The Other Half Lives

17

‘Did you fall in love with Aidan the instant you saw him?’ Mary asks abruptly.

‘Yes.’

‘So did Martha. Funny how that’s used as a gauge of love’s worth, isn’t it? The more groundless it is, the more based on nothing, the more impressive it sounds. “I fell in love at first sight.” We all want to say that-prove how passionate we are. And Martha was the worst kind of fool-a clever one. She was good with words and ideas, could make them serve her purpose, whatever it was. Within seconds she’d spun her reaction to Aidan, which was probably nothing more than sexual, into an irresistible narrative of love and enforced separation: the formalities of the occasion dictated that she had to walk into the interview room and he had to walk out of it while the chair of the appointment committee held the door open. Time for their eyes to meet, but nothing more. And their souls, according to Martha. She was an idiot,’ Mary adds vehemently, as if afraid I might miss the point of the story.

She talks like no one I’ve ever known. I want to ask again about the eighteen empty frames, but she’s already ignored the question three times. I know she’ll continue to ignore it until she’s ready, so I let her talk.

‘The stupid cow made a virtue of it. If they’d exchanged even one word, she went round telling everyone, the perfection of that moment would have been ruined. There’s no reasoning with someone like Martha. When the college phoned her to tell her she hadn’t got the job, she claimed she’d known he’d got it before they told her. She was happier for him than she would have been for herself, she said. And she knew where she’d be able to find him, as of the first of October 1993: Trinity College, Cambridge. She didn’t bother with the subtle approach-she wrote to him and told him she was in love with him. Any half-decent man would have read that letter and known straight away how vulnerable she was, but Aidan didn’t care. He wrote back and told her he’d noticed her too. Noticed! She offers him unconditional love, and in return he tells her he’s registered her existence! That was when I knew how dangerous he was for someone like Martha.’

‘Dangerous?’

‘He didn’t say, “I feel the same way”, he didn’t say, “I’m sorry, I’m not interested”. From his letter it was obvious he was one of those men who likes to reel women in, offering the illusion of intimacy with no substance behind it.’ Mary is picking up speed, barely aware of my presence. ‘He invited Martha to Trinity. She was so worried about being late, she got an earlier train and arrived in Cambridge an hour before she was supposed to. He’d told her where to find his rooms. When he opened his door and saw her there, he said, “You’re early,” and shook her hand. He didn’t even kiss her on the cheek. She apologised and asked if he was busy. He said, “I’m painting.” You know what he did then? Sat down at his easel and carried on. “I can talk at the same time,” he said, not even looking at her. Martha had gone all the way to Cambridge to see him, and he made her wait while he finished filling in the red background of his painting with a tiny brush. She said it was like being tortured. ’

Mary grabs a strand of her hair and puts it in her mouth, chewing it as if it’s a curl of liquorice. ‘When he’d finished painting, he took her for lunch. In college, surrounded by other people. He told her he was flattered, thought she was amazing, but didn’t want to get involved with anyone-said he’d find it too stressful. He could have told her that when he wrote to her, saved her the trip, instead of leaving her to wonder if something about her in the flesh hadn’t lived up to his memory of her. After lunch he sent her away. She wrote to him every day for a long time-her feelings hadn’t changed-but he hardly ever wrote back. When he did, his letters were chatty, anodyne-as short as he could get away with. I also wrote to him once or twice: hate mail.’

Mary tries to smile. ‘You know what I’m like when I get angry. I couldn’t bear what he was doing to her. In the end she stopped writing to him and started writing a novel instead. All about him, and her obsession with him. It wasn’t so much a book as a self-indulgent splurge, but apparently I was the only person who thought that. It got published. When it came out, she sent him a copy. She got his reply two days later-a card, thanking her for sending it, and quoting Gore Vidal. I suppose you know the famous quote?’

It’s a few seconds before I realise she wants a response from me. Not giving her what she wants doesn’t occur to me. ‘No.’

‘ “Whenever a friend succeeds, something in me dies.” ’

‘That’s horrible.’

‘Plenty of things are horrible,’ she says impatiently. ‘If they’re true, it doesn’t matter, but that’s not true, not of me, anyway. I’d only want someone to fail if I disliked them. Wouldn’t you?’ She doesn’t wait for my answer. ‘Anyone else would have torn up Aidan’s card and written him off as the arsehole that he is, but not Martha. Do you know what her take on it was?’ When Mary laughs, it sounds as if she’s choking, fighting for breath. She looks limp, like a doll that’s had the stuffing pulled out of it. ‘At least he thought of her as a friend.’

‘What?’

‘ “Whenever a friend succeeds, something in me dies.” Martha decided to minimise the hurt to herself by taking it as a declaration of friendship, something she’d not had from him before.’

I flinch. This is too personal a detail. I feel as if I’m invading Martha Wyers’ privacy, ransacking the mind and heart of an unhappy dead woman. I ought to tell Mary to stop. I don’t.

‘She wrote him a few more letters, to which he didn’t reply,’ she resumes her toneless cataloguing of the facts. As she sees them. I wonder what Aidan would say if he could hear her telling the story. Would his version of it be different? ‘Everyone told her to forget him, which was disastrous for someone like Martha-the very worst thing to say.’

‘It supported her idea of them as doomed lovers, with the world against them,’ I say. When Mary smiles at me, I feel something that’s not easy to distinguish from pride, and it scares me. My desire to please others isn’t safe. I wanted so badly to please Aidan. And Stephen Elton. For a while, I thought I had, did, both of them.

‘What is it?’ Mary asks.

I don’t want to tell her what I’m thinking. I’ve surrendered too much of myself already.

‘Don’t you believe me?’

I nod.

‘You don’t, not entirely. You’re not sure. It doesn’t sound like the Aidan you know. That Aidan’s kind and loving. On the other hand, you can’t explain his recent behaviour, and you hope I can. You need me to be able to, so part of you wants me to be telling the truth. That part believes me.’

She’s right. ‘You make me sound schizophrenic,’ I say, to hide my discomfort.

‘There are divisions within every person. Especially those who are forced to bear unbearable pain. That’s what trauma does-it divides you against yourself: the need to survive versus the desire for oblivion.’

One half dies. The other half lives.

I think I’m starting to understand. ‘Did Martha hang herself because of Aidan?’ I ask. ‘Because he rejected her?’

‘Yes. But that was much later, after they’d had sex,’ Mary says. It seems not to occur to her that this might be hard for me to listen to. ‘They met again in 1999. Someone decided to round up young, promising artists and writers and the like, and parade them in the press like performing monkeys. Martha and Aidan were both chosen. You can imagine what she made of that.’

‘She thought fate had brought them together again.’

‘She was right. Martha was Aidan’s doom, and he was hers. Why do people assume fate has their best interests at heart?’

‘I don’t,’ I tell her.

‘You’ve got more sense than Martha, then. She tried to turn herself into the person she thought Aidan wanted her to be. She lost weight, changed the way she dressed…’

‘Had he said he didn’t like her appearance?’

‘He’d said nothing! She made it up, the lot. All those years she’d been denied access to the real Aidan, she’d grown an alternative version in her mind, complete with all the preferences and attitudes she thought he ought to have. That was the man she was trying to please. And if he said things that didn’t tally with what she wanted to believe about him, instead of letting them crush the fantasy, she denied her own feelings, brought them into line with his. Like when they were interviewed for The Times and asked which was more important to them, personal happiness or work. Aidan said-in front of Martha, knowing how she felt about him-that nothing could ever matter to him as much as his work. Martha said the same thing, to win his approval, even though she’d gladly have renounced not only her work but also her family, friends, everything, if she could have had Aidan.’

So would I, if I could have him how he used to be. Before London. I try to keep an even expression on my face so that Mary can’t see what I’m thinking, but she’s wrapped up in her own thoughts, not even looking at me.

‘That was Martha’s fatal mistake,’ she says. ‘If she hadn’t told that one stupid lie, she’d be alive today.’