The Essence of the Thing (9 page)

33

He drove her, pretty fast, to Notting Hill and they chatted a little on the way; they discovered each other’s occupations, but very little more. Nicola, glad simply to have been taken home without the trouble of finding a taxi, thanked him very much and went up to bed. A very nice-looking, possibly somewhat inhibited, probably rather dull chap whom I’ll never see again, she thought, but it was awfully lucky he turned up like that.

In the middle of the week he telephoned her at work. So he’d been paying more than casual attention when quizzing her according to the usual polite formula: she was disconcerted. They met for a drink in a wine bar in Charlotte Street. Later that evening they found themselves dining together: it looked as if they might be getting on rather well. He was still very nice-looking—not to say, rather angelic—and might be somewhat inhibited, for all one knew, but it wouldn’t be correct to call him dull.

Without the feathers, in her working clothes, she was still grave, still the sort of girl who’d sweep up the broken glass at a rowdy party before it caused a nasty accident: she had an edge of fastidiousness which was a challenge to him, and Jonathan was no stranger to challenge; a challenge was something he could respect.

After a few weeks he began to ask himself, wonderingly, if the feeling which seemed to be growing in him indicated that he was falling in love: because he hadn’t heretofore believed that this was a thing one really did; he’d come to suppose that it was something done only by characters in fairytales.

They went on seeing each other; there were so many things to do—London was one immense cornucopia of inducements to be enthralled; even quite speechlessly to marvel. He’d never quite apprehended this before. The whole city was in actuality a great pleasure garden; it had obviously—but in secret—been designed expressly in order to entice its denizens into the silken bonds of love. Now he saw at last what everyone else had always, plainly, understood, that it was no mistake after all that Alfred Gilbert’s famous statue at the very centre of the whole glittering maelstrom should have come to be known as Eros. The inconclusive, aborted infatuations he’d felt in the past for other women had been like the attempts of infant children to talk: what he felt now had brought him to the verge of true language. And yet, as the weeks went by, he did not speak.

Nicola began nonetheless to be sure that he would: Nicola had very quietly and distinctly apprehended that Jonathan was—very probably—the last remaining male of her own circumspect species. They were like those frail animals one sees in television documentaries: crowded out by other stronger and more successful competitors, they hunt for each other, trying (before it is too late) to mate.

The ritual (they might be the very last of their species to perform it) continued over a period of some months, stage by delicate stage; at last they found themselves sweltering together in the heat of a black July night. They’d been to a concert on the South Bank, and now they were in Nicola’s sitting room, drinking iced tea.

34

‘Be quiet a moment. Listen. Can you hear that saxaphone? There. Did you hear?’

‘Yes. Nice.’ They were silent again, listening.

‘That’s “Summertime”, isn’t it?’

‘I believe you’re right. Goodness, how corny.’

‘No, it’s nice. Do you think he’s all alone?’

‘It might be a she.’

‘Women don’t play the saxophone.’

‘Are you quite sure about that?’

‘Positive.’

‘Let’s go and look out the back and see if we can see him. Her.’

‘It’s probably a record.’

‘No, it’s solo.’

‘It might still be a record.’

‘Let’s go and look.’

Nicola jumped up from the old rickety sofa and went into the bedroom and Jonathan followed. They leaned out of the window and saw only trees, thickly in leaf, and a light shining out onto the balcony of the first-floor flat in the next-door house.

‘I think it’s actually coming from there.’

They listened again. ‘Summertime’ ended, and the player paused for breath, or refreshment; the nearby darkness was silent except for a very faint stirring in the leaves.

‘It’s much cooler in here,’ Nicola remarked.

‘It would be, it faces north,’ said Jonathan.

‘Let’s stay in here,’ said Nicola, sitting down on the end of the bed. ‘There might be more music in a minute.’

Jonathan sat down near her.

Nicola had not turned on the light when they had come in, so she said, ‘Do you want the light on?’

‘No,’ said Jonathan. ‘It’s nice in the dark.’

It was time, at last, to speak, and so, slowly, they began, at last, truly to speak. And there was not then, or later, any need ever actually to say: this is what it means to love you: this is what loving you means: and that there was no need was always an essential part of the whole point. Lovemaking was an esoteric language which they were now entirely qualified to speak. Even when the novelty— the marvel—of discovery wore off, this was a fact which Nicola at any rate simply and ineradicably knew.

35

‘Jonathan,’ she cried, now; ‘don’t—
don’t
get up, don’t go away. We have to finish now that we’ve started, we have to have this out.’

He turned his head towards her again and smiled very faintly, as one who, patient beyond all expectation, was prepared to humour her. ‘But I’ve told you already,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing to
have
out.’

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Very well. Very well, there may not be. You may not be the person I believed you to be. I have to know this. I have to know who you really are, who you really have been.’

‘It makes no odds now, surely,’ said Jonathan—still in the same tone of sweet reason.

‘It does to me,’ Nicola cried. ‘I have to
know
, it will
kill
me not to know. Please,’ she continued, trying desperately to control her voice, ‘don’t make this even worse than it already is. Can’t you see what you have done to me? I loved you, I love you still: nothing that we’ve ever done together,
especially
our lovemaking, has ever had any other meaning for me. I thought you felt the same. I thought that was the whole point and now you tell me this. It’s like being murdered.’

He was, at last, affected.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘If you really feel like that—yes, I can see that this is a shock for you. Of course, you’re right. Of course, I was in love with you to begin with, and even for quite a time afterwards. Obviously, we wouldn’t have set this household up together if we hadn’t both felt like that. That’s water under the bridge, unfortunately. I’m sorry about that too. Quite as sorry as you are, I dare say. But I suppose no one goes on being in love. It simply isn’t humanly possible. I suppose the best one can hope for is that the state of being in love becomes a state of simply, well, loving. And unfortunately that hasn’t happened to us. At least, not to me. I’m sorry, but there it is. I can’t pretend, can I? You’d hardly want that. We’ve got to be realistic, and cut our losses.’

Nicola was feeling faint again with the horror of it all, but she knew this might be her only opportunity to discover what she could of the truth. ‘When—’ she said, ‘when—did you stop caring about me? How long has it been, that you’ve just been going through the motions—’

‘Oh,’ said Jonathan, ‘who can say? Several months, perhaps.’

She felt ill, not only with the shock and pain that everything he had said had produced in her, but also with shame. She felt so horrifying and unthinkable a shame at the idea that Jonathan had even once, never mind many times, made love to her while feeling in fact no love, only this growing cold indifference, that she could almost have run from this place and hidden herself forever.

‘Christmas-time,’ she said, brokenly, remembering it, remembering the presents. ‘Did you feel like this at Christmas-time?’ She remembered the white satin nightdress, and other matters.

Jonathan thought for a moment, remembering too. He pulled a face. ‘No,’ he said judiciously. ‘I still loved you then. It must have changed after that. But look, please drop this cross-examination. I really don’t remember the date. The only salient thing is that it’s happened, that’s all.’

‘Supposing it happened straight after Christmas,’ Nicola said, wonderingly, sick with shame and astonishment, ‘you’ve gone on, all this time, three months or so, isn’t it? as if—you’ve made love to me dozens, I don’t know how many, times, as if—’ Jonathan’s lovemaking, silent, intense, like a ritual enacted in a state of possession: she could begin to see that he might conceivably have continued to give the performance in a state of cold indifference: she saw now that, this being the case, she had actually been violated.

‘Yes, well,’ he interrupted her, ‘since you insist on making such heavy weather of this, I might suggest that you’re being rather naive, aren’t you? As you’d be the first to remind me in other circumstances, men are different from women in their attitude to sex if not in every other way as well. I mean, it’s no big deal, Nicola. It doesn’t mean anything. When it’s there, you have it and when it isn’t, you don’t. Of course when one’s in love it means more, I suppose, but that really is by the way. You’re an attractive woman, obviously any man in my situation would have been glad enough to fuck you, it doesn’t mean anything one way or the other. All right, I grant you, it did once, but it doesn’t now. It hasn’t lately.’

‘I see,’ said Nicola. She had been not only violated but entirely destroyed.

‘I admit,’ Jonathan went on, in a brisk tone, ‘it’s rather second rate, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? I mean, that’s why I realised that it really was time to call
time
. Get on with our lives. And I suppose, now I come to think of it, that that business about your stopping the pill might have been a factor. I mean, I imagine you’d like to have a child or two sometime soon, which means settling down in earnest, and I’m not your man for that. It simply wouldn’t be fair to hang on as one’s been doing, really it wouldn’t. I’m sure you can wholly agree to that at least. So—’

‘Yes,’ said Nicola.

She was so ill now with the horror of it all, and above all with the realisation, at last, that Jonathan had, indeed, meant what he had said, and had known what he meant, and that their relationship was now truly over, that she could say no more; she got up as one in a dream and went into the bedroom and shut the door.

36

‘Bloody hell,’ thought Jonathan. ‘Bloody
hell
.’ And he continued to sit there for a moment, staring at the empty grate and brooding.

Then he got up abruptly and went to the doorway to retrieve the briefcase which he had left there upon first coming into the room. He sat down again and opened it and took out a thick folder of documents, and started to look through them, but after a short time he put them aside and stared once more at the empty grate.

It’s her own bloody fault, he assured himself. She
would
insist on knowing. She wouldn’t be put off, she
would
peer into my soul: if she doesn’t like what she sees it’s her own bloody fault. How utterly typical. First they insist on getting it out of you, and then they blame you for the resulting injuries. They’ll never bloody learn. Still, just so long as she’s got the message. Roll on, peace and quiet. And he picked up the folder again and began to look at the top document once more. It was only now that he suddenly noticed that he was still dressed for the office, so he got up impatiently and went to change. Returning to his work once more, he settled down properly at last and was soon absorbed in its intricacies.

Much later, glancing at his watch, he saw that it was nearly midnight: as late as that! He straightened up the papers and put them back in his briefcase, turned out the lamp and went to the room which was now no longer spare, but his; but as he did so, glancing at the fast shut door of the chief bedroom, his step faltered for a moment. He had not heard her move, or open the door—she was still, the woman who had pleaded with him and then quailed at his words, silent, even sequestered, within, behind that closed door. Was she asleep or awake? Was she all right? Well, it was none of his business, after all. She was a free agent now. The worst was over. She was a free agent, as was he. He could once more call his soul his own: as could she. End of chapter, end of story. And so to bed.

The evening’s events, jumbled out of sequence, ran through his head again as he drifted and then slid towards sleep, until, in an anomalous instant, he suddenly seemed to see, flashing up at him, a ruby eye as of a phoenix. It flashed, staring at him, and then it vanished, and with it his last conscious apprehension of the elongated day.

37

The dark-haired young man behind the counter in the coffee shop seemed to half recognise her this morning: he nodded when she gave her order, identical to that of the previous day, as if to say, of course. He brought the coffee and the croissant and placed them before her with a sort of gentle deference, and with the same gentle deference—one step backwards before turning—withdrew.

Nicola saw all this as if through the wrong end of a telescope: the world beyond her seemed to have been miniaturised by the lens of her anguish. Once in the office she was forced to make a monstrous effort to bring this world beyond into something like normal focus, but it was always in danger of slipping back again, she always on the verge of losing control.

But she was lucky in her work: there was always too much— that is, enough—to be done; by mid-morning she and her word processor were enjoying something like their usual ambivalent relationship. She was drafting a section of a submission to the Arts Council, which would in due course be seen, marked and re-drafted by another greater hand before being rewritten
in toto
and being given into a still greater hand for final comment and, it had to be hoped, approval.

She worked on: she had promised herself, early this morning, while she showered and very carefully dressed, that no one here should see the slightest sign of the horror which had befallen her. For she had indeed—she saw—been murdered. Jonathan’s speech had ripped away a veil of delusion into which her very soul had been woven. If he had ceased to love her, if their conjunction had become meaningless, if she must now, as she must, now, leave him and their home, then she was no longer the Nicola she had known and unquestioningly been. No one at the office should know this: she should continue to play the part of Nicola and play it so impeccably that during the hours she spent here even she might suspend disbelief. It required only total concentration.

At lunchtime she sent out for a sandwich and worked on while the office slowly emptied around her. At last they were all gone. She carried on valiantly for a few minutes but then abandoned the machine, and pushing aside the half-eaten sandwich and the half-drunk coffee, and leaning her elbows on the desk, she buried her face in her hands, and sat thus, immobile, abandoned for a time to the unveiled acknowledgment of white-hot relentless pain.

It will get better, she told herself at last, it must get better; I have only to live through this. She did not see that it would get better in some ways, and worse in others, would change its shape and colour through the days and weeks to come so as at all times to possess her mind and ensure her suffering until at last it was pleased to retreat. I must, she thought, just concentrate on what comes next, and try to live through this as decently as I can. She was not British for nothing.