In the Evil Day

54

…HAMBURG…

‘I’m regretting this,’ said Alex. ‘I was regretting it before I got into the car. It’s stupid of me. An imposition.’

She was holding two bottles of red wine and she offered them to Anselm.

‘To drink,’ she said. ‘Tonight.’

Even in the dim light, he could see that she was flushed. She had been crying and he thought she looked beautiful and desirable.

‘Welcome to the house of remorse,’ said Anselm. ‘Here we regret almost everything we do.’

He took the bottles, showed her into the study and went to the kitchen. It was a choice between a 1987 Lafite and a 1989 Chateau Palmer. He drew the corks of both bottles and went to the pantry for good glasses. He’d broken many Anselm wine glasses, glasses his great-great grandfather might have drunk out of. But there were enough left to see him out.

In the study, Anselm said, ‘This is kind of you but this wine’s too good for me.’

‘From my ex-husband’s collection,’ said Alex.

‘It’s nice of him to donate it.’

‘He killed himself in Boston yesterday.’

Anselm poured the Lafite. They sat in silence, each in a cone of lamplight, the wine dark as tar in their glasses.

‘I don’t know why I’m upset,’ said Alex. ‘For a long time I hated him. And then I came to terms with my feelings.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘A colleague of his rang an hour ago. I felt so…fuck, I can’t express it.’

‘Why would he do it?’

‘Apparently the woman he lived with left him about a month ago. His colleague says he was depressed, he’d been drinking a lot, not going to the university, missing classes.’

More silence. She finished her wine and he refilled her glass. She leant her head back, half her face in shadow. ‘He rang me about two weeks ago,’ she said. ‘I didn’t let him speak. I told him I had nothing to say to him.’

Anselm wanted to say that it wouldn’t have made any difference but he could not bring himself to. ‘Would you have taken him back?’ he said.

‘No. Never.’

‘I wouldn’t dwell on it then. How long were you married?’

‘Six years. He left me for the American woman.’

Anselm rolled wine around his mouth, swallowed. ‘You can keep coming around with this stuff,’ he said.

‘Kai wouldn’t open a bottle except to impress. One day he brought his head of department home for a drink, a fat man, a medievalist, so self-important you wanted to kill him. But you would not be able to get your hands around that pig neck. And Kai opened a fifteen-year-old burgundy. The man couldn’t believe it. Life’s too short to drink inferior wine, Kai said. This is from a man who bought house wine from that little place next to the canal in Isestrasse, do you know it? You take your own bottles, he fills them with terrible Bulgarian liquids full of brake fluid. Whatever that is.’

She looked at him, she licked her lips, drank a lot of wine.

‘I took the marriage seriously. That was the end of serious relationships for me.’

She drank. ‘It had been going on for a long time before I found out. More than a year. He had all these trips, London, Copenhagen, seminars, that kind of rubbish. I believed him.’

All betrayals were the same, thought Anselm. The only tragedy was that, in the instant in which they became known, the life drained from everything that had gone before-like colour photographs turning into black-and-white.

Alex held out her glass. He half-filled it, added some wine to his.

Her quick drinking made him nervous. He was the quick drinker, that was his escape.

She studied the wine against the light, took a big mouthful. ‘He’d done it before,’ she said, not looking at him, looking around the room.

‘Done what?’

‘Left one woman for another without any warning.’

He knew what she was going to tell him.

‘He left his first wife for me,’ she said. ‘He sent her a telegram.’

Anselm went to the desk and found a cigarette. He could remember his grandfather sitting behind the desk smoking a cigar. The big brass cigar ashtray was still in position, to the right of the blotter in its embossed-leather frame.

He leant against the desk. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he probably intended to tell her in person, never got around to it.’

‘He was twelve years older,’ she said. She swilled the last of her wine, looking at the scarlet whirlpool, drained it. ‘More, please.’

Anselm poured the Lafite, left an inch in the bottle, there was sediment.

Alex drank. ‘It tastes better and better,’ she said.

‘Twelve years,’ said Anselm. ‘An older man.’

‘When he left me, I worked out that I was the same age his first wife was when he left her. He told me she was frigid, didn’t like being touched, he thought she was a repressed lesbian, she was always kissing and hugging her women friends.’

‘That could be a sign, yes.’

‘No. I saw her with a man at an exhibition. He looked like a biker. She couldn’t stop touching him, she rubbed herself against him like a cat.’

‘What did that tell you? Clinically speaking? With hindsight?’

Alex finished her glass. She held it out and shifted in her chair, crossed her legs, a hint of languor in the movements.

It felt as if the atmospheric pressure had fallen. Anselm poured the Palmer into clean glasses.

‘It told me, clinically speaking, that he’d lied to me from the start,’ she said. She sat back. ‘Talking about it makes me feel better. Have you betrayed many partners?’

‘A few, I suppose.’

‘You don’t remember?’

‘Some I remember. I remember the reverse too.’

‘And how did you respond to that?’

There was something edging on the flirtatious in her voice, the way she was sitting, in the carriage of her head. It wasn’t the manner of a bereaved person.

‘I didn’t bear grudges.’

‘Would you say you were a forgiving person?’

‘No. I think I just didn’t care enough.’

Anselm looked away. He hadn’t intended to say that, he hadn’t wanted to admit his emotional callousness to anyone. He hadn’t admitted it to himself. Much of his adult life had been spent in pursuit of things, including women, but in the moment of possession, they had lost some of their value. And, later, he had not felt any lasting pain at losing them.

‘Are we talking about before or after Beirut?’ she said. ‘Or both?’

‘Before. Things have been quiet in the partner business since.’

She tilted her head and her hair fell onto a shoulder. In the lamplight, her lipstick was almost black. ‘Not enough big-breasted women around? For a tit man like you?’

‘I was lying,’ said Anselm. ‘I’m really a leg man. Legs.’

Alex recrossed her legs, ran a hand over a thigh. ‘I’m not quite sure what that expression means,’ she said. ‘Does it mean legs like dancers’ legs?’

‘Well, for some. We legmen are not all alike.’

‘And you? Personally?’

‘I like runners’ legs.’

She smiled. ‘I’m a runner.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s warm,’ said Alex. She unbuttoned her waistcoat, leant forward and took it off, threw it onto an empty chair. She turned her head to Anselm. ‘Would you like me to keep going?’

Anselm’s mouth was dry. He sipped wine. ‘Yes,’ he said.

She unbuttoned her shirt. She was wearing a white bra.