A Stairway to Paradise (6 page)

He held her hand very tightly all the way home. ‘I’m afraid you’ll fly away,’ he said, ‘and I’ll never get you back. Like a helium balloon.’ She laughed. He went on holding her hand all the way up the stairs and as they entered the room; he leaned against the door and pulled her towards him, still holding her hand.

‘Take off your clothes,’ he said.

‘I can’t with one hand,’ she protested.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘just
do
it.’

She began to unbutton her blouse with one hand. He started to help her undress, with his free hand. It all took quite a long time: ‘I hope you’re enjoying this,’ he said, kissing her mouth, ‘as much as I am.’ Then he began to undress. She lay on the bed, watching him. It all took a long, long time.

‘I know what it means, now,’ he said, almost wonderingly, almost to himself— ‘What?’ she said.

‘With my body I thee worship,’ he said.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Is it from a poem?’

‘No,’ he said, slowly. ‘It’s from the marriage service. “The Solemnization of Matrimony”. In the Book of Common Prayer.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘The old prayer book.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The old prayer book.
The
Prayer Book. I suppose you’re too young to have known it.’

‘I didn’t know you went in for that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘God, and so on.’

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But with my body I thee worship. I know what it means, now.’ He half sat up; he wanted to go on. ‘
I know what it means
. Do you see? It’s the most astounding thing. Just think about it. I mean, I thought—you know, at school we used to read the Prayer Book, the Book of Common Prayer, surreptitiously during sermons.’ He laughed. ‘One got to know it pretty well, God knows how they get through the time now. I suppose they have to listen to the sermons, poor blighters.
With my body I thee worship
. I suppose I was about fourteen when I first came across that. I wondered how it could be true. I thought it was just some sort of metaphor. And now I know what it means. After almost twenty-five years.’ He laughed again. ‘To think,’ he said, ‘that the best, the truest, most literal description of sex that we have in the language is from the hand of some Tudor clergyman. Cranmer, I suppose. Well, who better, after all. But still.’

‘
Now
do you believe in God?’ she said.

He laughed. ‘No,’ he said; ‘only that Mary is His mother.’ He was suddenly serious again: he looked down at her. ‘Stay quite still,’ he said, ‘while I thee worship.’

She did as he had asked for as long as she possibly could.

16

It was afterwards again; the light was fading. She sat by the window in a red dressing-gown. She had made some tea. Alex was dressed again, because soon he would have to go.

‘Alex,’ she said, ‘what are we going to do?’

‘How do you mean?’ he said.

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘
what are we going to do?
’

He looked at her for a while. ‘Come over here for a moment,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Yes, just for a moment. I have to talk to you. I can’t do it while you’re over there.’

She came reluctantly and he pulled her down beside him and put his arms around her. They were lying back across the bed and he kissed her cheek. ‘Don’t you really understand,’ he said, ‘what we’re going to do?’

‘You’d better tell me,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure that I do.’

He was silent for some time, holding her in his arms. ‘I meant it quite literally when I said, with my body I thee worship. I was absolutely serious. I am still.’ He paused. He was having to articulate what was too new and too rare and too strange to articulate. ‘I feel . . . stunned. As you see, this is a new experience for me. In fact I feel as if I know something that no one else does. Except perhaps that Tudor clergyman. I’ve hardly begun to take it in, I’m too amazed by it to be able to think about it.’

They were both silent for a time. They were both still, after all, in a state of amazement.

Then there was a change in the temperature and he spoke almost abruptly. ‘But as you see, otherwise,’ he said, ‘I’m in it up to the neck.’

She thought about this for a moment but her head began to swim. ‘I’m not sure—’ she began, slowly; he cut her off. There was only the faintest vibration of irritation in his voice: only she would have perceived it; it lacerated her heart.

‘I have obligations,’ he said. ‘You’ve known that from the beginning. You know my situation as well as I do. Do we really need to discuss it? I have a wife and two children and a household to maintain: those are the givens.’

She thought for a moment, but a piece of iron had been driven suddenly into her soul. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘
you mean—
’

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘and perhaps I should have said this clearly at the start, but it never occurred to me that it could be necessary, that I can’t think of leaving Claire and the children: surely you see that. This has nothing to do with how things stand between me and Claire—well, maybe it does. I mean, we have, as I said, a
modus
operandi
. Of which the object is to raise Marguerite and Percy as peacefully and as properly as we humanly can. I couldn’t even think of breaking up the family until at the earliest Percy is settled in at Westminster. Assuming he gets in. And that’s seven years off. What else did you expect?’

‘I thought,’ she said, ‘I thought—’ and she could not now, did not dare, now, say what she had thought, so wrongly thought; she could not go on, now, because she saw that she was coming—no, had come—to something dreadful.

‘You thought, I suppose,’ he said, ‘that we would run away together and live happily ever after, did you?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

He was silent for a long time, holding her in his arms, stroking her hair. ‘Haven’t we run away together,’ he said sadly. ‘Shan’t we live happily ever after?’

‘But we won’t be together,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d be
together
.’

‘But we
are
,’ he said.

‘We won’t be,’ she said. ‘Very soon, we won’t be. You’ll be at home and I shall be here. And then—how often shall we be able to meet after that? No, don’t tell me. I know. But even that is not really the point. We’ll be sneaking about behind Claire’s back, deceiving her and the children, behaving as if this were something disgraceful, secret—
it just won’t do
.
I can’t do it
. Don’t you see?’

And she had pulled away from him, she was sitting up and looking at him, and he knew she was right. He knew, with the coldest and most terrible dread and certainty, that she was right.

‘But we must,’ he said. ‘It’s all we have.’

17

It was as if his utterance had come from far away, from some never-before-revealed chamber of his mind, and it echoed down long corridors into a corresponding, equally remote chamber of hers: they sat, marvelling at and almost petrified by these echoes. She made a terrible effort.

‘It isn’t enough,’ she said. ‘It is not
it
.’

And he saw that she was right: of course, she was right.

‘Of course, Claire can look after herself,’ he said, slowly; ‘my absence would be neither here nor there as far as Claire is concerned, as long as everything kept ticking over; but Percy—Marguerite— you couldn’t possibly think, you couldn’t
possibly
have thought that there was any question of my disturbing their lives in this way, could you? The house would have to go, for a start—I couldn’t run that plus another household somewhere else, as matters stand: their lives would be very seriously altered—you couldn’t really have thought I’d do that to them?’

And he began, wonderingly, to face the possibility, the terrible possibility, that she really had.

She was silent, she too having been made to see a different conformation from the one she had taken unreflectingly for granted. It was some time before she was able to answer him. ‘Other people seem to separate,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Other families break up, and everyone seems to manage. Oh, of course I know there are wretched divorces where the children are damaged and never readjust, but I thought—since you and Claire—I thought— perhaps,’ she said, in an even smaller voice, ‘perhaps Marguerite and Percy would be happier if you and Claire were no longer together. Since you don’t love each other.’

‘Claire and I don’t quarrel,’ he said sharply. ‘We may not be a loving or even affectionate couple but we’ve always treated each other politely in front of the children at least. They accept us as we are.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said, desperately. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to imply—I just thought—I—’ and she began, quietly, helplessly, to weep.

Her tears were appalling. He rocked her in his arms. ‘You’re so much younger than I am,’ he said. ‘I was forgetting. You must be, I suppose, ten years younger: you couldn’t have known what one knows another ten years down the road. You see what having children does to one!’ And for a time he thought, quite irrationally, and in a kind of desperation, that, now that she had seen what he had always seen, her terrible declaration, It is not
it
, might be nulli-fied, and that she would no longer be right in so saying, and that he would no longer see her to be.

Her tears had ceased; she seemed quite calm and lay very still in his arms. They were both silent for some time and then he began to speak, hesitantly, almost reluctantly. ‘There is nothing I can say to you,’ he said; ‘there are no words, except that clergyman’s, that describe what I feel, and even those are not quite the whole of it. I can’t tell you anything, and as you see I can’t promise you anything, or even offer you anything, except myself; whatever that should mean. And for what it may be worth.’

There was another silence; the room had grown quite dark. He could sense that she was reflecting on everything that he had said, and done, and been, and he waited in fear for what she would say.

Her voice when eventually she spoke was quite clear and level; she might have been talking to Percy. ‘It won’t do,’ she said. ‘We can’t—go on.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know whether it would be different if I didn’t know Claire, and the children, but as it is—it isn’t possible. It isn’t worthy of us.’

Of course she was right; he knew she was right.

‘We won’t see each other again,’ she said, and she held his hand very tightly, showing that she was his own: that she belonged to him, with all her being.

18

‘This has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Claire or the children,’ he said. ‘This—this—there is no word for our situation, yours and mine: this
place
we’ve come to is ours alone, it has
nothing to do
with anything else in the world or in our lives, it’s ours alone. You can’t possibly mean what you’ve said, you can’t possibly be saying that this
place
doesn’t exist. After the time we’ve spent here.’

‘It exists,’ she said. ‘But we can’t go on being in it.’

‘
Why not
,’ he said.

She went on as if talking to Percy in one of his moods of deliberate recalcitrance. ‘It’s not separate from the rest of our lives, or the rest of our selves, or the rest of the world,’ she said. ‘It only
feels
as if it is.
That’s the whole point of it
. Don’t you see?’

He was silent, frozen with dread: he had seen that she was right, he had hoped to dissuade her (and himself ) nevertheless, but he had never truly, never to the depths of his being, believed that they would really act upon the principles which she had enunciated. He had never until now thought seriously that he might not see her again.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t be able ever again to see Claire, or the children; not as your secret lover. I couldn’t do it, you know that I couldn’t. It would be unimaginably—what is the word? Something even worse than deceitful. And then simply to stop seeing them, in that situation, would be just as bad. You do see what I mean, don’t you?’

Of course he did. Unimaginably deceitful, unimaginably tasteless; either way: unimaginable.

‘As it is,’ she smiled to herself ruefully, ‘I shall have to find a tactful way of not seeing them again, anyway.’

And he saw that this too was the case. She would not see any of them again, at any rate for some long time. Tactfully, apparently by accident, she would withdraw. And he realised now, as had she from the start, that the moral argument was always inexorable, that it overwhelmed even the enchantment which had befallen them both: still half within their secret, sacred place they looked out together on a terrible world which the exercise of virtue alone could make tolerable. It was possible to see and comprehend and even accept this now, when they were sated; the anguish they felt was all in their minds; in the days, the weeks, the months to come Alex discovered a veritable hell. So did Barbara. So they continued, after all, to inhabit their own secret, sacred place; one in which the sensations they shared, of torment now and not of ecstasy, seemed as endless, as boundless, as time, every hour which passed, an eternity.

19

‘Oh, Alex—could you just keep an eye on that for a moment to see that it doesn’t
boil
, it has to
simmer
for ten more minutes and I must make this telephone call, I’m trying to get hold of Barbara.’

Yes, of course, absolutely. Get hold of Barbara. Oh, God, God in whom I don’t believe,
have mercy on me
: you bastard, God, you complete and utter all-time sadist. I’m trapped here with the
sauce
béchamel
, Claire is going to
get hold of Barbara
, my own, my goddess, and I’m going to have to overhear the whole thing. Impassively.

‘Barbara? Oh,
brilliant—
I’ve been trying you all afternoon— how are you? Oh, good. Fine. Yes, they’re fine too. Look, you must come and see us very soon—they’ve been asking for you! Yes, of course, I do understand.

‘The reason I rang—specifically—you couldn’t be interested in a little jobette, could you? Perfectly horrible, but cash on the nail. It’s just—we have some friends who live in Chelsea with a five-year-old, a perfect little
monster
, their au pair has just walked out on them—I think they’ve managed to get through about three in the last year,
hopeless
: anyway, they’re looking for someone who could collect the monster from school every day and take him home and give him his tea and generally keep him out of mischief until she gets home from work at about seven o’clock.