The Temporary (12 page)

She reached a turning and stopped as a glowing lava of cars erupted from the traffic lights and flowed hotly across her path. Crossing it seconds later she recognized ahead the bar in which they had arranged to meet and she found herself hurrying towards it. She was late, a genuine ten minutes appropriated by a long wait for the Tube. She felt
momentarily
comforted by the sudden reality of time, the forceful packing of it after a day of empty, ghost-like hours which had haunted her one by one, each with its own ghastly tincture. Ralph had protested at meeting her in Camden, saying that he ought to come to West Hampstead, but to Francine the
idea had sounded too much like a favour, a kind visit after which he could walk away free. She wanted him embroiled in scenes of himself from which he could not escape.

She saw him as soon as she arrived, sitting at a table in the corner with a newspaper. The bar was not crowded and her entrance was unimpeded, but as she swept past tables, glad again of her dramatic coat, and felt faces turn gratifyingly towards her, she was disappointed to notice that Ralph himself did not look up to observe her finely judged approach. The interlude somewhat restored her possession of herself, however, and as she sat down opposite him the sudden calming of her fractious uncertainties allowed her to
manufacture
a radiant smile.

‘Francine,’ said Ralph, looking up from his paper.

Francine was satisfied to see a look of surprise flit across his face, and knew that he had forgotten how beautiful she was. She was glad they had arranged to meet in a bar. The almost tangible force of public opinion around her – people were still looking round, she could see them from the corner of her eye! – seemed to offer some security against the disaffections solitude might have admitted.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said softly, forbidding the triumph which surged in her thoughts from exiting importunately through her mouth. She considered advancing the reason for her delay and then decided against it.

‘Don’t worry, I was enjoying catching up with the papers. What would you like to drink?’

Francine felt a mild chill of disappointment that he should have found her absence so productive. She noticed that he was wearing the same clothes as he had done the last time she had seen him, and could not decide what it meant.

‘Oh, I’ll have red wine,’ she said. As Ralph looked around for a waiter, she glanced at his glass and saw that he was drinking beer. ‘So what have you been doing lately?’ she said.

‘What?’ He craned his neck and flapped his hand
ineffectually
. ‘Oh, ignore me then, you idiot.’

Francine turned her head and immediately caught the waiter’s eye, drawing him with a smile to their table. She was relieved by the distraction. Her attempt at conversation had given her an odd sensation of nakedness.

‘You’re good at that,’ said Ralph once the waiter had disappeared. A slight grimness about his mouth kept the remark short of a compliment. ‘I can never get them to see me.’

Francine’s thoughts were alarmingly empty. She wished that she had rehearsed a topic, or, now that she knew Ralph read them, at least looked at a newspaper over lunch.

‘So what have you been doing lately?’ she said again.

‘Me? Oh, not much.’ He looked better than he had before, and when he met her eyes she felt a tug of attraction. ‘I haven’t done any reading for ages, so I mostly just caught up on things I’d been meaning to finish. Oh yes, and I went to see that exhibition at the Hayward.’

‘Really?’ said Francine, who had been unaware of ‘that’ exhibition but resolved to visit it as soon as possible. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘Well, it was all right, but a bit thin, didn’t you think?’

‘Oh, I haven’t had time to go yet. I’m going over the weekend.’

She glanced at Ralph and caught the shadow of a strange smile on his lips. It gave her the idea that he might be thinking things about her which conspired against the impression she was attempting to make, and she grew diffident from the injury, looking down at her hands in silence until the waiter came with her drink.

‘What about you?’ said Ralph in a more kindly tone. ‘How was your weekend?’

‘Oh, exhausting. I went out every night.’ She remembered
her telephone call to Ralph on Friday evening. ‘Except Friday, of course. I never go out on Fridays.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I like to have an evening to myself, just to relax, you know. I read a lot,’ she added.

‘But why Friday? Why not Sunday or Monday?’

‘I don’t know.’ Francine was growing uncomfortable with his line of questioning. She remembered the night they had first met, a Friday night. ‘Anyway, I do go out on Friday if there’s a party or something.’

Ralph looked perplexed.

‘So what sort of things do you read?’

‘Magazines mostly,’ said Francine. ‘They’re not just about fashion – they have really interesting articles as well.’

Ralph’s eyes brightened and she felt satisfied that she was beginning to understand him.

‘And what about books?’ he said. ‘Do you read books?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Francine named one or two of her favoured authors, those in whose thickly gathered pages she had found the best confirmation of her own ideas about how the world worked. Ralph didn’t appear to have heard of them. ‘Perhaps I’ve got the names wrong,’ she said, giggling for his benefit. ‘I’m not very good at remembering names. Normally they get passed around the office so you don’t get to keep them for very long.’

‘I see,’ said Ralph. ‘Would you like another drink?’

‘Thanks,’ said Francine. The red wine had flushed her cheeks and she felt her spirits begin to rise. Ralph had been drinking slowly, but now he drained his glass with conviction and set it firmly on the table.

‘I think I’ll join you,’ he said. ‘We might as well get a bottle.’

Watching him, she caught an expression on his face for which she was unable to find an explanation. It was as if he
had forgotten she was there, and looking at him she had a sense of glancing through a window at something she shouldn’t see, something private. Seconds later he caught her eye and the expression disappeared hastily, as though he were embarrassed. She had sat many times at tables such as this, the face opposite her but a mirror in which her successes, her charms, every flicker of her loveliness were clearly reflected. Ralph’s face was unkind to her image, and Francine was unnerved by her suspicion that behind his barred eyes whole worlds turned, lives of thought were born and flourished, and that at the centre of its operations was a presence before whom she was powerless. She shrank slightly from this unpleasant notion of his complexity, and then returned with redoubled boldness, determined to conquer it.

‘Have you had many girlfriends?’

The force of her own words surprised her and she saw that their penetration had been considerable. His eyes widened at the question and he drank fiercely from his glass. She
wondered
why she hadn’t enquired of history before for clues which might make him clearer to her. Generally she wasn’t interested in what people had done before they met her, but Ralph didn’t talk about himself as much as other men.

She watched him drain his glass and swallow. She was only sipping at her own wine now, remembering the lethargy and the strange feeling of desperation which had been the residue of their last evening together, and with her restraint had come a sense of advantage as Ralph mechanically sank the bottle’s level.

‘Not many,’ he said. His eyes met hers. They were
unfathomable
now, two dark little wells into which suddenly she was afraid to look. He poured more wine into his glass and it gushed dangerously towards the rim. ‘There was a girl called Belinda who I knew at university. We were together for a year or so. I suppose she was my only real girlfriend.’

The mention of Belinda – what a ridiculous name! – and university drove Francine back into silence. She disliked the inference made by this twin assault that she was not the star of his experiences. Normally on such occasions, the present moment was firmly declared the climax of all that had gone before, but Ralph appeared to have said his piece and it seemed unlikely that any comforting codas would be added. This talk of ‘real’ girlfriends was unsettling. Belinda’s
isolation
, the very thing Francine would have imagined left her a clear field, made her seem all at once mountainous.

‘I suppose you’ve had a lot of men,’ said Ralph.

‘Oh, not really,’ Francine hurriedly replied. She found his comment peculiarly insinuating, and attempted to defuse it with protestations of innocence. ‘All the men I meet are so – so shallow. I mean, they only really want one thing, and once they’ve got it – well—’ She looked down at her hands. ‘It’s harder for girls, you know.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Ralph, who appeared not to be listening.

Outside it had grown colder and a whip of wind stung Francine’s legs as they turned into the High Street. She wished that Ralph would put his arm around her as a signal of protection against the night and the lonely waste-cluttered pavement, beside which demon-eyed cars roared too close, illuminating phantoms of litter leaping in the wind. People waited at a forest of bus stops, their faces ghoulish and grey. Someone was shouting on the other side of the street, a man walking slowly alone, his bearded face turned to the brown sky.

‘I’ll walk you to the Tube station,’ said Ralph. ‘It’s on my way,’ he added, although she had not objected to his inconveniencing.

He had drunk most of the wine in the end, and Francine had waited while his eyes grew liquid and bright and his face dismissed its guard for some unruly outbreak of interest, but now he seemed withdrawn and composed. His unrelenting manner as he marched her to the station fuelled her dread of the imminent solitude of the Tube, the precarious walk home, the emptiness of return as she unlocked the door. She wished fiercely that things were going differently, but the sound of her desires had never been more faint. They were apparently to have no effect on what was actually going to happen. The situation was, she had to admit, out of her control. She wondered, walking silently beside him, how he had escaped her. What was wrong with him? If only he would do
something
, make some acknowledgement of those qualities others had always found exceptional, it would have been easier for her defiantly to take her leave of him intact. His indifference was compelling, bound her in inaction, and she feared most of all the thoughts that would visit her once she was released from it.

Just then a smartly dressed man passed them on the pavement. He pinioned her with a searching look and then moved his glance to Ralph, smiling his approval quite openly before he walked on, leaving an ether of expense and the sound of tapping footsteps behind him. As if automatically, Ralph’s arm moved up and placed itself across Francine’s shoulders. The warm flood of her satisfaction filled recesses parched with anxiety. They drew level with the Tube station and stopped.

‘Would you like to come back?’ said Ralph, as if the idea had only just occurred to him.

‘If you like.’

Francine looked at his face and saw nothing there. His features were absolutely still, and in the draining, neon-lit darkness he looked unnervingly like a photograph. To her
surprise he suddenly leaned forward and hugged her, his body stiff and awkward against hers. His mouth was pressed against her ear.

‘What do you want from me?’ he whispered.

She pretended she hadn’t heard, and soon they were walking in silence towards the Lock.

These days, when wandering through his memories, Ralph would occasionally stop at the door behind which his dead love lay and would decide to go in and visit her. Lying in her vault she seemed beautiful to him, luminous and intact, the pall of sickness faded, the lines of agony smoothed, the scars of his autopsy invisible, all erased by the artful undertaking of time; and while her ghost still sometimes haunted him, a mischievous poltergeist caught in the echo of his own essential unchangingness, or hers, he felt in her recollection a sense of peace, a certain sculptured completeness which was altogether new.

Yes, he certainly felt differently about Belinda now – not that Francine had changed him, of course, merely moved him further away from the person he had been by provoking actions which did not seem to belong to him – for in learning again to speak the conjugal tongue, he had discovered new expressions of bitterness, a whole vocabulary of
dissatisfaction
, which in hindsight made him understand things about Belinda whose meaning had at the time escaped him. What he had heard as harmony, he now saw, had in the end sounded to her ears as an intolerable dissonance. In acting her part – if only he had been able to do it sooner, how much he might have saved himself! – he had brought his own
sympathies to the role, and there was something compelling in the act of forgiveness, the gentle, invigorating climb towards empathy, which made him want to savour it and draw it out. He was treading a narrow path, though, and when he strayed from it, tempted towards the rocky reaches of the irresolvable, he would come back shaken by the knowledge of how many parts of himself were still dangerous. It was then that he most wanted to know in what state he had been preserved by she whom he considered so respectfully; and then passed quickly on from the thought, frightened by what it might tell him, as if past a rainy day funeral to which no one goes, a grave on which fresh flowers have never been lovingly placed.

Despite his busy hours spent marshalling the riotous crowd of things that had gone for ever into a more disciplined formation, these weeks with Francine – how many weeks? Perhaps only four? – had been accompanied by an
encroaching
consciousness of his own isolation. From it he looked back to the time before they met as if towards a distant mainland, discovering longings within himself, not for the extinguished joys it harboured, for he could still admit that they were few, but for its familiarity, the memory he had of being recognized there. He supposed he had felt a similar dissociation from himself when he had first met Belinda, but it had been a holiday feeling, an ecstatic celebration of escape. He had used to tell her about the place from which he had come, inflating its horrors, not realizing that she would eventually return him to it. He would enjoy presenting her with the shameful fragments of his past in the knowledge that she would fit them together to make something different.

Once, when he was very young and his parents still lived together in their house – a memory more disappointing than precious, a good beginning made ridiculous by what came later – he had been sitting on the edge of his parents’ bed while his mother ‘lay in’. She often did that at the weekend,
her pillows banked behind her, the frill of her nightdress making a doll of her recumbent form, and he had used to think that she suffered from a brief but regular illness which afflicted her only on those particular days, days when he wanted to play and the house to be full of life. Later, when she really did fall ill, the resemblance of her confinement to those mornings made it seem natural to him, a state to which she had always been going to revert. On this particular morning, he had found something on her bedside table, a mysterious plastic contraption like a large straw, with a funnel at one end and a smaller inner cylinder which slid in and out of the larger one.

‘What’s this for?’ he had said, holding it up and trying to make a toy of it by sliding the cylinder in and out.

‘Never you mind‚’ his mother had snapped, reclaiming the object from his curious fingers and putting it in a drawer beside her.

‘But what’s it
for
?’ he had insisted. Her censorship had shown him a glimpse of something dark and confidential, and he attempted to work it out himself so that he could present her with the answer.

‘You’ll find out when you’re older,’ his mother had replied; and he had known then that it must be something to do with
sex
, that unwanted inheritance which promised one day to explain things which now seemed comic and unbelievable. The odd thing was that he hadn’t found out later, when sex was as familiar to him as he feared it was ever going to be. It had haunted him, a missing clue, a cipher for his
inadequacies
. His failure to encounter it devolved accusatorily back upon him, made worse by the fact that even in his enlightened state he still couldn’t begin to conjure up a use for the silly thing. Then, one evening, he had found one in Belinda’s bathroom, lying nonchalantly on a cluttered shelf among shampoo bottles and jars of face cream. For a moment he had
been paralysed by the sight, but the sudden and tangible appearance of the symbol filled him with a heedless
determination
to decipher it. He took it back with him to the other room and held it before her.

‘What’s this?’ he demanded.

A mild astonishment lifted her features, and even through his agitation he felt a fist of love clench in his chest for the way expressions settled on her face like butterflies.

‘It’s for thrush,’ she said calmly. ‘You put this pill on the end of it, a huge sort of horse pill, and then just shove it up.’ His face must have been entertaining, for she began to laugh as she watched him. ‘Don’t look so horrified,’ she said. ‘You did ask.’

He told her about his mother and saw her amusement become kinder and more genuine. She liked to hear of him as a little boy, and he sometimes feared that her feelings for him found a more natural object in that younger incarnation.

‘What on earth did you think it was?’ she said.

‘An erotic sex toy,’ he admitted gamely, playing the fool. Belinda’s revelation had made him feel quite light headed.

‘But how—?’ She began to shake with laughter, wiping tears from her eyes.
‘Really?’

He sensed a thread of mockery in her voice, and for a moment he didn’t understand how he had changed from an object of sympathy into one of ridicule. A flash of anger tore through him, not at her, but at his mother, for seeing in his young, pliant face a future in which this scene would come to pass. Her failure to save him from it, to make the world easier for him, seemed to constitute evidence of a horrifying neglect, but thinking about it later, he saw in it something far worse, a submission to indignity, the certainty of a terrible
homogeneity
which made the future as inescapable as the past.

The sense of imprisonment within his own faculties which had haunted Ralph then still plagued him, and lately he had
found that the wide and insuperable border which lay between himself and Francine, rather than lending him a prouder definition, had made him feel more than ever sealed up inside himself. In the beginning he had fancifully imagined that their differences might eventually be fertile – she had said so herself, in fact, reading to him from a magazine in that impervious way she had, about the attraction of opposites – but once or twice he had glimpsed himself lost in the bleak open spaces of their conversation and had since abandoned the hopeful examination of their prospects. Had he been going to put a stop to it all and return to the imperfect but comfortable life which only a few weeks ago had been in his grip, that moment when he had diagnosed a fatal sterility in their situation was the time to have done it. Now, however, his senses were no longer vigilant against novelty, and although he had
developed
no real liking for the element in which he currently lived, custom made it harder to remember Francine’s insinuations and thus extricate himself from them. His early posture, redolent of imminent departure, had disintegrated into an attitude of collapse from which thoughts of change or
movement
were hazy and reluctant. He was waiting, he supposed, for an outside impulse to direct him towards action, knowing that his own mechanisms had failed and their authority been superseded by that of circumstance. His resolutions visited him like ineffectual salesmen, and although he had often persuaded himself with the memory of his most recent meeting with Francine to draw their history to a halt, the subsequent encounter would invariably demonstrate the intractability of the status quo in the face of his attempts to suborn it.

‘I think I need to spend some time on my own,’ he had even said to her one evening, his heart growing wild in its cage of timidity.

They were sitting in his flat watching television, a habitat in which at first he had been benumbed with sorrowful
incredulity, but which was becoming every day more familiar to him. Francine had certain programmes she liked to watch, and their recurring nature formed a schedule from which, he soon found, she could not be derailed. The appearance of such habits had been swift, and the hostility of their tastes meant that their diversions rarely blended to form an impression of mutuality. The depth of Francine’s security in her own preferences, in fact, meant that Ralph’s suggestions of things they might do were often overridden, and he had begun to suspect that her early willingness to investigate his cultural activities was merely ceremonial. She had beaten him at the negotiating table, he had to admit, with the luring inference that she might be willing to change, but having secured his interest the hint of compromise disappeared. His only manoeuvres were those of indifference, and he was surprised to discover how much of it her vanity could withstand.

‘Why?’ she had replied, creasing her forehead in the mildly irritating demonstration of incomprehension she gave him when he said things she didn’t understand. He perceived the reprimand for obtuseness contained within this expression, and knew that she really didn’t see what he meant. Her face told him that he would have to be much clearer, clearer than perhaps he could be and certainly more cruel, if he wanted to make himself understood.

‘Why do you want to be on your own?’ she repeated.

He realized that she merely considered him boring, a consideration which possibly troubled her as much as his own misgivings. The spirit of reform had left him after that, and Ralph began to wonder if the problem was really his own. The way in which Francine presented herself to him as if with the expectation that he would manufacture substance, would perform tricks like a man sawing at a spangled woman in a box, cultivated in him the suspicion that what he was
witnessing
was merely the spectacle of his own inadequacies.
Through her he saw the lives of strangers, heard their footsteps echo through the halls of her heart, watched their ghosts slip inadvertently from her lips as she mentioned them, the advertising executive with the sports car, the local
nightclub
owner, the married manager, even the geography teacher at school, for Heaven’s sake; these men whose keys had fitted the mysterious lock with which Ralph daily wrestled, amongst whose furnishings he was expected to make himself at home, these dreadful characters whom he could not but feel it was ordained for him never to encounter, suddenly sharing with him the most galling intimacy! They hung about him like an ill-fitting second-hand coat, a dark path around the collar, pouches at the elbows, a roll of old mints discovered in a pocket. He was repelled by their proximity. He had loathed Belinda’s old boyfriends too, of course, but in a more brotherly manner: they were more perfect versions of himself, with whom nevertheless he felt a certain kinship, a loose matching of identities which left his essence undisturbed while jealously could torment his surface. His relation to Francine’s
redundant
men was altogether more troubling, for he could not see what it was that united them. They made a shiftless, uncomfortable group, a band of brigands amongst whom one had to watch one’s back, their common principle not love, but weakness.

He had seen Stephen recently, for the first time in weeks, and his familiarity had made an exhibition of Ralph’s secret changes, retrieving them from the obscurity of his suffocating heart and putting them on prominent display. They had met in a pub near Stephen’s flat in Notting Hill Gate with the intention of having Sunday lunch; an arrangement which Stephen always suggested, making it sound so appealing, so proper, but for which history could make hazardous claims, coming as it did so soon after the night which traditionally saw the eruption of Stephen’s worst excesses. Ralph had often
sat for half an hour in the pub waiting for him to appear, and would berate himself for remembering the last such interlude, and the resolutions he had made during it, only when immersed in the next. He supposed that in other
circumstances
he might have been pricked to deny his company to someone so careless of it, but he knew that it was not awe or even ineffectualness which delivered him time and again to Stephen’s rudeness. Rather, he saw in Stephen’s recurrent request for the assignation a need for someone to be waiting for him on a Sunday afternoon, a forecast of continuation which, when he awoke on Sunday morning, he could use to ward off whatever obsolescence lingered from the night before. That was Ralph’s suspicion, in any case, although whether the person equally needed to be him was less a matter for certainty. These days Ralph brought the newspapers to the pub and read them almost contentedly until Stephen turned up.

It had come as a surprise, then, to be met on his arrival by the sight of Stephen sitting on a stool at the bar reading a book. He looked almost dapper, in an old-fashioned tweed jacket with a pale shirt undone at the collar beneath and loose trousers of some soft material. Ralph glimpsed the back of his neck bent over his book as he approached. It was pale and more slender than he remembered, a bare stalk which
embarrassed
him but which for a moment he almost wanted to touch.