My Secret History (63 page)

“I love you.”

“I wish I hadn’t asked you,” she said. “Now it’s too late.”

That night in the hotel room I was lying on the bed reading the Madras daily newspaper,
The Hindu
, as Eden took a shower. With the sound of rushing water was another murmur. Was she speaking to someone? Was she singing? I put down the newspaper and went to listen at the door.

She was crying—and not just crying but sobbing, a slow struggling sound that rose and fell.

“Are you all right?” I called out.

She did not hear me. She went on sobbing. But soon the shower stopped and there was no sound from her. When she came out of the bathroom she looked relaxed—very calm, almost serene.

“I heard you talking in the shower,” I said.

“I was crying,” she said, but in a voice that indicated that whatever sadness she had felt had long passed.

She saw me still staring.

“I always cry in the shower,” she said, stating a fact and smiling at me for not knowing it.

She always cried in the shower?

In the plane on the way back to Delhi she said ruefully, “I
wanted you to make love to me one more time.” She took my hand. “I wanted you to take me by force.” And then she became self-conscious. “I guess all women have rape fantasies. I’m pretty conventional that way.”

“Conventional meaning you have rape fantasies?”

“Of course,” she said, in that same fact-stating and smiling way.

“I’m forty-three years old, and I never—”

All women have rape fantasies?

But in Delhi, we did not stop, there was not time, I did not take her by force or test this fantasy. We changed planes and flew for nine and a half hours into the sun.

In London, at Heathrow, she looked suddenly alarmed, as though remembering, and said, “Oh, God, you’re leaving me.”

“You’ll be all right,” I said.

“I’m all right now. But when you turn that last corner in the terminal and I can’t see you anymore, I’m going to cry.”

Then I was on the train, between two lives, hurtling from Eden to Jenny, and I was alone.

It was a thundery spring morning of blackish blowing trees and clouds the color of cast-iron marbled by yellow cracks. The window beside me was made so opaque by the storm that I could see my face in it—another person. But this one after a ten-hour flight and no sleep looked like a zombie who had risen from a hole in the ground to push his haunting face through the world. Around me were people on their way to work, reading newspapers and books. My impression was not that they were hardworking and virtuous people but simply that they were better than me. Yet when I considered that they too had deep secrets I realized how alike we were.

On my own like this I closed my eyes and held my breath, like a man dropping into a well. I no longer asked myself whether I was happy. It hardly seemed an important question, and there wasn’t time to answer it with any clear reply. I inhabited this space, all this hissing air, going from one life to the other believing I was unchanged. I had lived like this for a long time. But today (I had no idea why it had not occurred to me sooner—perhaps it was the sight of my face in the glass) I had an intimation of another self within me, someone lurking, and I thought:
Who are you?

I was living two lives, and I knew I was a slightly different person with each woman—lied to each of them, or chose a different version of the truth for each of them; remembered what to include and what to leave out. We were lovers. They invented me; I invented them. But for each of us there was a more complete person beyond all that fiddle. Wasn’t I a new man when I was alone?

I did not want to make myself conspicuous on the train by writing, and so I mumbled to myself: Maybe I am living my life like this not because I want to enhance it with the intensity of two of everything, but rather because I am afraid to be alone. I am fearful of meeting face to face and having to give a name to that odd solitary man; I am afraid to see him whole.

But this rainy morning passing through Hounslow I saw there was a third person. He was the observer, the witness to all this, like the inspector who had just entered the coach to examine tickets: not a word, not a murmur, only the nibble and bite of metal punch. This third man was the one who stood aside and made the notes and wrote the books. His life was lived within himself. He was silent, he seldom gestured, he never argued, he dreamed, he saw everything, and so he was the one who suffered.

He rode his bike in traffic, he watched from the top deck of buses, he sat in the corner seat of trains and his reflection never stared back at him—his eyes were always fixed on other people. He was the one who read items in newspapers entitled
Bloody End to Love Triangle Riddle
and
Private Life of Jekyll-Hyde Writer Revealed on Piccadilly Line
. He took long solitary walks. He made excuses about urgent meetings and hurried away from demanding friends to eat fish-and-chips in the park and feed the leavings
to the ducks. He picked up discarded letters and read them, foraged in the wastebasket at the main post office for first drafts of telegrams that people threw away—all that passion in a few lines; and he stared intently at the way women’s clothes fit their bodies. If a woman glanced at him he went away; if ever he caught anyone’s eye he looked askance and moved on. He was a letter writer. He killed time at the movies. He went to museums. He sat alone at concerts. He loitered in libraries. In the early darkness of winter he paused at the lighted windows of houses and looked in. He ate lunch standing up and seldom went into good restaurants. If there was a fight on the street, or an argument in the next room, or a crossed line, or someone punishing a child, he was transfixed, and he listened. He was alert, he was alive—not an actor waiting in the wings for a cue that would bring him onstage. This was his real existence, and there was no time to waste, because his life was passing and it was no more than a bubble the size of a seed pearl rising to break at the surface of the liquid in a tumbler, and then it would be over.

Being alive is being alone
, I wrote, concealing my small notebook behind my hand.
Being alone is being alive
.

The only way of his understanding the world was in this intense and lonely concentration, seeing the stations pass, as he had once seen the Stations of the Cross at St. Ray’s. But these were plainer and more misleading names, from Osterley to Boston Manor to Northfields. And did that man do the
Times
crossword every day and fold his paper in that same way? And what did that woman next to him feel when she read (as he could see, and it was still only eight-fifteen in the morning at Acton Town)—
then, once on deck he embraced her and covered her mouth with his and heated her lips and she felt his hard manhood throbbing against her as the yacht heeled in the wind
—when she read
throbbing
did she throb and what did she see?

The train slowed and stopped. The doors rushed apart. Two passengers alighted, a man boarded—he stood. The doors shut. The train shuddered and resumed, gliding on the tracks, picked up speed, rattled, slowed, stopped, and that man alighted and four more people pushed in; and on and on.

I had two lives but I had intimations today that because there were two they were both incomplete. I lived in the cracks between
them—had only ever lived in that space. Outside it, among others, I was not myself, and so no one knew me. Was that everyone’s condition—that we were each of us unknown? I did not talk. I listened. I watched. And in my silence I became invisible.

I thought: As soon as someone else’s eyes are on us we are diminished—made into ugly miniatures of ourselves—which was why when someone looked at me I turned away. When I was invisible I felt vast and efficient, and I sensed that I saw everything.

And that morning, of all mornings, memorably, a young woman took a paperback of one of my books out of her bag, and flexed it and opened it and held it like a thick sandwich. A paperback that has been carefully read actually looks it—it swells and fattens and its spine wrinkles and cracks, and the reader’s interest has had a physical effect on it. This copy, I could see, had been enjoyed. I watched the woman read on and I took pleasure in it—not watching the book but her face, her eyes. She was wearing a black coarse-knit cardigan over a blue blouse, and a bluish pleated skirt and white shoes and pale tights. She had big soft curls and her lips were pressed together in concentration, and sometimes they relaxed in amusement, slightly parted, as though she had seen something or someone approaching from the page. Eagerly, she turned the page with a neat plucking motion of her fingertips.

I could have watched her for twenty hours, and I might have missed my stop, except that at Earl’s Court a voice piped up. It was a voice that sounded as though it came from the squawkbox of a synthesizer.

“Mind the gap … Mind the gap.”

And then I changed trains.

Jenny still had not woken. But the sky had mostly cleared, the high wind having pushed the thunderheads east and under the blue sky of an April morning the air had been freshened by the storm. The streets were damp and, rain-washed, looked blacker. And these few weeks were the only time of the year when London had any fragrance—the traffic fumes of the city were actually modified if not overpowered by the masses of pink and white blossoms—the flowering trees of an English springtime.

The house stood tall and detached on the quiet Clapham road, its white windows looking bright against the soot-soaked brick, and the brick itself no recognizable color—not red or black or brown, but the hue of an old tree trunk, senile and scorched, with the texture of porridge or tweed. The laburnum at the front had just come into flower. I was fascinated by the beauty of a living thing I knew to be poisonous.

I mounted the stairs but did not ring the bell. I used my own latchkey, quietly, and when I was inside I took off my shoes and some of my clothes and crept into the dark room and slid into bed with her.

“I heard you come in,” she said, and kissed me.

Her limbs closed around me, her body attaching itself to me like a sea plant to a stone. The sheets were warm and moist from her deep sleep: she slept motionlessly, glowing in her still slumber.

“Your feet are cold,” she said, and pedaled with her legs, and yawned. “What’s the time?”

I said I didn’t know, because if I told her she’d say
It’s so late
and would get up. I wanted to lie there with her for a while.

“Are you glad to be home?”

“Yes.”

“Did you miss me?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have a good time?”

I did not reply, I hummed equivocally, and finally said, “I might have to go back.”

“Oh, God!” Jenny said and took a breath, and her body hardened against me.

“You could come with me this time,” I said.

She did not speak. She sighed and her body softened again.

“Yes, take me with you,” she said, and kissed me. “But I know what it will be like. All your trip. All your plans and arrangements. You’ll be big and bossy, and I’ll have to follow you around like your mistress.”

She then clung to me.

She said, “Do you have a mistress, Andy? No, don’t tell me—I don’t want to know. Listen, are you serious about taking me to India?”

“This is the first proper meal I’ve eaten since you left,” Jenny said.

I had made her an English breakfast—eggs and bacon, grilled mushrooms, porridge and—just to see her reaction—fried bread. She drank coffee, and I had brewed a pot of green tea for myself. We were sitting at the table by the window—Jenny dressed for work in a flower-patterned dress that resembled the clematis in the back garden, pinky white blossoms on a background of pale green.

She said, “Did you notice I lost weight? I hardly bother to eat when you’re away. I eat cheese and biscuits, I watch telly and eat sausage rolls, I drink too much. Sometimes I think I’m turning into an alcoholic. You didn’t miss me, did you? Oh, never mind—it’s so good to have you home. Are you going to see Jack?”

“I might meet him this afternoon for tea,” I said.

“He’d love to see you,” Jenny said. “He misses you so much when you’re away. He gets pale and goes all quiet and he snaps at me when I try to be nice to him.”

And she gave me the other news: the car was buggered and wouldn’t start, the skylight had sprung a leak, the charlady hadn’t shown up for almost a week, there was no food in the fridge—she said there hadn’t seemed any point in shopping, since Jack was home only at weekends, I had missed the best of the daffodils, and my messages and mail were stacked on my desk.

“I couldn’t be bothered taking detailed messages,” she said.
“It’s such a bore, and what’s the point? I told everyone I didn’t know when you’d be home.” She shook her head and frowned. “They feel sorry for me when you’re away. They treat me like a widow. I hate that. And some people get so obsequious when they find out I’m married to you. I had one the other day. I told him my name, and spelled it. ‘Like the author,’ he said. His mother reads your books. It’s pathetic. I’d like to change my name.”

“Why—are you ashamed of me?”

“No,” she said, “but I’m a person, too. I’m intelligent, I read books, I have opinions, I even have my own name.”

“One would never know you have opinions,” I said.

She smiled and then began to laugh, and stood up to go. “That was a lovely breakfast, but you’ve made me late for work.”

I was still thinking about these obsequious people she met. I said, “You’ll see—travel is hard. India isn’t a vacation. It’s work.”

“Don’t lecture me, Andy, please,” Jenny said. “I need a little time to think about this. And don’t think you can come back and start ordering people around. I’m not going to drop everything I’m doing to go to fucking India. I’ve got a job too, you know.”

She had been putting on her coat and growing flustered and fiercer as she fumbled her arms into the sleeves. I just watched her, saying nothing.

At the front door she said, “Oh, God, look at your face. I’ve said the wrong thing. Give me a little time, Andy. I got used to your being away. And now I have to get used to having you back.”