She doesn’t say “after his death,” even to herself. She doesn’t use the D-word about him at all. He might overhear it and be hurt or offended, or perhaps confused, or even angry. It’s one of her not-fully-formulated beliefs that Ewan doesn’t realize that he’s dead.
She sits at Ewan’s desk, swathed in Ewan’s black plush bathrobe. Black plush bathrobes for men were cutting edge, when? The ’90s? She’d bought this bathrobe herself, as a Christmas present. Ewan always resisted her attempts to make him cutting edge, not that those attempts had lasted much beyond the bathrobe; she’d run out of interest in how he looked to others.
She wears this bathrobe not for heat but for comfort: it makes her feel that Ewan might still be in the house physically, just around the corner. She hasn’t washed it since he died; she doesn’t want it to smell of laundry detergent instead of Ewan.
Oh Ewan, she thinks. We had such good times! All gone now. Why so fast? She wipes her eyes on the black plush sleeve.
“Pull yourself together,” says Ewan. He never likes it when she sniffles.
“Right,” she says. She squares her shoulders, adjusts the cushion on Ewan’s ergonomic desk chair, turns the computer on. The screensaver comes up: it’s a gateway, drawn for her by Ewan, who was a practising architect before he took up the more dependable job of university teaching, though what he taught was not called “Architecture,” it was called “Theory of Constructed Space” and “Human Landscape Creation” and “The Contained Body.” He’d remained very good at drawing, and he’d found an outlet for it in making funny pictures for the children and then the grandchildren. He’d drawn the screensaver for her as a gift, and to show that he took this thing of hers — this thing that was, let’s face it, somewhat embarrassing to him in the more abstract intellectual circles to which he belonged — to show that he took her thing seriously. Or that he took her seriously, both of which she’d had reason to doubt from time to time. Also that he’d pardoned her for Alphinland, for her neglect of him because of it. The way she’d look at him without seeing him.
One of her own ideas is that the screensaver was a repentance gift, making it up to her for something he wouldn’t admit he’d done. That period of emotional absence during which Ewan must have been otherwise occupied — if not physically, then emotionally — with another woman. With another face, another body, another voice, another scent. A wardrobe not hers, with its alien belts and buttons and zippers. Who was that woman? She’d suspect, then be wrong. The shadowy presence laughed at her softly from the sleepless darkness of 3 a.m., then slid away. She couldn’t pin anything down.
All that time she’d felt like an inconvenient block of wood. She’d felt boring, and only half-alive. She’d felt numb.
She’d never pushed him about that interlude, never confronted him. The subject was like the D-word: it was there, it loomed over them like a huge advertising blimp, but to mention it would have been like breaking a spell. It would have been terminal. Ewan, are you seeing someone else? Pull yourself together. Use your common sense. Why would I need to do that? He’d have brushed her off, minimized the question.
Constance could think of a lot of reasons why he would need to do that. But she smiled and hugged him, and asked him what he’d like for dinner, and shut up about it.
The screensaver gateway is made of stone, curved in a Roman arch. It’s situated midway in a long, high wall that has several turrets on top of it, with red triangular banners flying from them. There’s a heavy barred gate, standing open. Beyond is a sunlit landscape, with more turrets poking up in the distance.
Ewan went to some trouble with this gateway. He cross-hatched, he water-coloured; he even added some horses grazing in a faraway field, though he knew better than to fool around with dragons. The picture is very pretty, very William Morris or perhaps more Edward Burne-Jones, but it misses the point. The gateway and the wall are too clean, too new, too well kept up. Although Alphinland has its corners of luxury, its silks and taffetas, its embroideries, its ornate sconces, for the most part it’s ancient and dingy and somewhat decrepit. Also it’s frequently laid waste, which makes for a lot of ruins.
Over the screensaver gateway is a legend carved in the stone, in pseudo-gothic Pre-Raphaelite lettering: ALPHINLAND.
Constance takes a deep breath. Then she goes through.
On the other side of the gateway there’s no sunny landscape. Instead there’s a narrow road, almost a trail. It winds downhill to a bridge, which is lit — because it’s night — by yellowish lights shaped like eggs or water drops. Beyond the bridge is a dark wood.
She’ll cross the bridge and move stealthily through the wood, alert for ambushes, and when she comes out on the other side she’ll be at a crossroads. Then it will be a matter of which of the roads to follow. All of them are in Alphinland, but each leads to a different version of it. Even though she’s its creator, its puppet mistress, its determining Fate, Constance never knows exactly where she might end up.
She began Alphinland a long time ago, years before she met Ewan. She was living with another man then, in a two-room walk-up with a lumpy mattress on the floor and a shared toilet in the hallway, and an electric kettle (hers) and a hotplate (his) they were not officially supposed to have. There was no refrigerator so they put their food containers out on the windowsill, where the food froze in winter and spoiled in summer, though it wasn’t too bad in spring and fall, except for the squirrels.
This man she lived with was one of the poets she used to hang around with under the sweet, youthful belief that she too was a poet. He was called Gavin, an unusual name then, though not unusual now: the Gavins have multiplied. Young Constance felt very lucky to have been taken up by Gavin, who was four years older than she was and knew a lot of other poets, and was lean and ironic and indifferent to the norms of society and grimly satirical, as poets were then. Perhaps they’re still like that: Constance is too old to know.
Even to be the object of one of Gavin’s ironic or grimly satirical remarks — to the effect that her hypnotic ass was a much more significant part of Constance than her frankly forgettable poetry, for instance — was obscurely thrilling to her. She was also accorded the privilege of appearing in Gavin’s poems. Not by name, of course: female objects of desire were addressed in poems as “Lady” then, or else as “my truelove,” in a gesture to chivalry and folk songs — but it was enormously seductive for Constance to read Gavin’s more erotic poems and know that every time he wrote Lady — or, even better, “my truelove” — it meant her. “My Lady Reclines on a Pillow,” “My Lady’s First Morning Coffee,” and “My Lady Licks My Plate” were heartwarming, but “My Lady Bends Over” was her favourite. Whenever she felt that Gavin was being terse with her, she would get out that poem and reread it.
Along with these literary attractions there was a lot of vigorous and impromptu sex.
Once she’d become linked to Ewan, Constance had known better than to reveal the details of her earlier life. Though what was there to worry about? Although Gavin had been intense, he‘d also been a shit; so he was clearly no competition for Ewan, a knight in shining armour by comparison. And that particular early life experience had ended badly, with sorrow and mortification for Constance. So why bring Gavin up? It would have served no purpose. Ewan had never asked her about any other men in her life, so Constance had never told. She certainly hopes Ewan has no access to Gavin now, through her unspoken thoughts or in any other way.