I led Polly to the sofa, as so often before but with a very different intent this time, and we sat down side by side, like a pair of guilty miscreants settling themselves resignedly in the dock. She hadn’t taken off her coat, and this made her look more miserable still, all toggled up in bulky shapelessness. “What am I going to do?” she said, a faint, strangled cry. I told her that was what Marcus had asked me when he was here, and that I hadn’t known what to say to him, either. “He was here?” she said, staring at me. I told her about him coming up the stairs and bursting in and demanding drink; I told her about us emptying the brandy bottle. “I thought you were drunk, all right,” she said. After that she was silent for a while, thinking. Then she began to speak about her life with Marcus, just as Marcus, a while ago, had spoken of his life with her. Her account of it — their early days together, the baby, their happiness, all that — was strikingly similar to his. This irritated me. In fact, I was by now in a state of irritation generally. Life, which had seemed so various before, a sprawling pageant of adventure and incident, had all at once narrowed to a point, the nexus of this little trio: Polly, her husband, me. Glumly I foresaw the days and weeks to come, as gradually our drama unfurled itself in all its predictable awfulness. Polly would admit who her secret lover was, and Marcus would come and shout at me and threaten violence — perhaps more than threaten — then Gloria would find out and I’d have her to deal with, too. I felt beaten down just by the thought of it. Polly was still telling her story, more to herself it seemed than to me, in a dreamy, singsong voice. I kept being distracted by the window and the washed-blue sky outside, with its sedately sailing pearl-and-copper clouds. Clouds, clouds, I never get used to them. Why do they have to be so baroque, so gaudily and artlessly lovely? “We used to take baths together,” Polly said. That got my attention. At once I had a searingly vivid image of them, sitting at either end of the tub, their soapy legs entwined, splashing each other, Marcus chuckling and Polly hilariously squealing. It was strange, but I had never, before today, thought of them in the intimacy of their lives together. Marvellous how the mind can keep things tightly sealed away in so many separate compartments. I knew, of course, that they shared a bed — there was only one bed in their house, a double, Polly had told me so herself — but I had declined to picture the ramifications of this simple though striking fact. I could no more have imagined them making love than I could have pictured my parents, when they were alive, clasped to each other in the throes of passion. All that was changed, now. I could feel my shoulder-blades begin to sweat. Is there anything more overwhelming than the sudden onset of jealousy? It rolls over one inexorably, like lava, boiling and smoking.
“I suppose I’ll have to leave him,” she said, in an oddly mild, matter-of-fact tone, sitting up straight and squaring her shoulders, as if already preparing herself for the task. “That is, if he doesn’t leave me first.”
I made no comment. I was hardly listening. There had come to my mind, or slithered into it, more like, a fragment of memory from my earliest days with Polly. We were here one afternoon, in the studio, she and I, eating cream crackers and sharing a bottle of bad wine. She wasn’t in the habit of drinking, certainly not in the daytime, but a glass or two always had a calming effect on her and on her conscience — she was still amazed at herself and this thing she was daring to do with me. After the second glass she slipped demurely into the cramped, whitewashed closet in the corner, and I put my fingers resolutely in my ears — why is so little said, so little acknowledged, about the minor awkwardnesses, the squeamish delicacies, but also the courtly forbearances that mark the shared erotic lives of men and women?
Just outside the lavatory, on the wall to the right, there is a big square antique mirror, framed in rococo gilt and flaking round the edges, in which I used to test the composition of a picture in progress; a mirror image offers an entirely new perspective and will always show up the weakness of a line.
After a minute or two I saw the lavatory door opening, and quickly dropped my hands from my ears.
My, how they unnerve me, mirrors. We hear so much these days about the multiplicity of universes we unknowingly move in the midst of, but who remarks the wholly other world that exists in the depths of the looking-glass? It appears so plausible, doesn’t it, that pristine, crystalline version of this tawdry realm where we’re condemned to live out our one-dimensional lives? How still and calm all is in there, how vigilantly that reversed world attends us and our every action, letting us away with nothing, not the faintest gesture, the stealthiest glance.