The Real Thing (17 page)

She did not know why he was coming. Two years had passed since she had rung him about some message from Nancy, their daughter, about an urgent need for money. Before that, they had met for lunch, in Manchester as it happened, where she was working and he visiting. In 1980, she thought that was. This encounter had been handled by both of them as if bullets might start flying around the restaurant at a single wrong word, and the strain of it had prevented another. Before that, meetings had always been for legal reasons and policed by solicitors, or because of the children.

But when he had telephoned to say he wanted to meet her ‘just to talk’, what she had felt, unexpectedly, was delight, as if she were opening a present so well chosen she could feel the giver’s thoughts dwelling lovingly among her own, approving her choices.

She perfectly understood the quality of this delight, its exact weight and texture, because of a smile that these days she sometimes felt arriving on her face together with thoughts of certain men. It was a rich, irresponsible, freebooter’s smile, and she knew that this smile must appear on their faces when they thought of her: a smile that had nothing to do with what society might be saying at any given time, or with morality, or with the wars between men and women.

But the point was, he-her husband-had not been one of these men, for thoughts of him had been loaded with
anxiety and self-doubt. Now she felt that he had been restored to her.

She stood with one capable hand among the reflections of the flowers on the shining tabletop and smiled, not bothering to look in the mirror, for she knew that just as she, meeting him, would seek-anxiously but confidently-among the dry ruins for what she remembered of a quarter of a century ago, so he would seek in her what she had been. This is how former lovers meet, when ageing, as if suffused by that secret, irrepressible smile.

Once upon a time, when young, walking along a pavement or into a room, they had never failed to see in the faces turned towards them the gratified look that comes from absolute lightness. They had been a match, a pair, flesh of an immediately recognizable category of flesh. Both good-looking, healthy, fitted to mate and beget, causing none of the secret unease that people feel when confronted by couples who can make you think only of the unhealthy or ugly offspring they are likely to produce. Sarah and James had given others pleasure that had in fact little to do with being young, handsome, healthy, and so on. No, it was because of their being flesh of one flesh. They had both been tall; she, slim, he, spare. Both were fair, he with shaggy Viking locks, she with long pale gleaming tresses. Both had very blue eyes, full of shrewd innocence. If there ever had been moments of disquiet in their early days, it was because of this: when they lay in each other’s arms and looked into that other face, what they saw was so similar to what they saw in mirrors.

The woman he had married after her was large, black-haired, swarthy-a nice change, she had thought, in her bitter days. The children he and this gypsy had made between them were ‘one white and one black and two khaki’, as she had put it, full of shame. (Not literally
‘black’ of course: one was like her mother, brown and sleek and dark-eyed; one like James, pale and fair with eyes that shocked because of their blueness; and two indeterminate beings like neither.) Nice-looking children, but when these six people were all together no one need think of them as a family.

When Sarah and James were together, with their two children, they were four of a kind, blue-eyed, blond Northern Europeans, so different from the majority of the world’s people that you had to think this was some kind of a rare and threatened race and you were being privileged to see perfect representatives of it. She had not seen things like this then, but later she did, confronted with Rose and the new family.

The two children were now, of course, more than grown up. One was in Boston. This was Nancy with her husband and children. The son was on some island in the Pacific investigating the ways of fish. She did not often see either of them, or her grandchildren. She was pretty sure this was because of the divorce happening when it did, when they were ten and eleven. Protecting themselves, they had separated inwardly not only from their father, who had betrayed them for the new family, but from her, the innocent party. They had become cautious, sparing of affection, self-doubting, and critical. Of her. Unjust! But these days she never used, or thought, words like justice, or happiness.

When her Viking husband had left her for the siren-voiced, histrionic, over-colourful Rose, she had-of course!-been devastated. Literally. She fell apart. Well, women did. She was for a time poisoned with bitterness, she could not believe that her husband,
her friend
, had so treated her. Oh no, it was not possible: she confronted him with the impossibility of it, the indignant innocence of her gaze demanding an explanation she could acknowledge. She
drank too much. Then she stopped drinking. She coped well and sensibly with the two sensible and over-cautious children who, like her, protected a calloused place.

But all that had gone away, seemed to belong to some other time, even some other woman.

Now she felt herself connected, not with that vulnerable discarded woman, but with herself as a girl, before she had met him.

Deliverance from weakness had not happened quickly. Five years after the divorce, at a party, he had stared at her, as if unable to believe what his eyes and senses told him, that this was-still-his wife, with whom he had lived for ten years. The tears spilled down his face, and he exclaimed, ‘But Sarah, what happened?’ At which she had been so angry she spat at him (astonishing herself as well as him-it was behaviour she associated with gypsy women, never her moderate self) and turned her back on him and left the party, weeping. But other women had told her that on unexpectedly meeting former husbands, these men would also exclaim, genuinely startled, ‘But what happened?’ As if their delinquency was something not only surprising to them, but not really their responsibility at all, rather the result of some ineluctable fate.

For a while, she had raged over what she had then seen as the lying sentimentality of ‘But what happened?’ Had raged briefly, because one did
not
permit self-indulgence in useless emotion. And then had forgotten, it had all gone away, and when she thought of him, not often these days, what she saw was the blue innocence of that look of his, reflecting the candour and honesty that she had first loved in him, qualities she prized above all others.

Now she lived in her two adequate rooms. In the same town as he did-but that was chance. Because of her work she had lived in Paris, New York, various towns in England, always moving, and good at moving. She never
felt she lived in one place more than another. She was a personal secretary in a big oil firm.

But her husband had left her for that other house where he had lived, not moving at all, with his new family. Not always contentedly, as she knew. But she did not now care about all that. He had made his bed, and she genuinely hoped it was a good one. She did not care, one way or the other. Not to care, that was the great, the unexpected, the miraculous deliverance. What a lot of nonsense it all was, the anguish, and the suffering, and the lying awake at nights weeping! What a waste of time.

And now when she was free of him, James was coming to see her.

His footsteps approached. Rapidly. Lightly He was taking two steps at a time up the stairs, then he knocked, and was in, standing just inside the door and looking at her.

Knowing exactly how they must look to each other, they frowned with the effort of re-creating younger selves in what they were actually seeing. Their eyes met without difficulty, and did not disengage because of confusion, pain, guilt. Perhaps they had not really seen each other since the separation.

What she was looking at was an elderly Viking, his shaggy locks, like hers, tarnished with silver. He was much burned by sun, wind, so there must have been a very recent walikng holiday somewhere. His handsome face was thin, all crags and ravines. He seemed to have dried out, as she seemed to herself to be dry and light, time dragging moisture out of her, like a sun.

His acute gaze now left her, and rested on the flowers … a small table where she look her meals … a gas fire with a light armchair beside it … a shelf of books … the tumultuous blue and white seascape. Then he approached the blue square of the end window, with his fast light high
step that had been the first thing in him to delight her. It still did. At the window he looked downward into a scene of back gardens, birds, trees, fences loaded with creepers, children’s climbing frames, cats stretched out absorbing sunlight. Family life … He was scrutinizing it with a small dry smile she knew well. Then he stepped quickly to one window in the side wall, and then the other: the same view from both; a quiet street lined with parked cars, plane trees, an old woman sitting on a bench.

This was the second floor. In summer the trees were like towns full of birds, and she stood there watching them. He turned about, and stood checked in his need to step off to somewhere else in this room. He was used to rooms where one might walk about, take a short stroll. But there was nowhere else. He was feeling confined.

‘I suppose you are wondering what I’m doing here?’ he said hastily, but then went red, because it sounded conventional, though she had not taken it like that.

‘Well, yes, I did wonder,’ she said agreeably, and sat herself down near the flowers. She at once became conscious of how she must look, posed near these flowers she had bought because of pleasure at his coming, and she moved quickly to the armchair near the gas fire. It was a chair that made one sit up straight. She sat there lightly and erectly, and looked at him. And sighed. She heard the sigh, and saw his quick conscious look when he heard it, and it was her turn to blush.

He sat down near one of the windows and beyond him a plane tree shook with the visitations of birds. He looked as if he might leap to his feet and be off again. A hunted man, he frowned, and put his lean brown hand to his face, but then let it drop and sighed too, and sat back in his chair to face her.

There isn’t a reason really,’ he announced. ‘It began
to seem to me so wrong, that we didn’t even meet occasionally.’

She merely smiled, agreeing that they had not met only because of some whim or oversight.

‘We were together all that time … the children …’ He shrugged, giving up, and looked straight at her, inviting aid.

She could, she supposed, ask after his children, his other family. But there was no point in his coming, no point in all this upset and adjustment and sighing and excitement if all they did was to exchange pretexts for not talking. Besides, she knew how they all were, his family: a good friend of hers remained a good friend of his, and reported what went on. Not like a spy, but like a friend. Once she had needed to know; recently she had listened as if to news from a household that did not much concern her.

He half got up, but sat down again, seeing there was nowhere to move to. ‘You don’t have much space up here,’ he remarked. It sounded like a reproach, and he again reddened.

‘But I don’t need much space.’ And now this, she felt, could be taken as a reproach, and she made an irritable gesture – too irritable for what was happening, full of elderly impatience at the trivial. ‘I didn’t mean …’ she exclaimed carefully, ‘what I meant was, I
don’t
need much room, now the children are grown up. Nancy and Martin hardly need their own rooms any longer!’

Suddenly he seemed tired. She knew why. The house he now lived in was large, full of rooms in which one might take a little stroll. But it was of course always needing repairs the way houses did, and it was shabby, because it was a much used family house, exploding with the four children and their friends. It pulsated with people, noise, music, telephones ringing, loud voices -Rose’s, particularly – singing, a dog barking, doorbells,
the drone of vacuum cleaners. Family life. The oldest child was fifteen, the youngest, nine. In front of James was at least ten years, probably much more, of finding a good deal of money for education. He was a business consultant. He had not wanted to be one. But that was what he had become when, needing a lot of money for the new marriage, he had given up his previous career as an expert in electronics for the aircraft industry and for boats. That was what he had enjoyed.

Everything he did now, where he lived and how, was because he had fallen in love with Rose, her own opposite in every way, and gone off with her. And things would go on as they were now, they would have to, for years and years. He was fifty-three. He would grow old in Rose’s service. That was what he had chosen. If you could use a word like ‘choose’.

She was two years older than he.

She said, ‘I decided to retire this year. They asked me to stay on, but I don’t want to.’

And now his whole person was momentarily full of the energy of words not spoken, words of aggressive inquiry, if not reproach. It was he who had arranged her very good job with the oil firm. He knew – since the man she had worked for all these years was a friend – that pressure had been put on her to be more than a personal secretary. They had offered her all kinds of better jobs. But she had not wanted to become ambitious and sink her life in the firm’s. She had found her own life more interesting, and had been careful to guard it. But had she accepted, money would have been much less tight. She knew of course that James had been critical of her for being content to be a mere secretary, and this quite apart from the money side of it.

She said, I don’t need very much money now. I can do as I please.’

‘Lucky Sarah,’ he said, suddenly emotional.

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘There is no way, no way at
all
that I could
not
have gone off with Rose,’ he said unexpectedly. Unexpectedly to him: but she knew this was why he had come. He had to say this! Not as a justification. Not as a plea. He needed to explain some absolute, some imperative, that she – his first wife – must acknowledge. He was asking for justice. From her!