But why the great surprise? Why shouldn’t it have been Polly? I don’t know. I just had not imagined she would be the one to find me. Why wasn’t it Gloria, I wanted to know? Shouldn’t my wife have been the one to come and fetch me? It’s a puzzle that she didn’t. She had phoned me, she knew where I was. Why didn’t she get in her car and drive out to the gate-lodge, as surely any wife would have done? But she didn’t. It’s strange. Can it be she didn’t want me back? That’s a thing I don’t wish to consider.
Polly has a way, when she’s upset and agitated, of breaking on the instant into unexpected and startlingly rapid movement. These sudden light-footed flurries, remarkable in a young woman as solidly built as she is, must be related to the skittish bouts of dancing that Marcus described her performing about the house, in happier days, before the catastrophe struck and while the pillars of the temple were still standing. Now the door was no sooner open than she fairly flung herself at me, with a stifled sound that could have been an expression of joy, of anger or relief, of recrimination or anguish, or of all these things together, and ground her mouth against mine so fiercely that I felt the shape of her overlapping front teeth through the warm pulp of her lips. I was shocked and confused, and couldn’t think of anything to say. What I felt was something like a happy seasickness, my knees wobbly and my insides heaving. I hadn’t realised how acutely I had been missing her — I find it unfailingly amazing how much can be going on inside me without my knowing. Polly said something similar once, didn’t she, about dreams and the dreaming mind? Now, with her mouth still glued to mine and mumbling incomprehensible words, she pushed me backwards into the hall, while the child, sandwiched between us, wriggled and kicked. It was like being seized upon by a mother octopus bearing one of her young before her. At last I freed myself from that entangling embrace and held both of them, mother and child, away from me — held, mind, not thrust. I was breathing heavily, as if I had been brought to a sudden halt in the middle of a desperate run, which was the case, in a way. The cut that Marcus’s ring had made on Polly’s cheek was healed, but a tiny livid scar remained. How, I asked her, how had she found me, how had she known where to look for me? She gave a brief high laugh, tinged with hysteria, so it seemed to me, and said that of course this was the obvious place for me to have fled to, since I had talked so much about the gate-lodge and being here with my parents and my siblings, long ago. This gave me a shock. I couldn’t recall ever mentioning to her the subfusc life I had led here as a child. Is it possible to say things and not be aware of it, to speak while awake as if one were asleep, in a state of talkative hypnogeny? She laughed again, and said I had made her so curious that she had driven out one afternoon during the summer to have a squint, as she put it, at the scenes of my childhood. I stared at her in dull bewilderment. “You were here,” I said, “here in the gate-lodge?”
“No, no, not inside, of course not,” she cried, with another wild-sounding laugh. “I just stopped at the gate and sat in the car. I’d have come and looked in through the windows but I didn’t have the nerve. I wanted to see where you were born and where you grew up.” But why, I asked, still at a loss, why would she do that? — why would she be curious about such things? For a moment she didn’t reply. She stood before me, holding the child hitched on her hip, and tilted her head to one side and surveyed me with a fondly pitying smile. She was wearing a heavy woollen jumper and a woollen skirt, and her unruly hair was held at the back of her head by a big broad-toothed tortoiseshell clasp. “Because I love you, you sap,” she said.
Ah. Love. Yes. The secret ingredient I always forget about and leave out.
In the kitchen she put the child sitting on the table — from which, need I say, I had already smartly removed to hiding the thick school jotter containing these precious ruminations — and looked about the room and wrinkled her nose. “Smells damp,” she said. “It’s cold, too.” She was right — I was wearing my overcoat and scarf — yet I felt immediately and absurdly defensive. I pointed out stiffly that the place hadn’t been lived in for a very long time, and that there had been no one to look after it. She snorted and said, yes, that was obvious. The harsh light through the window gave to her face a scrubbed, raw look, and standing there, in her jumper and her matronly flat shoes, she seemed, although there was no mirror about, barely familiar, and might have been someone with whom I was no more than distantly acquainted, even though I yearned to take her in my arms and hold her tenderly against me and chafe her cold cheeks back to rosy warmth. She was, after all, and despite everything, my own dear girl, as how could I ever have thought otherwise? Far from cheering me, however, this realisation, this re-realisation, caused in me a sort of plummeting sensation, as if the bottom had fallen out of something inside me. The snares I had thought to free myself from were still firmly clamped around my ankles, after all. And yet I was so pleased she was here. Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves.
Polly, eyeing the bare shelves and the cupboards that had the look of being equally empty, asked what I was living on. I said I had been going down to Kearney’s, the pub at the crossroads, where there was soup to be had at lunchtime, and sandwiches in the evening, made up on the quiet and specially for me by the publican’s daughter, Maisie her name, in whose heart I seemed to have found a soft spot. “Is that so?” Polly said, and sniffed. I almost laughed. Imagine being jealous of poor rough-hewn Maisie Kearney, pushing fifty, chronically unwooed and definitively unwed. I said nothing; Polly’s manner now, sceptical and imperious, was making me cross. Isn’t it remarkable how even the most outlandish circumstances will after a minute or two adjust themselves into a humdrum norm? Here I was, surprised by a cruelly abandoned lover, in my formerly parental home, where I had been in hiding from her, as well as from her husband and my wife, and already, after the initial shocking irruption, we were back once more amid the old, accustomed trivia, the squabbles, the resentments, the petty recriminations. Yes, I could have laughed. And yet, such was the jumbled state I was in, at once harried, distraught and desirous, that I could hardly think what to say or what to do. Desirous, yes, you heard me. I ached for my girl’s achingly remembered flesh, so familiar and yet always a new and uncharted land. What a shameless cullion it is, the libido.
The child began to fret but was ignored. She was still sitting in the middle of the table, pot-bellied and inanely pouting, like a miniature and unsmiling Buddha. I wondered vaguely, not for the first time, if there might be something the matter with her — she was nearly two and yet was showing scant sign of development, was barely at the walking stage and still couldn’t talk. But what do I know about children? “You must be lonely here,” Polly said, in a sulkily accusing tone. “Didn’t you miss me?” Yes, I hastened to say, of course I had missed her, of course I had. But there had been, I said, brightening, there had been my rat to keep me company. She lowered her head, tucking her chin into that notch above her clavicle that I used to love to dip my tongue into, and regarded me with a hard frown. “Your rat,” she said, in an ominously toneless voice. Yes, I said, unable to stop, he was a friendly fellow and often came out of his lair under the gas cooker to see what I was up to. He was, I guessed, of a good age, and solitary, like myself. The front he presented to me was an equal blend of curiosity, boldness and circumspection. Often of an evening I would bring back from the pub the remains of one of Maisie’s lovingly assembled sandwiches, a buttered bit of crust, or a morsel of Cheddar, and set it on the floor in front of the cooker, and eventually, sure enough, he would come nosing out, making little feints and jabs with his snout, his pinkly glistening nostrils twitching and his slender, delicate claws making scratching sounds on the linoleum, so tiny and faint that to hear them I had to sit perfectly quiet and even suspend my breathing. While he ate, which he did with the finical niceness of an aged and dyspeptic gourmet on the umpteenth course of an imperial banquet, he would glance up at me now and then with a speculative and, so it seemed, drily amused expression. I imagine he considered me an accommodating simpleton, only mildly puzzling, and obviously harmless. His tail, lank, nude and finely tapered, wasn’t a pleasant thing to look at; also, in the course of consuming the tidbits that I offered him, he had a way of bunching up and arching his hindquarters that made it seem as if he were preparing to vomit, though he never did, in my presence. These things aside, I was fond of him, wary old-timer that he was.