Exposure

by Talitha Stevenson

  Now he saw that all our actions are less final than we insist. He saw, above all, that we are eternal optimists when it comes to love. Our minds entertain strange, secret attachments, long after they ought to. Perhaps only death is blunt enough to convince the human imagination that it is too late to make amends.

  He knew perfectly well that he had spent his life in avoidance of reflection and confrontation. He had defeated every impulse to think about his past, or to sit down and confide in his wife, with a relentless emphasis on his work or other practical concerns. He had even put elaborate research about health care or financial security long before an afternoon with his children—a very long way before time with his son. Somehow, for the last thirty-nine years, there had always been a letter to write immediately after supper, or a million bills and a new brief to go through over the weekend.

  But, of course, it had recently turned out that even resolute pragmatism requires a particular kind of faith. And it was as if, in return for his long worship, he had been granted a pardon, so long as he went quietly, from the humiliation of disciplinary proceedings. But he had lost the faith itself. Now that it had gone, Alistair found that the manifold little acts of will or of self-denial that account for the steady outline of a personality no longer felt 'natural'.

  Here he was again, after all, on the cliff— thinking.

  He watched the waves curling up and over and back in on themselves. After a while he began to wonder if he hadn't always had the wrong idea about the sea and its display of supreme indifference. The disappearing waves had reminded him of all that is transient and uncontrollable in the world and he had literally dared himself to look at them. But now it was as if, quite suddenly, his perspective altered. He saw that with absolute consistency, with every breaking wave, the sea was repeating the point: nothing lasts and that is why it is beautiful. Just then this seemed to be the unexpected secret of happiness, which he had made it his life's purpose to destroy.

  He was conscious that the driver was waiting, but he stayed on for a few more minutes, calmly aware that he would see the view again, that this was in no sense a final gesture of farewell, but that he simply did not want to go just yet. As he stood there, he did not ask for or receive any grand philosophical insight, but every so often there was a kind of sensual satisfaction, when he seemed literally to hold the idea of time, like cupping a marble egg in the palm of the hand. There was weight and there was smoothness and then these qualities dissipated, and perhaps it was time that he saw reflected back at him by the cool and empty horizon.

  When he went back to the cab, he found the driver doing the crossword and they discussed clues all the way to the station. It gave Alistair enormous satisfaction to find that he was able to supply all the answers and to receive such enraptured gratitude. 'Oh, well, you're very kind. I'm afraid I'm not much good for anything else, though,' he said, as they arrived, feeling unworthy of such praise although it meant so much to him.

  'Sharpness, though,' the driver said, refusing to hear anything of the sort.'Brains— they'll get you a long way in life.'

  Alistair smiled and paid him.

  The first train was going to Charing Cross, rather than to the more convenient Victoria. It did not matter very much. On the platform, he took out his book on the Ottoman Empire by his old acquaintance Henry Downing and a coincidence in his mind caused him to remember a particularly touching description Henry had written in a Times book review in connection with Charing Cross. He had described how Edward I, distraught at the death of his wife Eleanor of Castile, had brought her body from Scotland to London and placed a cross at each point where her body and retinue had rested. Alistair felt moved all over again by this gesture—particularly when Edward I was only ever remembered for his cruelty to the Scots. There had been good in him, after all—there had been love. Alistair felt tears coming and wondered what on earth was the matter with him. He bought a paper to see if there was another crossword he could do.

  But the crossword was of no interest. Neither was the news. Sitting in the train carriage, with his bag tucked rather spinster-ishly behind his feet, his thoughts turned to Rosalind - inevitably to Rosalind. His hands folded and unfolded the edge of his ticket. He knew that it was not to an address that he was going back, not to a white house in Holland Park with a number on the door, but to a woman with brown hair and graceful hands and an abject disillusionment in her eyes. He was deeply afraid.

  He looked out in amazement as the train pulled in at its first stop, Folkestone Central. Surely this was the fastest train in the world.

  Alistair might, as ever, have made a success of avoiding the issue of his marriage, but his mind had none the less been prey to nervous tics. He was curiously plagued by the uncharacteristic phrase that Rosalind had used on the night of the attack: 'But how could you not have heard them, Alistair? They must have been ... silent as dogs.'

  His immediate reaction had been to wonder if she had ever had an affair. A few little words had caused this big doubt! But his wife's imagination had roamed flagrantly beyond its usual parameters and he had felt threatened. If that, then why not sex, too? Why not one of his friends? Julian, perhaps? Julian had always been in love with her, and Elise knew it and behaved impeccably. How fitting, then, that it should have been Julian who had secured Alistair's disgrace with his upstanding neighbourly spirit.

  Yes, Rosalind and Julian—an odd couple, but who knew what women found attractive? Or Henry Sanderson, perhaps - with his broad hands and the thick head of hair he was plainly never going to lose. Or Anthony Crichton, with that smarmy way he had of offering to help with the plates and the way he called her Rozzy, which no one did, except her sister, for God's sake— 'Oh, Rozzy, you're being an angel as ever. Do let some of us mere mortals lend a hand.'

  Alistair heard Rosalind's giggle. Yes, his wife and Anthony Crichton. They were not implausible, physically. Anthony would kiss her neck as he undid her shirt and ran his blunt-ended fingers between her breasts.

  There was sweat on Alistair's forehead and his fist gripped the train ticket. The image of Rosalind and Anthony was replaced by one of an early horror in his life: it was the one of his mother, the time he came back unexpectedly from his confirmation class at the church hall. There she was, struggling under Mr Bisset's fat body on the floor in the hall. He remembered thinking at the time, Can you kill a man with an umbrella? Would they hang you if you were saving your mother's life? But before these questions were relevant, the huge shoulder moved back to reveal his mother's smiling face. She was enjoying the attack. She was urging on her aggressor. What did it mean? What horrible mystery was being played out in front of him on the grubby hall carpet?

  'Oh, Alistair, I thought you were down the church.'

  'I forgot my sandwich. I got hungry.'

  The train burst, obliviously, through a station, past men reading papers, mothers holding children, a man with a dog, two teenagers kissing. It all flashed curiously by, and Alistair found himself wondering if he had ever satisfied Rosalind sexually. He was not sure. They had always made love fairly regularly, but in the back of his mind had been the suspicion that she was always elsewhere, that he might have had possession of her soft, pale arms and legs, but that her mind was closed to him. On one occasion - and this was excruciating to remember—she had fallen asleep. It had been just for a few seconds—a few heartbeats, in effect—but she had undeniably been asleep. OK, it had been after a few very hard months with Sophie in and out of a clinic, Luke with tonsillitis and Suzannah getting divorced, but the sleep had somehow not seemed like tiredness so much as escape. He had stopped moving and stared down at the blind female body, which, though it was heavy in his arms, had left him completely empty-handed and foolish. He remembered thinking: What I am looking at now is the very opposite of desire—not boredom, but isolation, loneliness. And after she woke and he pretended not to have noticed, he had tidied the thought away, so as to survive.

  It was fair to say that they had both suffe
red a good deal of sexual frustration.

  He had blamed her for this, of course. (He had done such a lot of blaming over the years.) And yet now he was beginning to wonder if the fault lay primarily with him. Now he could hardly bear to remember the poignancy with which, in their early days, she had put up her face to be kissed, or unbuttoned her dress so that he could lay his weight on top of her, against her pale skin. It had been like leaning towards light to make love to Rosalind. She had been so tender, so trusting of him, her one and only lover. And at first it had been beautiful. He had felt blessed with her body, and when she stood by the window wrapped in her dressing-gown, gazing out over the little garden at their first house, he knew she had been blessed by his. There was a mutual satisfaction that fed on itself; a pleasure in what they gave to each other and of what they created in combination.

  But it had not lasted. He couldn't help associating its disappearance with the disappointment he knew Rosalind had suffered shortly after they were married. They had agreed not to have a child for a few years. Rosalind's parents had insisted that Alistair did not make enough money. Her mother said, 'To speak with brutal frankness, Alistair,' he had found himself wondering when she had ever spoken otherwise to him, 'you do not yet have a secure environment in which to bring up a child safely. You can't afford to do it properly— in a civilized way.'

  Chastened and spiritually ashamed as ever, he had spoken firmly to Rosalind about the grave dangers of their attempting to be parents yet. They had followed the advice to the letter. They had not even tried for a baby until Rosalind was twenty-eight, when he could afford the nannies and prams and cashmere shawls that Rosalind herself had been given. Alistair had made certain that all the mystical charms that would bring happiness and order were in place.

  He knew that his young wife had found it painful to see all her friends give birth before her. She was made a godmother twice and he wondered now if he had ever acknowledged the humility with which she undertook this role. He remembered how she had spent long evenings embroidering smocking dresses for Laura and Harriet, her two goddaughters. She must have minded so much!

  Rosalind's pleasure in her unusually clever husband had always been apparent to him but, as she cradled her friend Camilla's son, Rory, Alistair thought he could hear her thoughts roam: a husband with enormous potential was very nice, but even a dull insurance broker had his appeal if he could give you a life to adore. Alistair would pat the baby's head awkwardly, and then he would wander off and talk to the men.

  Why had they listened to her parents? Or, rather, why had he, because Rosalind had in fact listened to him? He recalled, with horror, how frequently she had hinted to him that she wouldn't mind doing absolutely everything for a baby herself, that in fact she would love to and that she would be more than happy to use Camilla's hand-me-downs rather than buy expensive new Babygros and so on. But he, knowing better, had shaken off this romantic folly. He had merely placed an empty kiss on her forehead like a full stop and gone back up to his desk. He had treated her as if she was a child swearing to care for a guinea-pig—if only she could have one for Christmas.

  How patronizing he had been to Rosalind! It was no wonder that her resentment had been physical at times. His own kisses had become a subtle form of violence—she got a little blow to her cheek or forehead or mouth if ever she seemed to be on the verge of questioning his methods. It was no great surprise that she had learnt to close her eyelids, avoiding him, even as they made love. He had insulted her in many ways.

  Over the years, he had begun to view the loneliness of his own body as 'normal'. So there was, after all, he told himself, no transportation in the act of sex, no mystical communion. Afterwards, he loped clumsily from the bed to the bathroom on feet of clay. And, of course, he saw other couples settle into filial indifference to each other's presence; he noted affable shoulder squeezes batted off in irritation. From these observations he derived a mixture of reassurance and heart-freeze.

  But neither feeling persisted because there was always an important discrepancy when it came to himself and Rosalind: their attraction to one another remained far stronger than their sex life might have suggested. She walked quietly past him in the hallway and he caught that light, lemonish scent of hers and felt weak - as weak as he had when he helped her into the punt at his college ball. He saw the hips, the waist still slim and smooth beneath her dressing-gown, and his mouth watered quite automatically—just as it did for the taste of raspberries and cream or a good single malt, or venison in a pungent, red-wine sauce. And if her hair brushed his cheek when she reached past him for her toothbrush, he could find his eyes closing as if to contain the sensation.

  One could not entirely confuse the body—no matter how scrambled the mind.

  These moments did not occur all the time, of course—habit and schedules and the practicalities of caring for children saw to that. But they did happen sometimes and when they did he could only draw the conclusion that his attraction to her was timeless, intact beneath the landslide of life, and that this was greatly to be envied.

  But Alistair had never known what to do with any of his blessings. His self-consciousness spoilt everything. He thought of catching her wrist, of shouting her name after her down the hall, but every gesture seemed contrived or embarrassing in some way and he rejected it.

  And yet when his friends began to be unfaithful to their wives, he knew he would always be the odd one out. He was unable to add his part to the wicked titillation they afforded one another at their men-only suppers. The others shared their descriptions of trysts with nubile secretaries or plump au-pair girls the way boys at boarding-school pass round dirty pictures. But he could only remain silent. It was soon thought that he 'disapproved' and the stories were censored around him.

  The truth was, he didn't understand. He genuinely didn't desire other women because Rosalind was the woman he had always wanted and that was why she was his wife.

  This last assertion caused him to laugh now—with deep bitterness. If this charmingly monogamous notion was the truth, then what had happened recently—on that night at the Ridgeley Hotel?

  Strange as it was, though, he hadn't particularly lusted after Karen. Of course, she had possessed her textbook sex appeal, and her attraction to him, though blatantly Freudian in origin, had still been flattering to a man in his sixties. But he had not made love to her as he had made love to the young Rosalind. And this was not merely a subtle distinction between making love and having sex, but the more brutal one between making love and masturbation. In fact, what he had done in that huge white bed, with the weird images flickering on the screen beside them, had not even amounted to masturbation. The primary thrill had not even been sexual.

  He felt perplexed and scared by the mystery of himself. What had he been doing—after almost forty years of fidelity—having sex with an unknown girl, with a witness in a trial he was prosecuting? A girl who had inspired only the bare minimum of physical reaction?

  Suddenly he remembered something Rosalind's cousin Philip had shown him, during his last weeks. Poor Philip had gone through a repentant, pious stage, languishing in his four-poster, surrounded by lilies and peonies. His frail, shaking hands and yellowish skin had been at such painful odds with the vibrancy of the flowers and all the hand-painted cards. And it was awful to see how even against all the colour in the room, against the good wishes so superstitiously accumulated, cirrhosis of the liver still won hands down.

  After a life of constant activity, whether it was sex or eating or dancing or travel—and, sadly, it was always drinking—Philip had taken to reading and meditating a great deal. He began to read the Bible, which, at the time, Alistair had found wildly hypocritical. Philip had always spoken of his Catholic upbringing with nothing but vitriol (it had been the subject of all his most wicked and brilliant jokes) and his promiscuous, homosexual lifestyle had seemed no less of a refutation.

  Hypocrisy had always been, in Alistair's mind, profoundly irritating as a spli
t infinitive. But in this case he was unnerved - even emotionally disturbed - by it. Philip was a bright, possibly even brilliant, man and there he was, contradicting himself at the essential moment. Why?

  Alistair left this unsaid, of course, because it was hardly the time for intellectual debate, and Philip died at last with no idea that he had lodged a thorn in the mind of his finicky old chum, Al.

  Alistair gazed out of the train window at the light rain falling on the glass, at the trees pulsing by. Of course, he could see now what had got him so worked up about Philip's change in reading habits. It had not been a fixation with logical consistency (and had this ever really been his concern? Had it not always been a preoccupation with honesty, rather than with that mere surface detail, clarity?). The sight of Philip's Bible had contained the terrifying idea that the past might lie in wait, intact, despite the beatings it had taken.

  Had he always been quite so transparent?

  It had been a passage in St Augustine's Confessions that Philip held out to him with such difficult passion in his eyes. Augustine described the pleasure he had taken as a boy in stealing pears unripe pears, which were inedible anyway, only to toss them away. He confessed to God, 'I loved my own undoing. I loved my error—not that for which I erred, but the error itself.'