The Temporary (18 page)

‘Soon,’ he said kindly, like a mother. He considered putting an arm around her. ‘Have you warmed up a bit?’

She didn’t reply, catching a dark strand of hair and twirling it amongst her fingers. Her face was lowered, absorbed in something at which he did not want to guess, and he felt the sudden tug of her inescapability. It lay like a leash about his neck, forgettable sometimes, but always tightening when he strained at it.

‘We’ll have supper and then you can go to bed,’ he said. A feeling of despair martyred him. ‘I’ll move the television into the bedroom if you like.’

‘I don’t want to go to bed! I want to talk! You said we’d talk.’

‘All right,’ he said. His sympathy knocked aside, sent carelessly scurrying like a leaf as her words sped unstoppably along the immutable grooves of habit, he felt unutterably weary. ‘Go and sit down. I’ll be there in a minute.’

It had only just started to rain, but the sudden outburst was so fierce that long, glassy streaks were already pouring down the window-pane, vainly carving their writhing currents on its surface. Ralph watched the mesmeric patterns of flow, his heart quieted by this generosity of water, its sympathy with him. Francine sat on the other side of the table. She too, he felt, was becalmed by the rain, and a rare harmony was growing between them; not of concupiscence, Heaven knew,
but a fragile accord which seemed to have arisen from a silent admission of shared trouble. He had cleared away the
wreckage
of dinner and had lit candles, not through any desire to set a scene, but rather in honour of this sudden deluge of softness from which he wished to gain nothing but an interlude of peace between their noisy acts. Francine’s face opposite him was unusually unconscious, for once not busy with intentions; rather solemn and pale, in fact. Her features seemed more real to him like that, and he studied the miraculous way in which their lines composed beauty. He wondered, as he had done countless times before, how the genius of her design could merely be a felicity of surfaces, a lucky stroke from the hand of an inferior artist. He had used to think, of course, that such a face must have emanated from the heart, and even though he had since seen the rougher clay beneath its glaze, its riddle still had the power to beguile him.

‘Do you ever wish you had brothers and sisters?’ he said, suddenly wanting to hear her speak.

She looked bemused by his question, and he almost laughed aloud at how much impossibility was written in that sulky, incomprehending glance, what a bitter death it would be to live beneath it.

‘I don’t know,’ she said finally.

‘I used to be desperate for them,’ he said gaily. ‘I used to invent them, in fact.’

‘I suppose I used to do that,’ said Francine. She appeared surprised at the memory. ‘I don’t really remember.’

‘What are your parents like?’ said Ralph.

‘My mum and dad? Why do you want to know?’

‘Oh – just interested, that’s all.’

‘They’re normal.’ She sounded slightly affronted, as if his interest in her parents were unnatural.

‘Do you look like them?’

‘No. My dad’s got a beard.’

Ralph began to laugh encouragingly, thinking her reply hilarious, but she looked at him so strangely that he stopped.

‘What about your mother?’

‘What, you mean what does she look like? I don’t really know. Normal, I suppose.’

‘Do you see them often?’ he persisted.

‘Oh, they’re boring.’ She dismissed them with a wave of the hand. ‘They never do anything, except my mum goes to aerobics and my dad has his night out at the pub every Thursday. It’s not exactly exciting. They always say they’ll come up, but they never do.’ She sighed. ‘They don’t
understand
why I live in London.’

‘Why
do
you live here?’ said Ralph.

He didn’t really know why he had asked the question, but he suddenly found himself wanting its answer. Francine’s eyebrows furrowed, as if she were trying to decide whether he was joking.

‘Everyone lives here,’ she said.

They were silent for a while and Ralph noticed that the rain had stopped. In its hush he felt again their hopelessness, and the panic which had momentarily been driven away burst back into his thoughts. As he bore it once more he realized how much he longed to be clear of their endless, muddled communications, their intimate bureaucracy before which he knew his own poverty and powerlessness, to rise above it and gulp down drafts of honesty and sense. He felt his anchor lodged in rock, jammed deep down in the blackest and most inaccessible cave of fear. He had to get out of this – he had to! He caught Francine’s eye and she gave him an unnerving look, a look which seemed to have rounded up his thoughts and calmly admonished him for them. He saw her confidence, the fastness of her locks. Surely he could outwit her! He reasoned with himself while panicked seconds passed. He was
beginning at least to understand with what force Francine’s reactions held sway over her initiatives. She required the greatest delicacy in her handling, and although at that moment he was gripped by a violent urge to rip that part of himself she owned from within her, the fortresses of her flesh, he knew, could only be negotiated by cunning.

‘Do you want anything?’ he said, half standing in
anticipation
of a pretext to go to the kitchen and be alone.

‘You know what I want.’ She looked rather pleased with her own reply, as if she had been awaiting a cue to deliver it. Ralph sat down again. His head began abruptly to ache. ‘I want to talk,’ she added after a pause, which she had evidently expected him to fill.

‘What about?’

He looked at her with what he judged to be an expression of polite interest. He knew he was being cruel, but at that moment it seemed like the only liberty he had.

‘God!’ She implored the ceiling with her eyes. ‘That’s so
typical
.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I mean, you act like this is just my problem. It’s like you don’t even care.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s like you want to pretend it’s not happening. You never even want to
talk
about it!’

‘Well, what is there to talk about?’ said Ralph. He realized amazedly that his behaviour had been aptly surmised. ‘I was just trying to be nice. I didn’t know you wanted to talk about it any more. You gave me the impression that you’d decided everything.’

‘I’m allowed to change my mind, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘It’s not against the law, is it?’

She stared at him provocatively, a vague smile twisting her lips, and for the first time, without really expecting it, he
experienced such a wrench of resistance that his skin abruptly flamed and his heart seemed to fly from his chest. For a moment he could not ascertain what it meant: it was as if he had been told that he would suffer pain, and then been made to wait so long for it that when it came, it felt not like pain at all but reassurance.

‘Have
you changed your mind?’

‘Maybe.’ She fiddled with something on the table. ‘I don’t know.’

He opened his mouth but found that he didn’t have anything to say. Something strained at the locks and bolts of his thoughts and grew frantic, pounding at its walls. He fought it back, panicked by the things he might feel if he let it out. It wasn’t up to him! It had nothing to do with him, none of it! Disturbance sang through his veins, and with it every part of him seemed to find its note, loud as the keys of a piano. He chorused silently his own despair. Francine was watching him now, waiting to see what he would do. He saw himself quite clearly lunging across the table and clawing at her plump cheeks with his blunt, innocuous fingers.

‘What do you mean?’ he said nervously. ‘You must know what you mean.’

He met her gaze, willing her to let him go, but her sharp eyes pricked his swollen, dreamy detachment and he felt its poisons rush over him. He understood then that she wanted to
hurt
him, to draw him out and show him his own
helplessness
. What had he done? Why was he being punished so? As he wondered, everything – Francine, the germ she carried, the room itself – seemed to gather against him and accuse him of his own significance.

‘I don’t know,’ she said obstinately. ‘How should I know? It’s too complicated. How do you expect me to just decide?’

‘I don’t.’ He was surprised to feel tears leap to his eyes. ‘I thought you had.’

‘That’s just so
pathetic
,’
she spat. ‘I mean, you act like it’s just nothing, you know, like it’s my decision and it doesn’t have anything to do with you.’

He saw to his amazement that she hadn’t really thought about it at all, that she just said things to engage him; that all the time he had thought her to be moving in a particular direction, however obliquely, she had only been spinning threads around him, a web in which he now knew himself to be caught. Their predicament rose before him, new again, as raw as an untended wound.

‘I—’ He felt all at once terribly confused and his voice sounded thin, as if he were forcing it through something dense. ‘I don’t know,’ he said weakly. He dragged his eyes to her face. ‘I just can’t seem to believe in it.’

As he said it, he suddenly knew that at last he had jumped and that something would now happen. He watched Francine as he fell airily away from her, and she appeared to grow so hard before his eyes that he wondered if she might break like a glass bottle if she fell with him.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said finally. Her voice sounded harsh and deliberate, retaliating for his obscurity with belligerence.

‘I don’t think you can either! I don’t think you’ve actually
realized
that you’re going to have a baby. A baby.’ He said it again, understanding that he hadn’t really known it until that moment. His acceptance of it came in a rush, whole, as if he had solved a mathematical enigma, and he felt the knowledge begin to function in him as efficiently as a machine.

‘You don’t know anything!’ said Francine. Her words rattled like dice, looking randomly for victory. Ralph realized that he was frightening her, and the sense of returned power, its possibilities, aroused him. ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’

‘Go on, then. Tell me. Tell me what it’s like.’

She settled back in her seat, confident again, and examined her fingers with studied self-deprecation.

‘What do you want to know?’ she said, more sweetly.

‘I want to know why you’ve decided not to keep it.’ He felt utterly unlike himself, and he trusted his new incarnation, loved the sound of his voice. ‘Tell me what’s going on in your mind. I want to know how you made the decision.’

Her eyes brightened at his mistake.

‘I didn’t say I’d decided, in case you’d forgotten. I only said I might have changed my mind.’

She straightened in her chair and looked at him defiantly. His hatred for her snapped its leash and leapt unbounded at her throat.

‘But what if I said that
I
wanted you to have it?’

Ralph heard the air gasp. A silence teetered between them. Francine looked down at her hands again, and when her eyes returned to him they had assumed a new softness.

‘Do you?’ she said.

He almost laughed aloud as he realized that she was actually
flirting
with him. A smile strained at his lips and seeing it, she coyly fiddled with something on the table.

‘I’m not talking about us,’ he said, surprised to hear the gentleness in his voice. It felt wonderful to say what he was saying. His life flowered before him, a future filled with a person he now knew he could be. ‘I’m talking about what’s the right thing to do.’

‘I can’t do it on my own!’ she said, thumping the table wildly with her fist. She appeared to have shrunk before his eyes, her words coming in enraged squeaks. ‘It’s your responsibility too!’

‘I know it is.’ He paused and then said what all at once seemed perfectly natural. ‘What I’m suggesting is that
I
look after it.’

His meaning launched itself, rose, drifted between them.
Ralph watched it anxiously, wondering whether it would work, whether it were plausible and true, a thing that could be said.

‘It makes sense when you really think about it,’ he
continued
hurriedly. ‘I can provide financial support and’ – he felt himself growing horribly ridiculous, his confidence
draining
– ‘and take full responsibility for it, and you can get on with your life as if nothing had happened, if you want.’

Francine was so still that it seemed impossible that she would ever again come to life. His words echoed around her as if in an empty room. Ralph prayed for her to speak, to clothe the nakedness of what he had said.

‘Without me?’ she said finally.

‘Yes.’ Her comprehension fuelled him for his last leap. ‘I – I don’t love you. You must know that.’

It seemed odd to him that he should suddenly have found the means to tell her that which, in the uncomplicated weeks before all of this happened, had been so impossible to
pronounce
. He was astonished by his own courage, which he seemed to have found lying idle in him as if it had been there all along; an ungainly tool whose beauty he had discovered only in its use. Now that he had it, he could see with one frenzied examination that his life was broken and that he could repair it all. Already he had built a firm platform of righteousness, and from it he steadily viewed the range of what he could do, whole reaches of himself he had never explored. It was as if he had laboured all this time in a dark, unfavoured comer, scratching life from a soil so blighted that it multiplied his efforts far beyond its yield; while all along a whole kingdom had been in his possession to which only truth gave entrance. He had never felt more certain of his
recognition
of this key, more expert in his ability to pluck it from amongst its thousand glittering imitations.

‘I want to go home,’ said Francine suddenly.

She stood up, pushing her chair. It fell back, thudding to the floor like an executed man.

‘Francine—’

‘Leave me alone.’

She looked straight at him, drawing her eyes like knives. His heart flailed in his chest.