What we lacked was conversational intimacy. We were closest when we argued about the Task Force. When we went to a bar, her conversation was general. She was happy with her solitude or with lively chat about public matters, but there was nothing personal in between, except her father’s health or his literary career. When I tried to ease us towards the past, perhaps angling in gently with something about myself or a question about her own history, she reached quickly for generalities or an account of the earliest years of her childhood, or an anecdote about someone she knew. I told her about my idiotic excursion into tax fraud, my experience of court and the tedium of my hours of community service. I would have told her anyway, but the story was my pretext to ask if she herself had ever been in court. The answer was abrupt. Never! And then she changed the subject. I’d been in various promising affairs and in love, or almost in love, two or three times before, depending on definitions. I fancied myself an expert and knew better than to put her under pressure. I still thought I might get more out of Adam on the Salisbury affair. If I didn’t know her secret, at least she didn’t know I knew she had one. Tact was everything. I still hadn’t told her that I loved her, or divulged my fantasies about our shared future or even hinted at my frustration. I left her alone with her books or her thoughts whenever it suited her. Though the subject was not in the line of my interests, I worked up an acquaintance with the Corn Laws and developed some ideas of my own about free trade. She didn’t dismiss them, but nor was she impressed.
So here we were upstairs at dinner in her kitchen, which was even smaller than mine. The table was of white moulded plastic, just big enough for two, probably stolen from a pub garden by a previous tenant. Standing at the sink, up to his elbows in suds, Adam dealt with the plates and cutlery we’d handed him at the end of our meal – toad-in-the-hole, baked beans, fried eggs. Student food. On the windowsill, where yellow gingham curtains hung still in our late-summer heat wave, a radio was playing the Beatles, recently regrouped after twelve years apart. Their album, Love and Lemons, had been derided for its grandiosity, for failing to resist the lure and overreach of an eighty-strong symphony orchestra. They could not master such forces, was the general drift, with half a lifetime’s store of guitar chords. Nor did we wish to be told again, the Times critic complained, that love was all we needed, even if it were true, which it was not.
But I liked the music’s muscular sentimentality, emptied of irony by these middle-aged performers, so confident and tuneful, liberated by useful ignorance of two and a half centuries of symphonic experimentation. Lennon’s rasping voice floated towards us from some faraway echoing place beyond the horizon, or the grave. I didn’t mind being told again about love. Here before me were all of its warm possibilities, barely three feet away, and it was all I needed. Here was her long, exquisitely shaped face (those angled cheekbones might break through the skin one day), the amused gaze, at this point still merry, and narrowed, locked on me, the lips parted, for she was about to speak against what I’d just said. Her perfect elongated nose flared faintly at the base of the nostrils’ arch to signal in advance her dissent. Her pallor set off her fine brown hair, tonight childishly parted dead centre. Against prevailing fashion, she kept out of the sun. Her bare white arms were also thin and unblemished – not a single freckle.
From my point of view we still holidayed in the foothills, among possibilities whose fulfilment rose like distant alps. I tried to ignore them in order to attend to details. From her perspective, on the other side of this frail table, we may have already reached our highest point. She may have thought she was as close as she ever wanted to be, or could be, to another person. Love stories like Jane Austen’s used to conclude chastely with preparations for a wedding. Now their climax lay on the far side of carnal knowledge, where all of complexity waited.
For now, my business was to conduct a political argument with her without feelings running high then turning sour, and at the same time stay true to myself and let her do the same. It was a feasible balancing act, as long as I drank less than half a bottle of the indifferent Médoc that stood between us. We’d had this conversation before and it should have been easier now, but repetition seemed like an indictment of us both. We didn’t really want to be talking about it. Impossible to avoid, even though we knew it would lead nowhere. But this was how it was for everyone. We were all still tending the wound. How could Miranda and I spend our lives together when we couldn’t agree on such a fundamental as war?
About the islands formerly known as the Falklands she had firm views. She insisted that the Argentine flag-planting on remote South Georgia had been a clear violation of international law. I said it was an inhospitable place and no one should be asked to fight to the death for it. She said that the taking of Port Stanley was the desperate act of an unpopular regime looking to whip up patriotic fervour. I said this was all the more reason not to get drawn in. She said the Task Force was a brave and brilliant conception, even in failure. I said, uneasily remembering my emotional state when the ships set off, that it was a ridiculous enactment of lost imperial grandeur. How could I not see, she said, that this was an anti-fascist war? No (I spoke over her) it was a row over property, fed on each side by nationalistic stupidity. I summoned the Borges observation: two bald men fighting over a comb. She replied that a bald man might hand down his comb to his children. I was struggling to understand this when she added that the generals had tortured, disappeared and killed their citizens by the thousands and were running the economy into the ground. If we’d taken back the islands, the humiliation would have finished the military regime and democracy would have returned to Argentina. I replied that she could not possibly know this. We had lost thousands of young men and women to the cause of Mrs Thatcher’s ambitions. My voice began to rise before I remembered. I resumed quietly but with a certain tremor: that she remained in office after such slaughter was the greatest political scandal of our time. I delivered this with a finality that deserved a moment’s respectful silence, but Miranda came straight back to tell me that the prime minister failed in a decent cause and was supported by almost all of Parliament and the country and she was right to remain in office.
During this conversation, Adam finished with the dishes and stood with his back to the kitchen sink to watch us, arms folded, his head turning from side to side, speaker to speaker, like a spectator at a tennis match. Our exchange was not exactly weary, but repetition had given it an air of ritual. Like facing armies, we’d taken up our positions and intended to hold them. Miranda was telling me that the Task Force set off without proper ship-to-air missiles. The chiefs of staff let the armed forces down. I used to hear terms like these – ship-to-air, homing devices, titanium-tipped – at the Warwickshire student union bar, but only from men, men of the political left, whose opinions were complicated by tacit admiration for the weapon systems they condemned. In her soft and fluent delivery, she mingled these with other concepts from the lexicon of established power – the open society, rule of law, restoration of democracy. Perhaps it was her father I was hearing.
While she was speaking, I turned to catch Adam’s expression. What I saw was his devoted attention. More than that. A look of delight. He adored what she was saying. I turned back to Miranda as she reminded me that the Falklanders were my fellow citizens, now living under fascism. Was I happy with that? I disliked this rhetorical turn. It was a masked insult. The conversation was turning sour, just as I’d feared, but I couldn’t help myself. In the tiny kitchen space, I was hot and irritable as I reached for the wine and filled my glass. There could have been a negotiated settlement, I started to say. A slow and painless thirty-year transition, a UN mandate, guaranteed rights. She interrupted to inform me that we could never trust any undertaking by the murdering generals. As she said it, I saw them in caricature, in braided hats, campaign ribbons, cavalry boots, and Galtieri on his white horse in a confetti blizzard on the Avenida 25 de Mayo.