As she approaches the door she feels a disorientating lurch, as if Michael’s outline, seen through the glass panel, has melted and re-formed in front of her eyes, hustled through two decades of time-lapse photography. It occurs to her, more strongly than it has done for years, that she disapproves of infidelity, and that she deplores her part in it. When she opens the door there’s a flutter of reassurance, of things settling back into place, but it’s short-lived. There’s something in Michael’s face she has never seen before; she’s sure there is.
Michael is fifty-nine, and he bears the imprimatur of the academic who is oblivious to his appearance. It’s a badge of honour with him, this dishevelment: the slight staleness of his clothes, the impatiently pushed-back hair which has receded obligingly beyond his reach. Cressida has tried, sometimes, to find a term for it: asceticism is one she likes, or unworldliness. She has always known that it isn’t altogether unconscious, nor wholly a matter of indifference to him: now, in a moment of giddy clarity, she sees that he is as vain in his way as the next man, and that this veil of learning, of thinking, of greatness, is what he has cast out to snare her and draw her in. It’s no different to a peacock’s tail or a bullfrog’s chant. It represents what she might want in the father of her children, the spectacular brain and single-minded purpose of a charismatic scholar.
He looks back at her from the cramped porch with a glimmer of impatience. Rain drips down his nose.
‘Are we to conduct a conversation on the doorstep?’ he asks.
Cressida steps back from the door without saying anything. Her mind is hurrying onwards, dragging her along in its wake. That expression she glimpsed, a moment ago. She’s sure she knows what it means: that he’s steeled himself to dispose of her. He’s giving up his college teaching this Michaelmas; he could spend more time with her in future, but he doesn’t want to. She’s been a convenience, but he can sense the possibility of her becoming a nuisance. So.
There’s no room for emotion: other things matter more just now. Some instinct tells her that preserving her self-respect, her pride, will send her forward from this encounter on a little wave of borrowed energy, whereas if she leaves matters to him she’ll fetch up stranded on the beach while the tide creeps away.
‘I haven’t got any food, I’m afraid,’ she says, ‘but I can give you a glass of wine.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ he says. ‘A glass of wine would do nicely.’
Is his tone any different from usual? His speech, his wit, his affection have always been dry, but now that doubt has been seeded it’s hard to dispel. Especially since the doubt is about her own feelings as well as his.
Michael has always preferred white Burgundy, and there’s a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet in the fridge, a gift from one of her brothers. Cressida has no idea why it’s all right to field such an expensive bottle of wine but not a Waitrose pizza, but that unexpectedly capable instinct is in control still. She seizes wine glasses in one hand and the bottle in the other, stops to dig a corkscrew out of a drawer.
Michael is standing beside the piano.
‘Do sit,’ Cressida says, as though he’s a formal visitor, not familiar with the house. She sets the wine and the glasses down on the little lacquered table they bought together at a shop in Ludlow at the end of a walking weekend a few years ago. She can smell the wine as she pours: peach and lemon, she thinks, Michael’s training deeply ingrained by now. A dash of honeysuckle.
She holds a glass out, but keeps hold of it when he leans forward to take it from her.
‘Michael,’ she says, ‘there’s no easy way to say this. This is a farewell toast.’
His reaction isn’t what she expected. He sags a little, as though something that has been giving him extra padding or stiffening has been removed. The expression on his face doesn’t reveal sorrow or even surprise: irritation is closer to the mark. It’s almost as though he regrets the waste of a journey on a wet evening. It occurs to her that she read the signs wrongly when he arrived, that he had no intention of breaking off with her – and then she is filled with an extraordinary cacophony of feelings. Impossible, she thinks, grasping her wine glass tightly, to identify any of them accurately, but she is quite certain that nowhere among them is a morsel of doubt that she has done the right thing.
*
In the months that follow, that cacophony of emotions has ample opportunity to reveal itself, ingredient by ingredient. The grind of the academic year is marked out, this year, by the changing colour of Cressida’s anguish: a brief flare of triumph to see out September, succeeded by fury in October, self-loathing in November, disbelief in December. The new year brings sorrow in January, and then indignation in February, regret in March, anger again in April – a procession that bears no relation to any sequence of mourning she has read about, and which shows no sign, as spring approaches, of moving towards a resolution.
In fact, as time goes on, another thread is discernible, running in the wake of her feelings about Michael: she begins to suspect that very little of the blame can be placed at his door, and she begins to fear that the same failings which allowed her to devote so much of her life to him are going to keep her in thrall to this self-pitying, self-perpetuating cycle of regret and despair for ever. She never deserved better than to be Michael’s half-considered mistress, she thinks, and to be left by the wayside once the modest glow of youth had passed. For the first time in years, she remembers how much she blamed herself for scuppering another chance of happiness, once before. She knows that isn’t an entirely just interpretation of events, but she can’t muster the energy to defend herself. She can only feel regret, and contempt for her own shortcomings. What hope is there for her if she can’t drag herself out of this morass, just as she failed to salvage things twenty years ago?
And then June arrives, and with it a burst of sunshine. The change is quite sudden: the flick of a switch, banishing the chill of May and the gloom in Cressida’s soul. She wakes one Saturday morning to the warmth of sunlight through her curtains and an unfamiliar feeling which she diagnoses, with surprise, as happiness.
She’s not sure, at first, to what she owes this unexpected blessing. She’s been spared Finals marking this year, which means the next fortnight will be unusually free. The TLS has invited her to review a novel which has been tipped for the Booker Prize. The irises she planted last year along her front path have started to flower. No, it’s none of these, although each adds a further glow of warmth. She must have had a good dream, she thinks, and she feels a flicker of disappointment: she never remembers her dreams, especially not the good ones.
But then it comes to her. Not a dream, but her last waking thought last night, almost lost in the fringes of sleep. She wants a baby.
Cressida is forty-one. She’s aware that conceiving a baby at forty-one is not as simple as it would have been at twenty-one, or even thirty-one, especially without an obvious candidate for fatherhood at hand. But the practicalities seem less important just now than the sudden, glorious discovery of maternal yearning. She feels it opening within her, a door into a realm of unexplored delights. The rest of the world seems to shrink into a meaner perspective: the same feeling she had when she was first absorbed in the pages of a book at five or six, and family life receded to an agreeably safe distance, her brothers no more than tiny caricatures in a world whose existence she could deny, after that, whenever she chose.
And what can she deny now? Oh, almost anything, she thinks, airily. Her work, or at least the tiresome aspects of it; the fretting over reputation and status. Who gives a fig what people will remember of you if you have a child to leave to the world? Who cares whether your paper is accepted, your abstract approved, if you can come home to the milky scent of a baby? Certainly men, with their uncongenial habits and displeasing smells, have had their day. Men with their arrogance and their closed minds and their certainty that age doesn’t wither them: what could she possibly want from a man now, except the wherewithal to make her pregnant?
> Happiness always makes her orderly: it’s an instinct honed in childhood, to keep her pleasures under close control. Today, she thinks, she will have breakfast at the little table in the front garden so that she can admire her irises, and when she has read a hundred pages of the TLS novel she will reward herself with an hour on the Internet. There is a vitamin you’re supposed to take when you’re planning a pregnancy, she thinks, and certain foods to avoid. All of that must be explored. This afternoon she will read in the back garden, which faces west. It doesn’t cross her mind that the sun might disappear before that.
The sun obliges, but Cressida makes slow progress with her reading. Since her scholarly edition of First World War poetry came out last year – a brief sidetrack from her pursuit of Romanticism – literary editors have taken to sending her war narratives to review. Most of them she likes well enough, but this one, an account of an African genocide written by a man who was a school teacher in a remote village until it was razed to the ground, contains the most graphic descriptions of rape she has ever read, and in Cressida’s view they do little to enhance the book’s literary merit. She isn’t usually squeamish about violence on the printed page, but today . . . It’s almost as though she’s pregnant already, she thinks, putting the novel aside and shutting her eyes for a moment. And why should she not bring her feminine sensibilities to bear on this great slab of male aggression? She peeks inside the book again: page 92. Enough for now.
*
Cressida’s joy doesn’t falter over the next few days. If sheer conviction could make life spring into existence within her then she would have no difficulty in conceiving, but as the days pass her mind turns, a little reluctantly, to the technicalities. She’s found websites that will lead her to donated sperm, and although the notion of syringes and clinics horrifies her a little, she knows she’ll have to get used to messiness and indignity if she’s to manage pregnancy and childbirth. It’s too bad, she thinks, that it didn’t occur to her to let Michael impregnate her, the biggest-brained bullfrog in the fens. But she doesn’t want Michael’s baby. It might be a girl, and inherit his peculiar ears. Worse, it might be a boy and inherit his peculiar ears.
Meanwhile, there are other things to distract her. It’s years since she’s sampled the festivities of May Week (Michael, of course, disparaged such frivolity), but she accepts an invitation to a garden party given by the college’s English students, and is more warmly welcomed than she anticipated. One thing leads to another: ‘Are you coming to watch the Bumps, Dr Benham?’ asks a first-year who has, if his essays are anything to go by, spent considerably more time rowing than reading this year. And yes, the sun shines again, and it’s fun to cycle to the river and to be borne along the towpath by a crowd of bellowing, banner-waving students following the college’s First VIII. At the barbecue afterwards, a colleague she has never exchanged more than two words with talks to her about the genocide novel – which Cressida brought with her in case of boredom, and which he has read with, as he puts it, a human rights hat on – and as they are leaving he invites her to the Law Faculty cocktail party the next night. And so on Friday evening she finds herself searching in her wardrobe for a silk dress she bought for a cousin’s wedding a couple of years before. It’s prettier than she remembers, with a bold print of tiger lilies. She has no idea if it’s in vogue or not, but the Cambridge Law Faculty is hardly Paris Fashion Week, and she’s impressed by the sight of herself in the mirror. See, she tells herself: life has changed.
But when she arrives, her nerve fails. Among the crush of people she can see from the door there is no one she knows. Clustered in little knots, they throw back their heads and laugh, the women elegant in simpler dresses than hers. The colleague who invited her is nowhere to be seen.
It seems to her suddenly that the last week has been an absurd fantasy. This is who she is: a woman in her forties who can’t manage a simple social encounter. A woman who would rather run away than accept a free glass of wine. How foolish it was to imagine that her life could still be transformed. But she makes a bargain with herself, the kind of face-saving bargain she’s made more often than she’d care to admit: she’ll go into the party, drink a glass of Prosecco, then pull out her mobile phone and fake an urgent call. In half an hour she’ll be safely home again, and she might even finish the hateful novel tonight. With her colleague’s political spin to draw on, she could manage a rather stylish review in the end.
Thus steeled, she smiles at a waiter, takes a glass, catches a glimpse of her reflection in a window and is gratified by what she sees. Her plan is almost accomplished, her exit in sight, when she spots Michael on the far side of the room. Michael, at a party? But it’s definitely him – and worse, he’s spotted her. Bugger and fuck: too late now to escape. Instead, she turns towards the group of people on her right and smiles broadly, as if she’s been talking to them all along.
The people smile back, and Cressida feels a wave of gratitude. There are three of them: a dark-haired man, a fair-haired man, and a much younger woman, perhaps an undergraduate.
‘Hello,’ she says, ‘I’m Cressida Benham. I’m an interloper from the English Faculty.’
‘Mark Mason,’ says the dark-haired man. ‘This is Tilly Beeton, and Heming Erikson, who’s visiting us from Trondheim.’
‘Hello,’ says Cressida again. Is this what people do when you barge up to them at parties, she wonders, or are the polite introductions intended sardonically? Oh well: in for a penny – she’d rather make a fool of herself with a group of strangers than let Michael see her standing by the door on her own, anyway. ‘How long are you in Cambridge for?’ she asks the Norwegian.
As he turns towards her, Cressida notices something about Heming Erikson. He is quite extraordinarily attractive: a Nordic god with white-blond hair and blue eyes and high cheekbones. And then she notices something else: Mark Mason has taken Tilly Beeton by the arm and is leading her off towards the bar. Cressida feels another reversal come upon her; another giddy turn in the story of the evening.
‘I have been here for six months,’ Heming says, in almost unaccented English. ‘Sadly, I have to return to Trondheim this weekend. I have to teach on a summer school starting on Monday.’
‘Just when the sun’s arrived,’ says Cressida. ‘That’s too bad.’
‘It’s sunny now in Trondheim,’ says Heming. ‘In fact, we have possibly more sunshine than you, although it’s never very warm. Of course our summer days are very long. We have around twenty hours of daylight in June.’
‘Gosh,’ says Cressida.
A waiter passes with a bottle: Cressida accepts a refill, and motions the man towards Heming’s glass. Good: they don’t have to fight their way to the drinks table.
‘What is your specialism?’ Heming asks.
‘Nineteenth-century poetry,’ Cressida says. ‘But my interests are fairly broad.’
She takes a large swig of wine, and Heming regards her solemnly.
‘I expect you know Ibsen pretty well,’ he says. ‘We also had two Nobel Prize-winning authors in the twentieth century, Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t read either,’ says Cressida. Her head is beginning to spin a little, either from the wine or from the peculiarity of the situation. She tries to think of other Norwegian writers she could cite, but she’s stumped: Scandinavian names swim in her head, the Swedish and the Danish indistinguishable, just now, from the Norwegian or the Finnish. Jonas Lie, she thinks – she’s sure he was Norwegian. But by now it would be obvious, if she mentioned his name, that it was the only one she knew. Instead she smiles.
‘And what area of law are you interested in?’ she asks.
*
It’s hard to say when a definite intention to seduce him takes shape in her mind, but when it does, she’s dizzied by the simple brilliance of the plan. Much better, so much better, to adopt the old-fashioned solution rather than the tawdry business of scanning catalogues of sperm donors. And seduction proves very
much easier than she might have feared, even if all those glasses of Prosecco hadn’t immunised her against fear. It feels a little like shoplifting, but the merchandise she’s helped herself to has none of the sour taste of a stolen sherbet fountain. Oh, those years of missed opportunities, stuck with the faithless warthog . . . But perhaps the disappointing years played a part, as they do for fairy-tale princesses. She’s gone from bullfrog to prince: she should have had more faith in the power of narrative. He whispers to her that she’s the first Englishwoman he’s slept with, and it seems churlish not to believe him.
*
For months afterwards, Cressida wakes from something that is not a dream, but a sleeping remembrance. She wakes flushed once again with sex and chutzpah, certain that the Norse god’s sperm cannot have failed her. Sometimes it’s a full minute before she remembers that it took only a week for that possibility to be washed away by the unstoppable logic of her menstrual cycle.
Part VI
September 2015
Cressida
When the man who was not Giles Unwin had gone, there was a palpable sense of deflation in the little group standing around on the drive outside High Scarp. Frustration, bewilderment and anger showed in their faces – but also wariness. They’d psyched themselves up for this moment, Cressida thought, and this latest development had undermined their defences. Was that what Fay had intended? Was it possible that this had all been planned?
Clearly Bill was wondering the same thing.
‘So what’s this about?’ he asked. ‘Is the delay accident or instruction?’
‘It sounds like instruction,’ said Judith, ‘or there would have been an explanation. That fucking . . .’ She gestured impotently after the car that was disappearing down the hill.
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