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  ‘You don’t like it?’

  She took off her hat, bowing her head slightly to one side to draw it off. Then she shook her head, sweeping back her hair.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘You don’t mind it?’

  She glanced round for somewhere to put her hat, laying it eventually on the table beside the flowers.

  ‘It’s exactly,’ she said, ‘as I imagined.’

  ‘Home from home.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Then she laughed.

  She had gone to the window and glanced out. He couldn’t see her expression. The sound of her laughter was like that of some other presence, derisive, looking in from outside.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s like another planet.’

  She glanced back at him. Perhaps she was disappointed.

  ‘There’s a kitchen as well,’ he said, ‘across the landing.’ He explained the few amenities. ‘We’re on the phone.’

  The telephone stood on a pile of directories on the floor.

  ‘Have we anything in to drink?’ she said.

  ‘No.’ It was the one thing he’d forgotten.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  She took off her coat.

  He took it from her, scarcely glancing at her, searching for somewhere to put it.

  He took it to the wardrobe.

  ‘I don’t think,’ she said, ‘in there.’

  He looked round again, found a peg at the back of the door, and hung it up.

  She was wearing a black dress, flared slightly from the waist and with buttoned sleeves.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘We’re here.’

  She took a cigarette from her bag and lit it with the small lighter, then moved over to the fire and stood by it, stroking her arms.

  ‘Well,’ she said, looking up. ‘How are you?’

  ‘We could look somewhere else,’ he said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘I’ll give you my share of the rent.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Is this all the heating there is?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  She turned back and gazed at the fire, her arms folded, the cigarette held from her.

  He watched her for some time in silence.

  She looked up finally at the wall in front of her, glanced round for somewhere to stub her cigarette, then dropped it in the hearth.

  When he hesitated she turned round and slowly raised her arms.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said, smiling.

  There was the same look of insolence, almost violent.

  Just as quickly it disappeared.

  She went to the door, sprang the lock and bolted it.

  In some real way this wasn’t what he had intended. His arms shook. His legs scarcely held him.

  When he closed the curtains the room was illuminated solely by the fire.

  Four

  It was to Coles that he most wanted to confess it.

  He rang him at home one evening – the college was no longer in session – and met him for a drink. At the last moment he hesitated from revealing anything directly, merely insinuating by his exuberance that something astonishing had happened which raised him beyond the level to which at one time he had felt himself to be irretrievably condemned.

  Coles watched him with a smile.

  ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ had been his reply.

  And yet, if not directly, it was with Coles and with Kay that he celebrated his new-found freedom, the sense of liberation which, once he was away from the room, came pouring out.

  There, everything was dark and serious.

  The first week they met at the flat every day. There was a blind, almost malicious intensity about their encounters. Only when he left did he feel his spirits rise. Each time he reached home he greeted Kay with a long embrace.

  Going to the flat during the day or, if he could invent an excuse, in the evening, he saw Helen each time with a fresh shock of recognition, of suspicion and disbelief. With her his feelings were never still. They ran up against one another, erupting and breaking. Nothing, while he was with her, could rid him of this feeling, a kind of fear. He could never look at her directly. He was most aware of her when she was some distance away, in the darkness, moving towards him or across the room.

  Once he was exhausted he could never lie near her.

  He got up, made some tea in the kitchen, gazing out at the tenement opposite and the rows of parked cars below.

  Occasionally a face would peer out from one of the windows, glance out, sometimes at the sky, then vanish.

  She was always remote.

  Between leaving her in the bed and her appearing fully dressed he never really looked at her. Once she was dressed he would stand across the room admiring her, aware of his pleasure in watching her come and go.

  He learned very little about her. The less he knew the easier he felt.

  ‘I suppose your husband knows nothing of this arrangement?’ he asked her.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Doesn’t he think it strange, you going out?’

  ‘He’s never there,’ she said.

  ‘What time does he go to work on a morning?’

  ‘It varies.’

  ‘And coming back?’

  She shrugged. ‘Much the same.’

  During these examinations she would be lying on her back, smoking, submitting to his questions with a vague air of irritation. He learned not to enquire too directly, nor too deeply. In a way they were both content.

  ‘I’ve never once heard you use my name,’ she told him one morning as, separately, they were about to leave.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t like it.’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘Or perhaps you’ve forgotten it.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Well, then . . .’ She waited.

  ‘Helen,’ he said.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said and, laughing, kissed his cheek.

  Shortly after Christmas Kay’s parents arrived.

  His father-in-law was a country doctor, stout, white-haired, with a red face and bluish eyes, self-amused, quiet, self-effacing. The mother too was quiet, modest, open-faced: they drew back slightly at the sudden strength of his affection. ‘Well, no one’s been quite so glad to see me,’ the mother said, ‘for such a long time.’

  She wasn’t sure, quite, what to make of his embrace.

  There was a certain ruthlessness in him they might have recognized from the start, a certain clumsiness, a kind of blindness. They stepped back slightly, full of smiles.

  They loved the children. When they came they were taken out of Kay’s hands. Almost their entire time was spent with them, this bridge which he had helped to erect for them, flowing into the future. He sensed a fresh purpose in their lives.

  When, at the flat, he next met Helen, she had drawn back, alarmed.

  ‘What is it?’ she said. Perhaps she suspected she was the cause of his sudden affection. It was the first time he had seen her frightened.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I feel fine. Splendid.’

  He walked about the room, no longer ashamed.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You seem very strange.’

  ‘Shall I see you tomorrow?’ he’d asked her on leaving.

  ‘If you like,’ she’d said, and turned away.

  Later, when he returned home, he felt this same elation growing, a weight of feeling which the house and its occupants seemed suddenly too frail to withstand. He drew back as he entered, restrained, smiling.

  It was a desire t
o fondle all he possessed that overwhelmed him. He carried the children to bed, embraced them, standing with his arm round Kay as she put out the light.

  She had watched him with a half-frown as if his pleasure somehow eluded her. It made her smile.

  ‘Colin’s been in such a strange mood, Mother,’ she said, as if she might well have confided more to her parent if she had only known how. ‘I think it’s the prospect of him working on his own,’ she added, ‘away from the college.’

  ‘Well,’ his mother-in-law said, laughing, ‘I don’t think I disapprove.’

  She stood so hopefully on the threshold of their existence, afraid at times, out of her anxiety, to look in.

  And really, in that gesture, the closing of her eyes to a conflict – frightened, exhilarated, the whole thing suddenly portentous, larger than life – he saw all that he loved in this other woman: a measure of all those things which he both possessed and had yet transcended. He was moving into new realms, rising beyond her, bearing her along on this new and enormous tide.

  Later, at night, lying in bed with Kay and listening to her parents’ voices as they, in bed too, talked in the room below, he said, ‘Really, only now, you know, am I beginning to get a feeling of things growing.’

  ‘From what?’ she said.

  ‘From the past into the future. It’s so rare you get such a sense.’

  ‘Isn’t it a strain,’ she said, ‘having my parents here?’

  ‘They always make me feel responsible, more responsible than I feel I really am,’ he said. ‘And yet now it’s as if they’re here to confirm, not remind.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you feel a difference?’ he said.

  ‘I think so.’

  She still bore such heavy wounds about her. It was strange, the way he had forgotten.

  ‘You’re glad of so many things these days,’ she said. ‘It’s uncanny.’

  ‘I really feel,’ he said, ‘that I’m being carried along by things. I don’t feel the need to resist. I don’t, any longer, feel frightened.’

  For a while she was silent. In spite of everything it sounded remote.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘We’ll see,’ and added, ‘My mother’s decided to stay a few days longer, after Dad’s gone back. She must be feeling pleased.’

  And it was Kay’s mother he kissed as he left the house the following day; an embrace which, carried from one woman to the other, united all his worlds, bringing together at long last the extremes of his existence.

  It was the wholeness he brought to the flat; Helen’s surprise was that of someone turning to be greeted by one person – only, at the last moment, to be confronted confusingly by several.

  He came to her so full and overflowing. She vanished before him. In the end he was astonished to find that he was not alone.

  ‘I have to go away for a few days,’ she told him as she was leaving. ‘I won’t be able to see you for a while.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Oh. A conference.’ She shrugged.

  ‘With your husband.’

  ‘That’s right.”

  ‘And you can’t get out of it.’

  ‘I go with him every year. It’s hardly worth the trouble to make this an exception.’

  ‘What does your husband do?’ he said. He had asked her several times before.

  ‘Oh. Nothing important.’

  ‘You find it pretty boring?’ he suggested.

  ‘More or less.’ She smiled, watching his expression.

  ‘You find most kinds of work boring,’ he said. ‘I mean, you have much the same response to mine.’

  ‘It’s a means to an end,’ she said. ‘At least, that’s what they tell me.’

  He laughed, too, at his own intentness and said, ‘Well, in any case, I’ll miss you.’

  ‘I’ll miss you, too,’ she said.

  Yet once she had gone he felt relieved.

  It was a fight; like a frontier he was pushing back. He needed time to consolidate the ground.

  When she came back she seemed changed, perhaps more distant. She was slow, even thoughtful.

  ‘What will happen to all this,’ he said, ‘when your husband finds out?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Or if.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She seemed surprised. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Do you want to end it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not just yet?’

  ‘Not ever. I can’t see any end to it.’

  She looked at him in disbelief, with a kind of irritation.

  Then, as she was leaving, she said, ‘You never asked about the conference.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d want me to.’

  He had never really believed her excuse for going away.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

  ‘I’d like to know,’ he said.

  ‘Really. It’s not important.’ She began to laugh.

  Curiously, it was his distrust of her that made her real.

  There had been one moment, the day before Kay’s mother was due to leave, when he and his mother-in-law had been left together in the house and he had been about to tell her everything. He had arranged to go to the flat and before he left he turned to her with the confession on his lips. He had the distinct impression she would have been pleased to hear it. Instead, he stooped forward and kissed her cheek saying, ‘I have to go. Look after the children,’ as if he were leaving them for good.

  She had merely said, ‘All right, I will,’ looking up at him with a kind of pleasure, impatient, half-amused.

  He was happier than he had ever been. And he was never happier now than when he was returning home, or than when he was about to leave home to go to the flat and looked up, thinking of it and her.

  The attention he paid Kay never flagged. One evening, after taking her out to dinner and getting drunk, he told her suddenly, in his expansive mood, that he thought he ought to take a room somewhere, away from the house. He was surprised himself that the thing had come out so directly.

  ‘To do what?’ she said.

  ‘Really to get down to work, I suppose. I’m not getting through all I want to at the college.’

  She looked puzzled. After a moment she said, ‘Well, if you really have to.’ Then adding, ‘Can you afford it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He held her hand, reassuring her. ‘I’ll have to think about it. It’s only a suggestion.’

  Yet, now the college was back in session and the area crowded with students, he had to plan his meetings at the flat with greater care.

  With this restriction came a sort of restlessness.

  ‘What are we supposed to be doing here?’ he asked Helen on one occasion.

  ‘Doing?’

  ‘Is it just something of a convenience to you?’

  ‘If it was,’ she said, ‘I’d hardly go to all this trouble.’

  ‘But then, by making it difficult you can give it a kind of significance.’

  ‘Why do you think I come here?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said quickly. After a moment he added, ‘I suppose I’m too frightened of losing you to answer that.’

  On another occasion he said, ‘Perhaps we’d better discuss it. What it is, I mean, we’re doing here.’

  ‘Discuss!’ she said, lighting a cigarette. She flicked the lighter shut and turned away.

  He began to feel cheated. To feel, that is, that he was cheating himself. As time passed he wanted to make something out of his feelings for her. Nothing stood still.

  Kay had grown quieter, more contained. In return, his own response grew more deliberate. The continual need e
ach time he returned home of having to court her, to reassure himself of her, to question her by his gestures as well as by his silences, began to wear him down.

  He began secretly to despise her: someone who could so easily be deceived. Her naïvety irritated him. If she knew something why didn’t it come out?

  He began to hate his work.

  He had in any case done very little. It had become quite meaningless and absurd.

  At first he had carried on with it, borne along by these new forces that had flooded into his life. Yet quite soon it began to seem like one more appendage to his past, one more impediment, that sense of delay which persisted at every level of his life, frustrating him, holding him back.

  It was all wearing very thin.

  One evening at the flat he decided he would have to tell Kay what was happening.

  Helen was lying on the bed, gazing at the ceiling, smoking. He no longer felt any obligation to avoid either her body or her looks.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said when he saw her lack of response.

  ‘You do what you think fit,’ she said, gazing at the ceiling. ‘In any case, I would have thought she knew by now.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well . . .’ She glanced across at him and half-smiled.

  ‘You don’t mind if I tell her?’

  She shook her head slowly. ‘So long as you don’t tell her who I am.’

  ‘Doesn’t it make any difference to you, her knowing?’

  ‘What can I do? I suppose I’ve always assumed she did know, one way or another.’

  ‘And assumed she’d made no bother?’

  ‘She’s that kind of woman, isn’t she?’

  ‘You don’t know her. How can you tell?’ Absurdly, he found himself in the situation of defending Kay against her.

  ‘No, I don’t know,’ she said, apparently contented.

  ‘Really, all you’re wanting here is a position you can withdraw from,’ he told her, ‘any time you like.’