The Essence of the Thing Read online

  Jonathan sat down near her.

  Nicola had not turned on the light when they had come in, so she said, ‘Do you want the light on?’

  ‘No,’ said Jonathan. ‘It’s nice in the dark.’

  It was time, at last, to speak, and so, slowly, they began, at last, truly to speak. And there was not then, or later, any need ever actually to say: this is what it means to love you: this is what loving you means: and that there was no need was always an essential part of the whole point. Lovemaking was an esoteric language which they were now entirely qualified to speak. Even when the novelty— the marvel—of discovery wore off, this was a fact which Nicola at any rate simply and ineradicably knew.

  35

  ‘Jonathan,’ she cried, now; ‘don’t—don’t get up, don’t go away. We have to finish now that we’ve started, we have to have this out.’

  He turned his head towards her again and smiled very faintly, as one who, patient beyond all expectation, was prepared to humour her. ‘But I’ve told you already,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing to have out.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Very well. Very well, there may not be. You may not be the person I believed you to be. I have to know this. I have to know who you really are, who you really have been.’

  ‘It makes no odds now, surely,’ said Jonathan—still in the same tone of sweet reason.

  ‘It does to me,’ Nicola cried. ‘I have to know, it will kill me not to know. Please,’ she continued, trying desperately to control her voice, ‘don’t make this even worse than it already is. Can’t you see what you have done to me? I loved you, I love you still: nothing that we’ve ever done together, especially our lovemaking, has ever had any other meaning for me. I thought you felt the same. I thought that was the whole point and now you tell me this. It’s like being murdered.’

  He was, at last, affected.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘If you really feel like that—yes, I can see that this is a shock for you. Of course, you’re right. Of course, I was in love with you to begin with, and even for quite a time afterwards. Obviously, we wouldn’t have set this household up together if we hadn’t both felt like that. That’s water under the bridge, unfortunately. I’m sorry about that too. Quite as sorry as you are, I dare say. But I suppose no one goes on being in love. It simply isn’t humanly possible. I suppose the best one can hope for is that the state of being in love becomes a state of simply, well, loving. And unfortunately that hasn’t happened to us. At least, not to me. I’m sorry, but there it is. I can’t pretend, can I? You’d hardly want that. We’ve got to be realistic, and cut our losses.’

  Nicola was feeling faint again with the horror of it all, but she knew this might be her only opportunity to discover what she could of the truth. ‘When—’ she said, ‘when—did you stop caring about me? How long has it been, that you’ve just been going through the motions—’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jonathan, ‘who can say? Several months, perhaps.’

  She felt ill, not only with the shock and pain that everything he had said had produced in her, but also with shame. She felt so horrifying and unthinkable a shame at the idea that Jonathan had even once, never mind many times, made love to her while feeling in fact no love, only this growing cold indifference, that she could almost have run from this place and hidden herself forever.

  ‘Christmas-time,’ she said, brokenly, remembering it, remembering the presents. ‘Did you feel like this at Christmas-time?’ She remembered the white satin nightdress, and other matters.

  Jonathan thought for a moment, remembering too. He pulled a face. ‘No,’ he said judiciously. ‘I still loved you then. It must have changed after that. But look, please drop this cross-examination. I really don’t remember the date. The only salient thing is that it’s happened, that’s all.’

  ‘Supposing it happened straight after Christmas,’ Nicola said, wonderingly, sick with shame and astonishment, ‘you’ve gone on, all this time, three months or so, isn’t it? as if—you’ve made love to me dozens, I don’t know how many, times, as if—’ Jonathan’s lovemaking, silent, intense, like a ritual enacted in a state of possession: she could begin to see that he might conceivably have continued to give the performance in a state of cold indifference: she saw now that, this being the case, she had actually been violated.

  ‘Yes, well,’ he interrupted her, ‘since you insist on making such heavy weather of this, I might suggest that you’re being rather naive, aren’t you? As you’d be the first to remind me in other circumstances, men are different from women in their attitude to sex if not in every other way as well. I mean, it’s no big deal, Nicola. It doesn’t mean anything. When it’s there, you have it and when it isn’t, you don’t. Of course when one’s in love it means more, I suppose, but that really is by the way. You’re an attractive woman, obviously any man in my situation would have been glad enough to fuck you, it doesn’t mean anything one way or the other. All right, I grant you, it did once, but it doesn’t now. It hasn’t lately.’

  ‘I see,’ said Nicola. She had been not only violated but entirely destroyed.

  ‘I admit,’ Jonathan went on, in a brisk tone, ‘it’s rather second rate, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? I mean, that’s why I realised that it really was time to call time. Get on with our lives. And I suppose, now I come to think of it, that that business about your stopping the pill might have been a factor. I mean, I imagine you’d like to have a child or two sometime soon, which means settling down in earnest, and I’m not your man for that. It simply wouldn’t be fair to hang on as one’s been doing, really it wouldn’t. I’m sure you can wholly agree to that at least. So—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nicola.

  She was so ill now with the horror of it all, and above all with the realisation, at last, that Jonathan had, indeed, meant what he had said, and had known what he meant, and that their relationship was now truly over, that she could say no more; she got up as one in a dream and went into the bedroom and shut the door.

  36

  ‘Bloody hell,’ thought Jonathan. ‘Bloody hell.’ And he continued to sit there for a moment, staring at the empty grate and brooding.

  Then he got up abruptly and went to the doorway to retrieve the briefcase which he had left there upon first coming into the room. He sat down again and opened it and took out a thick folder of documents, and started to look through them, but after a short time he put them aside and stared once more at the empty grate.

  It’s her own bloody fault, he assured himself. She would insist on knowing. She wouldn’t be put off, she would peer into my soul: if she doesn’t like what she sees it’s her own bloody fault. How utterly typical. First they insist on getting it out of you, and then they blame you for the resulting injuries. They’ll never bloody learn. Still, just so long as she’s got the message. Roll on, peace and quiet. And he picked up the folder again and began to look at the top document once more. It was only now that he suddenly noticed that he was still dressed for the office, so he got up impatiently and went to change. Returning to his work once more, he settled down properly at last and was soon absorbed in its intricacies.

  Much later, glancing at his watch, he saw that it was nearly midnight: as late as that! He straightened up the papers and put them back in his briefcase, turned out the lamp and went to the room which was now no longer spare, but his; but as he did so, glancing at the fast shut door of the chief bedroom, his step faltered for a moment. He had not heard her move, or open the door—she was still, the woman who had pleaded with him and then quailed at his words, silent, even sequestered, within, behind that closed door. Was she asleep or awake? Was she all right? Well, it was none of his business, after all. She was a free agent now. The worst was over. She was a free agent, as was he. He could once more call his soul his own: as could she. End of chapter, end of story. And so to bed.

  The evening’s events, jumbled out of sequence, ran through his head again as he drifted and then slid towards sleep, until, in
an anomalous instant, he suddenly seemed to see, flashing up at him, a ruby eye as of a phoenix. It flashed, staring at him, and then it vanished, and with it his last conscious apprehension of the elongated day.

  37

  The dark-haired young man behind the counter in the coffee shop seemed to half recognise her this morning: he nodded when she gave her order, identical to that of the previous day, as if to say, of course. He brought the coffee and the croissant and placed them before her with a sort of gentle deference, and with the same gentle deference—one step backwards before turning—withdrew.

  Nicola saw all this as if through the wrong end of a telescope: the world beyond her seemed to have been miniaturised by the lens of her anguish. Once in the office she was forced to make a monstrous effort to bring this world beyond into something like normal focus, but it was always in danger of slipping back again, she always on the verge of losing control.

  But she was lucky in her work: there was always too much— that is, enough—to be done; by mid-morning she and her word processor were enjoying something like their usual ambivalent relationship. She was drafting a section of a submission to the Arts Council, which would in due course be seen, marked and re-drafted by another greater hand before being rewritten in toto and being given into a still greater hand for final comment and, it had to be hoped, approval.

  She worked on: she had promised herself, early this morning, while she showered and very carefully dressed, that no one here should see the slightest sign of the horror which had befallen her. For she had indeed—she saw—been murdered. Jonathan’s speech had ripped away a veil of delusion into which her very soul had been woven. If he had ceased to love her, if their conjunction had become meaningless, if she must now, as she must, now, leave him and their home, then she was no longer the Nicola she had known and unquestioningly been. No one at the office should know this: she should continue to play the part of Nicola and play it so impeccably that during the hours she spent here even she might suspend disbelief. It required only total concentration.

  At lunchtime she sent out for a sandwich and worked on while the office slowly emptied around her. At last they were all gone. She carried on valiantly for a few minutes but then abandoned the machine, and pushing aside the half-eaten sandwich and the half-drunk coffee, and leaning her elbows on the desk, she buried her face in her hands, and sat thus, immobile, abandoned for a time to the unveiled acknowledgment of white-hot relentless pain.

  It will get better, she told herself at last, it must get better; I have only to live through this. She did not see that it would get better in some ways, and worse in others, would change its shape and colour through the days and weeks to come so as at all times to possess her mind and ensure her suffering until at last it was pleased to retreat. I must, she thought, just concentrate on what comes next, and try to live through this as decently as I can. She was not British for nothing.

  38

  ‘Susannah?’

  ‘Oh, Nicola—at last! I was going to ring you myself—’

  ‘Susannah, listen, I have to ask you a favour—’

  ‘Are you going to come and stay here? Will you come tonight?’

  ‘Are you quite sure you can bear it? I’m not much fun at the moment. I’m no fun at all, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘You will be. Of course I can bear it—when will you come?’

  ‘On Saturday—is that all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course it is. Why do you keep asking? I think you should come today, tonight.’

  ‘I can’t, I have to sort my things out and so on. I’ll come on Saturday.’

  ‘All right, Saturday. Are you all right?’

  ‘No, I think I might have died and gone to hell, I’m not quite sure.’

  ‘Oh, Nicola.’

  ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘I think we should kill Jonathan. I think that might be best.’

  ‘No, it won’t make any difference.’

  ‘It will make me feel better.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s a good enough reason. All right, kill him.’

  ‘We’ll plan it together after you get here.’

  ‘I have to go now, Susannah, I have to go to the Tuesday meeting.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that. Well, look—’

  ‘I’ll be with you on Saturday about midday, okay?’

  ‘I could come and fetch you, shall I do that?’

  ‘No, please don’t worry, I’ll get a taxi.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘Yes. Susannah—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thank you so much. So much.’

  ‘Just take care, Nicola. We love you. Till Saturday!’

  Susannah replaced the receiver and stared at the telephone. So it really had happened. Nicola had lost her lover and her home, just like that, kaput. What vile cruelty. It was like an Act of God in its suddenness, its comprehensiveness, its magnitude; it left one gasping. It was almost enough to make a person start smoking again: one really might as well, considering how many much worse ills awaited one. For several minutes the world looked to Susannah unutterably dreadful. Then she went on with her work. She was a picture researcher and at the moment she was attempting to collect together colour transparencies of all the paintings of J. B. Chardin. She picked up one which had arrived in that morning’s post and looked at it again through the viewer. The world was unutterably dreadful, but. There might be almost nothing one could do about it, but there was after all something one could do in spite of it. Hallelujah, she said to herself, hallelujah. Whatever that may mean. And so she consoled herself.

  39

  Jonathan had not come back to the flat on Tuesday night by the time Nicola went to bed, but the next morning she found signs of his having eaten a sketchy breakfast before vanishing again, still unseen. A sort of dull fatigue had taken possession of her but she too was reluctant to linger here: once more she left the house much earlier than usual and once more she went into the little coffee shop.

  ‘Good morning,’ said the young man politely.

  She managed to smile at him.

  ‘Filter coffee?’ he said. ‘And one croissant?’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and she sat down at the same table as before.

  When she returned to the flat that evening, after having worked on well past the usual time, there was a letter lying open on the kitchen table. Attached to it was a note: ‘For your information, J.’ It was the house agent’s valuation. She put the letter back on the table and then on second thoughts found a pen and wrote at the bottom of Jonathan’s note the single word ‘Noted’ and her initial.

  Still Jonathan did not appear; Nicola returned to the task of sorting out her clothes and other possessions: those she must take away immediately, those she must leave behind to be called for in due course, those she would throw out. What else should one do, dazed by grief, but sort out one’s possessions? Just before she fell asleep she thought she heard Jonathan coming in, but she was too exhausted to be dragged back from the brink, and if he made any further sound she was unconscious of it.

  On the following morning she simply smiled at the young man in the coffee shop, and said, the usual, please, and he grinned back: right you are, he said; coming right up. As she sat down she at last saw why it was important, and even essential, that she should come here each morning, that she should continue to have this glancing encounter with this nameless dark-haired young man: because it was the only one in which she was not known to be—to have been—the Nicola who had lived with Jonathan; loved Jonathan; belonged, altogether, to Jonathan. Here, and only here, she could fairly purport to be unashamed and whole. It might be a sort of rehearsal for a new existence.

  By ten o’clock that night she had finished sorting out all her more personal belongings: these included the china dogs from the mantelpiece, which was now quite bare. She sat down on the sofa and looked at it, forcing herself to contemplate this detail of the enormity which had overtaken her. At last she
heard Jonathan’s key turning in the lock, and got up, and he, seeing the light, came unbidden to the doorway.

  ‘I shall be leaving here on Saturday,’ she told him quite calmly. ‘I’m going to stay with Susannah for the time being. If you need to get in touch with me for any reason you can call me at the office. Or write to me.’

  He seemed taken aback, and said nothing; she went on. ‘I won’t be able to remove everything on Saturday,’ she said. ‘Some of my things will have to wait until I’ve got my own place. If they’re in your way, tant pis. Finding something else to do with them is one more thing than I can manage. As for the books, the tapes and CDs, the furniture and the etcetera—do what you like with them. I renounce all title. Oh, and there are a few boxes of stuff for Oxfam—perhaps you could drop them off some time if you wouldn’t mind.’

  He seemed by this stage of the speech to be stunned; he did not seem to know what to say.

  She shrugged. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think that about covers it, so I’ll leave you in peace.’ She began to cross the room; but Jonathan stood, still, in the doorway, effectively obstructing her exit.

  ‘Look,’ he managed to say at last, ‘there’s no need, you know, to make a dash for it like this. I didn’t expect—’ but what was he saying? It was what he had in fact hoped for, as recently as last weekend: coming back from the country on Sunday night he had hoped, he had even expected, that he would find her gone. It was recent, but at the same time, how long ago that evening seemed! ‘I didn’t expect,’ he repeated, ‘that you’d be able to find somewhere else to live just like that, before we’ve even sorted out the money and so on—technically this is still as much your place as it is mine, after all. There’s no need for you to camp out with Susannah.’