What You Will

Hilary pushed Gwen’s shoulders away, slapped at them, belligerent, half joking. ‘Bitch.’

‘Who talked first?’

‘Paul. Handled it easily. As if he were in white tie and tails and presenting me to a duchess, but with this kind of blandness, like he was – under hypnosis.’ She mimicked his English accent exaggeratedly: ‘“Ah – Hilary, what a surprise. Can I introduce you to my friend Orlando?” – or whatever the guy was called. But I didn’t meet him; he must have been as surprised as I was; made tracks. And then Paul said, “We were just having a bit of a rest, actually.”’ In her broadest American accent Hilary added, ‘Well, duh –’

‘And how’d you make your getaway?’

‘Badly. Really badly –’ Hilary started to laugh, too. ‘Some garbled junk about airplanes and how I had no idea what time it was and I was sorry and I’d call in the morning. To his credit, Paul did ask, “Is everything all right? Quite all right?”’

Hilary rolled her eyes. ‘Perfect. It’s all perfect. Can’t you see? My life is completely perfect. What does he care?’

Lawrence lifted his head a little as Gwen slid under the covers.

‘Sorry, darling,’ she whispered.

‘How is she now?’ he muttered. ‘OK?’ He laid a hand on Gwen’s thigh, squeezing it softly, then giving it a gentle shove, the cadence of goodnight.

‘I’ve got to find her someone to marry.’

Lawrence snorted into his pillow. ‘Wouldn’t it be enough to find her a place to live? Or maybe a job?’ He turned his head away, closing his eyes. ‘Why does she need to marry anyone?’

‘She still wants her old job. But we need to keep her away from Mark for a while. He’s so angry, it’s as if he’s lost his mind. She definitely doesn’t know how to pick men.’

His head came up again. ‘Do you know?’ Then dropped.

Gwen bent down and pressed her face into the nape of Lawrence’s neck, rubbing against his bristling hair where it was cut close at the back, metallic with grey. ‘OK,’ she admitted, ‘it was you who picked me. But by now, I can recognise the goods. Hilary feels so much, and she just throws herself at whatever – next it could be a passing car. I have to help her.’

Lawrence didn’t answer; he was asleep.

Upstairs in the studio, on her thin spare pillow, Hilary was thinking about Lawrence and Gwen lying side by side in their wide bed with its massive, blackened oak headboard. So much presence, that bed. An institution in itself, she thought. The thick modern mattress supported by the Jacobean frame, five hundred years or more of ageing wood hewn by hand with an axe – an oak tree reshaped as beams, posts, creaking pegs neatly filling invisible holes in the tight corners, and the broad exposed planks boldly, impressively carved.

Generations were born and died in that bed, Hilary thought. She saw them in pairs, producing a life, producing a death. In her mind’s eye, she only approximated the bodies, generic, strangely innocent, dressed in white like Gwen in her nightgown; what did Hilary know of their intimacy, in fact? She revered the idea of it. She pictured Lawrence and Gwen together throughout time, their hands folded on their breasts, not touching at all. Like figures carved in stone on a funeral monument. You could sleep for ever in that bed, she thought.

She had slept there herself during half of July and most of August when Gwen took Will to the cottage for the summer air and offered Hilary a vacation from the service flat. There had been a string of mornings so bright that Hilary had relished being called to them early by the birds. Relished dozing and dreaming in the half-light before dawn, under the pleasing shroud of Gwen’s stiffly laundered cotton sheets, slightly abrasive with London lime on the naked skin. How lucky, how certain, how easy I felt in that bed. Before all this mess.

Hilary longed for sleep now, for oblivion. But her mind raced on. I could get to hate Gwen, she thought. Both of them. It might seem easy to tell myself I don’t want what they have. But for whose benefit, that lie? The spinster’s bitter defiance, life at arm’s length. It’s a marriage I admire, and it’s their marriage. No way I can stay here more than a day or two. I have to tell her. Tomorrow – right away. Ask her to lend me money for one more ticket. Save what’s left of the credit cards.

Trouble with goddamned fucking New York is everybody’s apartments are so small. In London people have things like extra beds. She ran over in her mind the friends who might have room for her to stay, thinking how they were really Mark’s friends more than hers, how they might have an opinion, either hate her guts or try to talk her around, and how she wouldn’t be able to bear the interference. One or two from graduate school she could maybe impose on, her old PhD supervisor, for instance, who still treated her as though the world needed the thesis she had never finished writing. She pictured herself telling the whole sorry tale again on the phone to New York, and her stomach toiled with embarrassment.

Could Mark really kick her off the project? She’d been agonising over it, telling herself she was too tired to think straight. Eddie wouldn’t leave me so exposed. Eddie, whose last years had been haunted by the future, by planning, eventualities. And then with a shuddering ache, Get real, Hilary. Eddie was never planning with you in mind. He wouldn’t leave his collection so exposed.

But it was hard to give up that fragile old-man voice in her ear, croaky, desiccated, the Bronx twang made fine by education and a certain natural delicacy: ‘How can you be so sure you want to give your life to this when I’m gone? And the lockstep with Mark? Maybe I should set you free from that? There’s always some other way, you know, with lawyers.’

How many times should Eddie have asked her? She had been so quick to reassure him, It’s decided. I’m all yours. As if she herself were a piece he wanted for the collection. Because she knew his appetite, and it gave her so much pleasure to satisfy it. And because in his growing frailty, he was facing something so big, drawing closer all the time, and she could shield him a little with this indulgence; she could take his mind off his fear. The legal stuff ’s fine. Mark’s good at that. Let him deal with it, she used to say.

I left myself exposed, she thought. I had – a sense of expectation; she had to admit it.

After the funeral, Hilary wondered how much she really cared for the treasures. All those years, had she been living off Eddie’s enthusiasm? Until it all came to life again with Paul. Paul loved the collection with that unhesitating lightness of heart, that spontaneous certainty that she had come to feel she would never encounter again. The touch of boyish disregard that carried it off.

That was real, she thought, that part of my friendship with Paul. It was the same as with Eddie – we shared some things perfectly, others not at all.

At last she began to sink into sleep, feeling justified in something. She let go of trying to make sense; let the pieces of her puzzle fall apart into their jigsaw fragments. She drifted among bodies, among beds. Gwen, Lawrence. Eddie lying alone under his grand red canopy, lost in the magnificence of its height and hangings. Slipping away. Eddie in his wheelchair in the big living room. In the sunlight beside her desk. Safely dead at last; the silent move he made, out of reach.

I only slept with Mark’s body, she thought without clarity. It felt like something she needed to explain. But not now, under the weight of the thin blanket, carrying her down. Don’t try.

Then she had a sensation of hurt. A jolt, as if the pillow had dropped underneath her, the whole bed. There was a shuddering black edge around her thoughts as she was thrown back from sleep for an instant.

I knew Eddie was selfish. I made it easy for him. She tried to push past this discomfort, her sense of error and responsibility, still reaching for sleep. I have to go forward from where I am now. With what I know now. I can get back in touch with Paul, on a new footing. He’ll help me. It’s OK here with Gwen until I get myself together.

She was sure of Gwen. At least there’s room for me here. With Lawrence and Gwen.

CHAPTER 3 (#u8edd8b60-41ab-5a5e-80a3-4e0fa2296ec8)

It seemed obvious to Gwen whom Hilary should meet. Roland was tall enough, smart enough, steady enough, good enough. Did it matter whether he was handsome? Walking along King Street the next morning after dropping Will at school, she decided that handsome wasn’t really the point. Up until now anyway, Gwen had never much judged people by how they looked. But he’s got a great face, she reflected. Solid, intriguing. A lot of texture to his skin, a real beard and a head of thick, dark hair, a kind of masculinity and force. Maybe she had never before considered Roland on the question of looks. Did she know him too well? When had she first looked at him? When had she ever looked at him? Six or eight years ago?

He had been introduced by Lawrence as an Ancient History colleague; one of the few colleagues who seemed to Gwen to be actually alive. So many of those Oxford types, Gwen thought, as she made her way towards a cash machine through the sparse, early scurry, existed only as their academic selves – a constellation of starred alphas, named memorial prizes, Oxford University Press publications, sherry-stained gowns, high-table ripostes. But she had liked Roland right away. At one of those wistful gatherings in a barnlike room, everyone standing because the chairs were so far apart, so stiff-backed and so sunken-seated, a hot little drink in the fist. He had made jokes and asked her direct, friendly questions about herself, real questions, that sought out what was inside her, not the windy senior-common-room cross-examinations that aimed to position you on an imaginary list and then dismiss you as falling below some necessary level of academic accomplishment on that list. What are you working on? they felt free to ask once they had established that she didn’t spend all her time looking after children, a house. Years ago, it had been her undergraduate degree in Greats. Then, when she gave up on that, she would answer, I paint. And it seemed to stump them. Hmm, they might reply, with a slight interrogative inflection, nodding vigorously, stretching the brows upward in a contortion of sympathy, optimism, goodwill. Some would venture on to a further question, What sort of things do you paint? Or even the informed probe, Figurative or abstract? But there the conversation would end. They couldn’t taxonomise this particular activity, landscape painting. It was easier to look upon her as a dropout.

But not for Roland. He was good for my self-esteem, Gwen reflected, and he’ll be good for Hilary’s. She fed her debit card into the machine, her PIN number circling through her brain like a glimmering fish until she hooked it, stabbed the digits into the hard little keys. Roland has the energy to take a genuine interest in anything, and he has the nerve, too. He knows that there is plenty of vitality and conviction outside the locus of clever, singular answers, outside the high-walled, ancient quadrangles. Those dons go head to head with each other so hard and so long that they forget everything else, the rest of the world, for instance, what it’s actually like. She bubbled with resentment, thinking about them. Their conversation, she thought, whatever the topic, is like a conversation about the weather, because they don’t actually want to make contact. Real contact. They might have to follow that up with some expenditure of emotion. They can’t afford to hear what you might have to say in case it doesn’t fit into their train of thought, in case it might disturb some theory they are pushing towards. Some simplification of life. How she had hated those gatherings in college, attended with universal joylessness, another fixed commitment during which it was possible to kill a little time away from books and pens, rest their mighty brains, while eating.

The cash wheedled out crisply as if it were newly printed expressly for her. Then there was the thump behind the screen, the personal vault slamming shut.

But they’re not all like that, she thought, folding the twenties into the pocket of her jeans, striding for home past the fountains playing over the smooth-paved piazza at her feet. Lawrence, Roland. Hilary will feel it right away. Roland’s curiosity and his warmth. Gwen smiled, picturing it. Hilary’s so tuned in. She’ll find out how widely read and how thoughtful Roland is. Older and wiser than Mark or Paul. Will Hilary think he’s too old? Lawrence’s age? Nearly fifty? A baby, compared to Doro.

She climbed the black-painted front steps, grabbing up the milk and pinning the bottle under one arm as she let herself into the colourless, empty stairwell, struggled with the keys to the stiff little door of the flat. As to why such a cultivated, lovable man wasn’t already involved with a worthwhile woman, Gwen glossed over it in her thoughts as she entered the ground-floor hallway, skipped down the basement steps to the kitchen. Or rather, she considered it rapidly as she flipped the fridge open and shut, and she decided, He hasn’t met a good one yet, a good enough one. The right one. In the back of her mind was the flattering certainty that Roland had always been quite attentive to her. From this, she concluded that he liked American women and that he ought to meet more of them. She looked upon his chivalry towards herself as a promise, even a guarantee, that he would like Hilary, indeed, that Hilary was exactly whom he was waiting to meet.

She put Will’s breakfast things in the dishwasher, walked around to the clammy back room, and started dragging towels and sheets out of the dryer, heaping them on the ironing board in crackling electric mounds so she could transfer the wet things in from the washing machine. She stopped to find Roland’s number in the kitchen drawer, dialled it, and kept the phone clutched against her ear as she went back again to the laundry room.

‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’ She felt unexpectedly shy – bent double, arse up, at the mouths of her machines, struggling one-handed to weed out little cotton items to dry on the rack, her knickers, a bra, falling on the dirty floor as they came untangled from the wet lump in the bouncing, perforated drum.

But Roland welcomed it. ‘I’ll drive down with Lawrence,’ he said. ‘Any day this week apart from tomorrow. It’s only the freshers arriving now.’

‘Lawrence thought he might be staying up for a couple of nights.’

‘I’ll give him a ring, shall I? And we’ll fix it.’

That was it. She chucked more laundry into the washing machine and turned it on with the dryer, leaving the folding for later, everything churning.

Mentioning the arrangement to Hilary, Gwen was casual. ‘There’s a friend coming to supper. It’s just the four of us.’

Hilary was horrified. She had woken up late and swayed down into the kitchen in her pale blue-and-grey-striped men’s pyjamas with a black V-neck sweater over them. Her dark tendrils of hair were pulled into a bright red scrunchie at the back of her head so that her whole face was revealed in the morning light, flushed, puffy around the eyes, but smooth with deep, long sleep.

She came on with a spoiling chill. ‘I don’t want to meet anyone, Gwen. I’m a wreck. I need to recover. I need time to – figure out what’s going to happen.’ In her alarm, she pulled her hair loose from the scrunchie, scowled as she plucked at its ends.

Gwen just looked at her for a few seconds, trying to tell from Hilary’s half-veiled face why she seemed to be receiving the effort as an insult. But she couldn’t see Hilary’s eyes. An insult to grief? Gwen considered. Or to the seriousness of what’s happened to her? How much time would Hilary need to mourn the end of her engagement? Gwen lifted her eyebrows and, at the same time, she blinked, indicating doubt, an attempt to be patient. She didn’t speak.

‘Don’t get mad, Gwen.’ Hilary dropped into the same chair where she had sat last night, reached for the box of Weetabix sitting on the table, studied the package.

‘I’m not mad.’ Gwen was trying to suppress her sense of investment in sorting Hilary out. She was thinking, It’s a problem to be solved, let’s get the ball rolling. Why dawdle and agonise? But she said, as casually as she could muster, ‘Do you want me to postpone it?’