‘I’ll only be a few moments. Don’t let me disturb you.’
She walked past him, between the counters laden with beakers and test tubes and trays of blue tinted jelly-like substance - a casual chaos which she had never quite learned to reconcile with her media myth of pristine laboratories. More like the kitchen of a large restaurant.
‘No, no. It’s not a problem. You have the key to Dr. Caldwell’s office?’
Tessa turned back as much to look at the young life of him as to murmur, ‘Yes, thank you.’
No wonder Stephen preferred to work late in the lab than make his way home, if the lab provided him with a stream of loyal assistants like this. She felt colour warm her cheeks and she turned away, edged carefully past microscopes and centrifuge, to take refuge behind the door of Stephen’s office.
For a moment, she couldn’t remember why she had come. Then she realised she didn’t exactly know what she was looking for. Proof of duplicity? Hard evidence of an affair? A hoard of letters, a diary? A key to Stephen’s inner life. Something, someone to blame for the dissatisfactions, the impasse at which they had arrived.
She sat down with a thump in the swivel back chair and let her eyes rove round the office. The only inner life it gave evidence of was that contained in the letters CGAT and their endless permutations. There they were on a print-out in his letter tray. Indecipherable sequences of ciphers. A set of biological basics as closed to her as Stephen now was himself. As mysterious as the prints on the wall with their ribbon like strands and floating blobs of x-rayed matter.
In the centre of one of the bookshelves there was a more familiar image, though she didn’t instantly recognize it. Herself. Six year ago, seven perhaps. She was standing in the gardens of Trinity College. She was already too thin, though her tightly belted raincoat belied the fact and her hair blew softly round her face hiding the angles. She wore a smile, slightly wistful. Not unattractive.
Tessa turned away and began to sift through the papers in the letter tray. Not a single one of them was handwritten, except for a PS from an Edward S. Knight which said, ‘See you in Paris.’ In a second tray, there was a series of printed papers in unrecognizable languages, Russian, she thought, amongst them. What on earth was Stephen doing with Russian papers? She shivered, despite herself, then spotted at the top of one of the papers a note in Stephen’s writing. ‘Copy to Simone,’ it read. Her pulse quickened. Simone again. Her instincts had been right. She only wished she could understand the language of the text. Perhaps Simone was a translator. That would make sense.
Quickly, Tessa shuffled through more papers, found a series of conference schedules, including one for a Paris conference on La Nouvelle Génétique. This was one she had hoped to find and this too had a ‘copy to Simone’ handwritten on it. So he would be meeting her there. For a moment anger at Stephen’s duplicity engulfed her. She forced herself through it, tucked the papers into her bag, then tried the top drawer of the desk. It was locked. Of course it would be. Everything here was locked, secret, kept remote from intrusive eyes.
She took a deep breath and was about to reach for the key ring, when a knock made her leap from the chair.
‘A coffee?’ Pavel Katuretsky peeked round the door. ‘I can bring you one from the machine. Plastic coffee.’ He made a face. ‘But drinkable.’
‘No. No, thank you. I’ve found what I came for.’
‘Are you sure? I want one myself.’
‘Alright then. Black, one sugar.’
He flashed her a happy look, as if she had just answered an earnest desire, and ambled off.
Tessa smiled to herself. Perhaps her life wasn’t over yet. Perhaps she could once again be a woman, even if not for Stephen. She flicked a comb quickly through her hair, was about to try the desk again, when she heard Pavel’s footsteps.
He beckoned her towards a small windowside table, brought out a packet of chocolate biscuits, proffered them. ‘They make the taste better.’
‘Yes.’ Tessa bit in. A chocolate digestive hadn’t tasted this good in a long time.
‘So, you will be joining Dr. Caldwell?’
Tessa flushed. ‘Perhaps,’ she mumbled.
‘You are busy with your work.’
‘And you. Will you be going to the conference?’
‘No, no. There is too much to do here.’ He waved his arm round the room. ‘This is an exciting moment. Dr Caldwell’s new research…’ He gave her a complicit grin she didn’t know what to do with, so she simply nodded.
There was that smile again. She basked in it, only to have a computer beep rupture the moment.
‘There’s my call - the program’s finished running.’ He didn’t move for a moment, as if he were waiting for a sign for her.
‘I had better let you get back to it, then.’ Tessa drained her paper cup. ‘Good luck.’
‘It was a pleasure to meet you,’ he said with emphasis.
‘And you.’
As she left the lab, Tessa reflected that it had indeed been a pleasure. The long-lived mists of depression seemed to have dispersed a little. She felt buoyant, prepared to embark on that journey which had only become imperative a few hours ago. She didn’t imagine that spying on Stephen, let alone confronting him, would continue to prove quite so heady a business. But she was ready.
-3-
_________
Things started to go awry for Tessa the moment she emerged from the cocoon of the gleaming high-speed train. Maybe she simply wasn’t meant to be a creature with wings in this Paris where the powdery markings of beauty were so important.
On the train she had been warmly pleased with herself, proud that she had cancelled her island holiday and decided at last to take active charge of a life that had run away from her. She had imagined herself as a cool investigator of her coupled condition. She had seen herself phoning the intimate-voiced Simone, going to see her, confronting Stephen with frosty aplomb, making him take note of her, forcing change. All this was also somehow entangled with once again feeling like a woman.
She had said as much, though perhaps a little more obliquely, to her older sister, Pen, at whose house she had spent Sunday night. Pen now lived conveniently in London, not so very far from Waterloo.
‘Good, I’m glad,’ Pen had said firmly when Tessa had told her about her change of destination. ‘He neglects you. He thinks he can get away with anything. You’ve been coddling him for too long.’
‘Have I?’ Tessa hadn’t been certain of that, but she had been glad to have her plan approved.
Nonetheless as soon as she stepped out into the Gare du Nord, her courage dwindled. First there was the station crowd, so determined in its hurry that it was hard to pause and read signs. Then there was the smell of Paris which she had quite forgotten: a smell composed of urine and petrol and something else which she couldn’t quite name until she found herself standing in front of a butcher’s display and gazing upon rows of innards, hearts and kidneys and lungs, gutted rabbits still wearing their fur, birds hanging from wrung necks - all laid out like some exotic garden. So she decided the final component of the smell was slaughtered flesh and she fled.
After that she was turned away from three hotels with a laconic murmur of ‘complet’. In the final one, when she picked up her case to leave, a woman started to shriek at her, and it took Tessa a few moments to realise that she had picked up the wrong bag and was being treated as a thief.
To regain her composure, she sat in a café and ordered coffee and a sandwich from a self-important waiter, who looked at her askance because she was at a table laid with white mat and knife and fork - the signal for a substantial lunch. So she moved outdoors to a poky round table with a plasticized marble top, took one bite of her baguette and realised that she was up to neither the forceful chewing it required, nor the crumbs.
When she called the waiter over to pay her bill, he gave her an odd look.
‘Terminez déjà?’
‘Oui,’ Tessa said and thought that she was
probably already finished in more ways than one. But that was no reason for him to look at her as if she were some mad old bat.
She found herself in front of the butcher’s window again and she suddenly remembered how Stephen, a few years back, after a Christmas visit to her parents’ had abruptly announced that no nation which cared so much for animals would ever know the meaning of cuisine, let alone how to eat. She hadn’t paid much attention to the remark at the time, had thought it was just Stephen’s way of letting off steam after yet another of her father’s frontal attacks on scientists and their use of laboratory animals.
Her parents, in their retirement, had moved to Gloucestershire, where they lived with three dogs, a neatly tended vegetable garden and a great many of her father’s newly found passions, which he vented splenetically whenever he had a chance. One of these was animal rights. Another was Europhobia. Given even half an audience he would deliver a lecture on how all of Britain’s ills were due to an influx of corrupt European ideas. Stephen would sit silently through these lectures, staring at his gravy-covered plate, with its untouched mound of sprouts, his face a mask of politeness. Only that once, as far as she could recall, had Stephen made a critical comment.
On impulse last year she had sent her father a book she had edited. It contended that Britishness was an eighteenth-century invention, not some primordial essence. The invention had taken shape over what could be seen as a hundred years’ war with the French. It was a useful invention, since it kept England and Scotland and Wales united against the enemy. One of its wheels was the Bank of England. Another was the propaganda, which became assumed fact, attributing to the nasty, foppish French everything that the brave and manly, sincere and innocent British were not: Catholic, superstitious, militaristic, wasteful, corrupt, oppressed, badly paid and self-flaunting, garlic-eating hypocrites to boot. So being British had only taken on meaning against the French, our closest and preferred enemy. The problem was that now that we were all supposed to be friends in one not altogether comfortable union, the very idea of Britishness teetered precariously and was no longer able to gloss over a spectrum of internal differences.
But her father was impervious to rational argument. He clung to his prejudices, as much a part of him as his digestive tract. And maybe, Tessa thought as she continued to be transfixed by the butcher’s display, she was more her father’s daughter than she thought. Whereas Stephen had moved on. Yes.
With a shrug Tessa hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to Saint-Germain. She would treat herself, go up-market. After all, she hadn’t been to Paris for some eight years. She found a little hotel in the Rue du Dragon, amidst antique shops and boutiques which wafted perfume and women like iridescent butterflies. She sat in her hotel room and gazed at the telephone next to which she had placed the card with Simone Lalande Debray’s number and felt like a faded moth waiting for light. At last she forced herself to pick up the receiver and dial the number.
A clear self-sufficient voice replied, eliciting messages with seductive charm. Tessa hung-up promptly, her resolution vanishing as quickly as it had come. She couldn’t face the owner of that voice. Not yet. In any event what would she say?
‘Hello. You don’t know me, but I think you’ve been sleeping with my husband. Oh, it’s all right. I don’t mind. Not really. Not today. It’s just that I need to know. So that I have a reason to leave him, you understand.’
What could the woman say in response? Would she offer her coffee to assuage her ruffled English dignity? Would she protest in utter incomprehension? Would she hang up?
No, a little more preparation was necessary. Tessa had to see the woman first, get a feel of her. And before she could even do that she had to do something about herself. This different mirror, which she forced herself to look into, reflected a woman who was all but invisible, too pale, too thin, insignificant. All her fears were written large within its gilded frame. And it shouted at her, told her how much she had let herself go these last years, had become merely the woman who couldn’t have a baby, not a sexed creature at all really, just a shadow.
In the beauty salon, all chrome and mirrors and outsize posters of androgynous youth, a graceful and tanned young man who might well have stepped down from one of the images except that he was smaller, flashed her a bright smile and showed her to a chair. She smiled back weakly and told him she wanted a change, anything he might suggest, within reason of course. With a serious air, he studied her face in the mirror, held it this way and that, brushed her hair up and let it fall. Good hair, he commented and the comment made Tessa disproportionately happy.
She relaxed in his hands, let him apply a lightening rinse, to bring out the gold he said, listened to his chat as he washed and cut and styled. He surprised her by telling her, now in his lilting accented English, how much he loved London, how the best fashions came from there, how English women were always nicer, easier to please, less pernickety.
When she looked at herself, Tessa had to admit that she was pleased. He hadn’t done anything radical but her hair had a glowing sculpted look to it, freed only by the swoop of a wave at her right temple. And her face looked less drawn.
‘You have a special occasion tonight?’ he asked, smiling at her pleasure.
‘Sort of.’
‘May I suggest a little colour here and here?’ He pointed to a space above her cheekbones, to her lips.
Tessa tipped him generously. She also followed his orders and promptly found a parfumerie where a woman advised her on blushers and bases and shadows and lipstick. She did more than that. At a boutique near the salon, she bought herself a beautifully-tailored jacket in a rich charcoal-brown, a matching skirt, shorter than anything she had worn for years, striped trousers with loose pleats at the top and pencil slim at the base, and two jerseys recommended by the assistant, who was as quick to tell her what didn’t suit as what did. Tessa appreciated the help. She wanted nothing more than to be made over. When she finally got back to the hotel with her numerous purchases, she fell soundly asleep and dreamed of a woman called Simone who looked remarkably like her re-made self.
In the morning the courage of make-up almost failed her, but she chivied herself into the masquerade and set out along the Boulevard Saint-Germain into the narrow streets of the fifth arondissement. She found the stretch of embankment easily enough. In another mood she would have gasped at what was almost the flagrant beauty of the view, the airy stone haunches of Notre Dame spread astride the sinuous river. Now, she was too nervously intent on locating a house to match the number indicated on the card. When at last she spied it atop heavy wooden doors at the corner of a tiny side street, she realised she had already passed in front of the house three times. The doors seemed barred to casual entry, but an unpretentious café on the pavement opposite provided a convenient spot for a little harmless spying. Tessa positioned herself beneath a striped awning, ordered an orange pressé, unfolded a newspaper and waited.
The first person to emerge from the heavy door was a man carrying a ladder. Obviously not a candidate for the name Simone, Tessa mocked herself. He returned a few minutes later without the ladder, but with a roll of wall paper and punched out a door code. Then for a good half-hour there was nothing.
Tessa consoled herself with the notion that she was soaking up atmosphere. She tried to imagine Stephen walking up the street. She gave him a box of chocolates, one of those expensive ones full of truffles and exotic creams, all hand-made and hand-picked and wrapped in metres of gold ribbon by a coy woman in a choice confiserie. She saw him punch out a door code, step over the threshold, slam the door in her face.
She poured more water into her orange pressé and remembered a conversation she had had with her sister, in the early days of her marriage with Stephen. Pen was miserable at the time. The sisters were out of step. Pen’s marriage to Robert was on the rocks and she had come to stay with Tessa and brought Jamie, then two, along with her. They had talked late into the night and Pen had said she suspected Robert was
having an affair and she had to find out about it. She talked wildly of hiring a private detective.
‘Why don’t you just ask him?’ Tessa had queried.
‘Because he’ll lie.’
‘How do you know?’
Pen had shrugged and taken on that newly bitter voice of hers. ‘Because men want everything they can get away with.’
‘I don’t think Stephen would lie. Not to my face.’
‘Ha!’ Pen had sneered. ‘Not yet.’
As it turned out, there had been an affair, but Robert and Pen hadn’t split up. They had had another child instead.
And that, Tessa thought, was the difference.
Just before she and Stephen had stopped talking and more or less stopped doing it, they had both gone off individually for fertility tests - at her insistence. The doctor had told her there was nothing wrong with her. She must just be patient. Sometimes, when one had reached one’s mid-thirties, he had smiled at her kindly, it took time.
Stephen, too, it seemed was all right, though he had done no more than grunt in response to her questions. She had wondered then what he thought about when he had to do it into a bottle. Did he look at pornographic magazines, think of her, of other women? She hadn’t dared to ask, of course. Sex was not something one could talk about with Stephen. He would shuffle his feet and grow remote and awkward, like a schoolboy. He had been like that in the early days too. But then it hadn’t mattered, since their bodies had taken their own course. She had liked this darkness of passion, speech through another medium. She was a romantic at heart and sex talk reminded her too much of her don and his embarrassing worldliness. But if romance went awry, as it had done after her miscarriage, talk, with all its difficulties seemed necessary.
When she had dared to say to Stephen that perhaps they should seek more specialist advice, get treatment, he had lost his temper for perhaps the one and only time in their marriage. Did she know what all that involved, he had railed, the time, the expense, the anxiety, the obsessiveness of it? Did she realise how many failures there were for every success? Did she really want to have months of repeated hormone injections? Undergo lengthy courses of antibiotics? Lie supine for weeks? Be able to think of nothing else?
The Things We Do For Love Page 3
