‘Of course, sorry,’ said Ralph.
He went into the kitchen and leaned against the fridge with his eyes closed. Already he was beginning to feel dangerously detached and he pressed hard on his face with his hands to remind him of the imminence of his predicament. It amazed him that Francine could continue to defeat him when he could see her so clearly, every mechanism on display like the guts of a clock. Worse still, he could also see that he was conspiring with her against himself, promulgating the consciousness of her advantage. She knew that there was no chance of him deserting her, and her knowledge — provided by him! — made her unassailable. There was nothing he could do but wait, in the faint hope that her muddled formulas would end in a passable result for both of them. His helplessness dragged at him, amplifying his first faint identification that morning with the mysterious entity of which Francine had such complete and bewildering charge into a stronger allegiance. It was a mistake, he knew, to start getting ideas about this captured pawn, this knot by which he had been tied, but the power of relation, of bound blood, both frightened and drew him. He felt its absolutes mired in the sinking ground of his dispossession. It hadn’t flowered yet into any definable emotion but its sturdy roots and trunk were exerting their pressure inside him. Feeling it there, growing tight in his chest all day, he had had to fight off hourly the temptation of thinking that he was no longer alone.
He carried the scalding tea back into the sitting-room, and, as he lowered it on to the table in front of Francine, was ambushed by a violent image of throwing it at her. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he next looked up Francine was lapping at the cup contentedly.
‘So,’ he said again. His persistence reminded him of times when he had dialled a continuously engaged number with little hope of getting through. ‘What are we going to do?’
She looked him through a pale shimmer of steam.
‘What do you want to do?’ she said.
He sensed from her calmness that she had already thought of this exchange and that she didn’t really care what he said during it. It occurred to him that she was enjoying the extended interlude of their uncertainty, was perhaps even protracting its entangled hours.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy. Obviously, we have two choices.’ He felt rather foolish putting it so formally, but his longing for something concrete to displace the stifling vagueness of Francine’s evasions urged him on. Her look of sweetness had begun to cool into a less yielding expression, and he realized, his understandings coming at him now as fast as flying fists, that she actually saw something romantic in it all which his mention of choices was about to destroy. ‘Come on, Francine,’ he said, more gently. ‘I know it’s hard, but we’ve got to face it. It happens all the time—’ He heard the suggestion in his voice and reared away from it, frightened for a moment, before plunging over. ‘People do it every day, I promise. There’s nothing wrong with it — I know loads of women who’ve done it. It’s easy. It was an accident, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.’
She had turned away from him slightly while he spoke, and her face had found a certain angle from which she was utterly unfamiliar to him. Through this point, this tiny gap of dissociation, rays of alienation and loneliness fanned coldly over him. He wanted desperately to be away from her, for their whole rambling disaster to compress itself into a noxious pellet which he could spit from his mouth. It was only when she turned her head again and met his eyes that he saw the mesh which webbed his limbs and felt the sting of hooks in his tender flesh.
‘What do you mean?’ she said. Her eyes were full, though whether of ammunition or feeling he could not tell.
‘I only mean that it’s not such a big thing.’ It was an effort to remind himself of how charged she was, how filled with the capacity to hurt him. ‘It was a mistake. You shouldn’t get too — upset, you know, about getting rid of it.’
To his relief, she didn’t say anything. As he watched her, he suddenly felt such a surge of pity that he rose from his chair and went to put his arm around her. The action returned to him his sense of normality, of propriety, and with it came a feeling of acceptance — almost warmth — for the grain of intimacy at the heart of their situation and the common history which wrapped it. He was suddenly convinced of the fact that these things happened all the time, just as he had said, and that their unpleasantness was as controllable as that of an injection or a dental appointment.
‘There, there,’ he said awkwardly, patting her shoulder. ‘There, there, darling.’
‘I’m keeping it,’ she said.
‘What?’
Her form felt so lifeless beneath his arm that her voice seemed separate from it, as if there were someone else in the room who spoke.
‘It’s mine. I’m keeping it.’
‘But you can’t!’
She stood up, shrugging his arm from her shoulders.
‘I can do what I want.’
*
Later, he didn’t know what time it was, Ralph lay on the sofa. He was alone, but Francine was still in the flat somewhere — in bed, that was right — and he was drinking far too much considering he had to go to work the next day. He wanted to talk to Stephen but there had been no answer when he’d dialled his number and the machine wasn’t on either. Stephen was never there when he wanted him. What was strange was that earlier he had suddenly remembered the telephone number of his parents’ old house and had thought he might ring them. When he’d tried, though, all he’d got was a horrible noise. He didn’t want to talk to his mother anyway — he hated his mother, actually, he’d decided — but his father would have been all right. He’d talked about things like this with his father before. It had been a long time ago, but he felt sure his father wouldn’t have forgotten their conversation, and he’d been drunk himself then, after all, so he’d be a hypocrite if he criticized Ralph for it. He’d have understood, too, about Ralph not liking Francine much, because he’d told Ralph that time that his mother hadn’t liked him much either, but she’d married him just the same. Ralph had been his ticket home, he said. His lucky charm. She was the love of his life, he said, and after she’d gone he’d promised himself to look after Ralph, because Ralph was what had brought them together, after all. He had put his big hand on the back of Ralph’s neck. Ralph could feel it there now, warm and surprisingly steady.
Thirteen
The wall behind Francine’s desk was almost entirely commandeered by disciplined rows of large files, all of them presented in military grey, distinguishable only by a typed label centrally placed on the wide spine. She rarely looked at these files, for they were undisturbed historical annals of past deals, of correspondence long since read and answered, and had been superseded by the more active system on the other side of the office. Now and then, however, her aimless eye drifted over them, and she would search their dry demarcations anew for some drop of interest to relieve the boredom of her desktop. Once, she had chosen one at random — Investments (1984) — and had leafed nonchalantly through it, but her expectation that she would find nothing in its pages to amuse her had been unpleasantly confounded by the strange sensation she had experienced when contemplating the familiar, monochrome vistas of type. The letters and reports were identical in style and substance to those she daily produced, and seeing them thus interred she had received an unsettling impression of her own disposability, and with it a desire to leave in commemoration behind her artefacts which were distinguishable in some way from the remains of those who had gone before.