13
Roundabout
Two faces look out from a windscreen: Ralph’s on the passenger side, Eve’s above the wheel. They’re not speaking to each other. In fact they haven’t really spoken for this entire holiday. They’ve exchanged practical information when required, agreed on outings, sorted out meals, but there’s been no communication between them about themselves.
There’s a reason for this, which Ralph knows and Eve doesn’t. All she knows is that Ralph is absent – not unpleasant, not unhelpful, but simply absent – and that this absence is of a new quality. Something or someone beyond her field of view, some powerful gravitational force, is tugging his attention constantly away from her. When she asks Ralph a question and he answers, it’s as if a receptionist has been left in charge of his voice, quite polite most of the time and sometimes positively solicitous – as receptionists can be, when they sense that a caller is becoming annoyed – but never authentically Ralph.
‘There’s something on your mind,’ she says now. ‘Something you’re not telling me.’
He laughs, but it’s a laugh that’s been deliberately chosen from a range of options, as if from a set of dials or sliders: Volume 3, Warmth 1, Nonchalance 10. ‘As I keep saying, it’s just the usual stuff. Work worries. What’s going to be waiting for me when I go back on Monday. All of that.’
‘There’s something else.’
‘I need a weewee,’ says Lily’s voice from the back.
In the parked car, Ralph takes out his phone.
‘Ianthe, it’s me! I had to call. How are you?’ Even the simple word you is magical when he says it to her. ‘It seems so long. So long since I saw you last, so long before I see you again. Two whole days! I’m counting off the hours.’
As he listens to Ianthe’s reply, he peers out through the windscreen at the main entrance of a motorway service station.
‘Yes, I know,’ he says, his face a little crestfallen. ‘I know I must. But I really can’t do it now. Lily’s with us all the time. I’ll talk to Eve when we’re back home. Listen, I’d better go. We only stopped so Eve could take Lily in for a pee. They’ll be out in a minute. I can’t wait to be with you, Ianthe. I… Oh, here they are now. Sorry, my dearest, but I’ve got to go.’
Ralph’s face is impassive as he stares out at the road again, this time from the driver’s seat. Calamity lies ahead, he knows, but he’s oddly unmoved by it. All his usual loyalties are in abeyance, even his loyalty to his own future self. All his usual feelings are distant and muffled, as if behind soundproof padding. And if they do break through at all, he has simply to turn his mind to Ianthe – her smile when she sees him, the way she can’t help herself from touching him, the words she says, her throaty laugh – and everything else is subsumed at once into a surge of sublime longing. You, he thinks, you, and the hills beside the motorway seem to smoulder in her golden glow. Ianthe, he thinks, Ianthe, and even this banal river of cars seems suffused with meaning.
He glances in his mirror, flips the indicator downwards, pulls out past a cargo of shipping containers.
But I need to decide what to do, he tells himself, as he presses down the accelerator.
He knows there’s no way forward that doesn’t involve pain. He understands that once he’s told Eve what’s been going on, the golden trance will end. Eve and Lily are remote from him now, far away behind that soundproof padding, but once they know the truth, they’ll smash their way through, their own emotions far too powerful to be kept at bay. And even Ianthe will make new demands on him.
That’s already starting to happen, actually. Up to now, his desires and Ianthe’s have been so perfectly aligned, that to submit to hers has been to indulge his own. It’s been possible to be magnificently generous and greedily selfish both at the same time, to receive boundless gratitude for gratifying himself. But now, as he replays that snatched phone conversation in his mind, he can’t avoid the impatient edge in Ianthe’s voice. He called her for a heroin-like shot of numbing love, but she reproached him for keeping her waiting. And the reproach still stings, even though it’s him she says she longs for.
But her circumstances are not identical to his. She’s had to think of him going to sleep beside Eve and waking up beside Eve in the morning, while Ralph’s not had to imagine her with anyone but friends and workmates (though actually he envies even them). And there’s no calamity ahead for Ianthe either, no one whose life she must devastate in order to be with him. So Ralph has always had more of an interest than her in prolonging this golden limbo, this little eddy swirling round and round at the margins of the stream of time. He has never experienced such intensity before in this life, and he knows he may never experience it again. There have even been moments when he wondered whether this thing itself is what he most craves, not Ianthe, but this incredible intensity, this centrifuge of love. Of course, he’s always rejected this thought as soon it came to him. And, in any case, Ianthe is growing impatient. Whether he likes it or not, the golden limbo is coming to an end.
So there will be ugly practicalities now, money to be divided up, contact with Lily to be negotiated. He will have to deal with competing claims on his time and his loyalty, and face friends and relatives with the news of his callousness and duplicity. And then there will be this little family for him to grieve over, when he can no longer kiss his daughter goodnight every evening, or hear her cheerful voice calling out in the morning to announce the good news of her awakening.
Ralph can even see that, in this new world, his feelings about Ianthe herself will change, and hers about him. The two of them may be golden now in each other’s eyes, but gold derives its value from scarcity, and their seemingly identical desires up to now have been the product of the tiny and simplified universe, that little glowing nest outside of time, in which they have conducted their secret relationship. That is the centrifuge, after all, that’s how it works, whirling round and round to separate out pure golden desire from everyday ordinariness. He and Ianthe have both spoken of how they long to spend more time together, meet each other’s friends, walk hand in hand in the streets without fear of being seen, but the truth is that everything will be different when the two of them emerge into the world under the sky. Her only just barely noticeable sharpness on the phone was a harbinger, the tip of a chisel that will prise apart two halves of a golden globe of mutual longing and turn them back into separate human beings, with their own histories, priorities, foibles. It’s quite likely, Ralph thinks bleakly, that in the long run they will come to something not so different from the way things are with Eve.
It’s not the first time he’s thought this. Right from the beginning of his affair with Ianthe, there’s been a calm observer inside him, watching, noticing the dynamics, wondering at the melodrama of it all. The Czar dreams of new and golden lands. The peasant, to whom the fighting will actually fall, wonders what benefits, if any, will really flow from all that spilt blood and spent treasure. But the peasant has no influence in the polity of Ralph’s mind, for he and Ianthe in their golden nest have told each other that they can be Czar and Czarina forever, and, as is often the case with Czars and Czarinas, no one has had the the power to contradict them.