“It’s so sordid,” she laughed. “It’s so properly sordid. Like a film.”
“I shall get a night from somewhere,” he said. “I’ll get some petrol in the car and we’ll go—drive up to Manchester, get a decent meal and find a hotel. I’ll come up with something. Just give me time.”
“Give me time,” she said mockingly. “That’s the anthem of the married man. Give me time while I make my excuses, give me time while I sort out my head. Just another week, just another decade, just till my wife understands. Be reasonable, give me time, just till my children grow up, give me time. And what do you suppose time will give to me?”
“Before the winter’s out,” he said, “things will be different. I told you that first night that I’d leave her. Give me—no, no, you’re playing games. If I left her you’d laugh in my face.”
“You’ll never leave her,” she said. A ginger-haired woman moved between the tables, whisking cigarette butts into a waste bag, her white face set in lines of ineradicable fatigue. She watched them with pale bitter eyes.
“She wants us to go,” Isabel said.
“Drink your tea. Then we’ll go.”
“It’s like treacle. It’s the end of the pot. It always is at this time of night.”
She leaned forward and tears dripped into the cup and splashed onto the table. She got up suddenly, thrusting her chair back, and strode towards the door ahead of him, fastening her coat and looping her scarf around her neck. He was afraid of the clenched set of her mouth. The rain had stopped; he saw them hurrying, reflected in puddles, ghost-white flitting among the petrol pumps and headlights. She put her foot on a sodden mess of paper and slime and skidded to her knees. He ran behind her and picked her up. Holding her tightly by the waist he steered her towards the car. In her seat she unbuttoned her coat again and pulled up her skirt, rubbing at her grazed knees and picking at the shreds of her tights. She sobbed and sniffed, fumbling for a handkerchief. He reached across her and fastened the seatbelt in her lap, making the soft nonsensical sounds of comfort he used to his children.
“You must take me to your house. We can’t go on like this—”
“I’ve told you, no. Her voice shook. “No, no, no.”
“What is it, love? What’s upsetting you?”
She turned and looked at him, for a second, as if she had never seen him before. “Whatever is wrong in my life,” she said, “might have nothing to do with you.”
“But has it?” She turned her head away. “Perhaps I’ve done you an injustice. Perhaps you do feel—”
“Oh yes, I feel,” she said harshly. “I took a training course to educate me out of feeling. I’m not paid to feel. But still I do it.”
“Then it’s your job that’s getting on top of you.”
“I don’t know.” She took a deep breath.
“And your dad. Your home. Caring for him. Perhaps it’s that.”
“I see you have your theories. Just leave off, Colin.”
“Leave off? Leave me alone, you mean.” He was angry. “You want to have me around when it suits you, you want to talk about your work, you want to put the burden onto me. You burst into tears, then you say leave off.”
“I’m sorry if I upset you.” She lifted her face. “See, I’m not crying now.”
“I worry about you.” He touched her hair tentatively. “You’re getting thin.” Suddenly he saw it. “You need me, don’t you?”
He did not ask, what for? She seemed vulnerable in her distress, naked; he rushed to cover her with willing assumptions.
“How shrewd,” she said.
“You need to pack in this job. You need a husband. You need a proper secure home.”
“And you’re offering?”
“Isabel, give me something back. I’m human.”
“Sure.”
“You go on as if you hate me. As if there were some enemy in your life, and it’s me.”
“It’s not you, Colin.” She spoke slowly. “I don’t hate you. I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Well…what is there to be afraid of?”
She began to laugh, a low-pitched and merciless chuckle. Or perhaps to cry? She is unpredictable, he thought; mad. Perhaps her period is coming on; I must keep a check. She pretends to be hard, to be casual, but everyone knows that women can’t have casual affairs. She and I are equal now. But still—though the question was settled in his mind—her laughter made his skin crawl; as if there were some deep derangement in the situation that she meant to cherish alone.
“I hardly like to explore my own mind,” she said softly. “I think I imagine things. I
“Do you have to be so cryptic?”
“It would be pleasant to be a victim: a victim of circumstance. If there were no patterns in our lives, we would have no responsibility. I would like to think that events were entirely random. It would be comfortable.”
“I can never see a pattern. Perhaps I can’t see the wood for the trees. Stupid saying, that. I only…I didn’t want
