When Polly stepped out of the lavatory, the door, before she closed it, was behind her, hiding her from my view, but in the mirror, to which she had turned — which of us can resist a glance at ourselves in the glass? — she was facing me, and our eyes met, our reflected eyes, that is. Perhaps it was the intervention of the mirror, or the interpolation of it, I should say, for the faint hint of treachery the word insinuates, that made us seem, just for a second, not to recognise each other, indeed, not to know each other at all. We might have been, in that instant, strangers — no, more than strangers, worse than strangers: we might have been creatures from entirely different worlds. And perhaps, thanks to the transformative sly magic of mirrors, we were. Doesn’t the new science say of mirror symmetry that certain particles seeming to find exact reflections of themselves are in fact the interaction of two separate realities, that indeed they are not particles at all but pinholes in the fabric of invisibly intersecting universes? No, I don’t understand it either, but it sounds compelling, doesn’t it?
Of course, I’m thinking now of Marcus, the last time I saw him, in Maggie Mallon’s shop as was, saying that he didn’t know his wife any more. He too had suffered his estranging moment with her, when she had sat on the side of the bed that morning and looked up at him in furious and unforgiving silence.
Anyway, that passage of unrecognition had left us shaken, Polly and me. We didn’t speak of it — what would we have said? — and continued on together as if it hadn’t occurred. Though unnerving, and deeply so, for the time it lasted, it was hardly unique: life, pinholed life, is punctuated by such glimpses into the unfathomable mysteriousness of being here, all of us together and irreconcilably alone. Yet I can’t help wondering now if Polly and I came back fully from whatever other reality, whatever looking-glass world it was, that we had strayed into, however briefly, in that instant. Early on though it was in our affair, was that the moment when, all unknowing, we began to draw apart? I have the impression, and I credit it, that in certain cases a union is no sooner forged than the seed of separation sprouts.
When she had gone, tearful, anxious, and full of tender concern for me and for herself and for the two of us together, I took to my heels and fled. I didn’t even pack a bag, I just went. It was a wild evening on the roads, the trees lashing their branches together and a full moon flashing through flying clouds like a fat eye blinking at me in stern reproval. But what did I care for the elements? I had my topcoat, my boots, my trusty malacca. I clamped a hand on my hat and lifted my face, in a kind of tearful ecstasy, like Bernini’s swooning St. Teresa, to the wind and the rain, as in other times I used to offer it to the salt-laden sunlight of the south. I saw myself as the wandering hero in some old saga, sore of heart, maddened from loss and longing, and sick with self-doubt. I hardly knew what I was doing, or where I was going. White horses were rearing on the black waters of the estuary. Twilight and storm, in the world and in me both. On the ancient metal bridge at Ferry Point a farmer stopped and offered me a lift in his lorry. He was your genuine old-timer, with a toothless, collapsed mouth and stubble growing every which way on chin and cheeks and a pipe jammed between glistening gums. He smelt of hay and pigs and rank tobacco, and it’s a sound bet his trousers were held up with a belt made of binder twine. The lorry juddered and gasped like a work-horse on its last legs. Old MacDonald drove at high speed and with lunatic abandon, yanking the gear-stick and spinning the steering-wheel as though intent on unscrewing it from its post. As we went along he told me with relish of a suicide committed in this place years ago. “Drownded himself, he did, after his girl jilted him.” He chuckled. I pulled the brim of my hat low over my eyes. Before us the yellow headlights probed the gathering dark. To be no one, to be nothing, astray in tempestuous night! “They found him down there under the bridge,” the old man wheezed, “with his two arms wrapped stiff around one of them wooden piles under the water — would you credit that, now?”
Polly Polly Polly Polly Polly
The house when I arrived was
—
I think that’s Gloria’s car I hear pulling up outside. Dear me.
II
THE SILENCE WAS the thing that struck me first. It settled on the house like a hard frost and under it everything went frozen and stiff. I thought of winter evenings in childhood — yes, here it comes, the past again — when our country neighbours’ sons from round about, and daughters, too, those raucous tomboys, would gather on the hill outside the gate-lodge and sluice bucketfuls of water down the road to make a slide. I imagined I could see the frost falling as the night came on, a glistening grey mist sifting out of the sky’s dome of gleaming deep-blue darkness. I seemed to hear it, too, a hushed metallic tinkling everywhere around me in the stinging air. And later on, when the slide was hard as polished stone, how blackly the ice would shine in the starlight, as enticing as it was daunting, daring me to take my turn and sprint forwards like the others and let myself go skimming down the hill, my knees braced and trembling and the cold air searing my lungs. But I was timid and didn’t dare, and hung back in the sheltering shadows of the gate-lodge, watching enviously. The voices of the sliders rang sharply in the glossy darkness, and the trees stood motionless, like silent spectators at this wild play, and the countless stars too seemed to be looking on, with a flinty, spiteful glitter. Whenever a motor car approached the children would scatter amid shrieks of laughter, and the driver would roll down his window and hurl curses after them and threaten to call the guards.
The hushed place I’m speaking of, the place I’m in now, is Fairmount, my noble-fronted dog-house on Hangman’s Hill, also known, by me, in secret, with unconsoling humour, as Château Désespoir. I must say, being home again is strange, despite the short time I was gone — can I really have been away only a matter of days? There’s the silence, as I say, but also my wife’s glacial calm, though the former is largely an effect of the latter. Of my precipitate departure and hangdog return she makes no mention. She doesn’t appear to be angry with me for having run off, and not a word is spoken of Polly and all that. How much does she know? Has she spoken to Marcus — has he spoken to her? I’d dearly like to know but daren’t ask. And so I am on tenterhooks. Her manner is distracted, dreamily remote; in this new version of her she reminds me, disconcertingly, of my feyly affectless mother. As we go about our day here in the house she hardly looks at me, and when she does, a slight crease forms between her eyebrows, not a frown, exactly, but a sort of ripple of perplexity, as if she can’t quite recall who I am — an echo of Polly and me in the studio mirror that day, in fact. I would say this distant demeanour is a tacit rebuke, only I don’t think it is. Maybe she has given up on me, maybe I have been banished from the forefront of her mind altogether. She is, it appears, concentrating on the future. She talks of returning to the south, to the Camargue, erstwhile home of the godless, war-loving and triumphant Cathars, where we lived for a time, more or less tranquilly. She says she misses the salt marshes down there, the enormous skies and limitless, sun-struck perspectives. There’s a house for rent in Aigues-Mortes that she’s looking into — that’s what she says, that she’s looking into it. I don’t know how seriously to take this. Does it mean she’s bent on leaving me, or is it just a taunt, intended, like her silence, to wound and worry? It was in Aigues-Mortes that we plighted our troth, sitting outside a café one sunny autumn afternoon long ago. There was a hot wind blowing, scraping the sky to a dry whitish-blue and making the sunshades in the little square crack like whips. I extended an open palm across the table and Gloria gave me her strong cool big-boned hand to hold, and there we were, plighted.