Geoffrey had another view: that money was the enemy of happiness. Now that I was living inside his topsy-turvy world, it no longer seemed like freedom. He had no TV because it made you ignorant. No car, because a bicycle was superior. And no visiting London, because the city had nothing important that couldn’t be found here, and it just tore money from your pocket. London squatted monstrously on the horizon, half an hour away by express train. I was more than ready to offer myself as sacrificial virgin.
Geoffrey worked. “My work ...” was his favourite way to begin sentences. By day he was at the university and in the evenings I had to keep quiet while he wrote his Zanzibar report on the living-room table. At night he tossed and turned, caught up in some puzzling anxiety about his status in the University of Reading’s Centre for International Development, a place that appeared to be as riddled with intrigue as Zanzibar, but with none of the consequences. He was much smaller now that he was in England. I tried to comfort him. I cooked. I reached out for him in bed. He said: “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s my work. I’m tense. I’ll get better.”
“I can help you to relax,” I offered, and curled my arm over his back to find and stroke his penis.
“No, let’s just sleep.” He moved my hand up to his heart.
I felt useless and wrong, tied by lack of money to someone who did not want me. I took back my hand and turned away from him, muffling the little coughs that kept me company through the night.
“I love you, Marcella,” Geoffrey murmured, making me cry.
I read David Copperfield as slowly as I could, but it still ended. “Do you have any more books like this?” I asked Geoffrey, my hand still on David.
He looked around his shelves, happy to advise, and said, “Try this one. It’s about a woman.”
Jane Eyre, the other book to save me, affected me in a much more complicated way. Here was another misfit— an orphan—making her way without attachments, this one my size and sex! When Geoffrey came home from work, irritating me by wheeling his bike through my kitchen, I was increasingly impatient. I told him that his anxiety about his work was excessive, that he should have more spirit, more appetite for life. I adopted Jane Eyre’s tart tongue and tried for her precise no-nonsense way of summing things up. Jane saw through people and when a situation was bad she had the dignity to speak out and, if necessary, leave. Then there was Rochester, broad- chested, big-voiced and bursting with passion. When he spoke to Jane, his directness and wit were a perfect match for hers. Geoffrey’s worrying and whining did not compare well to Rochester. Where was our great passion? Jane would never have shared a bed with someone she did not love just because she had nowhere else to go. She’d rather run into the bush and starve. Reading Jane Eyre was working me up into an agitated state. Oddly, it never occurred to me to compare myself to Rochester’s imprisoned foreign wife.
“Geoffrey,” I declared, “I’m going to go to London. Will you lend me the money for the train? I’ll pay you back when my money comes.”
“You needn’t pay it back. Why don’t you wait for next week? Then maybe we can both go.”
“I mean go for good.”
“For good! What are you saying? You can’t go to London just like that. You don’t have a place to stay.”
“I’ll find somewhere. I’ll work, do anything.” I thought of Jane on the moors, destitute, and then taken in by sisterly women.
“Marcella, you’re talking nonsense. You don’t know. You’ve no idea how big London is—maybe a hundred Zanzibars. I brought you here. I can’t just let you do that.”
“It was a mistake. You don’t like me being here. You don’t introduce me to your friends, or your family. I should never have come.”
“No, it’s just work. I get tense, that’s all. I’m not used to having someone around. It’s good for me, having you here. I need to learn how to do this.”
“So, you won’t help me?” I was giving up. He was no Rochester and I was no Jane.
“No, I want to help you. I know it’s hard for you. It’s just ... Look, tomorrow night I’m not going to work. Come down to the pub with me, meet some of my friends.”
“I don’t have anything to wear.”
He laughed. “Wear anything. Jeans. People aren’t pretentious in Reading.”
MY VERMONT HOUSE COMES EQUIPPED WITH OLD
books as well as old pots and pans, and furniture. Professors who have stayed here before liked—but left behind—books of poetry, travel in Europe, natural history and fiction. Books about the lives of men I have never heard of are well represented. One is called The Days of a Man and every morning it stares at me in two volumes from the bookshelf opposite my bed. Such a vain title. Two volumes by the author about himself. I want to poke him in the eye.
Mostly, I pick up the books at random, feel their weight and texture, read a few lines and put them back somewhere else, sowing disorder. It’s like partygoing, exchanging pleasantries with strangers to whom you’re unavailable. I run my fingers down their spines too, my tips tingling, as close as I come to sex. The last time was— let’s see—before prison, nine years ago: Benji, several nights before the last night that I saw him. I’ve regretted those several nights when, in ignorance, we chose sleep. I cannot remember Benji with any book other than his Filofax.
It’s Christmas again.
