Ever After

21

So let me tell you (with special benefit of hindsight) about what might have been, what very nearly was, my last day on this earth.

The scene: a June afternoon; this college; my venerable Fellow’s chambers. Outside, rain is sluicing down — one of those vertical, seemingly immovable midsummer downpours which fall from a swollen sky and fill even covered spaces with a damp, sticky breath. The light is leaden. The lamps of study are lit. I sit reading (Darwin: the chapter on Instinct) by my venerable Fellow’s fireplace. Beside me, on the coffee table, my working copy of the Notebooks and scattered notes thereon. The gas fire is on, not because its warmth is needed, but to dry a pair of socks that dangle, pinned by a glass ashtray, from the mantelpiece, just to one side of John Pearce’s implacably ticking clock. I have just been out (my last mortal errand — cigarettes and coffee) and been caught, in leaky shoes, in the onset of the deluge. To counteract the heat of the fire, a window is half open, so that the room is full of the not unpleasing orchestration of the rain.

A quarter to four by John Pearce’s clock. When you are sitting at home by the fire … A knock on the door. I open it, in bare feet, a cigarette in one hand, a pencil behind one ear: the perfect picture of incommoded scholarship.

“I was just passing. Shelter from the storm?”

Now I think of it (this hindsight), that climb up my spiral staircase (ah yes, the stealthy chatelaine) cannot have failed to remind her of that earlier foray, years ago, to Potter’s office. Why else, on this wet and lethal afternoon, should she have described to me that very episode — given me the full, sorry saga of her and Potter? So the whole exercise (if that is the word) was a sort of re-rehearsal of that former, ostensibly scholarly assignation — with me in the role of the plausible tutor.

Ah — Katherine, isn’t it? Do come in. Now, what was it? Of course — Arthurianism in Tennyson. Well, you have come to the right place, my dear. Spiral staircases and genuine Gothic features. And the fireplace, you notice, a genuine piece of neo-Gothic pastiche, dating from Tennyson’s own time. Who shall we pretend to be? Lancelot and Guinevere? Perhaps not. Merlin and Vivien? Yes, I fancy myself as a beguiled wizard.…

Seduction by a female agent. The thing is obvious. No one “just passes” my corner of the College: there are gateways, courts, medieval intricacy. And, beneath her rain-spattered raincoat, there is a dress that no one casually wears at four o’clock on a wet afternoon: downy-soft, charcoal cashmere; well above the knee, figure-hugging; a row of winking buttons from nape to small of back. The legs are black and sheer (this is Gabriella’s sable costume upgraded). There is a single, thin silver chain round her neck. There are high-heeled shoes — damp and flecked with grit (should I suggest she kick them off?). The legs (I notice) are good legs, but without verve, as if she is not used to showing them. But this gives them a certain — appeal.

“You’re working — I can see. I’m disturbing you.”

“No, no. Please …”

I take her coat. She has left an umbrella weeping on the stone landing, but strands of her hair are wet; there is a drop or two on one cheek (it might have been arranged, this rain). She enters my room with an air of simultaneous premeditation and precipitateness, as if someone, perhaps, has gently pushed her, as if she is stepping on to the stage of some bizarre and potentially disastrous initiative test. And I am meant to guess, perhaps, that it’s all a performance, that it isn’t her idea; and therefore — out of sympathy — co-operate? But perhaps she is intent on not failing this — audition. Perhaps this wouldn’t be happening if Ruth hadn’t been an actress.

“Katherine— I wasn’t expecting— I— What can I get you? Tea? Coffee? Hot soup? A towel?”

She gives the room a long, prying, but distinctly hesitant glance. I have ushered her in, my initiative: she is the inveigled innocent — play it that way round. I think what she takes in first are the notes and the photocopy on the coffee table. Then that there are no obvious mementos, photographs (they are all in my bedroom). Then what she takes in are my socks.

“Ah — I’m sorry—”

But the socks seem to rescue her from incipient loss of nerve. The socks — limp, grey flags of discouragement though they must be to anyone bent on erotic manoeuvring — are in fact the unenvisaged trigger to the afternoon’s proceedings. It occurs to me now that if I had not removed my socks and hung them to dry on the mantelpiece, I might not be sitting here, in this quasi-afterlife, trying to recognise my former self.

“It’s all right,” she says, moving towards the fire. “I need to dry off myself.” She gives the skirt of her dress a little pluck and shake, though it doesn’t look wet to me. “Besides — I like a man with bare feet.”

She reaches out and fingers the socks — a strange combination of the sensual and the housewifely.

“They’re dry, you know.”

And it’s at this point, as she turns (catching me, perhaps, eyeing her from behind), that our eyes truly meet for the first time. And I can see in hers that she suddenly realises that the chemistry she is trying to induce might just, after all, be there. The gaze sharpens, brightens. Perhaps she won’t have to force it, feign it; perhaps she isn’t beyond it, past it. And certain things are on her side: this gushing veil of rain; the little orange hint of the gas fire; this innocuous man, all by himself, caught drying his socks.

Ah, yes, my dear — the Idylls of the King. Published, as you no doubt know, in the year that Darwin published his Origin of Species. At one and the same time these hapless Victorians had flung before them the spectre of their derivation from monkeys and Tennyson’s misty and moated chivalric nostalgia. But the latter, as you doubtless also know, was only a wistful cloak for a study of the perils of sexual freedom.…

She takes the socks from beneath the ashtray and toys with them, running a hand inside one and spreading her fingers.

“This is awful of me, isn’t it, butting in like this?”

She smiles. Then makes her move.

“Are those your notes on the Pearce manuscripts?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s a copy of the original?”

“Yes.”

“May I—?”

She picks up the photocopy, my socks still twined round her fingers. This is the first time I’ve allowed anyone — excluding Potter — to look at the Notebooks. I don’t know what portion of Matthew’s agony she briefly alights on.

“Michael is pretty upset that you won’t let him help you. You know that, don’t you?”

I say nothing.

“Pretty upset. You know what he’s like.”

There’s a sort of plea for corroboration in her eyes.

“I know what he’s like.”

“But you’re determined, aren’t you? You’ve made up your mind.”

She flicks through the photocopy as if riffling through a magazine. It seems somehow sacrilegious. I experience a passing urge to grasp it back — as if she means simply to appropriate it and make off with it. I have a sudden, bleak vision of what my life might be like without these — distracting — notebooks.

“I have,” I say.

She puts the photocopy back on the coffee table.

“And there’s nothing that would persuade you?” She seems to take a deep breath.

She holds up the socks fastidiously, one dangling from each thumb and forefinger, like incriminating articles.

“Nothing?”

I go to take them. I know it’s the wrong move.

“Nothing?” she repeats as I grasp them, and she doesn’t let go. Her face is transformed by a strange, unlovely effort. It’s as though, out of sudden, reckless confidence or out of sheer nervous impatience, she has decided to dispense with whatever further preliminary manoeuvres she may have planned and go full-tilt at the thing.

She pulls me, by the socks, towards her. I am not going to play tug-of-war. But before I can disengage, she lets go of one sock, grabs my free hand with her free hand and jams it against her left breast. My crumpled sock is inadvertently trapped between my palm and her dress. Beneath both, I can feel something lacy, scratchy. The breast is soft and warm.

“You know why I came here, don’t you? It’s not the manuscripts, it’s—”

I pull my hand away. Perhaps I even take a virtuous step backwards. Her face seems about to undergo some further extraordinary transformation. To fall apart, perhaps. She spreads a hand (no longer possessed of a sock) across it, as if to hold it together.

“Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Bill. I—”

Her throat is suddenly clogged with wordless gulps. She peers helplessly through her fingers.

“I’m truly sorry. Oh God. I wouldn’t have done it if — I mean — I mean — I wouldn’t have done it, anyway, if — if—”

But then tears start coming in great wrenching eruptions. She leans towards me. I drop my socks (I have them both now, one in each hand). Quite possibly, the pencil is still behind my ear. I step forward, put my arms around her. I feel her palm pressing on my back, her breasts on my ribs. A wet cheek on my cheek.

It’s strange, we are doing now, almost involuntarily, what a moment ago had been the object of intense, abortive machination. What’s more, I have this erection, a stiff, indomitable erection, and, though I try to be careful, she must feel it.

It’s her turn to pull away. “I think — I think I need that towel you were offering.”

And, trying to prevent me from seeing her face, she blunders first into my bedroom, then into the bathroom.

I don’t know what to do while she’s in the bathroom. I should make tea? Pour brandy? (I haven’t any brandy.) Say soothing things through the door, like some penitent seducer? I don’t know what will happen when she emerges. She will have regained a fragile composure and wish to leave? She will be minus her dress?

I pick up my socks, think of putting them on; then, as if putting them on would signal some sort of insensitivity, drop them again. I look at my notes strewn on the coffee table. I look at my bare, white feet. To be honest, for much of the preceding encounter, I have felt oddly like a mere manipulated dummy. Now I have the sensation (it’s not comfortable — it’s like some anaesthetic wearing off) of being dragged out of a state of suspended animation.

And I have this obstinate, towering erection. My body seems constructed around it.

A full minute passes. The plumbing (not medieval, but not up-to-the-minute) sings. I think: what state is my bathroom in? What horrors of male squalor? What scum in the bath?

But I quite forget one thing. When she comes out, she is neither composed nor naked. Her eyes are dry and puffed; but, rather than softened by a look of contrite, mustered dignity, the face is alert, suspicious, vaguely vindictive. It conveys a new sort of bewilderment, as if she, now, is the victim of some trick.

I smile imbecilically. What now?

“Well, you’re a sly one, aren’t you, Bill? But your visitors should be more careful — leaving their perfume in the bathroom.”

This takes me wholly by surprise. But, in the circumstances, it is absurdly proprietorial, absurdly accusatory — not to say wildly imaginative.

I think she realises this too, for she suddenly bites her lower lip, half closes her eyes, and her face is all an ominous quiver again.

What to say? I am bereft of inventiveness. It seems to me that the best thing to say is the truth. Perhaps it will be a way of getting me neatly, honourably out of all this.

(How wrong can you be?)

“Shall I tell you who that perfume belongs to? It belongs to Michael’s research student. Gabriella.”

She gives me a fierce, astonished, even more accusatory look.

“Her!”

“I can explain,” I say (feeling surprisingly guilty).

So I tell her about the events of that morning when I found myself a coerced passenger in Potter’s car. How I pocketed the perfume. Though I don’t tell her how I stalked the corridors of the Library, on a spring day, looking for a girl less than half my age (dressed in kittenish black), with ideas in my head as fantastical and concocted as the scent in my pocket.

All of which produces another convulsion of forgiveness-seeking, another welter of tears.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. And you did it because of me. You’re— But I know about Gabriella. Of course I know about her. I know about them bloody all, don’t I?”

And then, as the tears subside, she begins to tell me, without announcing it, the full story of her life and hard times with Michael Potter (M.A., Ph.D.), beginning at the beginning, with that encounter, long ago, in a room in a university.

I listen. I fetch Kleenex. I make tea. We switch to something stronger. Dry sherry. College reserve. The academic tipple. The rain still thrums. My sitting-room is not furnished for intimacy — commiserative or otherwise. No sofa; two huge and dumpy armchairs which engirdle and engulf their occupants. A room meant, presumably, for learned, man-to-man debate, with much puffing and waving of pipes. We sit islanded from each other, Matthew’s Notebooks, like an impotent arbitrator, between us.

And it was her fault, you see. She thinks it was all her fault. (She has this way of being at fault.) It was even her job, at the BBC, that gave Potter his eventual entrée into real-live mediadom. But it would never have happened the way it did — she is sure of it — if they’d had a kid. Or two kids. She used to see famous names pass through the studio doors — more than once, it seems, she saw Ruth Vaughan passing through the studio doors — but what she wanted most then was a child. It wasn’t his fault. His machinery wasn’t faulty. (Or underused.) It was something wrong with her. Several tries. Several tests. Then, at last, by a fluke, it happens. She gives up her job to be a mother. But the thing is born prematurely and dies within hours, and it seems there won’t be a second chance. And within months Potter is messing around with a former colleague of hers, a TV producer called Lena (“Legs-up Lena”) — his new career is about to begin.

And she is left only with years of pretend marriage; of feeling that if she hadn’t walked through Potter’s door all that time ago with her notes for her long essay (chivalric nostalgia!), her life would have been a different thing; and of feeling, all the same, that it’s her fault, she is the one to blame — so much so that she even submits to this mad and self-recriminatory degree of ignominy, this exorcistic climbing of my staircase, as if she is returning full circle, to walk through the door again, to try to put it right.

The gas fire fizzes. John Pearce’s clock chimes — five, six o’clock. Her face is a smudged, reddened mess — she has first sobbed, then leaked tears. It makes a pitiable contrast with her dressed-to-kill outfit, as if one part of her is a discarded doll, the other an unmasked human being.

But something is happening as she speaks. Her face seems slowly to reassemble. Or rather, a new face, a face I have never seen before, seems to appear, as if something, some layer, some sad accretion, has been rinsed away. It is an extraordinary thing this, like watching some rare natural event, to see another person loom out of themselves.

She folds her legs beneath her on the chair (I’m not sure now that they don’t have verve), one hand clasping her ankles. She has abandoned her shoes. Her high heels, my grey socks, lie like the litter from some previous intimate encounter on the worn carpet. We are like young people. Provisional people. These college rooms. These conversations that have no end. As if we have gone back in time and this is us now, beginning.

It could have been her. It could have been us.

And now she has stopped. Now she wants to know about me, how it was with me. She wants to know about Ruth.

But how do you begin? I can’t find words. Something is happening. Something is stuck, struggling inside me. Something is turning completely around, inside-out — and she, now, is the calm, re-embodied one, watching me dissolve.

She gets up. She comes and stands by my chair and takes my hand. I don’t know if her intention is to lead me, there and then, into my bedroom or merely to kiss me sweetly, briefly, and say something sad, wise and conclusive. But I resist the tug of her hand. I don’t know if this hurts her, but she draws her hand away as quickly as I draw mine, as if it’s her mistake — all her fault again — then she moves away to the window, her back towards me. She says nothing, but her back — her whole person — is eloquent.

I get up. I go to the window. I stand beside her. It is possible, by an effort, not to touch. There flashes through my mind a whole course of events — a whole fairy-tale prognosis — that I will only institute later (though, tell me, was it necessary to have been jerked back from the gates of death first? Do only ghosts have initiative?). I will give her the Notebooks. I will send her back to her husband. Oh, the true, chaste knight, a true Sir Galahad! She is Potter’s wife; Potter is her husband. Potter, with the Notebooks, will become the happy scholar again (happy researching other people’s spiritual crises). And when Potter becomes the happy scholar again, the man she once married will be given back to her. Hey presto! The wizard Merlin — ha!

The rain still teems down, but there is a faint gleam in one corner of the sky. The cobbles in the court and the tiles on the rooftops opposite have a pewtery glaze.

And children? Children can be adopted. Substitutes can be arranged. What is so important about this flesh-and-blood thing? This damn flesh-and-blood thing?

“It’s going to stop,” she says. The air from the open window is cool on our hot faces. “Then I won’t have any excuse, will I?”

I try not to look at her. I still have this mutinous erection.

“But I’ll go now if you want me to.”

Someone, hooded by a raincoat, dashes, feet slapping, across the court.

“Life goes on, Bill,” she says. That old trite truism.

“Go when it stops,” I say.

But maybe it won’t stop. Maybe the gleam is a false gleam, and the rain will go on all night. All night! Yet, even as I think this, the gleam spreads and brightens, the rooftops glisten and, as if someone has closed a tap, the full pelt of the skies becomes a sprinkle.

“Bill—?”

It’s a full, hard embrace with nothing restrained or disguised about it. It lasts maybe fifteen seconds, and it’s she who breaks off first.

She walks across the room. She retrieves her shoes. She doesn’t glance at the papers on the coffee table. She looks so different from the woman who walked in. She takes her coat from the hook on the door, opens the door. She pauses, her mouth half open as if to say something, but the door is already shut when I say, “It hasn’t stopped yet.”

I hear the cautious click of her high heels descending the worn and uneven spiral stairs — it’s not easy, you have to be careful. I think of her dressing, preparing for this. I look down on to the court. It seems amazing that these buildings have been here for centuries. It seems amazing they should be here at all. I watch her cross to the main gate, but she is all but hidden by her umbrella. A black, man’s umbrella. She doesn’t look up.

I stand by the window, waiting for the rain to stop. It takes longer than I expected. There is a moment when the sky seems partially to darken again and the deluge makes a temporary come-back. But after a while — I’m not paying attention, and it’s as if I awake to the fact rather than observe it — a weak, lemony light floods the court and there is a sudden assertion of routine, incidental noise: footsteps, drips, birdsong.

I go to the bathroom. I need to have a prodigious pee. Tea, followed by sherry, and all this rain — and only now does my erection yield to my bladder. I feel as if I am emptying out my being. I feel as if I am pissing out my soul. The sun shines on the tiles. On one of the glass shelves is Gabriella’s unclaimed perfume. On another is an old bottle of pills that a doctor gave me to “help” after Ruth died. Doctors must be short-sighted people.

I take it down, shake it to see how many pills are left. (Apparently, not enough.)

Then I go back into my sitting-room, and with the aid of what’s left in the sherry bottle, swallow the lot.