And in the end it had not been the feral whiff of infidelity that had spelt the end, but the simple death of love. Something he had never reckoned with. Death. Not a diminution or shift of emphasis, a levelling off with which one could have made do, to which one could have adjusted and lived on in a lesser way but tolerably. Not that, but a death so absolute that both knew they could no more spend the rest of their lives with one another than with some unreachable stranger.
And after that he had himself died for a while, or so it seemed. When at last he lifted his head again, and began to look around, Alice Cook had appeared. There had been no ritual, no overtures or manoeuvres; he simply found himself, by mutual agreement, having sex with Alice Cook once or twice a week. Their union had a curious innocence, it seemed to him, but also no history, and no substance.
‘Why did you marry Mum, and not other people?’ Jane had asked him once. Unnerved, he had stumbled through various answers. Because I happened to meet her. Because we found we had various tastes and interests in common. Because I fell in love with her. All of which reasons were true, and mutually dependent. He had seen Jane staring at him as he spoke, glimpsing perhaps the awful capriciousness of life, and he had quickly changed the subject. Not yet; she is only eight.
Approaching the wine bar, he was seized not by panic but self-contempt. The last time I did this sort of thing, he thought, I was about seventeen, and it turned out as unsatisfactorily as one could have expected. At my age, it is contemptible. Furthermore, I have embroiled this poor wretched young woman.
He was early. He found a table, ordered a drink, sat. When, twenty minutes after the appointed time, she still had not arrived, he knew that she had more sense than he did. He called the waitress, paid for his drink, and headed for the door.
Where he collided with her.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I…’
‘Not at all, I was just going to have a look …’
Back to the table. Return of the waitress. Sort out the matter of food and drink. All of which serves to construct a platform, a base, a tenuous sense of companionship.
‘Actually,’ said Sarah Bridges. ‘I may as well be honest – I’d pretty well lost my nerve.’
‘I don’t blame you.’ He checked himself in time – not appropriate to add, I nearly did the same myself.
‘I haven’t done this since I was about sixteen. And even then it was what my mother always told me not to do.’
‘Sensible woman’, said Matthew.
The drinks arrived, creating a diversion. A chequered exchange about the Hebrides, to which Matthew had never been, which petered out. A silence which stretched, approached danger point. Both spoke at once.
‘When you think about it,’ said Sarah Bridges. ‘The usual …’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Matthew began. ‘I’ve always thought …’
She laughed. ‘Go on.’
‘No. Please …’
‘I was only going to say that actually the usual ways you meet people – you know, at work or because you know someone in common or at a party or whatever – are pretty dodgy too, when you come to think about it. I mean, in one’s mother’s sense. Nobody comes tricked out with a guarantee and a list of character references. You have to learn to suss people out as you go along, and I suppose the thing is that if you’ve got any sense you get better at it as you get older.’ She gave him, at this moment, a cool and level look. Making the point, presumably. Her eyes were brown, he saw, with curious little green flecks.
‘Oddly enough,’ said Matthew, ‘I was about to say much the same thing. I’ve always thought random association as promising – or as potentially disastrous – as anything else. One of my best friends is a man I met because we drove into each other on a roundabout.’
‘Whose fault was it?’
‘His. Or so I maintain. We still argue about it occasionally.’
‘I like that,’ said Sarah Bridges. ‘But what an incredible piece of luck. The only people who’ve driven into me have been couriers on motorbikes, who might have been nice people I suppose but I never really got to find out, and a van driver who was absolutely horrid.’
‘It really arose because we discovered we both liked playing squash and hadn’t got anyone to play with. I was on my way to a squash club at the time and …’ Heavens, he thought, enough of this.
‘I’m afraid I can’t play squash.’
‘I’ve given it up now anyway.’
‘I don’t do any sports,’ she said. Nailing her colours to the mast, evidently. ‘I rather like going for long walks, but that’s all.’
Matthew admitted to watching the occasional game of cricket. She gave a noncommittal nod; possibly awarding a black mark.
‘Very occasional,’ said Matthew. ‘In search of fresh air as much as anything.’
And here, now, was the food, supplying a further interval, a break for inspection and assessment. She wore a blue striped dress, Matthew now noted – no jewellery except a silver locket which sat neatly in the pit of her throat. Those wings of brown hair against the cheeks. He addressed himself sternly to his plate, caught out in a glance across the table.
‘Is yours all right? I haven’t been to this place for some time.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘It’s a feast. I usually just have a sandwich. In my office, if it’s raining.’
Her office, it transpired, was in one of those little streets near the British Museum. She was deputy editor of a magazine for connoisseurs and collectors of furniture and objets d’art.
‘I’m an architect,’ said Matthew.
‘I know.’ A touch of reproof in her tone. ‘It says so on your card. What are you building at the moment?’
And so he told her. Cobham Square. Frobisher House. He mentioned the glass engraving. And, lo and behold! it turns out that she knows of Eva Burden, that last year she had to seek out photographs of her work to illustrate a series of articles on glass engraving past and present. A small piece of common ground has been pegged out, they are taming the great wilderness of each other’s experience and concerns. They are no longer talking, quite, as total strangers.
‘A year ago,’ said Sarah. ‘I could have told you all about the history of glass engraving techniques. When I was editing those articles I could have reeled off names and dates. And now I’ve forgotten almost all of it. That’s the trouble with my job – I become an extremely temporary expert on one thing after another. Just now I know about bellarmines. Do you know what a bellarmine is?’
‘No,’ said Matthew, lying. Because it was becoming more and more agreeable just to listen to her. Because listening you could also look, and learn. You could note that the right hand incisor tooth is slightly chipped (and what is the history of that?), learn that she has occasionally the very slightest hint of a stammer. That her eyebrows are neatly arched, that her fingers seem exceptionally long, that she uses her hands to emphasize a point.
‘Are you really interested in all this?’ She came to an abrupt halt, catching him out in mid-contemplation.
He said that he most certainly was.
‘Hmn. I suspect you’re just being polite. Frankly I’m not sure how interested I am. It’s just that it happens all to be in my head at this moment. Which doesn’t give me the right to inflict it on other people. Perhaps you should tell me what’s in your head.’
No, that would not be a good idea. If, indeed, it could be put into words at all. Adroitly, Matthew sidesteps.
‘I could tell you about various things I’m bothered with just now which are in fact far less interesting than bellarmines, such as the distance between balusters of a staircase, and the price of sheet glass, but I don’t think I will. On the other hand, if we’re trading esoteric information I could possibly cap the bellarmines. I was thinking about dinosaurs on my way here. I came through Lincoln’s Inn Fields.’
‘I often eat my sandwiches there,’ said Sarah.
‘Oh, do you?’
‘No dinosaurs
in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, surely?’
‘Strictly speaking, no. But the Royal College of Surgeons was once the home of the Victorian palaeontologist Richard Owen and, such is the power of association, I can never walk past it without conjuring up dinosaurs. What was bothering me just now was that I couldn’t remember if an ichthyosaurus is a swimming creature or a sloshing about in the swamps creature.’
‘I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. I’m totally ignorant about dinosaurs. They don’t rate very high with antique furniture connoisseurs. I could look it up for you – they’ve kitted us out with a terrific range of reference books.’
Matthew accepted the offer with enthusiasm.
‘Ichthyosaurus. I hope I don’t forget it. Actually, I’ve never heard of Richard Owen. Is that very ignorant?’
‘Not in the least,’ said Matthew. ‘I only happen to because I took my daughter to the Natural History Museum last month.’ And thus arises the opportunity for various other cards to be laid discreetly, deftly upon the table. Matthew’s domestic situation: Susan; Jane. Sarah’s: unattached, hint of a liaison discontinued at some point in the recent past. But these matters are dropped, merely, upon the checked cloth, allowed to rest there briefly alongside the empty plates (Matthew realizes that he must, all this while, have been eating, without being conscious of so doing) and then whisked away before they can become portentous. This is not the moment.
She has a flat in Hackney. She plays the violin (badly) and sings in an amateur choir. She has firm opinions and takes account of an alternative point of view with her head slightly tilted, and an expression of faint severity. She is fatally susceptible to chocolate mousse; she drinks in moderation, she wears glasses for reading (fished from the maelstrom of the untidiest handbag Matthew has ever glimpsed). The sun, when it falls across her arm, lights up a fine pelt of golden hairs.
And suddenly the meal had wound to a close. They had finished their coffee. A brief tussle over the bill (‘But I owe you a sandwich …’) which Matthew managed to win. She glanced at her watch: ‘I shall have to …’
They were in the street. Why not, he suggested – casually, craftily – walk through Lincoln’s Inn Fields? It’s hardly out of your way. And so they did. Over the road and onto the path under the trees, among the great gnarled antediluvian feet of Platanus X hispanica Muenchh. And, walking beside her, under the shifting branches, over the brocaded sun and shadow of the grass, in the great green bowl of the square, Matthew experienced a surge of uplift, of anticipation, of well-being. Be careful, he told himself. Stop this. There is no reason, no justification. The whole place was lit up, it seemed – the sparkling buildings, the bright clothes of passers-by, the iridescent pigeons. He wanted to share with her his exuberance, to offer her the whole of it, to see it with her eyes and for her to look through his. He wanted, violently, to tread the world again with someone else.
They pause to inspect the memorial to Margaret Macdonald, who ‘took no rest from doing good.’ Sarah points out her favourite lunch-time bench, admits with a laugh to proprietorial indignation when others have reached it first. They linger for a minute to watch the tennis players. And there, of course, is the Royal College of Surgeons. ‘Ichthyosaurus,’ she says. ‘Is that right?’ It is indeed, Matthew replies. She moves away to throw a newspaper into a litter bin; a crowd of schoolchildren come jostling past, separating them. And Matthew waits, looking up at the windows of the Royal College.
*
He lays down his pen, and stares out at the trees, which he does not see. In his head are stones, bones and words. He takes up the pen again, and writes: ‘… a compensation for the want of horizontality of their tail fin was provided by the addition of a pair of hind paddles, which are not present in the whale tribe. The vertical fin was a more efficient organ in the rapid cleaving of the liquid element, when the ichthyosaurs were in pursuit of their prey, or escaping from an enemy …’
He becomes aware of a presence at his side, of a gentle pressure on his arm, of the chink of china. His wife has brought him a cup of tea. He sighs, and surfaces, leaving the ichthyosaur to cleave the Jurassic seas; he returns to 1858 and three-thirty of an August afternoon, in which his wife is trying to discuss with him the matter of the coal merchant’s bill, and at what hour they should leave for the theatre, and invites approval of a purchased footstool. He considers the footstool, which is covered with a wool embroidered motif of entwined acanthus leaves. ‘Very nice, my dear,’ he says. He lays his hand upon his wife’s, and feels her warmth, the blood rushing beneath her skin, the life of her.
The flock of schoolchildren has passed, and Matthew looks around for Sarah Bridges. He cannot see her. He scans the path in each direction; she is nowhere. What has happened? Surely she has not walked off – just like that? There has been some mistake. Those children … She must have thought he was heading for the road. He dashes to the pavement. Dashes back. Makes a tour of the tennis courts, returns to where he was before. Gazes in all directions.
She is gone. With nothing said, no arrangement made. Whether by accident or design he cannot know. Digested again by the city, which surges around him now, uncaring, pressing about its business. As must he, the afternoon half gone. And drained now of that brilliance, that promise. He crosses the square once more and makes for the tube station.
‘We got back last night,’ says Jane. ‘We drove for hours and hours and we had lunch and tea at motorway places. I’m all brown. I caught five mackerels and a sort of flat fish.’ In the background, Matthew can hear Susan’s heels click across the room; she speaks. ‘What? Mum says could you fetch me on Friday evening instead of Saturday because she’s going to the theatre with Simon. We went sailing all day twice and had picnics on the boat and I helped pull the ropes.’ There is a fractional pause; Susan, perhaps, has spoken again. ‘Did you have a nice time on your holiday?’
He went to see his mother, at this hinge of the year, suspended between summer and autumn, with the days inching forward, cooling down, misting over. She led him immediately into the garden to pick the apples for her from the tree which he remembered as being, once, no taller than himself.
‘When did you put this tree in, Mum?’
‘Two years after we moved here. You’re missing out those on that branch at the back. Mind, what I’ll do with all these I don’t know. Maybe you should take some for your lady friend.’
He looked down at her, startled.
‘You said last month there’s a person you see.’
‘Ah. Yes. She’s not really the type that would make chutney, I’m afraid.’
‘Then it’ll have to be the neighbours.’
He carried the baskets into the kitchen for her and sat at the table, helping to sort the fruit. ‘Put the wormy ones into that box. She’s not the domestic type, then?’
‘Nothing’s going to come of it, Mum, if that’s what you’re wondering.’
Her lips were pursed, as always when she was intent upon an issue. ‘I’ll tell you something. A couple of years after your father died I thought of setting up with someone again. There’s a man I know that comes to our church – nice fellow, widower. And he had it in mind, I could tell. I only had to give him an opening.’ She shot Matthew a canny glance. ‘You didn’t know that, did you?’
‘I certainly didn’t, Mum.’ And why should he feel so shocked, perturbed, put out? What could have been more natural, more to be wished for?
‘I’d nothing against him, and you’re not looking for romance when you’re sixty-eight. He’d have been company, someone to tell your troubles to, have a laugh with. But then the more I thought about it the more I came to think I’d be better off the way I was. It’s not easy, adjusting yourself to another person. All the more when you’re older, both of you.’ She shot him another look. ‘Put those bruised ones in with the wormy ones. Anyway, the point I’m making is, maybe we shouldn’t be so set on all the world being paired off. You can be as miserable with someone else as on your own. But I dare
say I don’t need to be telling you that.’
He said nothing, attending to the apples.
‘Time was, if a woman was single, or a man either, come to that, people wondered what had gone wrong. Well, things have changed, as far as I can see, and about time too. I miss your father every day of my life, but I can manage on my own. If I can’t have him I don’t want someone else for the sake of it. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this really. Just I wouldn’t want to see you do something you might regret.’
‘What was his name?’ Matthew asked, after a moment.
‘Who? Oh, him. Trevor Stewart. And it’s all water under the bridge. I see him from time to time. He drops in and cuts the grass for me every so often.’
‘Oh, does he? There’s no need for that. I can cut the grass when I come over.’
‘You’ve got enough on your plate,’ said Mrs Halland crisply. ‘And he’s the sort of man that needs something to fill his time with. I’m doing him a favour. Put the kettle on, will you – we’ve earned a cup of tea.’
‘Sarah Bridges is not available at the moment …’
He rang off, unnerved. Why should it be marginally worse to risk making a fool of yourself to a machine than to a human listener?
Graham Selway telephoned. ‘Good to see you the other day. You must drop by Spitalfields more often. Can I pick your brains for a moment?’
‘Go ahead.’
They discussed a conversion that Graham was currently working on. ‘Thanks a lot – that’s a help. How’s the city of the future? Incidentally – there’s some ugly business going on in connection with that site I took you to have a look at. Remember?’
‘I remember,’ said Matthew.
‘Apparently it’s become a battleground between would-be developers. Principally Glympton’s and some rather shady outfit run by a character called Rutter, who’s apparently started operating in a big way of late. They’ve both been buying up as hard as they can, Glympton’s having the edge so far, or so the word goes. But Rutter acquired five or six strategically placed properties and has been busy winkling the tenants out, it seems – they’re mostly Bengali sweatshop people. And a couple of them have been sticking – holding out. Presumably the poor things don’t have anywhere else to go. Well, early this week there was a fire at one of these places, in the middle of the night. An awful business with a couple of children trapped in an upstairs room. They got one of them out, but a little boy was suffocated by the smoke. Ghastly. And the word going round is that it was an arson job. Police enquiries and all that, of course, but it doesn’t look as though they’ll be able to pin it on anyone. I’d hardly believe it myself, except that I’ve seen these bully boys about, collecting rents or whatever. Not people you’d want to tangle with. It makes the flesh creep, doesn’t it? Matthew? You still there?’