‘But she’s not “Lydia”,’ Ellen says. ‘Her name is Sonia Middleton. She’s Master of the college. I got introduced to her – just before we came to sit down.’
‘Master?’ Stella says. ‘Mistress, more like it. She leaves her suspenders in other people’s beds.’ Then the wine goes up her nose. Pen strokes her back. He is having no fun at all, poor man, wedged as he is between his silent mother-in-law and his suddenly garrulous wife.
Katherine, too, has turned away from him and is talking in anxious whispers to her husband.
‘She’s terribly thin,’ she says. ‘Jonathan, why is she so pale?’
‘She was always pale, remember,’ Jonathan whispers back.
But Katherine is not placated. ‘Jonathan,’ she says, ‘for heaven’s sake, take a look at her. Stella is as white as a sheet.’
The senior tutor has risen to his feet and he bangs on the table with a gavel.
‘Will all the gentlemen please move two gentleman’s places to the left?’ he says.
‘But I ought not to leave you,’ Jonathan says.
‘Go’, Katherine says. ‘Please. Talk to her, Jonathan. Try.’
The move brings Jonathan to Stella’s left, and Pen to the left of Ellen. Stella is the first to speak.
‘If I’d known you were going to be here, then I wouldn’t have come,’ she says.
‘Strange meeting,’ Jonathan says. ‘Stella, we really had no idea—’ Then they are silent for a good long while. ‘All the same,’ Jonathan says, eventually, ‘for my part, I’m very glad.’
‘That woman,’ Stella says, ignoring him, ‘that woman up there next to Izzy. Your girlfriend as was. Or is she still your girlfriend?’
‘Stella—’ Jonathan says.
‘She told me her name was Lydia,’ Stella says.
‘Sonia?’ Jonathan says. ‘You’ve met her?’
‘Oh, I haven’t exactly “met” her,’ Stella says. ‘But I’ve had words with her on your intercom. You know. That speaky thing in your little place in London – the one you keep for screwing her in, I suppose. I found her suspenders in your bed that night – that night I ran away. So when she came round and rang the doorbell – well, I told her to get lost.’
Jonathan has turned rather cold. ‘You told Lydia to get lost?’ he says.
‘Well, I was in a bit of a state,’ Stella says. ‘So I told her to piss off.’ She drinks briefly from Pen’s glass. Then she goes on. ‘I told her she was wrecking your family. Something like that. Something corny. So then she must have pissed off. Well, I wasn’t going to entertain her, then, was I? Izzy’d been getting off with Grania and, what with you and her in Fortnum’s—’
‘Her?’ Jonathan says.
‘Yes, her,’ Stella says. ‘That woman up there next to Izzy. Why do you ask? Are there lots of them? Gosh! And to think I always imagined that Fortnum’s was just for you and me.’
Jonathan sits in silence as things click into place. Stella, who had been in a little bit of a state, had told Lydia to piss off – Lydia, whom she had assumed was Sonia, whom she had seen acting flirty that afternoon in Fortnum’s, where she had happened to be falling out with Izzy, who had lost her in a café on account of her having taken flight to the Quaker landlady’s bedsit, where she had let herself in with her key, having found him absent from the spot. And Lydia, poor sweet Lydia, lacerated by his distressed daughter’s tongue, had run from the doorstep, straight into a passing car.
‘Well, you’ve gone very quiet,’ Stella says. ‘Why do I remember you as a talkie sort of person?’
After quite a long time, Katherine overhears Jonathan speak to Stella. ‘Your mother has begun to write children’s books,’ he says.
‘I know,’ Stella says. Her tone is completely deadpan. ‘They’re Holly’s favourite books.’
‘And do you like them?’ Jonathan says. ‘It’s my hunch, Stella, that she writes them for you.’
‘I’ve never read them,’ Stella says. Her deadpan tone does not waver. ‘Pen always reads Holly’s bedtime stories. I’m not a very good reader – especially not out loud. I tend to stumble over words. But why should you remember?’ Then she turns aside to address the stranger who is seated to her right. He is a man of middle age; a manufacturer of quality swimwear for ladies. Stella smiles at him, most charmingly, and affects great interest in his trade – though she is, of course, a lady who has never cared to swim.
When Pen is alerted to his mobile phone, he excuses himself from Ellen and makes his way from the hall, through the low Tudor doorway which requires him to bow his head. He takes the call in the barrel-vaulted corridor between the dining-hall and the kitchen. Then he returns at once.
‘It’s for you,’ he says quietly, into Stella’s ear, and he hands over the phone. ‘It’s Dr Sachs and he says it’s good news. I suggest that you take it in the passage.’
There are many eyes in the dining-hall that follow Stella’s departure; the rustling departure of the beautiful girl with the death-white skin and the mass of hair that spreads out like tongues of fire. Two of these eyes belong to Ishmael Valentine Tench who is beginning to itch for a smoke.
‘Christ Almighty,’ Izzy says, out loud. ‘If that’s not Stella, I’m an Arab.’
‘But I thought you were,’ Sonia says brightly. ‘Well, on your father’s side, that is.’
Izzy pays her no attention. He gets up quickly and crosses the floor. Unlike Pen and Stella, he passes easily under the low Tudor doorway, having no need to bow his head.
Stella is at the end of the passage with her back towards the doorway. She is listening to Dr Sachs, and what he is telling her is causing the carefully constructed artifice of her life – the careful sacrament of each and every day – to fall in pieces around her. What he is telling her is that, thanks to her new medication, the virus within her cells is no longer actually detectable.
‘I’m not saying that it’s eliminated,’ he says, ‘but Stella dear, there is now scope to envisage that it will be. The prognosis is really very good.’
In short, Dr Sachs is telling Stella that she is once more under sentence of real life. ‘I had to let you know,’ he says. ‘I hope this is not a bad time? I wish you were right here beside me, Stella. Will you come and see me tomorrow – just as soon as you get back?’
Stella can hear the pleasure in his voice, but she, herself, feels only confusion and anticlimax, and an alarming drop in stature. She sees herself exposed and insecure in a field of dreams and choices. She stands there, trembling slightly and can think of nothing to say.
‘Stella?’ says Dr Sachs.
‘But who am I?’ Stella says, at last. And, to herself, she thinks, ‘I am Mrs Nobody, that’s who I am. I am a stupid, stupid girl who threw away her life to have a baby at nineteen and live in a nutshell fitted out in twelve shades of sand with a man who will not touch me.’
‘Stella?’ says Dr Sachs again. ‘Stella, are you there?’
But Izzy has come up behind her and has disconnected the caller. He licks the white exposed skin of Stella’s shoulder where it meets the base of her neck. ‘D’ye fuck?’ he says and he blows briefly at the spot, cooling his own glistening deposit of saliva.
Stella pulls herself up with a start and turns to confront him. Pale hairs have jumped to attention all along her forearms.
‘Izzy don’t,’ she says. ‘Please. Go away. Now. Izzy please. I want you to go.’
In response, Izzy extrudes his tongue, a gesture which she struggles to ignore. Then he kisses her mouth. He could be said to commit rape upon it, with his tongue and his teeth and his spittle. Tears have sprung to Stella’s eyes. She wipes her mouth vigorously with the back of her hand.
‘For God’s sake,’ she says. ‘Izzy, you must know that we shouldn’t. You must know that we’re sick—’
‘We’re all sick,’ Izzy says. ‘What’s your problem?’
‘Izzy—’ she says. ‘That’s just—’
‘Life’s a disease,’ he says. ‘You c
ould choke on a sweetie. A wee rock could fall on my head.’ Then he kisses her again. After that he leads her by the hand, down a narrow dark passageway that disappears to the left, and he tries a door at random.
Once within, where he switches on the light, Stella sees that they are inside the men’s lavatory. She states uneasily at two urinals, knowing what they are only from the photographs she has seen in a book about Marcel Duchamp.
‘I don’t want to be in here,’ she says. ‘I don’t like it. Izzy, I want us to go.’
By the time they are scuttling hand in hand across the quad, the thing has become a little adventure; a conspiracy to play hookey; a breath of air in a night almost stifled with angst. In the car-park directly across the road, Sonia Middleton has made available to her guest of honour her own private car space. It is there that Stella stops dead in her tracks.
‘Well, I don’t believe it,’ she says. ‘Izzy, I do not believe it. How can your car be so idiotically pink?’
Izzy’s car is a pink, fifties Chevrolet, long as a goods truck and gleaming with chrome. The tart’s teeth of its radiator are leering at her in welcome. Stella begins to turn cartwheels in her head. Her heart is dancing to the Cello Suite in D. She is suddenly high on the prospect of an act of unretractable daring. And hasn’t Dr Sachs just set her free?
‘Where to?’ Izzy says. She directs him to Port Meadow, where he parks his car beyond the railway bridge, and they walk towards the river. It amuses her to realize, suddenly, that she still has, clutched in her left hand, her husband’s mobile phone. On the low-lying damp of the meadow grass, Stella gets cow dung on her beautiful dress and goose turds in her hair. Izzy throws off the shiny jacket and rips open the constricting neckband of the non-iron, Liberace shirt.
‘Oh, God, how I love those braces,’ Stella says. ‘Izzy, your clothes are something else.’
‘Don’t blather,’ Izzy says, because his preference is for unprotected, penetrative sex without audial accompaniment. His medium has never been vocal. Before he is through, he has turned her over and got her onto her knees – the Allen Jones coffee table presenting from the rear. Varoom.
Back in the car she stares down at the mess that was once her dress. Izzy is smoking a cigarette.
‘I’ve forgotten the phone,’ Stella says. ‘Never mind. Pen will buy another one.’
But Izzy has opened his door. ‘Hold on,’ he says. ‘I’ll get it.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Don’t. Leave it, Izzy. You’ll never find it. Not in the dark.’
‘Can’t take you back without the mobile,’ he says. ‘Your old man’ll give you what for.’
‘What?’ Stella says. ‘What?’ But Izzy has already moved off. She sits alone in the darkness, trying not to brood upon the implications of Izzy’s latest quip. Because she knows that she cannot go back. Will not. Not now. Not ever.
Izzy returns remarkably quickly. He throws the phone into her lap. Then he starts up the engine.
‘So where are you staying?’ he says.
‘Nowhere,’ Stella says. ‘Izzy, I can’t go back. You know that. You’ll have to take me with you.’
Izzy laughs. ‘Still the same old Stella,’ he says. ‘One fuck and bingo. You start to dryclean my life.’
‘But, Izzy—’ Stella says.
‘Coal in the grate. Teabags in the cupboard. That’s what your husband is for.’ Stella says nothing. She tries not to cry.
‘Come on,’ Izzy says. ‘Where are you staying? Or I could drop you back at the party—’
Stella closes her eyes. She says nothing. She thinks maybe she’ll sign up at the nunnery where Pen’s family always goes for midnight mass. That’s if the nuns will have her. Gott soll allein mein Herze haben. It is certainly crystal clear to her that Izzy does not want her heart.
Meanwhile Izzy reverses, at speed, back over the railway bridge, after which he swings backwards into a junction at the bottom of the hill. Then he heads purposefully back towards town. ‘The phone was ringing, by the way,’ he says. ‘D’ye know a bloke called Ambrose?’
‘Yes,’ Stella says. ‘Ambrose is Pen’s brother.’
‘He wants Pen to phone him,’ Izzy says. ‘Their dad’s just died in hospital.’ Meanwhile the diners have moved from a table of fruit and nuts and port, to an upstairs room for coffee and Belgian chocolates. Pen makes the first approach. He crosses to Jonathan and Katherine.
‘You’re worried about Stella,’ he says, ‘and, frankly, so am I.’ He volunteers himself to telephone Izzy’s room and to check the extension at the porter’s lodge.
‘I really think—’ Jonathan says, uncertainly.
‘Isn’t it a bit—?’ Katherine says, but Pen is adamant. In the event, the matter is academic, since there is no reply from Izzy’s particular guest room. As the evening draws to a close the three of them retire to Pen’s hotel. At one o’clock in the morning, Pen is running a hand through his hair.
‘This may be a matter for the police,’ he says and he sits down with a sigh.
‘Oh, surely not,’ Katherine says, but during the last ninety minutes she has become very fond of her son-in-law.
‘Mrs Goldman,’ Pen says firmly, ‘I’m afraid this is not quite all that it seems. Stella is very ill and so is Izzy.’ They both stop and stare at him. ‘Stella is HIV positive,’ he says. ‘And Izzy is the source of her infection.’
Stella’s parents say nothing. They absorb this disclosure in total silence, understanding, at last, how it is that their daughter is ‘frail’ and ‘unwell’. Shortly afterwards, they leave Pen’s hotel room and return home to wait by the telephone for him to call – just as soon as he has news.
When Stella enters the hotel room, Pen is standing, in his clothes, with his back to her. He is staring out of the window. ‘Stella, call your parents,’ he says, without turning round. ‘They are worried half to death.’
I have been here before, Stella reflects. She pauses. This time she says, ‘Yes. Yes, all right. I will.’ Pen keeps on standing with his back to her.
‘Pen,’ she says. ‘There is something I must tell you. But I need you to look at me.’
When Pen turns round, she sees him observe her with a flicker of distaste. ‘I suggest you run a bath,’ he says. ‘You smell of cowpats and your hair is full of goose droppings.’
‘Yes,’ Stella says. ‘Yes, I know that and I’m sorry. Pen, you must listen to me. Something awful. And my timing couldn’t be worse.’ She stretches out to him the hand in which she holds the mobile phone. ‘You’re to phone Ambrose at once,’ she says.
There is a pause. ‘It’s my father,’ Pen says.
‘Yes,’ Stella says. ‘Oh Pen, I’m so sorry. How can it be, when he was getting on so well?’
While Pen phones home on the mobile, Stella phones her parents. She taps out the number with no hesitation since, in the event, she finds that it is carved into her brain.
‘Hello, Mum, it’s Stella,’ she says. ‘I’ve phoned to tell you I’m all right.’ Stella finds that making the call is, after all, not difficult. It is as easy as talking to a stranger. The bonds are all dissolved; the shared past all erased. She thinks, I and this woman could meet; will meet. We will talk pleasant, superficial nothings. We may or may not like each other. That is not important. It no longer signifies. But Holly will discover new grandparents. My father will make her laugh. My mother will teach her how to knit. Holly is the sort of daughter that she should have had all along. But it gives me no offence. This is because I am no longer the Precious Girl and the Fairy Princess and Mummy’s Angel-pie and Daddy’s Butter Melon. I am myself and that is all.
‘Stella,’ Katherine is saying, perhaps a little too eagerly. ‘Can we possibly meet? Can we have breakfast tomorrow? Late-ish? In Oxford? The Old Parsonage is very good, you know. You’ll not have been there, I think.’
But the moment is not altogether appropriate. ‘The thing is,’ Stella says, ‘we’ve had bad news. Pen’s father has just died.’
‘Oh,’
Katherine says, ‘Oh how dreadful. Oh, the poor boy. Tell him I’m so sorry.’
‘The thing is,’ Stella says, ‘we’ll have to go back right away.’
‘Yes of course,’ Katherine says. ‘Another time, I hope?’
‘Yes,’ Stella says.
‘Stella,’ Katherine says cautiously. ‘Can it be soon?’
After that Stella runs a bath. Then, having first sealed up the dress in a plastic hotel laundry bag and crammed it into her suitcase, she steps into the tub and washes her hair.
‘What was it Dr Sachs had to tell you?’ Pen asks her. He is brushing his teeth alongside her at the washbasin and has paused to spit toothpaste and rinse his mouth.
‘Oh,’ Stella says. ‘He says the virus is much reduced. Still. It may be that, after this evening, I have put all that at risk.’
Pen stows his toiletries in a bag and draws the zip shut. ‘Dearest,’ he says, and he hands her a towel. ‘We ought to hurry things up a bit. We’ll need to get all that hair of yours dry before we can face the night air.’
* * *
‘Pen,’ she says, once they are headed north in the Rover. ‘Who is Lydia?’
‘Lydia?’ Pen says. ‘She was Ellen’s younger sister. She died in a car crash, remember? Somewhere in London. On the night that you fled back to Edinburgh.’
‘But where?’ Stella says. ‘Where exactly did she die?’ She asks this because her mind has begun to flash an image at her, of bollards and police cars and plastic tape. The image runs, always to the left of her, just within the orbit of her left eye, as she heads out, from her father’s bedsit, for Euston Station. She has the Kenyan basket over her shoulder.
‘Where, exactly, did she die?’ Stella says. And, although Pen does not know and cannot tell her, Stella finds that she knows already, because – while she tries repeatedly to blink it away – the image comes back to her again and again. And again.
Acknowledgements
To Margaret Alice Stewart-Liberty for the loan of her cello and to Sandra Dodson for making a helpful connection for me, between Joseph Conrad and the German Romantics; to my father, F. J. Schuddeboom – a mathematician wholly unlike the Dreamboat – for filling my childhood with the sound of his tenor voice singing Die schöne Müllerin and, finally, to ‘dearest her, who lives, alas! away’.
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