The Golden Fleece (9 page)

“Thank you,” he said, “but no.”

He knew that it was a mistake as soon as he had said it. He realized immediately that he should have said “Yes please!” as eagerly as possible. That way, she could have asserted herself by refusing. As things stood now, he’d issued a tacit challenge, which she might just feel compelled to meet.

“Liar,” she said.

“Honesty doesn’t come into it,” he lied, clumsily. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to look at your recent work, given that this isn’t working out the way that Mr. Jarndyke hoped it would. There’s nothing I can do for him here. I don’t say that it wouldn’t be interesting to see your work, for myself...but I will confess that I’m a little afraid of the effect it might have.”

“Coward, then,” she amended.

“Very much so,” Adrian admitted. “May I please go back to Mr. Jarndyke now?”

It was her turn to lie. “Nobody’s stopping you,” she said, and raised her arm as if to show him the way, in case he’d forgotten where the door was.

They both went back to the dining room, and Adrian spent a dutiful twenty minute telling Jason Jarndyke what a magnificent painter his wife was, and what it privilege it had been to see her works.

Angelica Jarndyke made no attempt to challenge him, having reverted to her policy of not looking at anyone, and only making the most blatantly tokenistic efforts to take part in the conversation. Her husband didn’t seem offended by that, or even disappointed. His optimism was still intact. He still imagined that she was “coming round,” and that she would one day be grateful to him for discovering Adrian, and making her a gift of his miraculous sight.

He had no idea what was really going on, Adrian thought. How could he, given that he was more than averagely unsighted, even though he was convinced that he could see with perfectly clarity, and was honest enough to call a splodge a splodge?

~ * ~

There was no question, this time, of simply waiting for Jayjay to drop by his desk or his lab with another invitation to the Old Manse. The game had gone beyond that. Adrian was expecting a direct approach, and it was almost a relief when he didn’t have to remain in suspense for weeks on end.

Three days later, when the doorbell of his flat rang during his scheduled relaxation time, at eight o’clock in the evening, he knew who it would be, but feigned astonishment anyway. He invited Angelica Jarndyke in, and offered her a cup of coffee, which she accepted once he had confirmed that he had no alcohol to hand.

She didn’t beat around the bush. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she told him.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“No,” she said. “I challenged you to prove that you understood, because I still didn’t believe that you did. I asked for it.”

He didn’t try to deny it. He watched her toy with her coffee cup for a few moments, shifting uneasily in her armchair.

“It was a shock,” she said. “Much less so for you, it seems. Have you met others?”

“No,” he said. “No one as adept as me, at any rate—or you. But because I had a scientific explanation, I was always aware of the theoretical possibility. I was surprised, but I couldn’t be shocked. Perhaps I should have been more pleased than I was, because your existence proved me right...but the situation wasn’t conducive to that.”

“Do you always talk like that?” she asked, with a hint of asperity. “Analytical...pernickety...pedantic.”

“Yes,” Adrian told her. “I try not to, but the scientific turn of mind keeps coming through. People call it pedantic, but it’s not.” Only a pedant, he knew, would pull people up on the propriety of their use of the term “pedantic,” but he didn’t voice the joke. It was hardly the time.

“I’m the one that’s at fault,” she told him, with a sigh. “If I’d had a more scientific turn of mind...I’d have understood too. If I’d thought like you, I’d probably have gone into advertising as well. What a marriage I’d have had then eh? Jason and I would be partners instead of...not that it would be any guarantee of happiness. Are
you
happy, Adrian?”

“No,” he relied, bluntly.

She looked at him carefully: not
hard,
the way she had looked at him up at the Manse, but curiously, inquisitively. He was not the only one, he realized, who had been led by their encounter to re-examine all the decisions he had made, and wonder what might have happened if the flip of the coin had gone the other way.

“Jason says you’re not gay,” she told him, brutally, “just socially retarded. He had to find out—even in this day and age, closeted gays can be vulnerable to blackmail.”

“I don’t mind,” Adrian said. “My sexuality isn’t an issue.”

“Which is exactly what’s puzzling. Has it anything to do with your supersight?”

Adrian thought long and hard about dropping out of the conversation altogether, but he felt that he had an obligation to help Jason Jarndyke’s wife, if he could—to help her to understand, that is.

“Indirectly,” he said. “Although it was nothing visible, it still marked me out as different—slightly alien. You must have experienced that too. It’s not an insuperable obstacle in itself, even when coupled with the social awkwardness that often comes with a scientific mind, but I had my looks to contend with too.”

“You’re quite pretty, in a way,” she said.

“Exactly,” he said. “I’ve always looked five years younger than I am—not such a handicap now that I’m in my late twenties, and I’ll probably be grateful when I’m forty, but as an adolescent... what teenage girl wants to become involved with someone who looks five years younger than she is? It didn’t take long to figure out that I wasn’t cut out for that side of life, so I decided to concentrate on the other. A little obsession can be a good thing, in science. So can a measure of oblivion to potential distractions.”

She didn’t sympathize, but she did nod her head to show that she could follow the argument. “It’s different for girls,” she observed, stating the obvious. “Same problem, in a way— totally different consequences.”

Adrian nodded his head, to show that he understood. What man didn’t want to become involved with a woman who looked five, ten or twenty years younger than he was?

“Ungrateful bitch, aren’t I?” she said. “Four women out of five would kill for my looks, and I just resent the way they define me. I could probably have done with your mentality—but I didn’t have that sort of ability, any more than I could cut it as a painter. I have everything I need to be happy—loving husband, nice kids, more money than Croesus—but I’m not. The fault isn’t in my stars but in me. I hid it away, where Jason couldn’t see it—where no one could see it. But you can, can’t you? And you can’t even lie about it, like a normal person. You had to tell me.”

“I could never understand how liars kept their stories straight,” Adrian muttered. “It always seemed simpler just to tell the truth. Normally, it doesn’t cause any difficulties.”

“Bullshit,” she retorted. “In order for it not to cause any difficulties, you have to lead an utterly abnormal life—which yours seems to be, by the way, although Jason has a whole zoo of freaks like you, so you probably feel right at home.”

“I’m sorry,” Adrian said, flinching under the assault.

“Well, there’s one lie you’ve mastered,” she retorted, as if by reflex—but then seemed to realize that she was being terribly unfair. “Sorry,” she said in her turn. “Not your fault. Not Jason’s either. All mine. I think I’d like it better, through, if your eyes were clouded with lust, like almost all the rest. Just knowing you can see clearly creeps me out a bit, but when you look right through me like that...you don’t miss it—that
side of life?”

“I just learned to tell myself that it doesn’t matter—that there are other things in life to pursue.”

A lesser person might have said “Money?” but Angelica knew better, She might not understand him as well as he thought he understood her, because he was a scientist and she wasn’t, but she knew that he hadn’t come to work for Jason Jarndyke for the money. She knew, as her husband did, that he was in quest of a metaphorical Golden Fleece for reasons more intimate than that.

Instead, she said: “I learned that, at least. Don’t you find, though, that people
expect
you to be happy—not just to want to be happy, but to
be
happy? I always feel that I’m somehow letting them down.”

“I’m not a beautiful woman,” Adrian pointed out. “I don’t have that kind of burden weighing down on me. Scientists are allowed to be eccentric...cynical and miserable, even. Nobody expects them to be happy.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” she told him—meaning the beauty, he assumed, not the misery and the cynicism, let alone the lack of expectation.

He didn’t reply—which was probably a tactical error.

“Come on, then,” she said, making as if to get to her feet, even though she hadn’t finished her coffee.

“Where to?” He asked, although it was a silly question.

“The barn, of course. I want you to see it. I need you to look at it.”

Adrian didn’t move. “Thank you,” he repeated, stubbornly, “but no.” He knew that he wasn’t going to get away with it, but felt obliged to put up a show.

She arched her magnificent eyebrows. They were phenomenal eyebrows, and they arched with a perfection he’d never seen before. “Come on,” she said. “No more lies—and I know you’re not really a coward.”

“You shouldn’t have come here, Mrs. Jarndyke.”

“Why? Because Jason might jump to the wrong conclusion? He won’t. He’s in London. If he finds out—and he probably will, although I won’t tell him—he’ll jump to the right conclusion. And he’ll be glad. He
wants
me to let someone into the barn: someone who can see. He’s glad that he found you. He’s not in the least afraid that I might be so glad to have found a sight-mate that I’ll screw you.”

Given that Jason Jarndyke had mentioned that possibility twice, in seeming jest, Adrian wasn’t so sure—but it was a trivial matter. Nothing of that sort was going to happen.

“You shouldn’t have come, because you shouldn’t want me to see your work,” he explained. “Let anyone else into the barn by all means—but not me. Keep your secret.”

She pulled a face, without injuring her beauty in the least. “Not the reaction I was expecting,” she confessed. “Aren’t you curious?”

“Of course I am,” Adrian said. “I’m a scientist. But I’ve seen the direction of your work, from the painting of Jason onwards, all the way to Hell.”

Her face lit up then, with a peculiar delight. “You figured it out!” she said. “Well done! And you actually think the trick might work? On
you!’’

She had jumped a little too far with that conclusion, but Adrian couldn’t see any point in correcting her.

“I figured out, even though I didn’t see the start of the sequence, that you must have had high hopes of your children at one point,” Adrian said. “There was a time, I imagine—up to and including the painting of Jason and the Fleece, when you thought that you might one day have an audience—someone with whom to share...but genetics let you down.”

She threw up her hands in a gesture of disgust. “They’re as bad as Jason,” she said. “I tried to teach them, to show them... but they didn’t grow into it. They couldn’t. Not their fault, poor lambs.”

Adrian didn’t want to suggest to her that perhaps it had been mistake to marry Jason Jarndyke. She had still been trying to
fit in
at that point, and even if it had occurred to her, it would have been unthinkable to anyone else that having bagged her multimillionaire, she might turn him down for art’s sake, or even for love. She hadn’t been a gold-digger, though; she hadn’t been thinking in terms of an eventual divorce and a settlement that would make her independently wealthy. She certainly wasn’t thinking about that now.