She said, “Why shouldn’t I have done that?”
I said, “I wanted you to be better than me.”
She said, “It’s absurd that you should hate me because you find I am just the same as you.”
“It’s not absurd — it’s logical,” I said. “But you’re worse!”
And in between these quarrels we sat down and ate, we watched television, we slept together. I did not hate her. We were in love, and I was dying.
Death was in all my dreams. I opened doors on familiar rooms and there was no one inside. I searched the woods for my son and saw him far-off, holding someone else’s hand. And when I looked down I saw that what I had taken to be a side of raw beef in a ditch was my corpse in a grave. There were never any mourners in my dreams, there was no grief, there was no evidence that I had ever existed. I dreamed constantly of flying — soaring low over hills and keeping to their contours. When I crash-landed, exhausted by the speed, my bones broke like chair legs snapping.
I woke from such dreams as if I had not slept, my body ringing with aches. And then I could not do anything except follow the brainless routine of an angry housewife. I took Jack to school, I dusted, and did the dishes, and then I met Jack and fed him and I forced him to have a nap because I needed one. I disliked the entire day, but was not capable of anything else. When Mrs. Trevor, the charlady came, I went out alone — usually to Drummond’s Bank, where I lurked, often following Jenny home, shadowing her, and then at the station hurrying to the ticket barrier and pretending that I was meeting her.
I saw nothing. She never spoke to anyone. She read her Evening Standard and that was that. And nothing was more dispiriting to me than to sit in a London train filled with homeward-bound commuters. They were tired and pale and rumpled; I was sure they dreamed, but they looked defeated. Being among them frightened and depressed me. Once I had felt like an alien: I was different, I had hopes and my own work, I was a bird of passage. Now I suspected that I resembled them — we were all being cheated.
I opened her mail, and I discovered that the phrase “steaming open a letter” is meaningless. There is no such process, none that serves any purpose. Steaming destroys the envelope, the ink runs, it makes a mess. It was the postman who showed me the best way.
A postage-due letter had come from the States and I had to pay twenty pence on it. The handwriting was irregular: a reader’s letter, care of the publisher. They could be very kind or intensely irritating. I needed a kind one; I didn’t want the other.
I hesitated with my money and said, “I wish I knew what was in it.”
The postman said, “Here, got a pencil?”
He inserted the pencil point under the flap at the side — not the one that is licked, but one that is stuck down already, one of the seams of the envelope — and by rolling the pencil he separated the glued seams, and opened the triangle at the side.
The letter began, I have never written to an author before. I read a bit more and then handed over the twenty pence. And nearly every day a letter came for Jenny. I opened them all the postman’s way, but they told me nothing. They were from Oxfam, and her college tutor, and the Labour Party.
The note I had found in her handbag I was sure had been passed to her at work. And the other week, when in my fury I had said that her lover had been someone at work she had merely sobbed. She had not denied it.
There were not many men in the bank, and I knew most of them by sight. One sat at a desk near the Enquiries window. He was about my age, early thirties, and he worked with an air of concentration, seemingly unaware of the noise and motion going on around him. He did not wear a suit like the other men in the bank. His corduroy jacket was slightly stained, but his tie was fashionably wide and bright. He looked out of place there. He reminded me of myself. The name-slot on his desk said A C SPEARMAN.
The other men in the office whose desks and name-slots I could see — Dinshaw, Roberts, Wilkie, Slee — all wore dark suits and looked dull and rather stupidly hardworking. They went home defeated, like the commuters I saw swaying on the 17:43 to Catford Bridge.
I loitered because I had nothing else to do, and I followed Spearman for a few days, as I had followed Jenny. He lived in Sydenham, which was suspiciously near, though he was on a different line. He always went to Charing Cross Station alone. There was something about his shoes — scuffed, misshapen, with worn-down heels — that convinced me he was the man. He lived on the top floor of what had once been a huge family house, now divided into flats. His name was beside one of the eight bells.
“I know who it is,” I said.
Jenny had just come home. She was always at her most vulnerable then, too tired to fight; she wanted to sit quietly and have a drink. She was grateful that I had made the evening meal, and that it was ready.
She had put her briefcase down and was sitting away from the light. She was pale and looked exhausted.
She said, “Please don’t.”
“I’m not starting a quarrel,” I said. “I’m not angry anymore. I believe you when you say it’s over. I’m working on my book. It’s just that I know—”
Every word was a lie.
“It’s Spearman — I know it.”
She sighed and said, “No, no,” unwilling even to argue.
When I started to insist she put her face into her hands.
She said, “I’m glad you believe me when I say that it’s over—”
There was no irony in her voice: she really did believe me.
“But it wasn’t Andrew Spearman. That poor fellow. He lives in fear of being sacked. I loaned him the electric fire.”
“I could ask him about you,” I said. “I know where he lives.”
“Andy, please. If you promise me that you won’t make a scene, I’ll tell you who it is.”
She was speaking from the darkness on the far side of the lamp, and she remained in the shadow as she went on.
“Sometimes it’s better to know the facts. The less you know, the worse it is for your imagination. I wish you had never found out.”
I said, “I promise I won’t make a scene. I just want to know. I agree with you about the facts. My imagination is really dreadful sometimes.”
I was talking softly, but I was trembling. Didn’t she know that I would have promised anything? But it was like lying my way into a building — conning someone to gain entrance. It was more than that, though, because I was smiling, I was agreeing with her, I was using my charm and putting her at ease. It was like seducing her, and with a sigh — seeing no alternative — she submitted.
“It was Terry Slee,” she said. “Don’t be angry, darling.”
“I’m not angry at all.” I thought: I’ll kill the bastard.
5
I should have known. She had not chosen a man who resembled me — she had chosen my opposite. He was older — divorced, I discovered — rather well-dressed in a conventional bankerish way (the same uniform with slightly brighter stripes). He was worldly and ambitious. I woke every morning with the sense that I was far from home. This man was a Londoner, like my wife. He was the assistant manager at the bank. He had probably hired her. She saw him every day. I found that unbearable. I hated the way she had called him Terry — so familiar. The truth didn’t ease the pain. It only made it worse. I thought: There’s more, there’s always more.
Because she had chosen someone unlike me in every way I felt she had rejected me. I might have been able to rationalize another American, or explain a ne’er-do-well; and I had almost gotten used to the idea of Spearman and his broken shoes. But this ridiculous spiv, who had dumped his wife, so pleased with himself, his three-piece suits, his copy of the Financial Times, his affectation of carrying a sensationally battered briefcase — this was an insult. How could she?