The year continuing mild, they walked a good deal around London and the parks, often following paths she had known with Stephen. Sometimes she felt she was walking with two men, not one. Stephen certainly was not dead for her, because she seemed to feel his presence close to her — better be careful, look what it had led to with him: did she really want to be possessed by a ghost, in the same way he was? When Stephen was truly dead for her, would she then begin to grieve for him? Or was she grieving for him now? While preoccupied with these thoughts, she had agreeable if sometimes slow and absent-minded conversations with Benjamin. He was entertaining her still. Some of the 'projects' she was sure he invented there and then, though he presented them to her with an emphatic solemnity which was part of the joke.
'How about a van coming to your home full of materials or samples of materials? You know how they make you a suit in twenty-four hours in Hong Kong or Singapore? Well, you'd choose your material, give them something to copy, and you'd have it back in a day.'
'You'll make a fortune on that one, I promise you.'
'You're sure? Well, how about this. We are thinking about reviving Leamington Spa and Bath and Tunbridge Wells — we would add gyms and health clubs and health farms and this new cold water therapy. All it would need is for some VIP to make them fashionable again. The way your royal family did with the old spas.'
'That and a lot of money. You mean you can afford all that and your Kashmiri lake?'
'I must confess that we have decided the Kashmiri lake was a bit too much for us. Money is a bit tighter than it was.'
'But reviving all the spas in Britain — that's all right?'
'I believe in it,' he said. 'This is a downturn, that's all. I'm sure the markets'11 pick up after Christmas.'
So the money men were talking in 1989, just before the new Slump, or, if you like, the Recession.
He told her, too, about his family. It was clear that between the two of them he and his wife made a good deal of money. His children, male and female, were in university and doing well. He showed photographs of them and of his house and of the Associated and Allied Banks of North California and South Oregon. He did this as if reminding himself, as well as her, of the value and worth of his life. Yet time had passed since he had observed her against the glamorous backdrops of Belles Rivieres and Queen's Gift. So how did he see her now? As glamorous still, and her life here in London, which was humdrum and at the moment unbearably so, seemed to him as sophisticated and worldly as the life depicted in books of memoirs about the theatre. Which he said he was reading. Surely her flat must seem to him small, a poor thing compared to the big house he lived in? But her rooms were full of pictures, books, theatre memorabilia, photographs of people she knew as friends or acquaintances but whom he thought of as famous. How did he see her solitary and chaste way of living? He imagined a lover of many years' standing, and remarked that he envied him.
About Stephen's death he spoke angrily and disapprovingly. He could not understand why anyone who had so much could be willing to leave this world. She tried the word depression but saw that for him it was only a word, not more than when someone exclaims, 'Oh hell, I'm depressed today.' Suppose she told him, 'Stephen was living in despair for years' or 'He was in love with a dead woman'? These accurate statements would not leave her tongue. She could not say them to this sane, sensible, and serious man. Did that mean she did not see Stephen as sensible and serious? Yes, but sane, no. She contemplated the word serious. Whatever Benjamin was or was not, he was certainly serious. To be precise, humour, or the ambiguous, was not his gift. With him she was never on that frontier where attitudes can change themselves into their opposites, good and bad reversing themselves with a laugh. More than once she made the kind of joking remark she could share with Stephen, but had to say quickly, 'Sorry, I was only joking; no, I didn't mean it.'
Benjamin thought over — as was his way — what she had said about Stephen, and next day came back with 'But why did Stephen do that awful thing?'
Suddenly impatient, she said, 'Stephen died of a broken heart. There is such a thing, you know. Why it was broken in the first place — well, that is for the psychiatrists. But not everything is curable. The point is, he had been living with a broken heart and he couldn't stand it any longer.'
He could positively be heard thinking that broken hearts were not for serious people. 'I'm sorry, but I can't accept that.'
'That's only because you've never had a broken heart.' She knew he was hearing this as a flippant or frivolous remark.
After a while he said, stumbling over it, 'I believed that you and he… I think I told you I envied him.'
'No. We were friends.' She heard her voice shake. But went on, 'Believe me, that was all.' All.
An acute look: he did not believe her. He thought it was a plucky lie. He put his arms around her. 'Poor Sarah,' he murmured into her hair. He laid his cheek against it and then kissed her cheek. She remembered another kiss and stood back, smiling. Smiling, he let her go. They were standing on a pavement. Early afternoon, but lights were coming on in the houses and talked directly to her heart of intimacy, of love. The trees in the square they stood in were wild and full of noisy wind, and underfoot was a thick layer of sycamore leaves, black-webbed and slippery, like cut-off ducks' feet. She thought, If I were to tell this man, even try to tell him, watering it down, making it less, what I've been feeling all the time since I first met him, he would walk quickly away from the lunatic.
They said goodbye, and she said, 'Next year in Belles Rivieres.' When he did not react, she asked, 'Did you ever see the film Last Year in Marienbad? It was about people who remembered different things about what happened the year before, and they were remembering possibilities, different parallel possibilities, too.'
He at once said, 'Believe me, Sarah, I shall never forget one single minute of anything that has happened when I've been with you — with you all.' He added, 'It's certainly an interesting idea. I'll get the video.'
'It's the same idea as the song "I remember it well."' Here she was relieved when he laughed and said that he remembered it well.
It was about then that she got a letter from Andrew.
Dear Sarah,
I am in Arizona, making a film about a screwed-up cop but he has a heart of gold. What screwed him up? His childhood. I never told you about my childhood. It would be taking unfair advantage. Do I have a heart of gold? I have a heart.
I am living with my sister Sandra. She is my real sister from my real mother. She has left her husband, my good friend Hank. She says they have nothing in common. That's after twenty years. She is nearly fifty. She is starting life again. I like her kids. She's got three. We are in a house twelve miles from Tucson among all the sand and the cactuses. Coyotes howl at night. If the TV goes wrong a man arrives from Tucson to mend it within the hour. I did not think this strange until my girlfriend Helen from Wiltshire England said we take too much for granted. But she thinks it's cute. Rather, fascinating. When I said girlfriend, she's one of the women I lay. My sister wants me to marry one of them. Why is it people who were unhappily married are so keen on others doing it? I'd rather marry her. I say this and she laughs at the jest.