At first she could scarcely contain her excitement at what she had done, and was so overjoyed by her successful subterfuge that she delayed the implementation of her plan for a day or two. On the second evening, a visit from Christine Poole reminded her of her purpose; but as she was deliberating over the time and place in which she would most like her lifeless form to be discovered, with the maximum horror, guilt and tragic effect for all concerned, she began to feel a strange tickling in her throat. Half an hour later the sensation had grown distinctly uncomfortable. She drank some water and found she could barely swallow. Unable to face the thought of returning to the sick-bay, she removed two aspirin from the bottle, swallowed them, and went straight to bed. In the morning her head felt pounding and feverish. Her throat was by now inflamed. Again she was forced to dig into her supply, and continued to do so during the day. By evening, the bottle was worryingly depleted; although as she tried to go down to supper and found herself falling, disorientated, back on to the bed, it did occur to her that nature might have taken things into its own hands, thus temporarily shelving the problem.
She was discovered in this pitiful state by one of the kinder nuns, who called a doctor, and by morning she was diagnosed as having contracted glandular fever. Her parents were notified and she was whisked from the convent’s fiendish portals with scarcely a backward glance. Her mother, noting Agnes’s wan appearance, could have been forgiven for thinking that its causes were more viral than psychological; but the six weeks she insisted her daughter take off school, during which time she ministered to her with loaded trays and maternal affection, nonetheless were sufficient to avert a fatality either way. Agnes returned to school to find another girl occupying her unenviable place; and although she was not brave enough to intervene in her defence, she liked to think that her obviously reluctant participation in that persecution with which by now, after all, she was so familiar, along with the occasional sympathetic glances she offered her when other eyes were turned, did not go unnoticed.
Later, when she met John, she would sometimes be overwhelmed with relief that she had not taken her leave of life so peremptorily. One night, with an excess of intimacy, she had told him of her suicide manqué, in the hope that he would share her loving interpretation of destiny’s mysterious intervention. To her surprise, he had seemed barely moved by the thought of how close he had come to losing her.
‘Everyone does that, don’t they?’ he said, as if surprised that she should mention something so commonplace.
‘Did you?’
‘Oh, I expect so. Or thought about it, anyway.’
She had felt almost disappointed by his response. It suggested that her emotional register was in some way incompatible with his. How, if this was how he felt, would she ever encourage him to scale the heights of passionate love which ascended within her with every passing moment? After swapping suicide stories so casually, what was there left to live for?
Chapter Fifteen
HAVING always been advised to take the rough with the smooth Agnes did so; but found in her hands the two so successfully blent as to form a dull and coarse texture that bore little resemblance to either of its originators. She fondled her experiences too much, played with the past until it was dog-eared and tattered; its purer moments sullied by the oily press of palms, its horrors soft and elastic. Then, like moviestar monsters, her recollections would sometimes come back from the dead with a thrilling lurch, wringing out unplied reservoirs of sensation from places that had been thought drained.
She began to grow suspicious of the future. There had been a time when she had thought that by forecasting its events she would therefore control them: she could never be surprised, for her mind was always in wartime, a busy operations room in which possibilities snaked like rivers over maps of foreign places. Now, looking back on the reality her dreams had become, she felt foolish for having thought herself forearmed. There was an inexorability to disappointment. It lived on, like something radioactive. It contaminated things. She began to think of herself as existing only in the present tense, a conduit through which the future flowed to become the past.
She met her lover by chance in the street and they went for a drink in a pub that was too hot and crowded. She found herself sweating and babbling while he watched her, gaunt and quiet. Afterwards he left her on the road, his tail-lights glowing in mercurial retreat as he roared away. As she walked home her heart leapt at every shadow and barking dog. She soon broke her vow not to call him and gorged herself on his answering machine for two weeks with a hunger she did not attempt to control. It became something necessary, the reassuring click and hum, the sound of his voice trapped like an echo, like a ghost. When he picked up the phone himself one day she almost hung up in terror. To her surprise, he was kind and did not object to the idea of seeing her.
‘Let’s go somewhere,’ she said, emboldened. ‘Let’s get out of London for the day.’
They arranged to go to Hampton Court the following Saturday, and Agnes’s spirits lifted once more. She made plans and bought something new to wear. In these sudden bursts of sunshine, she found she could bear to look at things.
‘Have you gone to the dogs?’ Greta inquired.
‘What do you mean?’ said Agnes. The question seemed suspiciously perspicacious.
‘Oh, isn’t that what you say?’ Greta furrowed her brow like a perplexed student. ‘You know, where those skinny dogs run around after fake rabbits and stuff?’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. No, I haven’t. I don’t think it’s very nice, though.’
‘I’m going Saturday,’ said Greta firmly, as if decided by Agnes’s disapproval. She grinned mysteriously. ‘With London Transport.’
Agnes shrugged, a gesture intended to divest Greta’s travel arrangements of the unwarranted importance with which she had seen fit to report them.
‘It is cheaper, I suppose,’ she said.
She found it hard to talk to Greta sometimes. It made her feel as if she had not mastered even the basic verbal skills required to go comfortably through life.
‘Not London Transport,’ Greta groaned. ‘My friend — you know, the one I met on the tube. That’s what I call him. London Transport.’ She screeched with laughter. ‘It is cheaper, I suppose,’ she mimicked languorously. ‘You’re such a card, Agnes.’
‘I didn’t know you’d seen him again,’ remarked Agnes stiffly.
‘Oh, sure, I see him all the time. He works my station. We have a good time together,’ she mused. ‘He’s kind of weird, though. I went to his house with him one night and he showed me all this stuff.’
‘What stuff?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Porno mags and stuff, I guess,’ she said vaguely. ‘Hey, guess where he lives? Somewhere called Tooting — can you believe that? What a place for a train-driver to live, huh?’ She made tooting noises like a train and laughed. ‘It is, however,’ she added with mock sobriety, ‘a real dive.’
Agnes felt rather disturbed. She saw how easy it would be to sink without trace into a realm of strange men and nasty magazines and squalid flats in Tooting. One just absorbed what came along, she supposed, as if by osmosis. She had often wondered what would happen if she took up the offers of the men who commented upon her in the street. There was another world beneath the surface of the one she chose each day, a dark labyrinth of untrodden paths. Its proximity frightened her. She wondered if she would ever lose her way and wander into it. She thought of her lover, of her strange job, of her crumbling house, and wondered if she was already there.