I can tell you, it was a great shock to me when Marcus found out about us — found out half of it, anyway — but, strangely enough, it was the one thing I hadn’t expected, not from that quarter, certainly. For many months I’d lived in terror of Gloria getting wind of what was going on, but Marcus I thought altogether too dreamy and distracted, too deeply enmeshed in his miniaturised world of mainsprings and flywheels and pinhead-sized rubies, to notice that his wife was canoodling with a strange man, who was, however, did he but know it, not strange at all, or not, at least, a stranger.
It was to me that Marcus came, of course, one horrendously memorable rainy autumn day, which seems a very long time ago but isn’t at all. I was in the studio, pottering about, scraping dried paint off palettes, cleaning already clean brushes, that sort of thing. It was all I did there now, by way of work, in my latterly sterile and idle state. Good thing Polly wasn’t with me: I would have had to hide her under the sofa. Marcus came stamping up the stairs — the studio has a separate street entrance beside the laundry — and banged so loudly on the door I thought it might be the police, if not the avenging angel himself. Certainly I didn’t expect it to be Marcus, who is not normally the stamping or the banging type. It was raining outside, and he wore no coat, only the leather jerkin he works in, and he was drenched, his thinning hair dark with wet and plastered to his skull. At first I thought he was drunk, and in fact when he had barged past me into the room the first thing he did was to demand a drink. I ignored this and asked what the matter was. I had difficulty keeping my voice steady, for I was guessing already what the matter must be. “The matter?” he cried. “The matter? Ha!” There were raindrops on the lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles. He strode to the window and stood looking out at the rooftops, his arms bent at his sides and his fists clenched and turned inwards, as if he had just come from boxing someone’s ears. Even from the back he looked distraught. By now I was certain he had found out about Polly and me — what else would have him in such distress? — and I had begun desperately to search for something I might say in my defence as soon as he started to accuse me. I wondered if I was going to get hit, and found the prospect oddly gratifying. I pictured it, him taking a swing at me and my grabbing hold of him and the two of us tottering about, grunting and groaning, like a pair of old-style wrestlers, then toppling over slowly in each other’s arms and rolling on the floor, first this way, then that, with Marcus shouting and sobbing and trying to get his hands around my throat or to gouge out my eyes while I pantingly protested my innocence.
I went to him and put a hand on his shoulder, which immediately drooped, as if under an immense weight. I took it as a good sign that he didn’t wrench himself furiously away from my touch. I asked again what was the matter, and he hung his head and shook it slowly from side to side, like a wounded and baffled bull. Behind the smell of his wet clothes and soaked hair I caught a trace of something else, raw and hot, which I recognised as the smell of sorrow itself — a smell, I can tell you, and a state, with which I am not unfamiliar. “Come along, old chap,” I said, “tell me what’s up.” I noted with a quiver of shame how calm and avuncular I sounded. He didn’t reply, but moved away from me and began pacing the floor, grinding the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. Terrible to say, but there’s something almost comic in the spectacle of someone else’s heart-sickness and sorrow. It must be to do with excess, with operatic extravagance, for certainly those old operas always make me want to laugh. Yet what a truly desolated figure he cut, stalking stiff-legged from the window to the door and wheeling tightly on his pivot and coming back, then wheeling round and tormentedly repeating the whole manoeuvre all over again. At last he halted in the middle of the floor, looking about as if in desperate search of something.
“It’s Polly,” he said, in a voice feathery with pain. “She’s in love with someone else.”
He paused to frown, seemingly amazed at what he had heard himself say. I realised I had been holding my breath, and now I let it out in a slow, soundless gasp.
Someone. Someone else.
Marcus once more cast about the room helplessly, then fixed his stricken gaze on me in a kind of mute beseeching, like a sick child looking to a parent for relief from its pain. I licked my lips and swallowed. “Who,” I asked — croaked, rather—“who is it she’s in love with?” He didn’t reply, only shook his head in the same dull, wounded way that he had done a few moments ago. I hoped he wasn’t going to start pacing again. I considered getting out the brandy that I keep in a cupboard behind bottles of turps and tins of linseed oil, but thought better of it: If we started drinking now, who could say what it would lead to, what tormented revelations, what stammered confessions? If ever there was a time for a clear head, this was it.
Drooping again, as if physically as well as emotionally exhausted, Marcus crossed to the sofa, unwound his glasses from behind his ears, and sat down. I winced inwardly, thinking of all the times Polly and I had lain together on those stained green cushions. I was sweating, and kept digging my nails spasmodically into my palms. A faint continuous tremor, like an electrical current, was running through me. When he is excited or upset Marcus has a way of winding his long legs around each other, hooking one foot behind an ankle, and joining his hands as if for prayer and thrusting them between his clenched knees, a pose that always makes me think of that sign outside chemists’ shops showing the Rod of Asclepius coiled about by a serpent. Twisted up like that now he began to talk in a slow, toneless voice, gazing blankly before him. It was as if he had escaped some natural calamity unscathed in limb but numb with shock, which was, come to think of it, the case. I was glad I was standing with the window behind me, since from where he sat he would not be able to make out my face clearly: it would have been quite a sight, I’m sure. He said that for a long time now, for many months — all the way back to last Christmas, in fact — he had suspected that things were not right with Polly. She had been behaving in strange ways. There was nothing definite he could have pointed to, and he had told himself he was imagining things, yet the niggle of doubt would not be stilled. Her voice would trail off in the middle of a sentence and she would stand motionless, with something forgotten in her hand, lost in a secret smile. She had become increasingly impatient with Little Pip. One day, he said, when she was in a hurry to go out she had screamed at the child because she was refusing to lie down for her nap, and in the end she had thrust the mite into his arms and told him he could look after her since she was sick of the sight of her. As for her attitude to him, she swung between barely restrained irritation and overblown, almost cloying, solicitude. She was sleepless, too, and at night would lie beside him in the dark, tossing and sighing for hours, until the bedclothes were knotted around her and the bed was steaming with her sweat. He had wanted to confront her but hadn’t dared to, being too much in fear of what she might tell him.