‘Which makes you … my maths … a third. Ish?’
She said nothing. I glanced at her. She was as plain as a girl in a French film, with her clean-skinned frankness of face, the full sting of her mouth. Despite her pallor, her eyes were shadowed with faint bruisings of colour, as though she stood in an unlit room in the evening. She wore a plain little narrow frock thing, and her hair was a dark dull brown, and very straight. Her pale clear skin rendered every small detail of her face visible: a blue vein where her hair began, the shadows under her eyes, her unpainted lips.
‘Where did you grow up, then?’ I said.
‘All over,’ she said in her surprising, slightly gravelly little voice.
I waited. I found I was gazing at her mouth when she spoke, to have somewhere to look at.
‘Basically,’ she said. ‘Where did you?’
‘Cornwall.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That would be very beautiful.’
‘Well, people always say it is. It is. I couldn’t wait to scarper, though. Flee the cows.’
There was silence. I hesitated. She was impossible. I felt my teeth meet in frustration.
‘Right.’ I glanced to one side, calculating when I could escape.
‘It’s dull at these things, isn’t it?’ she murmured. ‘You’re bored.’ She looked at me and a slight smile lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘I think I was too. I was imagining all the other places I could be.’ Faint animation lit her skin.
I paused. ‘Where?’
She gazed at me for a moment, then glanced away. ‘Any number of other places,’ she said.
‘Tell me,’ I said, thrown by her silences. ‘Tell me what you do.’
‘Oh,’ she said, looking to one side. She seemed to catch someone’s eye. ‘I – study. Literature. I’m finishing my PhD. And then I write. Academic publications. And you–’
‘I–’
‘Do you know how much I loved your book?’ she said simply, interrupting me. ‘I truly did. I thought at first I wasn’t going to like it at all, but it crept up on me; you got the very essence of him. I started to know him. It was as though I lived with him, sailing all those seas – the Strait of Magellan; Tierra del Fuego; all those names – for the days I was reading it.’ She moved her hands finely, precisely as she spoke, her fingertips grazing her neck. ‘It’s something remarkable to do that – conjure a world, pin down a person, a whole life.’ She turned away, as though she had said too much. She glanced down at her shoes. I glanced at them too. Little narrow laceups, reminiscent of a young Edwardian woman’s. I noticed that her ankles were narrow and finely cut. She caught her breath awkwardly.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Automatic pleasure rose inside me – despite myself, despite the terrible dowdiness of my critic. Praise was the reward for innumerable hours alone in a study toiling at my ill-paid books, all two and a half of them so far, the equation so unbalanced that such shards of compensation contained a jolt of sweetness.
There was silence.
‘Are you new to London?’ I said, trying to be kinder.
‘I’ve been here about a year.’
‘And–’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘About that.’
I wanted to break the silence; I felt driven to offer help in some unspecified way, despite her appearance of almost chilly self-sufficiency. Her mouth twitched with an expression of self-consciousness, as though she was embarrassed that I had detected the solitary nature of her existence.
‘Give me a call at work,’ I said, finding my card in my wallet, and feeling bountiful as I gave it to her. ‘You might like to take away a few books from my office – people do. Clear my filthy landslide shelves for me. It’s beginning to look like Iris Murdoch’s house in there.’
She laughed, a full laugh that made her eyes crinkle.
She leaned closer to me. She smelled somehow of extreme cleanness. ‘I once saw her, in North Oxford,’ she said. ‘She was sort of ugly, and sort of very beautiful. I was with someone I shouldn’t have been with, and there was Iris Murdoch on the street, like a living ghost. The two became interconnected in my head. It was a good day.’
She smiled at me, and she walked away. I watched the back of her hair as she made her way through the room and disappeared.
Four
Lelia
I had finished talking to my old friend Kathy, and suddenly I knew that I was pregnant; or I thought that I knew. I felt different. I had conceived twice before, with another man – the first pregnancy an accident; the second a strange attempt of mine to prove to myself that I was fertile, that I wasn’t always surrounded by death – and both times, the uneasy sense that I was not really pregnant at all had bothered me, and I had lost the baby weeks later in a mess of clotted blood and grief. The loss had faded, but it never disappeared. I felt guilty about those children, as though I had caused the briefness of their lives. I wanted to look after them, and honour what might be their ghosts. If I thought about them too much I always cried, so I tried very hard not to remember them.
Yet, in the face of this, I was suddenly filled with the confidence that my body worked and I had the power to bear a child. I felt a rush of hope.
I looked up to find Richard, to mouth at him, ‘I’m pregnant.’ He was tall; I located him easily, bending down to talk to someone and laughing. The baby that married our DNA was just beginning to form itself inside me. I looked at his mid-brown hair, his distinctive big eyes with creases beneath them, his imperfect nose that only a man could carry off, and joy curved inside me at the thought that our heights and skin tones would meet somewhere in the middle as our genes merged: I pictured the pigments of our eye colour as a striping swirl of my dark brown and the blue-green-grey that I thought of as Cornish, though his parents’ origins lay elsewhere.
A surge of terrified love hit me as I watched him. He looked like a fisherman from a story to me, a seafaring creature who rarely actually dirtied his hands with oily rope, but seemed to belong to a windier place than the streets on which I saw him, his hair’s springing waves hardly constrained by his short haircut, and his restless air more suited to wider spaces. I stared at him to catch his attention. He didn’t turn round. A rod of tiredness seemed to press into my forehead, and I sat down. Ren’s ghastly paintings glared at me. My inner eyelids prickled as I closed them, and I held them closed for some seconds, the dry tingling carrying on with a life of its own.
‘Lelia,’ came a voice that I didn’t know.
I looked up. I saw someone I recognised. She seemed very familiar, and then less so. Blankness descended on my memory.
I realised who she was. My mouth opened slightly. It was the woman we had met at MacDara’s house.
‘Hello,’ I said. I smiled at her. The addition of her name in response ran through my mind, but it sounded stagey. I murmured something, but she didn’t respond.
‘Hello,’ I said again, instead. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh, I’m well, thank you. But you’re not – you’re quite pale.’ Her hand touched my head for a moment. ‘I think you need some water.’ Her voice was sweet and foggy, its tone unexpected. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Oh, I’m fine. Actually … I would, really. Where do you think–?’ I looked around.
‘I’ll find you some,’ she said.
The rod of tiredness seemed to bore through my skull, leaving me almost faint; then it receded.
She returned. I didn’t hear her.
‘Here.’
I took big gulps of fizzy water. I felt as though I were in a swimming pool. The water lapped, blue, against the sides of the cup, enclosing my mouth, nose, eyes.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I feel bad–’
‘Do you?’
‘No, I mean – Richard said you were at Marine Ices the other night – on Christmas Eve, wasn’t it? – and I didn’t realise. I would have said hello. I’m sorry, I just didn’t see you there.’
‘Well, you see, it seems that I can b
e invisible,’ she said in that tranquil, faintly husky voice, the corners of her mouth tilting. ‘I just can’t – I can’t really do the social thing. I don’t know if I want to either. It’s all right.’
‘You should have come over.’
‘No.’ She looked evenly at me. ‘You two were together.’
‘So? We’re not surgically joined. As you can see,’ I said, stretching my neck, looking for Richard again. Too many bodies were in front of me. The party had become louder. Clothes brushed against my knees. She bent awkwardly to talk to me. ‘Sit down,’ I said. Someone knocked into her as she sat, and she reached out to steady herself on my shoulder. The pressure was nice. My back was tired; I longed for Richard to massage it.
She gazed coldly at the person who had unbalanced her.
‘The proof,’ she said. ‘That I’m invisible.’
‘Of course you’re not!’ I said, laughing a little.
But she was essentially accurate. She was not noticeable in a room. Yet despite her lack of ornamentation, there was something about her I had remembered. She could have been any age between her mid-twenties and early thirties, while appearing younger: it was hard to tell. She was slight and straight-haired, and her features combined plainness and near-beauty, so that she was almost jolie-laide, her nose quite prominent, the movements of her mouth, with its tilted curves, restrained in comparison. Her skin, though it was fair and very fine, seemed to pull shadows to it that gathered under her eyes, beneath her dark eyebrows and at her temples. Her face was very even. Only her mouth was full: I could see what to do with that mouth.
She was as prosaically dressed as the dull people at school we had called the beige girls, though her clothes were probably more expensive than they looked. I could see exactly what needed to be done with her: cut her hair more sharply; disguise those shadows; paint that one obviously good feature, so it was a show-off’s mouth. Then dress her from scratch so that she concealed herself less. But she would never do it. Whenever the odd beige girl with aspirations rebelled for the first and last time at school, she would take the ethnic route, with drooping pink bags, and beige-on-maroon waistcoats with frogging, and self-aware earrings; or she would add cochineal streaks to dishwater hair.
‘Do you work?’ I said, for something to say.
I had once visited a pub in the small Cornish town close to where Richard had grown up, and we had talked to people he had once known, and there they all were, still sitting in the same pub they had frequented at school, and I realised I could never say to any of these people, ‘What do you do?’ They took courses; they drove vans; they were looking into film-making. And meeting them had made me more circumspect.
‘Well,’ said Sylvie. ‘I’m finishing my doctorate, but I’m writing papers too. What do you do?’
‘I teach at UCL. Comparative literature. French and German.’
‘You’re an academic!’ she said. ‘I should know that, shouldn’t I, but I don’t know your surname.’
‘Oh, I never know. I’m always meeting people I assume are some kind of caretaker, and they’re the Emeritus Professor of Byzantine History at Trinity.’
‘Exactly. I walk past them, all the time. Some of the people drifting in and out of the Historical Institute on Russell Square look like the inmates of a Victorian asylum,’ she said, then paused.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘I have to work with these people. I often think I’ll catch nits from them.’ I looked up for Richard again, but he was invisible, lost to me in a babble. I was pregnant. The extreme weariness had lifted, but I felt certain, as I had never felt before, that I was pregnant. Losing it was too distressing to think about. I muttered a little prayer in my head for the baby to survive.
I pressed my nails into the side of my seat.
‘Where do you work?’ I asked, idly inventing questions since I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘At home,’ she said. ‘My PhD’s supervised at Edinburgh, but I’ve moved down here.’
‘Is it OK working at home?’
She paused. ‘I hate it,’ she said with intensity.
‘Why?’
‘It drives me mad, to stay in one place, just working, working,’ she said, in the same impassioned tones. ‘I don’t think life should be like that. It’s a form of madness. I need people. I go out, I work in cafes, just to avoid it.’
I pictured Richard, on his Fridays at home, discovered by me at lunchtime still banging round the flat, wild and irritated in his dressing-gown, his hair dishevelled, or watching Neighbours with cereal propped on his knee in a frenzy of self-hatred, lamely inventing semi-lies about plumbers and computer crashes to obscure his inactivity, and then spending the whole evening catching up.
‘But you could work in the library – it’s fantastic to work in. Senate House, I mean.’
‘How? I’m not a student there.’
‘I’m sure I could give you a reference for a card.’
‘Oh!’ she said, and turned to me, her eyes resting on me as though I had handed her a large gift.
‘I can just say you’re one of my students.’
‘What – oh, that would be so lovely. Thank you,’ she said with passion.
There was silence. I tried to think of a comment or a question.
‘Where did you grow up?’ I said.
‘Oh, all over the place.’
I waited. ‘In France?’
‘I went to school for a while in France.’
‘Where?’
‘It was an American school.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And were you brought up here too?’
She shook her head. She smelled distinctive, I noticed as she turned, like expensive soap: that very pure almond and milk soap that lingers lightly on the skin and made me think of old houses.
‘And – your family?’ I asked, but instinctively I knew I was drifting into difficult territory and that I might hurt someone who was possibly solitary. I paused. ‘Do you have family?’ I said.
‘No, not…’ she said.
‘Oh,’ I said.
She was silent.
‘You must come over to ours,’ I said. ‘I mean – it’s not connected,’ I finished awkwardly.
‘I’d like that,’ she said politely.
‘Come next week. Can you do – let’s see.’ I found my diary. ‘Friday’s free. Could you do that?’
‘I think so,’ she said. Her knees were closed. Her hair hung very neatly, almost limply, below her chin. She looked like a reticent French schoolgirl. ‘I’d love that. Thank you.’
‘Come then, then. Good,’ I said.
The sounds of people laughing and drinking rose in front of us.
‘You’re not very well, though,’ she said. ‘I feel worried about you.’ Her voice was warm in my ear and comforted me.
‘I’m just tired.’
‘You look exhausted. I think I know what it is,’ she said, and smiled.
I blushed. ‘Do you?’
‘I … think so!’ she said playfully.
‘Really?’ My heart thumped uncomfortably.
‘I can sometimes tell.’
‘Well…’ I said.
‘You can tell me – next time I see you,’ she said, and turned to me. Entirely unexpectedly, she kissed me before she rose, and I felt the desire to confide in her right then, to tell a stranger something that I wouldn’t even tell my mother for a few weeks.
Her hand rested on my shoulder.
‘I have to go,’ she said.
I felt her kiss upon my cheek, the varying pressure of her palm against my shoulder. I placed my hand on my stomach and I searched for Richard, so that we could be together, so that he could take me home.
Five
Richard
Even if I was abused, dismissed, despised, I possessed the power of hatred, a gift as rare as the cleverness I had been given, and I would summon it when the time came to save myself. I had attempted to be good; I had toiled to make samplers, gifts, surprise
s; I had tried so hard not to be a trouble to my mother, and in the end, it had come to nothing.
Earlier that morning, I had caught a streak of something new in her: a faint glaze in her eyes, a careful folding of her body as she sat down, and I knew in that moment that my enemy had come. Mother’s tightly laced waist would soon relax; the servants would hush themselves, and the monthly nurse would be engaged. I would be swept into the corner, and this time, the starvation would have to begin.
Oh, piss off, I thought. What is this creepy stuff? I clicked on Reply, and I wrote Piss off.
I hesitated over the Send icon. I clicked the button. My answer disappeared into the ether. I laughed slightly, my own rudeness still inspiring amusement in me, piqued by the age-old fear of reprimand. I was always, in childhood, the one who triumphed in games of Dares, pushing myself to greater heights of boldness, secretly terrified of the punishments that might befall me, my pleasure equally secretly enhanced. And even in adulthood, my superego was teacher-shaped, and haunted me with interesting threats.
The only one who never reined us in was my mother, who, in her kindness and tolerance, was wryly amused by our exploits as she raised five clamouring children with dramatically varying quantities of money in the middle of nowhere; and I loved her in return with an ardency undimmed by distance or time. She had been my one constant, my dear old friend. And now Lelia, who was somewhat less tolerant of my outbursts of silliness, was here beside me too. I felt blessed by them.
I stayed online for some minutes, waiting for a reply. There was nothing.
‘Oh, goodness – shit,’ said Lelia, her diary open on the table. ‘I forgot. We’ve got Sylvie – you know, that girl – I asked her round on Friday.’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘I just felt like it.’
‘But why?’
‘I like her. I think she’s probably on her own, and we could be friendly, that’s all.’
‘Oh, Jesus. She’s just one of your bluestockings. You’re reverting to type, my love …’
‘Oh, bugger off. Better than the total lunatics you used to know. And fancy.’
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