beautiful than Monroe, drifting about the house and garden at weekends in a haze of blonde and pink and pale blue. What an adolescent colour scheme he had fallen for, and at his age.
He turned fifty-three that July, and naturally she ignored his birthday, then pretended in her jolly new style to remember it three days later. She gave him a kipper tie in Day-Glo mint green, telling him the style was being ‘revived’. Yes, the weekends were the worst. She would come into a room where he was, not wishing to talk, but perhaps wanting to be seen, and she would look about in mild surprise before wandering off. She was evaluating everything afresh, not only him. He would see her at the bottom of the garden under the horse chestnut, lying on the grass with the newspapers, waiting in deep shade for her evening to begin. Then she would retire to the guest room to shower, dress, apply make-up and scent. As if reading his thoughts, she was wearing her lipstick red and thick. Perhaps Rodney Tarpin was encouraging the Monroe notion – a cliche Beard was now obliged to share.
If he was still in the house when she left (he tried so hard to keep busy at night), he found it irresistible to ameliorate his longing and pain by observing her from an upstairs window as she stepped into the evening air of Belsize Park and walked up the garden path – how disloyal of the unoiled garden gate to squeak in the same old way – and climbed into her car, a small and flighty black Peugeot of wanton acceleration. She was so eager, gunning the engine as she pulled away from the kerb, that his douleur redoubled because he knew she knew he was watching. Then her absence hung in the summer dusk like garden bonfire smoke, an erotic charge of invisible particulates that caused him to remain in position for many pointless minutes. He was not actually mad, he kept telling himself, but he thought he was getting a taste, a bitter sip.
What impressed him was his ability to think of nothing else. When he was reading a book, when he was giving a talk, he was really thinking of her, or of her and Tarpin. It was a bad idea to be at home when she was out seeing him, but since Lisbon he had no desire to look up old girlfriends. Instead he took on a series of evening lectures about quantum field theory at the Royal Geographical Society, joined radio and TV discussions, and at occasional events filled in for colleagues who were ill. Let the philosophers of science delude themselves to the contrary, physics was free of human taint, it described a world that would still exist if men and women and all their sorrows did not. In this conviction he was at one with Albert Einstein.
But even if he ate late with friends, he was usually home before her, and was forced to wait, whether he wanted to or not, until she returned, though nothing would happen when she did. She would go straight to her room, and he would remain in his, not wanting to meet her on the stairs in her state of post-coital somnolence. It was almost better when she stayed over at Tarpin’s. Almost, but it would cost him a night’s sleep.
At 2 a.m. one night in late July he was in his dressing gown on his bed listening to the radio when he heard her come in and immediately, without premeditation, enacted a scheme to make her jealous and unsure and want to come back to him. On the BBC World Service a woman was discussing village customs as they affected domestic life among Turkish Kurds, a soothing drone of cruelty, injustice and absurdity. Turning the volume down, but keeping his fingers on the knob, Beard loudly intoned a fragment of a nursery rhyme. He figured that from her room she would hear his voice, but not his words. As he finished his sentence, he turned up the volume of the woman’s voice for a few seconds, which he then interrupted with a line from the lecture he had given that night, and made the woman reply at greater length. He kept this going for five minutes, his voice, then the woman’s, sometimes artfully overlapping the two. The house was silent, listening, of course. He went into the bathroom, ran a tap, flushed the lavatory and laughed out loud. Patrice should know that his lover was a wit. Then he gave out a muted kind of whoop. Patrice should know he was having fun.
He did not sleep much that night. At four, after a long silence suggestive of tranquil intimacy, he opened his bedroom door while keeping up an insistent murmur, and went down the stairs backwards, bending forward to beat out on the treads with his palms the sound of his companion’s footfall, syncopated with his own. This was the kind of logical plan only a madman might embrace. After seeing his companion to the hall, saying his goodbyes between silent kisses, and closing the front door on her with a firmness that resounded through the house, he went upstairs and fell into a doze at last after six, repeating to himself softly, ‘Judge me by my results.’ He was up an hour later to be sure of running into Patrice before she left for work, and of letting her see how suddenly cheerful he was.
At the front door she paused, car keys in her hand, the strap of her book-crammed satchel cutting into the shoulder of her floral blouse. No one could doubt it, she looked shattered, drained, though her voice was as bright as ever. She told him that she would be inviting Rodney for dinner that evening, and that he would probably stay the night, and she would appreciate it if he, Michael, would stay clear of the kitchen.
That happened to be his day for travelling to the Centre out at Reading. Dizzy with fatigue, he began the journey staring through his smeared train window at suburban London’s miraculous combination of chaos and dullness, and damning himself for his folly. His turn to listen to voices through the wall? Impossible, he would stay out somewhere. Driven from his own home by his wife’s lover? Impossible, he would stay and confront him. A fight with Tarpin? Impossible, he would be stamped into the hallway parquet. Clearly, he had been in no state to take decisions or to devise schemes and from now on he must take into account his unreliable mental state and act conservatively, passively, honestly, and break no rules, do nothing extreme.
Months later he would violate every element of this resolution, but it was forgotten by the end of that day because Patrice arrived home from work without supplies (there was nothing in the fridge) and the builder did not come to dinner. He saw her only once that night, crossing the hallway with a mug of tea in her hand, looking slumped and grey, less the movie icon, more the overworked primary-school teacher whose private life was awry. Had he been wrong to berate himself on the train, had his plan actually worked, and in her sorrow had she been forced to cancel?
Reflecting on the night before, he found it extraordinary that after a lifetime of infidelities, a night with an imaginary friend was no less exciting. For the first time in weeks he felt faintly cheerful, even whistled a show tune as he microwaved his supper, and when he saw himself in the gold-leaf sunking mirror in the cloakroom downstairs, thought his face had lost some fat and looked purposeful, with a shadow of cheekbone visible, and was, by the light of the thirty-watt bulb, somewhat noble, a possible effect of the sugary cholesterol- lowering yoghurt drink he was forcing himself to swallow each morning. When he went to bed he kept the radio off and lay waiting with the light turned low for the remorseful little tap of her fingernails on his door.
It did not come, but he was not troubled. Let her pass a white night re-examining her life and what was meaningful, let her weigh in the scales of human worth a horny-handed Tarpin and his shrouded boat against ethereal Beard of planetary renown. The following five nights she stayed home, as far as he could tell, while he was committed to his lecture and other meetings and dinners, and when he came in, usually after midnight, he hoped his confident footfalls gave the impression to the darkened house of a man returning from a tryst.
On the sixth night, he was free to stay in, and she chose to go out, having spent longer than usual under shower and hairdryer. From his place, a small, deeply recessed window on a first-floor half-landing, he watched her go along the garden path and pause by a tall drift of vermilion hollyhocks, pause as though reluctant to leave, and put her hand out to examine a flower. She picked it, squeezing it between newly painted nails of thumb and forefinger, held it a moment to consider, then let it drop to her feet. The summer dress, beige silk, armless, with a single pleat in the small of her back, was new, a signal he was uncertain how to read. She continued to the front gate and he thought there was heaviness in her step, or at least some slackening of her customary eagerness, and she parted from the kerb in the Peugeot at near-normal acceleration.
But he was less happy that night waiting in, confused again about his judgement, beginning to think he was right after all, his radio prank had sunk him. To help think matters through he poured a scotch and watched football. In place of dinner he ate a litre tub of strawberry ice cream and prised apart a half-kilo of pistachios. He was restless, bothered by unfocused sexual need, and coming to the conclusion that he might as well be having or resuming a real affair. He passed some time turning the pages of his address book, stared at the phone a good while, but did not pick it up.
He drank half the bottle and before eleven fell asleep fully dressed on the bed with the overhead light on, and for several seconds did not know where he was when, some hours later, he was woken by the sound of a voice downstairs. The bedside clock showed two thirty. It was Patrice talking to Tarpin, and Beard, still fortified by drink, was in the mood to have a word. He stood groggily in the centre of the bedroom, swaying a little as he tucked in his shirt. Quietly, he opened his door. All the house lights were on, and that was fine, he was
