by David Szalay
While they were waiting, he touched her a second time. Sitting side by side at a table near the entrance—a stained tablecloth, plastic flowers—they had lapsed into silence and he put his hand on her thin jeaned thigh and stroked the fabric a few times with his thumb. She did not seem surprised. She did not tense up or move her leg. She just lifted her eyes from the Taste of India carpet and looked at him steadily for a minute with no particular expression on her face—or an expression, at most, of tolerant indulgence. Then the smiling waiter approached with their supper.
They ate it with the television on. Her flatmate, Summer, was there—she had been away for the weekend with some man; her suitcase was still in the hall. He had not even known of her existence until they found her sitting on the sofa with her small stockinged feet on the old leather pouf, watching TV. Her presence had the effect of taking most of the interesting tension from the situation—things seemed flat now that she was there—and when Katherine went to do the washing-up, leaving them to talk amongst themselves, he felt that it was probably time for him to leave.
He found her standing at the sink in the kitchen. She may not have noticed he was there until, stepping up to her, he put his hands on her waist. When she did not move even then, he went a step further and, tucking down the tag of her sweater, kissed her exposed neck.
‘Do you want to stay the night?’ she said, still sloshing things in the sink.
‘Do you want me to?’
‘It’s up to you.’
He seemed to think for a moment. ‘Yes, I’d like to.’
‘Okay.’
‘Are you sure?’ he said.
‘Am I sure?’
‘Are you sure it’s okay? I don’t want to stay if you don’t want me to.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said, freeing herself from his hands, which had stolen onto her stomach, and taking a dishcloth.
Her pale hair was tied up severely, showing the high pallor of her forehead, and her face had a freshly scrubbed look. She was wearing a loose T-shirt and old-fashioned pyjama trousers. ‘I’ve still got my period,’ she announced, turning down the duvet.
‘Okay.’
Sitting there, he found it slightly difficult to see what the point of his presence was—she was under the duvet now, and did not seem to pay him any attention as he slowly undressed and joined her. She was lying on her side, facing away from him, and she did not move when he put out his hand and sent it down the shallow slope of her side and up the steeper hill of her hip, feeling under his fingertips the filled, homely fabric of the pyjama trousers.
‘Are you sure you want me to stay?’ he said.
A sudden susurration of the sheets—she turned. In such proximity her face looked different. His perusal of it, and his silence, seemed to unnerve her and shaking her head on the pillow, she said, ‘What?’
‘Nothing… I like looking at you.’
She smiled very slightly and he kissed her. She let him. She let him kiss her unparted lips, once, twice, and even then it seemed no more than a sort of tolerant indulgence, until her mouth melted open and for a few seconds seemed to be searching urgently for something inside his. His hands were inside her T-shirt. ‘I don’t want to have sex,’ she said. ‘I told you, I have my period. And even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t want to have sex.’
They lay still for a while.
She put her hand on his face and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m pleased you insisted on staying.’
‘Insisted? I didn’t insist…’
She smiled. ‘Okay, you didn’t insist…’
Taking it from his face, he kissed the palm of her hand—plump and mild and slightly damp—and that was the start of a tortuously slow exploration, an exploration sub specie aeternitatis, of the sense of touch.
Towards morning—they were naked on the mattress, their senses painfully peeled in the warmth of the storage heater—she muttered, ‘I don’t think I can not have an orgasm,’ and letting her knees fall open, quietly started to play with herself.
*
Suddenly, unexpectedly, no longer even seriously hoped for, there were a few lovely days. Sun-fire on frozen ponds. Everything seemed okay then.
Then on Saturday afternoon, towards the end of the afternoon, when the winter daylight was starting to fail, he met her at Angel tube station, and there was something wrong. He had sensed it earlier in the day when they had spoken on the phone, and when he met her at the station and tried to kiss her she just turned and started to walk away.
They had walked some way up Essex Road—past Packington Street, were in front of the open facade of Steve Hatt the fishmonger, standing on the stained pavement in a faint sea smell—when she stopped and said, ‘What are we doing? Where are we going?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I thought you wanted to get a drink,’ she said.
‘Is that what you want to do?’
‘Isn’t that what you want to do?’… ‘Do you want to get a drink?’ she said.
‘I don’t mind. What do you want to do?’
If it was a drink he wanted, she insisted on returning to Angel, and they were nearing Islington Green, still in silence, when he stopped and said, ‘Look, if you’re not going to say anything, maybe I should just go.’
She went very still.
‘You’re not saying anything either,’ she said half-heartedly. Then she said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know…’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘I feel a bit weird.’
‘What do you mean you feel a bit weird?’
‘I’ve been feeling a bit weird this afternoon, since earlier.’
‘I don’t know what you mean when you say a bit weird.’
‘Let’s just get a drink,’ she said. ‘Let’s just get a drink and see how it goes.’
‘See how it goes?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
He followed her into the nearest pub. Not a particularly nice pub. The Nag’s Head. And she still seemed to be feeling quite weird. While they stood at the bar waiting to be served, surrounded by screens shouting about sport, she started to laugh. Perhaps it was just the fact that they had ended up there, in the Nag’s Head, a straightforward pub with a passion for sport, and a sour smell of lager soaked into wood. They sat down at a long table which they had to share with some other people. She seemed strangely exhilarated. There was a strong flush in her pale skin.
He was wary. He pressed her on what she had meant outside when she said she was feeling a bit weird.
She stopped smiling. ‘I just… didn’t… feel anything,’ she said.
‘You didn’t feel anything?’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean? When?’
‘This afternoon.’ Seeing the expression on his face, she took his hands in hers and said, ‘It was just something weird. I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry.’
‘This isn’t just what you’re like, is it?’ he suggested, smiling sceptically.
She laughed and shook her head. ‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
Over the second pint they started to talk about other things— he told her how he had once owned a pizza-delivery franchise nearby, and how he had mortgaged it to produce a film (directed by Julian Shoe—the name made her laugh, he swore he wasn’t making it up), which had never found a distributor, forcing him to sell the pizza franchise and work instead as an estate agent at one of the snootier Upper Street outfits—Windlesham Fielding, pinstriped suits moving in the shop window. Though she knew by then that he had old links with the postcode, this was the first time they had been mapped out for her. He told her how—after a stint in the City which ended in minor scandal—he had set up on his own as an Islington estate agent. For a while he was successful. He owned up to having owned a Porsche—to having been a Porsche-owning estate agent. (She laughed at
that.) He said he had lived in several thousand square feet of warehouse flat overlooking the canal. He had not seen the place for years and he suggested they walk over there tomorrow.
‘Okay,’ she said.
It was dark when they left the Nag’s Head. Under towering streetlights, the junction at Angel pumped people and vehicles like an exposed heart.
He was sufficiently upset by what had happened to seek a meeting on Monday with Toby, at whose wedding they had met. Toby had known her since university; they had been at Cambridge together, had shared history tutorials as undergraduates at Trinity. And Toby had something to tell him. She was married. Separated for a year or so, but still, so far as he knew, married. Her husband—he had left her, was Toby’s feeling—was some sort of photographer. Fraser King.
‘He’s some sort of pap. She hasn’t told you this?’ he said, surprised.
‘No.’
‘She’s not mentioned him?’
‘No.’
James thought, and then said that the only hint he had had of it was that nestling in the mess on the little night-table next to her bed—among the tumblers of stale water and screwed-up tissues—he had noticed a watch. A man’s watch. It looked like a pilot’s watch or something. A very macho watch. He had of course wondered who its owner was.
‘Probably Fraser’s,’ Toby offered. An overweight City lawyer, tanned from his Indian Ocean honeymoon and still in the suit he wore to the office, he was jiggling his portly knees and looking wistfully towards the door. They were in a pub and he wanted to smoke. ‘Sounds like the sort of watch he would have.’
‘Did you ever meet him?’
‘A few times.’
‘What was he like?’
Toby shrugged. ‘He was okay,’ he said, putting the emphasis on okay so as to make it vaguely praiseful.
‘She’s said some things…’ James said, thinking aloud.
‘What?’
‘Things about the past. I don’t know. That she still has ties to the past or something. Nothing specific. That must be what she meant…’
‘Probably. Mind if I step outside for a minute?’
They went and stood in front of the pub. It was on a quiet, pristine Chelsea street—Toby’s local. In summer it looked like it was made of flowers, and even now it was festooned with elegant wintergreens. Toby sucked hungrily on a duty-free Marlboro Light in the sharp, smoke-blue evening air. ‘So how’s it going, generally?’ he said.
James told him it was going fine.
What he did not tell him was how on Saturday night after supper, though she had with some solemnity invited his hand into her unbuttoned jeans to feel how wet she was—very wet—she would not let him fuck her. He was left pleading there, literally kneeling on her living-room floor (Summer was away for the weekend again) while he unknowingly paraphrased Marvell.
Had we but World enough, and Time,
This Coyness, Lady, were no Crime…
He had not in fact actually fucked her since the night of the fiasco. She had not let him. In that sense the fiasco was very much ongoing—the latest thing was that she had started to talk of wanting to get him looked over by a doctor. ‘I don’t know where you’ve been,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing.’ He promised her that he had no diseases. They were at that point in bed and he finally turned over and sulked.
No, he did not tell Toby these things.
‘Are you married?’ he said.
What followed—they were having a late supper in the trattoria with the plastic plants next to Russell Square tube—was surprisingly short and simple.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Separated.’
She was obviously prepared for this.
‘Were you planning to tell me?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I should have told you already. It doesn’t make any difference, though. I haven’t seen him for more than a year.’
He was full of questions he wanted to ask her. He had imagined that they would spend the whole evening on the subject. In the end, however—it was obvious that she did not want to talk about it—he just said, ‘Is that his watch by your bed?’
And she said—‘Yes.’
(And the next time he looked, the watch was no longer there.)
So that was that. Except that that night, for the first time since the fiasco, she took the erection which was pressing fervently into the small of her back and pulled it into her. She immediately started to sob. In the very faint light that leaked in from the street he saw her scrumpled face, the shine in the tiny valleys to the sides of her eyes. ‘It’s okay,’ she whispered, worried that he might not understand her tears. ‘It’s okay.’ She smiled tearfully. ‘It’s okay.’
*
Things must have been okay then, in mid-February—there was a minibreak. In the monochrome interior of the Eurostar as it flew through the Kentish twilight, she laid out the key facts—a medieval port, the largest in northern Europe, a sort of doublet-and-hose Hong Kong or Singapore. Then the Scheldt silted up and stopped the opening to the sea (a poor fate for a port), leaving it, for the last four hundred years, an exquisite fossil.
She had a list of things she wanted to see, and he tried to keep her warm—they would have needed a polar explorer’s microfibres to do the job properly—as she led them to grey-skinned emaciated Christs, and many quiet vistas of narrow little houses with their feet in the water. It was the water that made the strongest impression on him. The very sight of it, its black viscosity, made him shudder. In the morning, seen from the hotel window, steam stood thickly on its still, house-edged surface. At the end of each afternoon the sun shone on it, a strange cold yellow. It was heavy and heatless. He pitied the fish in it, and wondered why it wasn’t frozen. The streets were frost-scoured, and the tourist-trade horses—he pitied them too—steamed with their dung in the stone squares.
There was something almost hallucinatory about the place. The tangle of streets, squares and waterways. Everything was extremely small in the Middle Ages—that was very evident. For instance, the tavern they stooped into one twilight. It occupied the lower floor of a tiny house which teetered forward into its alley. There were only two tables, space for no more than a dozen people. The whole interior was made of wood, and smelled of warm smoke from the fireplace. They stayed there for an hour or two, the evening thickening in the quarrels of the windows, while she told him about John of Gaunt—that is, John of Ghent—son of Edward III and Chaucer’s friend and patron, who was born in the Flemish city in 1340 while his parents attended a summit meeting that went on for more than a year. Time, she thought, was different then. Partly for technological reasons. Partly because of the presence of a living idea of eternity. Look at Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna and Joris van der Paele. (They did look at it, in the Groeninge Museum.) The living presence of eternity—a painter striving to paint it. Who would try to paint such a thing now? And why?
Later they hurried through silent streets laughing at the sheer shocking lowness of the temperature, every last joule having seemingly evaporated into the yawning interstellar spaces overhead. For a moment she stopped and looked up at the mess of stars and thought tipsily—The living presence of eternity… Tight-jawed, he hurried her on through the stinging air, towards the lobby of the hotel.
He has often wondered how small birds, stuck outside in them, survive nights like that. Walking Hugo on winter mornings when the puddles are ice and hearing, in the leafless park, their pathetically subdued tweeting always touches him with pity, and a sort of wonder that they are able to survive the subzero night, to make it through to the morning to whistle with such touching fortitude—though weakly—as he walks by swaddled and scarfed up to the eyeballs, and still shivering, still stamping his feet in a struggle to keep the numbness from them. How do they survive?
She shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ she said.
The question did not seem to interest her.
‘You’ve never thought about it?’
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.
They were on the train to Ghent. Outside the windows the Netherlandish banality of the landscape was mitigated by a frost so thick it looked like snow and sparkled in the flooding sunlight.
He said, ‘Am I just being sentimental?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe anthropo… whatever.’
‘What?’
‘Anthropocentric? Is that the word?’
There was something about the way she said, Is that the word? Without the slightest fear of seeming stupid or ignorant. She just knew she wasn’t stupid or ignorant. It was something that secretly impressed and intimidated him, which took him uneasily back to the times he used to sit with Miriam and her friends on his Islington terrace. In the presence of those men—and they were invariably men—James the estate agent would tend not to have much to say for himself, especially when the talk turned intellectual. And the talk was often oppressively intellectual when Miriam’s visitors were there, sitting on his terrace, with the faint odour of vegetation floating up from the water, supping his champagne. Magnus. Karlheinz. And Linhardt. Linhardt. He was the worst. That French twat, with his high forehead and serial killer’s blue eyes…
‘The famous are part of us,’ he is saying, when James steps onto the terrace with the second bottle of Veuve Clicquot, ‘of our identity. That is why they are so fascinating to us, why we feel strange when we see them, why we have even a sense of awe. You can say they are half-abstract beings, ideas, belonging to the world of the mind…’
‘Who’s your favourite celebrity?’ Miriam says.
Linhardt ignores her. ‘I make visible these ideas,’ he says, looking at James, ‘which I think is completely consistent with the definition of art…’
James nods, pours…
Linhardt. The thought of him still makes James want to kick something. Then, he took it out on the towpath—pounding it all the way to Victoria Park, under the low bridges, through the spaces laced with moving light when the sun was shining on the water.
