‘Mrs Grace, this is my husband, Guy,’ Helen said when I got back and had put my bags down in the hall. We shook hands. She was a large, middle-aged, yet clearly very alert woman who moved quickly on her feet; a good face, strong and full of character, intent eyes, well-kept fluffy dark hair, a fine aquiline nose. There was something obscurely passionate and unfulfilled about her, a mood of poetry almost, which she wished to communicate, and had failed only for lack of an understanding audience. She had obvious finesse and intelligence, and long unmarked fingers, one with a gold cameo ring on it. She was like no daily help I’d ever seen.
‘I’m very pleased to meet you Mr Jackson,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting Helen’s husband very much.’ She turned to Helen with a friendly, tender look. ‘We have got on so well together.’
Helen came with me. There was a landing to the side of the building with a run of small windows looking out on the fir plantation up the hill to our right, and our bedroom doors in a line to our left. She paused for a moment, between the first two doors — undecided for an instant. Then she opened the nearest one to the staircase and we went in. It was a spare room, very neat with a dark blue fitted carpet and two single beds with patterned blue and white coverlets, curtains to match, a steeply slanting ceiling and a dormer window looking down on the valley. I could just see the top floor and the tall chimney of the Government Communications building, the red-brick glowing in the evening sun.
‘I suppose you’d better use — here?’ She turned, perplexed, uncertain as I was of my role and placing in the house. ‘Mrs Grace goes home. But there are the children.’
‘Of course.’
I put my luggage down. Where could I begin, I wondered? How did one start — what were the right words? I started to fiddle with the locks on the cases and she went over to a dresser beneath the window and started to arrange the lavender stalks in a roughly glazed Italian jug. She seemed completely her old competent self now, the sophisticated Manhattan socialite, adept in all the social virtues, every nuance of formal greeting: a friend had come to stay for a few days, and all the hospitality would be gracious and perfectly ordered.
‘I —’
‘I —’
We both spoke at once. She turned from the window and came towards me — and then, very formally with a hint of annoyance, she said, ‘Where is Guy? What stupid game are you both up to now?’
‘I — we,’ I stammered. I was intimidated by the sudden school mistress in her. ‘Look, could we talk about this later, when the children are in bed. It’s very serious. There’s no game.’
‘All right, but roughly what? Where is he? What are you doing in his clothes? What are you doing’ — her voice rose suddenly with incredulous anger — ‘in his suit, his shirt, his shoes. And his wedding ring.’ She grabbed the lapels on the coat and pulled them, shaking me. ‘What in God’s name are you up to?’
I felt she’d be hitting me in a second. ‘Now? You’re sure you want it now?’ She nodded. I took the ring off and gave it to her.
‘Guy is dead.’ And then I rushed on before she had time to say anything. ‘He was pushed out of the window of my office in the UN yesterday evening in New York. By your organisation, the KGB. In my bloody clothes. And that’s why I’m wearing his. It’s up thirty-two floors, you know, my room — and I’m supposed to have killed myself: a pulpy mess on top of the cafeteria roof. But that was Guy, I’m afraid, though they wouldn’t have recognised either of us after that tumble. They want me for his job — to get some information for them, in that building. Down there.’
And now I was angry too — at the inescapable hurt that I was causing her, though she didn’t show it.
‘They put me into his clothes, dragged him to the window, made me watch everything, then took me back to your apartment, briefed me, and I took over everything of Guy from there.’ I paused. She said nothing. She held his ring, turning it over slowly in her hand, her face perfectly composed, expressionless, her eyes on mine but unfocused, looking through me.
I was shaking now again — and suddenly completely exhausted, a shivering overwhelming nauseous fatigue. I lit a cigarette.
‘You need a drink,’ she said. ‘You must. I’ll go get something.’
When she got back with a bottle of whisky from somewhere, and two toothbrush glasses from the bathroom, she said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I was sitting on the bed, my head in my hands, barely able to move. I tried to smile.
‘You’re sorry? It’s the other way round, Helen.’
‘No. I couldn’t have seen him killed, couldn’t have stood that. Not the actual sight of it, that would have killed me. You had to see all that.’
‘Yes. He looked at me …’ But I didn’t go on.
‘Exactly,’ she said. I could hear the sound of the children downstairs, shouting over their tea. ‘There would have been such pain in that look for me, as if I’d killed the marriage and he was being sacrificed into the bargain — as if I were physically killing him as well. You know the feelings sometimes in a bad marriage, actually wishing the other person were dead. Well, it would have been that, going through that in reality, seeing it happen. And you know, it might have been me who had to watch that, they might have wanted to use me in the same way. Instead, you were the one.’
She sat down on the bed opposite, and drank with me, and she was warmer now, and still extraordinarily composed.
‘Times when you wanted him dead. Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Yes, there were. But not real death. I wanted some act, some action in our relationship, some decision for good or bad: a development of the marriage or an ending to it — not just tagging along together, unfriendly, as strangers, for the sake of the children. And that’s happened now. Something’s happened.’
‘The most appalling sort of action though, isn’t it?’
Now she smiled, fingering the ring. And I couldn’t restrain the comment then, seeing this smile and remembering Guy’s very different expression as he went to the window, the always disdainful, isolated face so suddenly flooded at the last with all the essential warmth of life. I said, ‘You’re being a little cold-hearted about it all, aren’t you?’
‘Peter, I’m not thinking about it. Yet. It’s just an event somewhere, a war, a casualty, a story you’ve told me. It’s quite unreal. Quite.’
‘And you smile about it? He didn’t need to die, you know. You could have got a divorce. I always told you.’
She didn’t reply. ‘I was thinking about irony,’ she said at last slowly, considering the words carefully as they appeared, confirming that each bore the exact weight of her thought. ‘Someone once told me I didn’t have that quality — that I was too much involved in hope, in the here and now. Well, I’m not any more, am I? “Ironic reflection” he said — that that was needed just as much as the singing and dancing.’
‘So what?’ I didn’t understand.
‘I have to smile — looking at you in Guy’s clothes, and seeing, thinking, how you’ve come from being my lover to being my husband, without ever having been either: yet still the image of the two people I shared most with — but without our knowing anything about each other, or even having really touched in any way. You see? What kind of reality is it that makes such things happen? I don’t know. It’s not real. Yet.’
She put her hand across the space between the beds and touched mine, just running her index finger lightly along my knuckles.
‘Later,’ she said. ‘Of course. Everything later. The house may be wired. Let’s see how Mrs Grace does her apple jelly.’