Tonie goes to a party at Janine’s flat in Battersea. It is a warm evening and everyone is out on the terrace. Tonie looks around, not recognising anyone in the indistinct light. Then she sees Janine, a dark shape with pale accents, her bare arms and glittering dress picking her out from the others. But the terrace is crowded and Janine is far away. Tonie gets a drink. She wonders why everyone here is so formless and anonymous. Their bodies look lumpy in the dusk, their faces featureless and indifferent as stones. The lack of excitement almost frightens her. Only Janine, in the glamour of her party-giving, is distinct. The others, half-hidden in the shadows, don't seem to belong to the same reality as Tonie. Either they are unreal or she herself is.
She sees Lawrence Metcalf, too late to pretend that she hasn’t. He doesn’t move, but his eyes take on a devouring expression that obliges her to approach him.
‘How are you?’ she says.
He is tall, so that she has to look up to talk to him. He wears a gold hoop in one ear, like a pirate.
‘I’m very well, actually,’ he says, his eyes already moving around above her head. ‘I’ve just been in Stockholm for a few days, which was fantastic.’
‘You got your funding,’ Tonie says, resigning herself to the conversation.
‘Oh, absolutely. There was never really any question. The board put it straight through.’
‘That’s great.’ She tries to remember what his funding was for. Something to do with Vikings.
‘Stockholm is just a different world. Beautiful place, beautiful people, everything so clean and well organised – do you know it?’
Tonie does not know Stockholm.
‘They’re just light years ahead of us in every conceivable way. We’re like a Third World country by comparison, in terms of educational provision. And the quality of life is just staggering.’ His eyes dart around. ‘The women are pretty staggering too. Every other girl that passes you in the street is like a bloody goddess.’
‘Really,’ says Tonie.
‘And they’re pretty liberated, you know, I don’t mean in terms of the – ah – cliché about the Swedes, which they all seem to find quite funny, but in terms of their attitudes. You don’t get that female resentment you have here. Wouldn’t you say that’s true, Dieter?’
For the first time Tonie notices that there is another man there. He is much smaller than Lawrence. In the darkness Tonie can see only the bland oval of his face, and the watery shapes of his glasses.
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ he says.
Lawrence throws back his head and laughs. The other man smiles slightly and looks at him inquisitively.
‘You see?’ Lawrence says to Tonie. ‘He doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. Resentment, Dieter. It’s what gives English women all those little lines around their mouths.’
‘I know what resentment is,’ the man says. ‘It is the ubiquitous consequence of sexual inequality. Swedish women are better protected by the law, that’s all. But it has to be enforced.’
Lawrence looks slightly sulky. Tonie ponders his big, fleshy face, his darting eyes, his luxuriant hair that he wears slightly long, curling around his gold earring. He is the sort of man that makes Tonie feel invisible. His interest seems to go in every direction but hers. She consciously dislikes him – why, then, does it trouble her that he has no interest in her? Why does she feel negated by the restless eyes of men like Lawrence Metcalf?
The small man turns to her.
‘I take it English men don’t have wrinkles.’
‘Only around their hearts,’ Tonie says.
He laughs warmly and his eyes glow at her behind his glasses. ‘That is much more off-putting.’
‘Dieter,’ Lawrence says, ‘come on, I must introduce you to our hostess. The fabulous Janine.’
Tonie is left alone again. Then she spends a long time talking to a junior lecturer whose name she can’t remember. The sky is black and smoky and starless overhead, and the commotion on the terrace remains formless and indistinct. She can’t seem to make a connection anywhere. She can’t seem to see people’s faces, to understand their motives, to penetrate their reality. She sees her boss Christopher and for a while she watches him, watches the way he talks and listens and laughs, watches his Adam’s apple moving in his narrow throat. He is not questioning the reality of Janine’s party. He is absolutely concrete, just as Lawrence Metcalf is concrete. She realises that most of the people here are men. In her life before, she was almost always in the company of women and children; she remembers the feeling of perennial afternoon and of something growing, growing and growing unimpeded, her unopposed sense of self expanding into empty space. She did not resent men, in those days. She forgot, quite simply, that they existed. It was as though she had become a child again herself, her knowledge of the male obliterated and replaced by a perennial female afternoon. When Thomas came home in the evenings, he seemed to have risen straight out of the swamp of creation, a recent invention, or else an obsolete one. It was his masculinity she could never remember. He seemed to stand at the door with it in his hands, an implement whose uses she couldn’t quite determine.
But then, slowly, over the years, she came to crave something else. She began to remember how variegated life used to be, how full of contrast: it would come over her suddenly, the realisation that existence was not single-stranded, univalent, but dual. Each thing had its necessary opposite – this is what she had forgotten, in the torpor of unending afternoon. She had forgotten that she would die. And suddenly she craved it, her opposite, masculinity. She craved it not of Thomas nor of any other man, but of herself. She wanted her own duality. She did not want to grow and grow, a branching tree of femininity: she wanted her own conflict of female and male, her own synthesis.
But now, this evening, she wonders whether she has failed to find what she wanted. And the world of men, perhaps, will not satisfy her after all. They, too, lack the knowledge of contrast; they too have lapsed away into a single-stranded existence, in which the feminine has been utterly forgotten. Did she come all this way merely to bump up against their stiffness and self-importance, their barren fantasies? It is passion she wants, the passion of synthesis. But she isn’t going to find it here.
She notices that Christopher has gone. It is the behaviour of a professional: she, too, should go, and get home while it is still early. Except that when she thinks about it, she realises that she doesn’t want to be at home.
She feels a hand on her arm and she turns. It is the small man, Lawrence’s friend. Though now that he isn’t standing next to Lawrence, she sees that he isn’t small after all.
‘We were interrupted,’ he says. ‘I was sorry.’
‘The fabulous Janine,’ Tonie says.
‘The perfectly nice Janine,’ he says.
Tonie laughs. He presses his fingers lightly on her sleeve.
‘Would you like me to take you somewhere else?’ he says.
*
He is German, not Swedish, though he has lived in Stockholm all his life. He is a doctor. He is here on a three-month secondment to a London hospital. At dinner he takes off his glasses and folds them into his pocket.
‘Tell me about your home,’ he says.
She tells him about Thomas and Alexa, explains the events of the past year, going over its conflicts and difficulties, touching even on the green shoot of feeling that has struggled up through it all, her own desire to experience life, to live fully in her own body. She cannot believe she has told him so much, so quickly; and just as she thinks it, she sees him close his eyes. She laughs, troubled.
‘I’m boring you,’ she says.
He shakes his head slowly. He smiles. He doesn’t open his eyes.
‘I just want to hear you speak,’ he says. ‘It’s better with my eyes shut.’
And in fact it is what she needs, though it feels a little strange; this witnessing of her voice, which leaves her body innocent and unimplicated. He is older than her, perhaps fifty. She watches his face while she talks. It is a small, strong, highly modelled face, with narrow cheeks and a prominent brow and mouth, like a face from profoundest antiquity. It is not a face she has any previous knowledge of. Yet she seems to recognise it.
When she has finished he opens his eyes again. She is intensely moved by their warm brown colour.
‘I want attention,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘That is the tragedy of most people,’ he says.
‘What about you? Is it your tragedy?’
‘I had a good mother.’
She smiles. ‘Does it have to be the mother?’
‘No. But mine was what was available.’
‘What about your father?’
‘My father was what you call standard issue. Cold and critical.’
She thinks about Thomas, who has given his attention to Alexa. In a way, then, he has liberated Tonie. But here she is, giving her attention to another man.
‘There isn’t enough attention to go around,’ she says, laughing.
She sees that she will go home after all, that she will abandon her quest for attention, for passion. This man is too old, too unfamiliar. He is too formed in himself: she can’t see what his intentions are.
‘That sounds like the end of the conversation,’ he says softly.
‘This is a tragedy, remember,’ she says.
He reaches across the table and grasps her fingers.
Outside in the street Tonie waits beside him while he looks for a taxi to take her to the station. In the darkness the traffic seems full of abstract patterns and strange revolving lights. She has surrendered to his authority: she is not required to make sense of what she sees or does. Yet she knows that this authority is ephemeral, in so far as it relates to him. Rather, it is a place in herself, a kind of hollow. A complete stranger can come and fit the shape of his authority into that hollow. He can cause her to succumb, to obey him. In a few minutes she will be alone in a taxi, on her way to the station. It is fortunate that there are such things as taxis and trains and places she needs to be at particular times. Otherwise he could make her do anything, anything at all.
But there are no taxis. Exasperated, he turns and rests his hands on her shoulders. She is beginning to understand that this man has power. When he touches her she is paralysed by his authority. It is fortunate that there are practicalities to bear her away.
‘We’re not going to find one here,’ he says. ‘But I live very close. We can get my car and I’ll drive you.’
‘That seems ridiculous,’ Tonie says. ‘I’ll wait. Something will come along.’
‘Please,’ he says. ‘It would make me unhappy to leave you here.’
They walk away from the main road, into the deserted quiet of residential streets. Tonie begins to feel uneasy, moving away from the general into the sordidness of the specific. She imagines a spartan rented flat, strewn with the sad detritus of solitary living. She imagines herself confronted not by power but by failure. In fact he lives in a house, not a flat. It would have shamed her, somehow, to go up to a flat. But the door is there on the street, correct.
‘Come in,’ he says. ‘I need to find my car keys.’
Inside it is home-like, beautiful. There are books and paintings. He goes around switching on the lamps.
‘Do you want anything?’ he says.
She is looking at his things, his antiques and rugs, the books on his shelves. She is filled with strange yearning, as though she has no home of her own, no possession, no place where she belongs.
‘This feels so – permanent,’ she says.
He laughs. ‘I’m too old to be anything except permanent,’ he says.
He has told her that he is amicably separated from his wife, that his children are grown-up, that his work has become increasingly vocational, like that of a priest; and it seems to her now that this is the true accomplishment, this informed solitude, this independence. Is it not sad, then, to be alone? Is it, after all, truer, more honourable? She imagines herself and Thomas, old. She images their lives so entangled that they could never be extricated. It would be horrible to die tangled up with another person, not to know precisely what it was that was dying.
He is standing in front of her. The door to the street is open. She looks at his face but she can only see his eyes. They are so warm, so possessive. They leave no part of her out.
‘How is it possible?’ she says. ‘I feel like I know you.’
It is because he is already formed: there is no entanglement, no blurring of self. She supposes he can be petty, boring, demanding. But it would have nothing to do with her.
‘Tell me what you want,’ he says, touching her face.
She laughs. ‘I want to know the nature of your relationship with Lawrence Metcalf.’
His hands are in her hair. He is kissing her, kissing her throat and mouth, and speaking while he kisses.
‘Lawrence Metcalf is a friend of my cousin,’ he murmurs, against her lips. ‘I thought he was a bore but I was wrong.’
‘Were you?’ she laughs, while he puts his fingers under her jacket and slides it from her shoulders.
‘He is a – what’s the expression? A good bloke. I will always care for him. Always,’ he says, kneeling, unbuttoning her shirt, kissing her navel. Then he stands and goes to shut the door. He picks up her jacket. She watches him fold it carefully and lay it over a chair. He holds out his hand to her. ‘Come upstairs,’ he says.
*
He drives her all the way home. It is past midnight and the roads are empty. His car is clean and fast, expensive. She wonders what she will do. She does not feel anxious. It is his authority, the authority of his age and his decisiveness, of his knowledge and his fast car that allays her anxiety. It is as though he has authority not only over herself but over Thomas too. Just as he has dispensed with the fiddliness of her arrangements, scattered the train timetable to the winds in his fast, efficient car, so the tangle of her bonds and loyalties seems to fall away and dissolve in the darkness of the swiftly running roadside. She feels powerful and calm, sitting beside him. She feels free. But as the familiar outskirts of home appear, she is suddenly riven by thrusts of fear. She feels that he is going to abandon her. He is going to leave her here, stripped of the integrity of her own life, her arrangements all destroyed. Whatever he has dispensed with, he gives no sign that he intends to replace it with something else. He assumes she knew what she was doing, that she did what she meant to do. It is up to her what she does. She realises that she is not powerful after all. The power is his: it has enclosed her for a few hours, as his car now encloses her; it has moved her from one place to another.
He puts out his hand and touches her. The other hand is on the steering wheel. She feels again how formed he is, how complete. But now it is something she is on the outside of. She is shut out, yearning to be let back in.
‘This is difficult,’ he says.
She wonders what he means. Is he referring to a generic difficulty, the difficulty of returning a married woman to her home after a sexual encounter?
‘It’s okay,’ she says, staring through the dark windscreen at the familiar streets. They have stopped at some traffic lights. He is watching her. He is watching her staring at the things she has broken, as an adult watches a child staring at a broken toy. He is sympathetic, but he is not a member of her world.
‘It’s not okay,’ he says. ‘Do you want to go back to my house?’
She shakes her head. But he has made her pain go away. She feels better. She feels powerful again. Only this time, she is suspicious of the feeling.
‘You turn left here,’ she says.
Yes, it is bewildering, unfathomable, to find that love and loss and despair and hope are cellular, partitive; that in the fragment of each the structure of the whole is present, like the specimens scientists examine under microscopes; the whole structure and character of her life present in these moments of terror and elation. How can she love a man she only met a few hours ago? How can she feel abandoned by someone who this morning she didn’t know was alive? Yet she does. Her love and her terror lie beyond her scope, at cell-level. They existed before she herself knew what existence was.
This is what the call of her body has been, the very cells asking for assuagement.
‘It’s just here,’ she says, at the top of Montague Street.
‘I feel that something is wrong,’ Dieter says. He pulls into the darkness at the side of her road.
And she will never afterwards know what exactly he meant, though it will seem to her as though he was in that moment mysteriously gifted with a special insight, with new forms of knowledge; she will never know exactly what he intended to say. She will only marvel at how quickly and glidingly it happened, the fusion of impulses, so that she snatched her phone from her bag and remembered that she had switched it off, hours ago. She thinks of it often afterwards. She thinks of the way she felt during that drive with Dieter, of her realisation that her fate was inscribed in the smallest particles of her being, inextricable; that she would always love and despair and struggle and succeed without knowing quite why she did. She thinks of the passion she experienced with Dieter, a passion of the cells, of the smallest particles. This, she believes, is why no logical explanation can be found for what he said. And it died the instant it was born, this chance of proceeding without logic, without reason, without explanation. For a beautiful, catastrophic moment she glimpsed the possibility of a relationship of pure instinct.
The phone pulses and bleeps, pulses and bleeps, spewing out messages. Thomas has called more than twenty times in four hours. He is at the hospital. Dieter turns the car around and drives her straight there.