Half Light

by Frances Fyfield

  CHAPTER NINE

  Francis could not call this particular waking up a normal ending to sleep. His was the variety of sleep which had been induced by five different varieties of wine and violent exercise. There was an exaggerated slowness to his movements when he woke before dawn and staggered again to the bathroom. The stream of urine alleviated nothing, especially since the mirror was placed in such a way that he was forced to see his face reflected during micturition and did not like what he saw. A pale face, with lines appearing around the eyes and a mouth which was saying to this image, You’ve got lucky here, old son. He did not like himself, drunk in the house of a mere acquaintance and going to bed with her just because he was being led by his prick and a feeling of disorientation which made this a far safer option than going home.

  Part of him supposed, with a grim humour, that he had already paid some of the price. He wondered why he returned to bed since he had already been punished by the heat. Annie believed in comfort, while Francis, indoctrinated in the spartan regime of public school, had a preference for elegant necessities, the minimum of bed clutter and a cool, hard mattress. Not an enveloping cushion which wrapped itself around him as he sank, nor a duvet which could have furnished an Arctic expedition and had left him fighting in the small hours, pushing the cover away while the sweat gathered in the valley of his chest. He adjusted to the edge of the bed with one foot sticking out as a reminder to himself that this was not really a prison but simply a captivity he could escape in the morning. A strange combination of manners and exhaustion had kept him from moving out in the middle of the night although the temptation was there. That, and an overwhelming sense of grief, a sharp pain in his sternum. Elisabeth had been the last lover and he had not lain with her like this, for all his final petulance. Distant though she was, self-contained and cool, he had been comfortable in that bed of hers, serenely intertwined, loving her while she in her own way was loving him. They had functioned thus: they had understood the secret places of the other, loved modestly but well. If she had not opened her heart, she had tried to open part of it and he had not encouraged her: when she had hugged and kissed in the privacy of the dark, she had been with him, in him and around him, both of them giving a quality notable in the absence here. His enactment of the same rituals with Annie was a travesty.

  Now he was aware of her adopting a similar position as himself in her over-soft bed, clutching the opposite side to avoid the contact inevitable in the dip which was the centre. The realization provoked the first real feeling of tenderness towards her. It was an improvement, this knowledge of her being vulnerable and also slightly ashamed of such pointless intimacy.

  Annie was also far more direct. She could not dwell with unfamiliar guilt, her own or anyone else’s. The feeling bored and niggled; she had to spit it out. When Francis fell into a deep sleep just at the time it was almost decent enough to get up and leave, Annie rose, cleaned her kitchen with headachy fury and fortified herself with caffeine. Then brought to the bed a glass of orange juice laced with vitamin C and a cup of dark brown coffee. Francis was blurred on the edge of uncomfortable consciousness when she shook him awake. He groaned, attempted to smile, muttered ‘Thank you’, and could not meet her eyes. She was not having any of this.

  ‘Well, that was a mistake, wasn’t it?’

  He gulped on the boiling coffee, burning his mouth, put it down and reached for the orange juice.

  ‘Well, wasn’t it?’ Her voice was determinedly cheerful, questioning rather than accusing. Last night’s bitchiness was gone.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, it was, a bit of a mistake. I’m sorry. I behaved badly.’

  She shrugged. ‘You and me both.’ Annie scrunched up her face and tapped her head to indicate incipient madness. He ignored the bright washed sheen of her eyes. ‘Booze and bodies,’ she added. ‘A bad combination.’

  ‘Yes.’ He buried his head in the pillow. Not only badly behaved but ignoring any survival code for chance encounters, just a random coupling.

  ‘Too bad. I’m not worried. Too late, anyway. What I want to know is what are we going to do about Elisabeth? Our Lizzie?’

  Francis was sitting upright by now, his hand holding the coffee mug jumped six inches, sending half the contents slurping over the rim.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. Take advantage of my hospitality, then ruin the duvet, go on, why don’t you? You heard what I said, as well as knowing what I meant. OK, I repeat: what are we going to do about Elisabeth? Because we have to do something.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because all of a sudden she fucking haunts me, that’s why. Lying awake last night – and I know you were, too – I got to thinking how stupid I was. You know, always going around, banging into things, men included, all that kind of stuff. And how friendless I really am. I’m not a good friend to anyone, even though I can make up a party by clicking my fingers, and if I disappeared … well, I suddenly thought, no one would come looking for me. Single people, you know, living like we live, well, maybe not you, you’d have a mummy and daddy still, wouldn’t you?, but if you haven’t, no one would bother for ages, would they? None of mine would. They’d be like you, dying not to know. So I thought I’d better begin as I mean to go on. If I take a bit of trouble for Lizzie, who was, actually, always ready to take trouble for me now I come to think of it, maybe, someone, sometime, might look out for me if I happened to get lost. A sort of insurance policy.’

  ‘She doesn’t like being called Lizzie.’

  ‘I’ll call her what I effing well please, and what a nitpicking lawyer you are. Do you want some more coffee and are you reading me, Spock?’

  ‘Yes. Yes to both.’

  ‘Well, put some clothes on, then. Your skin doesn’t go with my duvet.’ The brief tenderness which had occurred before dawn in his awareness of their mutual discomfiture flowered now into respect. Within the parameters of his hangover, he began to like her brazen honesty, although none of that quite prevented him from wanting to leave. Or thinking wistfully of a retreat to his own home. In the event he stayed, took the sheet and duvet cover off the bed as Annie was itching to do, put them in her washing machine as if that ended the whole carnal episode, then sat at her kitchen table and pooled information. The stock of their knowledge was pathetically small.

  All the dead timber of the week stockpiles on Sundays: Sundays without an art fair or some collectors’ venue were as dead to Francis as a corpse. Work was always there to fill the void: perhaps Elisabeth had used it to fill the canyons of her mind. Sitting here with nothing but Sunday and a bad conscience, he saw in a rare moment of insight how becoming a workaholic was a natural progress for a certain kind of life.

  ‘She worked a lot,’ he told Annie. ‘She worked all the time. She was either working or looking for work. She wouldn’t have taken a holiday, not if you had actually given her something to do, she’d honour that first. That’s why I think she’s simply gone somewhere else. Did we ask that neighbour of hers if she’d left any messages?’

  ‘We did, and she didn’t. Come on, Francis, is that all you know? You’re pathetic. You’re with our Lizzie for how many months, and you’ve only amassed enough information on her to fill the back of a postage stamp.’

  ‘So? You’ve known her twenty times longer and don’t know that much more. Such as where do you start? Her correspondence? Her contacts, the place where she grew up? I gather, by the way, her parents are dead and she probably hasn’t been home for years, although she pretended to me she had.’ He was becoming defensive, toned himself down.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘The police, something like that. She never talked about family to me.’

  ‘She’s got brothers, I know she has, I once moaned at her, said I was short of men, didn’t she have any single relatives.’ Annie grinned ruefully. ‘She said, yes, she’d got brothers, but she couldn’t recommend them and didn’t know where they lived.’

  ‘Hmm. Maybe. As for w
hat she likes and doesn’t like, apart from privacy, paintings and men, which isn’t, come to think of it, quite consistent, I don’t know. She didn’t steal those paintings of yours, you know. I just can’t see her doing that.’

  ‘No,’ said Annie, uncomfortably aware that if Elisabeth had done such a thing it would be no more than a guarantee of debt, common in her line of trade; dealers were always holding one another’s stock in lieu of cash.

  ‘The only thing I can say about her with complete confidence is that she never complained,’ said Francis, wondering at that even as he spoke. ‘Never. Oh, sometimes, in a sentence, about money, never about a person. Never complained, never asked for anything. She wouldn’t argue, either; she hid instead, but never ranted, even mildly. Never fought anyone or anything. All she seemed to want was walls of colour and equipment, as if that made up for everything.’

  ‘Maybe it did,’ Annie mumbled, unconvinced.

  ‘For what, though? Why is she so subdued, so self-controlled?’ He stood up, tall in the confines of the kitchen. ‘She loved me, you know. I think. In her way. God alone knows why, I doubt if I deserved it.’

  The word love embarrassed Annie. She sneered. ‘How do you know she loved you? How does anyone know?’

  ‘You can feel it through the skin.’

  Annie looked at him sideways, lit a cigarette quickly and exhaled to fudge the view. He was decent, despite this useless questioning and a level of unworldliness she found shocking. She looked at him again, tried to summon up contempt for his immaturity and the vanity of his motives, could not find it in herself to dislike him. Bodies were treacherous things. If she had reached across her table, she might have touched him. As it was, she remained quite still.

  Thomas knew, on Sunday morning, that his guest had been inside his bedroom to use the telephone. Bodies were treacherous, they left traces. He knew she had been in here and he knew in what mood: he could almost time the moment, after he had gone out in the night, although it was knowledge he refused to digest until morning. If he left the house himself in future, Butler would stay and the door would be locked, as always.

  For shame. Sunday, the deadest day of the week, except for the Sunday she had come here. It was only on this Sunday, realizing the implications of her being inside the room which served not only as sleeping space but also as painting store, along with those others locked somewhere, that he knew there might not be an end to this plan. Elisabeth Young wanted to go home. She could feel the bars already and he could feel her feeling them. She was no longer a willing partner: he was not enough, the paintings were not enough. The thought filled him with such sadness that he lay in his bed with his sheet to his chin and wept. His head was huge against the pillow and, from where he lay, his paunchy abdomen looked flat. The mound of his feet, splayed beneath the blanket, gave the lie to his length being anything other than short: one foot, the right, always moved up the bed against his will. His hands, small and neat, gripped the sheet either side of his chin and he had the impression of himself as wearing a bib. I am ridiculous, he thought. I shall always be ridiculous. He removed one of his curled fists and felt his thinning hair, finding no comfort in what was once blond, now grey beneath the black streaks applied every other week. Ridiculous.

  Sunday, perversely, was the day he always associated with lies. Sunday in a hospital, gazing towards another face with his one remaining eye, mulishly silent and life hitting the first downhill tangent. Another Sunday, years after, when he had been left rich, but not rich enough to avoid the stroke which shook him from skull to heel as he gestured for help. The wrath of God in the form of the punishment which was not quite death, but felt like death. I never touched her, he was trying to say. I never touched her; however beautiful she may have been, which is not as beautiful as now. I hate her. God, I hate her, but will you believe I never touched her in the way you mean? You have no right to touch me now.

  ‘Touch me!’ Thomas whispered. ‘Touch me!’ The stump of his penis sprang into life beneath the bedclothes, so that the mounds beneath his one sheet and blanket were in line, one left foot, one right foot further up, one indiscriminate hump looking for air. As he watched, it subsided, like a small child sinking behind a desk after some humiliation. Or a dandelion plant the morning after the weedkiller spray, Thomas thought, killed but still rooted, pathetic all the same, that little thing as ugly as the rest of him. He looked at its demise without disappointment.

  Thomas swung out of bed and lumbered over to the window. It was a round window, like a porthole; only the top half was ever open, locked like that and he seemed to have lost the keys. They were suicide-proofed, these windows: only a cat could climb through and, out of that fear, Thomas told himself, he had parted with the cat. No, that was not quite true. He did not part with the cat; he killed it. You had to kill even beautiful things if it was too distressing and dangerous to keep them alive.

  Thinking obliquely of that, he remembered his umbrella with annoyance and a hint of alarm. The blast of cold air hit his naked groin as he looked down towards the street. A long way down: a message on paper would float far away, hither and thither, to join London’s legendary litter in some distant park. The cold braced him. Thomas made himself stand there until he felt faintly numb and dizzy, his hand holding the window frame. Then he let Butler into the room while he washed and the dog stood guard against the bathroom door.

  ‘They tell lies all over the country today, dog,’ Thomas said. ‘They stand up in church and sing them without blushing. About God being good and all men being equal, and at no level, no level at all, is this true, do you hear me? I haven’t told her too many lies, have I, Butler? Not nearly as many as a standard priest. Sunday’s a good day for it. Even in that cathedral.’

  The dog maintained silence.

  ‘She owes me, anyway,’ Thomas continued aloud. ‘She started it all.’

  The dog growled and his hackles rose, the clue to movement elsewhere in the vastness of the flat. Elisabeth rising, perhaps, going to the kitchen, the Sabbath phoenix rising from the ashes of poor sleep.

  ‘By the way, Butler, don’t bite her,’ Thomas continued. ‘You shouldn’t have bitten Maria, whatever she was doing wrong, and you mustn’t bite Elisabeth, not ever. You only have to frighten them. I do the biting … Me!’

  Dressed, shirt with large buttonholes made for ease, clip-on tie, trousers pressed, shoes shone, he ambled out of his room towards the kitchen. Oh dear, no avoiding some sort of confrontation today, how she must hate it. Sunday was the day for lies.

  She was waiting, of course. Sitting in front of untouched coffee, tired, but as gloriously gentle as ever, politeness first.

  ‘Are you better this morning, Thomas?’

  ‘Greatly, thank you.’ He sat heavily, opposite her. She raised troubled and haunted eyes to his, and he thought with a rush of pity, I’m right, I know I am, she cannot cope out there and how beautiful she is. So like the olive-skinned woman in the portrait I bought purely for the resemblance: she, too, would suit an unset pearl at her throat, and how strange, how remarkably unvain, that she has never seen that resemblance. She will make that picture perfect as herself. I need them both.

  ‘Thomas, I must talk to you.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  She quivered with the effort, the strain transferred to her coffee mug, which she spilt at the moment Francis, a few miles away, spilt his. There was a moment’s distraction while she mopped up the mess. During that interval she began to speak. Typically, he thought, beginning with an apology.

  ‘I’m sorry I trespassed into your room last night, but I was looking for the telephone.’

  ‘Oh. Did you get who you wanted?’

  ‘No. He was out.’

  ‘People are always out when you want them,’ said Thomas kindly. ‘Don’t you know that? People are not reliable.’

  ‘Yes, I do know that. Thomas, what are you doing? Why do you double lock the door on me when you go out, like last night? What are you trying to d
o?’

  Sunday was the day for lies. Thomas bowed his head, absurdly penitent ‘There’s something I must tell you. I didn’t want to tell you before, but I have known for a day or two … meant, in fact, to tell you yesterday.’ He sensed she was holding her breath.

  ‘What then, what?’

  The slight shrillness of her tone hardened him: it was all for her own good, after all. ‘Listen, dear, purely out of concern for you, I went to see if your flat was safe. It wasn’t. Seems your car was stolen and burnt out. Seems your flat was burgled, too. The police went over it with a toothcomb, trying to find where you might be. You understand me? So I went there, too. Took what I could. I only went to rescue your privacy. There was so little left.’

  ‘How?’ she asked wildly. ‘How did you get in there? How could anyone?’ She was feeling in the pocket of her smock for her key, closed her hand over nothing. He watched the fumbling.

  ‘I took your key,’ he said simply. ‘Oh, and a dry-cleaning ticket. To save you the agony. But the doors had been forced. You must have left some kind of address in the car. I am so sorry, but you don’t really have a home any more. I just didn’t want you to know, that was all.’

  ‘And now I do.’

  ‘Now you do.’

  She leapt up from the table and ran to the front door, tugged at the handle briefly and then let her arms fall to her side. Butler had flung himself after her, pushed his snarling, snapping muscle between herself and the door and stood with his chest heaving. As her movements gradually ceased under the threat of those yellow eyes and teeth, he began to wag his tail, the whole of his rump moving in sympathy. You may bite the hand which feeds, but should stroke the head which bites. Elisabeth did as she automatically did, stroked the big ugly muzzle in conditioned affection, without purpose. You did as you were bid in this house, acted like Pavlov’s dog to Pavlov’s dog. Especially if you had no home of your own. She did not disbelieve Thomas, although she knew he lied about the timing: she had seen that picture in his room. If what he said was only some approximation of truth, the end result was the same. No privacy, no castle, no life worth the name. She had a memory of sitting on Thomas’s bed, listening to the phone ring in Francis’s empty flat, and felt a terrible calm anger which could find no words to serve it. The words would have to wait. Elisabeth turned and walked back to the kitchen table. Perhaps she still owed Thomas courtesy, but she did not really think at all. She saw in her mind’s eye a hundred smashed jugs of brilliant colours and the inner eye was blinded. The hands were placed flat on the surface of the table, a fine, dark wood table, unsuitable for a kitchen, the surface comfortably cool. Her hands looked sallow and enormous, ringless as became a woman without status, big, spatulate fingers as suited artist or surgeon. Ugly hands for an ugly body, like the rest of her, helpless as a row of dead fishes. Hands which were guilty, neglected, skilful. She saw, out of the corner of her eye, the one good hand of Thomas’s, manicured in a way she had always found repellent with a slight sheen to the nails, extended towards her downturned palms. As she watched, the hand withdrew.