‘The fog slowed me down a bit.’
‘Yes. It would. I think it’ll lift soon, though.’
She was hesitant a moment in the middle of the room before she went to the window and drew the curtains. In taking off his jacket and hanging it over a chair, Cameron became vulnerable, like a tortoise without its shell. The white shirt-sleeves seemed ridiculous, a symbol of domesticity that was out of context here. The anonymity of the room swamped him. The bulb that hung from its fraying flex was shadeless, giving off the dull, cold light that seems to be stored in the waiting-rooms of railway stations. The whole place gave a sense of being in transit. Books were piled in several places, and two of them lay open, as if they had been abandoned by people in a hurry. On the arm of Margaret’s chair was a half-eaten biscuit. The wallpaper was ancient, and parts of its motif asserted themselves here and there, like graffiti.
Cameron found himself wondering what he was doing in this room, and what he and this woman drawing curtains had in common. Margaret didn’t help to make the situation seem more natural. She crossed awkwardly from the window to the fireplace and became preoccupied in a contest with her own untidiness. She lifted an empty cup from the hearth and put it on the mantlepiece, as if that was where it belonged. She took the jotters from the chair and placed them neatly on the floor beside it. Trapped in her own chaos like a complicated chess problem, all she could do was shift the fragments of it around into different patterns, searching vaguely for some way out.
The particles of her confusion seemed to settle like dust on Cameron, fouling his taste for this moment. He had an impulse to put his jacket back on and get out for good, leaving his key on the table, as if this room was a locker he had no further use for. It was hopeless for him too, he suddenly realised. He was like Margaret, forever pushing the refuse of his life from one place to another, as if it made a difference. He had been coming to this room for over a year now, and yet he felt it was pointless. Every time he turned his key in the lock, his own shame and self-deception fell out on him, smothering him. It was as if he kept his relationship with Margaret locked up in this room, like luggage he was always just about to use. But he hadn’t used it so far. He came back from time to time to check that it was still in the same place and still available to him. But he wasn’t sure he had the guts to take it any further. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to. Almost every morning, he woke into the same question: would he do it? Would he ever break with Allison and go to Margaret? Emotionally, he lived each day with his case packed in the hall. All he had to do was save enough resolution to buy a ticket. But it only needed Alice to cut her finger or Helen to touch his hand with questions, and he was robbed of resolution. It would be more honest just to leave now, and for good.
But turning from the fireplace, Margaret showed him her face in familiar half-profile, the high forehead, the straight nose, the large mouth, the brown eyes that went opaque with secret thoughts, the dark hair in which even this light found veins of sudden amber. He inventoried her features painfully, like a clerk recording someone else’s wealth.
‘I wanted to come tonight,’ he said. ‘I had to see you.’
It was spoken like a recrimination.
‘I’m glad you did.’
‘It’s been some day. What a day! Disaster day.’ He wanted to give all the tawdry weariness of it to her, as if she could expunge it.
‘I know what you mean. It’s been like that for me too. But you’ve salvaged some of it for me.’
‘You were going to do some work?’
‘That doesn’t matter. The past participles can wait. How long have you got?’
‘Not very long. I’m going out tonight. We’re going out. With friends. Damn them.’
‘At least you’re here.’
‘I wish I could stay.’
‘I wish you could.’
A small hammer of blood tapped at Cameron’s temple. They stood in mute commiseration with each other, reluctant to give more. They had fed that demanding pain that grew out of their mutual presence, dropped a few words into it, and the jaws of it only widened. Taut and painfully dignified they waited for it to swallow them, transcending the little drabness of the place. Formally, solemnly, quietly, like someone articulating the first words of a ceremony, Cameron spoke.
‘I want you,’ he said and, walking over, flicked the switch, erasing the room.
The place seemed to roar with darkness. They found themselves clumsily in the dark, their fingers relearning each other’s bodies in frantic braille. Unskilfully, Cameron released Margaret from her dress, patches of skin blooming palely. She keened slightly, the sound a minute descant to the muffled traffic of the city.
‘Love me, love me, love me,’ Margaret said, and the words swam weakly through her breathing. ‘Take me through, take me through.’
They moved across the dark room like some impossible animal that had wandered out of prehistory. In the bedroom the curtains had not been drawn, and the fog washed on the window-pane, making the room seem to drift in a heaving void. Cameron felt angry at his clothes for shackling the urgency of his desire with the ludicrousness of trousers, the mundanity of laces. As he lay down beside Margaret, lust sprang her like a trap.
‘I wish there could be more,’ she was saying. ‘Why can’t we be together?’
‘I love you,’ offering the words as if they were some sort of absolution. Then he gagged her mouth with his.
Beyond the moilings of their bodies, the city churned and hooted faintly like a factory, busily engaged in manufacturing their futures, making arrangements, constructing situations, precipitating choices. Again Margaret made to speak, but Cameron smothered her words, for her voice gave access to the needs that waited for him to finish, illumined the faces that watched him from the darkness of his own head. Allison, their children, Morton, the young man. Inexplicably, one irrelevant thought hovered over him like a vulture, waiting to glut on the guilt of his exhaustion: was this Allison’s day for going to Elmpark? He wondered if it was. He hoped it wasn’t. Somehow, that would make his action worse.
But he drove that thought off with all the others, repelling it with the force of his involvement. He mined desperately at her body, as if he could transmute them both into something different and escape what waited for them, or could admit them to some small, private eternity, while the luminous dial that burned like a cancer on his wrist kept an ironic record of his efforts.
4
The clock showed half-past three. Mrs Dawson had already slipped out, unobtrusive as an earthquake, to brew the tea. Just time for a rousing finale before biscuits were served.
‘These are just a few samples of some of the things that have happened to our Guild Members while on hospital visitation. I hope I haven’t painted too rosy a picture. Nor one that is too black. It is sometimes amusing, sometimes depressing. But I think I can safely say it is always useful. Illness is a lonely condition. And the sick can always benefit from pleasant conversation, friends, a little warmth.’
Which would be quite useful here too, Allison thought. The church hall was very cold. The walls were ascetically bare and painted a shiver-inspiring off-white. Igloo Grey. The four old-fashioned radiators that defaced the walls gurgled encouragingly from time to time, threatening heat that never came. Perhaps they had abdicated in favour of the spiritual warmth of the legend painted in huge letters below the clock: ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life’.
‘This is one small way in which we can try to show the truth of a Christian life. It is easy to forget in our own comfortable lives the quiet suffering that a lot of people less fortunate have to put up with. It’s not asking too much for us to sacrifice a little of our time for their sake. We mustn’t let our own comforts blind us to the needs of others.’
‘Comforts’ was an understatement. Looking round them, she could well understand why this was said to be one of the