A Closed Eye (6 page)

W
HEN
Harriet first saw Jack Peckham she put up her hand, instinctively, to shield her face. With no one else had she ever done this. The gesture was symbolic, as if she were hiding more than her face, as if she were hiding herself, for she recognized in him the stranger of her dreams, and in the light of day did not wish to be found. The four of them were in a restaurant, a week before Tessa’s wedding. Freddie had grumbled at the idea of this dinner, which, he thought, had nothing to do with him, but Harriet had insisted on this being their treat, and the most graceful way to show the recalcitrant Peckham that there were witnesses to his dubious entrance into Tessa’s life, and as if to warn him against a too precipitate departure from it. Theirs was apparently already a tired arrangement: he would stay with Tessa until the baby was born, and then they would separate. He had it in mind to be a free man within a couple of years.

‘I’ll never divorce him, never,’ Tessa had said to Harriet in the Ladies’ Room. ‘Anyway, he might as well be married to me as to anyone else. You’ll see what he’s like. He’ll never settle down until somebody makes him. And when he sees the baby …’

Harriet, apart from noticing the antagonism in Tessa’s voice, and understanding it, knew that she was wrong, that
Jack Peckham was unlikely to be seduced by a baby, or by a simulacrum of marriage, or even by a woman’s longing for him, because he was a prodigious man who was made for adventure in the wider world, and whom the same four walls, however welcoming, would irritate beyond endurance. He was already irritated by having to dine with this friend of Tessa’s and her pompous husband, a man of the kind who normally made him utter a short bark of laughter. He seemed to create annoyance wherever he went and to be indifferent to it. He had arrived late, wearing jeans and a leather jacket: light caught the very fine reddish stubble on his jaw, and his longish hair was untidy. Harriet became aware simultaneously of her husband’s disapproval and of that same husband’s costive navy blue suit and striped tie, his sparse hair, and the cologne which he used and which she now realized she had never liked. She switched her attention as best she could to Tessa, who had coloured hectically at Jack Peckham’s arrival and had caught at his hand, which was unresponsive.

‘Too bad of you to be so late, darling,’ she had said, in a tone which attempted to convey that they had been happily married for years.

‘I’m afraid I shall have to leave rather early,’ was his reply. ‘I have to go back to the office.’

‘Then we had better order now,’ said Freddie, who seemed to find Peckham’s presence displeasing. ‘Will you leave the wine to me?’

‘Delighted,’ said Jack Peckham, sitting sideways to the table. ‘Tessa mentioned that you were in the oil business. Can you fill me in on Riyadh? I have to go there in a few weeks.’

It was then that Harriet made a sign to Tessa to join her in the Ladies’; it seemed to her urgent to find out more about this strange alliance which had previously seemed to require from her nothing but sympathy.

‘He is very handsome,’ she said moderately, while combing
her hair. In the mirror she noticed, with a feeling of instant rejection, the white crêpe de Chine shirt, the black skirt, and the pearl stud earrings which she usually wore on such occasions. She felt she never wanted to see them again.

‘I hope I’m going to be able to manage this,’ said Tessa. ‘I usually feel sick in the evenings.’

‘I’m afraid Freddie is already a little put out,’ Harriet observed. ‘This is not going to be easy. Yes,’ she added, after a moment in which both scrupulously washed their hands, ‘he is marvellous to look at. He will break your heart, you know.’

‘He already has. He was bound to. I adore him. I hate him too.’

Both silently acknowledged the rightness of this last remark. Yes, thought Harriet, as they turned to go, you hate him because you will never master him. He will leave you and you will wait for him, and maybe he will come back but too late, and you will not look as he remembered you in the brief moments when he ever thought about you. I should be the same. No, I should be even more abject; I should be contemptible. I should wait for ever, so that my life would resemble a long widowhood, and I should still be proud to have captured—for however fleeting a moment, a second, even—such a man’s attention.

They went back to the crowded restaurant to find Freddie discoursing quite amiably to Jack Peckham, who was taking notes. So his time was not entirely wasted, thought Harriet meekly. Throughout the meal he continued to sit sideways to the table, as if he had no intention of staying. He ate decisively, economically, staring at his plate for a few seconds before making a strategic incision, then laying aside his knife as if of no further use to him. She studied him covertly, under her eyelashes. Although large he was very graceful. He was, she decided, the villainous hero of romantic fiction, the cruel lover who breaks hearts and thrills women, so that they look with disdain on the humbler, more available variety of men
for ever after. Thus did the virtuous Jane Eyre spurn St John Rivers, who would have made her a much better husband than Mr Rochester. Mr Rochester, she thought, has a lot to answer for, both in the book and in real life, where his legend lingers on. Only when he was blind and impotent did Charlotte Brontë let Jane have her way with him, and what kind of a victory was that? To master such a man demands extraordinary resources, of which undoubtedly the most effective is indifference. Jack Peckham had the unforgivably memorable looks which provoke a certain respect, from men as well as from women. Tall, big-boned, and of a reddish fairness, he lowered his head as if bored with admiring glances, and was taciturn, even rude, for the same reason. His extraordinary looks and his abrupt manners gave no clue to his character, but then his character would always be of less interest than his appearance, she thought, and so thinking, had no feeling of strangeness but rather one of familiarity.

Of course, he was not made for a conventional marriage, particularly of the kind which Tessa envisaged: her jokey coyness must make him grit his teeth with fury. He would have to be greatly diminished, like Mr Rochester, to allow a woman like Tessa any access, and then no doubt a woman like Tessa would ignore him, for conventional women like Tessa also had their cruelties. As it was, his very refusal, his obvious reluctance, had conferred on Tessa a certain depth, even a foreshadowing of tragedy, which did not become her. The very incongruity of Tessa’s passion and her well-brought-up obstinacy made Harriet uncomfortable. She was aware of tension, a tension which was in some perverse fashion attractive. Pity would come later, for pity was what she was supposed to feel, the solidarity of women in such a predicament. But the time at her disposal was too precious. For this hour it was almost permitted—and at the same time it was even a necessity—to contemplate Jack.

Feeling a pulse beginning to beat in her throat she laid
down her fork, and took a sip of wine. She found herself looking at his hands. Instinctively he raised his head; his gaze was quite dispassionate. It was then that she put up her hand to her face.

He is only the same as other men, she admonished herself, remembering her husband in the dark and his clumsy hands. Why should it be different? Yet she noted that her thoughts had immediately turned to the act itself, as if any other context were irrelevant—she, who out of fastidiousness, out of shame, even, would never allow herself to speculate on anyone else’s sexual activities, and who could hardly bear to think about her own. But this was a man with whom she would never want to walk or talk, or pass agreeable but unconsidered time: she would want to lead him straight away to a bed, to a secret room, and the odd thing was that in her imagining it was she who led the way, while he, prodigious though he might be, merely followed her. It took no further imagination to see them naked, as if all this were pre-ordained, as if her present life were a superimposition of no importance, which an expert hand had cleanly removed.

While thinking these thoughts she felt taller, stronger, more armoured against the world than she had ever felt before. She looked at her husband perplexedly, as if he were someone she barely remembered, saw his speckled hand pour the last of the wine into Jack’s glass. He was captivated too, she saw: his initial defensiveness had already dissolved into a kind of admiration, as if the stranger’s grace and force, his careless presence, his indifference, even, exacted their own tribute. So must Freddie have been at school, thought Harriet, clumsy even then, and flattered by the mere existence of beauty. He is such a decent man, she told herself, and he must never know what I feel at this moment, what I felt when Jack Peckham looked up and caught my eye, what I have been feeling ever since he came into the room. She saw Tessa
trying to suppress an ominous hiccough, laid her hand on Freddie’s arm, and said, ‘Dear, it’s getting late. Shall we make a move?’ and, turning to the others, said, ‘We are so looking forward to the wedding.’ (Indeed, she was anxious to see what Jack Peckham would look like in a formal suit. She was excited by the idea of his being momentarily subdued.) ‘Tessa, shall I come over to the flat tomorrow and give you a hand?’ She did not much care that her wishes and her remarks were dominating the proceedings. She did not at that moment feel guilty that she had eclipsed her friend, who admittedly was not looking her best, nor was she much impressed that their roles seemed to be reversed. Childhood now seemed far off, irrelevant, discarded. Now, for the first time, she had passed into a different phase of being.

Later that night cold realization came to her and she felt terrible. Better that she should remain in lifelong ignorance than yield to insights so destructive of her real life, her real husband, who now seemed to her to be definitely altered by her recent perceptions. He was not young for his age: he would get older, and his hands would get clumsier. And she would never know anything other than this. For her imaginings were not to be borne, not to be tolerated, as if they were dangerous. And they were, exceedingly dangerous; they were a danger to order. She saw that the power of Jack Peckham was to spread this grand disorder into other lives, not seeing, or not caring, that although disorder was his natural climate it might not be so for those with whom he came into contact. Already Tessa was damaged by it, had, like any girl victim in a melodrama, succumbed, and was diminished, never again to enjoy freedom. She had looked frail, mournful, behind that façade of defiant high spirits which so annoyed Freddie. Part of Harriet’s anguish originated in the knowledge that she must henceforth support Tessa, and Tessa’s interests, and that Tessa’s interests were not those of Jack Peckham, were in fact
diametrically opposed to them. Here was her chance to be the friend she had always longed to be, loyal and good and faithful unto death, like those valiant friendships she had read about in her fairy books. An immense sense of the fragility of human destiny enveloped her. It occurred to her briefly that she might choose another path. In her mind she chose it, then, blushing, put it away from her for ever.

The following day she telephoned Tessa at Cadogan Square, where she seemed to spend most of her time.

‘Will you be at the flat at about four? Could I come for a cup of tea? I’ll bring a cake. Line up something useful for me to do.’ A pause. ‘Longing to see you.’ And by then it was true.

‘Freddie tells me that Jack is going to Riyadh,’ she said, on that afternoon, picking her way through a jumble of boxes in the hallway of the flat in Beaufort Street. She noticed uncurtained dusty windows in a room at the far end of a cluttered corridor. The flat, what she could see of it, was large but empty of all the necessities of life. The arrangements had aborted, or had always been makeshift. She put her box of cakes down on a packing case, and followed Tessa into what she supposed would be the drawing-room. Abundant light appeared balked by the coating of grime which seemed to press in from outside; dust swirled in sharply defined cones of sunlight which spread briefly along the floor and died.

‘Yes, well, he’s a journalist, he’s got to go where the news is. I don’t mind. I knew all this when I met him. To tell the truth, I’m quite glad he’s not here while I’m being sick all the time. I’m not at my best.’

‘Where is he?’ asked Harriet.

‘He’s got a flat in Judd Street. He’s usually there.’

‘He’ll make you unhappy,’ Harriet said abruptly. ‘He may not be good for you. You may be going into something that is not necessarily in your best interest. Will you ever feel comfortable with him? Relaxed, like couples are supposed to
feel?’ None of this is what I meant to say, she thought. I meant to say, he will destroy you. Or rather that you will destroy yourself for him. Already you are less than you once were, when you were my friend, and I looked up to you. I hate this.

Tessa stared at her. ‘What’s come over you? Whatever made you say all that?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said those things. I just had a sort of feeling that you were doing the wrong thing.’

They were both silent. Tessa, sitting on one of the two dining-room chairs, which were all that the room contained, attempted unsuccessfully, haplessly, to screw together the two halves of an electric plug.

‘Why did you say all that?’ she asked eventually. ‘It’s not like you. You were always so, well, pleasant. My mother always said you had nice manners. Nicer than mine, was what she meant. I got a bit sick of it, I can tell you.’

‘I just don’t think he’ll make you happy,’ repeated Harriet, flushing with embarrassment and shame.

‘Do you know what it sounded like? It sounded as if you were jealous.’

‘Jealous?’ said Harriet, horrified.

‘Well, envious, then. Because he’s young, good-looking. Because he’s the kind of man women dream of, the kind of man women like you dream of, Harriet. I can see it in your face. Because you ended up with Freddie. Perhaps even because you can’t have children, at least you don’t seem able to. Sorry to say all this, but you did rather ask for it. Is it because Freddie’s too old? Well, you knew that when you married him.’ She relented when she saw Harriet’s bent head. ‘I don’t blame you for being envious,’ she said. ‘I’d be the same in your place.’