In moments like that you can feel memory gathering its material, beady-eyed and voracious, like a demented photographer. I don’t mean the big scenes, the sunsets and car crashes, I mean the creased black-and-white snaps taken in a bad light, with a lop-sided horizon and that smudged thumb-print in the foreground. Such are the pictures of Charlotte, in my mind. In the best of them she is not present at all, someone jogged my elbow, or the film was faulty. Or perhaps she was present and has withdrawn, with a pained smile. Only her glow remains. Here is an empty chair in rain-light, cut flowers on a workbench, an open window with lightning flickering distantly in the dark. Her absence throbs in these views more powerfully, more poignantly than any presence.
When I search for the words to describe her I can’t find them. Such words don’t exist. They would need to be no more than forms of intent, balanced on the brink of saying, another version of silence. Every mention I make of her is a failure. Even when I say just her name it sounds like an exaggeration. When I write it down it seems impossibly swollen, as if my pen had slipped eight or nine redundant letters into it. Her physical presence itself seemed overdone, a clumsy representation of the essential she. That essence was only to be glimpsed obliquely, on the outer edge of vision, an image always there and always fleeting, like the afterglow of a bright light on the retina.
If she was never entirely present for me in the flesh, how could I make her to be there for me in the lodge, at night, in the fields on my solitary rambles? I must concentrate on things impassioned by her passing. Anything would do, her sun hat, a pair of muddied wellingtons standing splay-footed at the back door. The very ordinariness of these mementoes was what made them precious. That, and the fact that they were wholly mine. Even she would not know their secret significance. Two little heart-shaped polished patches rubbed on the inner sides of those wellingtons by her slightly knock-kneed walk. The subtle web of light and shade that played over her face through the slack straw of the brim of her hat. Who would notice such things, that did not fix on her with the close-up lens of love?
Love. That word. I seem to hear quotation marks around it, as if it were the title of something, a stilted sonnet, say, by a silver poet. Is it possible to love someone of whom one has so little? For through the mist now and then I glimpsed, however fleetingly, the fact that what I had of her was hardly enough to bear a great weight of passion. Perhaps call it concentration, then, the concentration of the painter intent on drawing the living image out of the potential of mere paint. I would make her incarnate. By the force of my unwavering, meticulous attention she would rise on her scallop shell through the waves and be.
I did nothing, of course, said nothing, made no move. It was a passion of the mind. I had given up all pretence of work on the book. You see the connection.
I wondered if she were aware of being so passionately watched. Now and then I thought I caught her squirming, as if she had felt my slavering breath brush her flesh. She had a way of presenting me suddenly with unbidden bits of fact, like scraps thrown down to divert the attention of a dog that she feared might bite her. She would turn her head, consider for a moment my right shoulder, or one of my hands, with that strange blank gaze, and say: My father imported that tree from South America. And I would nod pensively, frowning. I learned the oddest things from her. Why a ha-ha is so called. That Finland was the first European country to give women the vote. Occasionally I could link these obscure pronouncements to something I had said or asked days ago, but mostly they were without discernible connection. Having spoken, she would go on gazing at me for a moment longer, as if waiting for some large sign of my acknowledgment that she was solid, that, see, she knew things, like real people do — or just that she was too dry for this dangerous dog to bother biting.
I recall one Saturday, when she was driving into town to deliver stuff from the nurseries, and I asked her for a lift. It was raining, the fields a speeding blur beyond the misted windows. We were past the village when she took her foot off the pedal and let the car bump slowly to a stop. “Puncture,” she said. But she did not get out. We looked in silence at a wild apple tree shimmering before us in the streaming windscreen. The wheels on my side had climbed the grass verge, and everything was slightly crooked. There was no puncture. A strange moment, I remember it, the rain,’ the sound of the rain, the worn sticky feel of the car seat. She took off her spectacles, and a strand of hair fell across her face. What was she thinking about? I did not like the way she wore her glasses on a cord, it made her look matronly. An old harridan within me suddenly muttered: She’s forty if she’s a day, and was immediately silenced. A minute went by. I rolled down my window and let in the smell of woodbine and wet earth. Charlotte rubbed the fogged windscreen with a fingertip. “Perhaps we should go back,” she said, and then, looking at my knees: “Edward is not well.” The sibyl had spoken. I nodded, a puzzled priest of the shrine. What was expected of me? Whatever it was I could not give it, and she turned with vague helplessness to the plants and punnets of fruit stacked on the back seat. Her eyes, what colour were her eyes? I can’t remember! She started up the car. We drove on.
Thus, always, it would teeter on the brink of being something.
At first I was afraid I’d give the game away, snatch up her hand and kiss it, or get drunk again and fall at her feet bawling, something like that. But of course I wouldn’t. I was like a young bride who has rushed home to tell hubby that the pregnancy is confirmed, only to go suddenly shy and strange at the sight of familiar things, his hat, that new sofa, the kitchen sink. In the midst of the old life I hugged this brand-new secret to my breast. It gave me a curious sense of dignity, of quiet wisdom. Is this what love is really for, to lend us a new conception of ourselves? My voice sounded softer to me, my every action seemed informed by a melancholy grandeur. My smile, faintly flecked with sadness, was a calm benediction upon the world.
I had feared too I might reveal myself before Ottilie, by showing a sudden coldness. But in fact, I was if anything fonder of her now. I even warmed toward Edward; I fairly doted (at a safe distance) on the child. They were nearer to Charlotte, in the commonplace world of breakfasts and bedtimes, than I could ever be. And they were the keepers of that most precious thing, her past, That they could not hope to achieve the proximity to her that I did, in my love, was something for which they could not be blamed, but only pitied. I spent hours, a smiling spider, weaving webs to trap them into talking about her, so that it would be always they who appeared to have brought up the subject. The hardest part was to keep them from straying on to other things. Then I was forced to take desperate action, and, elaborately casual, would jump in with: But what you were saying about Charlotte, it was interesting, did she really never have a boyfriend before Edward? And a red-hot coal of panic would briefly glow behind my breastbone when Ottilie paused, and glanced at me, struck I suppose by the incongruity of putting together such words as Charlotte and boyfriend.