The Temporary (13 page)

‘Good God,’ he said humorously, standing next to Stephen’s stool. An inappropriate feeling of love lodged
fluttering
in his throat.

Stephen’s eyes stayed on his book for a second too long, and Ralph remembered how he had used to read like that when they were at school, striking a contemplative pose and ignoring anyone who approached him, including teachers, until he had finished a particular page or chapter. His bouts
of reading usually occurred directly after the execution of some misdemeanour or other, and Ralph had come to suspect that Stephen’s erudition was merely a dramatic device for the production of high contrast, a baroque detail of the measured eclecticism with which he created himself

‘Afternoon,’ he said finally, snapping the book closed without, Ralph noticed, marking the page. ‘You’re looking very chipper.’

‘Likewise,’ said Ralph. ‘I hardly recognized you when I came in. What’s going on?’

‘I will brook no interrogations,’ said Stephen briskly. ‘Your absence has been noted.’

‘Sorry. I’ve been busy.’

‘I
know.
’

‘What do you mean?’ Ralph’s voice sounded fluting and nervous, like a girl’s.

‘Oh, calm down.’ Stephen cackled with laughter. ‘I’m merely –
surmising
from your failure to return my calls and your shining pelt that you’ve been—’

‘Do you want a drink?’

‘—hard at it. Right you are.’

Stephen raised his eyebrows and smiled. Ralph turned to the bar and fumbled in his pockets for money. For a moment his thoughts were in darkness, but he could feel their
predatory
movements.

‘What’ve you been up to?’ he said. He kept his face turned away, his eyes following the ministry of the barman. He could feel the heat of Stephen’s examination beside him.

‘Oh, working, same old crap. The magazine menstruates monthly. And I’m being punished for a little – cock-up from last month.’ He seemed willing to offer an explanation but Ralph, shying from involvement with his complications, didn’t ask him for one. ‘So this month it’s
cars
of all things, talking to morons about the potency of their Porsches. Loaded, every
last one of them. Sticks in my craw, old boy.’ He sighed and then laughed. ‘I’ve got a good one for you, though. This bloke, this real Home Counties Kev, said to me, you’ll love this, he says, “Look, mate—”’ Stephen lowered his voice in imitation, gruffly conspiratorial. ‘“Look, mate, I know it cost a lot, but it’s paid for itself in twat, see?” In twat! Glorious!’

‘That’s funny,’ said Ralph. He turned to give Stephen his drink and met his eye.

‘And yourself?’ said Stephen.

The pub was filling up, and in the warm, rising clamour of voices, the furniture of bodies from whose mouths brazen laughter burst in white plumes of cigarette smoke, Ralph felt his painful singularity begin mildly to disperse. He knew he shouldn’t discuss Francine, but Stephen’s almost involuntary skill at interrogation meant that only physical escape would make a certainty of his intentions. From the bruised and tender distance of Ralph’s curtained intimacies, Stephen seemed more abrasive than ever, and although the sight of his friend pressed upon him a chilly consciousness of his recent loneliness, he feared the confessional impulse which was every moment mounting within him.

‘Oh, not much. Work, I suppose. Nothing much, really.’

Stephen’s face betrayed a fleeting impatience and he jigged slightly on his stool as if in encouragement of social momentum.

‘Met anyone new?’ he chirped hopefully.

The unexpected appearance of Roz’s terrible question filled Ralph with a sudden private mirth, and before he could stop himself he heard a ghastly laugh rush from his lips. Stephen looked at him in surprise, and, really only to cover his moment of awkwardness, Ralph suddenly found himself prepared to admit everything.

‘I’ve been seeing Francine,’ he said loudly, turning to face the room. ‘Shall we sit down?’

‘Who?’ said Stephen. He picked up his glass and followed Ralph to a table, hovering avidly behind him like a reporter.

‘Francine.’ Ralph felt his brief flash of euphoria subside. ‘The girl we met at Alf’s.’

‘The secretary?’ Stephen sat down, as if in shock. His face was a cartoon of astonishment. He began to laugh, shaking his head. ‘You’re joking. I don’t believe it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t believe it.’ Stephen paused for a moment and then yelped again with laughter. One or two people turned their heads. ‘I just don’t believe it.’

‘Well, it’s true.’

‘Francine!’ His disbelief dissipated into a wide smile. ‘You’re a bloody quiet one. I wouldn’t have thought she was your tipple, not in a million years.’

‘I’d rather not talk about it.’ Ralph picked up his glass. His hand was shaking.

‘What’s she like?’ said Stephen, grinning.

‘What do you mean,
what’s
she
like
? Is that all you think it is?’

‘Well, what is it, then? She’s a—’ He gestured
mountainously
from his chest with his hands and then looked
exaggeratedly
contrite. ‘She’s a nice girl.’

‘She’s not stupid, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Of course she’s not.’

Stephen leaned forward and fixed him with a serious look, his eyebrows mockingly furrowed. Ralph shrugged and stared at his hands. They lay on the table, waxy and nerveless, instruments of indifference. The articulation of his secret had illuminated in its very first hateful exposure a veiled
background
of half-denied truths. In that moment Ralph knew his own misery, recognized it beyond doubt.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ he said dully. ‘I can’t seem to get out of it.’

The residue of mirth drained from Stephen’s cheeks and Ralph was almost gratified to see a glint of sobriety in his eyes. It was difficult to slay his good humour, and there was a strange pleasure to be derived from being the proprietor of a situation serious enough to achieve it.

‘You prat,’ he said, more kindly. ‘What are you on about?’

‘She won’t – I don’t really understand it. I don’t know what to do.’

‘She won’t what? Bugger off?’

Ralph nodded.

‘When it first started, I thought she understood it was just a temporary thing. You know, a one-off.’

‘One-off!’ Stephen barked with laughter.

‘You know what I mean,’ said Ralph irritably.

‘All right, all right.
Une
fois
.’ He laughed again.
‘De
temps
en
temps.’

‘I mean, you can’t just
tell
someone, can you? I thought I made it as clear as it could be.’ Ralph shook his head. ‘She came round for dinner and it was quite friendly, but we didn’t exactly hit it off, for God’s sake. I was actually surprised when she
offered
…’

There was a pause, and in it the two of them reached for their glasses.

‘Consummation?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what was it like?’

‘I don’t remember,’ said Ralph stubbornly. ‘I was drunk.’

‘And since then?’

‘All right, I suppose.’

‘Fussy,’ said Stephen, raising his eyebrows.

‘No – well, yes, in a way, except that I don’t really care about all that. I mean, I do care, I want to care, but then she’ll say something and I just—’

‘Don’t give a shit?’

‘If I could see what was in it for her then at least there’d be something to, you know, get to grips with, but she doesn’t even seem to like me very much.’ As he said it, Ralph realized that it was true, that it was the most bewildering thing of all. His predicament seemed suddenly more inescapable than ever. Stephen’s face before him was perplexed. ‘That’s it, really. She doesn’t actually like me.’

There was silence, which the noise around them at first amplified and then engulfed. Stephen drained his glass, his head tipped back, his throat pumping.

‘Another?’ he said, standing up with his fingers on Ralph’s glass.

‘Thanks.’

While he was gone Ralph waited anxiously, as if his absence were some kind of judgemental interlude from which he would return with a result.

‘Things have been pretty sweet lately,’ said Stephen when he returned, setting the brimming glasses carefully on the table and sitting down. He stretched contentedly and gave a grinning yawn.

‘That’s good,’ said Ralph. He felt the jolt keenly, the brutal message that Stephen found him tiresome. A feeling of dislike for himself gathered and sluiced coldly over him. ‘Tell me what’s been happening.’

‘The pursuit of pleasure,’ said Stephen vaguely. ‘Grotesque but successful. For the time being, anyway.’

‘What was that problem you mentioned at work?’ said Ralph, driving back his growing awkwardness with
ingratiation
. He felt peeled and exposed. ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘Oh, that. No, not really. They should have seen it coming. They sent me off to do a piece on
girls’
boarding
schools.
Can you imagine?’ He laughed. ‘So I roved for a week through the
groves of girlhood, and my God, there’s some talent there, old boy. Nothing like those speccy dogs they used to recruit from the local brain-bin for our end of term disco.’

‘So what happened?’ interjected Ralph. His voice sounded false with dread.

‘What do you think? One of them took a fancy to me, I invited her up for the weekend, and next thing the
headmistress
dobs me in to the magazine. Slapped hands all round.’

‘How old was she?’

‘Fifteen. Is.’

‘You’re still seeing her?’

‘Doing the school run, as they say. Very hush-hush, though. She’s an enterprising girl.’

‘Right,’ said Ralph despairingly.

Afterwards, they walked through the cold, electric sunlight down the Portobello Road towards Stephen’s flat. The light made Ralph feel fatigued, blinding him, blanching life from his skin. Stephen suddenly extended an arm and patted his shoulder jovially.

‘You’ll be all right,’ he said, looking into the distance like an explorer and wrinkling his eyes.

Ralph felt duly comforted. Stephen always provided him with curious remedies for the injury of his friendship. The bare assertion of his loyalty, their odd bond which had gathered so little to it over the years, was often the only thing which could palliate the pain which Stephen sometimes brought with him. Despite all that they had shared, Stephen still wrought in Ralph a unique discomfort, a feeling of terrible confinement within himself. He wondered now if that was how families felt, all that trapping knowledge, that looming history. Stephen knew too much about his past to believe in the secret alchemy of personal change. In his eyes he, Ralph, could never be more than the sum of Stephen’s knowledge,
could never escape the arithmetic of those redundant selves and conjure himself from the air.

‘Maybe.’

‘Why can’t you just enjoy it?’ cried Stephen, exasperated. ‘You’re a lucky sod. Just enjoy it!’

‘I can’t. I’m not like that.’

‘Then tell her to fuck off!’

Stephen broke suddenly from his side and Ralph watched him run ahead. He began skipping and leaping wildly on the pavement, waving his arms above his head in a sudden deluge of irradiation, while the cackle of his laughter made its contorted flight back to Ralph’s unhappy ears.

Francine’s flat was irrefutably located at the western end of Mill Lane, and much as she might try to clothe the fact in whimsically stated preferences for longer walks to leafier branches of transportation, the Tube station at Kilburn was undeniably her most expeditious point of contact with the outside world. On the occasions – really only once or twice, in fact, and more towards the beginning of things – on which Ralph had come to stay, she had directed him to the longer route, believing that her lair was better approached from the more seductive angle of West Hampstead. He had taken matters into his own hands, of course, by consulting a map, and as seemed often to be the case these days Francine had found her persuasive version of things overridden by the more logical conclusions of research. He had been so serious about it, showing her the map on his arrival and drawing the route with his finger as if she had no idea where the Tube station was, and she was forced to pretend that she hadn’t in order to keep the tedious conversation brief.

‘Actually, I might even have gone a long way round myself,’ he had said, stern with puzzlement. ‘Now that I look at it, this way’s probably quicker.’

While he spoke she had remembered another conversation, with his friend Stephen at the party, and it had kindled in her
a flicker of pleasure and irritation. He had asked her where she lived and when she said West Hampstead he had laughed.

‘That’s Kilburn to the likes of me,’ he had said, winking at her conspiratorially so that she had laughed too.

She preferred to stay at Camden anyway, for the dawning of truth over her own home had illuminated other things alongside its unpleasant location to place it irremediably into disfavour. These days the flat didn’t seem nearly as nice as Ralph’s, and even the masculine flavour of his bathroom – the only thing which, in the early days, had made her long to be back amongst her impedimenta – had been sweetened with the transportation of a half share of her abundant bottles and jars to its shelves. Ralph evidently hadn’t understood the rationale behind the relocation of her things – including several key elements of her wardrobe – and kept asking her if it was really necessary.

‘It’s not like you’ll be staying here that often,’ he had said. ‘And what will you do on the nights when you’re at home?’

She had explained to him, faintly touched by his concern, that what he saw was merely an emergency consignment of the greater stockade which remained in West Hampstead, and besides, as Janice had said when Francine told her of their difficulties, the proper maintenance of a beauty routine constituted an effort from which both parties benefited.
Francine
was surprised to suspect that Janice didn’t think much of Ralph, although on the few occasions they had met she had certainly made a point of giving the opposite impression. She would drift around the flat in a silk robe when Ralph was there, asking him if he wanted anything and putting her hand on his arm. Once, Francine had been disturbed to notice that Janice’s robe had come loose at the front, and when she bent over Ralph to give him a cup of coffee it became clear that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Ralph had looked uncomfortable, but his eyes had flown through the gap just
the same, and Francine had decided there and then to reduce their visits to West Hampstead. It was Ralph, in fact, who ensured her continuing appearances at home with his frequent appointments with himself. Two or three times a week he would declare that he needed to be ‘on his own’, and Francine, at first thinking that the request referred to a fashionable occupation of which she had been unaware, and only later seeing the slight it made against her company, was eventually forced to take matters into her own hands. She pre-empted him with arrangements of her own, both fictitious and
concrete
, which meant that she was unable to see him as often as he didn’t want to see her.

Things weren’t perhaps going as well as she had hoped, and feeling increasingly certain that Ralph was harbouring one or two criticisms – whose presence she caught leaking through his manner, even if she couldn’t exactly identify their source – of her, she permitted herself some grudges of her own. He was so boring, never wanting to go out except to see films, and even then only films in which nothing much seemed to happen either and of which the girls at work had never heard. He was always reading, too, even though she had been brought up to think that it was rude to read when there was someone else in the room. She had told him that once, enjoying the thought of how he would react to her knowing more about manners than he did.

‘Why is it rude?’ he had said, sounding more interested than perturbed. He hadn’t even put down his book when she said it, just lowered it a couple of inches so that he could see her.

‘It just is. It’s bad manners.’

‘What, like burping?’ He began to laugh. ‘Or picking one’s nose?’

‘It’s not like you have to do it,’ she had replied, disgruntled. ‘You’re not revising for an exam or anything.’

Her aversions, though, were the product of slightly
unnatural
impulses: it was easy to cultivate indifference in an atmosphere of intense interest, but the business was thwarted by unfriendly conditions and Francine found her stratagems ailing and refusing to yield. She would make accusations of his dullness or his unwillingness to take her out, or give displays of restlessness in the evenings, to which he would respond unnervingly.

‘Feel free to go out if you’re bored,’ he would say, rooting himself more firmly behind his newspaper. ‘I won’t mind at all.’

The proliferation of her freedom, the suggestion that it could be returned to her at any time, undeniably cheapened the commodity. It was hard to hold Ralph accountable for the fact that he rarely went out, that he didn’t particularly like to spend money, and that he didn’t come accompanied by a glittering entourage of friends, when he seemed willingly to accept the charge. What was easier was to suspect that he had conspired to give the impression of his glamour – his elegant flat, his educated manner, even his invitation to the party at which she had met him, where her own presence had been importunate; all of this had suggested the existence of greater things, a whole world of which this was merely the residue! – and, easier still, that this now-punctured illusion rendered his ability to resist her a sign not of the refinement of his tastes but of their mediocrity. This was her most substantial
complaint
– the fact that Ralph didn’t appear to be infatuated with her – and it was also the most difficult to lodge. The decline of his character in the light of his failure to find her enchanting was inevitable, but her own disaffection offered little hope for progress against the current of his. Her self-love would occasionally rally from his blows and return with zealous contempt for its injury; but eventually she would subside into paralysis, the helplessness of realizing that, being
apparently unable to attain what she wanted, she might have to settle for what was being offered.

Leaving Ralph’s flat sometimes in the mornings, she would catch people looking at her as she walked to the Tube station and would touch her face secretly with her fingers or strain to get a glimpse of it in passing shop windows, sure that some deformity must be drawing their attention. It was often several hours before the gloom of Ralph’s indifference dispersed and Francine realized that the glare from which she shrank was nothing but the friendly sun of admiration. Even the mirror seemed to have lost something of its magic, and Francine would wonder with a lurch of bereavement if her most companionable and delighting ally – herself – was gone for ever.

‘He’s dark,’ concluded Janice, when Francine revealed to her something of her troubles. ‘I knew it from the start. He’s crying inside. Look out for post-nasal drip – it’s supposed to be a sign of life-sorrow.’

Francine tried to enjoy the approval of those in her path, gleaning from it the confirmation of Ralph’s stupidity, and she had recently had the idea that when next she became the subject of concerted advances, her acceptance of them would provide the final triumph. Sitting at her desk, though, she would feel a yawning emptiness in her thoughts when she tried to consider her possibilities and would long for the return of their once-bright clutter. In these moments she could take no pleasure from the cheerful lust of the men who came into the office or the longing eyes which met her when she went out to buy her sandwich. She had lost the taste for her own imagination and it was suddenly hard to believe in the adventures it haltingly enacted. It was not love for Ralph, she was sure, which depressed her. She had never supposed herself to be in love with anybody, although she was prepared to accept that they might be in love with her. No, it was the
suspicion, which daily gathered more evidence to it, that in Ralph’s eyes she lacked something which was dragging her with unjust fingers down into its pit. Why she didn’t run from it, loosen its grip with a minute’s denial that she cared what he thought, was a question she heard only faintly. Her motives were listless things, grown diffident from her failure to
examine
them, and while once she had enjoyed the recumbent ease with which she could drift along with only the force of others’ desires to fuel her, she now found herself unable consequently to propel herself away from danger. She had finished affairs certainly, in the past, but it had always been easy:
someone
new had arrived to rescue her, or she had merely woken one day to find herself liberated by boredom or the facility of change. The infliction of pain, besides, was often a source of pleasure, reflecting as nothing else could the real depth and accuracy of her penetration, and she had found that the pinnacle of a man’s interest could be recognized by her own sudden natural impulse to flight once she had arrived at it.

Had Ralph been repellent to her in the way so many other men now were, she might have found it easier to escape from him; but her inability to understand him grounded her, and the more he eluded her faculties, the more resolved she became to better him. He had somehow succeeded in belittling those past conquests of which she had once been so proud, although she hadn’t told him much about them. It was in her own thoughts that she judged them, shrank from their
coarseness
or their stupidity, pitied the ease with which she had mastered them. He had raised a standard to which he evidently had no interest in conforming, made her dissatisfied with what she had, and yet refused to palliate her new appetites. As much as she tried to satisfy herself with thoughts of his dullness, his stiff manner, his unfashionable pursuits, the memory of his face would occasionally fill her thoughts
when they were apart and she would feel a contraction in her chest which, like hunger, would direct her to seek him out. She liked to look at his face, in fact, and sometimes would forget herself for several minutes whilst looking. It seemed odd to her to do that, and the naked sensation it gave her revealed what appeared to be glimpses of her own
worthlessness
. She had confided to Janice that she and Ralph didn’t speak the same language, and it was true. His sensibility felt awkward in her mouth when she tried it, and he didn’t seem to understand the meaning of anything she said, either.

Lately she had begun to feel a deeper, more pressing anxiety which occasionally drew itself through her stomach in a slender, nervous thread. She had come home one night to find Janice reclining on the sofa with a hot-water bottle clutched in her arms, regarding her midriff with a look of pained tenderness.

‘Are you ill?’ said Francine. Janice’s ailments were frequent and vague, but their interpretation nevertheless dramatic. She would complain of energy blocks and decentralization,
mysterious
agues for which lengthy meditations on their probable causes was often the only cure.

‘I’m coming on,’ said Janice dully.

Francine had only ever heard her mother use that expression, and the moment was a confusing one, suggesting as it did unthought of affiliations between people she had considered unconnected. In that second of disjointedness, that temporary blank, an idea insinuated itself in Francine’s mind. She stared at Janice, wondering how so large a piece of her, as dependable and unexamined as an arm or leg, could have gone missing without her noticing. She stood silently, all her efforts bent on the attempt to remember the last time she had seen her own blood, to track down recent scenes of its inconveniences and look at them afresh for evidence. Before long she had located a few minutes in a ladies’ toilet
somewhere
,
caught by surprise and pushing coins into a dispenser. Where had it been? It certainly wasn’t Lancing & Louche, for she remembered looking in a small mirror afterwards which couldn’t be mistaken for the opulent wall of glass at the office.

‘You could make some tea,’ said Janice irritably from the sofa. ‘I can’t get up.’

Francine went to the kitchen. The toilet had been at Mr Harris’s office. She had been surprised to find a dispenser there, although the only thing it provided was a giant white slab, an ancient relic like a mammoth’s tooth. She tried to number the weeks in her mind by means of their highlights, but they became blurred and resistant to her arithmetic and eventually she reached for her diary. The intractable
symmetry
of the pages caused her heart to clench with fear as she leafed backwards in search of Mr Harris. It was impossible that so much time should have passed, and yet the entries she glimpsed as she retreated week by week seemed horrifyingly distant and unrelated to her, as if they described the life of another person. Finally she found the Monday on which she had started with Mr Harris, and as she saw it remembered that her crisis had occurred on the second day of working there. She retraced her steps to the present moment, counting the weeks. There were just over six of them, and as they sprang up around her she felt the chill of their sudden shadow.

‘Francine!’ called Janice feebly from the sitting-room. ‘Fran
cine
!’