Two Is Lonely

  Despite my unease and the disturbances going on inside me, I had eaten (as indeed I always do, short of some absolute cataclysm) with rapacious appetite, and now I was flaked out on my bed, already half comatose. But Toby was insistent.

  ‘Do please come. There may not be another opportunity.’

  I struggled up and put on my bathing-suit (already bone-dry) while he waited outside on the lawn. I slipped on a cotton dress and stepped outside.

  The sun was really almost unendurable now, pounding down out of that ruthless sky. The light was as hard on the eyes as the scream of the jets was upon the ears, and there was no respite from it other than passing under the occasional tree.

  ‘The heat’s unbearable,’ I said, scarcely able to drag my feet along the hot tarmac paths. The tar was liquefying, and my rubber sandals kept sticking to it.

  ‘I like it,’ he said. ‘It’s sort of purifying. You keep pouring water into yourself and almost at once it seems to flow out of all your pores.’

  I prickled and sweated and felt a headache coming on. I wished to God I’d got some sun glasses.

  ‘Have you thought any more about—anything?’ he asked as we reached the wrought-iron gates of the pool.

  ‘I can’t think in this heat,’ I said irritably.

  But as soon as the water closed over my head, I felt instantly and miraculously better. I swam around awhile, enjoying the sensation of sudden freedom from heat which was the nearest thing to bliss on earth that I could imagine at that moment. My mind went back to Chris, and I blew a kiss to him in my thoughts. If only we were just bodies! Sometimes I felt as if we were. Walking up here, I had been overwhelmed by discomfort, my brain incapable of working; now I was saturated in a contrasting sensation, but still nothing seemed to be moving in my head.

  Toby stood in the shallow end waiting.

  I squinted down the glittering expanse of turquoise water at him. The top part of his body only was visible. His torso was brown and he had filled out a little since I had known him so intimately that my hands could recreate, even when apart from him, the sensation of touching every part of him. Even now . . . Concealed beneath the water, my hands moved, recovering the feel of his thinly-covered ribs, the elliptical bulge of his shoulder-muscle, the flat planes of his back, and especially the soft teddy-bear fuzz on the back of his neck. And although we were separated by yards of water, I could feel his touch on me . . . I shivered as I trod water, gazing at him with eyes narrowed against the glare, and he gazed back at me.

  He raised his arm, and a bright stream of drops caught the sun like a spilling of fire as he beckoned to me.

  I swam slowly and luxuriously towards him. An electric-blue dragonfly skittered by across the surface. I could smell the chlorine in the water mixed incongruously with the scent of the flowering shrubs—not a sweet perfume at all, but sharp and startling like carnations. As I drew near to him, Toby suddenly knelt down on the bottom of the pool and putting out his hands, caught mine and pulled me gently towards him. Our limbs floated effortlessly, mindless and sensuous as strands of water-weed, and got entangled with each other.

  He kissed me. The sun fell on us. The kiss mingled with the heat and the strong odours and created something like an explosion in my head.

  Floating in his arms, drifting, my roots washed free of the earth and nourished by the water, I was content to return to this old, natural, simple haven. The pool water and the water on our tongues mingled, dried in the sun; we put our faces under the surface to renew it, and laughed bubblingly into each other’s eyes and mouths through the cool alien element, surfacing in the midst of a kiss.

  ‘Your lesson,’ I murmured. But his hands closed firmly on my arms.

  ‘No humiliations,’ he answered. ‘Let’s do something I can do.’

  We rose with a cool swishing sound and walked to the broad steps, up them slowly, and then down we came onto our towels on the bank of spiky grass. A young birch-tree dappled our bodies with shadow. I looked around once. Swallows were diving over the water, now glassy smooth. Apart from their cries, and the far-distant purring of a tractor amid a cloud of dust, there was not a sound. The red roofs of the kibbutz lay in the valley below like dolls’ houses, uninhabitable by real people who might have to be considered. With all his old tender adroitness, Toby was peeling away my swimsuit. His fingers traced the winding paths that David’s milk had stretched on my breasts. Now his lips were fastened where David’s had been, with a different, sharper sweetness, and yet—allied, so that I remembered the joy of feeding the baby, just as, while feeding him, I had remembered this.

  He lay at full length beside me and held me close to him, murmuring to me all the old endearments, some of which I had forgotten. I lay passively, waiting for it to happen, feeling that it was quite inevitable, that here, in this act, lay some kind of magical answer. This accomplished, the nature of all our problems would be clarified; the daily dross would be changed to gold; the snags and tangles would be combed out silky and smooth, like flax, to be woven into a practical, useable length of cloth from which we could cut a brand-new garment, tailor-made to fit our lives and cover up all the old sores.

  He stroked and caressed me. We kissed again and again, our hands and eyes and mouths mutually refamiliarising themselves . . . It was lovely. He said so: ‘This is so lovely.’ It went on like that for a long time. And I began to think, ‘Well, when is he going to do it?’ And with that thought, I knew, quite suddenly, that he was never going to do it, because he wouldn’t ultimately be able to.

  Which of us communicated the knowledge to the other, I don’t know, but a few seconds later he stopped perfectly still for a moment, began again, half heartedly, and then abruptly rolled away from me and lay on his back, one arm over his eyes as before, the other hand holding mine. His thumb moved, stiffly, thoughtfully, bemusedly, rubbing back and forth along one bone in my hand.

  ‘What is it?’—although I knew.

  ‘I don’t know’—although he did.

  We lay like that, still and silent, until it became intolerable. Then he sat up with a sudden, jerky movement, letting go of my hand.

  ‘I don’t get this,’ he said harshly. ‘Am I incapable suddenly, or what?’

  ‘Of course you’re not.’

  ‘Then what the hell happened? It all went dead. All of a sudden, I could no more have made love to you than to—’

  ‘To a shadow?’ He turned to look at me sharply over his shoulder. His expression was stricken; his eyebrows were raised at the outer ends and strong, hard, angry lines of bewilderment and confusion had appeared on his forehead.

  ‘But I want you!’ he almost shouted. ‘I do want you! I’ve wanted you all these years. And now we have it, just look at it—what could be more perfect? And I can’t. I can’t!’ His voice cracked upwards harshly, just as a Mirage wrenched the sky apart over our heads, destroying the illusion of peace.

  ‘It’s not only you. I can’t either,’ I said.

  ‘But why?’ he demanded.

  I couldn’t meet his eyes, they were so full of anguish. It was as if he’d begun, very suddenly, to suffer what I suffered seven years ago when I found out I’d lost him. I couldn’t bear to think of him having to go through that; I remembered its pain too clearly.

  ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘Too late? It can’t be too late! Are you in love with someone else?’ he asked, in a suddenly altered voice.

  ‘I don’t know. There is someone else, but it isn’t that, not at this moment. For the past twelve hours I’ve been expecting this, us, to cancel all that out, I thought it was much stronger. But there’s something else against us.’

  ‘What? What is it?’

  I sighed heavily. There seemed to be heavy weights of sorrow pressing on my chest.

  ‘Perhaps it’s just—time.’

  ‘Fuck that!’ he said furiously. ‘I love you as much as ever.’

  ‘Me, as I am now? In seven years every cell in one’s body is renewed. And a
lot changes besides.’

  ‘You haven’t changed.’

  ‘It seems I must have. Our bodies know. With our minds we wanted to come together, we were striving to, but when it came to the crunch, we went dead. Both of us. We’re—dead to each other.’

  With that, something rose in my throat and I began to cry. He held me in his arms like a child and we clung desperately together. I cried in great sobs, as I hadn’t cried for many years, and he didn’t comfort me but just held me hard until my crying stopped.

  Then he let me go.

  We sat there, side by side, for what seemed like hours. The swallows stooped for the dragon-flies and the planes periodically raped the stillness; the sun flushed the moisture from our bodies, and the aqua water mirrored the pale blue, the orange, the hibiscus-red of the shrubs. The whole setting was, as he had said, perfection, and we sat in the midst of it like toads in the mud of our misery.

  At last he stirred.

  ‘I knew it really,’ he said, and in his voice was such a tiredness as one might expect after a long, hard exertion of strength. ‘I knew it last night, when I first saw you. I nearly said it to you then, and then I thought, no, give it a chance. Because part of my illusion was true. We have belonged together all these long, blood-stained years, just as I always knew. But you’re right. It is too late. Because love’s a thread that time draws thinner and thinner. It still carries one’s life’s blood but after a while it’s just not strong enough to do any good any more. Not strong enough to hold two people together, or to support either one of them as an individual.’ He turned his face right away from me, towards the hills. ‘I held you in my arms just now, and your body was as dear to me as ever, but just the same—it was like holding, not a shadow, but a legend. It’s not real, and you’re not real to me in the flesh any more. Only the dream-Jane that I’ve created to replace you has any validity in my life.’

  And suddenly I knew a truth about him that I had never let myself realise till then. The dream would always be more valid to him than the reality. It had all happened before. His leaving me alone in the L-shaped room because life and its demands were pressing him too hard. His staying in London after David’s birth instead of following me, being a stayer, a real, sustaining lover to me, and then later, blaming me for not insisting. He should have insisted. Then marrying Whistler, when, as he said now, he knew . . . because Whistler was a dream-girl, young, beautiful, rich, innocent, passionately loving and giving—a changeling, a fairy, a chimera, a will-o’-the-wisp, dancing invitingly before him across the bog. Only through his writing, which is a form of dreaming, had he ever been able to fasten himself to reality. As for me—I and my situation had always been too earthy and too demanding for him. The ‘dream-Jane’ was the real one to him. No wonder he’d been afraid to come into actual contact with me when at last he was free. He had not been afraid so much of harming me, as of bringing himself once more face-to-face with the need to become fully adult.

  It all fitted—even his flight to the kibbutz, supposedly in search of some ephemeral concept of Jewishness and personal integrity, but actually, surely, a simple need to escape into a valley of non-decision. Perhaps Rachel, with her almost angelic beauty, had only begun to seem real to him here—here where she grew brown and tom-boyish, scratching her knees and raising her voice and dirtying her clothes, turning into a real child. And now, I thought suddenly, he is trying to wish her off onto me . . .

  But this moment of harsh revelation did not stop me loving him. I looked at him now, naked and vulnerable, robbed of his dream by that cruel, lie-detecting instrument between his thighs, which, being the essence and symbol of all that is male and human and physical, had refused to perform upon a myth. And I pitied him with my whole heart, and loved him too, if one can love and pity a man at the same time, which till then I’d always doubted. I reached out and touched him, and he turned, and knelt beside me and stroked my hands, gazing into my face.

  ‘You’ll never be able to share with me what I’ve felt these last years,’ he said. ‘Even if you wanted to, you could never heal over a single one of the wounds I’ve collected. And I can’t heal yours. Least of all the ones I caused . . . That’s what separates us forever.’

  He put his head down in my lap in that most touching, because most child-like, posture a man can put himself in, pressing his face into my hands which he gripped tightly with his.

  ‘Jane? Jane?’

  His voice was absolutely beyond help, the voice of a man who doesn’t even call out loudly any more because he knows he can’t be heard, but speaks his plea quietly, for his own ears alone.

  INTERLUDE

  JOHN

  Chapter 1

  I FOUND John asleep on the second bed in my room. He lay flat out on his stomach, overlapping the little iron bedstead all round, both hands trailing, legs stretched out beyond the end of the bed from the middle of his shins. Big beads of sweat stood out on his shoulders, and as I looked, one drop joined another and they ran together in a rivulet down the channel in his back.

  I touched him and my fingers came away wet.

  ‘John,’ I said. ‘Can you wake up?’

  He grunted and rolled over. ‘Ugh, I’m all stickin’,’ he complained. ‘I don’t like this heat, ‘cept when I swimmin’.’

  ‘Me neither. Shall we go home?’

  He sat up, peering at me.

  ‘You all finished here?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘Yes.’

  He opened his mouth and then shut it again. He stared at me a long time. He wouldn’t ask, but I had to answer.

  ‘It’s no use, John. We’ve gone too far away from each other.’

  He put his feet on the floor and sat with his head down, looking into the palms of his hands.

  ‘Then it’s all over.’

  ‘Yes, in the way you mean.’

  He stood up and walked to the window, his enormous shoulders blotting out most of the light.

  ‘You know what I think,’ he said suddenly. ‘This whole world is just a ball of shit. Nothin’ ever goes the way you want it to. Don’t matter how you try, how much you hope or deserve the best, it all go wrong just the same. Sometimes I like to just get out of it, run away from the world completely.’ He turned round, all in silhouette against the bright afternoon window. ‘You don’t know how I hoped about you two people. How I was sure. Sure it come right in the end. Lucky I ain’t got a gun this minute, I think I just shoot myself, have done with it.’

  ‘John, don’t talk like that!’ I was shocked by the violent despair in his voice. ‘It’s bad enough without you being unhappy about it.’

  ‘Didn’t you know I would be?’

  I didn’t answer. The truth was I hadn’t been thinking of him at all.

  ‘To make me better from what happen to me,’ he said bitterly, ‘I need something good to happen to my friends. But ain’t nothin’ good ever goin’ to happen. I hate this lousy hot place,’ he almost shouted with peevish fury. ‘Let’s get out of here at least and get to where the sweat ain’t runnin’ in our eyes all the time!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’re going. I’ve just rung up the airport. All the planes are fully booked, we have to just go there and sit around till there’s a free place.’

  ‘You mean, we going to try to get home today?’

  ‘Why not? There’s nothing to stay for. Besides, there’s a war on its way.’

  ‘But what about all those other things you had to do? The things for your friend and the shop?’

  Christ! I’d forgotten. Everything. What indeed about all that lovely leather and filigree and—what else was it Jo had told me to investigate? Silver belts? I could almost have begun to laugh.

  ‘Thanks for reminding me. But it’s Saturday. That’s the Jewish sabbath. Everything’s shut.’

  ‘Then we wait till tomorrow. Hell, we only got here last night!’

  ‘But what about the war?’

  ‘I don’t see no signs of no war.’

  ??
?And I thought you were in such a hurry to get back?’

  ‘I ain’t intendin’ to get back to England and then have you turn around and say, how could you let me forget to do all them things I promised? I ain’t been much use on this trip so far, I got to do somethin’ to help you.’

  ‘Oh God! I can’t be bothered. I just can’t, John. The shop and all that, it seems so far away . . . besides, imagine tramping the streets of a city in this heat, looking for workshops and trying to make contact with people who only speak this weird language . . . Hell, I can’t, I simply cannot do it.’

  He came and put his arm round me. His volatile anger seemed to have died away as suddenly as it had blown up. He put his head down to mine tenderly and said, in the almost fatherly tone he sometimes used when he felt I needed it, ‘Look, Janie. I sorry for what I said, it was just me being a child who got disappointed. Now you got to forget all that happened on this trip, because this ain’t your real life. Your real life is at home, and very soon you be back there, and then it’s here, all this, and the island, that will seem far away. You got to do what else you come here for, or later you goin’ to be very sorry and ashamed. You got a business, that business keep you and David, and your friend Jo, even if I don’t like her so much, she and you is partners and you got to do what you promised. Anyway, it’ll help you to feel better about Toby, if you get to work and start thinkin’ about your real life you goin’ back to. If you start puttin’ your eyes ahead of you, instead of behind. It help me too.’

  He moved away from me and started to put the few things he’d taken out of his duffle-bag back into it again. I knew he was perfectly right and that soon his words would take effect, giving me back my will and energy; but for the moment I just stood still and stared out of the window at those chalky, pine-clad hills, beginning to go pink in the evening light. There was a hollowness in me that was hard to fill again with saving routine purposefulness and activity. Something very precious to me had gone and would never come back, and the loss of it, barely grasped yet, was as radical to my life as a missing limb or a whole section of my mind deadened by a violent electric shock.