Unsure of his welcome, Buzz edged slyly into the flat, concealing his nervousness by a manner at once sinuous and ramshackle. He narrowed his eyes to peer round furtively to see how things had changed; he saw a room like a nursery abandoned just as the children had left it when they went to school, filthy, full of broken things, the furniture scattered about the floor in a disorderly, careless fashion and dirty clothes spilling out of the bedroom everywhere. He was quite satisfied.
‘Hi, Alyosha,’ he said to his brother and sat down on the floor against the wall at his old, Euclidian angle. He exchanged one or two thin remarks with his brother who sat at the table marking third-form essays on aspects of current affairs and then he and Annabel began again their endless conversation of silences and allusions as if there had been no real intermission in it. She was unusually lively and laughed a little from time to time but she did not try her new smile on Buzz for she thought he would see through it immediately. She and Buzz began to smoke and the sweet, heavy odour drifted through the motes dancing on the air, mingling harmoniously with the rich smell of old clothes in the room.
It grew so close and hot that Lee pulled off his shirt. Buzz saw the tattoo at once and turned his eyes to Annabel with open admiration in them; they both broke into peals of derisive laughter and Buzz kept glancing at the mark from time to time in amazed mockery. Once, before Lee acknowledged any difference between what he did and how he responded to it, he had witch-doctored Buzz to tranquillity from one of his sporadic attacks of hysteria by locking him securely in his arms, according to the usual practice, down on the floorboards which had then been white and bare, not smothered up with ragged rugs as they were now. Annabel crouched watching by the fire and, when Buzz finally slept, she came and lay down beyond him, stretching out her hands over his shoulders to caress Lee wistfully and, as she did so, she drowned both brothers in cascades of her pre-Raphaelite hair. That was the only time all three spent the night together.
‘Oh God,’ said Lee to himself in horror. ‘Was that where I went wrong?’
But he could not bear to think that she might desire them both because she thought they were incomplete without each other. He was jealous only of the shared secrets at which they hinted with every glance but, even so, his jealousy was as bitter and humiliating as that which had tortured Buzz during the nights when Lee and Annabel first made love beyond the thin partition. Buzz knew this and was happy. Lee went on marking his books in angry disquiet for now he found he himself had become the sullen interloper; and, at this point, his brother and his wife might themselves have believed they could exclude him from their plottings. But the plot was woven solely to exclude him and so he remained negative but essential.
The sunlight occupied less and less of the room as evening drew on. Lee finished his marking, put on his shirt and prepared to go out for Buzz’s lean face grew more and more viciously malign and the heavy air breathed antagonism. But Buzz and Annabel got to their feet, also, as if mutually consenting to carry on the torment a little longer, and they drifted downstairs together, out into the golden evening. In the street, Buzz took care to walk between Lee and the girl to emphasize how emphatically he divided them. But still they would not let Lee go.
‘I need a drink,’ said Lee sharply.
Fortunately, there was a group of old acquaintances gathered already in the saloon bar so all three could take their places among them as in the old days and pretend for a while that nothing was happening. The girl, Carolyn, sat with her new lover and saw the Collins brothers and their wife come in. She had not seen Lee since the night Buzz broke her nose. She had hoped she would never see any of them again, trailing behind them their slimy snail trails of squalid passion. Lee recognized her and saw how ostentatiously she refused to look at him; he was glad of that for he was in no mood to cope with further complexities.
The bar was crowded with men and women, many of whom he knew and had often talked with in the past. He sat at a table around which were seated people who might think of themselves as friends of his but who seemed devoted solely to the pursuit of contactless sociability, as if this was the best that could be hoped for from human intercourse, gossiping away as if their lives depended on it and, a few feet away, sat a woman who had loved him once and was still so disturbed to find herself unexpectedly in his presence that she refused to acknowledge him. His wife stared into the middle distance in a state, apparently, of luminous vacancy; her lips drooped open a little in half a smile and Lee remembered coming home and finding her in tears because he was not beside her. In the earliest days of their association, her presence had seemed the key to all enigmas; now she was an enigma herself. She was the only one amongst the whole crowd to whom Lee wished to speak but he could find not one word to say to her.
In the course of a spirited conversation which expressed nothing but a common need to pass the time, Buzz reached out his hand and grasped a lock of Annabel’s hair. Everybody noticed but everybody went on talking with redoubled vigour. As, entirely without surprise, she turned to Buzz, he drew her towards him by his handful of her hair and kissed her for a long, long time. Then he pushed back his chair and rose; she took his hand and they went out together. As soon as they were outside the bar, they embraced again. Their single, merged silhouette flashed up against the glass door and vanished.
They left a vivid hush behind them. The disruption of decorum took place so abruptly nobody was in the least prepared for it or knew how the gaping hole in the fabric of everyday behaviour could possibly be repaired. Some kinds of collective embarrassment reach such an orgasmic peak the participants cannot recover easily from the crisis and relapse into prolonged discomfort. Those around the table fumbled with their beer mats and avoided the sight of the presumably outraged husband who lost face so entirely he no longer looked in the least as anybody remembered him, for his mouth was twisted in a vile, cynical grin and his reddened eyes were angry as raw wounds. He pulled himself to his feet, knocking over a chair.
‘Don’t –’ said a woman, clutching at his sleeve; the Collinses were famous for their violent passions. He remembered how useful his dazzling smile had been in emergencies and, after an immense effort, produced it again.
‘It’s all right, ducks, I haven’t the slightest desire to do him over,’ he said with as much poise as he could. The atmosphere began to ease. The brothers’ reputation for picturesque and shameless behaviour made the event more acceptable, a public confession of private deviances their friends had always suspected.
Lee wove his way through the crowded tables, nodding and smiling to acquaintances as he went; he managed to put on a fairly adequate show of insouciance but once he found himself in the open air he collapsed against the wall and slid to the ground. After a while, the gentle pressure of a hand on his shoulder announced the presence of the girl, Carolyn. He was not surprised to see her but guessed she intended to comfort him. This made him suspicious of her. She sat down on the ground beside him and did not say anything for a while. It was a beautiful evening; the sky was deep green with a lonely star or two. He looked at Carolyn sideways and was pleased to see her nose had mended perfectly without leaving any kind of scar.
‘It was terrible of them to do that to you,’ she said. She construed the event in the bar according to the motives she ascribed to Annabel whom she still saw as impelled by a need to punish and shame Lee because of Lee’s affair with herself, a perfectly natural interpretation even if quite wrong. She hardly bothered to concern herself with Buzz’s motives for she did not know him well and concluded only that he was sick, which excused everything and made it unnecessary to look further for causes of his aberrations. Lee had no desire to discuss his brother’s abduction of his wife. He tried to change the subject. He cleared his throat.
‘I saw you with that bloke, I thought you weren’t speaking to me.’
‘I was afraid you might do something stupid so I came out, just to see you, to see you were all right.’
‘Something stup
id such as what?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, faltering a little for he seemed so calm and reasonable violence was out of the question, and she might have followed him only from a need to reinstate herself with him. Because this might, in fact, be so, she grew a little uneasy but Lee wanted to illuminate the situation for her in depth. He was deceived by her concern and thought it was for Annabel, since Annabel was his principal concern, and we always think that others must have the same compulsive interest in our private perturbations as we do ourselves.
‘She’s probably bitten off more than she can handle, see. I’ve known him longer than she has, I know all sorts of things about him she’s never bothered herself with and probably wouldn’t understand, anyway, like how he feels about our mum, for instance. Our mum, see, she thought he was the Anti-Christ, he was only so high and she thought he leaked out poisons.’
He noticed his schoolteacher accent had vanished completely and found himself talking to Carolyn with the frantic desperation of the lonely; he gave her a last, explanatory sentence and stopped short, from pride.
‘But I can’t stop her trying it with Buzz, if she wants.’
‘Then why are you crying?’ For his eyes were watering, partly due to the smoke in the bar.
‘Of course I’m crying,’ he snapped. She misunderstood him completely for she did not know about his eye infection and took his tears at face value. She spoke in a muffled, distantly disappointed voice for it is always hard to acknowledge one has been a second-string lover, even when the affair is over.
‘You really do love her, don’t you?’
Whether he did or not seemed entirely beside the point to Lee and he snarled at her: ‘Shall we discuss it?’ Carolyn picked at a thread in her skirt, chilled at his unexpected irritation, and Lee remorsefully put his arm round her and drew her against his shoulders. She rested her cheek thankfully against his throat but did not look up at him and, after a while, spoke his name rather sadly.
‘Lee . . .’
‘Yeah?’
‘I had an abortion.’
‘Well,’ said Lee, at a loss. ‘Well, well.’
There was a pause. During this pause, a very pure moon sailed into the sky. It was now as difficult as it was necessary to carry on the conversation.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What could you have done?’
‘I dunno. Given you money or something. Been supportive in some way.’
He tried to normalize the revelation by giving her a brilliant smile but still she kept her eyes fixed on her fingertips and did not see it.
‘Is that all you can say?’ she said in a low, almost a choking voice. It seemed to her Lee had forcibly subjected her to monstrous excesses of fear, pain and feeling which, now all was over between them, were like memories of a trip to another planet and she needed a little reassurance that the excursion had not been a waste of time, for surely what had happened to her had been significant; only, she did not know in the least what it could have meant.
‘What do you want me to say?’ asked Lee gently for he was prepared to say anything that would comfort her if it meant she would go away more quickly and leave him by himself.
‘Oh, please,’ she said. ‘I did love you, really, I did.’
Whether she said this because it was true or because the confession or reminder of the connection which, however briefly, had existed between them might be a clue to the meaning she sought, she did not know; nevertheless, it was a kind of coercion which Lee’s sentimentality could not withstand. He began to feel sadly protective towards her.
‘When did you find out you were pregnant?’
‘Just before Easter. It couldn’t have been anyone but you,’ she added wistfully. Lee’s sadness turned into misery.
‘She was still in the madhouse, then. Was that why you didn’t tell me?’
‘Yes,’ she said with a sudden plucky little jerk of the head that implied hitherto unexplored dimensions of feminine grit. Lee experienced an instant revulsion.
‘That was terribly, terribly brave and thoughtful of you,’ he said so sardonically she was shocked. He decided to undervalue her self-sacrifice as much as he was able.
‘I’ll tell you what I’d have done if you’d told me. I’d have left Annabel for good and gone to live with you, if you wanted me to, that is, and looked after you and the kid and so on to the best of my ability. Yeah, that’s what I’d have done.’
She did not believe him at all.
‘Come now,’ she said with a certain irony for she knew she herself had acted for the best. ‘What would you really have done?’
‘Oh, it’s all hypothetical. That was then and this is now and how can I tell what I would have done, really? I might have moved in with you, that might have been my duty. On the other hand, I might have jumped into the river to escape my conflicting obligations.’
‘You’ve become terribly bitter,’ she said.
‘At least mad people don’t talk such banalities,’ he complained fretfully, annoyed by the implication she herself had remained unembittered by misfortune.
‘You never cared for me at all, not seriously,’ she said. Lee was quite befogged by a dialogue taking place in a language he did not fully understand for it was that of defensive emotional exploration. He shook his head to clear it and tried to answer her with a satisfactory degree of truth.
‘It was like as if you offered me a one-way ticket to normalcy. So of course I cared for you. And I would have lived with you, if you would have had me.’
At that moment, it seemed to him very likely he would indeed have done so, had it not been quite impossible. His voice was so steady and serious she was completely convinced by him and felt an immense nostalgia for her unnecessary misery; besides, he was still beautiful enough and, at the moment, sufficiently pitiable to move her. On the other hand, he was no longer a constant presence in her life but only a visitor from a time that was now gone for good; he was a revenant who no longer affected her. She reverted to the theme of his public humiliation for it was all there was left to talk about.
‘It was terrible of them to do that to you.’
Lee shifted his attention back to his brother and his wife.
‘It’s ironic, yes.’
‘I’ve got someone else to love, you know,’ she said almost apologetically and that, too, was ironic.
‘Go back to your new bloke, then. He’ll be wondering what’s become of you.’
But she could not leave him alone.
‘Where shall you go?’
‘Back home and wait for her.’
Carolyn was astonished.
‘Wait for her?’
‘Oh, she’ll be back,’ said Lee with a certain melancholy. ‘She’ll be back in a state of anguish in about two hours’ time, I reckon, though possibly a little before.’
‘Oh, darling, do come back with us,’ she said with well-bred solicitude for she could patronize him now he was helpless. ‘I don’t like to think of you, deserted, in that dreadful flat.’
Either because she had kept an excuse to leave Annabel for good to herself or, perhaps, because he would not stand for criticism of his wife in any circumstances, even if she was out of her wits, Lee now felt richly murderous towards Carolyn. He put on a display of ill-tempered bad taste, pulled himself together and went home.
‘Shall I come back for coffee then? Can we watch television or shall I chat with your bloke about abortion-law reform?’
Buzz and Annabel shared a twined silence until the key turned in the door of the familiar but unknown room, and, for a moment, they interrupted their embrace in a mutual hesitation when they found they had arrived so quickly at the locale of its conclusion. Their surroundings were just as Annabel had imagined them; she checked with a mental inventory the peeling walls, bare and lopsided staircase, fissured linoleum underfoot, foetid accumulated reek of years of the greasy cookery of the poor and the single bulb which meanly leaked a dim light. She found
she had overlooked no desolate detail. She shuddered with anticipation not so much to know she was near to assuaging a longing but that consummation would be accomplished in the place she herself had created for it.
The windows of his room were pasted over with sheets of black paper and the meagre sticks of landladies’ furniture were hidden by the detritus of his obsessions. The stained, brownish wallpaper was pinned everywhere with photographs of Lee and herself, of herself alone and of Lee alone. Lee had once possessed the rare knack of looking exactly like himself when photographed; his self-consciousness made it inevitable. She had not expected to see so many photographs of Lee. They represented, now, a fissure of tiny cracks in her scrupulous imaginary edifice. Nevertheless, she braved out his hundred eyes and stretched at once on the narrow, unmade bed where, as she expected, the sheets were yellow with use. Then began the slow decline of her hopes.