“Well,” said Malvina—who had known all along that she would have to be the one to get it started—“things have moved on a bit, haven’t they, in the last few months? The balance has shifted. When we started out, I got the impression—I mean, I might be wrong about this—that all you wanted to do was sleep with me. And that gave me a feeling of control over you and I suppose I liked that, I enjoyed it. But it started to feel different for me . . . when was it? . . . on the day of the march. That night, I mean. The night I stayed at your house. I remember . . . just sitting with you on the sofa, after dinner, in front of the fire, before we went to bed. We couldn’t bear even to touch each other and in a weird sort of way that’s what made it feel so intimate to me: or at least, that’s what made me admit to myself where we’d got to. That we’d got to the edge of a cliff, without realizing it. And then . . . Then I suppose we have Doug to thank for the rest. He told you what I was going through. And then you came round to see me, the night before you went to Denmark. And . . . well, I was surprised, I must say. Absolutely amazed, in fact. You really let yourself go that night. You said a lot of things—”
“I meant them,” said Paul, quickly. “I meant them all.”
“I know you did,” Malvina answered. “I don’t doubt that for a minute. All the same, I’m not going to hold you to anything.” She glanced at him. “You know that, don’t you?”
Paul said nothing. The sun was making his eyes ache and he was conscious that his shirt was becoming sticky with sweat. He was going to have sunburn by the end of the day, if he wasn’t careful. How would he explain that to Susan when he next saw her?
“I was on cloud nine for a day or two after that,” Malvina continued. “Till that thing in the paper brought me down to earth, I suppose. And now it doesn’t look quite so rosy. The last few weeks have been just awful. I feel I’ve lost all control over my life. I feel completely powerless. Do you know what that’s like? Probably not.”
Paul laid his hand on hers, and tried to sound reassuring. “I know things are difficult,” he said, “but it won’t be for much longer . . .”
“What do you mean?” said Malvina, suddenly angry. “How can you say that? Why won’t it be for much longer?”
“Because after a while the press will lose interest.”
“Never mind about the press. What about you? What are you going to do? What are you going to do about me? That’s the question, isn’t it? Not the fucking newspapers.”
“Yes,” he said, sighing deeply, and beginning to get a sense for the first time of what she was talking about. “Yes, you’re right. That is the question.”
He fell gloomily silent, then. It was not even that he was lost for words: he was lost for thoughts. All at once he was quite anchorless, adrift, with no idea at all of what he was supposed to be thinking or feeling.
“I can’t have an affair with you,” said Malvina, when it began to seem that he was never going to speak again. “I can’t handle it. I don’t want to hurt Susan, for one thing, or your daughter. And I can’t walk on eggshells all the time, never knowing when I’m allowed to phone you, never knowing when I’m going to see you next. That doesn’t seem to bother you. You almost seem to thrive on it. But . . . we can’t spend the rest of our lives meeting up in country churchyards, with you looking over your shoulder every five minutes to see if there’s a photographer behind you, or checking your mobile to see if Susan’s called.” Her voice was shrill with exasperation. “Can we?”
“No, I told you—I told you in an email, this is just a phase, until things quieten down, until they . . . sort themselves out.”
“But they’re not going to sort themselves out, Paul. You have to sort them out.” In a different voice—quieter and sadder—she added, “I know that’s asking a lot. And it’s not me that’s doing the asking, actually. You’re asking it of yourself, if you think about it. All I’m saying is, it’s got to the point where we have to make a choice.”
“Between?”
“Between being friends, and being lovers.”
Of course, it was just what he had been expecting to hear. But the starkness of the phrase rocked him, even so.
“Ah,” was all he managed to say, at first.
But then it started to dawn on him that the choice was not so brutal after all. What did “friendship” mean, anyway? Friendship was what they had already. An unusually intense, passionate friendship, certainly, but that was the best thing about it: that was what made it so new and exciting for him. So they hadn’t slept together: well, they could congratulate themselves on that, on their self-control. He and Malvina were doing something radical, actually—what they were experimenting with was a new kind of friendship, and one which (he was only dimly starting to intuit this) happened to satisfy his emotional needs rather well, when placed into the context of his secure marriage and family life. He saw no need to rock any boats, for the time being. What he had with Malvina was enough. And perhaps, even, as the friendship evolved, they would find a way of adding a sexual dimension, they would feel ready for it, after a while . . . Anything was possible. Anything was possible as long as they kept seeing each other, and took things slowly.
“Well then,” he said. “It has to be friendship. If that’s all we can have, then . . . that’s what it has to be.”
The words did not sound as triumphant, spoken out loud, as he had hoped they would. And they did not have the expected effect on Malvina. He felt a force-field go up around her, a protective wall of energy. Her whole body tightened. She didn’t move, but it seemed as though a physical distance had immediately opened up between them.
Her voice cracked as she said, after what felt like aeons: “Then why did you say those things to me? The night before you went to Skagen? What was the point?”
“I . . . had to,” Paul answered, helplessly. “It was what I was feeling. It was the truth. I couldn’t keep it inside me any longer.”
“I see.”
She stood up, and walked slowly to the other side of the churchyard. She stood there for some time, with her back towards him, looking out over the parched and baking fields. She was wearing a pale blue, sleeveless summer dress and once again Paul was struck by the thinness of her, the startling weightlessness of her bones, her terrible fragility. For an instant he felt as fatherly and protective towards her as he had ever felt towards Antonia. And in the same instant he remembered, with a rush of guilt, that he had had a ludicrous fantasy in the car on the way over, which had involved bringing her to some secluded churchyard just like this and making exalted love somewhere among the gravestones. It didn’t seem very likely, on the whole, that this was now going to happen. He wondered if he should go over and put an arm around her, say something to her. But now she was blowing her nose, and turning, and coming back to him. She sat beside him on the bench and sniffed a few more times. The sun passed behind a tall yew tree which folded them both in cooling shade.
At last she was able to say:
“OK, then. Friendship it is. But there’s something you have to understand.”
“What’s that?”
She swallowed and announced: “We can’t see each other any more.”
These words, when he first heard them, made literally no sense to Paul. He wondered if she had simply spoken them by mistake.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we cannot have a friendship—a successful, normal friendship—until these feelings have gone away. Not until we’ve got each other out of our systems.”
Paul’s stomach was churning now. He could feel himself starting to panic. “But—how long is that supposed to take?”
“How should I know?” said Malvina, rubbing her eyes and exposing their bloodshot rims. “I can’t speak for you. A long time. A hell of a long time.” She looked away, and twirled a strand of hair around one finger. In the sunlight it didn’t look so black any more: it was auburn, almost. “Anyway, I’m the one who’s in deepest, here. Deny that if you like, but it’s t
rue. So it has to be me who decides when we get back in touch. When I feel ready to be friends with you again. I don’t want you contacting me in the meantime. I can’t cope with that.”
Still bewildered at the speed with which this was happening, Paul asked: “Are we talking . . . weeks? Months?”
“I don’t know. As I said: I think it’ll be a long time.”
“But—” Now it was his turn to get up and start pacing between the crooked gravestones. “But this is crazy. Not long ago we were—”
“No. It isn’t crazy. The way we’ve been trying to live the last few weeks is crazy. Think about it, Paul. I’m right. It’s horrible, but I know I’m right.”
He did think about it. And they talked about it, too, for much longer, the conversation never going anywhere now, turning round upon itself in endless loops, oscillating and repeating itself, always coming back, in the end, to the central fact of Malvina’s proposal, which even to Paul seemed to have taken on a dreadful, unarguable necessity. So that finally, browbeaten into a kind of paralysis, he could only sit forward on the bench with his head in his hands and repeat the same exhausted phrase:
“I can’t believe we’re going to do this. I can’t believe we’re really doing it.”
“Neither can I, to be honest,” Malvina said. “But there you go.”
“I just think . . . there has to be some other route we could go down, some other—”
“Paul, listen to me.” She looked him directly in the eye. “When it comes to a situation like this, there is no third way. Do you understand? Do you get it? Stop trying to convince yourself that there is.” She stood up, and he could see that her eyes were glistening with tears again. “Right,” she said, her voice shaking. “Walk back to the car now?”
They walked back up the hill in near-silence. At first they held hands. Then Paul put his arm around Malvina and she leaned into him. They walked like that for five or ten minutes; it was the closest they had ever come to physical intimacy. Then Malvina detached herself, and for the last few hundred yards she strode on ahead. She was waiting for Paul at the gate beside the car.
“I’m going to have a look at the stones,” she said. “Do you want to say goodbye now?”
“No, I’ll come with you,” said Paul, and followed her through the gate.
There was nobody else there anyway. Despite the windlessness of the afternoon, it was not completely silent, for the stones were sited next to a main road, and every few seconds a car would speed past. None the less, as soon as they stepped inside the circle, they were both newly conscious of a great stillness; derived from nothing more, perhaps, than a sense that they had found themselves in a very ancient space, created for some sacred but now unfathomable purpose.
They stood very close to one another, not talking, not moving.
“I have been here before,” Malvina said at last. She wandered a few steps away from him. “My mother brought me here. I don’t know what we were doing in this part of the world. She’d just split up from her husband; her first husband. He was Greek, he had nothing to do with this area, I can’t explain it. Anyway: I remember it now, very clearly. My mother was weeping. She was doing this terrible histrionic weeping, clinging on to me, telling me what a dreadful person she was and how she was ruining my life. I must have been . . . six, maybe? Seven? No—six. That’s right. I can still remember this couple staring at us, this middle-aged couple, staring at us and wondering what the hell was going on. The woman was wearing a green headscarf. It was winter.” She looked around her at the corroded, misshapen stones, as if she hadn’t noticed them before. “Funny to be here again.”
Impulsively, Paul said: “Malvina, I don’t know what’s going to happen between me and Susan. I don’t even know if we’re going to survive this. Some time in the future, if I come looking for you . . .”
She smiled. “Well, of course you can do that. But I don’t know where I’ll be.”
“You’ll stay in London, won’t you?”
“I meant where I’ll be emotionally. Somewhere else, I hope. Somewhere new.” Kindly now, she added: “Paul—you had a choice to make, and you made it. That’s the important thing. Well done. Now go. I’ll make my own way back to the station.”
“Don’t be silly—it’s not safe.”
“It’s a beautiful afternoon. I’ll walk. Let’s get this over with.”
He could see that she was determined, even on this point.
Then Malvina took his hands and drew him towards her.
“Come on, then,” she said. “Ae fond kiss, as Robbie Burns would put it.”
But they didn’t kiss, even now. They merely held each other, and Paul breathed in the scent of her hair, the warmth of her skull, and that perfume whose name he still didn’t know, and the uncanny stillness of the circle reminded him of Skagen, with its unbroken silences, and he realized that he was being offered another of those moments that would never end, that would always be with him. He clung on to it fiercely, willing himself into a sense of timelessness. But he could feel Malvina pushing, pushing him gently away from her. And at last he released her and broke away.
Paul looked back only one more time as he made for the gate. It occurred to him, in a spasm of despair, that this might be his last ever sight of Malvina. Standing with her back towards him again, looking out over the fields, alone, in a pale blue summer dress, at the center of the circle; the circle of stones which watched over her, closed in on her, like the demons she had been fleeing all her life and whose nature he had never, he now realized, even begun to understand.
He turned on his heels and walked back towards the car.
He was still in a state of shock when he arrived back at the flat in Kennington. He drank the last two-thirds of a bottle of whisky and then every other drop of alcohol he could find in the kitchen. At ten o’clock he passed out on his sofa, fully clothed. He woke up again at three in the morning, with a raging thirst and an aching bladder. His head throbbed like the thumb of a cartoon character after it has been caught in a mousetrap. He wanted to be sick. Then he realized what had woken him up, and he almost shouted for joy. It was the double beep of a text message on his mobile phone. She had contacted him again. Of course she had. She couldn’t go through with it, any more than he could. It was all a terrible mistake and in the morning they would see each other again. He opened the message and found that his service provider was telling him he had won a £1000 prize draw. He would have to dial a special number to claim his prize and calls were charged at 50p a minute.
13
Paul’s resolve held firm. He was never quite sure if Malvina was doing this to punish him, or whether it was truly the only course she felt they could take, if she was to survive with her sanity and her sense of self intact. Either way, he respected her wishes, and made no attempt to contact her. The days without her were long and agonizing. He checked his answering machine messages obsessively, his emails every few minutes. Nothing came.
In time the days came to seem shorter, and the agony came to be less.
He acted swiftly to stop the gossip about his private life, and on June 1st, 2000 issued a statement to the press: delivered, as tradition demanded, in front of his family home, with Antonia clutching at his knees on the doorstep, and Susan standing beside him, smiling a tight, furious smile.
“After acting foolishly and wrongly,” he said, “I have made a strong decision to commit myself to my marriage, and my family . . .”
Malvina read these words in the newspaper the next day, while sitting in her college library. Feeling sick, she hurried to the toilets, but collapsed on the way and had to be taken by the assistant librarian to his office, and revived with a glass of water.
Just over a year later, in the early hours of June 8th, 2001, she was watching the television coverage of the general election results when the cameras went live to Paul’s constituency. He had been re-elected, with a slightly reduced majority. His beaming, gratified face filled the screen for a moment, an
d Susan, who was standing by his side, leaned in to kiss his cheek in close up. The sound faded as he stepped forward to make his victory speech, and his voice was drowned out by that of the TV pundit, commenting on the strength of the challenge Paul had faced from the Liberal Democrats. The camera pulled out for a long shot, and Malvina noticed that Susan was not only clasping Antonia’s hand in the background, but cradling a baby— probably another girl, judging from her pink sleep-suit—who seemed to be little more than two or three months old. So that was how they had resolved it, then. Why not? Who could say how other people’s relationships worked? A phrase came to her, suddenly, out of nowhere: You’ve been dead a long time . . . It was from a song, maybe, a song she’d heard some time last year, when she’d still been working for Paul. That was how she felt; and saw no prospect of ever feeling any different. Fuck it. She wished them well, anyway: then decided she didn’t want to watch any more, poured herself another Diet Coke from the fridge and started flicking between channels.
12
12 June, 2001
Dear Philip,
I don’t know if you remember me, but we were at King William’s School together back in the 1970s. All seems like a very long time ago now!
I’m writing to you out of the blue like this because sometimes I get to see the Birmingham Post and I like your journalism.
I live in Telford now—with my wife Kate and two daughters, Allison and Diane—and work in the R&D department of a local firm specializing in plastics. (I never did get anywhere with physics, after messing up that exam. Ended up doing chemistry at Manchester. Polymers are my thing, these days, if that means anything to you. It probably doesn’t.) We’ve been here for just over nine years and we’re doing fine.
Telford has been in the news a bit lately. I’m sure you know all about the Errol McGowan case, which has been in a lot of the national papers. Errol was a doorman at the Charlton Arms hotel and pub. He fell out with a white guy who had been barred from the pub and started getting a lot of racial abuse—through the post, on the telephone. Anonymous stuff. It started to turn really nasty and Errol became convinced he was on some kind of Combat 18 death list. In the end it gave him a kind of nervous breakdown and just over two years ago he was found dead in somebody else’s house, hanging from a door knob. He was thirty-four.