Such Visitors (20 page)

‘Maddening,' said Miranda. She sipped at her wine, ignored the bread and cheese.

‘So,' said Ivan, another limited smile uptilting his bewitching mouth, ‘here I am, meeting you at last. I've read all your papers, you know. You could say I was quite a fan. But I'd always imagined you … well, older, I suppose.'

Miranda felt the blood rushing to her face and lowered her head.

‘I've read all
your
books, naturally,' she said.

‘Have you really?'

He sounded surprised. His eyes were so hard upon her she was forced to raise her own and meet them. She put down her glass with a shaking hand. Her heart was battering audibly. She knew Ivan observed all this.

‘Look, my hand's shaking too,' he said, quietly. ‘Now isn't that indeed a peculiar thing? How do you explain that? Two people shaking, and they've scarcely met.'

Miranda gave a slight laugh. She tried to compose herself, resist this dangerous ground.

‘I'd like to take my chance,' she said, ‘to talk to you about Donne. I mean, about anything. But particularly about Donne.' She cursed herself for her own confusion.

‘Ah, Donne.' Ivan sighed. ‘Well, Donne would call this “our first strange and fatal interview”, wouldn't he? Don't deny it, now.' He laughed, lightening the moment. ‘Listen, there's so little time. To hell with Donne when there's so little time. Unless that's what you'd really like.
Is
that what you'd really like? Tell me, honestly.'

‘No, no,' conceded Miranda, and they both laughed.

What I'd really like, a voice within her said, is to take a speedboat to the moon with this man, talk to him for years, say things I've never said before which would need no words. I'd like to walk on beaches with him, climb hills, sit by fires while he read poems in that dappled voice … All that sort of fantastical rubbish. She twisted herself upright with a jerk, reclaimed her glass with a hand that was still shaking.

‘Alas, the negotiating of souls needs a little time,' Ivan went on, ‘once the light has struck blindingly. There you are, some Donne for you mixed with a pinch of Reid …' They both looked up to see the chairman approaching. ‘But promise me, afterwards, a drink somewhere?'

Miranda smiled brilliantly at the chairman. She wanted, dottily, to let him know of her irrepressible exhilaration.

‘You two known each other long, have you?' he asked.

‘For ever and ever, in a way,' said Ivan.

* * *

As she stood on the platform looking down at a blotched mass of faces she could not distinctly see, Miranda felt nervous. Her hands were still shaking. She held them behind her back, and leaned against the bare table to steady herself. Eventually, the shuffling and whispering and the squeaking of chairs ceased, and the silence in the hall was rampant, white-lit, frightening. The Dark in Hardy, Miranda said to herself. Ivan was somewhere at the back. She could not see him, and was glad. The silence continued, but the familiar opening words of the lecture she had given a dozen times had quite disappeared from her mind. Then she heard a distant voice, her own, and was aware that the quality of her audience's listening was almost tangible.

‘Why did you give no hint that night,' she began in a low voice,

That quickly after the morrow's dawn,

And calmly, as if indifferent quite,

You would close your term here, up and be gone

Where I could not follow

With wing of swallow

To gain one glimpse of you even anon?

Never to bid goodbye,

Or lip me the softest call,

Or utter a wish for a word, while I

Saw morning harden upon the wall,

Unmoved, unknowing

That your great going

Had placed that moment, and altered all
…

She stopped abruptly.

There had been no time to think. She had begun quoting spontaneously, some instinct telling her to send a private message to Ivan. There was no need to go on.

‘That was the beginning of a poem called “The Going”,' she said, ‘which, I think you will agree …' She was off, back in command, no longer shaking, her audience in her hands.

When the applause was over and the listeners all gone, Miranda found Ivan waiting for her by the door.

‘We're invited,' he said, ‘to join the others for a nightcap
back in that sterile room. But we won't be doing that, will we? We're going somewhere else. It won't be the sort of place I'd like to take you, but anything to get out of here.'

They hurried from the relentless white of the college building, down a deserted High Street, into a crowded pub of amber lights and glinting tankards on tartan walls. Miranda scarcely took in the practicalities. Somehow they were at a small, beer-ringed table, with two glasses of whisky.

‘That was very, very good,' Ivan said. ‘I could have listened all night. You had the old things absolutely enraptured. But I don't want to talk about Hardy, or Donne, or even Shakespeare, if you don't mind.' Against the background thump of taped music it was quite hard to hear his voice. He clenched his fist, thumped the table. Then he placed it on Miranda's hand, and left it there.

‘I'm a happily married man, at last,' he said.

‘And I've been a happily married woman for seventeen years,' responded Miranda, her voice unwittingly shrill, defensive.

‘There we are then, in precisely the same situation. That's good.' He sighed. ‘It's funny, though, isn't it? You come to a conference, expecting nothing. I never expect anything. And then the gods play tricks on you. Show you temptation. Upset the equilibrium. Physically shake you. All in – what? A matter of hours. What's it all about? Don't just widen your pretty eyes at me like that –
tell me.'

‘I can't,' said Miranda.

Ivan was standing, restless. Barely ten minutes in the pub, Miranda noted.

‘Come on. We must go back. I've a mass of stuff to read before the morning.'

He took her hand and led her through the bright, laughing people to the sharper air of the car park. A discreet moon lit geometrical shapes on the metal of the cars. In the office blocks that jutted up all round them the uniform windows were stuck in flatly silvered rows, sharp as flints.

‘Let's pretend we're not here,' said Ivan. He kissed her, kissed her.

When eventually they pulled apart, Miranda knew that nothing had been intended, and they were a long way from
doing anything more. Ivan's face was mostly in shadow, but splinters of moonlight flared in his eyes. He spoke quietly, all the brusqueness gone.

‘I've always had this thought, you see, that we're all such visitors in each other's lives – mere visitors. Even husbands and wives. Visitations are all we can manage, really: perhaps all we should require.' He paused. ‘I know what I'd
like,
of course. Apart from anything else, I'd like to come and find you one day, spend a little innocent time with you. But I don't believe in acting wilfully against the grain, do you?'

‘No.'

‘Endangering things?'

‘No.'

‘So this visit, this short, short visit, has to be over. I'm sorry.' He kissed Miranda again, lightly on the forehead this time, and put a hand on her neck. ‘There's a dreadful irony, isn't there, in the two faces of recognition?' He gave a small laugh. ‘On the one hand, the joy. On the other, such sadness, having to deny … But still, the fact is, we've met. At least we've met.'

‘We've met, yes,' said Miranda.

In silence they walked back to the college, swung through the plate-glass doors, stood dazed for a moment by the unkind whiteness of the lights. Ivan touched her chin with a teasing finger, smiled.

‘Never confuse me with a pure Elizabethan,' he said. ‘Hardy's my man, just as much as yours, that's why I've always read you with such interest. And Hardy it was who said – didn't he? – “Goodbye is not worth while”.' Then he turned away quickly and was gone, dissolved into the glare of the long white corridor, on his way to some single bedroom identical to Miranda's own.

She sat up, awake, all night, watched the morning harden, allowed herself a few fantasies about Ivan Whiteham-Jones, and then attempted to discard them. She arranged herself to go home, and when she arrived there she was pleased, as always, to be welcomed by her husband and her daughter.

Somehow, she did not mention to Jim that she had met Ivan. They were long past the stage of reporting what had gone on at each other's conferences. Besides, there was nothing of
substance that could be told. But in the rhythm of normality that swiftly returned, the glint of possibility she had now experienced flickered its small light in her soul, reminding her in some disturbing way that it had ‘altered all'. As she continued in her happy marriage, Miranda found herself hoping, for a while, there might be some word from Ivan, and then she found herself surreptitiously looking out for him. Once she heard him (that voice!) on the radio; another time she caught his last few moments on a television programme. At Christmas, as a sort of politeness, and to show she had not missed whatever had been recognised and denied at the conference, she sent him a card, care of his university. He did not send one back, but then she did not expect he would. None the less, she could not quite forget this brief visitor, this man who, in another life, might have been hers.

‘The last time I weighed myself, yesterday morning to be precise, the scales registered twelve stone and one ounce. That is not a record. I have been several pounds heavier. On rare occasions, these last five years, and quite by chance, I've also been a pound or so lighter.

You may be surprised by my saying this, and possibly not believe me, but I am not depressed by my weight. Passing shop windows, or the occasional glance in a mirror, confirm that all hope of ever retrieving my old, slight shape, has quite gone. And I don't mind.

The funny thing is, nor does Jeremy. We married twenty-three years ago when I was a mere slip of a thing – an old joke was that he referred to me as a
slipover
rather than a pushover. Food, then, did not concern me much. I cooked because I had to: meals for the children, dinner for Jeremy on the rare occasions he was home. But I did make quite an effort, for years, with Sunday lunch. There were constant disputes about whether it should be chocolate pudding or Brown Betty (as a family, we all love apples) each week. I made whatever they finally decided upon, and enjoyed their appreciation.

It was after Sam and Kathy left for university and only Laura, our youngest, was left at home, that I became unstuck. The trouble was, used to making enough for five healthy appetites, I miscalculated when cooking for two. I always made too much, to be on the safe side. There were always things left over. Remembering the post-war economy of my own childhood, and not liking to see things go to waste, I found it hard to leave them in the fridge or larder to await reheating. It became impossible to throw them away. Finishing them off myself – cold rice pudding for elevenses, cold chicken curry for tea, time doesn't matter to an anarchistic eater – became my habit.

By the time Laura finally left, too, to go to Durham, I had noticed the conspicuous change in my figure. I should have taken some strong hold – gone on a diet, changed my eating habits, whatever. But no. One of the pleasures I came to look forward to was a proper three-course dinner alone in front of the television. Plus half a bottle of Jeremy's nice white wine. He always said, ‘Help yourself from the cellar whenever you want to,' and I would take him at his word. Another pleasure was breakfast: all those fried glistening things I had cooked for years for the children and never eaten myelf, I now found immensely enjoyable. They gave a good start to the morning. They would keep me going till the chocolate biscuits and coffee at eleven, later followed by homemade bread and soup for lunch.

The children, when they came home, teased me mildly about my middle-aged spread. They found it odd I had put on so much weight considering I seemed to be eating no more than usual. For, out of habit, or perhaps secret shame, in front of them I remained quite abstemious, piling their plates with second and third helpings but toying with just one small helping myself. I contemplated confessing to them my secret vice, but then couldn't face it. Besides, they didn't go on about it, accepted me lovingly as always. As for Jeremy – home less than ever despite retirement being only four years off – he made no comment at all.