The House of Sleep (2 page)

‘I’m not a misogynist.’

‘Oh yes you are. All men hate women.’

‘You don’t believe that.’

‘Oh yes I do.’

‘I suppose you think that all men are potential rapists?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s another meaningless statement.’

‘Its meaning is very clear. All men have the potential to become rapists.’

‘All men have the
means
to become rapists. That’s hardly the same thing.’

‘I’m not talking about whether all men have the necessary… equipment. I’m saying that there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t feel, in some murky little corner of his soul, a deep resentment – and jealousy – of our strengths, and that this resentment sometimes shades into hatred and could also, therefore, shade into violence.’

A short pause followed this speech. The student tried to say something, but faltered. Then he started to say something else, but changed his mind. In the end, the best he could manage was: ‘Yes, but you’ve no evidence for that.’

‘The evidence is all around us.’

‘Yes, but you’ve no objective proof.’

‘Objectivity,’ said Veronica, lighting up a new cigarette, ‘is male subjectivity.’

The silence to which this magisterial remark gave rise, longer than the first and somewhat awestruck, was broken by Sarah herself.

‘I think she’s right,’ she said.

Everyone at the table turned to look at her.

‘Not about objectivity, I mean – at least, I’ve never thought about it like that before – but about all men being basically hostile, and how you never know when it’s going to… flare up.’

Veronica met her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said, before turning back to the student. ‘You see? Support on all sides.’

He shrugged. ‘Female solidarity, that’s all.’

‘No, but it’s happened to me, you see.’ The faltering urgency of Sarah’s voice caught their attention. ‘Exactly what you’re talking about.’ She lowered her gaze and saw her eyes reflected, darkly, on the black surface of her coffee. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know any of your names, or anything. I don’t even know why I said that. I think I’d better go.’

She stood up to find herself boxed into a corner, the edge of the table pressed into her thighs; squeezing hastily past the Australian and the earnest student proved a clumsy business. Her face was on fire. She was sure that they were all watching her as if she were a madwoman. Nobody said anything as she made her way to the till, but as she counted out her change (Slattery, the Café’s owner, sitting bookish and indifferent in the corner) she felt the touch of a hand on her shoulder, and turned to see Veronica smiling at her. The smile was diffident, appealing – very different from the combative smiles she had been turning on her opponents at the table.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I don’t know who you are, or what happened to you, but… any time you want to talk about it.’

‘Thank you,’ said Sarah.

‘What year are you in?’

‘Fourth, now.’

‘Oh – you’re a postgrad, right?’

Sarah nodded.

‘And are you living on campus?’

‘No. I live up at Ashdown.’

‘Oh well. Maybe we’ll bump into each other anyway.’

‘I expect we will.’

Sarah rushed out of the Café before this friendly, frightening woman could say anything more to her. After that dark and smoke-heavy interior the sunlight was suddenly blinding, the air fresh with salt. Shoppers trickled through the streets. It would have been the perfect day, normally, for walking home along the cliffs: a long walk, and most of it uphill, but worth it for the sweet ache in your limbs when you arrived, the feel
of your lungs distended with clean, thin air. But today was not normal, and she didn’t like the thought of those many lonely stretches of pathway, the solitary men she might glimpse approaching in the distance, or who might be sitting on one of the benches, watching her brazenly as she hurried past.

Writing off the cost of a week’s suppers, she took a taxi, was home in no time at all, and then lay in bed all afternoon, the numbness refusing to abate.

∗

ANALYST
: What was it about the game you found so disturbing?

ANALYSAND
: I don’t know whether ‘game’ is exactly the right word.

ANALYST
: It was the word you chose yourself, just a moment ago.

ANALYSAND
: Yes. I just don’t know if it’s the right one. I suppose what I meant… [chat]…

ANALYST
: Never mind that now. Did he ever cause you physical pain?

ANALYSAND
: No. No, he never really hurt me.

ANALYST
: But you thought that he might hurt you?

ANALYSAND
: I suppose it could have been… at the back of my mind.

ANALYST
: And did he know that? Did he know that you thought he might hurt you, one day? Was that in fact the whole point of the game?

ANALYSAND
: Yes, I suppose it could have been.

ANALYST
: For him? Or for both of you?

Sarah was in bed again by the time Gregory got back from his drink. She had been up, briefly, in the early evening, to put on her dressing-gown and pad downstairs to the kitchen, but even there she had remained nervous, and oddly susceptible to shocks. The kitchen itself was empty, and she could hear the sounds of an American soap –
Dallas,
or
Knots Landing
– coming from the TV room down the corridor. Thinking that she was alone, Sarah opened a can of mushroom soup and poured the contents into a saucepan. Then she lit the cooker, which stood in an area of its own, around the corner, hidden from the rest of the L-shaped room. She stirred the soup with a heavy wooden spoon, finding this activity unexpectedly restful. She stirred three times clockwise, then three times anti-clockwise, over and over, watching the patterns form and slowly fade into the sludgy mass of the soup. Absorbed in her task, she was startled to hear a male voice saying, ‘So where do they keep the coffee around here?’ and she let out a short, high scream as she wheeled around.

The man came round the corner, saw her and took a step back.

‘I’m sorry. I thought you knew I was here.’

She said: ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’

He had a kind face: that was the first thing that she noticed. And the second thing she noticed was that he appeared to have been crying – quite recently, in fact. He sat down at the kitchen table to drink his coffee, and she sat down opposite him to drink her soup, and as she was pulling up a chair she glanced across at him and could have sworn that she saw a tear inching down his cheek.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked. They didn’t get many first-years at Ashdown, but she wondered if he had just arrived at the university, and was already starting to feel homesick.

It turned out that this was not the case. He was in his third year, studying modern languages, and had moved into Ashdown only yesterday. What had distressed him was a phone call from his mother, who had rung from home a few hours ago to tell him that Muriel, the family cat, had been killed that same morning – run over by a milk float at the bottom of the front drive. He was clearly ashamed to be showing so much emotion about this, but Sarah liked him for it. To save him further embarrassment, all the same, she
changed the subject as quickly as possible, and told him that he was not the only one to have had an upsetting day.

‘Why, what happened to you?’ he asked.

It did not occur to Sarah until later that it was surprising to have found herself talking so frankly to such a new acquaintance, someone whose name she had not even, at this stage, troubled to find out. None the less, she told him all about her bizarre encounter on the street with a complete stranger who had glared at her and called her a bitch for no apparent reason. The new resident listened attentively as he sipped his coffee: striking, Sarah thought, just the right balance between concern (for he seemed to understand how traumatic the incident must have been for her) and a more lighthearted note of reassurance (for he encouraged her, at the same time, to laugh it off as the outburst of some pitiable eccentric). She told him about the conversation she had overheard at the Café Valladon, how it had turned to the subject of misogyny, and how she had felt compelled to join in.

‘It’s a very live subject at the moment,’ he agreed. ‘There’s a big anti-feminist backlash going on here.’ He told her how the university’s new Women’s Studies Department had been vandalized recently: someone had broken in and spray-painted the words ‘Death to the Sisters’ in foot-high letters all over the walls.

Sarah was enjoying talking to this man very much, but had started to feel tired. Sometimes she was subject to a sort of tiredness which was extreme, by most people’s standards, and once or twice had even found herself falling asleep in the middle of conversations. She didn’t want anything like that to happen here: she was too anxious to leave a good impression.

‘I think I’d better get back to bed,’ she said, getting up and rinsing her soup-mug under the cold tap. ‘It’s nice to have met you, though. I’m glad you’re moving in. I think we’re going to be friends.’

‘I hope so.’

‘My name’s Sarah, by the way.’

‘I’m Robert.’

They smiled at each other. Sarah ran a hand through her hair, taking hold of a clump and tugging at it lightly. Robert noticed this gesture, and remembered it.

She went up to her room and slept for an hour or two, until Gregory woke her by coming in and turning on the overhead light. Blinking, she looked at the alarm clock. It was earlier than she had thought: only ten-fifteen.

‘Home already?’ she said.

He had his back towards her, putting something away in a drawer, and grunted: ‘Looks like it.’

‘I thought since this was the last night you were all going to be together, you’d stay out late. Make an occasion of it.’

It was the beginning of the autumn term, and Gregory had come down from his parents’ house in Dundee merely to collect some belongings, to see some old friends, and to spend a few final days with Sarah. They had both finished their undergraduate degree courses in July. Later that week he was due to start at medical school in London, where he would specialize in psychiatry. She was staying on at the university for another year, to train as a primary school teacher.

‘Busy day tomorrow,’ he said, sitting at the end of the bed, tugging off a shoe. ‘Got to make an early start.’ His eyes flicked towards her for the first time. ‘You look done in.’

Sarah told him the story of the man who had abused her in the street, to which his initial response was: ‘But that doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone do that?’

‘I suppose I was a woman,’ said Sarah, ‘and that was enough.’

‘Are you sure he was talking to you?’

‘There was nobody else around.’ Gregory was preoccupied with a knotted shoelace, so she prompted: ‘It was quite upsetting.’

‘Well, you don’t want to let these things get to you.’ The shoelace untied, he felt for her ankle and squeezed it through the bedclothes. ‘I thought we’d gone beyond this. You’re
a big girl now.’ He frowned at her. ‘Did it really happen?’

‘I think so.’

‘Hmm… but you’re not sure. Perhaps I should write it down anyway.’

Gregory sat at the dressing-table and took an exercise book out of the top drawer. He scribbled a few words, then sat back and thumbed through the pages. His face, reflected in the mirror, betrayed a pleased smile.

‘You know, I was so lucky to meet you,’ he said. ‘Look at all the material it’s given me. I mean, I know that’s not the only reason, but… think of the lead it’s going to give me over all the other guys.’

‘Isn’t it a bit early to be thinking in those terms?’ said Sarah.

‘Nonsense. If you really want to get to the top, you can never get started too soon.’

‘It’s not a race, though, is it?’

‘There are winners and losers in the human race, just like any other,’ said Gregory. He had put the exercise book away and was taking off his shirt. ‘How many times have I told you that?’

Rather to her own surprise, Sarah took this question seriously. ‘My guess would be between about fifteen and twenty.’

‘There you are, then,’ said Gregory, apparently quite satisfied with this statistic. ‘It applies to everything, as well – even accommodation. I mean, you’d scarcely credit it, but Frank’s going up to London in a week’s time, and he hasn’t even found himself somewhere to live yet.’ He laughed incredulously. ‘How do you
account
for that kind of behaviour?’

‘Well,’ said Sarah, ‘perhaps he just isn’t lucky enough to have a father who’s in a position to buy him a flat in Victoria.’

‘It’s Pimlico. Not Victoria.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘About twenty thousand pounds, for one thing. We chose that location very carefully. Convenient for the hospital. Excellent neighbourhood.’ Appearing to sense an unvoiced contempt on Sarah’s part, he added: ‘For God’s sake, I would
have thought you’d appreciate it as much as anybody. You’re going to be staying there every weekend, aren’t you?’

‘Am I?’

‘Well I assume so.’

‘You know I’m going to have to prepare lessons and things. I’m doing lots of teaching practice this term. I might be busy.’

‘I can’t see that preparing a few lessons is going to take up much of your time.’

‘Some people don’t have to work hard. I do. I’m a plodder.’

Gregory sat down on the bed beside her. ‘You know, you have a serious self-esteem problem,’ he said. ‘Has it never occurred to you that it’s largely because of your low self-esteem that you never achieve anything?’

Sarah took a moment to digest this, but couldn’t find it in herself to get angry. Instead her mind went back to the scene in the kitchen. ‘I met one of the new people today,’ she said. ‘His name was Robert. He seemed really nice. Have you met him yet?’