Lisa Appignanesi
The Things We Do For Love
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First published by Harper Collins London 1997
©Lisa Appignanesi
For Josh
Who does a great many things
‘As a man of desires, I go forth in disguise.’
Paul Ricoeur
‘Without the possibility of a double life there is no morality’.
Adam Phillips
Contents
Copyright
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
PART TWO
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART THREE
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PART FOUR
Chapter 23
Acknowledgements
About the Author
PART ONE
-1-
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From all appearances Stephen Caldwell was not a man cut out for love.
He was neither tall nor small, old nor young, but depending on how he stood somewhere in between. His hair was an indeterminate brown and fell over pale skin in the cropped lines that unrepentant barbers and preoccupied mothers inflict on fidgeting schoolboys. Behind the square specs, his eyes were as vague as the shape of his worn cords.
None of this might have mattered except that Stephen Caldwell moved as if his skin weren’t his own. Perhaps he had yet to set up home in it.
On this wintry Friday in the last decade of our tired century, he was making his way up carpeted stairs to the deck of the cross-channel ferry which linked Dover to Calais. A fierce gust of wind greeted him as he pushed open the outer door. He gripped his large shoulder bag more firmly to his side and patted it once as if to reassure both himself and its contents. Then he propelled himself towards the precarious rail and watched the chalky cliffs, the avid swoop of the gulls.
He liked this palpable sense of England receding into the distance. First it dwindled into a picture postcard. Then the postcard became pattern, a series of lines and bumps, a contour on the horizon. And then, nothing. Just sky and sea and a trace in his memory which he could colour into being or not, as he chose.
He didn’t need to take the ferry, of course. He could afford to fly or chunnel, but he preferred that last glimpse of the cliffs, symbol and substance of his island home. Then, the slow unruffled going and the equally slow arrival. And in between an interim time made up only of buffeting winds and rocking sea and anonymity.
The slowness augmented the taste of his secrets.
Sometimes he thought that for him the ferry was really a way of walking to the Continent. As he was doing now. Stern and aft, upper deck, lower deck, quickly through the bars and restaurants smelling of tepid hamburger and massed bodies, more happily in the open air on the all but empty decks, wet from the light drizzle.
When he gauged they were over half-way there, he stopped in the men’s room. He took some time to come out and when he did there was a difference about him. It wasn’t only in the dark flowing coat and Homburg he had donned or in the freshly shaven face. There was a different set to his shoulders, a conviction to his step which seemed also to have deepened the colour of his eyes. Only the way he patted his bag was instantly recognizable.
On the train at Calais, the woman opposite looked up at him once and then a second time and a third. He didn’t return her glance.
Anglais, she thought. Englishman. And she craned her neck to look at the print of his book and check her assumption. The open pages showed diagrams and clusters of letters she couldn’t interpret.
Aware of her prying eyes, Stephen at last gave her a quick, oblique smile. As if by rote, he tapped his bag again and drew it a little closer, before returning to his book.
The bag, the woman noted, was large and new and good, with a sturdy lock dangling from its side and an intriguing number of zippered compartments. A man who had something worth carrying, she speculated, and peered to make out the title of a silvery paperback tucked in a side pocket. ‘A Perfect…’ she read upside down and strained to see the rest..
‘Do you read English?’ Stephen suddenly asked in a very good approximation of French.
‘Sometimes.’ The woman smiled.
With a direct gaze and a hint of a grin, Stephen handed her the book. ‘You might like it. It’s all about spies.’
The woman laughed, cloaking embarrassment. Decidedly, she thought, these English were deceptive, full of surprises beneath their impassivity.
Maybe, after all, the man had as many compartments as his bag.
-2-
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The post, as it always did on a Saturday, arrived with her second cup of coffee. Just because she had barely slept and was feeling out of sorts could hardly be expected to make a difference.
Tessa Hughes pulled back striped kitchen curtains to reveal a stretch of wintry garden. Bare branches of weigelia and honeysuckle jostled against the murky brown of a shaky fence and a matching dog house. Even the startling red of the single remaining rose looked muted in the grey drizzle. And the corner rubbish bin had taken on a disproportionate prominence.
She rubbed her eyes and overlaid the scene with the brochure image of the sun drenched beach where she would soon travel for a holiday. Carefully, she inserted herself in new black swim-suit against a stretch of silver sand and turquoise sea. She watched herself shake her hair out to give herself a sense of freedom and rub creams and oils into her skin. She could almost smell their sweet heavy scent. But even they did nothing to lift her spirits. The dull patch of Cambridge garden was still there waiting for her like a tired skin, too tight to shed.
With a sigh, she padded over to the front door to pick up what the postman had left. A couple of bills, an invitation to win £100,000 if only she could be bothered to read through, scratch out, fill in pages of junk, a letter for Stephen, his name neatly handwritten, the Dr. prominent.
Irritation pricked at her. Yes, Stephen was distinctly one of its major components. She stared at the letter, had a savage desire to rip it in two, then in four, then in eight, until there was nothing left but a little heap of shreds. Instead, she walked up the stairs to his attic study. Out of habit, she raised her hand to knock, though she knew perfectly well he wasn’t there, had left yesterday, had given her his abstracted good-bye nod and peck on the cheek before averting his face. As if he couldn’t bear to touch her. As if he were going off to the office rather than abroad.
Tessa grimaced at her raised hand, at the tug of habit, at the empty courtesies which framed their life together, then prodded open the door with a jerk.
There it was. Stephen’s study. The best room in the house really. Certainly the largest. Sky poured into the high window, over the neatly ranked books, the soft wing-backed chair, the childhood microscope on a corner table, the polished mahogany desk which she had given him. It was a suitable setting for the man one of her ingratiating junior colleagues had recently dubbed, when she introduced them at a gathering, ‘one of our foremost scientists.’ The woman’s voice had been lowered in awe as she said it and Tessa hadn’t been certain if her preceding murmur of ‘So that’s Stephen Caldwell. Stephen Caldwell is your husband,’ had signified surprise at Tessa being
married to a man of such note or the man of such note being the man who had just turned away from them. If she had still been a person who laughed readily, Tessa would have laughed then and dashed to recount the incident to Stephen. But she didn’t laugh much anymore and when she did, the sound had a hollowness to it..
Stephen’s desk was bare today, devoid of papers and books and laptop. Its pristine bareness gave her a start. The thought sidled towards her that perhaps Stephen had not simply gone off yet again to one of his numerous conferences or meetings, but had gone for good.
Tessa tasted the thought. Wondered if it was a wish. Turned it over in her mouth. It gave off a slow excitement. Stephen gone. Why not? It might be for the best. She moved towards the desk to check her first impression. No, nothing. Bare. Then in the far corner tucked between the three fossil rocks which Stephen used as paperweights, she saw his plastic key code and key ring. Odd that. Stephen usually carried his keys.
Tessa placed the letter she was carrying in the middle of the desk and picked up the keys. She dangled them in front of her as if they were some tempting bauble, put them down again, was about to pick them up for a second time when the desk telephone startled her with its ring. Stephen’s phone. His own line. Before she could decide to pick up the receiver, she heard the click of the answering machine and then a voice. A woman. Soft measured tones, speaking French.
‘Tu ne m’oublieras pas. J’insiste.’
That was all she caught before the whirring and click of the machine took over. Tessa stared at it, hesitated. She wanted to hear that voice again, knew at the same time that there hadn’t been much more to the message than that reminder, ‘you won’t forget me, I insist.’ No name. Just the intimacy of a voice which knew it would be recognized.
Funny. She had never considered the possibility of another woman. Even now, with those intimate tones replaying themselves in her ear and a quick calculation of Stephen’s numerous trips over the last years, let alone over the lifetime of their marriage. she couldn’t quite believe it. After all, there was the joint project with a French laboratory, indeed a whole host of collaborative projects. But what if work was not the only lure across the Channel? And he had been more than usually distracted of late. She had assumed it was to do with a breakthrough at the lab, had thought he had intimated as much. Yet that voice suggested otherwise.
Yes, another woman. That would explain a great deal. Explain his shiftiness when she suggested they talk, his elusiveness. Provide a ready reason for the distance that had fallen between them - a swamp of infested waters over which neither of them seemed to be able to build even a rickety, makeshift bridge.
Tessa tested her feelings. She felt something that wasn’t quite anger, but wasn’t quite not anger either. Beneath it, that excitement she had tasted a few moments ago took on a sharper edge.
With the covert gestures of a self-acknowledged trespasser, she tried the drawers of Stephen’s desk. There wasn’t much here - except a reminder of the orderliness which was Stephen. Stationery in one drawer, an assortment of pens and pencils, paper clips, stamps in another. A drawer with guarantees for appliances and instruction manuals. Next there was a stack of computer disks, back-ups numbered according to a system which for Tessa was as intricate as their imagined content. She couldn’t bother with those now, even if she could overcome the additional difficulty of incompatible systems. Then came a drawer full of bills. She picked up the telephone batch and glanced through the itemized list, was about to jot down two Paris numbers when a card tumbled to the floor.
There was a name printed at the top: Simone Lalande Debray. Beneath it a Paris address and a formal invitation, followed by a slur of handwriting she couldn’t quite make out, except for the opening words: ‘Mon très cher Stephan…’
Very dear, was he? With a little shiver, Tessa put the card into the pocket of her dressing gown and dropped Stephen’s keys in after it. For good measure, she noted the two Paris numbers, then brazenly pushed the rewind button on the answering machine and listened once more to that seductive voice. As she went downstairs, a smile began to tug at the corner of her lips. With it came the rudiments of a plan. It matured as she smoothed the sitting room sofa, tidied away newspapers, stray magazines, a lone glass. In the lacquered vase on the corner table, the roses Stephen had offered her the day after her birthday drooped their last. She bundled them into newspaper and took them out to the bin.
There had been a book, too, as if what she needed were yet another book, she who spent her life surrounded by them, reading, editing, publishing. But what could he give her since he wouldn’t give her the one thing she really wanted? A child.
Tessa looked round the room she had taken such pains over when they had first moved here in the third year of what was now a decade-old marriage. Everything was in place. The round dining table with its mellow gleam, its bowl of sculpted fruit, the arched lamps, the tiled fireplace, the watercolours and prints vivid on the walls. The two sofas facing each other across the divide of a low coffee table, waiting for easy laughter, conversation, the clink of glasses.
A setting for a life that had never quite taken place. And now the sofas were frayed and the walls had lost their brightness.
It had been well over three years since they had stopped talking of anything but the routine matters of daily life. Just before that there had been a brief phase when she thought Stephen was trying to speak to her, really speak, but only through print. He would leave articles lying around the house, where she would be sure to find them, indirect messages coded in the language of his trade. At least she assumed they were for her, these cold tracts, perhaps intended as consolation, though they only left her increasingly discouraged.
She had read how eight out of ten fertilized eggs in women attempting to become pregnant were spontaneously aborted because they carried lethal mutations. So it could only be to the good that she had miscarried her one and only certain conception, way back when, before the turn of the decade. She remembered another article telling her that chromosomal mutations were thirty times more common amongst women thirty-five and over than in teenagers. And that the rate of spontaneous abortion went up five times between the ages of thirty-five to forty-five. So all was for the best in the best of all possible thirty-five-and-over childless worlds.
Sexless too. Soon after the spate of articles, they had all but stopped making love. No point to it, really - she had put herself in Stephen’s well-worn shoes. After all, if the gene’s mission was to reproduce itself and reproduction wasn’t in the offing, why bother with all that business?
Age, she had read in one of those scattered DNA articles, was the antithesis of sex.
And now she was thirty-nine, half a year older than Stephen, and she could count the occasions she had been to bed with him in the last three years on the fingers of her hands. Not that she cared all that much about the sex anymore, but the lack of it hardly left much hope for those 2 out of 10 eggs which didn’t carry lethal mutations. Nor for much else. The stigma of her childlessness seemed to accompany her wherever she went, even latterly to the office. She would find herself searching for something she thought she had lost and then realise she hadn’t lost anything specific. Only that. She felt bereft, in mourning for something she had never had, somehow not even any longer a woman.
Oh she and Stephen trundled along of course, talking of the weather or the latest book she was editing, dining out with friends or round the mellow walnut table, remembering birthdays and anniversaries - if a little late. They were amicable, polite, busy, coupled. Sometimes, Tessa thought, they were perhaps already dead.
Not that bed with Stephen had ever been a matter of lightning and thunder and pounding horses hooves, Tessa reflected as she washed the grounds out of the cafetière. When she had met him, she had been in the last throes of a once passionate, now painful, affair with an older married don, whom she had at last realised would never leave his wife. She had gone to see Dr. Stephen Caldwell on recommendation. She was
editing a history of Cambridge science and she needed some expert advice on the final period the book would cover.
She could still remember the details of that first meeting as vividly as if they had been stored on some ineradicable disc. Perhaps the weather accounted for that, she now thought with a touch of cynicism. A freezing fog had covered the city overnight and the morning had dawned with icy whiteness in thrall to some snow queen’s glacial magic. Every roof, every branch of every shrub and tree sparkled with myriad needles of crystalline brilliance. In response to the gusts of wind which whipped her cheeks as she walked along the Backs, the trees tinkled softly. Rapt by their music, she took a detour to peer into the Clare College gardens, to watch the ducks scuffle along a thin crust at the edge of the Cam and fluff their wings into downy shields as they tipped into the waters.
She arrived at Stephen Caldwell’s rooms in Trinity a little late and full of smiling apologies.
‘Oh no. I quite understand.’ He smiled straight back and turned her towards his windows which gave onto the Backs. ‘I’ve been doing nothing but standing here myself.’ They had continued to stand there and stare out in companiable silence for some moments before he at last gestured her towards a chair. It was only then that she finally took in the man.
He had regular features in a narrow face topped by a sandy mop of hair which fell over his brow and occasionally got entangled with his specs. These he removed and put on again at random intervals as he talked in response to her questions. The gesture seemed to punctuate his conversation. He wasn’t as attractive as Jonathan, her Don. He had none of those little niceties of charm, those well-practised flourishes of smile and rhetoric. But when he warmed to his subject, she began to see a surprising force in him, an intensity which belied the surface diffidence.
In the heat of discussion, his glasses moved on and off more frequently. Without them, his eyes were a little bewildered, sad, and she wondered at the cause of their sadness. At one point he pulled off the bulk of his slightly tatty pullover to reveal a slenderness which bordered on gauntness. She really ought to invite him out to lunch, she thought. He needed the food. Unlike her don who needed a diet.
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