She woke up and clutched at me. She pushed her face blindly into my chest. She trembled.
“China!”
It was February, a year or two after we had met. I didn’t know it, but things were already going wrong for her. Her dreams had begun to waste her from the inside.
She said indistinctly: “I want to go back home.”
“Isobel, it was only a dream.”
“I couldn’t fly,” she said. She stared up at me in astonishment. “China, I couldn’t fly.”
At breakfast she hardly spoke. All morning she was thoughtful and withdrawn. But when I suggested that we walk down to the Danube via the Basilica at St. Stephen’s, cross over to Buda and eat lunch, she seemed delighted. The air was cold and clear. The trees were distinct and photographic in the bright pale February light. We stared out across the New City from the Disney-white battlements of Fishermen’s Bastion. “Those bridges!” Isobel said. “Look at them in the sun!” She had bought a new camera for the trip, a Pentax with a motor-wind and zoom. “I’m going to take a panorama.” She eyed the distorted reflection of the Bastion in the mirror-glass windows of the Hilton hotel. “Stand over there, China, I want one of you, too. No, there, you idiot!” Snow began to fall, in flakes the size of five-forint pieces.
“China!”
For the rest of the day—for the rest of the holiday—she was as delighted by things as ever. We visited the zoo. (“Look! Owls!”) We caught a train to Szentendre. We photographed one another beneath the huge winged woman at the top of the Gellert Hill. We translated the titles of the newsstand paperbacks.
“What does this mean, ‘Nagy Secz’?”
“You know very well what it means, Isobel.” I looked at my watch.
I said: “It’s time to eat.”
“Oh no. Must we?” Isobel hated Hungarian food. “China,” she would complain, “why has everything got cream on it?”
But she loved the red and grey buses. She loved the street signs, TOTO LOTTO, HIRLAP, TRAFIK. She loved Old Buda, redeemed by the snow: white, clean, properly picturesque.
And she couldn’t get enough of the Danube. “Look. China, it’s fucking huge! Isn’t it fucking huge?”
I said: “Look at the speed of it.”
At midnight on our last day we stood in the exact centre of the Erzsebet Bridge, gazing north. Szentendre and Danube Bend were out there somewhere, locked in a Middle European night stretching all the way to Czechoslovakia. Ice floes like huge lily pads raced toward us in the dark. You could hear them turning and dipping under one another, piling up briefly round the huge piers, jostling across the whole vast breadth of the river as they rushed south. No river is ugly after dark. But the Danube doesn’t care for anyone: without warning the medieval cold came up off the water and reached onto the bridge for us. It was as if we had seen something move. We stepped back, straight into the traffic which grinds all night across the bridge from Buda into Pest.
“China!”
“Be careful!” You have to imagine this—
Two naive and happy middle-class people embracing on a bridge. Caught between the river and the road, they grin and shiver at one another, unable to distinguish between identity and geography, love and the need to keep warm.
“Look at the speed of it.”
“Oh, China, the Danube!”
Suddenly she turned away. She said: “I’m cold now.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t want to go on the aeroplane,” she said. “They’re not the real thing after all.”
I took her hands between mine. “It will be okay when you get home,” I promised.
But London didn’t seem to help. For months I woke in the night to find she was awake too, staring emptily up at the ceiling in the darkness. Unable to comprehend her despair, I would consult my watch and ask her, “Do you want anything?” She would shake her head and advise patiently, “Go to sleep now, love,” as if she was being kept awake by a bad period.
I bought the house in Stepney at about that time. It was in a prettily renovated terrace with reproduction Victorian streetlamps. There were wrought-iron security grids over every other front door, and someone had planted the extensive shared gardens at the back with ilex, ornamental rowan, even a fig. Isobel loved it. She decorated the rooms herself, then filled them with the sound of her favourite music—the Blue Aeroplanes’ “Yr Own World”; Tom Petty, “Learning to Fly.” For our bedroom she bought two big blanket chests and polished them to a deep buttery colour. “Come and look, China! Aren’t they beautiful?” Inside, they smelled of new wood. The whole house smelled of new wood for days after we moved in: beeswax, new wood, dried roses.
I said: “I want it to be yours.” It had to be in her name anyway, I admitted: for accounting purposes.
“But also in case anything happens.”
She laughed. “China, what could happen?”
What happened was that one of my local drivers went sick, and I asked her to deliver something for me.
I said: “It’s not far. Just across to Brook Green. Some clinic.” I passed her the details. “A Dr. Alexander. You could make it in an hour, there and back.”
She stared at me. “You could make it in an hour,” she said.
She read the job sheet. “What do they do there?” she asked.
I said irritably: “How would I know? Cosmetic medicine. Fantasy factory stuff. Does it matter?”
She put her arms round me. “China, I was only trying to be interested.”
“Never ask them what they do with the stuff,” I warned her. “Will you do it?”
She said: “If you kiss me properly.”
“How was it?” I asked when she got back.
She laughed. “At first they thought I was a patient!” Running upstairs to change, she called down: “I quite like West London.”
Isobel’s new body delighted her. But she seemed bemused too, as if it had been given to someone else. How much had Alexander promised her? How much had she expected from the Miami treatments? All I knew was that she had flown out obsessed and returned ill. When she talked, she would talk only about the flight home. “I could see a sunrise over the wing of the airliner, red and gold. I was trying hard to read a book, but I couldn’t stop looking out at this cold wintery sunrise above the clouds. It seemed to last for hours.” She stared at me as if she had just thought of something. “How could I see a sunrise, China? It was dark when we landed!”
Her dreams had always drawn her away from ordinary things. All that gentle, warm September she was trying to get back.
“Do you like me again?” she would ask shyly.
It was hard for her to say what she meant. Standing in front of the mirror in the morning in the soft grey slanting light from the bedroom window, dazed and sidetracked by her own narcissism, she could only repeat: “Do you like me this way?”
Or at night in bed: “Is it good this way? Is it good? What does it feel like?”
“Isobel—”
In the end it was always easier to let her evade the issue.
“I never stopped liking you,” I would lie, and she would reply absently, as if I hadn’t spoken: “Because I want us to like each other again.” And then add, presenting her back to the mirror and looking at herself over one shoulder: “I wish I’d had more done. My legs are still too fat.”
If part of her was still trying to fly back from Miami and all Miami entailed, much of the rest was in Brook Green with Alexander. As September died into October, and then the first few cold days of November, I found that increasingly hard to bear. She cried in the night but no longer woke me up for comfort. Her gaze would come unfocussed in the afternoons. Unable to be near her while, thinking of him, she pretended to leaf through Vogue and Harper’s, I walked out into the rainy unredeemed Whitechapel streets. Suddenly it was an hour later and I was watching the lights come on in a hardware shop window on Roman Road.
Other times, when it seemed to be going well, I couldn’t contain my delight. I got up in the night and thrashed the BMW to Sheffield and back; parked outside the house and slept an hour in the rear seat; crossed the river in the morning to queue for croissants at Ayre’s Bakery in Peckham, playing Empire Burlesque so loud that if I touched the windscreen gently I could feel it tremble, much as she used to do, beneath my fingertips.
I was trying to get back too.
“I’ll take you to the theatre,” I said. “Waiting for Godot. Do you want to see the fireworks?” I said: “I brought you a present—”
A Monsoon dress. Two small stone birds for the garden; anemones; and a cheap Boots nailbrush shaped like a pig.
“Don’t try to get so close, China,” she said. “Please.”
I said: “I just want to be something to you.”
She touched my arm. She said: “China, it’s too soon. We’re here together, after all: isn’t that enough for now?”
She said: “And anyway, how could you ever be anything else?” She said: “I love you.”
“But you’re not in love with me.”
“I told you I couldn’t promise you that.”
By Christmas we were shouting at one another again, late into the night, every night. I slept on the futon in the spare room. There I dreamed of Isobel and woke sweating.
You have to imagine this—
The Pavilion, quite a good Thai restaurant on Wardour Street. Isobel has just given me the most beautiful jacket, wrapped in birthday paper. She leans across the table. “French Connection, China. Very smart.” The waitresses, who believe we are lovers, laugh delightedly as I try it on. But later, when I buy a red rose and offer it to Isobel, she says, “What use would I have for that?” in a voice of such contempt I begin to cry. In the dream, I am fifty years old that day. I wake thinking everything is finished.
Or this—
Budapest. Summer. Rakoczi Street. Each night Isobel waits for me to fall asleep before she leaves the hotel. Once outside, she walks restlessly up and down Rakoczi with all the other women. Beneath her beige linen suit she has on grey silk underwear. She cannot explain what is missing from her life but will later write in a letter: “When sex fails for you—when it ceases to be central in your life—you enter middle age, a zone of the most unclear exits from which some of us never escape.” I wake and follow her. All night it feels like dawn. Next morning, in the half-abandoned Jugendstil dining room, a paper doily drifts to the floor like a leaf, while Isobel whispers urgently in someone else’s voice: “It was never what you thought it was.”
Appalled by their directness, astonished to find myself so passive, I would struggle awake from dreams like this thinking: “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?” It was always early. It was always cold. Grey light silhouetted a vase of dried flowers on the dresser in front of the uncurtained window, but the room itself was still dark. I would look at my watch, turn over, and go back to sleep. One morning, in the week before Christmas, I got up and packed a bag instead. I made myself some coffee and drank it by the kitchen window, listening to the inbound city traffic build up half a mile away. When I switched the radio on it was playing Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman.” I turned it off quickly, and at 8:00 woke Isobel. She smiled up at me.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m sorry about last night.”
I said: “I’m sick of it all. I can’t do it. I thought I could but I can’t.”
“China, what is this?”
I said: “You were so fucking sure he’d have you. Three months later it was you crying, not me.”
“China—”
“It’s time you helped,” I said.
I said: “I helped you. And when you bought me things out of gratitude I never once said ‘What use would I have for that?’”
She rubbed her hands over her eyes. “China, what are you talking about?”
I shouted: “What a fool you made of yourself!” Then I said: “I only want to be something to you again.”
“I won’t stand for this,” Isobel whispered. “I can’t stand this.”
I said: “Neither can I. That’s why I’m going.”
“I still love him, China.”
I was on my way to the door. I said: “You can have him then.”
“China, I don’t want you to go.”
“Make up your mind.”
“I won’t say what you want me to.”
“Fuck off, then.”
“It’s you who’s fucking off, China.”
It’s easy to see now that when we stood on the Erzsebet Bridge the dream had already failed her. But at the time—and for some time afterward—I was still too close to her to see anything. It was still one long arc of delight for me, Stratford through Budapest, all the way to Stepney. So I could only watch puzzledly as she began to do pointless, increasingly spoiled things to herself. She caught the tube to Camden Lock and had her hair cut into the shape of a pigeon’s wing. She had her ankles tattooed with feathers. She starved herself, as if her own body were holding her down. She was going to revenge herself on it. She lost twenty pounds in a month. Out went everything she owned, to be replaced by size 9 jeans, little black spandex skirts, expensively tailored jackets which hung from their own ludicrous shoulder pads like washing.
“You don’t look like you anymore,” I said.
“Good. I always hated myself anyway.”
“I loved your bottom the way it was,” I said. She laughed. “You’ll look haggard if you lose anymore,” I said.
“Piss off, China. I won’t be a cow just so you can fuck a fat bottom.”
I was hurt by that, so I said: “You’ll look old. Anyway, I didn’t think we fucked. I thought we made love.” Something caused me to add, “I’m losing you.” And then, even less reasonably: “Or you’re losing me.”
“China, don’t be such a baby.”
Then one afternoon in August she walked into the lounge and said, “China, I want to talk to you.” The second I heard this, I knew exactly what she was going to say. I looked away from her quickly and down into the book I was pretending to read, but it was too late. There was a kind of soft thud inside me. It was something broken. It was something not there anymore. I felt it. It was a door closing, and I wanted to be safely on the other side of it before she spoke.
“What?” I said.
She looked at me uncertainly. “China, I—”
“What?”
“China, I haven’t been happy. Not for some time. You must have realised. I’ve got a chance at an affair with someone and I want to take it.”