The Essence of the Thing (8 page)

28

He was in the doorway again; he made an awkward gesture. It was still difficult to address her.

‘I’ve—moved my things,’ he said. ‘The coast is clear.’

One might have thought that it was she who had asked him to leave.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ve made some tea, will you have some?’

He came in and sat down once more. He was carrying a plastic bag which he put on the table.

‘My mother sent you this,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘I believe it’s some marmalade,’ he said. ‘From the latest batch.’

‘How kind,’ said Nicola, opening the bag. ‘You haven’t told them, then?’

‘Told them what?’

‘That we’re no longer in a shared-marmalade situation. That you’ve given me notice. That I’m out of their lives.’

No need to pile it on, though.

‘I thought it best to wait, until—’

‘Oh, yes. Until I’ve actually gone. Very circumspect. Meanwhile I’ve got some marmalade. It seems like false pretences, but still. I must remember to take it with me when I go.’

She looked inside the carrier bag. There was something else there as well, wrapped in damp-looking newspaper. She withdrew it—an awkward, very light cone-shaped parcel.

‘What’s this?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. She didn’t mention anything else—it all happened at the last minute, as I was leaving.’

Nicola unwrapped the damp newspaper to discover a small and exquisite posy of early spring flowers—the sort of posy that only a woman with a garden can ever produce, lovelier by far than anything from even the very best florist. She sat down and stared at it for a moment, and then began carefully removing the wet newspaper from around the stems.

‘How enchanting,’ she said. ‘What a darling your mother is.’

Jonathan got up abruptly. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said, ‘I’ve got some papers to look through before tomorrow.’

‘Oh, go ahead.
Please
. And oh, by the way, what time is that agent coming in the morning?’

‘Nine o’clock.’

‘I’ll leave you to it then.’

‘Right.’

‘Goodnight.’

‘Er—goodnight.’

She put the flowers in water and went to bed. It had been a long three days, and underneath her defiance she was suffering what she could expect to be a long-enduring and horrifying pain.

29

‘Where have you been all this time?’

‘I’ve been fetching Henrietta.’

‘But you’ve been gone for ages.’

‘Well I stayed for a drink with Louisa.’

‘Yes, but still.’

‘It’s nice to be missed.’

‘I couldn’t find the whatsit.’

‘Poor you.’

‘You left here before teatime.’

‘Oh, yes, well, I popped in on Nicola.’

‘
Nicola?
Why did you do that?’

‘I’ll explain later, I have to bathe Henrietta.’

‘Why isn’t Marie-Laure giving me my bath?’

‘See if you can guess.’

‘She’s got a pain.’

‘No.’

‘She’s lost.’

‘No.’

‘She’s gone to her English class.’

‘No, silly, not on Sunday. It’s her day off.’

‘When’s she coming back?’

‘After you’ve gone to bed.’

‘I’m going to wait up for her.’

‘No you’re not. She’ll be very late.’

‘Fergus is allowed to stay up late. Fergus stays up till midnight, every night.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘He does, he told me.’

‘Good old Fergus. Come on, out you get.’

‘Mummy.’

‘Yes?’

‘Why do I have to be good?’

‘We all have to be good.’

‘Why?’

‘There is a reason, but I’ve forgotten it.’

‘Merember it.’

‘I’ll try. Daddy will remember it—you can ask him. Now quick, nightie on. Dressing gown. Slippers. Good girl.’

Henrietta was eating her supper at the kitchen table.

‘Daddy.’

‘Yes?’

‘Why do I have to be good?’

‘Ask Mummy.’

‘She’s forgotten. She said to ask you.’

‘Ah. Let me think. Ah, yes. Because…’

‘Because why?’

‘I don’t buy ice-creams for bad girls.’

Henrietta thought for a moment. ‘When I grow up,’ she said, ‘I’m going to be bad, because then I’ll have my own money, and I can buy my own ice-cream. I’m going to be bad, and buy my own ice-cream.’

‘Well, that sounds reasonable enough,’ said Alfred. ‘But meanwhile, you’ll have to be good, is that understood?’

‘All right,’ said Henrietta reluctantly. ‘But only until I grow up.’

Soon after this she went to bed, and Alfred read her some Winnie the Pooh, and she fell asleep just as Kanga…

30

‘Why did you go to see Nicola?’

‘Because she’s sad.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t tell a soul. I probably shouldn’t tell even you.’

‘Fire ahead then.’

‘Well—’

‘Get on with it.’

‘Jonathan’s got cold feet.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Bloody Jonathan has handed Nicola her cards.’

‘He what?’

‘He’s offered to buy her out. The show’s over. He’s given her the elbow.’

‘Was he there?’

‘No, of course not. He delivered the blow and then more or less bashed off immediately to his parents’ for the weekend. She’s hoping to bring him round, but it doesn’t really look likely, does it?’

‘Bloody Jonathan. How very unfortunate.’

‘Yes, so say I.’

‘I thought they were a permanent fixture.’

‘Yes, naturally.’

‘Awkward, isn’t it?’

‘Very.’

‘I thought she was his salvation.’

‘Perhaps he doesn’t want to be saved.’

‘Or he doesn’t believe that she can save him.’

‘Perhaps she can’t, at that.’

‘Who knows?’

‘Only God; as usual. In any event, they won’t be coming with us to the cottage at Easter, so I thought we might take Fergus.’

‘Oh, God, must we?’

‘Yes, Louisa’s looking awfully peaky; she and Robert could probably use a break. Anyway, it’s nice for Harry to have another kid to play with.’

‘All right, let’s bite the bullet, then.’

So that was what they did.

31

Nicola lay under the bedclothes, hunched around her pain, despising herself.

She despised herself for her failure to oppose Jonathan’s frozen blankness with the tears and shrieks which would have expressed her true feelings. She despised herself for the mean little sarcasms which had been her only mode of attack—she despised herself even though these slights had found their petty targets, because the wounded pride to which they gave expression was—or ought to be—the least of her complaints. She believed that the wound Jonathan had dealt to her heart (her truly loving, trusting, faithful heart) was a more serious and more honourable wound than that to her self-esteem. She supposed these two could be differentiated, and so long as they could, she had shown him nothing of the real pain she was suffering. In the face of his cast-iron indifference she was apparently as dumb and cold as he. She despised herself for this dumb coldness. She had never before so plainly been shown the difficulty, the near-impossibility, of speaking truly to an interlocutor who will not hear, but she knew one must attempt it nevertheless, and thus far she had failed even to make the attempt. She swore she would make it on the morrow, and at last, wretched, now, beyond tears, she slept.

She left the flat on Monday morning long before her usual time, and when she got to Fitzrovia, where she worked, she found an empty table in a coffee shop. She ordered a large filter coffee and a croissant. (Hugh would have been delighted: what had he told you? There!) She took a long time eating it and then she smoked a cigarette. She might do this every morning now. She was free to do exactly as she pleased, now, almost whenever it pleased her. She need never think of Jonathan at all. She was free, she was horribly, abominably free. Was this, in fact, what Jonathan himself wanted? This freedom, this horrible, this abominable freedom? She would, she swore, find out. She would see.

Jonathan did not return to the flat that evening until after nine o’clock. It could be supposed that he had eaten dinner somewhere else.

Nicola was in the sitting room. ‘Jonathan,’ she called, hearing him enter. ‘Could you come in here? I have to talk to you.’ But she did not imagine that the irony was evident to him.

He stood, as had she, in the sitting-room doorway, looking not startled but tired and drawn. ‘What is it?’ he said.

She got up. ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Sit down.’

He entered the room with a terrible reluctance.

‘Sit down,’ she said again. ‘Don’t make this worse than it is.’

He sat down. ‘What do you want?’ he said.

‘The truth,’ she replied.

‘I’ve already told it you,’ he said. He moved slightly as if to get up.

‘The whole truth,’ she said. ‘All of it. I have to know.’

‘This is useless. I
have
nothing more to tell you. I’m sorry, I wish I had. I wish I could satisfy your curiosity, but I can’t. There is nothing more to know. I’ll speak as plainly as I can. I’m sorry that you find this so hard to take in, but I don’t want to live with you any longer. This relationship is getting us nowhere. I don’t love you.’

She was silenced; she felt almost faint. He had said the words. Black silence surrounded her. She sat down: she
was
faint.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But that is the truth. You asked for it. Oh, by the way, that agent came—they’ll send a written valuation, it should turn up in the next day or so. Then we can get cracking. Meanwhile, if you have no further questions, I’ll leave you—I’ve got some work to look at.’

‘Can you remember,’ said Nicola, fighting for her life, ‘when you last made love to me? Can you remember when that was?’

He shrugged dismissively and pulled a face; the question was out of order, it was in poor taste.

‘I can,’ she went on. ‘It was just a week ago. Last Monday night. Three nights before you told me to get on my bike. Which means, that in only three days, just
three days
—’

‘Oh, that,’ said Jonathan. ‘That means nothing. Sex. That’s a quite separate matter. It means absolutely nothing. It has
nothing
to do with love.’

The thing to do—this at least she had grasped—was not to be deflected from the chief issue, not to be diverted by surprise or anger from the line she meant to and must pursue.

‘You can’t mean this,’ she said. ‘You can’t possibly mean this.’

He shrugged again, as if to say, have it your way; say what you like; I know what I mean.

‘You must have forgotten everything,’ she said. Her voice rose. ‘That it had everything to do with love was always the whole point. You can’t have forgotten, you
can’t
.’

Still he said nothing; he even turned his head away, impatient to be gone.

32

That sex had everything to do with love had always been the whole point. It had always been perfectly evident to Nicola that one could not have sexual intercourse with a person one did not seriously love: it was a physical and spiritual impossibility, and the more she witnessed of the readiness of other human beings to disprove this contention the more incredulous she grew, until she could only at last shrug and say to herself, so be it. Nicola could not even imagine how—physically, spiritually—one might so much as
take off all one’s clothes
in front of—that is, for—a man (or, as the case might be, a woman) whom one did not truly, deeply, and with all one’s heart know, and trust, and love. The imperative seemed to be physiological as much as it was moral. But as the years had gone by she had never managed to encounter anyone who truly shared these scruples. She had begun to think that there might be something significantly abnormal about her, physiologically or morally or spiritually, but she dressed up and went out when invited to do so nonetheless, hoping for enlightenment from one direction or another.

Two years ago she had gone in just such a mood of wary optimism to a rather rowdy party—she was getting just a little too old for this sort of thing—in Fulham. She was wearing a very short red skirt, and she had a red feather boa round her neck. Some time after midnight a heavy young man had stumbled or been pushed against a table in the kitchen and several glasses had crashed to the floor. Nicola had been getting herself a drink of water from the kitchen tap. She managed to herd the several people in the room out of it and back into the melee, and then she hunted down the dustpan and broom, and began to sweep up the broken glass. She had just crawled back out from under the kitchen table, dustpan in hand, when a voice from the doorway asked if she needed any help.

‘Do you think you could try and find some newspaper?’ she said, looking up at a rather tall, rather diffident-seeming, rather angelic-looking stranger.

He entered the room gingerly, wary of the remaining broken glass, and began opening cupboards and peering into them. In due course he found a section of the previous week’s
Sunday Times
, and helped her to wrap up the broken glass, which he deposited in the waste bin. Then he held out his hand to her. ‘Jonathan Finch,’ he said.

‘Nicola,’ she replied; ‘Gatling.’

‘Like the gun,’ he said.

‘Like the bird,’ she replied.

‘Yes, I suppose you get fed up,’ he said. ‘Everyone must say that.’

‘Almost everyone,’ she said.

‘Are those gatling feathers?’ he said, looking at the feather boa.

She laughed.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ he said.

‘I was just about to leave,’ she replied. ‘I never stay long after the first breakage.’

‘I couldn’t offer you a lift, could I?’ he asked. ‘I’ve only had one drink—I haven’t been here long; I came on from the theatre.’

‘Oh, you’re a surgeon, are you?’ she asked. ‘Was it an emergency?’

He looked astounded and then laughed. ‘The West End theatre,’ he said.

It was even less Jonathan’s sort of party than it was Nicola’s, but he’d been brought by the girl he’d taken to the theatre. He wouldn’t have come, but there was a great hole in the middle of his life; he’d only just lately noticed it, and it was beginning to worry him. There was something he hadn’t understood, or noticed, or reckoned on, and now that he was aware of the fact he was inclined to go wherever—within reason—fate suggested, hoping to find a clue. It was the most imaginative decision he’d made since his distant, so different, adolescence. And now, striking up this acquaintance with this girl in a red feather boa, moving in so fast: it was so entirely out of character—as previously delineated, since the beginning of maturity at all events—but there was your answer: he’d been right to come here after all.

‘But did you come here by yourself?’ she said.

‘No, that’s all right,’ he replied. ‘The girl I came with lives upstairs—I’ll just say goodbye to her. She wasn’t really expecting me to stay long. We’re just—friends.’

‘If she really won’t mind,’ said Nicola. ‘If you’re sure.’

It wasn’t the feather boa, it was, to begin with, her legs, and then, when she’d stood up, that rather grave little face. Well, it was, perhaps, the combination, of that red feather boa and that grave little face. He couldn’t wait to get her away from all this noise and music and hectic activity.