before he died he told her he’d got…well, I don’t know, some sort of responsibility, an illegitimate child I think, some woman he met in a park. Now she goes on and on about it. She talks about her life, the life she’s had.”
“We all have a life.”
“But you have to put the past behind you, don’t you?”
“If it will let you.”
“That’s what she says. She says time’s circular, she can feel it snapping at her ankles.”
“She has a point.”
“There was this other man, before we met.” He had made an aeroplane; he held it up, admiring it distractedly. “In the last few months she’s talked about him all the time. She says she thinks he understood her, as much as anyone has ever understood her. But he let her down. Of course, with her being as she is, I don’t know if he ever existed. She might have made him up to torment me.”
Made him up? “No, I don’t think so,” Colin said. “She wouldn’t do that, would she?”
“She can go back to him if she can find him.” Ryan sniffed. “Let him have an innings.”
“Perhaps he wouldn’t want her now.”
“Not if he knew her, he wouldn’t want her. Not if he knew how she was now.”
“Not anyway. It’s a long time ago. We have to try, you know—” he spoke gently, realising it—“to put ourselves together in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.”
“But she doesn’t, do you see? Isabel gets drunk on her past, she goes crazy on it. She used to be a social worker, I suppose she saw some terrible sights. Sometimes she talks about this old woman who locked her in a room, and about these invisible things that came out and touched her legs. She says she thought she was going to die.”
Colin felt afraid; a tight ball of shame and regret pushed up into his diaphragm, shortening his breath. He stood up, pushing his chair away clumsily, and walked across to the far wall. He inspected the seascape. “Perhaps she needs help. You know. A doctor. That kind of help.”
“Help? She needs an exorcism. Oh, she can put on a good front. All the social work skills. They know how to detect neurotics, you see, and alcoholics, and so they know how to pretend they aren’t. She keeps herself on a very tight rein. You wouldn’t know, to meet her, that she’s had breakdowns.”
“Breakdowns?”
“Two, three. I’m not sure really. They all shade into one another.”
“I had no idea.”
“No, why should you have? I didn’t tell Suzanne, except just the usual, you know, the complaints one makes. Suzanne seemed to understand me, at the time—” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought that she’d have such weird ideas, but you can never tell, can you?”
Colin examined the picture, looked at the cracks in the frame. How could Isabel have settled for Jim Ryan? But all marriages are mysteries. What had Suzanne seen in him? Weakness; something of her father perhaps. Strength was being like Sylvia; making your opinions felt. Ryan was still flushed, his thin straw hair stuck up in tufts where he had raked his fingers through it when he talked about Isabel. He was a mass of little tics, of amoral reflexes, of tiny mental knee-jerks that kept him out of guilt and anguish and justified himself to himself.
“Do you always say people are mad if they threaten to inconvenience you?” Colin turned away from the wall. But his heart was not in it. Suzanne was abandoned; Isabel was sick. Sylvia was at home, waiting to know what he had made of the situation.
“Well, it is an extraordinary idea, you have to admit,” Ryan said. “Looking to Italian peasants for advice on birth control. It’s nearly as daft as some of Isabel’s ideas. I sometimes think, you know, all these people, walking the streets, pretending to be sane—they ought to go out at random and pick up a few people, and examine them to see what delusions they’ve got.”
“Perhaps it’s this town,” Colin said. “I think they put something in the water.”
A further quarter-hour passed in exchange of pleasantries. Colin smoked his last cigarette. He crumpled up the packet and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. Ryan said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this about my wife, it’s personal stuff.” He would regret it tomorrow; he was beginning to regret it now. He floated his paper aeroplane across the desk. It flew up, bombed sharply downwards, and landed at Colin’s feet.
“Right then,” Colin said. “There’s nothing to add, is there? I’ll be on my way.”
Ryan leaped up to see him out, as if he were a client. His hand, extended, hung in the air. Colin stopped at the door. He turned. “I am the man your wife says let her down. I knew her ten years ago. We had an affair.”
Ryan stared at him for a moment; but he had run the gamut of his talents for self-expression. He merely resumed his seat quietly, as if he were in church. His brown eyes had an opaque glaze. “Do you want to discuss it?” he asked.
“No,” Colin said. “I never want to discuss it as long as I live.” Half out of the door he paused, and spoke over his shoulder. “I’m moving my account.”
Head in his hands, Ryan groaned.
He saw her as soon as he closed the door; with the precision of nightmare, moving from a blurred backdrop and into view; defined, in her strange anorak with the racing-team flashes, against the mill of senior shop assistants rattling their cash bags, and the housewives rummaging for biros in the depths of their bags. Once he would have been surprised, but now he was not surprised any longer. Figure thickened a little, features blurred; dark eyes alight in her usual pallor, the complexion he remembered.
Can you set a term to passion? Two years? Five? Ten? For a moment he was going to call out to her, but then he didn’t, and as he didn’t, he noticed the irretrievable moment, splitting off and slipping away. From the fraction of a second which this failure occupied, his life changed; unnoticeably, irreparably, in silence. It was just like York Minster; no one had actually seen the lightning strike. Long before he had recovered his wits, long before he had time to gauge the extent of his loss, the queue for the quick-service till had parted, and swallowed her up.
