Pauline laughs. ‘Then you’d better move things on to a higher plane and tell me what you’ve been doing.’
Hugh has been across the Atlantic, visiting clients. He tells Pauline about trips to Yale and to Toronto, where he negotiates the sale of rare books to great libraries, and to New York where he acts as a purveyor of choice goodies to a man who collects modern firsts. ‘I’ve just filled the major gap on his shelf,’ says Hugh. ‘A Ulysses in pristine condition.’
‘Does he read them?’
‘Of course not, that’s not what they’re for.’
‘I’ll never really understand bibliophilia,’ says Pauline.
‘Nobody does. Mercifully there’s quite a bit of it around or I’d be out of business. You’re dealing with people who’ve got a bee in their bonnet. Perfectly normal in other respects. The New York fellow is a stockbroker. Stinking rich and an awful bore. He takes me out for a stupendously good dinner but the conversation’s rather heavy going.’
Pauline pictures Hugh on these trips, padding around North American cities in his shabby clothes, with his raincoat over his arm and some arcane treasure in his briefcase. She thinks of him negotiating in air-conditioned offices, eating appreciatively in carefully selected restaurants. Getting into bed in hotel rooms.
‘Where do you stay? In New York, for instance.’
Hugh looks startled, and then faintly embarrassed. ‘Well, as a matter of fact there’s a lady I stay with in New York. I’ve known her for – oh, ten years or more, I suppose. It’s a long-standing arrangement.’
Pauline stares at him.
‘The thing is,’ he goes on, ‘she does the most amazingly good breakfasts. She’s an Italian lady who has a deli on the Upper West Side and she also runs a very informal B & B arrangement for a few regulars. Her waffles are a dream.’
‘Hugh, I do love you,’ says Pauline.
‘I’m quite fond of you too. Is the salmon up to scratch? This pigeon affair is definitely interesting.’
Pauline pays courtesy calls at various publishing houses for which she does editorial work. She sits chatting to a former colleague for a while in the office where once she clocked in daily, tests herself for corporate nostalgia and decides that there is none.
‘How’s our Maurice?’ inquires the colleague.
‘Maurice is in good health, so far as I know.’
‘And how’s the great work coming along?’
‘Very well, I believe.’
‘James Saltash is putting it about that this is going to cause a stir, this tourism book. Controversial. Pulls no punches.’
‘I don’t doubt,’ says Pauline.
‘Interesting guy, Maurice,’ says the colleague, after a moment. She eyes Pauline and veers off in another direction. ‘So you’re dug in down in the sticks for the rest of the summer?’
‘That’s right. I’m watching a field of wheat grow.’
‘Life of Riley, it must be. Unlike the rest of us …’ The colleague embarks with relish on an account of high jinks within the trade, designed perhaps to indicate what a lot Pauline is missing. ‘What are you up to, workwise?’ she asks kindly.
‘Putting commas into a novel about unicorns,’ says Pauline, and takes her leave.
No, she thinks, going down in the lift – no, you can keep it. The hurry and scurry, the wheeling and dealing. The gossip was good – I miss that. The salary cheque was more reliable than a string of small commissions. But you can still keep it.
She walks out of the building, a free woman. She has plenty of work lined up. The unicorns will be succeeded by a gargantuan account of the North Sea oil industry and a travel book on the Caucasus.
Nearly twenty years ago she entered this building – or rather, its predecessor – and became for the first time an employee. Her role was a humble one, and the building was elsewhere, a modest house in a west London street, the home at that point of the imprint which has now fallen into the imperial grasp of a large conglomerate. The house is superseded by a green glass column with a lushly carpeted entrance hall, and few of her former colleagues are still present. But, back then, it was with a tremulous sense of freedom that she had gone to work. She hardly knew what to expect, and wondered if she would be up to it, but she knew that day was a climactic one. The end of dependence, in every sense. She was stepping away from Harry, and into a new country.
Harry went to California, and Pauline went to work. In the event she found not only that she was well up to it but that she was rather better at it than most. Her role did not remain a humble one for long. She grew. She moved on and away. The Harry years fell back, removed into some other dimension, where they exist still as a narrative of which many details are lost, and just a handful of potent moments survive, about which nothing can be done.
Waking that night in her flat Pauline is disorientated. There is some racket outside that should not be there. Then she realizes that she is not at World’s End, that this is the city, and the city talks day and night. People are shouting in the street – incoherent high-pitched abuse that goes on and on, in one voice and then another, an incomprehensible torrential exchange. She goes to the window and sees that the source is a bunch of young girls, adolescents, who eddy back and forth along the pavement, bawling at each other, coming together and drifting apart like a flock of birds. It is one o’clock in the morning. She watches them in dismay, hearing obscenities and hysterical accusations. Are they drunk? High on drugs? At last they drift round the corner and out of sight, their shrieking ebbs away and she goes back to bed, wide awake and insecure. The manic children have unleashed some nameless anxiety of her own and in the morning she has a compulsion to telephone Teresa, even though she is returning to World’s End the next day.
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Could you do me a favour and just check that I left my answering machine on?’ And then, ‘Everything OK?’
‘Fine,’ replies Teresa, perplexed. She has caught a whisper of that anxiety. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Perfectly,’ says Pauline. ‘See you tomorrow.’
9
Pauline looks out of the window – a World’s End window. She is holding Luke, who points – a majestic, whole-hand gesture. ‘Da,’ he observes. There is my father, he is saying. And there indeed is Maurice, standing in the sunshine on the track talking to Carol. Maurice stirs the grass with his foot, and gestures as he speaks. He is presumably in full Maurice spate, engaged on one of those long and often compelling discourses. Carol is idly shucking a head of corn, a green head of Chaundy’s corn which now has soft milky kernels. The sun glints off the neat gold helmet of her hair. She throws back her head and laughs.
An unexceptional scene, one might think. And now here comes James, and after another minute Teresa, and all four stand in the evening sunshine and then move towards the cars. They are going to the pub for a drink. Pauline has volunteered to give Luke his bath and put him to bed, because she will enjoy this and has no desire to join them.
She watches the four of them get into the car. James is driving. Maurice and Carol get into the back. The car moves away down the track. Maurice is still talking, Pauline sees. He has turned sideways towards Carol and his arm lies along the back of the seat behind her.
Pauline takes Luke into the bathroom and sets about the bathing process. She does and says all the things that have to be done and said – the running of the water, the undressing of Luke, the continuous commentary that is necessary to keep Luke happy and cooperative. Luke sits in the bath and bangs small plastic containers around. Pauline kneels on the bath mat with her arms over the side of the bath and demonstrates to Luke the physical properties of water – the qualities of whoosh and splash and pour – while thinking not of these nor indeed of Luke himself but of another child and another time.
The bath in that house in the cathedral town was made of cast iron, with claw feet. Lion’s feet. Lion. That was one of Teresa’s first words. Lion meant bath. The part became the whole. An antediluvian bath. Pauline
has observed that nowadays baths like that are manufactured once again and are displayed in emporia which sell bathroom equipment with very expensive price tags. Back then the possession of such a bath was a stigma. The upwardly mobile young couple aspired to an avocado suite.
Pauline did not aspire to an avocado suite. She had other things to think about in the Victorian house with the lion-footed bath.
She stoops over the high awkward side of the bath and soaps Teresa’s back. She feels the delicate wings of her shoulder blades and then the serration of her ribs. She knows every inch of Teresa’s body – each plane, each groove, each cranny. If something is amiss – a scrape, a bruise, a rash – she feels an instant disquiet. Teresa’s body is somehow more intensely personal than her own. It is as though it were a vulnerable extension of herself that must be protected from the onslaughts that Pauline’s own skin and flesh have come to endure.
She examines a scratch on Teresa’s arm – a pink thread. She sees and registers the scratch and registers also that it is insignificant, but without thought or attention. She cannot think or attend because of what she is feeling, because of the cold void in her stomach, because of the words that run through her head, over and over again.
‘There’s something you ought to know, Pauline,’ says Louise Bennett, who is married to Harry’s colleague Ted Bennett. ‘About Harry. The thing is, apparently – Ted says, everyone in the department is noticing – anyway, the thing is, he’s always with Myra. You know – Myra Sams, from International Relations. She’s always in his office, Ted says. Or they’re in the canteen together. I mean, maybe you already know …’ Louise’s voice trails away.
Pauline likes Louise. At least until that moment Pauline has liked Louise. Now, within three seconds, she no longer likes her. Nor Ted Bennett. Nor everyone in the department. That is all she can think of at this moment – how much she does not like Louise. The rest will come later. Oh, it will come.
‘Yes,’ she says. Quite calm, quite natural. ‘Yes, I expect she is. She’s helping him with his book. He was telling me – the other day. She knows a lot about French nineteenth-century population studies, so that’s very useful to him.’
‘Oh, I see,’ says Louise. ‘Oh, well …’ She looks away. She starts busily to talk of something else. And Pauline hears not a word she says. Not a single word. She can think only of them. Her and him. Him and her. Talking about the book. Smiling at each other. Laughing. Doing whatever it is that they do.
Myra Sams. The first. That is to say, the first so far as Pauline was concerned – the progenitor, the prototype, the only begetter. She who began it all, whose name was the first to prompt that icy trickle within, that creeping nausea.
And where is Myra Sams today? Vanished, extinguished, quite undone. She is neither here nor there – she exists only in Pauline’s head, as an emotive sound. Myra Sams. And indeed it is not her name which has prompted an echo of that time now, as Pauline leans over the World’s End bath to lift Luke to his feet. An echo, a twinge – like the ghost of a toothache when the real thing has gone.
‘Up you get,’ she says to Luke. ‘Out now. Yes, yes. Up and out.’ She swings him up. She wraps him in the towel. She chats, she sings. No, she is thinking. No, no, no. Not again. Not that again.
She looks across the table at Harry. ‘I’ve been burning your book,’ she says.
‘Why? Why?’
‘You know why,’ she says.
Oh, books, books … she tells Luke. Terrible things, books. Cause nothing but trouble. You keep out of the book business, my lad. Commodity dealing for you. Or heart surgery. Or the construction of oil rigs.
She puts Luke into his cot. Luke protests. She fetches his bottle, and he reverts to infancy. He lies there sucking, his eyelids drooping and then jerking open as she backs furtively towards the door. He drops the bottle and wails. Pauline returns to his side, restores the bottle, murmurs reassurances, creeps from the room, reaches the kitchen in time to hear Luke wailing once more.
This process is repeated several times. At last Luke is silent. Pauline plugs in the baby-alarm and settles herself in the sitting-room. She sifts through the pile of books on the table and rejects them all in favour of the newspaper. She reads for a while. Her attention drifts and she looks around the room, which records the presence of its recent occupants. Teresa’s straw hat hangs on the knob of a chair back. Luke’s ball has rolled under the table. On the mantelpiece is an alien pair of sunglasses – reflective with gilt rims – that must belong to Carol. The cream cable-knit sweater slung over the arm of the sofa is presumably James’s – it is far too considered a garment for Maurice. But the rather grubby cotton jacket with a rip in the sleeve does indeed pertain to Maurice.
Pauline waits for them to return. She knows this room intimately. And it is not right tonight. There is a whiff of something feral and disturbing, which is also a reverberation of that continuous elsewhere in the mind. Then and now have become uneasily confused. Simultaneously another Pauline waits in another room, waits for Harry to return from wherever he is and whatever he is doing – from the seminar that he is giving or the counselling of a student or the drink in the bar with a colleague. Or from some other activity which she does not want to think about but must – which she is driven to contemplate in excruciating detail, each image a torment.
She sees them face to face across a table, his hand on hers. She sees them making love, body to body. But most of all she sees them as she did indeed see them last week at a party, on the far side of a room, simply talking. Harry’s back is turned so she cannot see his face, but she sees it through the eyes of Myra Sams and knows precisely what Myra Sams is seeing. She knows the expression that Myra Sams is seeing, the way Harry’s mouth will tilt at one side, that quizzical look with his eyes slightly screwed up, the head a little on one side. It is the look he gives to those he has singled out for close attention. It is the look which once was directed upon her – over restaurant tables, in that car driving across America, in bed. She sees that look, and her insides run cold.
Pauline, Teresa, Maurice, James and Carol are in the grassy car park of this eighteenth-century mansion. Pauline is helping Teresa to stow Luke in the buggy.
‘So what’s your view, Pauline?’ says Maurice. ‘Come and arbitrate. Why do people visit stately homes? We differ. James says it’s just snobbery.’
‘Not quite,’ says James. ‘I said it panders to a need to fantasize. You know – I too might have lived like this – that sort of thing. Personally I just feel resentful. I know damn well where I’d have been living back then – in a hovel. My great-grandfather was a ploughman.’
Carol puts on the gilt-framed sunglasses, which almost engulf her small face. ‘Was he? You’ve never told me that. I think you’re both being far too ideological. People just like looking at nice things. All that plushy furniture and the walls covered in pictures. They like moseying around saying imagine sleeping in a bed like that and look at that amazing staircase and asking if it’s haunted. It’s not envy – it’s just curiosity.’
‘Up to a point,’ says Maurice. ‘But there’s surely an element of voyeurism and there’s certainly a built-in invitation to make comments and social comparisons. It becomes a very complicated experience. You’re confronted by the past, and by unfamiliar objects, and by suggestions of a distinctly alien way of life. People feel challenged. They can’t just look, they have to react as well. And they know this in advance, because they’ve already been sold the concept of the stately home. So …’ he looks provocatively at Pauline, ‘why are all these people here? Why are we here?’
‘Because it’s Saturday,’ says Pauline. ‘And the weekend has to be filled in somehow.’
James laughs. ‘There you are, Maurice! Perfectly simple.’ Maurice grins.
‘Could we move?’ says Teresa. ‘I’m going to have to find their loo first of all. Luke needs changing.’
They proceed along gravelled paths towards the house, which stands complacent amid
carefully arranged trees. They climb the sweep of steps, buy their tickets and sidle away from the sales pitch of the National Trust lady at the door. Maurice has views about the National Trust, which will be given expression in the book. ‘Sufficient unto the day …’ he mutters with relish, aiming a deferential smile at the sales pitcher, who is now directing Teresa to the toilets and asking if she could please leave the buggy by the umbrella rack.
They tour. They move slowly from room to room, inspecting tapestries and china cabinets and elaborate pieces of furniture. Each room is host to a temporary drifting population, which itself becomes a part of the exhibit, so that Pauline finds herself gazing with equal attention at a Japanese couple and at the polished oak fruit and foliage of a carved mantelpiece. The Japanese couple take it in turns to manipulate a camcorder. The mantelpiece juxtaposes pineapples with acorns. Pauline wonders about both. Will she appear on this video, hijacked willy-nilly into some sitting-room on the other side of the world? Did the woodcarver think pineapples grew in the Midlands, or is this an elegant joke of interior decoration? She looks round for the others. Maurice has vanished, having dived off in pursuit of something that has caught his attention, which is what Maurice always does. Carol and James are looking out of the window at the emerald swathe of the lawn. Teresa is trying to interest Luke in a display of Staffordshire dogs.
There are many pictures. Most are concerned in some way with slaughter. In a hunting scene hounds pour decoratively over a hillside; the gay scarlet of the huntsman’s jacket is complemented by the red flash of the fox as it leaps a wall. A still life of dead game birds has pheasants and partridges draped across the gleaming surface of a table, with swags of greenery and some apples strewn around, each detail meticulously rendered, the stippling of a feather, the bony surface of a foot, the smear of blood on a beak.
Pauline cruises these scenes of carnage, and finds Maurice suddenly at her side.