‘Hardly as a result of a deprived childhood,’ I said in the soft darkness, the place smelling of old candle wax and long-warmed pine from the rafters above us. ‘This and the tree house on the lawn.’ The very front part of her face — eyes, nose and mouth — were just visible in the faint light: a huge ghost in the middle of the small, perfectly proportioned window frame. I looked up at the street again. ‘And that’s not exactly the expected road to Moscow. I find all that difficult to follow.’
‘That was later. You’d have found it easy enough to follow then.’
‘You remember wanting to look in; not to be inside?’
‘Yes. That’s what I felt — outside my parents, outside all their concerns, the real life that mattered.’
‘Should get a little couch up here and a miniature trick cyclist and open a clinic.’
‘Trick cyclist?’
‘Psychiatrist.’
We had both learnt to laugh together now in this magic settlement under the eaves, drawn by its conceits, as children after the Pied Piper, into the inventions of a happy childishness. But how could it last? We were so obviously not fitted for that world, tall people in dolls’ houses — simply eavesdropping on that music. So I said, as the water suddenly started to rumble in the cisterns for the children’s bath downstairs, ‘It worries me. All three of us here held together in a cat’s cradle. All knowing — but not all knowing together: each of us having a better reason than the other for keeping quiet: you won’t tell the KGB about me, because you’ve got something else more important to do. Guy won’t tell because he somehow thrives on the exciting secrecy of it all. And I won’t tell my people —’
‘Why?’ She sat down on the floor of the front room, leaning on the window sill. ‘It’s not really because you trust me.’
‘The British have fucked me about for far too long. That’s the main reason why. And I feel safer with your secrets than with theirs. But what I want to know is how long do all these pieces of string stay up? How long before someone outside this triangle steps in and cuts it to pieces? Because, we’re not living all this out in a vacuum; there are others — and they don’t share our manners. And Guy — how long to go there? He’s living on hot bricks. He won’t tell them in London about you and Graham — all that he knows about you — the politics as well. Yet of course he should. They’ll put him away for ten years if they ever find out he knew about that. And then he has this running sore with you, this obsessive thing. And that’s explosive. All the more so, since I’m here now, filling Graham’s role.’
‘But you haven’t.’
‘Exactly. And that’s the danger. He’s pushing it all the time. It’s the potential that attracts in these circumstances; not the reality. That kills the obsession.’
‘You mean we should climb into bed together in front of him. And then live in peace?’
‘No. I meant that Guy is the loose end between us. Whatever we have to complete he may —’
‘Screw it up?’
I thought for a second that it was Helen who had spoken. And I looked across to her. But she was looking the other way. And then I saw Guy.
He was standing in the shadows at the end of the street, at the far end of the attic just above the stairway, towering over the first of the gas lamps, a tall leggy figure changed now incongruously into his pin-stripe suit for dinner, a distinguished monster making an entry in some horror movie.
And now Helen turned on him in a vicious way, a ruthless manner I’d not seen in her before, poking her head out of the window and hitting him with words, bitter accents, a loathing that seemed far too strong for the little houses, a fury that would split them open like an earthquake. All the years of her marriage seemed to explode inside her now — the first words a gaudy rocket signalling the start of a violent carnival.
‘Bastard. Motherfucker. Aren’t you? Say so, for God’s sake. No life of my own — without you. Anywhere. Always creeping up behind me — looking, listening, peeping. Trying to run my life for me — what I should do, and think, and who I should meet. All the time, forever. And all over Africa too. Even there, I hear. In a million miles of space you still have to live off me like a vegetable. Everywhere. And now in the attic. It’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? — all along. Getting us up here somewhere quiet so you could spy on us. All right then: I can do it here with him now, right now here in front of you — that’s what you want. And maybe then you’ll leave me in peace and go away.’
She had lost control, taking command instead of a terrible flirtatious anger, imperious and wanton — her face sparkling, a bright offering, looking at me with an absolutely determined desire. She stood up in the little room, began to unbutton her blouse and take off her skirt.
‘For God’s sake, Helen, stop it,’ I shouted across the road above the noise of the cistern. Guy had come forward now. ‘You’re mad,’ he. said. ‘I simply came up to join you both.’ He knelt down on the sidewalk so that he could look in the window and try to calm her. She bent down to meet him with her blouse half open and hit him on the face — two, three times. He took it and then hit her back just as hard. I tried to get out of my house to separate them but it wasn’t easy with the small door opening inwards, my pocket catching on it, and by the time I was out on the street they were at it hammer and tongs. Or rather poker. She had picked up the small metal poker that went with the drawing-room grate and was trying to get at him with it through the window, the two of them playing Punch and Judy. But Guy had leant back now and the bludgeon flayed wildly in the air in front of his nose.
Then she stopped. It was the moment for collapse or tears. But neither came from her. Instead she put the poker down and looked at the two of us bitterly: Anna Magnani at the end of a barney with her lover — blouse awry, hair tossed about, red weals rising on her cheeks. But they were not acting. This was terribly real — and quite ludicrous in the miniature setting. But they neither of them seemed in the least aware of this last point — the two of them shaking, still locked in the horrific surprise of their acts, contemplating their violence now, unfulfilled by it, wondering how to extend it in word or deed so that each, if it were possible, could part satisfied having killed the other.
‘You’ve owned me for too long, Guy,’ she said, making his name an insult not an appelation. ‘I’ll do what I want, wherever, with whoever’
He laughed without humour. ‘You’ve always done that, Helen. Think of something new. This is certainly a waste of time — I told you, I just came up the stairs. I’d no idea —’
She aimed to hit him again.
‘Look, not this — stop it,’ I said. But they weren’t listening. I had come to that country in a marriage where an outsider, no matter how understanding or sympathetic, has no visa and where he can really only do the inhabitants a disservice with advice, where his papers of entry can only be forged. The bitter conflicts, the blame or lack of praise, together with the many decencies and times of real happiness in a long association — all this is usually an impossible count for the participants to add up and come to any mutual understanding over. For an outsider it is a vast impenetrable algebraic display only a fraction of which he can begin to equate. The rest, though he may think otherwise, is mere guesswork.
Yet how much I had wanted to know it all — all Helen’s various and previous lives that Guy had just spoken of: that passionate curiosity of hers that had dispossessed him, given him the sickness of a leper, an outcast — forever looking in through windows. And yes, she had once done just the same thing — felt bitterly excluded from her family. But because of this she had come to look out on all the world while he, his obsessions far gone and lost to optimism, had come only to look in on her. They could never meet again now in any fair balance, I thought, he trying so hard to find her and she fleeing from him — lost to each other in a dreadful game of mental hide and seek.