‘Oh no, I’m sorry. I was just so – excited, I guess.’
‘That’s good. I want you to feel excited.’
‘Oh… Thank you for saying that.’
‘What would you like to do?’ I asked.
‘I’d like to cook you a meal. That’s what I’d like to do.’
‘I was hoping you might say that.’
‘I’m famous for my cauliflower quiche.’
‘My mouth’s watering already.’
‘Oh, you!’ she said, laughing. She scribbled the directions to her house on a scrap of paper, and we parted with a fond, liquid look into each other’s eyes.
Since she lived near the next train station up along the line, it wasn’t worth my while going back into Manhattan before dinner. I had two hours to kill. I went to my office, picking up a yellow interdepartmental envelope from my mailbox on the way. Inside was the piece Amber had asked me to look at. Reluctantly, I laid it on my desk and began to read, but I found myself completely unable to concentrate on it. I was thinking of its author – the way she seemed to suspend herself so vividly in the inner proscenium of my consciousness whenever I was in her presence, and the apprehension this always aroused.
At once I caught a trace of something from the distant past: a faint resonance, like the last, almost inaudible reverberation of a gong.
It sometimes seems to me that the mind – my own at least – far from being the infinitely capacious organ one likes to think it is, is in fact rather rudimentary, possessing only a very limited number of categories for the things it experiences, and lumping all kinds of diverse phenomena together on the basis of the most accidental resemblance. That would account for the way you realise from time to time that you have never made a real distinction between, say, the dog-owning neighbor in the town you were born in, and the cat-owning neighbor in the town you moved to later on. Both have simply been categorised as ‘pet-owning neighbors.’ It’s always a bit of a shock when you realise that the people or things you’ve fused together have nothing to do with each other at all.
In the case of Amber, what I realised was that I had combined her image with that of a figure from my adolescence: Emily Lloyd, my stepfather’s daughter.
It wasn’t that they looked like each other. Emily had thick chestnut ringlets; she was petite, with a watchful, smoothly angular face, while Amber was long-limbed, willowy, even a little gawky; a bit like a giraffe foal in fact, with her freckles and red-gold hair.
But the feeling each aroused in me was the same: a desire so sharp (I had had to acknowledge that Amber’s effect on me amounted to this) it seemed more to do with recovering something vital and precious that had been taken from me, than with gaining possession of something new. That, and a feeling of confronting something capable of destroying me.
Not wishing to think about either of them, I scanned the bookshelves for something to distract me.
A small collected Shakespeare caught my eye. I took it down and opened the front cover. In faded green ink, the handwriting as neat as a row of pines on a mountain ridge, was the following inscription:
To our beloved Barbara,
A gift to remind you how much we treasure you as you go off to college and embark on your life’s great dream.
Your ever-loving Mom and Dad
8 September 1985
The late Barbara Hellermann, I presumed: Trumilcik’s successor in this room, and my own immediate predecessor; brewer of coffee for her students, recipient of thankyou notes, collector of uplifting quotations… And quite a bit younger, judging from the date she went off to college, than I had imagined. Not more than her mid-thirties, it would seem, when she died: a painful thought, especially in the context of the parents’ loving inscription. With a small internal rustle – a little inner scene-shifting – the kind-old-lady image I had formed of her was replaced by that of a young woman in the tragic flush of some rare illness. Poignant, though since I had no personal connection, only superficially distressing.
Leafing through the silky pages of the volume, I came to Measure for Measure. I hadn’t looked at the play since my teens, but the lines were as familiar to me as if I had written them myself. There was the sexual miscreant Claudio, that ‘warpèd slip of wilderness’, on death row for his sins. There was his judge, Angelo, ‘this ungenitured agent’, as the dissolute scoffer Lucio calls him, battling (with underappreciated sincerity, I felt) his own ungovernable urges. And there was Claudio’s sister, chaste Isabella, about to enter the cloisters when she encounters Angelo, triggering his explosive lust. I took her part once in our all-boys O-level class, and I recalled now the queazy excitement it had given me to announce that I would rather die than accept Angelo’s offer to spare my brother’s life if I would sleep with him. Were I under terms of death, I remembered declaiming passionately, th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies…
I took the volume over to my desk, meaning to reread the play. I hadn’t got far, though, when Emily Lloyd started drifting back into my thoughts. It occurred to me that I must have come into contact with her right around the time we were studying this play. I was fifteen, home from school, where my stepfather was now paying the fees. I remember him tousling my hair as I arrived at the little station near the weekend cottage he’d bought my mother in Kent. I put down my bags and we shared a look of helplessness. We were less than nothing to each other – a void; the shape of an absence. In his case his own children; in mine, my father, who’d died of a brain tumor when I was five.
The house was tiny; all that Robert – my stepfather – had been able to afford now that his ex-wife had his finances tied up. It was a former ploughman’s cottage, with minute windows. My mother filled the little rooms with rustic bric-à-brac, but it remained obstinately gloomy, and every time the three of us spent any time there together, the effort of not getting on each other’s nerves would distill itself into a fine, potent melancholy that tended to engulf us in silence after a few hours.
‘You look a bit peaky, dear,’ my mother said to me that evening.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re not bored are you?’
‘No.’
‘I think it’s a dreadful shame you didn’t want to bring one of your friends to stay.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘There’s lots to do. Bike rides, sailing on the reservoir… I should have thought they’d jump at the opportunity to come and stay.’
‘I’m supposed to be revising.’
I couldn’t tell her it was out of the question that I should ever bring a friend here. There was an absolute veto on the subject in my mind. The form it took was a sense that everything that occurred in our household was blighted with a deep wrongness of spirit. I didn’t know where this sense had originated, but I knew it was so. Under our roof, the simplest observation on the weather was liable to sound insincere, or manipulative; the social functions my mother liked to arrange had a fraught, overelaborate quality that made everyone long for them to be over. With the resignation one learns at the kind of schools I went to, I accepted all this as my lot in life, but I had no wish to share it with anyone else.
Even so, my mother was right: I was bored, and I was lonely.
‘It’s a pity the Bestridges don’t seem to want to know us,’ she pressed on. ‘They have a boy Lawrence’s age don’t they, Robert?’
‘Do they?’
My stepfather was ensconced behind his newspaper with a glass of white port, his long legs in their well-cut pinstripes sprawling with an incongruous languor toward the diminutive fireplace.
‘Why don’t you invite them over for cocktails?’