Altered States Read online

  Now I must be tactful, for I had naturally entered an area of concealment. Nevertheless I felt an odd pang of regret for that spontaneous openness that had once been mine and which I was conscious of laying to rest on that particular Sunday, as I looked at the two gallantly wakeful elderly faces surveying me with carefully concealed indulgence. Mother’s face, when she kissed me, was warm: she hated me to see her looking less than her best. Aubrey shook my hand, as he always did. I waited until he had turned the corner of the staircase back to his own flat. Their relief when both of their doors shut was almost palpable.

  I marched briskly across the park to Marble Arch, through Old Quebec Street to Portman Square and up Baker Street to Paddington Street. There was no reply from Sarah’s flat. This did not greatly discompose me; I had not really expected to find her at home. I had no idea what young women did on Sundays in London; possibly I had thought that they drove out to visit friends in the country. Then I realised that I did not know the make or number of Sarah’s car, for I assumed she had one. In fact I knew nothing about her, how she spent her days, how she earned her living, how she saw her future. She presumably had enough money from the sale of the house to live on quite comfortably, yet the flat had been half furnished, and the droopy flowered dress that she had worn had looked as if she had picked it up from a market stall. Of her two expressions, the one morbid, the other indifferent, I preferred the former. Combined with her long crapy red hair it gave her a pre-Raphaelite air of brooding intensity. Yet, apart from brief intervals of animation when she was with friends, she was not intense: she was almost frustratingly superficial, confining her remarks to what could be avoided, refusing communication on any other level. What had made our nights together so exciting had been their very wordlessness: there had been enactment of an almost magical kind. It was that memory that was to sustain me through the days that followed, when I hoped, but did not expect, to hear from her, and when, in my own bedroom, I could almost hear the ringing of her unanswered telephone. Even this acted as an intriguing reminder of her silence, which seemed to me then to be superior to any gift for conversation. Indeed, her very taciturnity, the fact that at no stage would she explain herself, even when explanations were most urgently required, consigned her to a special category of passively demonic women who are usually death to a man’s peace of mind, as Sarah was to be to mine.

  On the following morning Brian came into my office, waving a square card of the kind used for wedding invitations. ‘Had one of these?’ he asked.

  I took it. ‘Sarah,’ it said. ‘At home. 5th May, 6.30–8.30.’

  I hated it. I hated the pomposity of the engraving and the coyness of ‘Sarah’. Above all I hated the fact that nothing like it had come in the morning’s post.

  ‘I expect mine’s at home,’ I told him.

  ‘The thing is, I don’t know whether to go or not.’

  ‘You could always take Pamela,’ I said nastily.

  ‘Felicity’s parents particularly want to see us at the moment. They’re rather insistent. Weddings, you know. I feel rather overlooked, to tell you the truth. Oh, she’s a marvellous girl, and we’ve known each other for ages, but I’m not sure I want to get married. I like women too much, you see.’

  ‘I’ve noticed.’

  ‘And I don’t want to stop.’ He produced this truth manfully, as he had at school, when owning up to a misdemeanour. Together we contemplated Brian’s future as a solidly married chaser of other women.

  ‘I don’t want you to go to this party, Brian,’ I told him. ‘There’s nothing in it for you.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ he said. ‘Why, you mean you …?’

  At that moment, to my intense relief, the telephone rang. When I eventually replaced the receiver I concentrated my energies and stared at Brian fixedly, in an attempt to forestall his next question.

  ‘And have you …?’ he asked, intrigued but not hostile. ‘Ah. I see. Right.’ I could see him thinking furiously, planning, for all I know. I am very fond of Brian, as he is, I think, of me, but I do not share his views on women. To Brian every woman is an unrepeatable offer, waiting to be snapped up: he is a confident acquirer of new friends. And it seems to suit him; he has a sunny disposition and an even temper and an aura of confidence that tells you that he was once his mother’s favourite. Nor does his behaviour lose him any friends. I have seen him prospecting, and there is a sort of grace about him even at those times, the sort of grace in which I have always been deficient. I am stolid and prudent and slightly behind the times, ill-equipped for subtlety or light-heartedness, and yet I know that I am capable of passion. This is my secret, to be revealed to only one other person. I had always thought that my behaviour would speak for me, so that I should have no need of embarrassing explanations. So far I had avoided them; now there was no point in disguising the fact that Sarah had breached my defences. I was in thrall to her, and encouraged so to be by the very fact of our physical virtuosity. This to me was love, love that had no need of words, pleas, arguments, justifications. To love wordlessly, to meet on a level of arcane comprehension, of mysterious communication not visible to others, still seems to me the highest good. That is when one is truly known, or so I tell myself still. Perhaps it was self-serving of me never to make a declaration, but I knew that if I did Sarah would merely raise a sardonic eyebrow. I told myself that she felt as I did, and in this alone I am persuaded that I was not wrong.

  I checked the second post carefully: nothing. I declined Brian’s invitation to lunch, saying that I wanted to do some shopping. This sounded silly even to my ears, but in fact I did go to a shop and buy a large bunch of pink lilies, which smelled as insistently as a chapel full of incense. These I took round to Paddington Street, where the door was opened instantly, as I had known it would be, by a girl whom I recognised as Sarah’s docile friend Angela. Sarah, wearing a towelling bathrobe, her marvellous hair newly washed, materialised silently behind her.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, cursing the need to use my voice. Words seemed to me as problematic as they must have been to primitive man. ‘I thought you might like these.’

  ‘Oh, aren’t they lovely?’ said Angela. ‘I’ll just put them in water, shall I?’

  With her momentary disappearance I sought to embrace Sarah, and was relieved to feel her response, when her friend returned, bearing a vase. She flushed as if she had witnessed something untoward. No doubt the poor girl was in an agony of embarrassment; the air was thick with the scent of our closeness, and it was evident that a third person’s presence was not required. Sarah remained calm, even amused, not altogether displeased by her friend’s discomfiture and my heavier breathing.

  ‘We were just discussing my party,’ she said, as if I knew all about it. ‘Angela’s doing the catering. She’s frightfully good at that sort of thing.’

  ‘I think it’s important that the hostess should be free to circulate,’ Angela put in. Her colour was beginning to fade, yet she looked unhappy. I wondered briefly if she were always so sacrificial, and if so what infallible instinct had guided her towards Sarah, who gave no prizes for constancy and devotion. Angela was the meek girl-friend whom every confident woman learns to use as a foil, probably when she is still at school. She would, if seen on her own, be thought pretty, with the sort of blonde hair and fair skin that tend to look colourless when their owner is not in perfect health and a little too suffused when she is. She was the third person to know of our attachment, the first two being Sarah and myself.

  ‘And am I invited to this party?’ I asked, determined to attend even if denied entrance.

  She shrugged. ‘Sure.’ In comparison with her unhappy friend she was an icon of impassivity, as she stood there in her white bathrobe, her feet bare, on her face a familiar brooding expression, her skin matt, as if her heavy hair had drained the colour from it, her hands hanging loose at her sides. Her friend was dressed in the sort of clothes my mother would have applauded as suitable, a grey pleated skirt, a red jacket,
and a white blouse with the same sort of pie-frill collar that I remembered vaguely as having seen before. The three of us stood somewhat awkwardly in the middle of the room, Angela and I being unwilling to be the first to leave, until I said, ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be getting back to work,’ hoping to call forth the same sort of declaration from Angela—Sarah clearly was not going anywhere—but, ‘I’m lucky, I only work part time. I get time off in the week for going in on a Saturday morning.’ Then I was moved to ask her what she did. It appeared that she was a secretary on an architectural magazine with offices in Bloomsbury and that she lived in a flat which she shared with two other girls, in Bedford Way. This information seemed to me so juvenile and depressing that I immediately discarded it.

  ‘I’ll look in this evening,’ I told Sarah. She gave no indication that she heard me. It was Angela who saw me to the door.

  The afternoon passed without incident. By six o’clock I was back in Paddington Street. As if warned by some attendant spirit, I did not expect to be admitted, nor was I. There was no answer to my ring, and when I lifted the letter box and peered in, the flat was dark. I knew that there was no one there, though I date the beginnings of my distrust from that moment. My ridiculous position, squatting down outside the door, should have told me that I was beginning to be in error. That was how I always thought of questionable behaviour, as being in error. Faintly I could smell the lilies, the scent of which now seemed to me baleful.

  I wandered home, though I knew I should go back later that evening. I thought of telephoning Mother until I realised that she and Aubrey would be settling down in front of Coronation Street, to which they were both addicted.

  ‘Isn’t it time he got a set of his own?’ I had asked her.

  ‘He doesn’t approve. He says television is one of the blights of modern civilisation.’

  ‘And yet he watches that rubbish.’

  ‘Well, you see, darling, it’s so frightfully good. So well acted. And the people seem so friendly in that part of the world. Aubrey has often remarked on this, and as you know he’s been everywhere.’

  I decided to leave them to it, and went round the corner for a quick meal, after which I felt unaccountably tired. All this was proving a strain. Knowing that I should not sleep, and preferring unfinished business to no business at all, I went back to Paddington Street and met the same black silence. I reached home just after eleven and slept exhaustively. I always sleep well when I am disheartened.

  I saw her again, but all too infrequently. Those meetings were to be our last, though I did not know this at the time. I can impute no fault to Sarah, have never blamed her for her absences, which never quite took the form of refusals. Nor was she entirely indifferent. Rather, she was unknowable, enjoying our comings together as much as I did, but not appearing to remember them, perhaps judging them as acts which would pass naturally into oblivion. It was only when I had lost her, had lost the possibility of ever seeing her again, that I began to dwell obsessively on her absence I never fantasised about her, never thought that I glimpsed her in the street, never reacted when a woman with the same colour hair walked in front of me, never smelled her phantom scent. I became aware of absence in the most dolorous and unexpected ways, yet even then I never pictured her with another man. Her gift to me was her singularity, so that in my imagination she was always alone, communing intently with herself, or perhaps not even thinking at all, simply existing, out of my reach. I never knew what she thought of me, because I never asked her. Even in hindsight I do not entirely regret this. I never made a fool of myself. If my expression was ever soulful and pleading it simply vanished into the black hole that was her lack of overt response. On that other level we knew each other perfectly. Like a satellite that fails to return to earth, our adventure was unfinished but beyond human retrieval systems.

  Her party, when it came, was dreadful, as I knew it would be. A deafening sound system had been installed, possibly by one of several young men, to whom I was not introduced. The room was full of people, all making a great deal of additional noise, among whom I made out her friend Berthe, to whom shouting and shrieking were a natural mode of discourse. The maidenly Angela squeezed past me from time to time, profferring plates of food, on which she had obviously spent the whole afternoon: pin-wheels of cream cheese and asparagus, tiny sausages which needed the accompaniment of a bowl of mustard, smoked salmon on brown bread, crudites, with another bowl, this time of mayonnaise, none of which was either necessary or appreciated. I felt sorry for her. Being somewhat superfluous myself, I could see how she had taken on this task in the hope of being popular. She was the sort of girl to whom her mother says, ‘Accept every invitation. You never know when you might meet someone.’ So far she had met no one, except myself, and I had come to the conclusion that I was out of place. I was not unhappy, merely bored. I never enjoy these gatherings, and this seemed to me worse than most. I was annoyed, too, to see that Sarah was enjoying herself, shrieking with the best of them, though this was becoming increasingly necessary in the crowded room. In this mode she struck me as ordinary, undistinguished. I preferred her silent, even when her mouth remained closed on the words I longed to hear.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ said Angela, who now seemed to me to be permanently at my elbow. ‘Is there anyone you want to meet? Not that I know everyone. But doesn’t Sarah do these things well? I think it’s a success, don’t you?’

  She seemed anxious for it to be a success, as if it were her own party. Perhaps she had been invited to think, or had merely assumed, that this was a joint affair, that it was her natural role to provide for the guests, in the vain hope that they would pay her some attention. If she had thought that, she was disappointed, although her disappointment was disguised by a hectic flush and a mask of fearful animation. She seemed as out of place as I felt. It occurred to me to ask her what the connection was between Sarah and herself.

  ‘We were at school together,’ she said. ‘I’ve known her all my life.’

  In which case, I reflected, it was a friendship doomed to be one-sided. Sarah was the kind of woman who does not need female friends, only the occasional sparring partner with whom to exchange recondite information. This function was obviously filled by Berthe, who waved to me across the room. I would have approached her, thinking her intriguing, though much too noisy, had it not been for Angela, whom it would have been rude to desert.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, ‘if you want to circulate. I’ve got my hands full. Has everybody had enough to eat, do you think?’

  The food lay around almost untouched. Drink, on the other hand, was being consumed on a scale with which I was unfamiliar. The atmosphere was thick with smoke.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry about the food,’ I told her. ‘You’ve done splendidly.’

  ‘I’d better take it back to the kitchen, then. Oh, you’re not leaving?’

  ‘Well, yes. I brought some papers home with me that I ought to look at tonight.’ That at least was true.

  I slipped out into the beautiful night, in which even the sound of a police siren made a relatively civilised noise. I was halfway down Paddington Street when I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Angela, her ghostly white blouse and flowered skirt enhanced by the light of a street lamp. Politely I waited for her to catch me up, reflecting that she was actually rather pretty. In the dark she seemed fragile, her waist and ankles thin, her hair almost bleached.

  ‘Which way do you go?’ she asked, a little breathlessly.

  I told her that I lived in Wigmore Street, to which she said, ‘Oh, then you’re quite near Sarah.’ I said that my flat was convenient for my office in Gloucester Place, to which she replied that she too lived near her work in Bloomsbury. After this there seemed nothing more to say, and we walked on in silence.

  ‘I can’t take you home,’ I said. ‘I’ve got this work to sort out before tomorrow. I’ll find you a cab.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. I’m in no hurry. It’s rather pleas
ant to walk after stewing in that room, isn’t it?’

  ‘Didn’t you enjoy yourself?’

  ‘Oh, of course I enjoyed myself. It’s just that I’m a bit of a loner. I love walking in the country. I love reading. Do you read a lot?’

  ‘Not really. What sort of books do you read?’

  ‘Oh, anything. I’ve been known to pick up two or three paperbacks just for the weekend.’

  This seemed to me so damning an answer that there was nothing further to say. By now we were in Wigmore Street, passing the coffee bar where I ate my breakfast. I was glad to see that it was closed.

  ‘Is that your local?’ she asked.

  ‘I sometimes eat there,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, how interesting.’ Her voice trailed off, as if she were thinking of something else. She seemed quite ready to get into the cab I hailed, as if exhausted or preoccupied. I lifted my hand briefly as the cab passed me, and then thought of her no more.

  Ringing Sarah the next day, or rather attempting to ring her, took the best part of a morning. When I eventually got through it was to be told that she was going away for a bit. ‘Anywhere special?’ I asked. Possibly America, I was informed. To see friends. To my enquiries as to when she was leaving the answers were vague. ‘I’ll want to see you before you go,’ I said temperately. ‘I’ll come round this evening. Will you be there?’