Читать книгу What You Will - Katherine Bucknell - Страница 5

CHAPTER 2

‘There he was putting me into the cab, practically strapping me to the seat to stop me throwing myself at him, while I was blubbing my eyes out and trying to apologise, and the expression on his face was so – well, I don’t know what it was. It was like he opened his face, made it – whatever I needed it to be. Made it an acceptance, or a forgiveness. A non-judgement. Without any sign that I could really make sense of.’

‘You mean – blank?’ Gwen asked. She had switched on the kettle, stood rummaging in the cupboards for mugs, tea bags.

‘Maybe that’s all it was. Just a blank. A make-of-me-what-you-will. And so I – I said goodbye, and the taxi pulled away and it seemed that anything was possible. That he had handed the situation over to me. That he would wait to see what I did next.’

‘And what you did next was break off your engagement.’

Hilary pressed her lips together hard, looked feisty. ‘God, you make it sound so cut and dried. Where the hell is that whiskey?’ she demanded.

Gwen laughed and chucked the boxes of tea back into the cupboard just as the kettle began to spout steam into the air. She moved off towards the Welsh dresser by the floppy green sofa in the window alcove, bent to the screeching doors, the clinking bottles, and brandished a bottle aloft as she recrossed the room. She sloshed whiskey into the pair of mugs. Then she sat down at the kitchen table opposite Hilary.

The first sip made Hilary’s voice deeper, huskier. ‘Oh God, the lustre was off Mark completely. I so did not want to see him – like a kind of sudden revulsion. It blows my mind how fast everything came clear. I just wanted the plane to turn around and fly the other way. I got this terrible headache, and I kept thinking that if I ordered more champagne, I’d get rid of the headache and I could lie back and daydream about Paul. There were bubbles inside me, you know, this sensation of something fizzing, exhilarating – how I felt about Paul and that now he knew it. But I couldn’t let the bubbles rise.

‘It was weird when we landed. The wheels hit with that hard bounce, and it was like – the knock of reality. There was that smell you get of burning, the reek of the brakes in your nose, really hurting. Utter destruction. All those years with Mark, some kind of lie I’d told to both of us. I was stale and sweaty and gross, but I was glad about it, because it proved how hard I’d been working – an alibi. I was the sexless professional again, the same work jock I’d been when I left town. And I was thinking how free it felt, and how I should just do what I wanted to do, and how being alone was fine. Strong. Kind of thrilling, in fact.’

Gwen basked in it, Hilary alone.

‘I was completely businesslike with Mark. Starting with, From three thousand miles away, I realised I didn’t really want to be married … But I couldn’t quite look him in the eye. Somehow you think the person’s going to hit you or something. I mean, you feel you need to be ready to run. What is that? Some primitive thing. Your gut tells you that, basically, breaking up is a fight.’

‘But you did say he was angry?’

‘Not at first. I mean – well, I don’t remember his face. Or – I didn’t look at it. At first he just didn’t believe me. And then when he started to take it in, he thought it was just a re-entry thing. That I’d gone skittish or gotten self-conscious. He was saying things like, Do you want to maybe take a shower.’

‘You mean because you didn’t really kiss him when you first came in?’

Hilary went red. ‘Oh, but Christ, I couldn’t kiss him, Gwen!’ Then she laughed. ‘My clothes stank, though. God, you think that’s what he meant? And I was thinking how I must seem like – such a bitch. Cold – and – but it’s true. I was.’

‘And the champagne?’

‘That was so terrible. A bottle of Dom Pérignon. The whole fiancé thing. And you know that he’s not really like that, Gwen. He’s much more beer and Chinese noodles. There were roses, too, in this tippy glass vase on the coffee table. Those dark red kind, like rolled-up bundles of velvet, on long, long stems. They looked completely ghastly. They were studded with thorns. And they had no scent; those waxy petals, nothing at all on your nose when you try to smell them. I guess he even bought the vase. Things he’d never done, never thought of. The apartment was bare, as if he’d stuffed all the mess into closets or had cleaners come in. All so contrived. Then he opened the champagne while I was in the bathroom.’

Gwen grimaced. ‘So you had to drink it.’

‘Of course I had to. And it made me think how easy it could have been to slip back into my old life, if I had been polite at first, or pretended a little. If I had let it start to happen between us as if nothing had changed, then – I don’t know.’

‘Nah, come on. You’d just have gotten here tomorrow instead of today.’ Gwen wrapped her fingers around Hilary’s wrist, lifted it gently, dropped it on the scarred top of the oak table, lifted it and dropped it again, feeling the weight of Hilary’s arm where it swelled towards the elbow, studying the flicker of the tendons where they disappeared inside Hilary’s pushed-up sleeve. Then she let go, looked up at Hilary again. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘I was scared there was going to be a ring. I kept looking for one of those little boxes, a bulge in a pocket. And I saw myself trapped there with only him for company, starved of something else I wanted. I couldn’t breathe. I knew I couldn’t spend one night there, couldn’t sleep with him even to comfort him. And he was saying that I couldn’t expect him to swear off me all of a sudden like that, after he’d been waiting all summer and looking forward to seeing me. In a way, that was the worst. Basically, he was begging for sex. I think he even had his hands like this.’ She put her palms together as if she were praying. ‘He never asked anything about my summer, about what had happened, or what I felt. So how could sex fit? Where could it come from, in a situation like that?’

Gwen tapped the whiskey bottle, raising her eyebrows at Hilary, but Hilary shook her head.

‘We drank too much, Mark and I, last night. That was part of the problem – the crying and the screaming.’

‘But, hey, you got through a lot of misery in one awful night.’

‘I feel bad for him, Gwen. It was like I’d inflicted this terrible injury. That’s how I keep picturing it – an open wound, bleeding and twitching.’

‘Worse for Mark if you hadn’t found out in time, hon.’ Gwen was casual, like someone who’d seen it all before, lots of times. Then she stooped close across the table and spoke caressingly. ‘It’s bitter to betray someone – anyone – a lover, a friend. But don’t you think when it comes to love and marriage – the lifelong deal, I mean – for that, don’t you have to pay any price? You can’t fake that. And if you want to have children? You did the right thing.’

Hilary was white-faced, dipping her finger in the dregs of her whiskey.

Gwen insisted. ‘You have to leave this with ragged edges, Hil. If he blames you or thinks you’re a shit, then that’s what he needs to do to survive. You have to let him deal with this – without you. Because if you’re dumping Mark, you’re dumping him. The thing is broken. That’s life. It’s painful.’

‘Yeah. Painful.’ Hilary’s voice creaked. Guilt pooled in her eyes. And then she seemed to shoulder it, like a burden. ‘Listen. I know there were big things wrong with me and Mark. We were always part of some gang. Endless room-mates. Then with Eddie, a gang of three. We only ever existed as part of a clique. Never a couple. It was more like being under a spell. I was still in graduate school when the whole thing with Eddie started, and because of him, I never even finished my degree. Mark and I had been around each other for so long that it just seemed like time for something else to happen. The truth is, Paul saved me.’

She paused for a long time, leaned back in her chair. And then at last, she let it out: ‘But man, I could never have pictured Mark’s anger. His eyes turned red – flaming. In all our years together, I had never seen – this – creature in him who didn’t get what he expected. Who couldn’t make me do what he wanted. That was totally scary.’

‘Stay away from him for a while, don’t you think? Till he calms down?’

Hilary sat up. ‘God, I’m stealing you from your bed, and Will’ll be up early needing you.’

Gwen was easy with it. ‘It’s fine. Let’s do the tea, huh?’

Hilary didn’t fight her. ‘Camomile or peppermint or something?’

Gwen switched the kettle back on, took clean mugs from the cupboard, talked with her back to Hilary, flipping labels loose from tea bags, extending their little strings. ‘So what about all your stuff? How are you going to get it out of Mark’s place?’ She launched the soggy tea bags into the sink where they splatted.

‘I don’t have that much. Anyway, where would I put it? I have to get my own place first. You can always buy new stuff. I just need my books from Eddie’s apartment. I miss those.’

Gwen rapped down the two smoking mugs, sat opposite again.

Hilary cupped her hands around one mug and shook her head. ‘Mark didn’t know about Paul, so he blamed Eddie, you know? The stuff he said – aggressive, disgusting stuff. How weird I was to have a thing for an old man. Did I get off on Eddie’s obsession, or was it the power I had over his money? Then shouting at me, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going to go now? You can’t get into his apartment if I don’t give you the key. What are you going to do? Sleep in the warehouse so you can fondle his pots and his lamps and his statues? That’s what you’d really like to do, isn’t it? Sleep with him – with his fucking collection.”’ Hilary’s lips curled back from her teeth, trembled ever so slightly.

‘You think he felt jealous when Eddie was alive?’

‘Maybe there was some power thing with them. Basically Mark never understood what all the excitement was about. Eddie and I just thought he did. He couldn’t see what we saw – about the past. Turns out it made him mad. Made him into a kind of brute – a bully.’

Gwen lifted her mug to her lips, put it down again without drinking from it; there was something in Hilary’s voice, disillusionment, a tone of fuck all. ‘But you don’t think he’d try to derail Eddie’s plans?’

‘He was kind of nuts with his threats, Gwen: “I can stop the whole fucking project. Doro’s dead; he’s buried in a hole in the ground. All that stuff in his apartment and all that stuff in the warehouse is dust and bones. It’s dug up out of graves, stolen from tombs. It belonged to people who died thousands of years ago. What is this with you – dead people, the past? It’s necrophilia, that’s what it’s called. You give me the creeps with your sarcophaguses and your burial monuments and your funeral urns.”’

Gwen squeaked with outrage. ‘But a lawyer – a trusts and estates lawyer – that’s all about people dying, and about them trying to reach into the future with what they want – to exercise their will! I mean the word, “will” – it’s all about enacting what you want from beyond the grave. That’s Mark’s job, it’s what he chose. What’s going on over there in America?’

‘I know! And I said to him, “It’s sarcophagi, by the way”; but, God, I wish I hadn’t! It just infuriated him.’ At last she sipped her tea.

‘Ginger and lemon,’ murmured Gwen, watching her.

‘I like it.’ Hilary took another, longer sip. ‘Up until I said that – “It’s sarcophagi, by the way” – I think there was maybe a chance I could have persuaded Mark to give me back the key to Eddie’s apartment. But somehow that one pedantic little remark changed everything. It seems trivial, but just as I was saying it, I realised that was the point: we weren’t speaking the same language any more. I needed to be with someone who understood what I was doing – so I could remember who I was. All I really wanted was to go to Eddie’s and sit there quietly and collect myself – Well, the thing is I couldn’t ask Mark, could I, because communing with Eddie –?’ Hilary stopped, raised her hands in mock horror.

‘He would have thought you were trying to hold a seance –’ Gwen said.

‘It crossed my mind that I could get the doorman to let me in. There’s one I’m friendly with. But there are all these procedures for access now because of the value of the stuff, and then Mark could accuse me of breaking the rules, and he’d have just what he needed to get me dumped for ever from the project. Imagine thinking that way, about a guy you were going to marry! And by then it was three or four in the morning and I wanted –’

The neglected undercurrent of Paul stirred between them. Gwen acknowledged it by lifting one corner of her mouth, not a smile, but sliding her lips around to the side of her face, making a squeegee sound inside her cheek. ‘Right – you wanted to be with someone who understood why you cared so much about all those antiquities.’

‘I got down into the street with my suitcases, and hailed a cab, and the whole thing just ran away with me. Arriving, departing. What was the name of any hotel, anyway? I felt all beaten up, and yet there was energy bubbling somewhere inside me. It was like I was right in the middle of a sentence with Paul, and I thought, Now I can talk straight to him because I’m free. So I told the cab driver to take me back to the airport.’

‘I still can’t believe you didn’t phone him!’

‘It was crazy. I thought – I imagined – that somehow he knew I was coming – or … I don’t know. Paul and I never used the phone; we always just walked in and saw each other first thing every morning. It felt like such a sure thing. I had his address and I – I was so excited – so impatient – like I was running to his arms. I wanted to amaze him. I thought it would make up for torturing him all summer talking about Mark. I kept remembering that expression on his face, when he put me in the taxi – open to whatever I decided. And this would be my answer, my fabulous, dramatic answer. I thought I was in love, Gwen, that’s the thing.’ Hilary swallowed a sob. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ she said loudly, defying it. ‘I’m so fucking tired.’

Gwen got up from her chair, slipped around the table, kneeled down beside Hilary, put her arms around her. ‘It’s fine. You have to give it time, Hil.’

‘I pounded on his door for ever!’ Hilary groaned. ‘What was I thinking?!’

‘You weren’t thinking, you were feeling.’

‘What was I feeling? None of it was real.’

‘So maybe that’s a problem people have about love. That they want it to feel passionate and impulsive. Maybe you did all this to make it feel like love when it wasn’t. To throw yourself, to jump blind. Maybe you needed the end of the world as you knew it.’

‘Christ, how does anyone ever know?’ Hilary turned her chair with a raw scrape and laid her cheek on Gwen’s hair; tears darkened the fine brown strands and swelled like beads on the flecks of green oil paint stuck to a few. ‘Any normal person would have given up and gone away, realised he wasn’t going to answer, assumed he wasn’t home.’

‘Shhh,’ said Gwen, rocking her gently. ‘It’s just as well he was there so it’s over already. One day you’ll laugh about it.’

‘When he finally opened the door, he was glowing. Hair tousled, no glasses, out of breath a little, giggling – and I still thought it was all for me. That he’d been waiting and hoping. He didn’t have on a shirt, his trousers were only half done up. It’s so embarrassing. I swear. I launched myself across the threshold, into the air, arms outstretched, before I even noticed the other man right behind him. This huge, hairy guy, half naked, twice Paul’s age.’

Gwen shook with laughter. ‘I’m sorry. I know how much it’s hurting you, but you tell it so perfectly, and I see this – tableau.’

Hilary pushed Gwen’s shoulders away, slapped at them, belligerent, half joking. ‘Bitch.’

‘Who talked first?’

‘Paul. Handled it easily. As if he were in white tie and tails and presenting me to a duchess, but with this kind of blandness, like he was – under hypnosis.’ She mimicked his English accent exaggeratedly: ‘“Ah – Hilary, what a surprise. Can I introduce you to my friend Orlando?” – or whatever the guy was called. But I didn’t meet him; he must have been as surprised as I was; made tracks. And then Paul said, “We were just having a bit of a rest, actually.”’ In her broadest American accent Hilary added, ‘Well, duh –’

‘And how’d you make your getaway?’

‘Badly. Really badly –’ Hilary started to laugh, too. ‘Some garbled junk about airplanes and how I had no idea what time it was and I was sorry and I’d call in the morning. To his credit, Paul did ask, “Is everything all right? Quite all right?”’

Hilary rolled her eyes. ‘Perfect. It’s all perfect. Can’t you see? My life is completely perfect. What does he care?’

Lawrence lifted his head a little as Gwen slid under the covers.

‘Sorry, darling,’ she whispered.

‘How is she now?’ he muttered. ‘OK?’ He laid a hand on Gwen’s thigh, squeezing it softly, then giving it a gentle shove, the cadence of goodnight.

‘I’ve got to find her someone to marry.’

Lawrence snorted into his pillow. ‘Wouldn’t it be enough to find her a place to live? Or maybe a job?’ He turned his head away, closing his eyes. ‘Why does she need to marry anyone?’

‘She still wants her old job. But we need to keep her away from Mark for a while. He’s so angry, it’s as if he’s lost his mind. She definitely doesn’t know how to pick men.’

His head came up again. ‘Do you know?’ Then dropped.

Gwen bent down and pressed her face into the nape of Lawrence’s neck, rubbing against his bristling hair where it was cut close at the back, metallic with grey. ‘OK,’ she admitted, ‘it was you who picked me. But by now, I can recognise the goods. Hilary feels so much, and she just throws herself at whatever – next it could be a passing car. I have to help her.’

Lawrence didn’t answer; he was asleep.

Upstairs in the studio, on her thin spare pillow, Hilary was thinking about Lawrence and Gwen lying side by side in their wide bed with its massive, blackened oak headboard. So much presence, that bed. An institution in itself, she thought. The thick modern mattress supported by the Jacobean frame, five hundred years or more of ageing wood hewn by hand with an axe – an oak tree reshaped as beams, posts, creaking pegs neatly filling invisible holes in the tight corners, and the broad exposed planks boldly, impressively carved.

Generations were born and died in that bed, Hilary thought. She saw them in pairs, producing a life, producing a death. In her mind’s eye, she only approximated the bodies, generic, strangely innocent, dressed in white like Gwen in her nightgown; what did Hilary know of their intimacy, in fact? She revered the idea of it. She pictured Lawrence and Gwen together throughout time, their hands folded on their breasts, not touching at all. Like figures carved in stone on a funeral monument. You could sleep for ever in that bed, she thought.

She had slept there herself during half of July and most of August when Gwen took Will to the cottage for the summer air and offered Hilary a vacation from the service flat. There had been a string of mornings so bright that Hilary had relished being called to them early by the birds. Relished dozing and dreaming in the half-light before dawn, under the pleasing shroud of Gwen’s stiffly laundered cotton sheets, slightly abrasive with London lime on the naked skin. How lucky, how certain, how easy I felt in that bed. Before all this mess.

Hilary longed for sleep now, for oblivion. But her mind raced on. I could get to hate Gwen, she thought. Both of them. It might seem easy to tell myself I don’t want what they have. But for whose benefit, that lie? The spinster’s bitter defiance, life at arm’s length. It’s a marriage I admire, and it’s their marriage. No way I can stay here more than a day or two. I have to tell her. Tomorrow – right away. Ask her to lend me money for one more ticket. Save what’s left of the credit cards.

Trouble with goddamned fucking New York is everybody’s apartments are so small. In London people have things like extra beds. She ran over in her mind the friends who might have room for her to stay, thinking how they were really Mark’s friends more than hers, how they might have an opinion, either hate her guts or try to talk her around, and how she wouldn’t be able to bear the interference. One or two from graduate school she could maybe impose on, her old PhD supervisor, for instance, who still treated her as though the world needed the thesis she had never finished writing. She pictured herself telling the whole sorry tale again on the phone to New York, and her stomach toiled with embarrassment.

Could Mark really kick her off the project? She’d been agonising over it, telling herself she was too tired to think straight. Eddie wouldn’t leave me so exposed. Eddie, whose last years had been haunted by the future, by planning, eventualities. And then with a shuddering ache, Get real, Hilary. Eddie was never planning with you in mind. He wouldn’t leave his collection so exposed.

But it was hard to give up that fragile old-man voice in her ear, croaky, desiccated, the Bronx twang made fine by education and a certain natural delicacy: ‘How can you be so sure you want to give your life to this when I’m gone? And the lockstep with Mark? Maybe I should set you free from that? There’s always some other way, you know, with lawyers.’

How many times should Eddie have asked her? She had been so quick to reassure him, It’s decided. I’m all yours. As if she herself were a piece he wanted for the collection. Because she knew his appetite, and it gave her so much pleasure to satisfy it. And because in his growing frailty, he was facing something so big, drawing closer all the time, and she could shield him a little with this indulgence; she could take his mind off his fear. The legal stuff ’s fine. Mark’s good at that. Let him deal with it, she used to say.

I left myself exposed, she thought. I had – a sense of expectation; she had to admit it.

After the funeral, Hilary wondered how much she really cared for the treasures. All those years, had she been living off Eddie’s enthusiasm? Until it all came to life again with Paul. Paul loved the collection with that unhesitating lightness of heart, that spontaneous certainty that she had come to feel she would never encounter again. The touch of boyish disregard that carried it off.

That was real, she thought, that part of my friendship with Paul. It was the same as with Eddie – we shared some things perfectly, others not at all.

At last she began to sink into sleep, feeling justified in something. She let go of trying to make sense; let the pieces of her puzzle fall apart into their jigsaw fragments. She drifted among bodies, among beds. Gwen, Lawrence. Eddie lying alone under his grand red canopy, lost in the magnificence of its height and hangings. Slipping away. Eddie in his wheelchair in the big living room. In the sunlight beside her desk. Safely dead at last; the silent move he made, out of reach.

I only slept with Mark’s body, she thought without clarity. It felt like something she needed to explain. But not now, under the weight of the thin blanket, carrying her down. Don’t try.

Then she had a sensation of hurt. A jolt, as if the pillow had dropped underneath her, the whole bed. There was a shuddering black edge around her thoughts as she was thrown back from sleep for an instant.

I knew Eddie was selfish. I made it easy for him. She tried to push past this discomfort, her sense of error and responsibility, still reaching for sleep. I have to go forward from where I am now. With what I know now. I can get back in touch with Paul, on a new footing. He’ll help me. It’s OK here with Gwen until I get myself together.

She was sure of Gwen. At least there’s room for me here. With Lawrence and Gwen.