Light poured in from the barren plain. She dozed against me and I stared at her. Funny how rarely you really look at the people you are closest to. I looked to admire, when we were promenading, I looked to enjoy, when she was naked, but I never looked to discover things. Now I wanted to learn about the rest of our life.
Yes, she was human, mortal. Her fine freckled skin had begun to wrinkle, there were little stretched fans beneath each eye, the eyelids were very faintly brown, and the bridge of her nose, so straight, so pure, was surely more visible than it once was, as if the bones were minutely closer to the surface.
I looked, I tell you, with absolute tenderness. I loved her more than I ever had as the glare revealed she would age like me.
Asleep, she trusted me completely; to look at her, to look after her. I kissed her gently, her hair and her cheek, still smooth as a flower beneath my lips, and she woke, and smiled, and slept again. We should be together till the day we died. A great exaltation rose in me, a certainty I had never quite had ever since she’d refused to bear my child some twenty years before, when we first fell in love…
It had been a refusal to give herself when she said she wasn’t interested in children — my children, I thought, she doesn’t want my children, how long is she going to want me? And the other thing, later, worse, much worse, as if she had killed a part of me, as if she’d decided to kill our future, unbearable still to think about that.
Yet Alex had stayed with me; she was forty-seven when we made that second trip to Portugal. On that slow hot train I felt at last that nothing now could take her away from me…
And everything I felt was folly.
The rest of that trip is a blur, with strange sharp fragments that don’t fit together. It was a different country we’d come to. The people were inturned, dour, suspicious; the bleakness of the country was in them. This land was wide and high and harsh, rock and cactus and flat baked earth. The edge of Europe was entirely ungentle, a savage break between earth and sea over which the winds poured and the waters raged, flung back by the cliffs in torrents of spray. At Cape St Vincent grey walls of rock dropped perpendicular into the Atlantic. The lighthouse looked brave and small from a distance. You felt these people clung on to the earth by a mixture of courage and grim endurance.
— So how did they ever summon the flair to set off on those epic voyages? How did they dare to send their wooden boats acros the enormous curve of the earth? Was it possible that Alex and I would find new heart for our travels here?
I saw most of this alone. Alexandra was strange and lethargic, she who was never lethargic, and spent much of the time in our hotel room reading Portuguese scandal mags and watching television. We were staying in the pousada at Sagres, which was full of rich Americans. It was outside the town, an unreal place of anonymous luxury, slightly dated; its style and size could not have been less attuned to its surroundings. There were too many staff, who wouldn’t meet our eyes. Everyone was dwarfed by the high ceilings; the lounge was a hundred feet long, and they’d chosen furniture to scale, so the guests looked tiny on the vast leather sofas. Our room had two massive dark wood beds, so large that they looked like two doubles. I made a joke about wife-swapping, and Alex said, ‘I hate them… they look like funeral barques.’
We both slept in the same one, of course. One night I dreamed that Susy and Isaac were in the other one together, some frightful mistake, they were making love, it was too late for me to save my daughter… then they stopped and sneered at us, the same but different. ‘It’s all your fault,’ Isaac said.
One dream-like memory I know to be true because it changed our life together. We were sprawled on the bed waiting for dinner, too lazy to dress and go to the bar, sipping the vast gins the maid had brought us. The evening cold that struck up off the sea was beginning to creep through the open window. We had switched on TV absent-mindedly and found a Portuguese soap in progress, which Alex insisted on watching, so I lay there companionably, reading my Baedeker. Recently she’d got addicted to soaps; they were international, she could find them anywhere. It was something I didn’t care to share.
And then she was sniffing; I heard her sniffing. I reached without looking for the box of tissues which like everything else was giant-sized; I thought she was getting a cold.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Alex said, or whispered, and the words seemed to come from someone else, for she was gazing entranced at the screen, the tears were welling in her hazel eyes, she wasn’t talking to me but herself; ‘Oh,’ she sighed, a little broken whisper.
She saw me looking and looked back, defiant. ‘I’m enjoying it,’ she said. The screen showed a hospital room, or a ridiculous set of a hospital room, all handsome doctors and exotic flowers.
And a woman miming ecstasy. And the cause of the ecstasy, and my wife’s grief, a small, supposedly newborn baby.
And so I began to understand.
‘Why shouldn’t I have a baby,’ said Alex, or someone else using Alex’s voice, a little girl using my darling’s voice. ‘I could have a baby too.’
‘You’re joking.’ It was utterly clear that she wasn’t. Alex never played the little girl. Part of herself had broken loose. Part of herself was learning to speak. It told me something I didn’t want to know.
‘I’m not joking… I don’t know what I’m saying.’
‘But do you want one?’
She nodded, weeping, clutching her arms across her breasts.
‘Is this something new?’
‘I don’t know… it’s mad… no, I keep crying when I see pictures of babies. It’s so stupid. I didn’t want to tell you. I mean, I’m too old… aren’t I? Am I too old to have a child?’ Her voice gathered strength as she spoke, becoming less shame-faced, more Alex-like. ‘Tell me I’m not too old.’
‘Since when have I been able to tell you things?’
She suddenly flung her arms around me, laughing and crying at the same time, tugging at my hair, kissing me. ‘Oh Christopher, let’s try. It would be a wonderful baby.’
I didn’t say ‘You weren’t very keen on Isaac and Susy.’ I didn’t say ‘It wouldn’t be your first.’ I didn’t remind her of the daughter she’d had adopted when she was twenty-two — before she met me, I wouldn’t have allowed it. Nor of the child of ours that she killed. It was our child and she fucking killed it… Part of me will never forgive her for that. She was four months pregnant, he had eyes, ears, fingers… yet I went along with it, afraid to lose her.
Now I went along with another mad scheme.
A new chapter of our life began, a new and more difficult journey, not at all the one I had anticipated. We could travel anywhere in the world, we could use our money to do anything we wanted, but this took us into interior, this drove us back against our own limitations. We were face to face with the ageing that travel had protected us from.
Her plan was mad, with a certain mad courage, and I agreed to follow it. I’d have followed her to the ends of the earth, and done anything to make her happy…
Anything I could, that is. She was forty-seven, I was sixty-two, we were much too old to start a baby…
But she was so eager, she had no doubts. Once the dam was broached, words poured from her at meal after meal and drink after drink, frenetic plans for our child, our children, names for our child, homes for our child… It was novel to feel sorry for her. I didn’t entirely dislike the change, the new, more vulnerable Alex.
In any case I didn’t dare crush her dream. Other men might have dreamed it with her.