A Stairway to Paradise Read online

  ‘Now do you believe in God?’ she said.

  He laughed. ‘No,’ he said; ‘only that Mary is His mother.’ He was suddenly serious again: he looked down at her. ‘Stay quite still,’ he said, ‘while I thee worship.’

  She did as he had asked for as long as she possibly could.

  16

  It was afterwards again; the light was fading. She sat by the window in a red dressing-gown. She had made some tea. Alex was dressed again, because soon he would have to go.

  ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘what are we going to do?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘what are we going to do? ’

  He looked at her for a while. ‘Come over here for a moment,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, just for a moment. I have to talk to you. I can’t do it while you’re over there.’

  She came reluctantly and he pulled her down beside him and put his arms around her. They were lying back across the bed and he kissed her cheek. ‘Don’t you really understand,’ he said, ‘what we’re going to do?’

  ‘You’d better tell me,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure that I do.’

  He was silent for some time, holding her in his arms. ‘I meant it quite literally when I said, with my body I thee worship. I was absolutely serious. I am still.’ He paused. He was having to articulate what was too new and too rare and too strange to articulate. ‘I feel . . . stunned. As you see, this is a new experience for me. In fact I feel as if I know something that no one else does. Except perhaps that Tudor clergyman. I’ve hardly begun to take it in, I’m too amazed by it to be able to think about it.’

  They were both silent for a time. They were both still, after all, in a state of amazement.

  Then there was a change in the temperature and he spoke almost abruptly. ‘But as you see, otherwise,’ he said, ‘I’m in it up to the neck.’

  She thought about this for a moment but her head began to swim. ‘I’m not sure—’ she began, slowly; he cut her off. There was only the faintest vibration of irritation in his voice: only she would have perceived it; it lacerated her heart.

  ‘I have obligations,’ he said. ‘You’ve known that from the beginning. You know my situation as well as I do. Do we really need to discuss it? I have a wife and two children and a household to maintain: those are the givens.’

  She thought for a moment, but a piece of iron had been driven suddenly into her soul. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘you mean—’

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘and perhaps I should have said this clearly at the start, but it never occurred to me that it could be necessary, that I can’t think of leaving Claire and the children: surely you see that. This has nothing to do with how things stand between me and Claire—well, maybe it does. I mean, we have, as I said, a modus operandi. Of which the object is to raise Marguerite and Percy as peacefully and as properly as we humanly can. I couldn’t even think of breaking up the family until at the earliest Percy is settled in at Westminster. Assuming he gets in. And that’s seven years off. What else did you expect?’

  ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘I thought—’ and she could not now, did not dare, now, say what she had thought, so wrongly thought; she could not go on, now, because she saw that she was coming—no, had come—to something dreadful.

  ‘You thought, I suppose,’ he said, ‘that we would run away together and live happily ever after, did you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He was silent for a long time, holding her in his arms, stroking her hair. ‘Haven’t we run away together,’ he said sadly. ‘Shan’t we live happily ever after?’

  ‘But we won’t be together,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d be together.’

  ‘But we are,’ he said.

  ‘We won’t be,’ she said. ‘Very soon, we won’t be. You’ll be at home and I shall be here. And then—how often shall we be able to meet after that? No, don’t tell me. I know. But even that is not really the point. We’ll be sneaking about behind Claire’s back, deceiving her and the children, behaving as if this were something disgraceful, secret—it just won’t do. I can’t do it. Don’t you see?’

  And she had pulled away from him, she was sitting up and looking at him, and he knew she was right. He knew, with the coldest and most terrible dread and certainty, that she was right.

  ‘But we must,’ he said. ‘It’s all we have.’

  17

  It was as if his utterance had come from far away, from some never-before-revealed chamber of his mind, and it echoed down long corridors into a corresponding, equally remote chamber of hers: they sat, marvelling at and almost petrified by these echoes. She made a terrible effort.

  ‘It isn’t enough,’ she said. ‘It is not it.’

  And he saw that she was right: of course, she was right.

  ‘Of course, Claire can look after herself,’ he said, slowly; ‘my absence would be neither here nor there as far as Claire is concerned, as long as everything kept ticking over; but Percy—Marguerite— you couldn’t possibly think, you couldn’t possibly have thought that there was any question of my disturbing their lives in this way, could you? The house would have to go, for a start—I couldn’t run that plus another household somewhere else, as matters stand: their lives would be very seriously altered—you couldn’t really have thought I’d do that to them?’

  And he began, wonderingly, to face the possibility, the terrible possibility, that she really had.

  She was silent, she too having been made to see a different conformation from the one she had taken unreflectingly for granted. It was some time before she was able to answer him. ‘Other people seem to separate,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Other families break up, and everyone seems to manage. Oh, of course I know there are wretched divorces where the children are damaged and never readjust, but I thought—since you and Claire—I thought— perhaps,’ she said, in an even smaller voice, ‘perhaps Marguerite and Percy would be happier if you and Claire were no longer together. Since you don’t love each other.’

  ‘Claire and I don’t quarrel,’ he said sharply. ‘We may not be a loving or even affectionate couple but we’ve always treated each other politely in front of the children at least. They accept us as we are.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, desperately. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to imply—I just thought—I—’ and she began, quietly, helplessly, to weep.

  Her tears were appalling. He rocked her in his arms. ‘You’re so much younger than I am,’ he said. ‘I was forgetting. You must be, I suppose, ten years younger: you couldn’t have known what one knows another ten years down the road. You see what having children does to one!’ And for a time he thought, quite irrationally, and in a kind of desperation, that, now that she had seen what he had always seen, her terrible declaration, It is not it, might be nulli-fied, and that she would no longer be right in so saying, and that he would no longer see her to be.

  Her tears had ceased; she seemed quite calm and lay very still in his arms. They were both silent for some time and then he began to speak, hesitantly, almost reluctantly. ‘There is nothing I can say to you,’ he said; ‘there are no words, except that clergyman’s, that describe what I feel, and even those are not quite the whole of it. I can’t tell you anything, and as you see I can’t promise you anything, or even offer you anything, except myself; whatever that should mean. And for what it may be worth.’

  There was another silence; the room had grown quite dark. He could sense that she was reflecting on everything that he had said, and done, and been, and he waited in fear for what she would say.

  Her voice when eventually she spoke was quite clear and level; she might have been talking to Percy. ‘It won’t do,’ she said. ‘We can’t—go on.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know whether it would be different if I didn’t know Claire, and the children, but as it is—it isn’t possible. It isn’t worthy of us.’

  Of course she was right; he knew she was right.


  ‘We won’t see each other again,’ she said, and she held his hand very tightly, showing that she was his own: that she belonged to him, with all her being.

  18

  ‘This has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Claire or the children,’ he said. ‘This—this—there is no word for our situation, yours and mine: this place we’ve come to is ours alone, it has nothing to do with anything else in the world or in our lives, it’s ours alone. You can’t possibly mean what you’ve said, you can’t possibly be saying that this place doesn’t exist. After the time we’ve spent here.’

  ‘It exists,’ she said. ‘But we can’t go on being in it.’

  ‘Why not,’ he said.

  She went on as if talking to Percy in one of his moods of deliberate recalcitrance. ‘It’s not separate from the rest of our lives, or the rest of our selves, or the rest of the world,’ she said. ‘It only feels as if it is. That’s the whole point of it. Don’t you see?’

  He was silent, frozen with dread: he had seen that she was right, he had hoped to dissuade her (and himself ) nevertheless, but he had never truly, never to the depths of his being, believed that they would really act upon the principles which she had enunciated. He had never until now thought seriously that he might not see her again.

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t be able ever again to see Claire, or the children; not as your secret lover. I couldn’t do it, you know that I couldn’t. It would be unimaginably—what is the word? Something even worse than deceitful. And then simply to stop seeing them, in that situation, would be just as bad. You do see what I mean, don’t you?’

  Of course he did. Unimaginably deceitful, unimaginably tasteless; either way: unimaginable.

  ‘As it is,’ she smiled to herself ruefully, ‘I shall have to find a tactful way of not seeing them again, anyway.’

  And he saw that this too was the case. She would not see any of them again, at any rate for some long time. Tactfully, apparently by accident, she would withdraw. And he realised now, as had she from the start, that the moral argument was always inexorable, that it overwhelmed even the enchantment which had befallen them both: still half within their secret, sacred place they looked out together on a terrible world which the exercise of virtue alone could make tolerable. It was possible to see and comprehend and even accept this now, when they were sated; the anguish they felt was all in their minds; in the days, the weeks, the months to come Alex discovered a veritable hell. So did Barbara. So they continued, after all, to inhabit their own secret, sacred place; one in which the sensations they shared, of torment now and not of ecstasy, seemed as endless, as boundless, as time, every hour which passed, an eternity.

  19

  ‘Oh, Alex—could you just keep an eye on that for a moment to see that it doesn’t boil, it has to simmer for ten more minutes and I must make this telephone call, I’m trying to get hold of Barbara.’

  Yes, of course, absolutely. Get hold of Barbara. Oh, God, God in whom I don’t believe, have mercy on me: you bastard, God, you complete and utter all-time sadist. I’m trapped here with the sauce béchamel, Claire is going to get hold of Barbara, my own, my goddess, and I’m going to have to overhear the whole thing. Impassively.

  ‘Barbara? Oh, brilliant—I’ve been trying you all afternoon— how are you? Oh, good. Fine. Yes, they’re fine too. Look, you must come and see us very soon—they’ve been asking for you! Yes, of course, I do understand.

  ‘The reason I rang—specifically—you couldn’t be interested in a little jobette, could you? Perfectly horrible, but cash on the nail. It’s just—we have some friends who live in Chelsea with a five-year-old, a perfect little monster, their au pair has just walked out on them—I think they’ve managed to get through about three in the last year, hopeless: anyway, they’re looking for someone who could collect the monster from school every day and take him home and give him his tea and generally keep him out of mischief until she gets home from work at about seven o’clock.

  ‘And she’ll pay five pounds an hour and fares. So I just thought maybe—anyway you could try it and see how it goes, what do you think? All right, her name’s Louisa, Louisa Carrington—she’s a darling, so is he, I can’t think where little Fergus gets it from, I suppose he’s simply been allowed to run rather wild. So here’s the number—I should think she’ll practically go down on her knees to you. She’s desperate.’

  I’ll go down on my knees to you. I’ll completely prostrate myself before you. I’ll agree to be buried in a deep pit if only it will make a difference, if only I can have you. Desperate: you don’t know what you’re talking about, Claire—as usual; you know nothing: this is desperation, it has never truly existed before: it is born in me. It is borne by me. Although it can’t be borne: it is unbearable.

  ‘Well, as I said, you must come over—what? All right, super, yes, do that—I’ll look forward to hearing from you. Don’t leave it too long! Bye!’

  ‘I hadn’t realised that we had people coming—’

  ‘Oh, Alex, you are hopeless. I reminded you this morning. Well, thank God you’re back in time anyway. You’ve got half an hour till countdown. David and Sarah. I told you. I should have known you weren’t listening.’

  Alex went upstairs to see the children: Percy was still in the bath, playing with a battleship or two. He aired some of his opinions on matters social, educational and anatomical and then he said, ‘I say, Dad,’—‘Yes,’ said Alex, looking down at his tiny successor: ‘I say, why don’t we get Barbara to come and be our au pair, and then she could live here all the time: don’t you think that’s a good idea?’

  ‘Barbara might not think so.’

  ‘Oh, yes, she would. Will you ask her?’

  ‘But Astrid’s already here.’

  ‘Yes, but Astrid is homesick. She told me so.’

  ‘Well, that’s very sad, but she has to get over it, because she wants to learn English: that’s why she’s here. Barbara already knows English.’

  ‘She could learn something else instead. She could learn Latin.’

  ‘Perhaps she knows that too.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. I know because I asked her. I told her I was starting Latin in two years and could she speak Latin and she told me no. So there!’

  ‘I shouldn’t think she wants to learn it now, though.’

  ‘She might. Will you ask her?’

  ‘I say, Percy, old thing, it’s time you got out. Have you actually washed yourself? With soap? All right then, pull the plug.’

  Nothing so thin, so pale, so stick-like as a little boy. He seemed to be made of wire, his cranium full of tiny wheels and rods all turning, endlessly turning, producing their endless stream of speculations and conclusions, notes and queries. Quite soon they would begin to get their first serious tuning: amo, amas, amat; amamus, amatis, amant. The great mantra: around and around and around, until the end of time. God have mercy.

  20

  Fergus Carrington, that fiend in human form: what would she have done without him? He had silky ash-blond hair and a rosebud mouth and one saw quite a lot of his pink tongue because he so frequently poked it out at one. He also liked to kick and punch and pinch and to hit one with his satchel. He was a perfect little darling: exactly what she needed: what would she have done without him?

  By the time she had him under something like control (it took only two months or so: she bribed him with the ten remaining marrons glacés, and when these were all gone, the National Army Museum) her yearning for Alex was only a dull constant ache.

  The weather got colder; she took Fergus to Harrods and bought him the regulation navy-blue overcoat and they had tea at Daquise on the way home. Fergus ate a large cream cake with a fork which he held in the correct manner, attracting comments full of extravagant admiration from two aged Polish women at a nearby table. Some of this admiration was directed at Barbara on the assumption that she was his mother and thus the person to whom credit was due, which was half true; she smiled at th
em briefly in graceful acknowledgment.

  ‘They think you’re my mother,’ observed Fergus.

  ‘It’s a natural mistake,’ said Barbara.

  ‘What are you?’ said Fergus.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Barbara.

  He thought for a moment and gave her a sudden suspicious sideways look. ‘You’re not an au pair, are you?’ he said. ‘I don’t like au pairs.’

  ‘No,’ said Barbara. ‘I’m not an au pair.’

  He thought again. ‘I suppose you’re just a friend,’ he concluded.

  ‘Yes,’ said Barbara. ‘Just a friend.’

  He sat brooding to himself for some time and then began kicking his heels against his chair and making a noise like an engine revving up, so his friend paid the bill and took him home.

  It had been a creditable performance for a five-year-old boy, especially as it was he who, just as they were leaving, remembered the Harrods bag stashed away under the table. Just think if they’d forgotten that!

  ‘What would I do without you, Fergus?’ said Barbara.

  ‘You’d be in really bad trouble,’ said he.

  21