Not to mention that safe, confessional, veterinary space in which all this occurred, under the chaperoneship of Otis. Now I’m confessing to you.
I even vicariously reversed the roles. That is, I pictured your poor dad — as a vet. Not such an unlikely job for a former biologist, nor such a bad one, and hardly a comedown, vets can make a decent living. Out of loyalty to your father (if I can say that), I didn’t disabuse Alan Fraser of his evident respect for the editor of The Living World. I didn’t say, it may be called The Living World, but it’s run from a roof in Bloomsbury. But then I’d already given him, a complete stranger, the full low-down on my husband’s spermatozoa.
Out of loyalty — and honesty too — to your father, I told Mike about these veterinary conversations, even about their non-veterinary element. I even told him he should make the acquaintance of Alan Fraser, and he did. They liked each other. And if the subject of families, of having them or not having them, came up between them, then, apparently, it didn’t cause ructions. Your dad didn’t feel obliged to hit Alan Fraser on the chin. Two scientists, two grown-up men.
Your dad would even say he was sorry, a few months later, when Fraser rather suddenly moved to a new practice, less than a year after he’d arrived.
I’m getting to the hard part. Now I’ve got there, there’s no point in wrapping it up. Here we go. Alan Fraser and I went away together one weekend. That’s even overstating it. It was a single night, a Friday night, you couldn’t call it a weekend.
That trip to Venice wasn’t the only business trip, or ostensible business trip, of mine in the first half of that year. I’d been to Paris, on my own, in January, and there’d been a second trip to Paris in May. Except it wasn’t. May is a very nice time in Paris and this might have been another shameless opportunity for engineering a break for two, sponsored by W. and F. Especially as I was to be in Paris, apparently, on a Friday.
But this wasn’t so very long after Otis’s return and, though he was much on the mend, he was still in need of monitoring, still technically — under the vet. We could hardly cart him off to his cattery quite yet. And it was a time when we had things on our minds, our resurrected debate, that might only cloud the delights of a weekend in Paris. Your dad even said, “Another time. But stay over on the Saturday too, if you like.” He saw me, perhaps, wandering broodily round Paris, clarifying my maternal position.
No, I said, I’d come straight back on the Saturday morning. I didn’t want him to expect me to ring. Or vice versa. I wanted my own clean exit. But I gave your dad — it was a risk — the name and number of the hotel where I’d stayed before in January. He didn’t ask to see my plane tickets. Why should he have done? I’d have said, anyway, they were for collection.
I wasn’t in Paris at all. It wasn’t a business trip. Alan (shall I call him just Alan?) wasn’t offering Paris. I wasn’t exactly in a position to specify, but, to be fair, nor did he want to be cheap or to make me feel that I was. Definitely not his flat in Stockwell.
For me it all involved considerable subterfuge and deception. That’s not an excuse, but it makes me realise how much I needed to do it. He was unattached, a divorced man: a pretty poor witness, you might say, for having a family, the very opposite of what, at this point, should have enticed me. Though enticement, I’m trying to explain, wasn’t my only or chief motive.
He was on the lookout, of course, let’s not pretend about that. He was experimenting too, and might even have used that convenient word himself. Where would a divorced vet first start to look? I don’t know how many experiments he might already have conducted. But what I do know is that he was my only experiment, my only ever trial run.
And he didn’t take me to Paris, though he was eager to impress. I took a morning train to Gatwick, as if to persuade myself I still might really be flying to Paris. He picked me up there in his car and we drove around for a bit, round Sussex, killing time, and had lunch in a pub.
Then he took me to the Gifford Park Hotel, five stars even in those days. Do you see my dilemma?
23
ODDLY, I SEE MYSELF now sleeping, alone, in the Hôtel Gustave, rue de Grenelle, Paris, where I truly did sleep and truly by myself, at the beginning of that eventful year, 1978. Not knowing then, of course, how eventful it would be and certainly not knowing that in a few months’ time I would have pretended to have slept again in that same Paris hotel, while in fact I’d slept much nearer home and not by myself. If you’re going to tell a lie, give it some dose of veracity.
And even when I slept with our vet, Alan Fraser, in Sussex in May, I thought about myself in Paris just four months before in January, but as if I might have been thinking of some other woman, some innocent me of long ago. It should have been the other way round, perhaps, I should have been innocent in spring, devious in winter. January and May: it’s a proverbial motif, a not so uncommon subject for the painters of the past. As you know only too well, since among our Rutherford Road collection is a small depiction of just that personified theme by the Venetian artist Vareschi. Gennaio e Maggio. Vareschi, by any art-historical rating, can’t claim to be much more than a very minor old master, but his work commands a price and it’s a measure of something that we possess one at all.
There he sits, anyway, January, that is, scrawny and grey-bearded, contemplating an almost naked and extremely nubile May in some verdant enclave which could be the corner of an orchard or a fanciful wood. Fruit, in any case, of an indeterminate but vaguely testicular kind, hangs among the foliage — it seems to be autumn as well as those other months of the year — and there are some roses with particularly pointed thorns.
You may have wondered, in your strangely dainty way, how such a thing could have its place in our house, or ever have been put into a gilt frame at all. It’s a dirty old man, isn’t it, eyeing up young flesh? Except, of course, it’s “art,” which justifies all kinds of things, and it’s pricey, it’s that business of your mum’s. And, incidentally — though what do you care, at sixteen? — it’s a perennial and much-visited allegory, it’s the whole sad tale of existence. The ageing male, his virile powers in decline, goes looking for some vision of lost youth. He picks up a young girl and takes her off to a hotel. For some curious, perennial reason, the young girl frequently obliges. January’s also, if Vareschi makes no allusion to it, the double-headed, the two-faced one. The whole thing often involves cheating on a wife.
Hardly at all the situation of Alan Fraser and me: him at forty-one and divorced, and me at thirty-two and married.
But I thought about that woman of only that preceding January as if I might have been thinking of someone half my age.
The weather had been true January weather, cold and still and sparkling, the kind of winter weather that can make the stone of Paris radiate. I’d found time, then, to walk, not broodily but simply contentedly, by the icy Seine, the water and the white walls of the quais dazzling, my ears pinched by the air. And I’d wished Mike was with me, our vapour-breaths mingling. Was there any glad moment of my life he shouldn’t share? All the same, I’d inhaled the strange pleasure of a separation that was hardly a separation at all — just a Wednesday night in Paris — and was almost over now anyway.