The Accidental Woman (5 page)

Nor was this the only way in which Maria would find her privacy violated. Having drunk the tea (disposing of it by any other means was impossible, because Winifred would stay in her room and watch her until she had finished it) she would often find herself being summoned downstairs to the kitchen and served with a bowl of steaming hot porridge. This porridge took the form of great grey globules of muck. She might have used it to plaster over the cracks in the ceiling but that was about all it was good for.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do this for me every morning, Winifred,’ she would say.

‘Nonsense, dear, nonsense. If one can’t light up the world with a few little acts of kindness now and again, then what is one worth, to be honest.’

Sometimes Maria would come in from the shops, a small bag of provisions in her hand, the materials from which to fashion a hurried meal as soon as the kitchen became vacant, and would find that Winifred already had a meal waiting for her, she would have cooked it herself, and she would not listen to Maria’s protestations, she would be unmoved by her arguments, such as that the food which she had only just purchased would now be wasted. Instead, Winifred would stand over her and force her to consume of a heap of indigestible disjecta, a sun-beaming smile on her oval face the while, radiating from within a scorching consciousness of her own goodness.

‘Did you like it, Maria?’ she would ask at the end.

‘Not really,’ Maria would say, like as not scraping or prising half of it into the overflowing pedal bin. She would say it out of honesty, not out of malice, for she knew that no amount of malice could ever divert Winifred from her philanthropic path.

‘Never mind, it was good and nourishing, and tomorrow I shall cook you something more tasty. What would you like?’

‘I should like you not to cook for me.’

‘Dear Maria.’ Winifred took Maria’s hand, and held it gently between hers. Maria attempted to recoil, but suddenly found that her hand was being held with a strength which it would not be inappropriate to compare to that of a vice. ‘You are so good, and generous. It pains you, doesn’t it, to see me put myself to any trouble on your account? But I don’t mind, honestly I don’t. It’s a pleasure. Performing these little acts of kindness for you is the only real pleasure I have in the world.’

Hardly surprising, then, that Maria was not able to match her mother’s enthusiasm. She did not dislike Winifred. She was baffled rather than frightened by her. All the same, her favourite time of day came to be the evening, when Winifred would not be around, for she usually went out in the evenings, to the meetings of charitable societies, and religious organizations. Often she would return from these meetings in a state of uncontrollable zealous excitement, and would find Maria and tell her all about it, sometimes if necessary rousing her from a deep sleep or interrupting her appreciation of a favourite piece of music. And if Maria were to lock the door again, she would simply hammer upon it until it was opened, or until the other two girls came to see what was the matter and the commotion became so great that Maria was no longer capable of ignoring it.

When Bobby asked Maria if he could stay with her for a night or two, therefore, she felt obliged to warn him about Winifred. She warned him that his sleep would probably be disturbed. But this warning turned out to have been unnecessary, and while Bobby was staying with her, Winifred said nothing to Maria, never once spoke to her or attempted to enter her room.

Bobby was now eighteen. He had left school, and was looking for a job. He had been unemployed for only a few months but already he was prone to fits of depression which lasted for anything up to a week, and his parents seemed to think that a short holiday with Maria in Oxford would do him good. This had been the purpose of their visit, to deposit Bobby. When the last of the biscuits had been eaten, and their parents had driven away, brother and sister were left, alone together in Maria’s room. Bear in mind that these two had hardly spoken to each other for more than five years.

‘It’s nice to see you again, Bobby,’ said Maria, after a long, but, it seemed to her, companionable silence.

‘Do you get lonely here, on your own?’

‘Yes, I do. Do you like it, living at home?’

‘No, I don’t. I want to leave. I’m glad I was able to come down here.’

‘You’re always welcome. You’ll always be welcome, with me, wherever I am. You look very well.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes. Do I look well?’

‘No, Maria,’ said her brother. ‘You look older. And tireder. Do I really look well?’

‘No,’ said Maria. ‘You look sad, and worried.’

‘Perhaps things will turn out all right.’

They both smiled.

‘Is Sefton well?’ asked Maria.

‘He’s fine. I was talking to him only the other day. He was in fine spirits. We were in the sitting room, and I was asking him a few questions. I said to him, What’s it all about, then? What do you think I should do? How do you view the career opportunities open to a man like myself, as an outsider, so to speak? As an impartial observer. You don’t let these things get you down, I can see that, I said. Come on, what’s the secret?’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He sort of stretched out on my lap, and purred, and took hold of my arm, and moved his claws in and out. It was very reassuring. I took it that he was advocating detachment. Indifference, even. Be idle, like me, that seemed to be the gist, there’s no stigma really. Live life as it was meant to be lived. Half asleep, preferably. That was good enough for me. I dropped the subject. He seemed to be fishing for a short stroke, so I obliged, and then we dozed off together.’

‘Does he remember me?’

‘Oh, definitely. He’s very fond of you.’

‘I miss him.’

Strangely, they continued to talk for many more hours, until ten o’clock, in fact. Bobby then realized that he had had nothing to eat.

‘Is there a chip shop near here?’ he asked.

Maria gave him the necessary directions.

‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘No. I’m not hungry.’

‘You look tired. Why don’t you go to bed?’

‘I might.’

Bobby borrowed his sister’s front door key, and left. Maria, meanwhile, decided to take advantage of his absence by listening to some music. It might be her only chance to enjoy the blackness and the solitude. You should not assume from this that she resented Bobby’s visit. On the contrary, as she made her preparations for bed that night, washing, undressing, choosing the tape, she did so in the consciousness of an unaccustomed warmth, a wholly unexpected rediscovering of kinship. But she was still reluctant to relinquish her midnight treat, the enjoyment of which had become increasingly important to her, now that her relations with Anthea and Fanny had deteriorated, and now that the attentions of Winifred had intensified her need to feel capable of self-reliance. When she listened to Bach, alone, and saw nothing, these people ceased to exist. She suspected that Bobby would not understand this process, and besides, it would not work if there were somebody else in the room. So she listened, for about half an hour, to the first and second violin partitas, and then she fell asleep.

She was awoken by the sound of her bedroom door opening, and by light from the landing. It was Bobby.

‘Hello,’ he whispered.

‘Hello,’ said Maria. ‘I must have fallen asleep.’

Sleepily she looked at her clock. It was four-thirty.

The next morning, as Bobby was toasting bread at the electric fire, Maria said:

‘I had a very strange dream last night. I dreamt I was asleep, and then you woke me up by coming in, and I looked at my clock, and it was half past four.’

Bobby chuckled.

‘What are you laughing at?’

‘What happened after that?’

‘I can’t remember,’ said Maria. ‘What time
did
you come in last night? I never heard you.’

Bobby laughed again.

‘That was no dream.’

‘Oh Bobby, don’t tease me. You can’t possibly have been out that late. What time was it? I must have gone to sleep very quickly.’

‘I was out,’ said Bobby, ‘until twenty past four. Your clock is ten minutes fast.’

Maria was both confused and alarmed.

‘But where were you? What happened? What was wrong?’

Bobby laughed again, quietly and at length.

‘One day, Maria,’ he said, ‘I shall tell you where I went last night. One day.’

‘Never mind one day. Tell me now,’ said Maria angrily.

Bobby shook his head, and kept his secret, for the time being. He stayed for two more days, cold, happy days. It was a windy afternoon when Maria said goodbye to him at the station. The sun kept making abortive efforts to penetrate dense banks of fast-moving cloud. The train was late, they stood chatting and holding hands, it grew warmer and less windy, and still Bobby would not explain. As his waving hand dwindled, Maria felt a sudden surge of loneliness. And then the sun really came out.

5. Last Days

Of all the Oxford days which Maria ever looked back on, she remembered none so clearly or with so much pain as a blazing summer’s day at the end of her last term. It was a wasted day, an unhappy day, a very beautiful day in some respects. It started, as far as Maria’s memory and therefore as far as we are concerned, in the afternoon. Armed only with a copy of poems by Baudelaire, which she had no intention of reading, she stationed herself on a bench, beneath a tree, opposite the main entrance to one of the men’s colleges. It was astonishingly hot, and had been for about a week, the heat was beginning to have that weighty feel which means that a storm is not far off. It weighed her down, supplemented internally by the heat of anxiety and of desire. Her heart pounded, as hearts do at such moments, and in such situations, not an unpleasant feeling as long as it doesn’t happen too often, more than once every few weeks, for example. In this position, which she varied only in a small way as we shall see, she waited for five hours, during which time she reflected haphazardly on the circumstances, the feelings and former incidents, which had brought her to this pretty pass. She did not recall them in chronological order, she did not so much recall them at all; in fact, it would be truer to say that they assaulted her, but we shall record them chronologically, for the reader’s benefit.

She had first met Stephen shortly after waving goodbye to her brother at Oxford station, all those months ago. Maria was short of friends at the time. Her tutorial partner, a girl called Madeline, had noticed this and, being a horse of a different colour from those which inhabited Cribbage House, she had taken pity, what’s more in quite a useful way. She had recognized immediately that there could be no real sympathy between Maria and herself, and so, rather than making an extravagant show of friendship, she had simply taken the trouble, over a number of weeks, to introduce Maria to most of her friends in the hope that some of them would like her, and that she, in turn, would like some of them. And indeed both of these hopes were, to a modest extent, realized, so that Maria needed no longer to be short of company on those days when she ventured into the city. She never took full advantage of this fact, it is true. For instance, she would never have called on one of these friends uninvited. But if she were to meet one of them by chance she would by no means hasten away, she would linger and talk, perhaps for a long time.

Of these new friends Maria had a particular favourite, whose name was Stephen. After waving goodbye to Bobby she had hurried off to her afternoon tutorial, and after her afternoon tutorial she had been invited back to Madeline’s room, for a light tea, and also, did she but know it, for the opportunity to meet Stephen. Maria and Stephen had not got on, initially. She had thought him furtive, and he had thought her unfriendly, although both were wrong. In Maria’s experience, boys either disliked her at once, or liked her at once, and if they liked her they would convert this liking, not knowing what else to do with it, into moonstruck love, droopy hangdog moody wide-eyed romantic slobbering, and if this emotion was not immediately reciprocated, which understandably enough it never was, they would adopt the absurd posture of the injured suitor, absurd enough in itself but fifty times more so if adopted within minutes of clapping eyes on the admired object. Now Stephen was very reticent with her at first, and so Maria assumed that this reticence had its origins in this same process, why after all should he be any different, and consequently she designated it with the word furtive, whereas in fact his only feelings towards her had been confusion, and an incipient liking which he had not known how to act upon. But Maria shortly came to realize her mistake. Meanwhile he had mistaken her distrust, her weariness, her abstraction and strange inner awareness of both loss and gain after the last two days with Bobby, all for unfriendliness. An inauspicious start, wouldn’t you say. And yet out of this misunderstanding had grown a bond, and, on Maria’s part at least, out of this bond had grown the stirrings of an attraction and an admiration so strong that they soon came to dominate her life and to seem, basically, a bit of a nuisance. At the same time she felt very happy, happier than she had done for months or even years, and it was a timeless happiness, too, free from the complications described in Chapter Three. It was qualified by one factor only, which was that she was not at all certain, she had no concrete evidence whatsoever, that Stephen returned her love. (And just when I was thinking that we could get away without using the word.)

Maria’s love for Stephen (in for a penny) bore little relation to her love for Nigel. They never went to bed together. They never kissed. These were not Maria’s decisions, she would have done both, simultaneously for preference. But at the same time she felt that it made a nice change not to do these things, it gave her a sense of independence to think that she could love without seeking routine satisfactions. Stephen himself never mentioned the matter. Occasionally Maria wondered whether he found her unattractive, or whether he was homosexual, or frigid, but more often she was happy to let things continue as they were. She had never had any use for wiles, the little feminine wiles in which it was considered by some indispensable to be adept. Charlotte, for instance, had found her attitude in this respect particularly hard to understand. You will never get anywhere, Maria, she had said once, until you learn to practise the ways, the little feminine wiles and ways by which we of the weaker sex are able to exercise our authority. Little gestures, Maria, and little actions, which render men helpless, which turn them to putty in our hands. These had turned out to be, in ascending order of effectiveness, the fluttering of the eyelashes, the crossing of the legs, and the sucking of the penis. Maria was not impressed by this advice and had never acted upon it. She felt that it would be wrong, apart from anything else, to force upon Stephen attentions and pressures which he had not invited. She was happy already, and did not want to jeopardize her happiness.

Although I have, in this context, used the word happy (three times, not counting various derivatives), I have not, as you may have noticed, used the word content, and there is a good reason for this, namely that it denotes, does it not, a placid state of mind, and according to this definition Maria was not at all content, and was well aware of the fact, in lucid moments anyway. She was content to be in love with Stephen, she was content not to go to bed with him, but she was not by any means content not to know whether he was in love with her. Indeed torment would be a more useful concept to invoke than content, when describing the state of mind or, for that matter, of heart, into which this uncertainty had thrown Maria. Simply to know, as a matter of incontestable truth, that he did not love her, would have been much better than not to have a clue one way or the other. Her uncertainty led her into every manner of peculiar behaviour, for, in the absence of any definite information to the contrary, one half of her believed Stephen to be in love with her, and acted accordingly, whereas the other half held her back, and would not let her carry through to their conclusion actions which half of her patently craved. On such occasions her behaviour was, therefore, essentially that of a madwoman. And this afternoon, the one I am about to describe, was itself one such occasion.

There had been others, many others. Days when she had waited outside Stephen’s college, knowing what time he was most likely to emerge in order to meet an appointment or an engagement, and had then followed him through the street, debating always within herself whether to approach him and to feign surprise, as if they had met by chance. Sometimes Maria could be very foolish. She knew that if Stephen ever found out about this behaviour, he would consider it incomprehensible, and might stop loving her, or might never start loving her, or might even stop liking her. Yes, might even stop liking her. But that didn’t stop her doing it. There was one time which kept coming back to her, as she sat waiting outside his college that hot afternoon, it came back to her in fragments, glimpses insistent in form and character, always the same, but this is not how I shall narrate it.

It had been another warm afternoon, uncomfortably warm, but worth it for the lovely cool into which she had stepped as soon as she entered the chapel. She walked softly, her shoes echoing on the slabs, and sat unnoticed at the end of a pew, two rows from the back. The chapel was empty, except for the organ loft, where Stephen and his music teacher were having a lesson. Maria knew that Stephen had an organ lesson at this time in the afternoon, and had come to the chapel for this very reason, to listen to him as he played. It was the first time she had ever done so, and also the last, the memory being, as far as she could see, more important than the experience. It, the memory, came to take on a peculiar texture, composed largely in the end of visual rather than aural elements. Even now she felt a shudder, perhaps of pleasure, perhaps of pain, at the thought of the scene as her mind’s and her remembrance’s eye had between them framed it, the pale glowing tetragon of sunlight on the slabs, the shaft of sunlight connecting this figure to her nearest window, the dustclouds dancing before her, the shade around, and the soft, insistent music, to which Maria hardly listened, at least in her usual way, but which might have spoken to her of regretful acceptance, if she had been interested in that sort of conjecture. Now: irony coming up. The music, as far as Maria was concerned, was Stephen’s. It was he who made it, and filled the chapel with it, it was he alone who was humanly responsible for the sound of those moments, for the sound which her world made, in other words, during that time. This was how she liked to look at it, and this was at the heart of all that day’s worth. But to tell the truth, never a bad thing to do occasionally even in a novel, it had not been Stephen playing the organ at all, in this instance, for his teacher, exasperated beyond measure by the hopelessness of his performance, had taken over and played the whole prelude without stopping, as a demonstration of how it should be done. Maria did not know this. But her inaccurate memory meant much more to her than our knowledge of the facts can ever mean to us, so we needn’t feel superior.

Since it was now approaching the end of their time at Oxford, things were getting desperate, from Ronny’s point of view. None of his proposals of marriage had yet obtained a favourable response, in spite of the fact that he had increased their delivery to the rate of one a day. He had, of course, found out about Stephen. Ever since making the discovery, about six weeks ago, he had been the victim of an insane jealousy. What Maria never knew, when she followed Stephen through the streets of Oxford, the two halves of herself frantically debating whether or not to approach him, was that Ronny, more often than not, would be following her, frantically debating within himself (one cannot talk in terms of halves with regard to Ronny, eighths would be nearer the mark) whether to accost Maria, and charge her with her infidelity, or whether to accost Stephen, and confront him with his treachery, or whether to leave well alone. No decision was every arrived at, because he always lost them sooner or later. Ronny would have made a useless spy. But he knew all about their movements, he was well acquainted with the strange fascination which this quiet young man exerted, oblivious, over Maria. That was why, as Maria sat beneath the spreading tree, watching the entrance to Stephen’s college, Ronny sat at the window of a nearby cafe, watching Maria through a pair of stolen opera glasses. He never once moved, except to order more cups of tea, his consumption of which soon ran into dozens, and to go to the lavatory, which he had to do more than he would have liked. At all other moments, his eyes were fixed on his prey. He sat sideways on his chair, poised to leap up should she make the slightest movement. He had no other idea than to follow her wherever she went.

This gave Ronny the edge over Maria, with respect to ideas. For she had not yet decided, had not really considered, for that matter, what she would do if and when Stephen emerged into the sunlight. We can only conclude, in fact, that she had not given either the motives or the consequences of her behaviour the slightest thought. Otherwise, how can we account for its absurdity? An absurdity apparent to everyone but Maria, apparent even to the passers-by who stared and shook their heads at the spectacle of her yearning vigilance. The best we can do is to surmise. Her course of action would probably have been to have hidden behind the tree, until he passed, and then to have called out, in an accent of surprise, Oh, hello, Stephen. And what she would have done after that is anybody’s guess, for it would have depended entirely upon his response, and what his response would have been is nobody’s business. I have enough difficulty predicting Maria’s behaviour, without bothering about his. From this quagmire of speculation, however, one fact can be retrieved. This is that it was essential, for Maria, that the encounter should seem to be unplanned. Explain that if you can. Perhaps she thought that Stephen might be disposed to interpret a chance meeting as the sign of fate’s intervention, and would thereby conclude that he and Maria were made for one another, or something like that. Or perhaps she wanted to be in command of the situation, and felt that the odds were better if it were only she who knew the circumstances by which it had come about. Perhaps (getting warmer) she did not want him to know how desperately she had wanted to see him again. Perhaps, therefore, we can explain the whole daft phenomenon by reference to a certain vice, five letters, beginning with p and ending with e, not entirely unconnected with a certain unfortunate incident which took place in a certain garden, shortly after the dawn of time, if you can remember that far back. There is obviously a very wholesome lesson to be drawn from this. Maria might have spared herself a great deal of unhappiness, it’s hard to say exactly how much, no more than a lifetime’s worth at the most. Anyway, guesswork can only go so far.

Part of Maria’s foolishness can be traced to the fact that her relationship with Stephen had recently drawn to a climax of aching ambiguity. It was the end of term and he was going away the next day, not home, but away, far away, to China, in fact, where he was to take up a teaching job. He would have gone earlier, but he had to stay in Oxford for a viva, that very afternoon, Maria didn’t know when exactly, which is why she was waiting outside his college all afternoon, for she knew that his route lay that way. The previous evening, alone together, in a bar, they had talked about his journey, he with a mixture of apprehension and excitement, she with a mixture of anguish and misery, neither of which he noticed, in his apprehension and excitement. Oh, but they had come so close, so very close, to a declaration of shared feelings. There had been moments when their hands had nearly touched, and their eyes had nearly met, and after that it might all have been plain sailing, love offered and reciprocated, nothing new really but it seems to mean a lot to the people involved. It never quite happened. I shall miss you, Stephen, she had said. I shall miss you, Maria, he had said, with emphasis on the ‘you’. Would you like me to come with you? Maria never said this, although she wanted to say it, she was dying to say it. I would like you to come with me. He had never said that either, although perhaps he too wanted to say it, but didn’t, out of shyness. Well, I suppose this is it. That’s what he did say, as they stood out in the dark after closing time and said goodbye. Maria now came close, very close, to asking her question, but all she had managed was to falter, If there’s anything you want, before you go. Yes, he had asked, when she tailed off. You know my number, she said. You know my number.