction the wind was blowing in. It was coming from your country and I thought of the mist on the mountain, the clouds so big, so roaming, reluctant to cross the Irish Sea and come and hang over this great wide blotch of a city of London and hang over me. I thought of you, whom I have never met.

So he had left home in order to go to his office to think of her, just as she went up into the woods with his letters to be alone with them. She kept telling herself it was all harmless, they could be Swift and Stella, corresponding on different sides of the Irish Sea. By writing to her he said he was finding relief from the ifs and buts and strains of editorial life, he was also asking for little glancing descriptions of her own life, not that he intended to pry.

In one letter he wondered if she had ever written anything apart from her insightful reports and if so might he be allowed to read them. She sent some pieces, apologizing for the rambling in them, yet his letter back was the transfusion she had been waiting for. Despite certain awkwardnesses he saw a new voice, a new slant, a girl revealing to him that the angels were on her side. Stories poured out of her, small things, bigger things, her father’s eczema that always came on after he had taken the pledge and the way it itched and crazed him, her mother squeezing oranges that they could not afford to humor him and giving her the pulp with a sugar loaf in it to suck from; then that

winter night when a man in a leather coat and leather gloves, possibly a doctor, came to their house to examine a neighbor, screams from the dining room, and next day the girl sent away and not heard of again. There was Drue, the workman, always asking her for a kiss, a birdie, but warning her not to tell. All this under her husband’s roof and without his knowing it, her friend meanwhile delighting in them. He would interlace his praises with talk of meetings and committees, describe the people who worked for him, a highly strung secretary, a voluble Scotsman reciting the poems of Iain Lom, who had fought with Montrose and thanked God that after the battle of Inverlochy that the plains and the hillside would be green and fertile in times to come because of the great enrichment they had from the bodies of the Campbells, left piled in the field.

To think that just two months ago he did not know her and now while fighting off art editors, advertising managers, and production directors, he was searching for her handwriting, searching among the stacks of mail for her reports, her stories that brought him from stoical begrudgery, from the hard carapace of money and budgets to his true self. In one letter he said she reminded him of a certain day in his youth when he too had discovered literature, the way she was discovering it and perhaps, perhaps, in time they would meet and they would talk about it and much else. He could feel and respond to some inward pressure in her and wanted to save her from the harshness of the world because he knew the world had already taken its knife to her.

He knew her husband’s name and her children’s names and would always conclude his letters with greetings to them. Then came the incriminating letter. He was on a business trip in New York and he described the evening before, going to a theater, going to dinner, then to a club, bushels of whiskey, then the dream of her that with the distance of an ocean gave him license to tell her that she had him by the hair of his head, for now, for then,

forever. In the dream he saw her, the sun on the lake, or rather her husband’s lake, the leaves in their wood patterning the light, the blue distance and the blue her, opening her slender arms to life. She was wearing a blue dress, white knitted stockings, and black suede shoes, the wind stirring her hair. She had asked him in the dream which direction was uptown and which was downtown and they got on one of those jaunting cars and told the driver to take them to Central Park. There, a frozen reservoir came into sight, it lay in green and silver shimmeriness, like a dance pavilion under a whey-green moon, and at the instant of asking her to dance he wakened up.

Her dream did not correspond to his.

When her husband announced that he was selling up and that they would move to London she could barely conceal her excitement. There began the flurry of departure, taking down curtains, rolling carpets, wrapping china and glasses, labeling the crates of books, almost too nervous to believe in it. In her dream life a white swan attached itself to her so that she was ferried to where she imagined to be London, standing on a bridge with its chain of lampposts, when a stranger, a robed man, held up card after card of ancient Hebrew lettering, telling her that she must discover the hidden meaning of the word. In another dream she was still in what she believed to be London, a fog-ridden milieu, a silver-gray motorcar, similar to the one her husband had, careening recklessly into a decrepit and shuttered dwelling.

Not Thackeray and not Dickens either. No high-ceilinged salons in which there lurked the trapped laughter of Lord Steyne and Becky Sharp and no Miss Flite with her twenty cages of birds and her daily pilgrimage to listen to the interminable wrangles at Chancery.

Their house was in a suburb that looked out onto a common, dismal and misted, a sluggish bottle-green pond and on

the wooden hoarding nailed to the bridge in blotched and fading lettering a list of the fish it had been stocked with. It was a semidetached house with mock Tudor windows and gabling, a small front garden with straggling rosebushes, identical to all the houses that ran either up or down the hill. There was a hatch in the small kitchen where dishes could be passed through, the linoleum, left by the previous owner, of black-and-white squares, which the children stamped on, asking plaintively when the family was going home.

She did not hurry to meet her friend, fearing the outcome, and kept offering lame excuses about settling in and fetching children to and from their new school. Yet she would make tentative journeys in anticipation of it. In the bright evenings after the children had gone to bed she would walk a mile or so down to the main road where the bus to the station ran every twenty minutes. She read the timetable, imagined getting on the bus, getting off the bus and onto a train, getting out at Waterloo Station and onto an underground train and the noisy venue where he would be waiting. What would he make of her? What would she make of him? Sometimes on those aimless walks she saluted a neighbor, an elocution teacher who lived three doors down and had handed her a card in case her sons wished to take lessons. A Miss P. Trevelyan, a timid woman, her white ermine collar and white pigskin gloves testifying to better days, yet rhapsodic at recounting the names of two famous actors that she had helped onto the London stage.

In the window of a newsagent there were handwritten signs, people looking for work, looking for love, looking for furniture, and one that struck her as being especially pitiful:
“Widower wishes to dispose of recently deceased wife’s clothing, as good as new, call evening.”

At the supper table her husband would resort to doggerel or rhyme so that
fife
and
strife
rhymed with
wife,
wife who bribed

children with sweets and toy guns to unseat father, to steal their love away from father so that he would be disliked and associated with duties such as taking their cod-liver oil, brushing their teeth, and doing their homework. Children were being sucked daily into the emotional incubator of mother, which rhymed with
smother.
The children were not deaf to these barbs but dealt with them in their childish ways, either laughing uncontrollably, making funny faces, or staring into the distance as if they had floated off. They asked the same riddles that they knew the answers of
—
“What bow can’t you tie
—
a rainbow, tee hee hee”
—
and when one answered precipitately the other threatened him with extinction: “My gang is bigger than your gang and will get you.” Her younger son read the essay he’d been given a gold-foil star for:

I was playing in a small enclosed space surrounded with young apple trees that the boys were using as goalposts, they were blossoming into color and it seemed a pity to see them being continuously pummeled by the hard leather ball. For some reason I had a magnifying glass in my hand and a girl ran away with it and I chased after her, but by the time I got it back the lunch bell rang and I had to go in. The girl started to throw apples at me so I threw some back at her.

His brother named the girl as Eustace and there followed the picturesque names of girls, who graced the playground like so many nascent ballerinas.

Puddle Dock. Blackfriars. Threadneedle. Throgmorton. Crip-plegate. Cheapside. Camomile. Names redolent of the toil, the trades, and the hardships that had gone on. Ancient brick walls veined with ivy and smothered in weeds, elsewhere warm brick abutting onto stone and onto newer, blondish brick, a bustle so in contrast to the humdrum tedium of their suburb.

Her friend recognized her at once, hale, welcoming, so lavish

were his gestures that his arm succeeded in overturning plates of luncheon that a waitress was carrying with great caution. In those flustering moments as they met, Eleanora felt a little lurch, gone the mystery they had constructed around each other, she saw a man with a near-scraped mustache, amberish, his bearing so cavalier that he reminded her of those officers in Chekhov’s plays, full of romantic but unfulfillable longings.