A Conspiracy of Friends (12 page)

“He’ll turn up,” said William. “He always does.”

They set off down a path that led past the barn and into one of the fields. As they walked, Maggie returned to the subject of her thesis.

“You know what I feel when I sit down to write about Iris Murdoch? You know what goes through my mind?”

William shrugged. “The ideas?” he suggested. “All those ideas you talked about?”

“No,” said Maggie. “I feel sad. I think sad thoughts.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s no longer with us. Because such a wonderful intelligence is silent. But mostly because the intellectual elite that used to be at the centre of our national life here is changing and there’s no room for such figures. What we have instead are sound-bite merchants.”

William was puzzled. “But there are plenty of people with opinions.”

“Are there?” asked Maggie. “Or are those who come out with something slightly different shouted down? Don’t you think there’s a certain hegemony of opinion these days? An approved way of thinking? Don’t you think that it’s considered almost indecent now to voice an opinion that deviates from the consensus?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps it’s a bit like that.”

Maggie said nothing for a moment. “Perhaps. But …” She hesitated, as if weighing whether or not to continue. “You know what you said back there about unhappiness. You talked about Geoff’s happiness. But you didn’t ask about me, did you?”

He was slightly taken aback. “Didn’t I? Well, that’s very rude of me. I suppose it’s because I’ve always assumed that you’re perfectly
happy. You have your …” What did Maggie have—her thesis on Iris Murdoch? Her Melton Mowbray pies? Her family?

“My kitchen? Is that what you were going to say?”

“No. Certainly not. You’ve got your thesis. But it’s not just a question of what you have—it’s a matter of attitude. And I think that your attitude, your disposition, is fundamentally happy.”

Her voice was quiet. “Well, it’s not. I’m not happy, William. I’m not happy.”

He stopped. The stick he was carrying, a bit of oak branch, fell to the ground. He did not bend to pick it up. “Why?” he asked. “Why do you say you’re unhappy?”

She was looking at him directly, staring into his eyes. “Because of you,” she said softly. “Because I’m in love with you, William. I’ve loved you for years—for years—and I’ve never had the courage to confess it to anybody. Well, now I’m telling you.”

F
OR
W
ILLIAM
, M
AGGIE’S
declaration was the cause of a mélange of feelings: in the space of a few seconds astonishment vied with embarrassment, which was quickly tempered by sentiments of pleasure, sympathy and affection. There were no words to describe this succession of reactions—no words other than “Oh” and something that sounded like “Ah” but could have been a simple exhalation of breath.

“So there you have it,” said Maggie. Her tone was matter of fact—the tone of one who has simply pointed out some mundane and totally unremarkable fact, such as “It’s about to rain” or “It’s Tuesday today.”

William cleared his throat. “I see,” he said. “Well, thank you for telling me.”

It was a trite thing to say, and he felt immediately ashamed that he was not able to rise to a more momentous acknowledgement of her declaration. She was, after all, talking of years of denial, years of frustration, and all he could do was to thank her for telling him. Well, he thought, at least that’s better than saying, “Thank you for sharing that with me.” That expression was the ultimate anodyne.

Maggie indicated that they should continue with their walk. “It’s only a bit further,” she said. “We come to a pond where we’ve tried to keep ducks for the last few years, but the fox outwits us, I’m afraid.”

They walked on. “Maggie …,” William began, but she reached out and touched him lightly on the forearm.

“No,” she said. “Don’t say anything. The subject has been aired, and now it’s closed. Permanently. No need to say a thing.”

He protested. “But I think that we—”

“No,” she said, more firmly. “I suggest that we treat my words as never having been uttered. What happened back there simply never occurred. All right?”

He did not respond. It was something he himself had done on more than one occasion—said to himself that he would pretend that something he found uncomfortable just had not happened. Willed amnesia, he believed it was called, and it could be invoked at an intimate level—as when we stop ourselves thinking of some situation of acute social embarrassment, or obliterate some act of unkindness or gross selfishness from our personal record; or it could be resorted to on a grander scale altogether—as when an entire nation denies some dire period in its history. It worked—human memory was tactful, and could be persuaded to be more sympathetic yet. And even if it was a dangerous recourse, as historians
are quick to point out, there could be situations in which it was the best and most productive thing to do; getting through life could be difficult enough even without a burden of guilt and self-loathing to drag us down further than we already were.

For the rest of the walk, conversation was sporadic, and shallow. Maggie pointed out a tree that found favour with wood pigeons; William observed that the hedgerows seemed in good health; Maggie said that she had read
The Cloudspotter’s Guide
and now knew what to look for in a cumulus build-up; and so on. In between these undemanding exchanges, William reflected on her revelation. He had had no idea of her feelings—not the slightest inkling. They were friends—close friends, indeed—and he enjoyed the relaxed intimacy of their relationship. They could talk about anything, more or less, and their conversation had always had the amiability and ease that marked out the conversation of old friends—people who had known one another for years, for so long they could not even remember how they met, and knew the preferences and prejudices of the other as well as or even better than they knew their own. An old friend, William thought, could
vote
in the place of his friend; could choose his breakfast; could write an entirely credible letter in his voice … could—and here the appalling, unwelcome thought intruded—could take his place in a marriage. No! No! It was not going to be like that.

Geoffrey was William’s friend; Maggie was the wife of his friend, and he could never entertain any thought of having an affair with her. How could he? How could he sit in the same room as Geoffrey, talking to him as he had always talked to him, harbouring all the while that secret knowledge? It was impossible. He could not do it.

And yet, he reflected, people did precisely that. People did it with astonishing regularity—they had affairs, which they concealed from others; they lied, not just occasionally, but for days, months,
years on end. They maintained the façade, he supposed, by some sort of interior bifurcation, which meant that they could be one person one moment, and another the next. And they did not think of the disloyalty involved, the dirtying deception, or, if they did, they put it from their mind. More denial.

He was not naive. He did not believe that he could do this personally, but he knew that the sheer power of love could quite easily drive one to such extremes. There was an adage that he had once seen inscribed on the label of a wine bottle:
Amor brevis furor est
. Love is a brief madness. It was true; it was. But even in the grip of madness, one could retain some sense of what was right and what was wrong; of who was one’s friend, whose trust one would never betray. One could retain that through all the tempests of love, couldn’t one? Couldn’t one?

They reached the house. “Geoffrey’s back,” said Maggie. “You go and see him while I check on things in the kitchen.”

He noticed how she spoke as if nothing had happened—
I’ll check on things in the kitchen
—when she had only a few minutes ago revealed that the whole structure of her life was undermined by a reckless, hopeless passion. Now, it was as if the revelation had never been made; as if those feelings were simply not there. Things were exactly as they seemed. She was happily married to an engaging and personable man. She had two children who loved both parents. They had an old friend, William, whom they both liked and who was almost a member of the family. Everything was as it had always been and as it should be.

But it was not.

M
AGGIE LEFT
W
ILLIAM
in the hall. He stood still for a moment, like a man at an unfamiliar crossroads, uncertain as to whether or not he should follow her into the kitchen and insist on clearing the air. It was all very well for her to announce that the subject was closed, but she had broached it in the first place and therefore could not simply walk away from it. He felt a degree of irritation, wondering what could have possessed her to blurt out her confession if she intended to become silent only a few minutes later. Or—and this was a disturbing thought—had she imagined her words would have met with a rather different response from that which they had actually elicited? If William had responded more warmly, then perhaps she would have been prepared to discuss the matter; but he had not concealed his shock, and this reaction might have been what silenced her. And if that were true, then his insensitivity had made things much worse for Maggie; rather than helping her, he had returned her burden to her not lightened, as burdens should be, but only made all the heavier.

He was still standing in the hall, seemingly paralysed by these questions, when his host appeared.

Geoffrey broke into a smile. “William! Old friend …”

Involuntarily, William winced.
Old friend
.

Geoffrey looked concerned. “Are you all right?”

“Of course. Of course.”

“It’s just that you looked as if … well, you looked as if you were in pain.”

He was in pain, he realised, his pain being the entirely familiar discomfort felt by the guilty. It was difficult to see why this should be; he had been completely ignorant of Maggie’s feelings for him
and had done nothing to encourage them. There was no reason, then, for him to feel guilty—and yet he did.

For a moment he questioned whether to tell Geoffrey about what had happened. If he did not, he would be concealing something from him, and one did not hide things from old friends. But if he were to reveal Maggie’s secret, it would be an appalling breach of confidence—an implied one, of course, but a confidence nonetheless. No, this was a miserable situation, whichever way one looked at it.

“In pain?” said William, trying to smile. “No, not really. I was just standing and thinking.”

“Thinking about what?” asked Geoffrey.

About your wife
, William said to himself.
About your wife—who has just revealed that she’s been in love with me for years
.

“Nothing important.” And then he said to himself:
Nothing important, other than your marriage and your wife’s happiness
.

Geoffrey smiled. “Ready for a Scotch?”

They went together into the low-ceilinged drawing room. On a table behind a sofa was a small array of bottles and decanters from which Geoffrey took a bottle of whisky. He poured two drams, adding a small quantity of water to each. “I don’t have to ask you about the water,” he said. “I know what you like.”

William raised his glass to his friend. “Your health.”

“And yours.”

Geoffrey looked at him. “You know, I was reflecting the other day on how long we’ve known one another. It’s getting to the stage where one doesn’t want to count the years.”

His friend’s words rang in his ears like the terms of a formal indictment. “Yes, it’s been a long time,” agreed William. He inhaled the aroma of the whisky before taking a sip. The thought of his friendship with Geoffrey weighed heavily on him because it was now dawning on him how difficult it might be to carry on. Geoffrey
and Maggie came as a package, so to speak—he could not conduct the friendship solely with one and not with the other; and while he had no desire to fall out with Maggie, at the same time he felt that it would probably be just too awkward to continue to see her with this unresolved issue hanging over them, an elephant in the room of their friendship.

Geoffrey was talking about his plan to plant truffles. “A long shot,” he said, “but I’ve got a bit of woodland that apparently could support them. Tricky things, though. Temperamental. Maggie can’t stand them.” He smiled. “Her tastes have always been a bit unsophisticated.”

William felt himself blushing. Was that why she had fallen for him? He finished his whisky hurriedly and looked at his watch. “I need to go and change,” he said.

“Me too,” said Geoffrey. “Where’s Freddie de la Hay, by the way?”

William had had other things on his mind, and now he realised that the dog had been outside for rather a long time. “I’ll go and call him,” he said. “He’s probably persecuting rabbits.”

“He’s welcome to do that,” said Geoffrey. “They’re a perfect pest at the moment. But I hope he’s careful. My neighbour lost a dog a few weeks ago. It went down a hole and never came back up. Everybody was very upset. They tried to dig him out, but you know what it’s like down there—a bit of a rabbit warren, as perhaps one might expect.”

“Freddie is very careful about these things,” said William.

“I hope so,” said Geoffrey.

William put down his glass and went outside. The sun had moved further down the sky, and although it was still light, the farmhouse was no longer bathed in gold. He looked up—the evening sky was quite empty, and was now that attenuated blue which occurs just before dusk sets in. One can so easily forget about the sky in London, he thought.

He called Freddie’s name, using all four words. This was how he normally summoned him, as he believed that the operative word that Freddie recognised was “Hay.” Dogs, he had read somewhere, pick up short words rather than long ones. He might, therefore, with equal effect simply shout “Hay,” but he felt it would sound ridiculous. One could not go about shouting “Hay”; one could not.