There were certain reticences between us. For instance, when we were together Polly never mentioned Gloria’s name, not once, in all that time. I, in contrast, talked about Marcus at the least excuse, as if the mere invoking of his name, done often enough, might work a neutralising magic. The guilt I suffered in respect of Polly’s husband loured over me like a miniature thundercloud whipped up exclusively for me and that travelled with me wherever I went. I think the injury I was doing to my friend caused me almost a keener pain than did the no less grave injustice I was committing against my wife and, I suppose, against his wife, too. And Polly herself, how did being unfaithful make her feel? Surely she was conscience-stricken, like me. Every time I started prattling about Marcus she would frown in a sulkily reprehending way, drawing her eyebrows together and making a thin pale line of her otherwise roseate mouth. She was right, of course: it was bad taste on my part to speak of either of our spouses at the very moment that we were busy betraying them. As for Gloria, she and Polly were on the best of terms, as they had always been, and when the four of us met now, as we did no less frequently than we used to, the over-compensating attentions Polly lavished on my wife should surely have made that sharp-eyed woman suspect something was amiss.
But let us go back now to Polly and me in the studio, that day at a cold year’s end we worked so hard to warm up. We were lying together on the sofa with our overcoats piled over us, the sweat of our recent exertions turning to a chilly dew on our skin. She had her arms draped around me and was resting her glossy head in the hollow of my shoulder, as she recalled for me in fond detail what she claimed was our first-ever encounter, long ago. I had come in with a watch for Marcus to repair. I can’t have been back in the town for more than a week or two, she said. She was at her desk in the dim rear of the workshop, doing the books, and I glanced in her direction and smiled. I was wearing, she remembered, or claimed to remember, a white shirt with the floppy collar open and an old pair of corduroy trousers and shoes without laces and no socks. She noticed how tanned my insteps were, and straight away she pictured the resplendent south, a bay like a bowl of broken amethysts strewn with flecks of molten silver and a white sail aslant to the horizon and a lavender-blue shutter standing open on it all — yes, yes, you’re right, I’ve added a few touches of colour to her largely monochrome and probably far more accurate sketch. It was summertime, she said, a morning in June, and the sun through the window was setting my white shirt blindingly aglow — she would never forget it, she said, that unearthly radiance. You understand, I’m only reporting her words, or the gist of them, anyway. I explained to Marcus that the watch, an Elgin, had belonged to my late father, and that I hoped it could be got to work again. Marcus frowned and nodded, turning the watch this way and that in his long slender spatulate fingers and making noncommittal noises at the back of his throat. He was pretending not to know who I was, out of shyness — he is a very shy fellow, as so am I, in my peculiar way — which was just plain silly, Polly said, since by now everyone in town had heard of the couple who had moved into the big house out on Fairmount Hill, Oscar Orme’s son Olly, who had become a famous artist, no less, and his drawling, lazy-eyed young wife. He would see what he could do, Marcus said, but warned that parts for a watch like this would be hard to come by. While he was writing out the receipt I glanced at Polly again over his bent head and smiled again, and even winked. All this in her account. I need hardly say I remembered none of it. That is, I remembered bringing in my father’s watch for repair, but as to smiling at Polly, much less winking at her, none of that had stayed with me. Nor could I recognise myself in the portrait she painted of me, in my flamboyant dishevelment. Dishevelled I am, it’s an incurable condition, but I’m sure I’ve never shone with the kind of stark, pure flame she saw that day.
“I fell in love with you on the spot,” she said, with a happy sigh, her breath running like warm fingers through the coppery fur on my bare chest.
By the way, why do I keep speaking of her as little? She’s taller than I am, though that doesn’t make her tall, her shoulders are as broad as mine, and she could probably floor me with a belt of one of her hard little — there I go again — fists if she were sufficiently provoked, as surely she must have been, repeatedly.
Last night I had a strange dream, strange and compelling, which won’t disperse, the tatters of it lingering in the corners of my mind like broken shadows. I was here, in the house, but the house wasn’t here, where it is, but on the seashore somewhere, overlooking a broad beach. A storm was under way, and from the downstairs window I could see an impossibly high tide rolling in, the enormous waves, sluggish with the weight of churned sand, tumbling over each other in their eagerness to gain the shore and dash themselves explosively against the low sea wall. The waves were topped with soiled white spray and their deeply scooped, smooth undersides had a glassy and malignant shine. It was like watching successive packs of maddened hounds, their jaws agape, rushing upon the land in a frenzy and being violently repulsed. And in fact there was a dog, a black and dark-brown alsatian, muzzled, its haunches very low to the ground, which the eldest of my three brothers, become a young man again, was setting off with on a walk. I tried to attract his attention through the window, since I was concerned at his being out in such weather, without even an overcoat, but either he didn’t see me or he pretended not to notice my urgent signalling. I wonder what it all meant, or why it has been haunting me since I woke from it, with a fearful start, at dawn. I don’t like that kind of dream, tumultuous, minatory, fraught with inexplicable significance. What have I to do with the sea, or with dogs, or they with me? And, besides, my brother Oswald, poor Ossie, will be a decade dead come Christmas.
Polly was, and no doubt still is, a great dreamer, or at any rate a great talker about her dreams. “Isn’t it strange,” she used to say, “how much goes on inside our heads while we’re asleep?”
I recall another day, in the first weeks of the new year, when we were again lying together languidly inert on the lumpy sofa with the studio’s big sky-filled window slanting over us, and she told me of a recurring dream she had about Frederick Hyland. This didn’t surprise me, though I did feel a touch dispirited. It seems that every woman — with the exception of Gloria, and I can’t even be sure of her — who has so much as caught a glimpse of him dreams about Freddie, otherwise known as the Prince, which is what the town calls him, in a spirit of irony: we are great mockers of men, especially of land-rich ones who until recently were our lords and masters around here. Freddie is the sole and, as seems inevitable, last male representative of the House of Hyland. Neurasthenic, infinitely hesitant, a figure of unfathomable melancholy, he rarely appears in the town, but keeps to the seclusion of Hyland Heights, as his house is ponderously called — in fact it’s a small, ordinary and rather shabby country mansion built on a hill, with a blurred coat of arms emblazoned on a weathered stone escutcheon above the front door and an inner courtyard where long ago Otto Hohengrund-cum-Hyland, the daddy of the dynasty, to whose design the place was built, used to put his imported Lipizzaners through their fancy paces. Freddie’s two unmarried sisters keep house for him. They also are rarely seen. There is a man attached to the place, one Matty Myler, who drives into town at the start of each month in the family’s big black Daimler to purchase provisions and to pick up, discreetly, from the back door of Harker’s Hotel, two crates of stout and a case of Cork Dry Gin. The spinster sisters must be the tipplers, for Freddie is known to be a man of temperate habits. Maybe it’s his very limpness that women love him for.