“I’ll tell you if you like,” she said, topping up his glass. “Because you’re scared, maybe? Because you’ve been with her for eighteen years and it’s the only way you know how to live? Because it suits you, in lots of ways? Because you’ve got your own little room at the back of the house with your desk and your computer and your recording stuff and it’s all too nice to leave? Because you can’t remember how to use a washing machine? Because watching some crappy programme about gardening with someone else is not quite as depressing as watching it by yourself? Because you’re fond of Emily? Because you feel loyalty for her? Because you’re afraid of ending up sad and lonely?”
“I wouldn’t end up sad and lonely,” Benjamin insisted, defensively. “I’d probably find someone else, anyway.”
“What—just like that?”
“I don’t know . . . In a few months, or something.”
Claire looked impressed; or pretended to. “You sound very confident about this. Anyone in mind?”
Benjamin hesitated for a moment, then leaned forward. “There is someone,” he confided. “She works quite near our house. She’s a hairdresser.”
“A hairdresser?”
“Yes. She’s gorgeous. She has this really . . . angelic face. Angelic and sophisticated at the same time, if that makes any sense.”
“And how old is she?”
“I don’t know—late twenties, maybe, something like that.”
“Name?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t actually—”
“—spoken to her,” said Claire, finishing off his sentence with the weariest of inflections. “Christ, Benjamin, what are you like? You’re in your forties, for fuck’s sake—”
“Only just.”
“And you’ve got a crush on a bloody hairdresser who you’ve never spoken to? This is who you’re seriously considering as your future life partner?”
“I didn’t say that.” Claire noticed that he was having the decency to blush, at least. “And you shouldn’t prejudge people, anyway. She looks very intelligent. I reckon she’s probably a Ph.D. student, doing it to make money or something.”
“I see. So you envisage having a few serious conversations about Proust and Schopenhauer between shampoos, do you?”
If she was expecting Benjamin to rise to the bait, she was disappointed. He merely looked more and more downcast. “What’s the point?” was all he muttered, bitterly, after a while. “I’m so bloody out of practice. I wouldn’t even know how to get into conversation with someone like that.”
“It’s not difficult to get into conversation with a hairdresser,” Claire pointed out. “All you have to do is go in there and ask for a cut and blow dry.”
Benjamin spent an unexpectedly long time pondering this phrase, as if Claire had just revealed to him some secret password that would unlock a hidden door on to a world of unimagined possibilities.
“Just a thought,” she felt obliged to add, somewhat embarrassedly. “You look as though you could do with a trim, to be honest.” Then she hesitated, feeling that it was time to shift things on to a more serious plane. “Benjamin . . .” she began, tentatively. (This was going to be difficult.) “You know what the problem is, don’t you? I mean, the real problem.”
“No,” he answered. “But I’m sure you’re going to enjoy telling me.”
“I’m not, actually.” She took a long, anxious sip from her glass. “The thing is . . . you’re not over her, are you? Twenty-two years later, and you’re still not over her.”
Benjamin looked at her intently. “By her, I take it you mean—”
Claire nodded. “Cicely.”
There was another long silence, as her name—the forbidden, never-to-be-spoken name—hung in the air between them. Finally, Benjamin enunciated one word, with great emphasis and feeling.
“Bollocks.”
“It’s not bollocks,” said Claire, “actually. And you know it isn’t.”
“Of course it’s bollocks,” Benjamin counter-argued. “We’re talking about something that happened when we were at school, for Christ’s sake.”
“Exactly. And you’re still not over it. You’re still not fucking over it! And what’s more, Emily knows that, and she’s known it all your married life, and it’s probably torn her apart in that time.”
And she told him what she had noticed at the concert, about the change that had come over him when he sat at his keyboard and played the opening bars of Seascape No. 4, how a different look had come into his eyes, remote, unseeing, an intensity of gaze directed not at anything in the room but into his own self, into the past, and how the look in Emily’s eyes had changed with that music, too, how she had stared at Benjamin for a moment and then down at the ground, all her enjoyment in his performance, all her pride, suddenly evaporating, leaving her bereft, her eyes hollow with loneliness and regret.
“And incidentally,” Claire added, “whatever happened between you and that woman?”
“Woman? What woman?”
“The one you were with when I saw you at the café. The one you introduced to me as your ‘friend.’”
“Malvina? What about her?”
“Well, you seemed pretty intimate with her, I thought. And she had a touch of the Cicelys about her, I couldn’t help noticing.”
“What are you talking about?” Benjamin was incredulous. “She’s got black hair!”
They lapsed into silence for a few seconds, both trying to regain some poise.
“I wasn’t . . . criticizing you or anything,” Claire began, apologetically.
Benjamin muttered: “Nothing came of it,” and there was no mistaking the ruefulness in his voice. To him, this transient friendship was still one of the defining emotional events of his recent life.
“So what did happen? Did you stop seeing her?”
“Not just that. She started having an affair with Paul.”
Claire winced and shook her head. “That’s rough.”
“I know,” said Benjamin, drinking again, consciously allowing his self-pity to be fuelled by the wine.
“No,” said Claire. “I mean—that’s rough on her. Jesus, that’s not something I’d wish on my worst enemy.” She paused, and then made a decisive pronouncement: “You need to say something to Emily about this.”
“About Malvina? What’s the point? It was nothing. I haven’t seen her for ages.”
“Not about that, necessarily. About why it started. What made you do it. I mean, clearly you have some need, some emotional need, that Emily isn’t satisfying at the moment and that’s . . . well, that’s something you should talk about, isn’t it? Because she probably feels the same way anyway. Will she be awake when you get home tonight?”
“Probably. She usually sits up and reads.”
“Well then, promise me this, Ben. Promise me that when you get home tonight, before you go to sleep, you just say to her, ‘Emily, we have to talk soon.’ That’s all it takes. Do you think you can do that?”
Benjamin shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“Promise me you’ll do it?”
“Yes, I promise.”
And after that, they talked about other things. About Claire’s decision to go freelance as a technical translator, what a relief it had been to get out of that student house in London, and how there was more call for business Italian in the Worcester and Malvern area than you would imagine. About how, in any case, most of her work could be done over the internet now, so that the contacts she’d made in London and Lucca were still useful to her, and she was already making more than enough to cover her tiny mortgage payments: which meant that she still felt a little precarious now and again, and sometimes woke up in the middle of the night having the odd panic attack, but things were all right really. And they talked about her son Patrick. How quiet he was, how introverted. How Claire was starting to believe he was far more damaged by her divorce from Philip than she had ever imagined. How he talked incessantly, obsessively, about his aunt Miriam whom he had nev
er met because she had disappeared in 1974, at the age of only twenty-one, never to be seen again, despite the best efforts (apparently) of the West Midlands police force. It was as if, Claire surmised, the separation of his parents had left him with some void, some obscure but bottomless void in himself, which he was trying to fill by seizing on this mythical, lost figure from recent history, and making her some kind of totem of everything that was absent from his own experience of family life. He collected photographs of her, pumped his mother for memories and anecdotes whenever they talked.
“How old is he now?” Benjamin asked.
“Seventeen. Takes his A-levels this year. Then he wants to do biology at university. I’ve no idea whether he’ll get the grades.”
He caught the undertow of anxiety in her voice and said, “Don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll be all right.”
“I know,” said Claire, who was hardly likely to be reassured by anything that Benjamin said, on this or any other subject. They were standing by the gate to her little front garden, and it was getting on for midnight. An almost-full July moon hung in the sky. Benjamin looked at it and remembered, as he always remembered, that there had been a full moon that night, too, the night after he had made love to Cicely in his brother’s bedroom. A yellow moon, like the yellow balloon of his childhood memory. He had sat out in the garden and looked at the moon and tried once again to savour his moment of perfect happiness and had already, in some obscure way (or was this just the wisdom of hindsight?), felt it slipping away from him. He had never seen Cicely since then, never once set eyes on her since she had left him sitting alone in The Grapevine with Sam Chase, after she had just spoken to her mother on the telephone and heard that there was a letter from America waiting for her, a letter from Helen. The next day he had phoned her mother himself and learned, incredibly, impossibly, that Cicely was already on a plane to New York. What could have been in the letter? He didn’t know, preferred not to think about it, could not bring himself to remember anything more about that conversation with her mother, so that his last real memory of Cicely, relating to Cicely, was of the half-hour or so that he had spent sitting outside in his parents’ garden, looking at the yellow moon, and ever since then he had measured his life in full moons, had never been able to look at a full moon without thinking of that night, and he now calculated, swiftly, without really having to think about it, that this was the 265th full moon since then. And he couldn’t decide whether that made it feel like a long time, or no time at all, or both . . .
“Benjamin?” Claire was saying. “Are you OK?”
“Mm?”
“I seem to have lost you.”
“Sorry.” He became aware that they had been on the point of saying goodbye, and gave her another of those brief, botched kisses.
“Good boy,” she said. “Now have a lovely time in Normandy. It might be just what you both need. It might work wonders.”
Benjamin was unconvinced. “Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t think so.”
“Go to Etretat,” said Claire.
“Where?”
“It’s on the coast, next to Le Havre. There are these fantastic cliffs. I was there two winters ago: just before I came back home. It was bloody freezing, but the view is something else. I stood there for hours, high on the chalk . . .” She tailed off, remembering. “Well. It’s just a suggestion.”
“All right. We will.”
“And don’t forget—don’t forget what I told you. What you’ve got to say to her.”
“Yes, I remember,” said Benjamin. “‘Cut and blow dry, please.’ ”
Claire assumed he was joking, at first. Then sighed when she realized that he wasn’t, and decided that there was no point in putting him right.
“Do you ever wonder why I bother with you, Ben?” she asked. “I do, sometimes.”
There was no answer to that, of course. But even Benjamin had noticed, and been touched by, the self-mocking sincerity with which Claire had said it, and a few minutes later, as he drove away from Malvern, towards the midnight lamps of the M5, he experienced a small epiphany. He tuned the car stereo to Radio 3, and recognized the music they were playing: it was the “Cantique des Vierges” from Arthur Honegger’s oratorio Judith. Of all the useless gifts with which life had lumbered him, none was more useless, he sometimes thought, than his ability to identify almost any snatch of music by a minor twentieth-century composer, and yet he was glad, on this occasion, because he realized that he hadn’t listened to his ancient cassette of this work for ten years at least, and although most of it was pretty unmemorable, this passage had once been one of his favourites, something he would turn to when he felt that he needed consolation, which the ethereal simplicity of its gossamer, child-like melody never failed to afford him. And now, looking into his passenger wing-mirror and seeing the yellow moon reflected, and beneath it the lights of Malvern (one of them, he knew, the light from Claire’s sitting-room window), and hearing this tune, again, this tune which had once been so familiar and important to him, he felt a glow of pleasure, of comfort, at the thought that he and Claire remained friends even after two decades. But there was more than that: for at this moment he admitted to himself, for the very first time, that there had always been a desire on Claire’s part for something bigger than friendship, a prospect which must have scared him, before now, else why would he have denied it for so long, suppressed the knowledge so ruthlessly? But tonight, suddenly, he didn’t feel scared by it. Nor did he want to turn the car around, drive back towards Malvern, and spend the night with her. The feeling which came over him wasn’t as simple as that. It was merely that the combination of Honegger’s limpid melody and the yellow moon which was so much an emblem of his most primal wishes seemed tonight to take on the aspect of a sign: a pointer towards his own future—at the centre of which, distant but ever-present, ever-dependable—was the gleaming lamplight from Claire’s cottage. As the radiant certainty of this swept over him, Benjamin found himself shivering, and having to pull over to the side of the road to brush hot tears away from his eyes.
He sat by the roadside until the music had finished, breathing deeply, before swinging out again on to the carriageway and resuming his northbound journey; back to the city, the house, the bedroom where Emily would be sitting up, yawning over an unread novel; her whole being—every look, every movement—a lexicon of unspecified reproach.
9
18 July, 2001
Etretat
Dearest Andrew,
I promised you a postcard from Normandy. Well—lucky you, you are going to get rather more than that. I’m booked home on a ferry which doesn’t leave for another two days and quite frankly I have had enough of driving around the countryside looking at monasteries and cathedrals so I am just going to sit in the hotel until then, and try to think things through, and calm myself down. I’ve got a lot of stuff to sort out in my head, but don’t worry about me: I’m fine. Whatever else happens—and I know there’s going to be a lot of pain to get through in the next few days and weeks, a lot of “difficulty” as my beloved counsellor would call it—I’ve come to a decision and I’m going to stick to it.
And in case you’re wondering why the whole of that paragraph was written in the first person singular, the answer is easy: I’m here by myself. Benjamin has gone. He went yesterday. I think he’s gone to Paris, but I’m not sure about that and to be perfectly honest I couldn’t care less. He’s turned off his mobile and that suits me fine as well. I’m cross with myself for trying to ring it yesterday, in fact. What would we say to each other anyway? I have nothing to say to him at the moment. Absolutely nothing at all.
Our marriage is over.
Meanwhile—let me tell you a little bit about the holiday from hell.
Perhaps “hell” is putting it a bit strongly—as far as the first ten days were concerned, anyway. “Purgatory” probably gets it about right, though. Then again, the whole of the last year has been a kind of purgatory for me—longer than that, even. I
suppose the pain has just been building up and intensifying to the point where it became unbearable. Unbearable for me, at any rate. Sometimes I wonder whether Benjamin ever feels any pain: real pain, I mean. No, that’s not true—he has felt it, in the past, I know he has, because of what he told me, years and years ago, when we were still at school, about the thing that happened to Lois and how he helped her to recover from it. I don’t doubt that he su fered over that, that he shared her su fering, very deeply. Every week, he used to visit her, I remember, without fail, and that must have marked him. So he can feel things deeply, he is just good at masking it: he has a lot of self-control, Benjamin—a very British quality, some people might say, and probably one of the things that drew me to him in the first place. (Benjamin thinks that our whole relationship is based on religion but it’s not, that’s just nonsense, it’s a convenient story he likes to tell to himself to explain why things have gone wrong.) But anyway, something has changed about Benjamin, since that day down by the canalside, when he told me the story of Lois and Malcolm. (You remember me telling you about that? God, I feel I have told you my whole life story—and the life stories of practically everyone I know— during the last year or two, and you have been so patient, listening to every word. You are such a good listener, dear Andrew. There aren’t many of them around!) It’s as if something has frozen him in time, so that he’s stuck at one particular moment and he can’t move on, he can’t shift himself. I even think I know what did it—or who did it, more to the point—but that can wait for another time.
Now, if this was one of my emails (and how many emails have I written to you in the last eighteen months or so? My guess is more than a hundred) I would delete most of what I’ve written so far and try to focus on what I wanted to tell you. The crux of the story. But instead I have gone back to the steam age of pen and ink and it constrains me to do my thinking on paper—which I have to say feels more like a luxury than a constraint. Writing this is probably good therapy for me—that’s what I mean to say. I could always call you on the telephone after all; and we’re bound to see each other in a few days’ time, aren’t we? So I don’t even need to post this, really. But I’m pretty sure that I will.