‘Well, you know what he’s like,’ Agnes offered. ‘He always seems half-asleep or something. He makes you want to check his pulse.’
‘What do you mean, “strange”?’ Nina persisted.
‘Well—’ She felt herself writhing. ‘He didn’t — he couldn’t — I tried, I really did, but it never made any difference because he still didn’t—’
‘Come?’ interjected Nina smoothly.
‘Yes,’ breathed Agnes. ‘I thought it was my fault.’
‘No, it’s pretty normal.’
‘Is it?’ She felt almost smug. ‘It’s never happened to anyone else I’ve been with.’
‘No.’ Nina looked at her oddly. ‘I meant it’s normal for people like him.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
There was a long and awful moment of silence. Nina turned away and began absorbedly chopping vegetables.
‘I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget it.’
‘No!’ Agnes cried. ‘No, I won’t forget it!’ She banged her hand dramatically on a counter-top for effect. ‘So — so just tell me, okay?’
Nina looked up at her coolly and then returned to her vegetables.
‘You asked for it,’ she said above the ominous thud of blade against board. ‘If you really want to know, he’s a smackhead.’
‘A what?’
‘Smackhead. Heroin addict, for God’s sake. I thought you knew. They often have problems like that — sexual problems. I thought you knew,’ she repeated.
Agnes wondered if she understood what had been said. The words appeared to be floating around her in big inflated balloons, like a comic strip. She thought of the gaunt cipher of him, the quiet greedy suck of his presence; his long silences behind the bathroom’s bolted door when she had thought he must surely be dead or sleeping; the heat of him, his black bullet eyes saying nothing.
‘How could I know?’ she said then.
‘How could you not know? What, are you blind? How could you spend all that time with a person and not know a thing like that?’
‘He didn’t tell me.’
‘Well, that explains everything,’ Nina said sarcastically.
‘Well, how did you know, then?’ said Agnes as the strange fact of it occurred to her. She was beginning to feel sick. ‘How did you know? Did he tell you? Did he?’
‘No. Don’t be stupid.’
‘So who did?’
‘Jack.’
A sudden surge of adrenalin made her feel almost buoyant. She put her hand on Nina’s shoulder and forced her to face her. Nina’s face betrayed a fleeting shadow of fear at the physical contact, as if it suggested things had got out of control.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Agnes demanded.
‘There was no reason to.’ Nina shrugged away Agnes’s hand. ‘And anyway, Jack asked me not to.’
So that was it, then. If only she had looked, how much she might have learned! Had she but guessed at the shady deals, the backhand bribes, the double-crossed hearts of others, for how much might she sooner have forgiven herself? It was Agnes’s nature to emulate others, not to judge them; how happy they must have been, with her to please them as well as they pleasing themselves!
‘He obviously didn’t want you to know,’ Nina conceded. ‘Otherwise he’d have told you, wouldn’t he? Look, maybe he was embarrassed about it. Maybe he didn’t want to hurt your feelings.’
‘What?’ Agnes laughed wildly and Nina looked startled. ‘What was it you said to me that time, about men being animals? So what are we saying now — that he didn’t want to hurt my feelings? You’re obviously a believer these days. I suppose you also knew,’ she added, triumphant at having a revelation of her own to hand, albeit one which could inflict injury on no one but herself, ‘that he was seeing someone else all along? Maybe you thought I shouldn’t know about that as well.’
‘I didn’t know that, actually. Was he really?’
‘Don’t bother defending him!’ Agnes shrieked. ‘I won’t listen! I know where your loyalties lie — I won’t be making that mistake again!’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Nina snapped. ‘Don’t get hysterical. You’re behaving like he’s a serial killer or something. Or maybe —’ she looked at Agnes curiously — ‘maybe you really are as innocent as you pretend to be. Maybe you needed to wake up. If you ask me—’
‘I don’t ask you!’ Agnes cried, putting her hands over her ears and turning to leave the room. ‘In fact, I don’t think I even like you very much.’
Chapter Nineteen
AGNES Day was letting herself go. The phrase did imply a certain freedom from imprisonment, but its effects were far from captivating. Hair sprouted freely over her unmown slopes, where bulges swelled like molehills. Skin sagged here and flaked there, puckering like a contour relief map. A distinct whiff of human flesh could be caught in the groves where exotic flowers used to perfume the air. Surrendering to the final molestation of art by life, Agnes abandoned her brush and palette and barely faced the world.
By becoming that which she had always feared — or perhaps had always feared she already was, underneath — Agnes knew certain things would have to be sacrificed. Men no longer looked at her as she passed, and while initially her heart had plummeted at the realisation, her spirit nestled further into the safe folds of a hermaphrodite sensibility. To think of herself as undesirable was second nature; to read it in the eyes of others was something else altogether and required some defence. She would give vent to her feelings in the privacy of her room at night, when she would cry and claw at her body with rage.
Eventually, however, she came to see that her despoilment carried within it its own defence. Her blank face and new folds of flesh were at once her protection from the world and her submission to it. They made her invisible. In times of despair she was tempted to return to her old ways, but never tried for fear of discovering that she couldn’t. Her renunciation of those things seemed to her then to have meant nothing but the death of everything she had once held dear.
Her career at Diplomat’s Week, meanwhile, began to flourish. She became expert at locating errors and discrepancies, and on more than one occasion saved the day by insistently carrying out last-minute checks even as the pages were being borne off to the typesetter’s. She wrote an article for the magazine and was surprised to find it accepted. She suggested new formats and saw them pass into legislature with scarcely a blinking eye.
‘We might have to give you that bonus before long,’ said Jean beamingly, who of late had been observing rather than participating in this show of labour.
‘How about me?’ said Greta. ‘I have to watch her. It makes me tired.’
Like someone who had come out of hiding, Agnes began to speak openly about her work with her acquaintances. In doing so, she discovered that it was possible, with but a modicum of glamorous embellishment, to make almost anything sound interesting if you described it in the right way. She talked about deadlines and copy dates, hymned galleys and bromides, discussed at length with fellow publishers the problems one encountered in the company of typesetters and printers. One companion was evidently so moved by her narrative that he offered to come and meet her for lunch so that the scene might be evoked in his mind more clearly.
‘Where’s your house?’ he questioned imperiously.
‘Highbury,’ replied Agnes in bewilderment, before realising to which establishment he was referring.
What irked her was the malevolent coincidence with which the application of her workmates seemed to falter in direct proportion to her own increase in zeal. At first she had thought this was merely the fault of her own altered perspective, but it soon became clear that Jean and Greta had fallen prey to rogue circumstances. Greta seemed detached and morose; Jean, on the other hand, radiated a nervous joy of the type which automatically generated its antithesis in those who encountered it. She had lost weight and begun to wear make-up. She arrived late, appeared distracted for most of the day, and left early. Agnes wondered if she and Jean had somehow exchanged personalities in a midnight astral collision.