‘It’s usual –’
‘Look, one minute we’re having lunch – an omelette, just as usual, and salad and Pouilly Fuissé – and the next minute the poor man’s dead.’
‘I thought you said –’
‘Oh, you know what I mean. “Lovely, oh darling, lovely,” he said, and then he collapsed. Well, I didn’t know he’d collapsed. I mean, I didn’t know he was dead. He collapsed just like he always collapses. Post-coital –’
‘I’d rather not hear –’
‘Oh, for Jesus’ sake!’ She was shouting. She was on her feet, again approaching the decanter. Her hair had fallen out of the pins that held it and was now dishevelled. Her lipstick was blurred, some of it even smeared her chin. She looked most unattractive, he considered.
‘I cannot help you in this matter, Mrs Matara,’ he said as firmly as he could. ‘I can telephone a doctor –’
‘Will you for God’s sake stop about a doctor!’
‘I cannot assist you with your friend, Mrs Matara.’
‘All I want you to do is to help me put his clothes back on. He’s too heavy, I can’t do it myself –’
‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Matara.’
‘And slip him down here. The lift is only a few yards –’
‘That’s quite impossible.’
She went close to him, with her glass considerably replenished. She pushed her face at his in a way that he considered predatory. He was aware of the smell of her scent, and of another smell that he couldn’t prevent himself from thinking must be the smell of sexual intercourse: he had read of this odour in a book by Ernest Hemingway.
‘My husband and I are a contentedly married couple,’ she said, with her lips so near to his that they almost touched. That man upstairs has a wife who doesn’t know a thing, an innocent woman. Don’t you understand such things, Mr Attridge? Don’t you see what will happen if the dead body of my lover is discovered in my husband’s bed? Can’t you visualize the pain it’ll cause?’
He moved away. It was a long time since he had felt so angry and yet he was determined to control his anger. The woman knew nothing of civilized behaviour or she wouldn’t have come bursting into the privacy of a stranger like this, with preposterous and unlawful suggestions. The woman, for all he knew, was unbalanced.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said in what he hoped was an icy voice. ‘I’m sorry, but for a start I do not see how you and your husband could possibly be a contentedly married couple.’
‘I’m telling you we are. I’m telling you my lover was contentedly married also. Listen, Mr Attridge.’ She approached him again, closing in on him like an animal. ‘Listen, Mr Attridge; we met for physical reasons, once a week at lunchtime. For five years ever since the Mortons’ party, we’ve been meeting once a week, for an omelette and Pouilly Fuissé, and sex. It had nothing to do with our two marriages. But it will now: that woman will see her marriage as a failure now. She’ll mourn it for the rest of her days, when she should be mourning her husband. I’ll be divorced.’
‘You should have thought of that –’
She hit him with her left hand. She hit him on the face, the palm of her hand stinging the pink, plump flesh.
‘Mrs Matara!’
He had meant to shout her name, but instead his protest came from him in a shrill whisper. Since his honeymoon no one had struck him, and he recalled the fear he’d felt when he’d been struck then, in the bedroom in Siena. ‘I could kill you,’ his ex-wife had shouted at him. ‘I’d kill you if you weren’t dead already.’
‘I must ask you to go, Mrs Matara,’ he said in the same shrill whisper. He cleared his throat. ‘At once,’ he said, in a more successful voice.
She shook her head. She said he had no right to tell her what she should have thought of. She was upset as few women can ever be upset: in all decency and humanity it wasn’t fair to say she should have thought of that. She cried out noisily in his sitting-room and he felt that he was in a nightmare. It had all the horror and absurdity and violence of a nightmare: the woman standing in front of him with water coming out of her eyes, drinking his brandy and hitting him.
She spoke softly then, not in her violent way. She placed the brandy glass on the marble surface of the Regency table and stood there with her head down. He knew she was still weeping even though he couldn’t see her face and couldn’t hear any noise coming from her. She whispered that she was sorry.
‘Please forgive me, Mr Attridge. I’m very sorry.’
He nodded, implying that he accepted this apology. It was all very nasty, but for the woman it was naturally an upsetting thing to happen. He imagined, when a little time had passed, telling the story to Mrs Harcourt-Egan and to others, relating how a woman, to all intents and purposes a stranger to him, had telephoned him to say she was in need of assistance and then had come down from her flat with this awful tragedy to relate. He imagined himself describing Mrs Matara, how at first she’d seemed quite smart and then had become dishevelled, how she’d helped herself to his brandy and had suddenly struck him. He imagined Mrs Harcourt-Egan arid others gasping when he said that. He seemed to see his own slight smile as he went on to say that the woman could not be blamed. He heard himself saying that the end of the matter was that Mrs Matara just went away.
But in fact Mrs Matara did not go away. Mrs Matara continued to stand, weeping quietly.
‘I’m sorry too,’ he said, feeling that the words, with the finality he’d slipped into them, would cause her to move to the door of the sitting-room.
‘If you’d just help me,’ she said, with her head still bent. ‘Just to get his clothes on.’
He began to reply. He made a noise in his throat.
‘I can’t manage,’ she said, ‘on my own.’
She raised her head and looked across the room at him. Her face was blotched all over now, with make-up and tears. Her hair had fallen down a little more, and from where he stood Attridge thought he could see quite large areas of grey beneath the black. A rash of some kind, or it might have been flushing, had appeared on her neck.
‘I wouldn’t bother you,’ she said, ‘if I could manage on my own.’ She would have telephoned a friend, she said, except there wouldn’t be time for a friend to get to the block of flats. ‘There’s very little time, you see,’ she said.
It was then, while she spoke those words, that Attridge felt the first hint of excitement. It was the same kind of excitement that he experienced just before the final curtain of Tannhäuser, or whenever, in the Uffizi, he looked upon Lorenzo di Credi’s Annunciation. Mrs Matara was a wretched, unattractive creature who had been conducting a typical hole-in-corner affair and had received her just rewards. It was hard to feel sorry for her, and yet for some reason it was harder not to. The man who had died had got off scot-free, leaving her to face the music miserably on her own. ‘You’re inhuman,’ his ex-wife had said in Siena. ‘You’re incapable of love. Or sympathy, or anything else.’ She’d stood there in her underclothes, taunting him.
‘I’ll manage,’ Mrs Matara said, moving towards the door.
He did not move himself. She’d been so impatient, all the time in Siena. She didn’t even want to sit in the square and watch the people. She’d been lethargic in the cathedral. All she’d ever wanted was to try again in bed. ‘You don’t like women,’ she’d said, sitting up with a glass of Brolio in her hand, smoking a cigarette.
He followed Mrs Matara into the hall, and an image entered his mind of the dead man’s wife. He saw her as Mrs Matara had described her, as an innocent woman who believed herself faithfully loved. He saw her as a woman with fair hair, in a garden, simply dressed. She had borne the children of the man who now lay obscenely dead, she had made a home for him and had entertained his tedious business friends, and now she was destined to suffer. It was a lie to say he didn’t like women, it was absurd to say he was incapable of sympathy.