‘To sleep with you?’ she parodied.
‘That would be best of all but it’s not important. We can spend the morning together,’ he said eagerly.
‘All right.’ She nodded.
They were both uneasy after the agreement. They had left one level and had not entered any other.
‘Do you think I should go to see if anything’s the matter with Marion?’
‘Maybe. Wait a little,’ he said.
Marion was pale when she came back. ‘I’m afraid I’m not used to the wine,’ she apologized.
‘I’m sorry, but we can go now. Do you think you’ll be all right?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.
‘Anyhow, you’ll both see Peter tomorrow. He said he’d definitely be at the reception.’
The last thing their eyes rested on before they went through the door the Italian manager was holding open was the blindman’s cane leaning against the side of the piano.
‘Do you think they’ll make the poor man play all night?’ she asked.
‘He seems satisfied. I even heard them arranging for a taxi to take him home. I suppose we too should be thinking of a taxi.’
‘I’d rather walk, if that’s all right.’
They walked slowly towards the hotel. The night was fine but without moon or stars. Just before they got to the hotel, the man shook hands with Marion, and the two women walked together to the hotel door. They stood a while in conversation there before the star went in and the blonde woman turned back towards the man.
‘It always makes me uncomfortable. Being part of the couple, leaving the single person alone,’ he said.
‘The single person is usually glad to be left alone.’
‘I know that but it doesn’t stop the feeling.’ He had the same feeling passing hospitals late at night.
‘Anyhow, you’ve had your wish. We’re together,’ the woman said, and they kissed for the first time. They crossed to the taxi rank facing the railings of the Green, and they did not speak in the taxi. What hung between them might be brutal and powerful, but it was as frail as the flesh out of which it grew, for any endurance. They had chosen one another because of the empty night, and the wrong words might betray them early, making one hateful to the other; but even the right words, if there were right words, had not the power to force it. It had to grow or wither like a plant or flower. What they needed most was patience, luck, and that twice-difficult thing, to be lucky in one another, and at the same time, and to be able to wait for that time.
‘Will I switch on the light?’ he asked her as he let her into the flat.
‘Whatever you like.’
‘Then I’d rather not.’
After they had kissed he said, ‘There’s my room and the spare room. I don’t mind if you think it too soon and use the spare room.’
‘Wait,’ she said softly, and her arms leaned heavily round his shoulders, as if she had forgotten him, and was going over her life to see if she could gather it into this one place. Suddenly she felt him trembling. She pulled him towards her.
‘Do you bring many people back like this?’ she asked close to morning, almost proprietorially.
‘No. Not for ages.’
‘Why?’
‘First you have to find a person who’ll consent,’ he half joked. ‘And there’s not much use after a while unless there seems a chance of something more.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of it going on, I suppose.’
There was a silence in which a moth blundering about the half-darkness overhead was too audible.
‘And you, have you men?’ he asked awkwardly.
‘No. Until recently I had one man.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. He was married. The man in question had a quite awful dilemma, and he suffered, how he suffered, especially with me. You see, he was torn between his wife and me, and he could not make up his mind. Women are, I think, more primal than men. They don’t bother too much about who pays the bill as long as they get what they want. So I gave him an ultimatum. And when he still couldn’t make up his mind I left him. That must sound pretty poor stuff.’
‘No. It sounds true.’
That hard as porcelain singleness of women, seeming sometimes to take pleasure in cruelty, was a part of the beauty.
‘Would you like to be married?’
‘Yes. And you?’
‘I suppose I would.’
‘You know that speech about those who are married or kind to their friends. They become olives, pomegranate, mulberry, flowers, precious stones, eminent stars.’
‘I’d rather stay as I am,’ she laughed.
‘I suppose it is all in life.’ He drew her towards him.
‘We didn’t choose it any more than those before us or those who may come after us.’
When they rose and washed in the flat in all its daylight, it seemed as if it was not only a new day but the beginning of a new life. The pictures, the plates, the table in its stolidity seemed to have been set askew by the accidental night, to want new shapes, to look comical in their old places. The books on the wall seemed to belong to an old relative to whom one did not even owe a responsibility of affection. Gaily one could pick or discard among them, choosing only those useful to the new. For, like a plant, the old outer leaves would have to lie withered for new green shoots to push upwards at the heart.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘Nothing much. Of another morning. A Paris morning, opening shutters, a water truck was going past, and behind came four Algerians with long-handled brooms.’
‘Were you alone or with someone?’ He was ashamed of the first pang of irrational jealousy.
‘Actually, I was alone. I suppose one usually is those mornings.’ Her gravity, much like a small child’s, took all the light to itself.
They had come from four separate people, two men and two women, lying together in two separate nights; and those two nights were joined in the night they had left, had grown into the morning.
She was not garlanded by farms or orchards, by any house by the sea, by neither judges nor philosophers. She stood as she was, belonging to the morning, as they both hoped to belong to the evening. They could not possess the morning, no more than they could disagree with it or go against its joy.
She was wearing what she wore at the dinner while the blindman played, a dress of blue denim, buttoned down the front, and on her stockingless feet were thonged sandals.
‘What are you going to do today?’
‘I have to go to the hotel and then to the reception. I suppose we’ll see the busy Peter there. After that I’m free. And you?’
‘I’m free all day.’
‘Maybe we’ll begin to learn a little more about one another then.’
‘As long as we know it’ll be more of nothing. We know hardly anything now and we may never be as well off.’
They would have to know that they could know nothing to go through the low door of love, the door that was the same doorway between the self and the other everywhere.
‘Well, anyhow we have to face the day,’ she said, dispelling it in one movement; and they took one another’s hands as they went to meet the day, the day already following them, and all about them.
Swallows
The wind blew the stinging rain from the Gut, where earlier in the bright weather of the summer the Sergeant had sat in the tarred boat, anchored by a rope to an old Ford radiator that clung to the weeds outside the rushes, and watched taut line after taut line cut like cheesewire through the water as hooked roach after hooked roach made a last surge towards the freedom of the open lake before landing slapping on the floorboards. The wind blew the rain from the Gut against the black limestone of the Quarry, where on the wet tar, its pools ruffling in the wet wind, the Sergeant and the young State Surveyor measured the scene of the road accident, both with their collars up and hatted against the rain, the black plastic chinstrap a shining strip on the Sergeant’s jaw. ‘What age was he?’ the Surveyor asked, as he noted the last measurement in his official notebook and put the tapewheel in his pocket.