Polly’s mother frowned and lifted her head as if she had heard something, some far faint sound, a secret summons, and rose from her place and, frowning still, wandered out of the room, taking her napkin with her, forgotten in her hand.
I turned to Polly, but she wouldn’t meet my eye; it must have been a great strain for her, being here in the withered bosom of her family with me sitting opposite her like something she had brought in by mistake and now couldn’t think how to get rid of. She was transformed yet again, by the way. It was as if in coming here she had taken off a ball-gown and put on instead a house-coat, or even a gymslip. She was all daughter now, plain, dutiful, exasperated, lips pursed in sullen resentment, and quick to anger. I could hardly see in her the wantonly exultant creature who of an afternoon not so long ago on the old green sofa in the studio would cry out in my arms and dig her fingers into my shoulder-blades and burrow with her avid mouth, sweet succubus, into the delightedly flinching hollow of my throat. And as I sat there, contemplating her in her porridge-coloured jumper, with her hair drawn tightly back and her face rubbed clear of make-up and harrowed by this long day’s tensions and travails, there came to me what I can only call a breathtaking revelation — literally, for it was a revelation, and my breath was taken away. What I saw, with jarring clarity, was that there is no such thing as woman. Woman, I realised, is a thing of legend, a phantasm who flies through the world, settling here and there on this or that unsuspecting mortal female, whom she turns, briefly but momentously, into an object of yearning, veneration and terror. I picture myself, assailed by this astounding new knowledge, slumped open-mouthed on my chair with my arms hanging down at either side and my legs splayed out slackly before me — I’m speaking figuratively, of course — in the flabbergasted pose of one suddenly and devastatingly enlightened.
I know, I know, you’re shaking your head and chuckling, and you’re right: I am a hopeless and feeble-minded chump. The supposedly tremendous discovery that announced itself to me there at the tea-table was really no more than another of those scraps of unremarkable wisdom that have been known to every woman, and probably to most men, too, since Eve ate the apple. Nor did it, I confess, have any grand illuminating effect on me — sadly, the light that accompanies such insights quickly fades, I find. No scales fell from my eyes. I did not look on Polly with a new scepticism, measuring her mere humanness and finding it unworthy of my passion. On the contrary, I felt a sudden renewed tenderness towards her, but of an unimpassioned, mundane sort. Nevertheless, though the magic had evaporated on the spot, I think I treasured her more, that evening, than I ever had before, even in those first, ecstatic weeks when she would come running up those too many steps to the studio and fling herself at me in a flurry of cries and kisses and walk me backwards to the sofa, fumbling at my buttons and laughing and hotly panting into my ear. I now in turn would gladly have taken her in my arms and swept her up the stairs to her bedroom and her bed, still in her woollens and her hockey-girl’s skirt, there to lose myself in her pinky-grey, bread-warm, most cherished, plasticiney flesh. But it would have been Polly, plain Polly herself, that I was caressing, for at last she had broken through the casing that my fantasies had moulded around her and had become, at last, at last had become, for me — what? Her real self? I can’t say that. I’m supposed not to believe in real selves. What, then? A less fantastical fantasy? Yes, let’s agree on that. I think it’s the most that can be hoped for, the most that can be asked. Or wait, wait, let’s put it this way: I forgave her for all the things that she was not. I’ve said that before, somewhere. No matter. Similarly she must have forgiven me, long ago. How does that sound? Does it make sense? It’s no small thing, the pardon that two human beings can extend to each other. I should know.
And yet, and yet. What I see now, at this moment, and didn’t see then, was that this final stage, for me, of Polly’s pupation, was the beginning of the end, the true beginning of the true end, of my, of my — oh, go on, what else can it be called? — of my love for her.
We did go up to her bedroom. Once inside the door I set down her suitcase and the cricket bag with the child’s things and stood back awkwardly, feeling suddenly shy. I tried not to look too closely, too interrogatively, at the objects in the room. I felt like an interloper, which is, I know, what I was. Polly glanced about and heaved a sigh, puffing out her cheeks. This had been, she said, her bedroom from when she was a child until she left home to marry Marcus. The bed, high and narrow, seemed too small for a grown-up person, and looking at it I felt a sharp little pang of compassion and sweet sorrow. How cherishable it seemed, how moving, this moveless, inexpectant cradle that had held and sheltered her through so many of her nights. I pictured her asleep there, oblivious of moonrise, bat-flit, dawn’s stealthy creeping, her soft breath barely a stir in the darkness. I felt like shedding a tear, I really did. How confusing everything was.
The fireplace had tiles down either side of it with a pattern of pink flowers painted on them, under the glaze. A log fire had been lit, but it hadn’t taken — the logs were wet and the kindling’s pale flames lapped at them ineffectually. “It always smoked, that grate,” Polly said. “I’m surprised I wasn’t suffocated.” The small, four-paned square window opposite the bed looked out on a cobbled yard and a line of disused stables. Further on there was a half-hearted hill topped by a stand of trees, oaks, I think, though to me most trees are oaks, their already almost bare branches stark and inky-black against a low sky of chill mauve shot through with silvery streaks. Inside the room the shadows of dusk were gathering fast, congregating in the corners under the ceiling like swathes of cobweb. I heard Janey down in the kitchen doing the washing-up and whistling. I strained to make out the tune. Polly sat on the side of the bed, her hands folded in her lap. She gazed out of the window. A last faint gleam clung to the cobbles in the yard. “The Rakes of Mallow,” that was the tune Janey was whistling. I was absurdly pleased to have identified it, and I turned, smiling, to Polly — what was I going to do, sing to her? — but at that moment, without warning, she dropped her face into her hands and began to sob. I held back, aghast, then went to her, creeping on tiptoe. I should have gathered her in my arms to comfort her, but I didn’t know how to manage it, so amorphous a shape she seemed, crouching there, her shoulders heaving, and all I could do was move my hands helplessly around her, as if I were forming a model of her out of air. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “Oh, dear God.” I was frightened by the depth of desolation in her voice, and inevitably I blamed myself for it; I felt as if I had tampered with some small, inert mechanism and made it spring into noisy and unstoppable movement. My fingers by chance brushed the eiderdown where she was sitting and the chill, brittle touch of the satin made me shiver. I, too, called on God, though silently, praying to his inexistence to rescue me from this impossible predicament; I even saw myself jerked by magic backwards into the fireplace and sucked in a whoosh up the flue, my arms pinned to my sides and my eyes elevated in their sockets in a transport of El Greco — esque ecstasy, emerging a second later from the chimney, like a clown shooting out of the mouth of a cannon, and disappearing into the sky’s dragonfly-blue dome. Escape, yes, escape was all I could think of. Where now was all that reinvigorated tenderness for my darling girl that had come over me at the tea-table not half an hour before? Where indeed. I felt paralysed. A weeping woman is a terrible spectacle. I heard myself saying Polly’s name over and over in a low, urgent voice, as if I were calling to her into the depths of a cave, and now I touched her gingerly on the shoulder, getting the same small shock I had got from the eiderdown. She didn’t lift her head, only flapped a hand sideways at me, waving me away. “Leave me alone,” she wailed, with a great racking sob, “there’s nothing you can do!” I lingered a moment, in an agony of irresolution, then turned and sneaked out, shutting the door behind me with appalled, with exquisite, with shaming, care.