On the day when we visited the zoo I had known Stephen for a little over three months. As the hours of daylight increased, so too did our love, and, like the alterations of the season, the increments by which it grew were hard to detect. The darkness through which I walked to the bus stop every morning seemed unremitting, and then one day I would notice that a church spire, which I had not seen for several months, was again visible. Almost every day I thought that I could not imagine loving Stephen more, and then, a few days later, looking back at that moment, I would realise that already my feelings were more expansive and more profound.
By the time Stephen and Jenny left me at the house, the street lights were fully on. They drove down the street and turned the corner out of sight, but even after they had disappeared I remained where I was, transfixed by Jenny's stare. The whole afternoon had been marked by her odd behaviour. Although she had been the one to suggest going to the zoo, she had seemed ambivalent about being there. Then there had been the incident in the ladies', when I had thought she might refuse to return my bracelet. But all of this was subject to interpretation. I could have misconstrued her behaviour; she could simply have been out of sorts. There was no question of construction, however, about her parting stare. Even in memory her gaze was sharp as broken glass.
As I pushed open the garden gate, it occurred to me that although I had now been seeing Jenny regularly for several
months, I knew as little about her thoughts and feelings as I did about those of the wildcat to which she had that afternoon appeared so strangely drawn.
Inside, the house was cold, and there was a distinct smell of paint. I turned my mind to the more immediate question of what to do about dinner; during the week since we moved, we had exhausted the local restaurants. Suddenly I thought that I could cook. We had made nothing more elaborate than toast and tea so far, but the stove worked and we had groceries for a rudimentary meal. The idea of surprising Stephen appealed to me. I started water to boil. Then I went to light the fire in the living room. Stephen had laid it that morning, and at the first touch of a match the paper flared. I drew the old-fashioned brocade curtains, which Mrs. Menzies had bequeathed to us, and turned on the small lamp in one corner. Although still cold, the room at least looked cozy.
I was in the kitchen stirring the tomato sauce when Stephen returned. He came into the kitchen, still wearing his anorak, carrying a bottle of wine. “You're cooking. This is amazing. What can I do?”
“It's only spaghetti. Maybe you could make a salad. We've got lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber.”
When everything was ready we carried our plates and glasses into the living room. Stephen fetched us blankets to wrap around our shoulders. We sat on cushions on either side of the fire, with our plates on our knees. Tobias had come in from the garden and lay on the sofa, purring audibly.
“Cheers,” said Stephen, raising his glass. “To us and our new home.”
“To us and our new home,” I echoed, clinking my glass to his.
The room grew warmer, and by the time Stephen refilled our glasses we were able to discard the blankets. “I can scarcely believe that I'm going to have to teach on Monday,” he said. “Sometimes I feel my life hasn't changed in fifteen
years. Here I am, middle-aged, still dreading the start of a new term.”
“You're not middle-aged,” I protested.
“According to my doctor I am. Last year when I wrenched my knee, he quoted Dante and told me that now I had entered the dark wood I had to be more careful.” He twirled up another forkful of spaghetti. “My pupils would certainly agree with him. They see me as ancient, whereas they of course are forever young.”
I looked at Stephen. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, his hair falling over his forehead, his face tawny in the golden light, he could have been twenty-five. I drank some wine, holding it in my mouth to appreciate the slight tartness. “Do you think Jenny likes me?” I asked.
“Of course she does,” said Stephen immediately. “What on earth would make you think she doesn't?”
I had intended to tell him what happened in the street, but now that the moment had arrived, I did not know how to begin. He often teased me about being insecure, and I could guess what his reaction would be. He would tell me that I had imagined her hostility; when I knocked on the window, she had thought I wanted to wave goodbye. Instead I said, “I felt I behaved badly at the cafeteria. It's none of my business if she wants to eat ten ice creams. I'm not her mother.”
“If anyone behaved badly, it was me. On the way home I was thinking how often I let Jenny get away with things just because it's easier. I ought to behave as if I saw her every day, not try to be nice all the time.”
“That's hard to do, though,” I said, “when in fact you see her once a week.” I helped myself to salad and passed him the bowl.
“Yes, of course, that's the excuse, but the last thing I want is to be the sort of absentee father who tries to buy his child's affection and leaves all the real work to the mother. It's so stupid. I worry that Jenny will think of me as another grown-up
she can blackmail for presents, and then that's how I behave.” He looked at me earnestly, his glasses glinting in the firelight. The bowl of salad sat ignored before him.
“But now we're living here, you'll be able to spend more time with Jenny in ordinary ways,” I said. “There's a garden, and she'll be able to come and stay.”
He put down his plate. “How could anyone not like you, silly?” he asked, pulling me towards him.
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I had taken a week off work to move, and on Monday for the first time I made the journey from our new house to the office. During my absence letters and manuscripts had piled up, and although I stayed at my desk all day, I seemed to make little headway. It was after seven when I arrived home, feeling cold and tired. As I stepped into the hall, the sight of the many boxes still waiting to be unpacked overwhelmed me. For a few seconds I wished that I were returning to Stephen's old flat, where I could sit down in a clean room and discuss my day. Then I thought, but this is our home, and it occurred to me that I had never before in my adult life been able to use that word with any conviction.
Stephen was at the dining room table, a pile of exercise books in front of him. “Surely you don't give them work on the first day,” I exclaimed, bending to hug him. “What a taskmaster you are.”
“I gave them some problems to do in class to see how much they remember from last term. So far amnesia is widespread.”
I went and stood with my back to the gas fire, warming myself. “I've been having rows all day,” I announced.
“Who with?”
“Clare mostly. Do you remember the dreaded Brockbank? He refused to accept my editing, so we're ditching him.”
“You mean you did all that work for nothing?” said Stephen incredulously. I had been editing the manuscript of
Brockbank's grammar book when Stephen and I first met, and for weeks he had watched me labouring over the stodgy prose.
“It wasn't for nothing,” I protested. “Some authors reject seventy-five percent of my suggestions, and at least this way we're getting rid of a bad book and I won't have to work with him for months.”
“I still think it's outrageous. He shouldn't have submitted the book for publication if he wasn't prepared to accept your editing. He ought to pay a fine, or something.”
“I'll suggest it,” I said, smiling at his indignation. “How long is it going to take you to do all those?”
He flipped through the books. “About half an hour. I thought we could go to Standard Tandoori.”
“Shouldn't we do something about the house?” A slight scorching smell wafted upwards as the fabric of my trousers grew warm. I shifted away from the fire.
“I think we'll get grumpy if we try to renovate after working all day. We can live in squalor for another few days and then slave like demons this weekend.”
“But if we only work at weekends it'll take ages to get everything done.” On the bus coming home I had been making lists and trying to decide in what order we should approach various tasks.
“I suppose it will take a little longer, but does that matter? Aren't we going to follow in our predecessors' footsteps and stay here for fifty years?”
“Yes, we are.” I walked back to the table and bent over him once more.
“You're so warm,” he said, running his hands up and down the backs of my legs.
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Brockbank proved to be only the first crisis of the week, and after staying late at the office several nights in a row, on
Friday I felt justified in leaving at the stroke of five. Even so, Stephen was home before me. I arrived to find him stripping the wallpaper in the dining room. He greeted me cheerfully from the top of the ladder. “This machine is great,” he said. “The stuff comes off in huge strips. Look.” He ran the steamer up and down the wall until the paper bubbled.
I made some tea, and Stephen came down from his ladder. We carried our mugs into the living room. “So how much does it cost to rent the machine?” I asked, as we settled down on the sofa.
“If we return it first thing on Monday, then we get the weekend special. If we keep it longer, the rate changes.” His explanation was cut short by the telephone. He went out into the hall to answer it. I knew immediately from his monosyllabic answers that he was talking to Helen. “Yes,” “No,” he said alternately, and then, “All right. Bye.”
He came back and sat down at the far end of the sofa. “That was Helen. Jenny has a cold, and Helen thinks it would be better if she didn't go out tomorrow.”
“Is she in bed?” I asked.
“No, but apparently she's been coughing and sneezing for the last few days.”
I was sharply disappointed. All week I had been thinking about Jenny's farewell. I vacillated between two impossibilities: on the one hand believing that she loathed me, on the other, believing that through some strange process of the synapses I had invented the whole affair. I needed to see her to find out what had really happened. “Are you sure she couldn't come?” I asked. “She'd only be outside for about sixty seconds as you bundled her to and from the car.”
“I thought you'd be glad of the extra time to work on the house,” Stephen said. He was frowning in the way he did when one of his pupils made a particularly incomprehensible mistake.
“We can work tonight, and we'd still have all of Sunday. I think it's important for Jenny to see your new home.”
“I suppose.” He leaned forward to pick up his mug of tea, then seemed to sink more deeply into the cushions.
“Couldn't you call Helen back and ask her?”
“I already agreed.”
I looked at him sitting hunkered down over his cup. On a number of occasions Helen had summoned him to baby-sit at a few hours' notice, and Stephen had gone without complaint. “She only asks me if it's an emergency,” he had told me apologetically, but what constituted an emergency in Helen's mind, as far as I could tell, was the possible thwarting of her desires. I did not understand why the situation could not be symmetrical. “You could at least suggest it,” I said. “The worst that can happen is she'll say no.”
“All right.” He put the cup on the floor and got slowly to his feet. For a moment he stood gazing out of the window, his hands plucking at the hem of his painting shirt, then he plunged out of the room. I overheard him repeating my arguments in conciliatory tones. After a couple of minutes, he bounded back.
“It was fine,” he exclaimed. “She'd been having second thoughts too. I'll fetch Jenny after lunch and take her back at six.”
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For the rest of the evening Stephen was in the best of humours; he felt that he had achieved a minor victory. By next morning, however, he had become convinced that Helen would change her mind. When the phone rang as we were finishing breakfast, he said, “Oh, God.” But it was only the young man who had taken over Malcolm's flat, wanting to know what to do with my mail. After I hung up, I asked Stephen why he was so worried.
He shrugged. “Helen will probably have decided that I bullied her into changing her mind.”
“You told me she agreed.”
“That's the rational approach,” he said, smiling at my innocence.
But the telephone remained silent, and at one o'clock he went off to collect Jenny as planned. When he had gone I fetched the white paint and began to paint the door of our bedroom. So far this was the only room we had decorated; we had stripped the wallpaper and painted the walls and ceiling the week we moved in. Now the room was a beautiful Antwerp blue. The colour was Stephen's choice; left to my own devices I would have taken the easy route of painting everything white, as I had done in London. He had paced up and down the aisles of the paint shop. “The front rooms don't get the morning sun, so we ought to paint them in warmer colours,” he had said judiciously. “And we should paint our bedroom to match your eyes.” I had watched with pleasure while out of a whole wall of finely gradated blues
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cobalt, ultramarine, cerulean, indigo
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he had chosen the perfect shade.