The Accidental Woman (4 page)

Maria and Nigel spent a peculiar evening together. Before the film, they met for a drink, or at least met at a place where drinks were served, and drank there. We say, ‘Shall we meet for a drink?’, as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another. When Nigel and Maria met for a drink, in other words, they were really meeting for a chat, to which the drink was no more than an oddly necessary accompaniment. After the drink, they went to the film, and after the film they went for another drink, or rather another chat because strange though this may seem after three hours together they did not yet want to part. And after the second drink, they went back to Nigel’s room for coffee. Or at least, when they got back to Nigel’s room, they drank coffee, but this was not the main purpose of their withdrawing there, because although I agree it surpasses belief, the fact is that after four hours they were still not tired of each other. We say, ‘Would you like to come for some coffee?’, as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other people. Funny, that. Several changes had already taken place in the nature of Maria’s and Nigel’s relationship by this stage, changes which, when Maria thought about it later that night, seemed hard to account for. For instance, when they emerged from the cinema, and walked from the cinema to the pub, they did so hand in hand. And when they emerged from the pub, and walked from the pub to the room, they had their arms around each other’s waists. And when they emerged from the room, and said goodnight under a cloudless sky, they had their tongues in each other’s mouths. Some people would call this progress. Maria didn’t know what to make of it.

This was the start then of Maria’s affair with Nigel. How significant, really, that the language affords no better word than ‘affair’ for this sorry procedure. How long it lasted, how much pleasure it gave them, these are details which we needn’t bother with. However, a few words about the pastimes, the means of filling out the hours of empty fondness, enjoyed by this couple.

Before meeting Nigel, Maria had discovered only two ways of affording herself anything which she could honestly call enjoyment. They were listening to music, and being with Sarah. Now Nigel did not like music, and he did not like Sarah, so both of these had to go out of the window.

There were many things, on the other hand, which Nigel was not ashamed to admit that he enjoyed. Only three of them need concern us here, for in only three of them was Maria allowed to have any share.

One of Nigel’s delights was to go to the pub and drink, with his friends, and now also with Maria. Many were the evenings on which he would take her to The King’s Arms, or The White Horse, where she would like as not be the only woman among a circle of perhaps eight or nine men, all friends of Nigel’s, all loud and jovial people, heavy and noisy and smoky and dark. The satisfaction derived by Maria from these entertainments was limited. It was not that Nigel’s friends ignored her, although that would have been bad enough. Nor was it that their talk offended her, for Maria did not take offence easily, if ever. No, the sensation with which she would look back over such evenings was one of puzzlement. The friendship which bound these people together was not, she decided, of a sort which she could easily understand, and yet she tried. Of course she did not understand, for that matter, the friendship which had held her and Sarah together, but at least the comfort and the reassurance which they had found in that friendship had always been explicit, and it was its very explicitness, the delight they would take in expressing it, the delight each would take in witnessing the other’s expression of it, which had made it all worthwhile, as far as Maria could see. For where was the comfort in all this boisterous aggression, what was the point of all this drinking, joking, thumping and laughing? This was what puzzled her. But if Nigel’s friends puzzled her, then how much more, although they would never admit it, did Maria puzzle them. Are you all right, they would say. Cheer up, have another drink. It may not happen, they would joke. Maria always fell for this one. What may not happen, she invariably asked, and then the deafening roars, the yawning hilarity.

Sometimes, when Nigel did not want to take her to the pub, he would take her to a party. Maria tagged along out of a sense of duty, or who knows, out of inclination, of a perverse sort. It would be stretching the truth, though, to suggest that she ever enjoyed the experience. Even she would admit as much to herself, sometimes. It would be hard to say which aspect of it she objected to most, there were so many. There was the heat, for example. Maria would wrap up warm, to go into the cold night, and then find, when she and Nigel arrived at the party, that the room was horribly hot, a consequence no doubt of the fact that it was crammed to the roof with people. And this also meant that Maria would find it difficult to move, or sit, or stand, without coming into closer contact with the other guests than she would have liked. And it meant, too, that the room would be extremely noisy, so that if Maria wanted to talk to one of the other guests, which, fair enough, she occasionally did, she would find it difficult to do so, so difficult, in fact, that she would be obliged to shout in order to communicate her ideas. Naturally, all the other guests would also be shouting, in order to communicate their ideas, or in some cases desires, so perhaps some exceptionally rational or level-headed person might have suggested, after calling a general silence by beating on the table with a stick, that everyone should henceforth talk, rather than shout, so that henceforth there would have been no further need for shouting. But such a person would have been misguided, for she, or he, would not have taken into account the fact that music was also playing, impossibly loud music, in order to encourage people to dance, or rather to shuffle, with as much freedom of movement as was consistent with a tolerable level of drink-spilling, and toe-treading, and knocking over onto the floor of bottles, and of people, with a crash. So not only did this make it doubly difficult for Maria to move, or sit, or stand, but it also made it doubly difficult for her to talk. And even when she did succeed in talking to one of the other guests, it was often, let’s be honest, a let-down, because what possibility was there of interesting conversation, when all of the guests, to a man, and to a woman, were more than likely pissed out of their heads, almost as soon as and in some cases before the party began? Maria too would be pissed out of her head, she had no choice; but strange to say Maria pissed out of her head retained vestiges of rationality equal, one might say superior, to those which most of us attain even when sober. Drink seemed never to affect her reasonableness. And it is no fun, when you are in the mood for an interesting conversation, to receive nothing in response to your remarks except grunts, or yelps, or loud bellowing laughter or inarticulate expressions of sexual desire. For Maria often found herself to be the unwilling object of sexual desire, at times like this. Sometimes she would wonder if she were the only person present whose immediate objective was not to achieve coitus with the nearest available partner, and at the earliest possible opportunity, which often as not meant there and then. And you would be wrong to think that Nigel was in any way a comfort to her in this situation, for he would not talk to her, or be with her, but would disappear early into the crowd and start making advances at whichever woman seized his wandering fancy. Which left Maria to stand and watch, apart but engulfed, removed but stifled, desperate, in her quiet way, for enjoyment, surrounded by what she had been encouraged to believe were its manifestations, and knowing nothing but this, that on none of the tired and wasted faces which thronged around her did she see the marks of real happiness, only the marks of a hateful delusion from which it seemed to be her privilege, and her burden, to be mysteriously free.

So much for parties. The third of his pleasures in which Nigel allowed Maria to share was sex. Indeed it might be argued that her co-operation, or at least participation, was in this instance essential, rather than accessory, to his enjoyment. But this is not quite true, for if there had been no Maria there would have been another woman, and even if there had been no other woman, Nigel could quite easily have satisfied his needs unaided, he had a pair of hands after all. It took him a week or two at first to entice Maria into his bed, and to gain admission to hers, but once the precedent had been established this interval decreased, until it could be done within a minute or two or in exceptional circumstances a matter of seconds. There is no need to give the details. Why describe all the gropings, the senseless fumbles and thrusts which this poor misguided couple executed upon each other on warm spring afternoons and clammy evenings? Why enumerate, in the hope of enlightening or perhaps even arousing the reader, the various gasps, kisses, groans, caresses, stains and clasps which characterize this ludicrous pantomime? Far better to forget, as Maria tried often and vainly to forget, the hours she had spent with this man in the flagging pursuit of a hazy gratification.

That then is the story of Maria and Nigel, the story of their love. Impossible to say how it ended, it faded away as all insubstantial things do. Sarah was waiting for her, of course, all this time, waiting to receive her when the moment came, which it did. And then all was well for a while. But the second year soon ended, and Maria and Sarah had to part, and not only for a few months, because Sarah’s studies took her to Italy for the whole of the next year, Maria’s last year. So that their days together, those days which had for both of them been nicer than most, were gone for good.

4. The House

The new academic year brought Maria a change of scene. One day during the previous term, her tutor had called her into her office.

‘I have a proposition for you, Maria.’

Maria watched warily from her low armchair.

‘When one has been at Oxford for as long as I have, teaching, working for the university, and when one is married to a man who has also taught, and worked for the university, for a long while, then one is bound to have accumulated a certain amount of – how shall I put it? – money. Now one doesn’t want one’s money to lie around idle, not doing anything, so one tends to invest it. My husband and I have chosen to invest our money in property. We own a small property, on the Iffley Road, which we rent out to students.’

A pause was left, in which Maria suspected that she was meant to manifest comprehension. This she did, by nodding.

‘Naturally, we like to choose our tenants carefully. We like to take our pick of the students. My husband teaches at St John’s, of course, but one of the first things we decided, was that we would prefer to let the rooms to girls, and to girls alone. And naturally, we look for certain … qualities, in a girl, before we make her an offer of rooms.’

‘What qualities?’ asked Maria eventually.

‘We look, above all, for quietness of disposition. We look for girls who would benefit from being removed from the pell-mell of college life. We look for the withdrawing type.’

Maria, who was tired, very tired, of living in college, accepted her tutor’s offer. Thus it was that she found herself living in Cribbage House, an establishment set up by the college authorities some four years previously as a means of farming out those students whose presence, for various reasons, they felt to be detrimental to the health of community life within college itself. It was a large house, comprising eight rooms, a shared kitchen, and two shared bathrooms. Structurally it was in need of repair. Most of the walls needed re-papering, or repainting, or re-plastering, and most of the floors needed re-carpeting, except for those which had no carpets, which simply needed carpeting. There was rising damp, and dry rot, and woodworm. On the top floor, in the attic, colonies of fungi sprung forth from the walls. Downstairs, in the cellar, tribes of slugs and spiders flourished, sometimes making sorties to the upper floors in search of food, or perhaps just for the hell of it. The furniture was spare, to say the least, and fragile, to put it mildly. The whole house was supposed to be heated by a huge gas boiler which none of them knew how to operate.

Maria decided that it wasn’t such a bad place.

She set about making her room more comfortable. First she bought herself a small electric fire, to go in the empty fireplace. It was on the mantelpiece above this fireplace that she arranged her books. Maria owned only one picture, a cheap framed print of Goeneutte’s ‘Boulevard de Clichy sous la neige’, which she had bought some years ago, in a second-hand shop not far from St Jude’s. She hung it on the wall opposite the fireplace. Her room was on the first floor, overlooking the road. There was a table, near the window, and a chair, near the door. She put the table near the door and the chair near the window. Once she had made these adjustments, she felt quite satisfied.

There was something about Maria’s room which invariably led visitors, of whom there were very few, to remark, that although it was adequately, even ideally, suited to meet the basic contingencies of daily living, it was less than adequate, and much less than ideal, as a place in which to pass the night. This was that it contained no bed. Maria too had noticed this almost as soon as she had first entered it. There was a mattress on the floor, but nothing more. A thorough search led to the discovery of sheets and blankets in a cupboard in a disused room on the second floor. Maria complained to her landlady at once, and elicited the promise that a bed would be delivered as soon as possible. Two weeks passed, and still no bed arrived, but Maria did not renew her request because by now she had decided that she did not want a bed at all. In fact she was enjoying better rest than ever before. Rest rather than sleep, you notice. She would sleep for about half of the night and for the remainder she would lie awake, in the dark. But the word dark hardly does justice to the blackness to which Maria consigned herself when she turned off her light at midnight. This blackness, and this mattress, she believed, were the reasons why she always awoke feeling so rested. For the curtains, the dark blue curtains in Maria’s room, were so thick, and so heavy, that not only was it hard work to close them, and to open them again in the morning, but also there was not a chance, not the slightest chance in a thousand, that a single ray of light from the sky or from the street outside should ever penetrate their soft defending wall. The dark in her room was absolute. Shadows and outlines didn’t enter into it. It was relieved by one item only, and this was the tiny, unwinking red light emitted by her cassette player when connected to the power supply. Maria did not lie in the dark in silence, you see. She would have found that boring, and very probably have gone to sleep instead after only a few minutes. No, she listened to music, long into the night. Maria was particular about the music to which she listened in the dark. Once, a while ago, she had loved music, all music, any music, she used to devour it without discrimination, from records, from the radio, from concerts, even from her brother, in the days when he had been learning to play the violin, when she would sit with him in the evenings, in his bedroom, as he complainingly went through his exercises. Since then, she had grown increasingly careful, for she had started to notice that while some pieces of music seemed to purify her, and to clean her out, and generally to sharpen her perception, there were other pieces which contaminated, which cluttered her and clogged her mind with thick drowsy feeling. She had realized that music should be used sparingly, and never as an accompaniment, only ever as a focus of undivided attention. And it seemed to her that her attention could only ever be truly undivided when she lay quite still in the black. She would study her collection of tapes, choose one, insert it into the cassette player, depress the play button, and then quickly, as quickly as she could, turn out the light and lie on the mattress, pulling the bedding tightly around her, or, if it was a warm night, discarding it loosely until she was comfortable. By then the music would have begun. A few precious seconds wasted, that’s all. And then for a while real joy, to hear and to understand this other language, to watch its beauty closely and to feel the guiding play of its proportions.

It would be tedious to mention all those works which Maria included in, and all those which she excluded from, her personal canon. A few examples. Most music after Bach sounded decadent to Maria, and decadence she abhorred. Bach himself could do no wrong. Her particular favourites were the suites for ‘cello, and the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin. Here the paths of melody could be followed without the distraction of any harmony other than that which was distantly implied. But anything by Bach always had the desired effect. She was fond too of the masses of Palestrina. What she hated most in music was inconsistency of dynamics. She could not tolerate the sudden change from pp to ff, and back again. By and large she disliked the piano, although there were pieces by Beethoven and Debussy which did not displease her. She preferred the chamber ensemble to the orchestra. She loved to be made sad by music, but this could only ever happen when she listened to music which pretended to no emotional effects. All that she ever asked was to be afforded a faint sense of wonder in the face of inaccessible beauty, a loveliness far in the future or far in the past, far off anyway, on which her attention would really be fixed while she stared, half-seeing, at the unwinking red light shining like a tiny beacon in the dark.

Cribbage House, although it contained eight rooms, had only four residents at this time. Thus four of its rooms stood empty, cold and locked. Maria had as little to do with the other girls as possible, although not out of ill-will. At first they all seemed nice enough to her (Maria was no judge of character, in the ordinary sense), but by now she was of the persuasion that people should have more to offer, if the fag of entering into human relationships were to be gone through, than mere niceness. And besides, as time passed, she began to have suspicions about these girls, she began to feel that their behaviour, not to put too fine a point on it, was odd, odd by any standards, not only the normal ones.

Their names were Anthea, Fanny and Winifred. Anthea was the most friendly, initially. She and Maria would sometimes walk into town together, to lectures, or to the shops, and sometimes go out together, to a film for instance, and even sometimes they sat in each other’s rooms, talking, for company. Maria took a qualified satisfaction in all this. Then, one day, going into Anthea’s room, when Anthea was out, in order to return a book, Maria noticed a notebook lying open on her desk. ‘I hate Maria. I hate Maria. I hate Maria’, it said, three times to a line, twenty lines to a page. There were forty-eight pages in the notebook and it was nearly full. Maria found this peculiar. And it was difficult, from then on, for her to talk to Anthea in quite the same way as before. They never spoke to each other again, in fact.

Fanny was neither talkative nor sociable, and Maria’s feelings towards her were, for a while, entirely neutral. It was only after a few weeks that, putting various circumstances together in her mind, she began to entertain doubts. These circumstances were as follows. Certain small items belonging to Maria, those which tended, as it happened, to be worth the most, in material terms, had started to disappear from her room. Small items of jewellery, mainly, but also the occasional book and once a pair of shoes. Maria did not know whom to suspect of these little thefts, for thefts they surely were. One night, however, while she was using the bathroom, the thief came into her room and stole a small pendant. It was of no sentimental value, fortunately, it had been a present from Ronny. Maria saw that it was missing as soon as she returned to her room, and at the same moment heard Fanny’s door close on the other side of landing. Maria thought that this was curious, to say the least. A few days later, late at night, she was washing up, in the kitchen. She had taken her watch off and laid it on the table. After a few minutes Fanny came in, sat at the table wordlessly, and began to read the newspaper. Then, when Maria had finished her washing up, and came to retrieve her watch, she found that it was gone.

‘Fanny,’ she said, ‘Give me my watch.’

Fanny looked up, feigning incomprehension.

‘What?’

‘My watch. You have stolen it. Please return it.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You’re a thief. You’ve been stealing my things for some time now. I know all about it.’

Fanny said nothing.

‘Is it only me you steal from, or do you steal from the other girls as well?’

‘No, only you,’ said Fanny.

‘Why?’

Fanny said nothing.

‘Give me my watch back.’

Fanny produced Maria’s watch, which she had secreted in her brassière, between her breasts. She stood up, and advanced towards Maria, who backed towards the sink. Fanny held out the watch. Maria took it, but as she did so, Fanny seized her wrist, and gripped it hard. Then she bent forward, and bit Maria on the shoulder. Maria cried out, and Fanny left the room without another word.

Maria found this behaviour surprising, although she was normally tolerant of other people’s foibles, and following this incident, she and Fanny did not get on so well together.

‘They seem like very nice girls,’ Maria’s mother said, one day in November when the family had all come to visit her. It was a dark Saturday afternoon and her mother, her father and Bobby were sitting around the electric fire. Tea had been served and drunk and there were a few biscuits left.

‘I don’t like them,’ Maria said.

‘Anthea is a striking creature,’ said her father. A man could fall for her.’

‘Why don’t you like them, Maria?’ her mother asked.

‘We don’t get on.’

‘But Winifred has such a kind face. She was so kind to us while we were waiting here for you to come back. Is she not kind to you, Maria?’

Winifred was extremely kind to Maria, that was the problem. Maria tolerated her, however; she was undoubtedly the best of a bad bunch. But a short account must be given of this extraordinary girl.

Winifred was all that Maria wasn’t, and more. She was an open, happy, confident and trusting person, who believed in the benevolence of God, the sanctity of marriage, and the innate goodness of human nature. She was moronic in other ways, too. For instance, she decided, on the basis of only a few days’ acquaintance, not only that Maria was in need of help, but that she, Winifred, was the person to provide it. Accordingly she took pains to befriend her. And so she started to do small favours, she would perform little acts of kindness, such as to tap on Maria’s door at seven o’clock in the morning with the words, Are you awake, Maria? A new day has dawned (as if this were anything to write home about) and I am just going downstairs to make you a nice cup of tea. This would perhaps not have been intolerable, were it not that Maria would have liked, occasionally, to have been allowed to sleep later than seven o’clock, and were it not that Winifred’s methods of preparing tea were unorthodox, and consisted of placing a tea bag in a cup and then adding a mixture half of milk and half of water from the hot tap. Maria was tempted, naturally, to lock her bedroom door from the inside, but tended not to do so because on the one occasion when she had, Winifred had attempted to batter the door down with her shoulders and her bare hands, so determined was she not to deny her friend her early morning treat. You are too good, Maria, she had said. I know what you feel. You feel it is too much for me to take all this trouble over you every morning. Not at all. It is only by performing these little acts of kindness that I feel I can ever render myself useful to my fellow creatures. Open up at once. Maria had capitulated, then and subsequently.