‘Mum,’ says Teresa, ‘what is all this?’
‘It’s a novel. Written by a young man who lives half-way up a Welsh mountain – also a somewhat traditional figure. Anyway … if her parents wouldn’t let her marry him she would run away with him. So her parents packed her off to a convenient friend of theirs who owned a castle in a distant place of unspeakable desolation, where he was to lock her up and keep her safe. This character was known as the Lord of the Far Land and needless to say he had designs on the Lady himself. So Talusa escaped from him, being a not unresourceful girl and powered as she was by consuming passion. And she began to search for the Knight, who was of course also searching for her.’
‘How had she met the Knight in the first place?’ inquires Teresa. ‘Through a dating agency?’
‘This is a serious story about serious matters. I’ll treat that remark with the contempt it deserves. As a matter of fact Rohan met Talusa because he rescued her from a unicorn. And of course we know what that’s all about, and I have to admit that I felt a certain resistance to the scene at first. Oh, come on … I thought. But it’s cleverly done – in one way he’s hamming it up and in another it’s rather beautiful and moving and distinctly erotic. Talusa is picking flowers in this meadow and there’s the unicorn, only she hasn’t seen it. It’s stalking her. And Rohan who is hunting comes out of the wood and sees what’s going on. Luke, stop that racket – I’m telling your mother an interesting tale and she can’t hear a word. Have you brought some juice for him? Right – that’s better. So Talusa looks up and sees the unicorn and Rohan both at once, and it’s simultaneous panic and unquenchable desire. The unicorn is thundering through the flowers towards Talusa now, horn at the ready, and Rohan raises his bow and takes aim …’
‘And bang goes another endangered species,’ says Teresa.
‘This is not a politically correct story. And in any case Rohan’s arrow does not kill the unicorn. The unicorn is merely wounded. It turns on Rohan, who manages to elude it and to snatch up Talusa, fling her on to his horse and gallop away with her. The unicorn is left bleeding on to the cowslips and will turn up later on in the story because it is now consumed with hatred for the Knight and is out to get him. Or the Lady, as the case may be. And indeed this becomes a recurrent theme. At one point Talusa is surrounded by an entire herd of unicorns. And on another occasion the unicorn turns up fortuitously when the Knight is busy dealing with a dragon, and the dragon’s attention is diverted in the nick of time. There’s a chilling pursuit by werewolves when Talusa is searching for the Knight in an impenetrable forest to which she has been directed by a sorcerer with ambivalent motives … Luke sounds as though he’s dropped his juice.’
Teresa dives over into the back of the car; Luke is once more silenced. ‘It sounds a weird novel. Is this what people read nowadays?’
‘Probably not. I fear for him, this young man. Mercifully his next opus appears to be more like a fictional version of the stuff on those machines in amusement arcades – quite incomprehensible unless you’re into that sort of thing but I dare say there’s a market of enthusiasts and maybe he’ll make his fortune. Personally I rather go for the Lady and the Knight, though of course he’s got it all wrong, my young man up his mountain.’
‘Got what wrong?’ asks Teresa after a moment.
‘Love. Unswerving irresistible romantic love to die for.’
‘So who dies? The Knight, I suppose.’
‘He does not. I told you this story is not politically correct. Talusa searches in vain for the Knight, overcoming insuperable difficulties and fortified by her trust and devotion. And indeed to begin with the Knight too is searching. But he displays an increasing tendency towards distraction, not to say dalliance. He finds frequent consolation with obliging wood sprites and water nymphs and suchlike riff-raff and eventually he drifts into a liaison with an extremely fetching witch.’
‘Definitely incorrect,’ says Teresa. ‘Even children’s books don’t have witches these days. So what about the Lady?’
‘She gets to hear about the Knight and his witch. Naturally. There’s always someone on hand to make sure a person hears about that sort of thing. And her heart is broken. She is drained of all joy, all hope, all expectation. She wants only to die. This is of course where I part company with my author. He lets her kill herself. He allows her – he encourages her. She drowns herself in a lake deep in the forest and sinks to oblivion, clutching armfuls of flowers. It’s the Lady of Shalott and Ophelia rolled into one. Totally unacceptable.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ says Teresa, rather coolly.
‘Huh … Acquiescence. Tantamount to saying to the Knight – I’m terribly terribly hurt but I’ll remove myself from the scene and not bother you any further. Sanctimonious self-sacrifice.’
‘There’s nothing she could do about her feelings. If that’s how she felt, then that’s how she felt.’
‘It’s not feelings I’m talking about – it’s actions.’
‘So what should she have done, then?’ demands Teresa.
‘Oh, there’s a rich choice. She could have done a deal with the unicorn or the werewolves or the Lord of the Far Land and had the pair of them duffed up or written off entirely. We don’t have the constrictions of the rule of law in this story, so it’s each for herself. She could have relieved her feelings by setting the tabloid press on them or by sending them poison-pen letters for the next ten years. Best of all, she could have just walked away from the whole situation and set herself up with a more traditionally reliable Knight if she felt pair-bonding to be so absolutely essential. Or she could have cashed in on her recent experience and contacts to set up a lucrative Adventure Holiday tourism agency and become very rich.’
‘Mum,’ says Teresa, ‘you’ve missed the Hadbury turn, you know.’
‘Never mind, we’ll go the long way round. Is Luke asleep?’
‘Yes. Did you say all this to the author?’
‘Good heavens no. Give me credit for a degree of professional tact. It’s his book. I keep my opinions to myself. Well – up to a point. And it must have something if the reader’s responses are thus aroused. I doubt if I’ll start being opinionated about the history of the North Sea oil industry.’
The Hadbury swimming pool is on the outskirts of the town, a part of the surrounding belt which services the place and the surrounding area – industrial estates, hypermarkets, golf course, arts-and-leisure complex. The countryside cannot now survive without the facilities available to an urban population, and Hadbury supplies these.
Pauline and Teresa get into their swimming costumes in a clammy changing room and instal themselves beside the training pool, which pullulates with small children. Luke is at first silent with amazement. He stands on the battered grass of the play area and stares at this scene of manic leaping figures and of heaving blue water which is backed by continuous noise – a high-pitched clamour as though the chatter of a flock of birds were turned up to an exaggerated volume. Teresa takes him into the water. She jumps him up and down. His amazement turns to apprehension and then to delight. His fickle universe has come up yet again with a new dimension of experience, in which air melts into water, in which dry becomes wet becomes warm becomes cold.
Pauline joins them. ‘You go and have a proper swim in the big pool. I’ll take him for a bit.’
Teresa goes. Pauline walks Luke around in the pool, amid the shrieks and the thrashing limbs. She trails him in his plastic ring on the sparkling, dimpled, chlorine-smelling water. She has forgotten now that turquoise pool in France and is thinking of her own mother, who did not do things like this with Teresa. Her own mother, she realizes, did not much care for children. She saw them simply as an essential accessory if you were to be a fully paid-up member of society. They were a credential, along with the mortgage and the pension. You married, you secured an income and a house, you had children – in her case, one child. And in due course your own child too gave birth, thus conferring upon you ge
netic respectability in the eyes of the world.
Pauline took Teresa on visits to her grandparents every six months or so. Harry did not accompany them – he was of course always too busy. Pauline’s parents accepted this without comment and perhaps with relief. They did not know how to deal with Harry; his conversation baffled them and his clothes unsettled Pauline’s mother. ‘I thought you said he had a senior position now in his work? So what will people think if he wears jeans all the time like that?’
‘They’ll think he’s reassuringly conventional,’ said Pauline. Her mother looked at her with scepticism.
Teresa was a source of interest to her grandparents, but not an emotional focus. On each visit Pauline’s mother would comment favourably (or otherwise) on the child’s growth and appearance, and then leave it at that. She was without the capacity to revel in what was demonstrably a standard procedure. ‘Well, she’s coming along quite normally, that’s the thing,’ she would say. Pauline realized that her own childhood too had been without that dimension of exaltation.
At the darkest point of the Harry years she felt impelled, on one occasion, to correct her mother’s complacent vision of her circumstances. Honesty had driven her to try this once or twice before, but her oblique attempts to counter her mother’s construction of a marriage that mirrored her own had been brushed aside.
‘Harry well?’ her mother inquired.
‘Harry is well, so far as I know. I don’t see a great deal of him.’
Her mother ignored this invitation to a more intimate exchange, for such it was. ‘He’ll have a lot on his plate, now he’s in this new job.’
And when Pauline stepped further yet into disclosure her mother backed off like a nervous cat.
‘Harry well?’
‘I wouldn’t know. Harry is in America.’
Her mother looked away, sensing danger. ‘It’s nice that he’s in demand like this.’
‘Is it?’ said Pauline. ‘Yes and no. The trouble is that the more he is in demand with others the less my demands are taken into account.’
Her mother looked disapproving, but not of Harry. ‘Men have to put their work first, that’s reasonable. Harry’s doing well, that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’
‘Mother,’ said Pauline, ‘I’m not talking about Harry’s work.’
At which point her mother glimpsed the truth, and took cover. ‘I wonder what Teresa’s up to in the garden – I’ll just pop out and see.’
Pauline never raised the subject again, and when shortly afterwards she announced that she was leaving Harry, and for what reason, her mother’s response came in the form of conventional expressions of pained regret that carried the implication that Pauline herself must be found wanting in some way. Pauline perceived that the concept of marital infidelity was not one with which her mother was familiar. She knew of it as a theme of fiction and of drama (she read library books and went occasionally to a film) but did not see it as applicable to real life and least of all to her immediate world. The notion of her own husband consorting with another woman was inconceivable. His infidelities were with the golf club, the Sunday newspapers and the test match on the radio.
Teresa returns from her swim. She sits on the grass with her wet hair sleeked back and a towel over her shoulders, watching the children in the pool. There is a pinched look on her face, a look which Pauline knows intimately, has seen time and time again since Teresa was six, nine, twelve and washed up on some malign reef of guilt, chagrin, disappointment, betrayal.
Pauline talks. She talks about the fact that Luke’s hair will soon need cutting, about Hugh who called yesterday and sent fond messages to Teresa, about a news item that caught her attention over breakfast. She talks about Chaundy with whom she had a chat yesterday. The wheat, she tells Teresa, is burning up, it seems – you’d think the stuff would revel in all this sun, but no, it’s frying and Chaundy is losing money by the day, unless we have rain. ‘My heart does not bleed – he’s a rapacious so-and-so …’ Teresa makes perfunctory responses. ‘Mmn …’ she says. ‘Did he?’ ‘Really? I didn’t know that.’ She is elsewhere, plunged in private malaise.
Something has happened. There has been some hint – something amiss, something awry.
Pauline takes a breath. Then she reaches again for the unicorns. ‘… So I’m quite sorry to be finished with this book,’ she tells Teresa. ‘It’s a change to find yourself so involved with a story that you start arguing with it. In a way I think it’s because it reminded me of a woman I once knew to whom that sort of thing happened – minus of course the unicorn or the dragon or the werewolves but the same damn business of obsessive, inescapable passion for a guy who was not similarly obsessed and who was having it off with wood sprites or the equivalent right, left and centre.’
Teresa blinks. She removes a discarded ice-cream spoon from Luke’s grasp and delves in her holdall for a toy.
‘It’s odd – at the time I could see exactly why she went on the way she did. It seemed as though there was no alternative. Now I’d want to take her in hand.’
‘What happened to her?’ asks Teresa. She does not sound much interested.
‘Oh, she came to her senses in the end and turned her back on it all. I’ve rather lost touch with her. I don’t feel we’d have much in common now. You know how you grow out of people? Though … actually I did run into her not so long ago and she talked a bit about him, her ex, because … well, um, because I’d come across him at one point … and she said that what she felt about him now was something like what you’d feel about a housebreaker. He was someone who had walked in and hijacked a large chunk of her life and she resented that because life is life, after all.’
Teresa says nothing. Either she is still uninterested or this notion does not appeal to her.
Pauline shrugs. ‘And at the time she was besotted. I know, because I was around and took note. Should we make tracks before Luke succeeds in throwing himself into the pool?’
They drive back to World’s End. Luke sleeps. Pauline puts on a tape. Teresa stares out at the shimmering landscape, at the cloudless sky, at passing traffic – coaches from France and Germany, a container lorry from Poland, car transporters, tractors, battered pick-up trucks, cars towing caravans. This is the deep of summer, and this is the depths of the English countryside.
Pauline carries Luke, still sleeping, into the cottage. Teresa follows with the holdall, the towels and swimming costumes. The red eye is blinking on the answering machine. Teresa walks straight to it, presses the button. Maurice speaks: ‘It’s me. Just to say I’ll be back in the evening on Wednesday, not morning – a couple more things have cropped up. OK? Oh – and James and Carol will be down for the weekend.’
Teresa turns. She takes Luke from Pauline. Her face is neutral, blank. Luke wakes up and starts to cry.
Pauline stands with Harry on a street corner. They have had lunch together in a restaurant – a rare treat. Harry got back from the States yesterday, fell jet-lagged into deep sleep, woke and said, ‘I’ll have to rush – I’m teaching at ten. Tell you what – let’s meet for lunch. I’ll take you to that Italian place.’ And so they have lunched, with Harry on a high – elated, exuberant, affectionate. And now they are parting on this street corner because Harry has a seminar at three and must rush again.
He seems abstracted now – abstracted and incandescent all at once. And suddenly he squeezes Pauline’s arm – companionable, high-spirited, slightly tipsy. ‘Isn’t life wonderful!’ he exclaims.
She understands that he has a new woman.
Harry reaches for her in the early morning. She drifts up from sleep to find him making love to her, that familiar warm invasion, and to begin with she is responding in her sleep – naturally, comfortably. And then she opens her eyes and looks up into his and sees that she is not there. It is not to her that Harry is making love, but to someone else. She sees this and goes cold. The act has become an obscenity.
Pauline realizes that she is an expert, a connoi
sseur. She has a subject, the special subject on which she is the leading authority. She is the authority on jealousy. She knows everything that there is to be known about jealousy. She could write a treatise on jealousy, a disquisition, a learned paper with footnotes and appendices. She could give seminars on jealousy, she could run a symposium, she could devise a degree course on the evolution and manifestations of jealousy. She could instruct the uninitiated upon the way in which jealousy combines physical with mental effects. If jealousy is a disease, she would argue, then we have to determine if its origins are biological or if they are in the mind. She would publish the definitive description of the symptoms of jealousy – the perpetual churning of the guts, the nausea that surges each morning as the sufferer awakes to a fresh realization of what is happening, the hollow plunge that succeeds each new uncertainty, each new suspicion. It would appear that jealousy is sited in the stomach, she would say, but the mental symptoms displayed must also be taken into account: the obsessive concentration upon a single issue, the feverish pursuit of evidence, the awful heightened awareness. And then there are the periods of remission, when the belief arises that nothing is going on after all, that it is a mistake, that all is well – bouts of false security that serve only to intensify the disease when it comes roaring back.
‘Pauline, why don’t you leave Harry?’ says her friend Linda. ‘He’ll go on doing it, you know. If it’s not this Julia person it’ll be someone else.’
And Pauline does not reply. Because she knows that this is what she has to do.
Maurice returns. Pauline hears the car. She is startled, because as it happens she is not at this moment in the cottage at World’s End at all but elsewhere and in another time and expecting someone quite different who will arrive – if he arrives at all – on foot or by taxi, conspicuously, filling the place at once with his presence. And there is something she is going to say, words that have rolled in her head for days, that are honed now to a fine precision, words whose hour has come.