When I got back from the hospital, an hour after lunch, Miranda was waiting for me. She intercepted me in the hall by her front door. We’d already been talking on the phone while I waited to be treated and I had a lot more to say, and I had some questions too. But she led me upstairs to her bedroom and there my words died in my throat. I relaxed into her concern for me. I was encased in plaster from elbow to wrist. While we made love, I protected my arm with a pillow. We passed into the sublime. At least for a while, she was personal, as well as inventive, she was solicitous, and joyous, and so was I. It was me she was with, not any capable man. I didn’t dare threaten with questions the novel and exalted feelings that passed between us. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her about Peter Gorringe, or about what she had told the court, or tell her what I had already discovered about the case while sitting in Accident and Emergency. I didn’t ask her whether she knew that Adam was ‘in love’ with her, or whether she had intended to dispose him to be so. I didn’t want to refer to the coolness between us after I’d mentioned marriage in Holy Trinity Church. How could I when at one point she pressed my face between her palms and looked into my eyes and shook her head, as if in wonder?
Afterwards, I remained silent on these subjects because I greedily thought that within the half-hour we would be going back to her bed, even though she was pulling away from me again as we drank coffee in her kitchen. I was happy to believe that all questions and tensions would be settled later. We talked now in a businesslike way, first about Mark. We agreed to try to find out what was happening to him. She was concerned about Adam. She thought I should take him back to the shop for a check-up. She still held to her plan for the three of us to drive to Salisbury to visit her father. I didn’t say that the prospect of us packed into my small car, spending the entire day covering for Adam and being polite to a difficult, dying man, had no appeal. I was keen to want whatever she wanted.
We didn’t go back to bed. A silence forced its way between us. I could see that she was already withdrawing into her private world and I didn’t know what to say. Besides, she had a seminar at King’s, in the Strand. I decided to settle my feelings by avoiding Adam downstairs and going straight out for a stroll on the Common. There, I walked up and down for two hours. My inaccessible wrist itched as I thought about Miranda. I didn’t know how we had traversed so smoothly from coolness to joy, from suspicion to ecstasy, and from there to an impersonal conversation about arrangements. She excited me and I couldn’t understand her. Perhaps some intelligible part of her had been damaged. I was anxious to dismiss that. It must be that she knew more about love, the deeper processes of love, than I did. So she was a force, but not of nature, not even of nurture. More like a psychological arrangement, or a theorem, a hypothesis, a glorious accident, like light falling on water. Wasn’t that of nature, and wasn’t this old hat, men thinking of women as blind forces? Then, might she resemble a counter-intuitive Euclidean proof? I couldn’t think of one. But after half an hour of fast walking, I thought I’d found the mathematical expression for her: her psyche, her desires and motives were inexorable, like prime numbers, simply and unpredictably there. More old hat, dressed as logic. I was in knots.
Pacing the littered grass, I numbed myself with truisms. She is who she is. She’s herself and that’s the end of it! She approaches love with caution because she knows how explosive it can be. As for her beauty, at my age, in my state, I was bound to think of it as a moral quality, as its own justification, the badge of her essential goodness, whatever she might actually do. And look what she had done – from my waist, almost to my knees, I still felt the afterglow of the most intense sensual pleasure I had ever known, and everywhere, its emotional correlate glowed too.
I had done two turns when I stopped in one of the larger, emptier expanses of the Common. A good way off, on all sides, the traffic turned about me like planets. Usually it oppressed me to reflect that every car contained a nexus of worries, memories and hopes as vital and complicated as my own. Today, I welcomed and forgave everyone. We would all turn out well. We were all bound together in our own overlapping but distinct forms of comedy. Others might also have a lover living with a death threat. But no one else with an arm in a cast had a machine for a love rival.
I headed home, north along the High Street, past the burned-out premises of the Anglo-Argentinian Friendship Society, past the stinking black heaps of plastic sacks, trebled in height since I was last this way. A German company had launched their bipedal, dustmen-automata in Glasgow. Public contempt was aroused because each one wore the perpetual grin of a contented worker. If Adam could make an origami boat in seconds, it should not have been much of a stretch to have a drone chuck sacks into the mechanical maw of a garbage truck. But the filth and dust caused failure in the knee and elbow joints, according to the Financial Times, and the cheaper batteries couldn’t survive an eight-hour shift. Each device cost five years’ wages of a dustman. Unlike Adam, it had an exoskeleton and weighed 350 pounds. The automata were falling behind on the work and on Sauchiehall Street, the bags were piling up. In Hanover, a robot dustman had stepped backwards into the path of an autonomous electric bus. Teething troubles. But in our part of the country, humans were cheaper, and they remained on strike. General outrage had given way to apathy. Someone said on the radio that the stink was no more remarkable than in Calcutta or Dar es Salaam. We could all adapt.
Peter Gorringe. Once I had the name, it was easy to find the press reports as I waited with my throbbing wrist in Casualty. They dated back three years and, as I’d guessed, concerned a rape. As victim, Miranda’s name was withheld. In broad outline, the case resembled a thousand others: alcohol and a dispute over consent. She went one evening to Gorringe’s bedsit in the centre of town. They knew each other from school, which they had left only months before, but they were not close friends. That night, alone together, they drank a fair amount and around nine o’clock, after some kissing, which neither side denied, he forced himself on her, according to the prosecution. She tried to fight him off.
Both parties agreed that intercourse took place. Gorringe’s defence, provided through legal aid, argued that she had been a willing partner. Counsel made much of the fact that she had not called out for help during the alleged assault, nor had she left Gorringe’s place until two hours later, or made any distressed phone calls to police, parents or friends. The prosecution case was that she was in a state of shock. She had sat on the edge of the bed, half dressed, unable to move or speak. She left around eleven, went straight home, did not wake her father, lay on her bed crying until she fell asleep. The next morning she went to the local police station.
It was in Gorringe’s story that the particulars of this case emerged. He told the court that after they made love, they drank more vodka and lemonade, that the post-coital mood was celebratory. She asked him if he had any objection to her texting her new friend Amelia to announce that she and Peter were an ‘item’. Within a minute there came a reply in the form of a laughing emoticon making the thumbs-up sign. The case for the defence should have been simple. But the messages were not on Miranda’s phone. Amelia had been living in a hostel for problem teenagers, and had gone off backpacking and couldn’t be traced. The phone company in Canada would not release their record of texts without a formal approach from the police. But the police had targets to meet for solved rape cases and were keen to see Gorringe go down. They knew, as the jury did not, that he had previous convictions for shoplifting and affray.