She went into the sitting-room and found Nina and Merlin huddled on the sofa like two conspirators.
‘We have great news!’ Merlin exclaimed, seeing her. He nudged Nina. ‘Go on, tell her.’
Agnes sat down on the edge of an armchair. She didn’t like news these days.
‘What?’ she said suspiciously.
‘We’re not telling you until you look more excited,’ said Merlin obstinately.
Agnes felt her backbone sag with frustration. She restrained herself from informing them that, had she been able to manufacture such pleasant emotions at will, her life would undoubtedly today be very different.
‘I got the job,’ said Nina abruptly. ‘I’m quite pleased, actually.’
Agnes had not known she was applying for one. She looked from one to the other of them in bewilderment.
‘Just think,’ said Merlin, coming to her rescue. ‘Our girl on the pages of a national newspaper! Elwood Street at the whirling vortex of the mass media!’
‘That’s great,’ said Agnes, more confused than enlightened by Merlin’s rather baroque explanation. ‘Great.’
Nina looked at her closely and then shrugged.
‘Don’t overdo it,’ she retorted. ‘You might actually sound as if you meant it.’
She got up and left the room. Merlin watched her go and drummed his fingers anxiously on the arm of the sofa.
‘It wasn’t my fault!’ Agnes protested. ‘I didn’t know about her job.’
‘I know,’ sighed Merlin. ‘But couldn’t you — well, couldn’t you at least have pretended to be pleased?’
Agnes had many memories of doing things against her will, but one occasion had always stuck particularly prominently in her mind.
It had happened when she and John had gone back to his house one night after a party. Sometimes they went back to her house, but more often these days they each went home alone. On this particular night, however, although comforted by the acceptance his invitation implied, Agnes had not felt much in the mood for the rites which were its usual conclusion. She was tired and had drunk too much, and had broadcast these symptoms several times on the way home in the hope that he would not press her into further denials once ensconced there.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ he had said as soon as they arrived; and Agnes did, snuggling up against the far wall so that their bodies would not touch, with as much of the aspect of an ailing child as she could muster.
He switched off the lights and got in beside her at a respectable distance, but scarcely five minutes had passed before his hand reached over and began caressing her. She sighed and attempted to feign sleep. His hand continued its wanderings undeterred. Suddenly, with one jerk of his body, he was pressed up behind her.
‘I–I don’t really feel like it,’ she said, troubled more by her own aversion than his persistence.
He hadn’t replied, appearing for a moment to desist, but seconds later she felt his hands on her again. He sat up in the darkness and turned her reluctant body on to its back.
‘I don’t want to!’ she had daringly cried.
His face was cloaked in shadow, but all the same she could have sworn she saw him smile. While it was going on, a curious form of revenge had occurred to her. She would do nothing. She would play dead and see how he felt about that. Her body lay inert, as if on a marble slab. Her arms lay still be her sides. Unperturbed, he had merely arranged her limbs for her. She waited for what seemed like hours while he gasped and sighed above her, but he did not seem troubled by her lack of participation. She imagined then that he was raping her. On to the oval blur of his face she imposed that of a stranger. So this is what it feels like, she thought. As he pumped and shuddered, her mind seemed to be growing further and further away until she appeared to be observing events from the ceiling. A lump of anger sat heavily on her chest. She tasted resentment, oppression and rage on her tongue like foreign foods. She had always known those things were there — she had read about them, after all, in books — but it seemed then as if she had simply never chosen to experience them for herself.
‘Thank you,’ he said finally, flopping down beside her while she lay still and opaque as a moonlit sea. ‘Thank you.’
He hugged and kissed her passionately. At one and the same time she suddenly felt deeply, achingly guilty, and terribly afraid. He got out of bed and paused to look down on her benignly and touch her cheek.
‘Agnes, will you marry me?’ he said.
‘What?’ She sat up. ‘What did you say?’
She felt she had finally discovered how to make him love her. She felt punished, grateful, devious and rather sick. It was so easy!
‘I said,’ he repeated, a smile which in the shadowy room appeared oddly contemptuous spreading slowly over his face. ‘I said, would you like a cup of tea?’
St Joan’s in Highbury Barn was an arkish construct. Agnes would eye it nervously as she passed, disapproving of its squat modern form and wide wooden belly. Such aesthetic disdain was a natural by-road off her main omission. Had the church been more attractive, the implication ran, she would surely have entered it by now. As it was she slunk guiltily past it like an old people’s home in which a decrepit, lonely great-uncle sat forlornly awaiting her visit.
Of late, however, things had changed. Agnes had begun to nurture a dawning awareness of a lack, a growing vacancy at her core. She was ripe for conversion, but while in others such a need brought with it the danger of being brainwashed by a religious sect or enrolling in night classes, Agnes’s mettle had since birth been cast in a mould which dictated its own modus operandi. Feeling the call, then, she had taken her sorrows up the hill to St Joan’s in the hope that by now some wonder of modern theology might have invented a panacea for them.
Once inside she felt slightly disappointed. She had missed the service and the church was empty save for a few worthies busying themselves with the tidying up of hymn-books and parish newsletters. She sat down in one of the wooden pews and waited for her spirit to be claimed. The pedestrian setting, however, did not facilitate access to the Presence. Perhaps she needed incense and a pre-pubescent choir. She found herself thinking about the new issue of Diplomat’s Week. It was to carry another of her articles, which she hadn’t quite finished yet. Merlin crossed her mind and she considered his predicament briefly. She thought about Tom. She ought to phone him.
While it was at least pleasant to have time to think, her ruminations had the effect of making her want to leave the church so that she could attend to them. Her eye wandered impatiently over the altar, behind which hung a crucifix bearing the usual gorged and bloodied simulation of agony. She regarded it indifferently, liiere had been a time when such representations had transfixed her with their animate, piercing gaze, causing her heart to sing with hope and grief. She had changed, she knew, but she didn’t quite know how or when. Like an old car, the addition of new parts over the years had left little of her original material, but her form remained unaltered. Could she, she wondered, still be said to be the same person?
Indeed, it seemed to her now that there had been a time when all her emotions had been as spectacular and colourful as a firework display. She had always known she was meant to feel things. She had believed she was special, so open was she to pain and love. Or was it only that she had indulged such emotions to protect herself from any lengthy contemplation of duller things: boredom, loneliness, failure, all of the things which hovered outside the door like tax inspectors, vigilant and malign?