“Are you doing this deliberately?”
He was surprised at the hatred in his voice. Nothing had evaporated.
She turned her eyes to him, trying to get through. I must read what she wants to say to me, I love them so much, he thought in a flash, but his anger overwhelmed him. He looked at the baggage to threaten her.
“Lawrence, this is where we are. This is our room for tonight. Just give me five minutes.”
She worked quickly, a kind of side-to-side harvest dance, and the sheets flew as if they were part of her own dress. He knew that only she could change the chore into a ritual.
She puffed the pillows where their heads would lie. She removed one of the blankets and draped it over a hideous armchair, reshaping it with a few tucks and folds. Into the closet she lifted a small drum table complete with doilies, vase, and a broken trick box from which a scissor-beaked bird was meant to dispense cigarettes. She opened the wicker basket he had bought her and withdrew their books, which she placed carelessly on the large table beside the door.
“What are you going to do about the sink? There are cracks in the porcelain. Why don’t you pry up a couple of floorboards and hide it under the carpet?”
“If you’ll help me.”
He would have liked to rip it from the wall and cause it to disappear with a magician’s flourish, a white cigarette gone, a gift for Shell. And he would have liked to wrench it from its grimy roots and swing it like a jawbone, completely demolish the room which she had begun to ruin.
Shell put out his shaving kit and her own secret case of cosmetics which smelled of lemon. She opened the window with a little touch of triumph, and Breavman could hear leaves moving in the spring night.
She had changed the room. They could lay their bodies in it. It was theirs, good enough for love and talk. It was not that she had arranged a stage on which they might sleep hand in hand, but she had made the room answer to what she believed their love asked. Breavman knew it was not his answer. He wished he could honour her home-making and hated his will to hurt her for it.
But didn’t she understand that he didn’t want to disturb an ashtray, move a curtain?
One small light was burning. She stood in the shadows and undressed and then slipped quickly under the covers, pulling them up to her chin.
It’s a better room for her, Breavman thought. Anyone else would have thanked her. She deserved a goose-feather bed with the sheets turned down so bravely-O. Which I cannot give her because I do not want the castle to cover it, with my crest carved above the hearth.
“Come.”
“Should I close the light?”
“Yes.”
“Now it’s the same room for the both of us.”
He got into the bed, careful not to avoid touching her. He knew his mood had to be attacked. Like the chronic migraine sufferer who doubtfully submits himself to the masseur who always cures him, he lay stiffly beside her.
She had known his body like this before. Sometimes he would disappear for two or three days and when he came back his body would be like that, armoured, distant.
Sometimes a poem would catapult him away from her, but she learned how to approach him, equipped with what he had taught her about her body and her beauty.
It was a refusal to be where he was, to accept the walls, the clock, the number on the door which he knew, the familiar limited human being in the familiar limited chair.
“You would have preferred it even dirtier,” she said softly. “Maybe even roaches in the sink.”
“You never see them if you keep the light on.”
“And when the light is off you can’t see them anyway.”
“But it’s the time between,” Breavman said with developing interest. “You come home at night and you switch on the kitchen light and the sink is swarming black. They disappear in seconds, you do not follow too closely exactly where they go, and they leave the porcelain brighter than you ever imagined white could be.”
“Like that haiku about strawberries on the white plate.”
“Whiter. And without music.”
“The way you talk you’d think we had fought our way out of the deepest slum.”
“We have, but don’t ask me to explain or it will sound like the cheapest nonsense from an over-privileged bourgeois.”
“I know what you mean and I know that you’re thinking I can’t possibly know.”
She would reach him, he was certain. She would uncover him so he could begin to love her.
“The mansion is as much a part of the slum as your horrible sink. You want to live in a world where the light has just been switched on and everything has just jumped out of the black. That’s all right, Lawrence, and it may even be courageous, but you can’t live there all the time. I want to make the place you come back to and rest in.”
“You do a wonderful job of dignifying a spoiled child.”
It was not that things decay, that the works of men are ephemeral, he believed he saw deeper than that. The things themselves were decay, the works themselves were corruption, the monuments were made of worms. Perhaps she was his comrade in the vision, in the knowledge of strangerhood.
“You didn’t want to touch a thing when we came in here. You just wanted to clear a small corner to sleep in.”
“Love in,” Breavman corrected.
“And you hated me for remaking the bed and putting us where we could see the trees and hiding the ugly old table because all of that meant that we couldn’t simply endure the filth, we had to come to terms with it.”
“Yes.”
He found her hand.
“And you really hated me because I was dragging you into it and you would have been free if you’d been alone,
