The Noonday Devil

by Alan Judd

  It was a big house, rambling, untidy, quiet, the sort of place he thought he might like for himself one day. He could imagine Tim living in it and filling it with antiques and damask. There were signs of a hastily finished meal in the kitchen. The only sounds were an occasional grumble from the Rayburn and the ticking of a red alarm clock on the kitchen shelf. He sat in an old Windsor chair by the window.

  Robert did not have Tim’s gift for waiting. Tim could wait as cattle wait, in a ruminative trance, passively, without expectation. For Robert, waiting was a form of activity that had to be pursued like other forms, with determination.

  When eventually he heard a key in the door it struck him that she might not be alone. He sat stiffly until he heard her slow footfall in the hall. She entered the kitchen and stopped, her handbag held loosely in both hands and her hat still down over her eyes. Her belly looked bigger than ever.

  ‘I didn’t mean to surprise you,’ he said, unembarrassed by his dishonesty.

  ‘You haven’t.’

  She walked over to the window and pulled the curtains behind his head. ‘Do you want a drink, or tea?’

  ‘Tea.’

  She put on a kettle, emptied the teapot in the sink and washed a couple of blue-and-white striped mugs. Next she went out into the hall and returned without her hat and wearing slippers. Her hair was tied back in a bun, making her face look fuller and more purposeful. He remembered that that was how she had her hair when he first saw her, working, in Duke Humfrey’s Room in the Old Bodleian. After three days of discreet but unsuccessful observation he had had to resort to looking over her shoulder at her reader’s ticket while pretending to consult Gauden’s Ecclesia Suspiria in the shelf behind.

  ‘David staying on at the party?’ he asked, to see if she knew when he’d be back.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Are you unhappy?’

  She looked calmly at him. ‘No, I’m very happy. We both are.’

  ‘Why did you say what you did about the baby?’

  She shrugged and half smiled. ‘I was being silly. Probably my condition.’ She spoke the words as if they were in inverted commas. ‘I feel needlessly overwrought sometimes.’

  It would have been easy to go on and be normal but he felt a cold determination, of which wanting to get at the truth was only a part.

  ‘Is it David’s baby, then?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  She poured from the electric kettle and put the cups and the milk on the table. She sat while the tea brewed. He tried to work out whether the baby could in fact have been his, and concluded it could, just, at least insofar as he understood the theory of such things. However, he felt better now that he had asked and wanted to be conciliatory.

  She sat side on to the table, her head resting in her hand and her face mostly hidden from him. With her other hand she picked at a splinter of the table’s edge. He tried to remember making love with her. She was such a different shape now that looking didn’t help. The more explicitly he tried to recall the less clearly he could remember.

  ‘The party wasn’t bad, was it?’ he said and then, feeling she would not reply, continued quickly. ‘It was a relief to leave, though. Always is.’

  She said something but her voice was so muffled he had to ask her to repeat it. She put both her hands to her face and her shoulders shook.

  Tears reduced Robert to tenderness and guilt. He stood by her chair and put his hands on her shoulders. When he spoke her name she got up and turned in one swift movement, pressing her face against him.

  Her grip loosened and she stood back. She rubbed something off his neck with her hand, her eyes downcast. ‘I’m so tired I can’t explain. You never listen to what I say, you always try to make me say things in a way I don’t really mean. And you’re so cold and distant, I don’t know what you want. I don’t think you want anything, not really, you just go on wanting. It’s always you, it’s never me.’ She put her hand to her face again.

  He pulled her gently to him, mistaking passivity for acquiescence, feeling at once a surge of tenderness and a small secret thrill of triumph. Keeping his stomach drawn in, so as not to press too much against hers, he bent to kiss her. Despite her bulk, she twisted like a cat in his arms. He glimpsed her face and her raised arm. He had in fact time to avoid the blow but did not. It was harder than he was prepared for, hot and stinging, knocking his head sideways. For a moment they stared at each other. Her face was flushed and her brown eyes hot and excited. One side of his jaw ached.

  She raised her hand again but he caught it, then grabbed the other. She pulled and pushed, her head bent, trying to kick him. He kept saying her name but she kept pushing and pulling in a silent ineffectual frenzy. He had visions of her miscarrying, of Dr Barry walking in, of her collapsing and dying. His thigh knocked the table hard and something fell, her head hit his lip painfully. Her breath came in gasps.

  Quite suddenly she stopped struggling, went limp and swayed towards him. He put his arms round her, trying both to hold gently and support her but she folded at the knees. He knew he would be unable to hold without squeezing and so he fell with her, slowly, one hand clutching the bar in front of the Rayburn. He managed to keep her on top and a little to his side. Her head was against his face, her hair in his mouth.

  He asked a couple of times if she was all right but got no answer.

  For a few moments he felt he was sliding into panic but he stopped himself by an act of will. It was remarkably easy. He had only to say no and he became immediately fatalistic; it was serious and absurd, it mattered and it didn’t.

  He was relieved, though, when she shifted to a more comfortable position. Her voluminous dress had risen up her thighs and one leg which now seemed incongruously thin lay across his. Still without speaking, she slowly moved her face from his shoulder and bit his arm. At first he lay still. The pain was sharp but he could make himself isolate it, consider it a thing apart as when he was running. When it deepened viciously he tried to pull his arm away but the top half of her body was upon it. He turned suddenly on his side, knocking the table leg and making something fall, then bit where her shoulder met her neck. Her dress tasted of washing powder and scent. The worse the pain in his arm the harder he bit. He had started to bite very hard, clenching his jaw, when she let go with a gasp. He did the same and felt her whole body soften. He kept his lips on the spot he had bitten.

  After a while she slowly raised herself to a sitting position, leaning against the table leg. She eased her legs carefully to the side, one hand on her stomach. He sat with his arm round her shoulders.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ he asked.

  She nodded. She seemed in no hurry to get up. He was torn between persuading her, at the risk of moving when perhaps she shouldn’t, and remaining on the floor at the risk of being found there by Dr Barry. They could say she had fallen. He already felt shabby for thinking it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly. ‘The answer to your question, I mean.’

  He felt no excitement but rather the opposite, a kind of deadening within. ‘You don’t know whether it’s his or mine?’

  ‘No.’

  For a while his mind was occupied trying to work out the timings, how quickly she must have begun with Dr Barry.

  ‘Will you help me up?’

  He helped her to her feet. She smoothed down her dress, pushed back some of her hair that had come loose and picked up a mug that had fallen over on the table. Her face was heavy now, puffed and blotched. ‘It might be better if you went,’ she said.

  He did not move. ‘And the other question?’

  Her brown eyes were impenetrably full. ‘Oh, yes, I am happy. I’m very happy. We both are.’

  It was later than he realized. He walked fast, away from Norham Gardens and away from the centre. The city was quiet. He wanted not to notice where he was going but it was necessary always to decide. He walked up the Banbury Road to Summertown, across to the Woodstock Road and back dow
n but he still wanted to avoid going back to college.

  He headed instead towards Jericho, an area of narrow streets formed by small nineteenth-century houses, once a red-light district but now middle-class and fashionable. Young couples, newly married or self-consciously unmarried, bought their first homes and put in heating. Some of the unmodernized houses were still let to students. He decided he would walk through Jericho, over the canal and railway and on to Portmeadow where he could wander in the dark without being able to see more than the Isis or the horizon. Entering one street, though, he recognized the house where Gina lived. He had visited it when telling her she had the part. It was the fourth down and she shared it with a fluctuating number of students.

  Her bedroom was the former sitting room, to the right of the front door. A dim light showed through the curtains. He knocked on the window pane. The edge of the curtain twitched and he stood back so that she could see him under the street lamp. The door opened a few seconds later.

  Her hair was tousled as if she had been lying down. He walked in without speaking and stood in her room while she closed the doors. He had no idea what he was going to do.

  Her smile was indulgent but slightly mocking. ‘Was your lady not in?’

  He sat. ‘I’d like a drink.’

  There was an opened bottle of red wine on the floor by her desk.

  ‘There’s only this plonk.’

  He nodded. The room was small and untidy. A radio-cassette played soul music quietly in the corner. On the narrow bed was a volume of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Around the walls were posters of plays Gina had been in. She handed him the wine. ‘You don’t look happy.’

  It tasted hard and bitter. He drank quickly, then reached for the bottle and drank from that. She sat crosslegged on the bed, her back against the wall and her face framed by her tousled hair. She wore yellow jeans and balanced her wine carefully on her foot in front of her crotch.

  ‘I want you to do something for me.’ He suspected he might be slurring his words.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take off your clothes.’

  She gazed unsmilingly at him with a gentle almost maternal expression, then got slowly off the bed and put her glass on the desk. She pulled her shirt over her head, shaking her hair free, and eased off each plimsoll with the other foot as she unzipped her jeans. She took off her white knickers and tossed them aside. Her triangle of hair was dark and tightly curled, her thighs slightly plump. She stared at him with the same calm expression.

  The music had stopped and he felt hot. The room seemed to be smaller, pressing in on him. Some people walked past the window, talking and laughing, alarmingly close and loud. He lowered the bottle to the floor by his chair and stood. She continued to stare.

  He walked past and out, out of the house, leaving both doors open. He walked quickly and unsteadily, still towards Port-meadow but noticing no more.

  Chapter 5

  Failure was always more tiring than success and when Tim returned to college late that evening he felt heavy-limbed and hopeless. The Elizabeth had been full so he had taken the three girls to La Sorbonne, which was as good and probably no less expensive. They had had a good time, as had he so long as he had the prospect of progress before him, but when he walked them back to St Hilda’s Suzanne made good use of the presence of her friends. She was effusive in her thanks, affectionate in her farewells, permitting him no chance of seeing her alone. In fact, her last words had been that she would see him after Schools.

  Approaching college reminded him of work. Another day with no progress on that front either, though as the time of reckoning approached he found he cared less. He would get a degree, he supposed. As for afterwards, there was nothing he wanted, just as there was nothing he lacked.

  Chetwynd stood at the bottom of Tim’s staircase, embracing four or five bottles of wine, a moist light in his eyes.

  ‘Take me to your room. I must not stop drinking and will not drink alone.’

  Tim did not want company and the prospect of Chetwynd was exhausting. But it didn’t matter; nothing did.

  Chetwynd spoke with gentle deliberation. ‘I am annihilated. Drinking since I saw you. First with Orpwood then with others unknown. Your arm, please.’

  They climbed the stairs carefully. ‘Nice of you to bring the odd bottle.’

  ‘I shall drink more than I bring. I stole them.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Someone’s party. Don’t ask whose. I was thrown out of a car on the Cowley Road outside a house with loud music and people. So I walked in, more or less straight, accused a meek-looking girl of drinking my wine and sent her off to get me another. The bottles were near an open window so I sat there and quietly put a few on the sill outside. I had some more wine, borrowed some matches – just to be sociable – went to the garden for a pee and left with the bottles. How many more steps are there?’

  ‘We’re on the landing now.’

  ‘I am royally drunk.’

  ‘I think you are.’

  ‘It destroys balance, vision, coordination but not speech, which is odd. If I have the good fortune to die when drunk I shall probably continue talking until rigor mortis sets in. No one will notice till then.’

  He sat on the floor of Tim’s room with the bottles lined up beside him and laboriously filled his pipe. ‘Before I leave tonight I have something to ask of you. Remind me. Now to drink. You choose.’

  Tim looked at the assortment of cheap wine. He was not, after all, indifferent to everything. ‘I’ve got some better stuff than that.’

  ‘It would be wasted.’

  ‘It’s a waste if it’s not drunk. Or we could go straight on to the malt.’

  Chetwynd took his pipe from his mouth. ‘Now I hear you.’

  ‘Do you want some matches? I’m not sure I have any.’

  ‘I have some.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to light it, then?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘You think so?’

  Chetwynd looked at his pipe. ‘You shouldn’t have told me. I thought I was enjoying that smoke.’

  Much later Robert joined them. He had rambled for over two hours in Portmeadow, and his shoes, socks and jeans were soaked by the dew. His jeans were also muddied down one side where he had stumbled over a cow that was lying down. It had heaved beneath him like an earthquake and left him sprawling.

  Chetwynd was by then stretched out on the floor with his eyes closed. Tim lay in one of the armchairs, a bowl of cereal mixed with whisky in his lap. He grinned and made a wide welcoming gesture with his spoon.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked Chetwynd. He held up one hand for Robert to shake. ‘I would embrace you but getting up would be tedious and undignified. Forgive my closed eyes. We were discussing despair.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why, indeed. Because your friend here still nurses a secret desire to find some point in life. He denies it but I know him better than he knows himself. He’ll never find one. He knows that, too, in his soul. He’s doomed.’

  Tim grinned and tried to speak through a mouthful of cornflakes but coughed. When Chetwynd heard the clink of the whisky bottle on Robert’s glass he raised his own to be filled. He could not hold it still and some of the whisky spilled on to his face, causing his tongue to become active around his lips.

  Robert sat on the floor by the door.

  ‘Find her?’ asked Tim sleepily. Robert nodded. ‘Lot of mud on your jeans. She throw you out of the window?’

  ‘That was Portmeadow. Nice dinner?’

  ‘Nice social dinner. Gratifyingly expensive. All for nothing.’

  Chetwynd opened his eyes. ‘Did I ever tell you I can’t get an erection with a woman unless I know her well? Sometimes I have to know her for months. Do you not think that strange?’

  ‘Sensitive,’ said Tim.

  ‘But when I’m not with her I get an erection every time I think of her.’

  ‘Scared of women,’ said Robert.

  ‘Most men are
but it doesn’t affect them like that.’

  ‘You have a chronic disease of the soul. Nothing is real for you unless you have imagined it.’

  Chetwynd laughed silently. ‘Go on.’

  ‘You can’t accept any experience directly. You have to detach it from its original and recast it as you want it.’

  ‘More, more.’

  ‘You are frightened of everything.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘It’s enough.’

  The empty bowl slid from Tim’s knees to the floor and rolled under the table. ‘End of the cornflakes,’ he said.

  Chetwynd held up both arms. ‘Would you mind helping me up?’ They tried but it was not easy. He started to laugh and twice they all ended up on the floor. Eventually they propped him against the wall between the window and the bookcase.

  He stood for some time with his eyes closed and did not speak until he opened them. ‘Before I go,’ he said, then paused as if mentally rehearsing each step of a long and hazardous journey. ‘Before I go there is a favour. I mentioned it a hundred years ago on the stairs. Will you do it for me, both of you?’

  ‘What?’ asked Tim.

  ‘Agree first. Friendship demands.’

  ‘Doesn’t demand that much.’

  ‘The essence of a favour is being predisposed to commit yourself to it. Is that pompous enough for you?’

  ‘Okay.’

  Robert nodded. Chetwynd took his glass from the table where Tim had put it and swallowed more whisky. His Adam’s apple bobbed twice. ‘I have a gun,’ he said quietly. ‘I tell you before showing you so that you know I’m not about to shoot us all in a fit of Schools’ madness.’