Two months before he met her, she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping tablets but the warden of the hostel where she lived found her in time. At the hospital where she was taken, she exhibited such marked stress symptoms at the suggestion she leave the art school where she was a student and return to her parents that they judged it best to leave her exclusively under the warden’s kindly eye. The warden was a liberal woman in her forties who hoped nothing better for Annabel than that at last she might find someone to love her. Her room-mate at the hostel took her to a party on New Year’s Eve. Annabel sat by herself in a corner and looked, first at some old magazines she found on the floor and, next, at the figures before her in the candlelight. She saw a series of interesting conjunctions of shapes and one or two disturbing faces and then she went to sleep. She woke up again because she was cold.
It was so late that all the lights were out and the candles burned down to stubs. Most of the guests had gone though a couple were making love on a sofa and several others were sleeping on the floor. Annabel was so cold she arbitrarily selected one boy and went to lie down beside him to keep herself from freezing. ‘Whom have we here?’ he said in the morning. Later, the warden visited him and was, of course, charmed; she thought he was sweet-tempered and stable and happily confided Annabel to his care.
He did not expect her to stay with him but she did so. Soon she brought in a record player from her old room. As he had suspected, she liked baroque harpsichord music best of all. He called upon reserves of tact, gentleness and sensitivity formed during his aunt’s last illness to cope with her vagarious moods; she was capable of every shade of melancholy from a sweet sadness to the bleakest despair. He was used to having somebody to care for and, because his brother was away, he cared for her. She slept beside him and occasionally, out of pure curiosity, embraced him. Sometimes he succeeded in eliciting a small, tremulous response from her but, more often, not, though he often woke in the mornings to find her, awake already, staring at him fixedly with her peculiarly luminous eyes as if blasting him with Platonic intimations he did not understand. Then his initial disquiet would briefly revisit him and he suspected that her visionary eyes pierced his disarming crust of charm to find beneath it some other person who was, perhaps, himself.
He was attracted to her because he was unsure of his effect upon her and became increasingly attached to her because of her strangeness which seemed to him qualitatively different but quantitively akin to the strangeness he himself felt, as though both could say of the world: ‘We are strangers here.’ Fish in the deep sea are luminous so that they can recognize one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them? He felt a sense of unspoken contact with her, like that of two people from different countries who do not speak one another’s language thrust together in a third whose language neither understands. Besides, for the first month they lived together, he was sleeping with the wife of his philosophy tutor, although it took him several years to realize that a logical remedy for some of his and Annabel’s discontents might be the presence of a complacent third, and a disaster to understand, still later, that it was not an entirely satisfactory solution.
This woman was perhaps five years older than Lee and he felt a certain derisive affection for her, though he continued with the affair because he was sure he was irrelevant to her and their experience appeared to cross over one another’s in a perfectly abstract manner with no recognition of each other’s individual natures. She was a tiny, sullen brunette, the mother of three small children. She had the gritty texture of the chronically unhappy and treated the young lover she had acquired out of spite and boredom with savage contempt, except for certain glimpses of her all-consuming discontent as she clung to him in the aftermath. ‘It is like screwing the woman’s page of the Guardian,’ he told Buzz but he never mentioned her to anyone else out of indifference rather than discretion.
She made cool and practical arrangements. He went to see her twice a week, in the afternoons, when her children were at their play group and also on Thursday evenings, when they were in bed and her husband took an evening class on the concept of mind. They always made love in the spare room on a sheetless bed under a framed reproduction of a Picasso blue-period harlequin with a bloom of dust on the glass. During the entire course of the affair, she never solicited so much as a single piece of information from Lee concerning his family, his environment or his ambitions; she showed no curiosity of any kind about him at all. He thought this was very interesting.
Anyway, she was a great convenience for him; he took a certain pleasure in coupling with the wife of a man who taught him ethics; she left most of his evenings free; and he felt, with a puritanical sense of satisfaction inherited from his aunt, that he was learning something important about the middle class. But when he arrived one Thursday evening in early February, he found her in a filthy mood and followed her, with a more than usually wary tread, into the terra incognita of the living room.
Unknown but by no means unpredictable. On a guard before the fire, small garments steamed. He saw she had been reading The Second Sex, which lay face down on the floor. The walls were beige, a cerebral Mondrian print hung over the home-made hi-fi and bits of plastic toy scattered the rush matting. Lee gave himself his private grin of wry pleasure, a facial expression he preferred to conceal from the world most of the time in case it gave too much away.
The weather remained cold; he squatted down on the matting and warmed his hands at the fire. He wondered if he should buy some rush matting for Annabel lay full length on the cold, hard boards for hours on end and he often thought she looked as if she were on a slab in a morgue. He did not like to be a prey to such melodramatic imagery. His other love – that is if Annabel were to be defined as his lover – anyway the other woman – and was she the Other Woman or simply another woman? – anyway, this particular woman seated herself in an armchair and drew her legs up defensively beneath her, thus making herself impregnable. She wore jeans, a checkered shirt, her feet were bare and her long, dark hair was caught at the nape by a rubber band. She twirled her wedding ring around her finger, a sure sign of repressed annoyance, and she was mute.
Lee rocked back and forth on his heels, holding out his hands to the electric bars. Tonight, he looked like Barnaby Rudge. Mentally he wandered through his wardrobe of smiles, wondering which one to wear to suit this ambiguous occasion. At a very early age, Lee discovered the manipulative power of his various smiles and soon learned to utilize them in order to smooth his passage through life for he liked to have an easy time of it; that was what he called being happy. He selected a tentative and encouraging smile; it clicked into position so smoothly you would have sworn he wore his heart upon his face. As soon as the smile materialized, she burst into speech.
‘You have shacked up with some bird, I hear,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ said Lee slowly, scenting trouble. ‘So what?’
She made a dismissive gesture with her hands, got up and started to prowl around the room.
‘Of course, I can hardly expect you to be faithful to me.’
‘So that’s it!’ thought Lee and knew the affair was at an end. He chose his words carefully.
‘I dunno. You’ve got every right to expect me to be faithful to you but whether I am or not, that’s a different kettle of fish, isn’t it?’
She continued to stalk around the room so stormily he became embarrassed for her as her behaviour seemed far in emotional excess of the circumstances.
‘Why didn’t you tell me yourself?’
‘No business of yours.’
‘Thank you,’ she said ironically.
‘Look,’ said Lee. ‘Something’s biting you over and above me pulling a piece of stray.’
‘To hear you talk, who would ever believe you were an undergraduate?’
At that, Lee decided to hurt her feelings.
‘Here, are you scared I’ll give you crabs or something,
or some vile disease?’
When she kicked him with her naked foot, he realized this analysis was correct and, as he went sprawling, he began to laugh. This made her angrier than ever.
‘Couldn’t you have told me about this girl yourself?’
‘I haven’t got a talking mouth,’ said Lee. He returned again to his oriental squat and turned upon her vengefully the full, disconcerting force of his dazzling smile for it had never occurred to him to tell her about Annabel since this other woman was so unimportant to him. Not that Annabel was, as yet, important to him. She lit a cigarette curtly, averting her head so as to regain her composure. It was a pleasant room, full of books and newspapers. Lee read a spine or two.
‘You are quite irrelevant to me, a thing. An object. The first time I slept with you, it was an acte gratuit. An acte gratuit,’ she repeated with some irritation for he did not seem to understand her. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
Lee said nothing, out of spite.
‘It was meaningless and absurd. It was a contentless act but, then, everything was contentless as if nothing cast any shadow, except my children and I couldn’t communicate with them.’
She fell silent. Lee glanced at her from under his lashes, half sorry for her, half extremely irritated. The silence lengthened. At last he stood up.
‘Well, I’d better be getting along,’ he said.
‘You’re a rat,’ she said. ‘You rat.’
Lee wanted nothing except to get out of the house as quickly as he could and would have agreed to anything she said. He nodded briskly.
‘Yeah, I’m a rat,’ he said. ‘A rat of working-class origins,’ he amplified.
At that, she jumped up and pummelled him with her fists. He caught hold of her wrists and hit her once. She subsided immediately and touched her cheek wonderingly with her fingertips.
‘She’s got funny eyes,’ said Lee. ‘I quite like her, if you want to know. She doesn’t say much. And she’ll probably have to go when my brother comes home, anyway.’
In moments of stress, his grammar-school accent collapsed completely. He was surprised to appreciate the extent of his agitation and also to hear his own words; since he never spoke anything but the truth, he must have become attached to Annabel. He was bewildered and blinked a little. Due to his chronic eye infection, his eyes watered under bright lights, weariness or strain; the lights were low but his eyes began to water. She pulled away her hands for the touch of his skin had become unbearable to her and gazed at him with wonder as she recalled his past physical tenderness. She was full of unbelieving pain to realize at last such caresses had been quite involuntary and, in a sense, nothing to do with her, no kind of tribute.
‘What the fuck do you want from me, anyway?’ demanded Lee with some brutality. ‘You want me to ask you to leave your husband and come and live with me?’
‘I’d never do that,’ she said immediately.
‘Well, then,’ said Lee and sighed. At this time, he did not appreciate shades of meaning. He thought a door must either be open or closed and that, in general, people meant what they said. Besides, he was poor and could not have afforded to support her and her children, even if he had wanted to. His eyes were watering so badly the dark young woman before him shimmered.
‘I could make things very unpleasant for you at the university,’ she said.
Now it was his turn to be shocked.
‘So it’s true what my aunt told me about the duplicity of the bourgeoisie?’
Then the baby wailed and its mother gave a small shriek and twitched a little. Lee was filled with angry sadness.
‘Ah, come off it,’ he said. ‘You had what you wanted, didn’t you?’
‘You have a cold heart, I must say.’
‘What?’
‘You lay me and you don’t give two straws –’ Her hair was coming loose from its band and her face was flushed.
‘What is it that’s troubling you, honestly, I mean, troubling you so much?’
‘Go away,’ she said. ‘I feel degraded.’
Lee was deeply offended and demanded, shocked: ‘Here, how can you possibly find sex degrading?’
She stopped short, taken aback, shot him a puzzled look and then took a deep breath.
‘I could have you thrown out of the university.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Lee slowly for he was beginning to realize she was attracted to him because she thought he was a thug. ‘Yeah, well; then I’d come and beat you up, wouldn’t I? Me and my bruvver, we’d both come.’
She had seen his brother in the street.
‘Dear God,’ she said. ‘I really think you would.’
She might have wished, all the time, that Lee would fall in love with her to lend the whole encounter a little more significance but if this was so he did not realize it. It seemed to him she had used him as a screen on which to project her own discontents, a fair exchange. He had a simple sense of justice.
‘Go away, Leon Collins,’ she said.
Lee realized she had learned his name by glancing through her husband’s class list for nobody ever called him Leon, not even his teachers, face to face. But, then, he did not know her first name, either. Diminishing screams of the still-untended baby followed him down the stairs.
‘Well,’ thought Lee, ‘you live and learn.’
But he was very bewildered and extremely ill at ease. His room reverberated with harpsichord arpeggios. Annabel had let the fire die down to a few red coals so all was a glowing darkness intermittently punctuated by headlights of passing cars which flickered through the uncurtained windows to play like the aurora borealis on the body of the girl on the white floor, which was the only object to disturb the emptiness of the room but for her record player. The music ended and the needle hiccupped over vacant grooves. Lee went to switch it off and she caught his arm.
‘You smell of outdoors,’ she said. ‘But you’ve been with some woman.’
‘Well, yes and no,’ said Lee, who always spoke the truth. ‘Does it hurt your feelings?’
He spoke very gently because her distress was so impassive. She shook her head wordlessly and the tears came pouring down without a sound.
‘Then why are you crying?’
‘I thought you wouldn’t come back.’
‘Oh,’ said Lee, nonplussed. Her huge, grey eyes were fixed on his face; his own eyes began to scald again as if burned by her metaphysical fire. He thought she was making some monstrous demand on him but he could not interpret it and, trapped in this strange regard, he found he was trembling so much he had to put out his hand to support himself on the floor. He was astonished to discover he was so touched by this grief, perhaps because it seemed evidence he was important to her in some mysterious way he could not fathom. The longer he stared into her eyes, the greater grew his confusion until, at last, with both relief and fear, he saw her newly magic outlines were those of a thing that needed to be loved. He thought: ‘Oh, God, I should have recognized her sooner.’ So his stoic sentimentality betrayed him. He kissed her hesitantly and though she did not open her mouth she placed her hands on his shoulders underneath his heavy jacket. He shrugged off his coat and spread it out to shield her from the hard floorboards. She lay back compliantly and did not take her gaze from him so he was still trembling from her scrutiny as he entered her.
But, even if they now acknowledged the state of love, their lovemaking was still permeated by unease for she understood the play of surfaces only superficially; she was like a blind man at a firework display who can only appreciate the fires in the air by interpreting their various degrees of magnificence through the relative enthusiasms of the noisy crowd. The nature of the dazzlement was dimly apprehended, not known.
On his return, Buzz seethed with jealous fury for a long time. In structure, the flat was an L-shaped ballroom divided by double doors which now served as a wall but this wall was very thin and Buzz, in his narrow cot, could hear each word and movement the lovers made. Every night he lay sweating at th
e unmistakable creakings and groans, writhing as he imagined their unimaginable privacy. He pressed his dark face into the pillow, cursed them bitterly and slowly became obsessed with the idea of stabbing them both as they slept together. He lovingly fingered his Moroccan knife and watched them during the day while, at night, he swore and masturbated. Lee was aware of the tensions ravaging his brother but was soon too much preoccupied with tensions of his own to pay them any attention for he could not ignore there was no magic implosion of the flesh in Annabel. He could evoke from her only those faint sighs and shudders the sensitive and perverse membrane of his brother’s ear transformed to shrieks and cries. She seemed to grow more and more fascinated by the appearance of his face and body but she had no memory of skin to compare the feel of his skin with and seemed to like, best of all, the sensation of intimacy she experienced in bed with him; she had often read about such intimacy. She began a series of pictures of him. She drew her first picture the morning after their first authentic night, when certain implicit avowals had been made; in this picture, he looked like a golden lion too gentle to ever eat meat. Over the years, she drew and painted him again and again in so many different disguises that at last he had to go to another woman to find out the true likeness of his face.