A Touch of Love (17 page)

‘Yes, as a matter of fact it did.’

‘Poor girl.’

‘Who?’

‘Whoever it was you messed about like that. She chucked you, did she?’

‘Yes, as it happens.’

‘Good.’

There was a decisive pause, before Robin stirred in his chair and said, with a touch of irritation:

‘What I wanted was your opinion of its literary merit.’

‘That’s what I’ve just given you. I can’t separate “literary” merit from what a story is saying. Why do you think all the academics here hate me so much?’

‘Did you find it amusing? Did it make you smile, the irony of it?’

‘Not really. What people call irony in literature is usually called pain and misunderstanding and misfortune in real life, and that doesn’t make me smile. There’s too little love in the world as it is, for me to find it amusing that two people should be incapable of expressing their feelings for one another. It’s the same with that horrible story about the lucky man. He was so obviously so stupid, so unthinking about the way life really works, you just wanted the narrator to say something about it, or punish him or something.’

‘A lot of people thought that story was funny. You’ve just lost your sense of humour, over the years.’

‘But you can’t laugh alone, Robin. Nobody laughs alone. I would laugh, if I had other people to laugh with.’

‘Do you remember,’ Robin asked, and his voice was quiet with anxiety, ‘how you used to laugh with me?’

‘I used to laugh with all sorts of people. Perhaps you were one of them.’ She did not notice the effect these words had on him, but hurried on: ‘These people who found your story funny – they were men, were they?’

‘Mostly men, yes.’

‘I imagined they would be. You see, men enjoy irony because it is all about feelings of power and detachment and superiority, the things they are born with. Female laughter and male laughter are quite different. I don’t think you understand the laughter of women at all: it is all to do with liberation, with letting things out. Even the sound is different, not like that barking you hear when men start laughing together.’

‘Are you saying I could never write anything that a woman would find funny?’

‘I’m just saying that you shouldn’t always be surprised when people don’t dance to your tune.’

This provoked another short silence, which Robin showed no inclination to break.

‘So,’ Aparna continued, ‘you think you’ve been unlucky in love, do you?’

‘I’ve spoiled a few good friendships with women over the last few years, if that’s what you mean.’

‘They can’t have been that good.’

‘Well, that’s for me to say, isn’t it?’

‘No, not really, because I don’t think you understand the nature of friendship at all. Men usually don’t. As soon as they start feeling real friendship for a woman then they can’t cope with it any more, so they convert it into something romantic. And that’s when everything falls apart.’

‘You seem very full of answers today.’

‘Somebody has to explain these things to you, when you come in here looking like a walking question-mark. Writing all these stories which are just disguised questions, cries for enlightenment. Somebody has to start sorting through all these tangles. My advice to you would be to learn. You should learn to spend more time, loving more people, in more ways. Loving someone means helping them, it doesn’t mean just… dumping your excess emotion into their lap. Your kind of love, it’s a self-gratification. Unlearn it, Robin, before it’s too late.’ He looked unconvinced, so she added, angrily: ‘You certainly won’t get anywhere by flirting with homosexuality. It’s pathetic, the way you tiptoe round the subject all the time, fascinated, like an uninvited guest peering through the window at a party. Yes? Now come on, Robin, either you knock at the door and walk right on in, or you leave it alone. Why this voyeuristic obsession? Make a decision, for once in your life. But that’s not your way, really, is it? You’ve been taught to toy with subjects, not to involve yourself in them. That wonderful English education, how good it’s been at protecting you from the world.’ She sighed, rhetorically, and concluded: ‘I would give anything to have had an English education.’

‘So what should I do?’ said Robin: quieter, flatter, more mechanical than ever. ‘I should follow your example, should I? See nobody; love nobody; feel nothing. Living alone all this time, looking down on the world in anger from the fourteenth floor.’

‘I wouldn’t have any regrets about the way I’ve spent the last two years,’ said Aparna, ‘if I’d got my work done. If they’d let me get my work done. Nothing else really matters. I don’t need friends any more, you see; whereas I think you still probably do. These cold, intellectual friendships you cling to. Did you ever notice how all your friends used to dislike me? How suddenly all that brilliant debate, that spontaneous wit, would dry up as soon as I sat at the table, with my serious eyes and my comical earnestness? I bet they still only have to hear my name and they curl up at the edges. Do you ever talk to them about me? Or is the subject of
people
slightly too mundane for your high-flown level of conversation nowadays?’

‘Why have you continued to see me, Aparna?’ Robin asked. ‘I’m puzzled. I’m intrigued. The thing I’d really like to know, before I leave, is why you’ve continued to see me.’

‘I like you,’ she said. This made Robin laugh, very briefly and softly. ‘And once, we could have helped one another.’

‘Once?’

‘That time… when was it, it must have been last summer. You kept promising me that we would go up to the Lake District together. You had some friend who had just bought a cottage up there, and we were going to go up and spend a week or two. You were going to ring him and ask if we could use it. You kept telling me about all these places you had seen as a child, and how you wanted to go back, and I can remember thinking, to share in something like that… it might have been fun. You talked more about your family in those days, didn’t you? Now you never talk about them.’

‘I associate that area… with having a family. It’s funny, isn’t it? They mean nothing to me now. Such distances. Other things started there too, I think. It was an age I was at. It would have been so nice to go back.’

‘Why? What would it have achieved?’

‘I don’t know. You would have come with me, would you?’

‘Of course I would. We could have stood by a lake at sunset, and held hands. It would have been very romantic.’

‘Perhaps I should see my parents… go and see them. What do you think?’

‘Perhaps we are both thwarted romantics, Robin, and it would have been the start of a passionate affair which would have been either the saving or the death of us both. Perhaps I could have swept you off your feet, and made you forget everything. Even the mysterious K.’

‘“K”? What do you mean?’

‘These sets of lovers you always write about. Always R and K. When are you going to tell me about her, Robin? When are you going to come clean?’

When he did not answer, Aparna slipped back into her tone of fierce reminiscence. ‘Anyway. Promises, promises, always promises. You never phoned your friend. We never made it on our sentimental journey, second class. You were toying again, weren’t you? I’m not saying you realized it, I’m not saying that you meant to, but you weren’t being serious with me. Not really. When
will
you ever be serious about something, Robin? Life for you is just a gloomy irony – and that makes things so easy, doesn’t it?’

‘I’m serious about my writing.’

‘Are you? There are a few serious ideas, I suppose, which you always make a point of slipping in: these little literary hobbies of yours, like suicide.’

‘Suicide?’

‘Yes. There’s always a reference to suicide in your stories. Often quite gratuitous. Like that poor family, in your first story, or the depressed friend, in this one. Nothing ever comes of it. You flirt with the idea, as you do with everything else. Perhaps you’re doing it to prove –’

‘Look, Aparna, shall I tell you what I came here to tell you? I spoke to Emma today. Emma, my lawyer? She doesn’t want to defend me on a plea of not guilty any more. She thinks I did it.’

Aparna lowered her eyes; and her voice, now, was all gentleness, all kindness.

‘I’m sorry, Robin. I had no idea, you know I hadn’t. Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I don’t know what to say.’

Robin was hoarse with unhappiness; he could barely speak.

‘Could I have another cup of tea, please?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She took the two mugs and went into the kitchen; and as she filled the kettle, reached for the tea bags, poured the milk, she bit her lip and tried to find encouraging words, forms of consolation. Perhaps she would ask Robin to stay for the evening, cook him a meal, snap herself out of this vengeful mood. She made the tea as fast as she could, and went to rejoin him. She would sit next to him on the sofa.

But Robin had gone. And the other thing she noticed was that, instead of the childish laughter and shouting, she could hear a confusion of more urgent, adult voices rising from the playground. Not knowing, not guessing, not even fearing, she rushed out onto the balcony, and looked down. Already quite a crowd had gathered around the body.

PART FOUR
The Unlucky Man

Friday 19th December, 1986

It was at last beginning to dawn on Hugh that he would never find an academic job. The realization had made its inroads slowly, like the winter weather, and he had developed the same way of coping with both, namely lying in bed for as long as possible, with the gas fire turned up to top heat. Half the time he would doze, half the time he would be wide awake, staring frog-eyed at the ceiling, his hand resting absently on his genitals. In this position, in order to avoid thinking of the future, he would think of the past. He would rehearse the proudest episodes of his life and compare them with his present state of stifled inertia: his graduation; his six-month tour of Italy and the Greek islands; the flush of intellectual excitement in which he had completed his MA thesis; his first sexual conquest; his second sexual conquest; his last sexual conquest; the publication of his note on line 25 of ‘Little Gidding’ in a 1976 issue of
Notes and Queries
; the second graduation ceremony, at which he had been awarded his doctorate.

But always at the front of his mind there festered the knowledge that these events had taken place a long time ago. They had all occurred within a period of eight years, and since then nearly the same period had elapsed, and in all that time nothing had happened. Not a solitary highlight. This meant, among other things, that Hugh had developed a very confused sense of the passage of time: he was
aware
that eight years had passed since he had received his final degree, but because there were no landmarks to punctuate these years, he could no longer distinguish them from one another, or achieve any grasp of their cumulative span. That day of triumph in Coventry cathedral seemed neither recent nor distant; it seemed, if anything, to belong to a quite different level of existence. His life now comprised other realities: the hiss of the gas fire and the heavy warmth of his bedroom; the texture of pubic hair as he twined it around his index finger; the smell (to which he had long since become immune) of the unwashed socks and underpants stashed under the bed; and the daily routine of forcing himself, at about 2.30, out of his bed, out of the flat, onto a bus and onto the university campus, in search of a kind of companionship.

Three o’clock found him walking through the rain to the bus station at Pool Meadow. There was an icy wind and in the distance, from the precinct, he could hear Christmas carols being played over a tannoy system. This reminded him that soon he would have to go back and visit his family, choose cards and presents, and he scowled. They would ask him the usual questions – ‘When are you going to get yourself a job?’, ‘Are you seeing anyone at the moment?’ – and he would have to suffer the subtle taunts of his younger brother who sold bathroom fittings for a company based in Aberdeen and made more money in a month than Hugh had ever earned in his life. But there would be decent meals and when it all got too much he could go up to his bedroom and smoke. Before anything else he would have to phone his parents and get them to send down the money for the rail fare home.

He was one of three passengers on the bus, and had the top deck to himself for the whole journey. At various stops he looked out for familiar faces – friends, lecturers, students who might have been staying up for part of the vacation – but none appeared; perhaps the weather was keeping them indoors. Similarly, there were no other customers in the coffee bar. Friday afternoons out of term were always quiet, but today there seemed to be a level of inactivity which unsettled even Hugh, accustomed as he was to the atmosphere of empty cafés and deserted bars. Sometimes he chatted to the woman who served behind the counter but he could tell that she wasn’t in the mood this time; she was reading a magazine, and anyway he couldn’t think of anything to say. So he sat and made his cup of hot chocolate last for nearly half an hour, until another customer finally appeared: it was Dr Corbett, the English department’s recently appointed senior lecturer. Being, like most of the staff, on cordial terms with Hugh, he came over and joined him. He had a beard and a leather jacket and had bought himself some coffee and a piece of chocolate cake. They exchanged murmured greetings, after which Corbett began eating his cake and Hugh was able to come up with nothing more original than:

‘Quiet today, isn’t it?’

‘Well, it’s getting on for Christmas,’ said the highly acclaimed author of
The Intelligent Heart: Thought and Feeling in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.

‘Been working on something today, have you?’ Hugh asked. ‘A new book or something?’

‘Examiners’ meeting,’ said Corbett, with his mouth full. ‘We had to fix the questions today, for next term’s paper, on the poetry course.’

‘That was today?’ said Hugh, incredulous. ‘Was Davis there?’