The mention of Belinda — what a ridiculous name! — and university drove Francine back into silence. She disliked the inference made by this twin assault that she was not the star of his experiences. Normally on such occasions, the present moment was firmly declared the climax of all that had gone before, but Ralph appeared to have said his piece and it seemed unlikely that any comforting codas would be added. This talk of ‘real’ girlfriends was unsettling. Belinda’s isolation, the very thing Francine would have imagined left her a clear field, made her seem all at once mountainous.
‘I suppose you’ve had a lot of men,’ said Ralph.
‘Oh, not really,’ Francine hurriedly replied. She found his comment peculiarly insinuating, and attempted to defuse it with protestations of innocence. ‘All the men I meet are so — so shallow. I mean, they only really want one thing, and once they’ve got it — well—’ She looked down at her hands. ‘It’s harder for girls, you know.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Ralph, who appeared not to be listening.
*
Outside it had grown colder and a whip of wind stung Francine’s legs as they turned into the High Street. She wished that Ralph would put his arm around her as a signal of protection against the night and the lonely waste-cluttered pavement, beside which demon-eyed cars roared too close, illuminating phantoms of litter leaping in the wind. People waited at a forest of bus stops, their faces ghoulish and grey. Someone was shouting on the other side of the street, a man walking slowly alone, his bearded face turned to the brown sky.
‘I’ll walk you to the Tube station,’ said Ralph. ‘It’s on my way,’ he added, although she had not objected to his inconveniencing.
He had drunk most of the wine in the end, and Francine had waited while his eyes grew liquid and bright and his face dismissed its guard for some unruly outbreak of interest, but now he seemed withdrawn and composed. His unrelenting manner as he marched her to the station fuelled her dread of the imminent solitude of the Tube, the precarious walk home, the emptiness of return as she unlocked the door. She wished fiercely that things were going differently, but the sound of her desires had never been more faint. They were apparently to have no effect on what was actually going to happen. The situation was, she had to admit, out of her control. She wondered, walking silently beside him, how he had escaped her. What was wrong with him? If only he would do something, make some acknowledgement of those qualities others had always found exceptional, it would have been easier for her defiantly to take her leave of him intact. His indifference was compelling, bound her in inaction, and she feared most of all the thoughts that would visit her once she was released from it.
Just then a smartly dressed man passed them on the pavement. He pinioned her with a searching look and then moved his glance to Ralph, smiling his approval quite openly before he walked on, leaving an ether of expense and the sound of tapping footsteps behind him. As if automatically, Ralph’s arm moved up and placed itself across Francine’s shoulders. The warm flood of her satisfaction filled recesses parched with anxiety. They drew level with the Tube station and stopped.
‘Would you like to come back?’ said Ralph, as if the idea had only just occurred to him.
‘If you like.’
Francine looked at his face and saw nothing there. His features were absolutely still, and in the draining, neon-lit darkness he looked unnervingly like a photograph. To her surprise he suddenly leaned forward and hugged her, his body stiff and awkward against hers. His mouth was pressed against her ear.
‘What do you want from me?’ he whispered.
She pretended she hadn’t heard, and soon they were walking in silence towards the Lock.
Ten
These days, when wandering through his memories, Ralph would occasionally stop at the door behind which his dead love lay and would decide to go in and visit her. Lying in her vault she seemed beautiful to him, luminous and intact, the pall of sickness faded, the lines of agony smoothed, the scars of his autopsy invisible, all erased by the artful undertaking of time; and while her ghost still sometimes haunted him, a mischievous poltergeist caught in the echo of his own essential unchangingness, or hers, he felt in her recollection a sense of peace, a certain sculptured completeness which was altogether new.
Yes, he certainly felt differently about Belinda now — not that Francine had changed him, of course, merely moved him further away from the person he had been by provoking actions which did not seem to belong to him — for in learning again to speak the conjugal tongue, he had discovered new expressions of bitterness, a whole vocabulary of dissatisfaction, which in hindsight made him understand things about Belinda whose meaning had at the time escaped him. What he had heard as harmony, he now saw, had in the end sounded to her ears as an intolerable dissonance. In acting her part — if only he had been able to do it sooner, how much he might have saved himself! — he had brought his own sympathies to the role, and there was something compelling in the act of forgiveness, the gentle, invigorating climb towards empathy, which made him want to savour it and draw it out. He was treading a narrow path, though, and when he strayed from it, tempted towards the rocky reaches of the irresolvable, he would come back shaken by the knowledge of how many parts of himself were still dangerous. It was then that he most wanted to know in what state he had been preserved by she whom he considered so respectfully; and then passed quickly on from the thought, frightened by what it might tell him, as if past a rainy day funeral to which no one goes, a grave on which fresh flowers have never been lovingly placed.
Despite his busy hours spent marshalling the riotous crowd of things that had gone for ever into a more disciplined formation, these weeks with Francine — how many weeks? Perhaps only four? — had been accompanied by an encroaching consciousness of his own isolation. From it he looked back to the time before they met as if towards a distant mainland, discovering longings within himself, not for the extinguished joys it harboured, for he could still admit that they were few, but for its familiarity, the memory he had of being recognized there. He supposed he had felt a similar dissociation from himself when he had first met Belinda, but it had been a holiday feeling, an ecstatic celebration of escape. He had used to tell her about the place from which he had come, inflating its horrors, not realizing that she would eventually return him to it. He would enjoy presenting her with the shameful fragments of his past in the knowledge that she would fit them together to make something different.
Once, when he was very young and his parents still lived together in their house — a memory more disappointing than precious, a good beginning made ridiculous by what came later — he had been sitting on the edge of his parents’ bed while his mother ‘lay in’. She often did that at the weekend, her pillows banked behind her, the frill of her nightdress making a doll of her recumbent form, and he had used to think that she suffered from a brief but regular illness which afflicted her only on those particular days, days when he wanted to play and the house to be full of life. Later, when she really did fall ill, the resemblance of her confinement to those mornings made it seem natural to him, a state to which she had always been going to revert. On this particular morning, he had found something on her bedside table, a mysterious plastic contraption like a large straw, with a funnel at one end and a smaller inner cylinder which slid in and out of the larger one.
‘What’s this for?’ he had said, holding it up and trying to make a toy of it by sliding the cylinder in and out.