'I haven't had lunch yet,' he says. 'I've no appetite and I've nothing to eat.'
'Would you like me to cook you something?' I go into the kitchen and open the fridge. There is nothing in it apart from a cube of processed cheese, a roll that has gone hard, and a few raw, shrivelled potatoes.
'I'll get you something from the shop.'
'Stay here. I don't feel like anything anyway.'
I sit down opposite him. 'How do you feel?'
He just shrugs. 'They've given me some tablets, but they make me feel rotten. What about Jana?' he asks.
'She told me she'd been to see you and made you some pancakes.'
'Did she?' He seems surprised. 'Oh, yes, that's right. She was here,' he recalls. 'She's turned into a real beauty.'
I tell him that the beauty will probably fail her exams, that she plays truant and hangs about with a bad crowd, and that she probably smokes cannabis.
He gazes at me wearily and then asks, 'What are you going to do about it?'
Yes — what will I do about it? For a moment the old bitterness wells up in me. That's what he'd always ask. Whenever our little girl ran a temperature, when he selfishly got me pregnant but definitely had no wish to be a father, when our flat was burgled one time, whenever there was a burst pipe in the upstairs neighbour's bathroom, he would ask me the same question: 'What are you going to do about it?' Not what he was going to do, or we were going to do. A modern man, I realized at the time. Latching on to a woman and clinging to her: a little boy at his mummy's breast, who stays there until he grows tired of it and fancies being suckled elsewhere.
I realized it too late, unfortunately.
No, I mustn't be callous. Whatever he was like before, he now sits here on this chair a poor, abandoned human being who suffers and fears the end. How could it have occurred to me to seek his advice or even expect any sign of interest?
I tell him I don't know what I'll do with our adolescent. I'll seek advice from someone who is better informed.
'Drugs. We didn't have that sort of thing when I was still teaching,' he says. 'Apart from smoking in the toilets. But you oughtn't to smoke. Not at home, anyway. You set a poor example.'
Whereas he always set a good example. He didn't smoke, he didn't drink, he did morning exercises, brushed his teeth and he took his shoes off when he came in. All he did was find a mistress and demonstrate to our little girl that deception and desertion are
part of life. 'How do you spend your day?' I ask, in order to switch the conversation back to the only person who still interests him.
'I sit here like this. Sometimes I read for a while. But what's the point? So most of the time I just sit here and wait and listen.'
'Do you listen to music?'
He shakes his head.
'What do you listen to?'
'The murmur of the universe. At night, when the street is free of cars, I can hear time rolling through motionless space. It's not nice. That's one reason why I stopped winding the clock. It was too much of a reminder of how time never stops rolling onwards.'
I don't know whether he is really recounting his own experience or trying to play on my emotions, or whether he is simply repeating something he read somewhere. 'Don't you sleep at night?'
'I sleep on and off, whether it's day or night.' Without looking at me he says, 'I'm scared of falling asleep. It's stupid because I won't escape the moment anyway; but I'd like to be awake.'
Father Kostka mentioned humility and reconciliation at the surgery the other day. I ought to have asked him what he had in mind. Maybe I could have said something comforting to give courage to my ex-husband, who maybe believes that he will outwit death, or even overcome it if he doesn't let it surprise him in his sleep.
'Don't think about it,' I say and it strikes me that it's not really the best way to finish my visit. So I ask him, 'Do you remember when I last visited you in hospital? There was a young man with you; you introduced him to me.'
'I don't recall.'
'You told me it was a former student of yours.'
'Oh, yes, now I remember. Why do you mention it?'
'He called me and asked how you were.'
'That was nice of him.'
'He seems like a nice person,' I say, trying to make my voice sound as disinterested as possible.
'Why not? Young people tend to be less spoiled. Some of them, at least. He was a quiet young fellow, a trifle erratic, but he was interested in history and the stars. We talked together about time. He once let on to me that he was interested in astrology and I tried to explain to him that it was obscurantism.'
'Maybe it isn't,' I countered in his defence.
'I know you believe in it too. I tried to explain to him that it was pseudo-science. I'm sorry to see that you as a doctor attach any importance to such heresies, but I'm hardly going to convince you now.'
'I'm glad you don't intend to convince me,' I say, and as I bid him goodbye I tell him I hope he'll get well soon.
But being a doctor, I don't fool myself that he'll ever get well.
4
Saturday morning. It was a hot night and I slept badly. I've been sleeping worse and worse lately. And yet I'm tired. I'm so tired that in the evening I collapse into insensibility. But no sooner do I overcome that deathly torpor than I'm awake again and trying in vain to get back to sleep. I am too weary to fall asleep; everything aches, my body, my back and my legs, as well as my thoughts. I need a rest. I need a seaside holiday.
The sea enthralled me from the very first moment I set eyes on it.
Water is my element.
Virginia Woolf loved water too. There one might have sat clock round lost in thought. Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds. . she wrote. And she also ended her own life in water. The river was called the Ouse.
Nadya, the wife of the Soviet tyrant, shot herself. They say that
outside the room where they found her, a rose lay on the floor; it had just fallen from her hair.
Four years ago I went to the seaside with Charles the Second. We had a room booked in a pension and the sea was just beyond some low dunes. Our room was small and clean, with fresh flowers on the table and painted flowers on the walls. We lay down side by side and even made love. His treatment of me was as always kindly and loving, but I was obsessed with the thought that the way he treated me was the way he must have treated some other woman just a few days before, that he had no difficulty in declaring his love to two different women. When, one evening, he started to talk about our future and about how we'd get married, I finally broached the subject. But I did so in the hope that he would deny everything, that he'd tell me I was crazy and that he loved only me.
But instead he said, 'Eva's been spilling the beans, I see.'
I told him it didn't matter who told me.
He hung his head and without looking at me asked me if I wanted to know the details.
That was something I really didn't want.
He asked me if I could forgive him.
I told him I could forgive him, but I didn't want to live with him.
He remained motionless for a moment, then got up and left the room. From the place where I sat I could see him climbing the dune. The sea was rough and a ban on bathing had been in force since that morning. Charles the Second was an epileptic and he hadn't taken his tablets yet that day. I don't know whether he reached the sea. Had it been a few years earlier, I might have thought he had simply taken the opportunity to stay in the West. But for the past five years there had no longer been any need to flee to freedom, he could only be fleeing from me. But why should he flee from me, seeing that I'd just told him I didn't want him? He could also have been fleeing from his conscience, from