“What about Kemp?”
“We went to see her.”
“We?”
“Yes. We.”
“Have you seen them? All of them?”
“Nicko, please don’t interrogate me. Please don’t.”
My name; a tiny shift. But she was still set hard and silent.
“Are they watching? Are they here somewhere?”
An impatient sigh.
“Are they?”
“No.” But at once she qualified it. “I don’t know.”
I said, “Look at me. Look at me.”
And she couldn’t do it. Face to face she could not lie to me. She looked away and said, “It was the one last thing. One last time. It’s nothing.”
There was a long pause.
I said, “You can’t lie to me. Face to face.”
She touched her hair; the hair, her wrist, a way she had of raising her face a little as she made the gesture. A glimpse of the lobe of an ear. I had a sense of outrage, as if I was being barred from my own property.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever felt that about. That they could never lie to me. So can you imagine what it was like in the summer? When I got that letter, those flowers…
She said, “If we start talking about the past.”
All my overtures were in some way irrelevant; she had something else on her mind. My fingers touched a smooth dry roundness in my coatpocket: a chestnut, a talisman. Jojo had passed it to me wrapped in a toffeepaper, her pawky joke, one evening in a cinema. I thought of Jojo, somewhere only a mile or two away through the brick and the traffic, sitting with some new pick-up, drifting into her womanhood; of holding her pudgy hand in the darkness. And suddenly I had to fight not to take Alison’s.
I said, “Allie?”
But coming to a decision, determined to be untouched, she threw the yellow leaf away. “I’ve returned to London to sell the flat.” She looked briefly at me; she wasn’t lying. “I’m going back to Australia.”
Terrible; we were like total strangers.
“Long journey for such a small matter.”
“And to see you.”
“Like this?”
“To see if I…” but she cut her sentence short, as if by some previous resolution. Or advice?
“If you?”
“I didn’t want to come. They made me.”
“Made you?” I sounded unbelieving.
“Made me feel I ought to come.”
“Just to see me.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re here against your will.”
“You could call it that.”
“And now you’ve seen me.”
But she would not answer the implicit question. She threw me one quick look, a sudden flash of fierceness. But then went back to her silence. She was mysterious, almost a new woman; one had to go back several steps, and start again; and know the place for the first time. As if what had once been free in her, as accessible as a pot of salt on a table, was now held in a phial, sacrosanct. But I knew Alison, I knew how she took on the color and character of the people she loved or liked, however independent she remained underneath. And I knew where that smooth impermeability came from. I was sitting with a priestess from the temple of Demeter.
I tried to be matter-of-fact. “Where have you been since Athens? At home?”
“Perhaps.”
I took a breath. “Have you thought about me at all?”
“Sometimes.”
They had told her: Be like white marble, be oblique. But why?
“Is there someone else?”
She hesitated, then said, “No.”
“You don’t sound very certain.”
“There’s always someone else—if you’re looking for it.”
“Have you been… looking for it?”
She said, “There’s no one.”
“And I’m included in that 'no one'?”
“You’ve been included in it ever since that… day.”
What Lily de Seitas had said: she is not a present being given to you; you must convince her you have the money to pay for her. I looked at Alison’s sullen profile, that perverse stare into the distance. She was aware of my look, and her eyes followed someone who was passing, as if she found him more interesting than me.
I said, “What is it?”
“What’s what?”
“What am I meant to do? Take you in my arms? Fall on my knees? What do they want?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh yes you damn well do.”
Her eyes flicked sideways at me, and she looked down. She said, “I saw through you that day. That’s all. For ever.”
There was a long pause.
I said quietly, “I made love to you that day. Also… in a sense… for ever.”
She shrugged, but a moment later she half turned her back and averted her face, her arm on the back of the seat. I spoke to the ground.
“There was a moment on that mountain when I loved you. I don’t think you know, I know you know, I know you saw it, I know you too well not to be sure you saw it. And remember it.” She said nothing. “You’re meant to answer.”
“Why should I remember it? Why shouldn’t I do everything I can to forget it?”
“You know the answer to that, too.”
“Do I?” So cold, so small, so quiet.
I said, “Alison…”
“Don’t come closer. Please don’t come closer.”
She would not look at me. But it was in her voice. I had a feeling of trembling too deep to show; as if the brain cells trembled. She spoke with her head turned away. “All right, I know what it means.” Her face still averted, she took out another cigarette and lit it. “Or it meant. When I loved you. It meant everything you said or did to me had meaning. Emotional meaning. It moved me, excited me. It depressed me, it made me…” she took a deep breath. “Like the way after all that’s happened you can sit there in that tea place and look at me as if I’m a prostitute or something and—”
I touched her then, my hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off. I had to move closer, to hear what she said.
“Whenever I’m with you it’s like going to someone and saying, torture me, abuse me. Give me hell. Because—”
“Alison.”
“Oh you’re nice now. You’re nice now. So bloody nice. For a week, for a month. And then we’d start again.”
She was not crying, I leant forward and looked. In some way I knew she was acting, and yet not acting. Perhaps she had rehearsed the saying this; but still meant it. And I thought, supposing they wanted to precipitate what I began to suspect both they and Alison wanted to precipitate: to bringing about in an hour what might take weeks… and I remembered that love of paradox, and how well they knew me. To fuse, to weld. And a last lesson, a last warning? A small wave of anger burnt up in me; but one I knew I could use.
I said, “As you’re going back to Australia, I don’t see the point of all this.”
I spoke lightly, without sarcasm, but she twisted a look back at me then; almost a look of hate, as it my crassness was monstrous. I made the mistake of beginning to smile; to call her hand. Suddenly she was on her feet and crossing the path. She walked out under the trees onto the grassy open space, and stood with her back to me.
Something about the way she stood, the direction she faced; it nagged me.
And then in a flash I knew for certain.
Beyond her stretched the grass, a quarter of a mile of turf to the edge of the park. Beyond that rose the Regency facade, bestatued, many and elegantly windowed, of Cumberland Terrace.
A wall of windows.
A row of statues. Gods. Classical gods.
Not the Outer Circle. The dress circle.
Polymus.
But once too often.
I looked at the Indian. He too was staring at Alison; then at me. Even if he had overheard he wouldn’t have understood what we were saying; and yet he knew what had happened. I could see it in his mild brown eyes. Dark men, pale men; but only one sort of woman. A ghost of sympathy passed between us.
I went up behind her; roughly took her arm. She made no move. The air was as mellow as at a harvest festival, the innocent park bred innocent people.