Outside, in the overcast yet strangely radiant day, a soft uncertain rain began to fall. I note, by the way, how rain punctuates my narrative with a suspicious regularity. Maybe it’s a substitute for the showers of tears that by rights I should be shedding, at the simple sadness of all this that was transpiring between us, between Polly and me, between Polly and me and Marcus, between Polly and me and Marcus and Gloria, and who knows how many others? Drop a pebble into the sea and the ripples roll out on all sides, bearing their sorrowful tidings.
I filled the battered kettle and put it on the stove to boil and laid out tea-things, glad of the excuse to be pottering about, just like a real human being, using up time and not having to say anything, or anything Polly could seize on, anyway, and turn against me. At bottom I’m just a cautious old mole. Indeed, I often think I would like to be truly old and at my last, a beslippered shuffler, wearing long johns, and gloves without fingers, and a dirty scarf wrapped round my stringy throat, and have a drip always on the end of my nose, and be forever moaning of the cold, and snarling at people, and phoning the guards to complain of children kicking footballs into my garden. Somehow I’m convinced things would be simpler, then — will be simpler, with only the end in view. Polly sat with a fist pressed to her cheek, gazing starkly before her, like that oddly burly angel in Dürer’s Melencolia. A glinting tear ran over her knuckles but I pretended not to see it. The child was gazing up at her with moon eyes, her wet, shiny-pink bottom lip stuck out. I remarked — having first to do a noisy clearance job on my throat — what a quiet child she was, how biddable, how good in general; it was, of course, no more than a craven attempt to get round the mother by lauding the child. Polly, however, was lost in herself and wasn’t listening. The kettle came to the boil. I made the tea and put the pot on the table, a delicate plume of vapour curling up from the spout like a half-hearted genie trying and failing to materialise. I sat down. The child transferred her — I keep wanting to say its — speculative gaze to me. I did my best to smile. Lifting a fat little hand she inserted an index finger into her right nostril and began luxuriantly to probe inside it. Have I remarked before how eerie children are? To me they seem so, anyway. My own little one, my lost Olivia, comes to me in dreams sometimes, not as she was, but as she would be now, a grown girl. I see her, the dream-she, quite clearly. She has the look of her mother, the same pale, blonde beauty, though she is slighter, of a more delicate make. Delicate, yes; that’s how they used to describe girls like her, when I was young. It meant they would not live long, or that if they did they would be anaemic, and childless themselves. In my dreams she wears a pink dress, very demure, with a crimped, flowered bodice — remember the kind I mean? — and white ankle-socks and patent-leather pumps. She doesn’t do anything, just stands, with a solemn and faintly questioning look, her arms pressed close to her sides, a bright figure at the centre of a vast, dark place. There seems nothing strange or even worthy of remark in her being there, older than she ever got to be in life, and it’s only when I wake that I wonder what these visitations mean, or if they mean anything — after all, why should my dream life have a meaning, when my waking one does not?
Little Pip took her finger out of her nose and gravely inspected what she had retrieved from the depths of her nostril.
“Are you not going to say anything at all?” Polly demanded of me. “What’s the use of us being here if we don’t talk?” I was tempted to point out that it was she who had come here, uninvited and, if I were honest, not entirely welcome, either; but I kept my peace. She sighed. “I’ve left Marcus, you know.”
“Ah.”
“Is that all you can say? — ah?”
I made to fill her cup, but she waved the teapot brusquely aside.
“Was there a fight?” I asked, keeping a steadily neutral tone, I don’t know how. I felt like a soldier trapped in a crater under enemy bombardment at whose feet there is lodged a recently launched, still warm and unexploded shell. Polly gave an angrily dismissive shrug, dipping and twisting her shoulders, like an acrobat in pain. “Why did you turn against me all of a sudden?” she wailed. The child left off studying her fingertip and fixed her eye upon her mother; her gaze, I noticed, took a moment to adjust itself, and I wondered if she, too, was going to have a cast in her eye, just like her mother. Polly had lifted up to me an anguished face; with that look, and the child on her lap, she made me think, disconcertingly, of a classic pietà—it’s what I do, I transform everything into a scene and frame it. I said I hadn’t turned against her — what would make her think such a thing? “You did, you did!” she cried. “I saw it in your face long before you ran off, the way you wouldn’t look at me, the way you kept making excuses and going around mumbling to yourself and sighing.” She paused, and her shoulders sagged. There is indeed, I’ve noted it before, a touch of the operatic to all discourse: there are the arias, the coloratura passages, the recitatives by turns bustling, reflective, or furiously hissed upon the air, in a spray of spittle. “After you went,” she said, “I’d wake up in the morning and tell myself that today you’d call, that today I’d hear your voice, but the hours dragged on until night and still the phone didn’t ring. I couldn’t think of anything but you and why you went away and where you might be. And all the time I was walking around in a fog. Yesterday when I was doing the washing-up a glass broke in the sink. I didn’t see it under the suds and didn’t feel it cutting me until the water started turning red.” She lifted her hand to display the dressing on her thumb, a wad of lint held in place with sticking-plaster and stained with rust-coloured blood, and at once I saw Marcus, in the studio, holding up his hand to show me his ring finger and the ring he had cut her face with. I reached out to her but she snatched her hand away and hid it behind the child’s back. There was a silence. The small rain worried at the window-panes. I said I was sorry, trying to sound humble and heart-sick. I was heart-sick, I was humbled, but I couldn’t seem to make myself sound as if I were. Polly gave an angry laugh. “Oh, yes,” she said archly, “you’re sorry, of course.”
The child began to cry, weakly and as it were exploratively, making a sound like a rusty hinge being effortfully opened inch by inch. Polly drew her to her breast again and rocked her, and at once she grew quiet. Motherhood. Another conundrum I shall never crack.
We sat there, at the table, for a long time. The tea, undrunk, went cold, the afternoon light turned leaden, the dreary rain outside drifted down at a slant. I did not feel as upset as by rights I should have felt. I have a knack of finding little pockets of peace and secret quiet even in the most fraught of circumstances — the harried heart must have its rest. Polly, with the child dozing now in her lap, talked and talked, to herself more than to me, it seemed, requiring me only to listen, or perhaps not even that — perhaps she had forgotten I was there. Grief, she had discovered, was a physical sensation, a kind of ailment that affected her all over. This was a surprise, she said; she had thought that kind of suffering was entirely a thing of the emotions. I knew what she meant; I knew exactly what she meant. I, too, was familiar with the soul’s ague, but I didn’t say so, the moment in the limelight being hers. Her fingers under her nails were sore, she said, as if the quicks were exposed — again she waved her hand in front of me, though this time there was nothing to be shown — and her eyes scalded, and even her hair seemed to hurt. Her temperature soared and plummeted; one minute her blood was on fire, the next she felt chilled to the bone. Her skin was hot and puffy to the touch, and slightly sticky, the way that the more delicate parts of her, the backs of her knees, or the plump puckers at her armpits, used to get when she was a child and stayed out too long in the sun. “Can you feel it?” she said, pulling back the sleeve of her jumper and thrusting the underside of her arm at me. “Can you feel the heat?” I could feel it.