‘What made you think she’s an orphan? Phoebe.’
Jane’s study window used to look out on the vernal expanse of Hadley Common (giving on to Hadley Woods) – with the small circular pond, the size of a helipad, just on the other side of the road; and at her disposal, back then, was a five-acre, three-lawn garden topped by an extravagantly imposing and ancient Lebanon cedar. She missed it all. Now Jane’s study window looked out on the steep and jumbled chunks of Hampstead as it reared up towards the Hill and the Heath.
‘Yes, why did I say that?’ Jane had turned in her swivel chair and now slipped off her glasses.
These glasses had a history and I asked, ‘Are they the ones that make you look like a career-mad cockroach?’
‘They’re the ones.’
‘Put them back on a second. Christ. They really do.’
‘I know, it’s the curly bits up here.’ Resignedly she lit a herbal cigarette, with its unenticing scent. ‘Yes, why did I say that?…When I was eleven or twelve I shared a governess with an orphan. Hattie. And Hattie put on a good show. She was always pretending things were all right, but they weren’t all right. Because her parents had both died in a hotel fire. Hattie – a good show, but she seemed to exist in another dimension. Always slightly glassy and preoccupied. One step behind.’
‘…And Phoebe reminds you of Hattie? Giving a good show?’
‘She gives a very good show, a very advanced show. It’s a show of normality. Well I suppose we all do that, a bit. I’m not trying to put you off, Mart. I understand the attraction…What is she, thirty-five? She’s going to want –’
‘No, she doesn’t want that, she says. No husband, no child…I must go.’
‘Mm. Then she has decided views.’ We embraced and Jane swivelled round to face her desk and the window. ‘She’s also got a wound, I think.’
The drive back in the Sunday twilight, with the days of the working week stacked up ahead of me. It was eerily daunting, that Sunday drive. Knowing how far I was from the child, the halfmade pupa, and how far I was from the adult – the finished imago.
Beset by small fears
That same Sunday night he rolled up late and parked on a yellow line outside the mansion flat on Hereford Road.
As she undressed in the bathroom (yes, yes: ‘in solitary’, ‘in splendid isolation’, ‘up the ivory tower’, etc.), he lay in bed, stoically reminiscing about their last act of love, 164 hours ago…With some girls, with many girls, with most girls, no, with all girls, even the most energetic and proactive, there came a point when their hands would float down to rest on the pillow – palm up on either side of the face, in what did happen to resemble an attitude of surrender; but the point was that their hands were finally still. Phoebe’s hands were never still; they never rested, right up to the very end…How to account for the attentiveness of the hands? Busying themselves down there, in the little menagerie, her hands were meticulous: ‘careful and precise’ but also ‘wary or timid’ (from L metus, ‘dread’). Her hands were beset by small fears…
When it was over, that time, and Phoebe prepared herself for sleep (struggling to untangle her garter belt and two sets of pants), she said, ‘One of these days I’m going to dress up as someone. Guess who. Eve.’
‘How can you dress up as Eve?’
‘Eve after the Fall.’
Next door, a light and two taps were thrown off, and she emerged, in her nightdress (white, opaque, knee length). Which reminded him.
‘Uh, Jane’s a fan of nightdresses – she thinks they’re good because if you…’
Phoebe gave him a look of the sourest exasperation, as if he’d been going on about Jane for at least an hour. It was one of those times when her feelings were very close to the surface – there to be read.
‘Sorry, I forgot,’ he said lightly. ‘Jane’s a woman.’
‘I’m a misogynist, okay?’ This wasn’t the first time that Phoebe had laid claim to that noun (seldom heard in the 1970s, and certainly never laid claim to, and only ever directed at men). ‘Can’t a girl even…And don’t blame me, Martin. Blame – blame that sick bat in Morley Hollow!’
This was Phoebe’s mother. He said, ‘You’re a bit too hard on Dallen, Phoebe.’
‘Oh am I. When I was seven you know what she did? She upped and went to bed for ten years!’ Phoebe reached for her hairbrush, and after a while the rhythmical motions had the effect of siphoning off her anger and replacing it (he thought) with sorrowful perplexity. ‘Not ten years. Eight. See, she had me in her forties and it completely did her in. First a heart attack and then she broke both her legs. Brittle bones. And after the hysterectomy she doubled her weight, so she was sort of trapped. All to do with “the Change” – don’t you think that’s a beastly word for it?’
‘Yes, beastly. That must’ve been hard on you. How did Graeme cope?’
‘Luckily Father Gabriel stepped forward.’ She opened the bed and let herself into it. ‘Father Gabriel’s very organised.’
‘Good,’ he said as he unemphatically embraced her. ‘You know, Phoebe, a misogynist hates women. All women. You don’t. You don’t hate Merry.’
‘You’re right. Blind loyalty, you see. The thing is I’m beholden to the old slag. Do the light…Do the light – so I won’t see your hurt face. I told you not to be hurt. How dare you be hurt? What about me? Give me your hand.’
He did her bidding. With the hand and then with the light.
About fifteen minutes later she murmured,
‘As it happens, Mart…Tomorrow I’m not going in till nearly noon.’
He felt a thrumming in his chest. It would be wiser, now, not to
