It would have been the same sort of morning in London perhaps, I thought, the same light teasing the charcoal grey of Bloomsbury and touching the windows of Mike’s cramped attic-office, up among the gnarled and mottled branches of the plane trees that fill the centre of Ormond Square.
Now we have our own place in France.
It was just a week before your dad’s birthday, and I’d even just bought him his present, in an antiques shop in the rue Bonaparte. It was one of those little brass calendar devices which you put on a desk, with a rotatable display of the day, the date and month: a particularly finely shaped and engineered example, elegantly scrolled and chased, with a pen-rest combined and with the pleasing distinction that the dates were, of course, in French. I saw myself, before I wrapped it, setting it to that all-important date for your father (and for me): “le 20 Janvier.”
Now it sits on his desk in that study-cum-office, the black numbers and letters on the white enamel regularly turned. And if you’ve ever wondered: well, I bought it in Paris in January, 1978. Not such an inexpensive whim for me then. Now we can buy a Vareschi. I saw it in the shop window just as the shop was opening, went in and didn’t hesitate. An electric fire blazed away while I counted out my francs. As I stood in that crystalline air on the Pont des Arts, taking in the classic view, my purchase waited for me, to be collected after my stroll, on my way back to my hotel. Then I’d check out and fly home to Mike.
Will he remember to turn on the date tomorrow? Or will he want it to stay always at yesterday? “Le 16 Juin 1995.”
There are points in our lives which, if we don’t know it at the time, we look back on later and see ourselves as if suspended, poised on some mysterious fulcrum. What did I not have then to be thankful for? All of Paris scintillating before me. I simply didn’t know what that year would bring, or take away, or what other hotel rooms I’d see, as well as that one at the Gustave, even before the year was half through. One by Lake Windermere, one in Venice. One, in between, at the Gifford Park. And that one in Paris, in a manner of speaking, twice.
An experiment. A practical, empirical (but top-secret) stage in our ongoing debate and, as it turned out, the decisive one. Your mother’s just playing with you? She was really just up for it with this veterinary surgeon with his hands on her pussy cat? She really just felt, at thirty-two — not exactly young and foolish, though she’s forty-nine now — like acting as if she was nineteen again at Sussex and screwing around? Here was another one to try. I don’t think so.
What you don’t have you can’t lose. But then again, it’s at least partly true that you don’t really know what you have until you lose it, or risk doing so. You don’t know the real things until you’ve sampled the false. At some point as the years gather, it’s bound to come over us perhaps: the perverse and crazy, but oddly almost prudent wish to put the whole fabric of what we possess to the test.
Excuses? I just went to bed with this Alan. Alan! And Fraser, you may have been thinking, is a Scottish name. I let him pick me up in his Peugeot and carry me off to spend a Friday night in a country hotel. I had my reasons, but where did he think it might lead: just one night? It was just such a previous exercise, it turned out, that had landed him in divorce. He made the mistake (the serious mistake, I think) of telling me. It wasn’t calculated to make me feel good. A little weekend escapade, he said, which shouldn’t have been any more, but he’d tumbled further, so it seemed, and then, when it was too late, this other woman (unnamed) had ditched him. Punished at both ends, and at one of them by the upset of his whole domestic apple cart.
What was I supposed to say? “There, there?” Or “Tough?” Or even “The cow!?” And now, of course, with me, he was risking nothing, having already lost the lot.
I could be risking everything I had.
I think what people often want from these midlife episodes (and note how I speak from vast experience) is a rather unexciting thing: comparison. They haven’t known it for a while, it’s been one of the rules that they forgo it, but is it, anyway (and this is the real persuasion), such an outrageous thing? They want the reassurance, the instruction or perhaps the sheer surprise of comparison. Life cuts you off from comparison. It might have been someone else, not Mike. I might never have met Mike. Poor me! And if not Mike, then it would have been someone else. Nothing’s written in the stars.
But I, of course, had my quite specific and highly specialised reason to know what it was like, while still having a husband, to jump into bed with another man. Did he appreciate that he was a “test case?” Perhaps he did — after those conversations in his surgery, all that scurrilous talk of insemination. It might even have been a sort of card he played, an unusual but opportune seduction technique. And I was “seduced.”
And he was a verifiable and practised father, if not the most shining example of paternity: two teenage kids. Just two cats now, apparently. What, incidentally, had he done with them, while we stole away to Sussex (Paris)? Just left them to fend for themselves?
Mike, back in Herne Hill, would have fixed himself a supper for one on a tray in front of the telly, then slept ignorantly alone — that is, if we don’t count a still fragile Otis curled up on a corner of the duvet. But then, at this time, the very same proposition would have been going through Mike’s head too: this primitive obstacle, this crude, unscientific bugbear to be overcome, that his wife, that Paula would have to do it, if not exactly at close-range or in hands-on fashion, with another man.
Oh lord. It rained that night too, though it had begun as a fine May day and finished with a balmy, hazy evening. Dinner in the “Akenhurst Room,” candlelit and oakpanelled, while the first drops began to patter, apologetically, on the terrace outside. He just wanted female company, a woman to share his bed? It had been a while, perhaps, and he’d had to go, or felt he had to, to this considerable trouble and expense. It was rather touching. I should have been flattered. I’d become special to him? He saw me as some replacement Mrs. Fraser? He was falling in love with me? God forbid.
I listened to more snippets from his troubled family life, and considered what I might tell him of mine: my late father’s divorces, for example, his three hapless marriages. And incidentally, he was a High Court judge. Switching subjects completely, I might have mentioned that Mike, whom by now, of course, Alan had met, used to work, before he worked on The Living World, on snails. Yes, snails. Perhaps Mike had mentioned them himself. But then if he had, surely Alan wouldn’t have chosen them (another serious mistake) — to eat. Escargots: they were on the Gifford’s distinctly Gallic menu, and Alan, as some Englishmen will, as a point almost of honour and bravado, went for them. Should I have said something?
To your dad and me, who’ll eat most things, they’ve always been strictly taboo.
And — thinking of things French — I thought, later that night, about that woman, in January, in Paris, where I was supposed to be right then. “That girl” I nearly called her. And the fact is I wanted to reach out protectively to her, standing there on that bridge in the wonderful cold light and perfectly happy as she was, to pull her collar up and tuck her scarf a little more snugly round her chin.
But hold on, you’ll be wondering: I had time to think, to contemplate, to conjure up such tender images, on this adventurous and plainly adulterous night, when thinking was hardly high on the agenda?
Yes, I had plenty. Without going into other details, my night with Alan Fraser ended up a little like now. I mean, absolutely not like now in one main respect, but in other respects, like it. It was even raining. The banal truth is that he fell asleep on me, and I stayed awake. There was dinner talk, there was preamble, there was even, I’m sure, during the thing itself, some gasping sex talk — but there was precious little pillow talk. I slept with him, I slept with our vet. I did all the things that that can mean. But, being strictly accurate, he slept with me before I slept with him, and I lay awake for a long while before I slept at all.