Two Is Lonely

by Lynne Reid Banks

  But he and David adored each other. He was the one male presence woven like a bright if intermittent thread through David’s entire life from babyhood; what cared he for John’s black skin or for his unacknowledged lack of masculinity? As for the almost childlike simplicity of John’s nature, this merely drew the two of them closer together.

  More by some kind of primitive instinct than because of anything I’d ever told him directly, John knew that I had never wholly shaken Toby off. Though we never talked about this, I believe his intuition about it sprang from empathy, for he, too, had loved Toby, in a manner not entirely different from mine. At the time of Toby’s marriage, John had quietly stopped seeing him. He said it was because he loved me best and didn’t want to hurt me by seeing Toby when I couldn’t; I believed this, but added the silent rider that he wanted also to spare himself much the same sort of pain.

  Once, however, an isolated incident occurred which John reported to me in full. It had happened around Christmas of the year before. John came down for Christmas as he invariably did—it would not have been the same for either me or David without him, and I sometimes thought he enjoyed it more than either of us—and while we were filling David’s stocking, in the early hours of Christmas morning, John told me that Toby had recently brought his wife to the night-spot where John played guitar with his all-black combo.

  With John it was useless even to try to hide my feelings or pretend, so I was free to ask him outright all my questions. How did he look? How did they seem together? What did they say, to him and to each other? He answered everything quite simply and exactly in the way I needed, seeming as he did so to provide me with a glimpse of the inner situation which only his deep-seeing instinctual eye could perceive.

  ‘They not right together, Janie. Sat there all night with their hands lockin’ together on the table, but like two people drownin’, never lookin’ at each other, never lettin’ go of each other, hardly talkin’. They only talk to me, when I got my break and sit with ’em and we had drinks. This little Whistler, she very sweet, I have to tell you. You don’t hate her, do you?’ I shook my head, busy wrapping a yellow sugar pig, and thus not having to look at him. ‘That’s good, because ain’t no harm in her, except she’s too young for bein’ a good wife for Toby. Was hard to find what to talk about after such a long time we ain’t seen each other, and Toby don’t seem like Toby, he different, far away, lookin’ at me like he’s all the time rememberin’ . . . He only come really alive when I asked about their kids. They got these two little girls—is this hurtin’ too much?’

  I frowned and shook my head again. It was hurting like hell as a matter of fact but it was a pain I didn’t want to forego.

  ‘They showed me pictures. Pretty little things, like black kids except they white of course, curly hair and full lips and little round faces, and big eyes, only too serious, like they know already what’s comin’ to ’em . . . No, Jane, I ain’t wrong. It can’t last. I see it in the way their hands gripped together and the way they burst into talkin’ when a third person comes, like they had nobody to open up to except some stranger. She all of a sudden sparklin’ and laughin’ too much and even kind of jokin’ about Toby, criticism’ him to me before his face, but it was wrong somehow. Not that she don’t love him; but she’s got things to say against him, and she’s so young she got to get someone on her side, even a big spade she never saw in her life before. Say, this is great!’ He broke off for a few moments to play with a toy monkey; you squeezed a rubber bulb and it played a drum.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘Then she go off to the ladies, and Toby sittin’ there quiet and starin’ at the band although he ain’t listenin’, and suddenly he looks in my face and says, “Do you ever see her, Johnny?” And I knew he means you.’

  He had the toy in his huge hands and he turned his back on me so I wouldn’t feel him watching for my reaction. I found myself sitting down on the sofa, breathing deeply, the wrapping paper silent in my hands.

  ‘I tell him I see you often and you’re well and David is well and your business is goin’ good. I tell him you’re alone. I knew what he wanted so I tell him. Why make him ask? And he sit there starin’ at me like he wants to say something and can’t, and then he says, “It’s the kids. What will happen to them? We can’t go on much longer, but it’s a question of the kids.” Then after a bit, just as she’s comin’ back, squeezing between the tables in her beautiful rich dress, wavin’ to us with like this fixed sort of smile, he watches her comin’ and says under his breath, “I feel like her father, too, sometimes.”’

  It was mainly due to this renewal of belief in the underground tie between Toby and me, that I swopped trips with Jo and sent her to Paris in my place in February. After what John had told me, it would have been quite impossible to go to bed with Pietro even once more without a sense of unequivocal betrayal.

  It occurred to me that Toby was too fair to expect me to have lived like a nun all these years (although I practically had). Just the same, it filled me with irrational dismay to imagine a renewed relationship with Toby now that I had slept with another man, one whom I couldn’t even claim to have loved—at least, not in any sense congruent with the emotional touchstone lodged in my memory with Toby’s name on it, like a grave which now promised (or threatened) to give up its dead.

  It may seem quite absurd that a woman of my age should have found it so difficult to forgive herself for one solitary affair in six years, and a pretty unintense one at that. But I was labouring under the kind of puritanical conditioning which is harder to break out of than a steel chrysalis. I was brought up to think that you shouldn’t have affairs, or at least as few as possible, and that each one represented a moral defeat. Of course nobody thinks that nowadays. I don’t think it myself, but apparently I still feel it. Dottie thought you could have as many as you liked, providing they were all part of ‘the search’. To her, each affair was a sort of dry-run for marriage, and, other things being equal, you had no cause to reproach yourself, after or during, as long as you had gone into it with what she loftily called ‘serious intentions’. The problematic emergence of the fact that the man’s intentions were less weighty might be a burden on your heart, sooner or later, but not on your conscience.

  My father’s variation of middle-class morality, however, had hamstrung me to a greater degree. The fact that he not only had me convent-educated but actually turned me out of the house when my first fumbling attempts at a sexual relationship, in my mid-twenties, resulted in the conception of David, illustrates this. I had fondly supposed that motherhood, independence and Toby had liberated me; they evidently hadn’t. Possibly the shock of getting pregnant at the first go-off, not to mention all the trials and heart-aches that followed, had served to reinforce my subconscious conviction that all sexual pleasure has a heavy price. Though how much could even the most punitive fates impose as a fine for dear, Gallic, no-strings Pietro?

  He began as one of those oh-be-joyful things that men can be heard declaring have nothing to do with their everyday lives—and no more had it, in its way. I was in Paris on shop business, in about 1963, when I made the discovery that just once in my life I actually was liberated enough to bump into a man painting Notre Dame (a picture of it, not the spire itself), talk to him casually for a while, go for a friendly drink with him in the gay, euphoric, live-for-the-moment atmosphere of the Place du Tertre; on from there to a fabulous eight course lunch—and finish up in his big brass bed amid a stench of turps at four o’clock in the afternoon.

  We didn’t, as I recall, rise from it until late at night, when only renewed hunger drove us forth. We ate onion soup and drank a carafe of wine with a bunch of his cronies, who all kidded us in a matey, ribald fashion unthinkable in England; after which brief, revitalising interlude we went laughing, singing and dancing through the sex-lined streets of Montmartre and up those endless steps, back to bed.

  And that was that. Next morning we kissed a fond farewell over huge bowls of
fragrant coffee, croissants and peaches he’d gone out early to buy. He rolled up one of his pictures and jammed it through the umbrella-loop of my suitcase, and took his canvasses and easel back to the Left Bank, while I went waltzing off to do my buying in a state of unutterable, if astonished, physical fulfilment. It was only when I returned to sane, sober, sexless Surrey that I paused to ask myself just what the hell I had thought I was doing.

  And answer came there none. Just a gently fading sense of what I can only call luxury. It had nothing to do with Toby, nor, as a matter of fact, with me, really. It was just isolated and innocent and lovely. Which only goes to show that Dottie and I don’t work on the same moral precepts at all.

  I revisited Paris and Pietro four more times, and each time it followed the same pattern. I looked forward to it, bought frivolous new clothes for it, worried for fear he might be gone or married or changed or that I might have grown too old to attract him. In the event he was always there, always sweet and welcoming and amorous, and always I returned after two or three enchanted days with mild reluctance to manless reality.

  But this could only continue so long as Toby was not part of that reality. The merest hint that he was, or might be, was enough to germinate the guilt which had lain doggo for four years. So this last time Jo, puzzled but uncomplaining, went to Paris, where everything naturally went wrong—she came home after a wasted week of cancelled meetings and pouring rain with a rotten cold, saying sourly that I must be a witch.

  And then one fine Sunday morning I opened a paper and saw Toby’s photo grinning at me over a caption which said: ‘Toby Cohen, whose fourth novel Oh Lord How Long? came out last month to rave reviews, is being sued for divorce by his wife Melissa. The suit is not defended. The couple, married seven years, have two daughters, Rachel, 6, and Clarissa, 4.’ I hadn’t let myself realise till that moment that during the whole time he’d been married I had been waiting—so secretly I hadn’t even let myself know it—for the marriage to crash.

  This, if true, could scarcely enhance my image of myself. Because what humane woman could wish upon another the horrible disaster of a broken marriage at the age of 24? Not to mention the children. But there was the private grin exposed, the private pain set down in terse print, and all I’d been hiding from myself was stripped away at one stroke, like a bear’s huge paw exposing a bone.

  From that moment on, I lived in hourly expectation of hearing from Toby. I realised it was unreasonable, unrealistic, absurd . . . Seven years without a word, after all . . . yet with every mail delivery, every ring of the phone, buried expectation crystallised into illogical but absolute certainty. Time after time I was disappointed.

  All I had to go on was a brief conversation over the phone with Billie. Billie Lee was a sort of friend, or rather acquaintance of mine, and my only real remaining link with Toby. Not that I had been much in touch with her over the years, but she was the literary agent who handled my aunt’s book, which was still selling; she was also Toby’s agent. Furthermore she happened to be—well—Whistler’s mother. She had never been happy about the marriage, and perhaps the greatest irony of my life had been her coming to me for advice about whether to let Whistler marry Toby . . .

  She now told me Whistler had come home to her with the two little girls, but that she, Billie, didn’t know how long the arrangement could last. Whistler was taking the divorce very badly, and most of the work of looking after the children fell upon Billie, who simply hadn’t the time—’Nor, frankly,’ she’d added with characteristic tartness, ‘the inclination. I’m not the grandmotherly type exactly. To tell the truth I think they’d be better off with their father, but then I suppose he’d never get any books written—which, both as his agent and his mother-in-law, I would naturally deplore.’

  I didn’t dare ask her about Toby, but I felt obscurely angry with her for not realising how badly I needed to know. I went through the days with a sensation of continually holding my breath. This feeling was aggravated whenever I was with Andy, which seemed to be surprisingly often. I say surprisingly; it wouldn’t have surprised me at first, when I had felt this definite current of interest between us; but the relationship did not seem to develop along any of the normal channels. When I tried to analyse it, it seemed to me that he was behaving as if there were some agreement between us that we had already thrashed out—almost, I sometimes thought from his possessive behaviour when we were together, an agreement to marry. He even made old remarks from time to time which bore this fantastic theory out—oblique references to the future, a future by inference already mapped out but in fact not overtly spoken about between us, ever. My whole mind centred on Toby, or rather, divided between him and David, I floated along with Andy, meeting him, going out with him, allowing his comforting male presence to cushion me, and didn’t ask too many questions. My tiredness contributed to this . . . If he had made the least demand on me physically, apart from holding my hand or my arm, I would have been brought back quite sharply and positively from my limbo. Perhaps he sensed this . . . Anyway, he became simply a man who was always there, and as such somewhat surreptitiously gained a certain undeniable emotional value. Apart from John, who hardly counted in that sphere, he was the only man I had ever known of whom this could be said. By some obscure variation on Parkinson’s Law, simply by virtue of being constantly and dependably around, my emotional life (if it could be termed that) spread out to include him, and he became, for all his peculiarities of temperament, speech and manner, a fundamental part of the picture of my life—how essential a part, I dimly supposed, I would only find out if and when he was no longer there.

  Chapter 3

  THE huge open field on which David and Amanda had used to ride was now a shambles of planks, metal rods, piles of large hollow grey bricks, heaps of sand and gravel, and a large noisy concrete-mixer, among a lot of other unbucolic objects. The flat irregular foundation lay in the middle like a lifeless concrete lake. The friendly gate had been taken off its hinges and part of the venerable hedge torn out to facilitate the entrance of lorries and other vehicles. Of the cluster of trees which, from time immemorial, had stood against the elements in the middle, only three remained; the rest had been bulldozed out or chopped down. Some of these sad dead giants had not yet been carted away, and lay on their sides in distant corners, the slowly rotting corpses of beauty and antiquity.

  I looked at it all with a sorrow and regret I could hardly explain or conceal. Andy, coming to meet me, saw my eyes on the raped hedge, the desecrated ground and the murdered trees, and turned me quietly towards him with both hands.

  ‘My dear Jane,’ he said gently. ‘I’m a fool. I shouldn’t have let you see this.’

  ‘But I knew.’

  ‘Knowing is one thing; seeing, another.’ The workmen were all around us and he dropped his hands, but he held me with his eyes. ‘Forgive me for doing it, and forgive me for showing it to you. I can see it’s hurt you. You shan’t come again until it’s finished, until the ground is healed. But just today I needed you to be here.’

  That word ‘needed’ sprang alive and armed into my mind, lit up like a sudden warning sign. He had never used it before in connection with me. John and Toby between them had taught me that this word is not to be ignored or despised in relations between men and women. Unless I were quite sure (which I wasn’t) that I didn’t want Andy, this was a turning-point which I must take the greatest care of. It was where I had gone wrong before.

  I pushed the sadness away and smiled at him. ‘Why? What’s going to happen?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  He sat me down on a portable bench the workmen used for their tea-breaks and disappeared into a little prefab, re-emerging after a few moments with the foreman, who blew a whistle (I hadn’t known foremen dared to do that any more, but I suppose it’s all right when it signals a break) and all the men downed tools and gathered round. Andy had gone to the car, and now came back with a large basket, from which he took several bottles and enough glasses f
or everyone. The foreman brought a table out of the prefab and the drinks were arranged on it.

  Then the foreman cleared his throat. ‘Now then, men. Mr. Andrews wants us to lay the foundation stone today in a little ceremony, and then as you see, he wants us all to have a drink with him.’

  The men, who’d obviously been briefed beforehand, trooped off to one corner of the irregularly shaped foundations, and we followed. Andy put his hand between my elbows and my side; I felt it warm there, through my spring coat. It was the way he usually walked with me. He had never kissed me. This restraint—and it was restraint, as my blood told me very loudly every time we were together—not merely puzzled but alarmed me. The longer he went on not kissing me, of course, the more I wanted him to, and the more I felt him wanting to; I could feel our mutual desire to kiss building up in both of us like a head of steam, and sometimes the force of it in myself frightened me. What would happen when . . .? The lightest touch, like now on my arm through my coat, produced a most exaggerated reaction.

  The ceremony was brief, but oddly touching; perhaps I was touched chiefly because I could see Andy was, and I was beginning, in spite of myself, to share his reactions to things. Two of the men lifted up a big slab of stone, and another man spread fresh cement on another slab almost flush with the ground. Andy took hold of one end of the stone himself and the foreman took the other, and together they lugged it until it was directly above the cemented slab; then they carefully lowered it into place. Andy took a builder’s trowel and tapped the top corners, and then scraped off the residual cement that had oozed out like butter from the stone sandwich. The men clapped politely. Andy stood back from the stone and looked at me. He had no hat on; his brown hair had fallen across his face. He grinned like a boy. Suddenly he handed me the trowel.

  ‘Hold it upside down and tap the corners gently,’ he ordered.