The true secret turned out to be that there was no secret. She had thought that sex would be something else, yet already could no longer articulate what that something else could have been. Instead it was what it was—the putting of parts into other, tighter parts. She had wanted to advance their intimacy, to elect Nathan as the central person in her new, adult life; she had wanted them to cleave together conclusively and could think of no more conclusive way than this. He had been loving, and gentle, and tender. He had whispered endearments, had held her face and looked into her eyes, and had shown he thought of no one and nothing but her. But when it was over she had felt weepy, and though Nathan had stroked her hair and told her he loved her and that she was beautiful, she had needed more reassurance than he could give. She had expected the intensity of his focus upon her in those few, vital moments to be the way he’d always look at her now, forever, and when his breathing had slowed and eventually his talk had gone back to normal she felt crushed. It was all meant to be different now, and wasn’t.
The bleeding had been a surprise. She was not a demure and sedentary Victorian maiden. She had done school gymnastics and ridden horses; her own fingers had never encountered resistance. But there had been a great deal of blood, in disproportion to the pain, which had—a relief—been less than she’d expected. They had drawn apart and it had actually gushed from her, warm and shocking. This was not the pale spot of new womanhood. Hung outside the window in another place and time, these sheets would suggest the groom had dismembered, not deflowered, his new bride. Nathan had looked stricken, and his concern that she had not been truthful about it hurting had made it all the more embarrassing. “My poor baby,” he had whispered, his hand on her heart, and his pity had made her feel pitiable.
The sheets were now stuffed into the kitchen sink and soaking in an improvised solution of washing-up liquid, peppermint hand soap, and hot water, and the contents of a sachet of something she had found in the back of a cupboard that claimed to restore net curtains to a wafting summer purity. Scrubbing had seemed to make it worse. While they soaked, she sat at the dining table in semidarkness, re-creating the watershed that had come hours before, when she had told Nathan she finally felt ready. Maybe you could go with Nathan. Well, maybe she would.
21.
“You must come to Paris,” the e-mail commanded, “and be part of the conversation. We’ll bring you over. You must come.” Pamela then forwarded the details of a travel agent in Stanmore named Joan Perelman whom, she said, would be in touch in due course. Joan was organizing a group booking for all nineteen of the conference attendees and had instructions to ensure that Mr. Alden be given the best room in the small hotel on the rue Christine. Joan would pop the information through Philip’s door.
Alone in the half-gloom of his flat Philip chuckled, then launched a damp spluttering cough, and then, recovered, laughed again. Pamela almost certainly wished him to go to Paris not to converse with her biennial assembly of trainee holistic midwives, but to be paraded as some sort of animated fossil dug out of the obstetric field. He would be both pitied and pilloried, specimen of a genus they hoped to drive into extinction. Pamela had stepped up her campaign by offering first Eurostar tickets, then this hotel room, and finally a small honorarium, as well as the chance to attend as many of the lectures and seminars as he pleased. He did not please. He would not have gone, even had it not felt disloyal to Julia, who was at this moment on her way over, delivering what she claimed was a spare fish pie.
At my age it would be irresponsible to commit to anything so far in advance, he wrote back, but thank you for thinking of me.
Philip had last been to Paris in 1974, when the Fédération Internationale de Gynécologie et d’Obstétrique had offered him a fellowship and he had spent six weeks living alone, teaching a series of courses at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. Iris and ten-year-old Daniel had stayed in London, aided by a homesick but willing Italian au pair. The final weekend of his tenure, after their long separation, Iris would join him, and two days later the au pair would deliver Daniel to Paris on her way home to Naples. Then the three Aldens would travel down to Nice for a week’s holiday.
For those humid August days, he’d had his wife’s sustained, unbroken attention. He alone, perhaps for the first time since they’d married. They had walked in the Jardin des Tuileries and—though Iris, unlike Philip, had not grown up in a particularly religious household—had eaten their first shellfish together, the tight, slippery mussels flavored with transgression and daring. Iris had gone further and tasted dainty snails in garlic butter, while Philip had sipped a cold beer and told her about his teaching, and she had listened. Philip read le Monde to her, translating Watergate coverage badly, on the hoof. On Monday morning he had a brief return to reality, a final series of administrative meetings at FIGO, while Iris had gone to meet Daniel’s train, and to deliver the au pair into a second train that would take her home—forever, it turned out, for she did not return to them as she’d promised. When Philip had left the office on Monday afternoon, his wife and son had been waiting for him on a sunny street corner, and the next morning they boarded the train for Nice, where the precious bubble of happiness had miraculously held. In gold kaftan and roman sandals, Iris had been the most elegant woman on the beach. The most elegant woman, Philip thought, that he had ever seen. She would drift for idle, solitary walks along the shore, disappearing sometimes for hours, and each time as she receded into the distance he ached for her as if she was slipping from him forever, like Eurydice. This ache was at its most acute when he saw her returning. In those moments, when she was approaching but not yet close enough to hear his voice, he feared his heart might break with longing. Approaching, but not near enough. Never near enough. No, he would not go back to Paris.
? ? ?
“I TRIED A DIFFERENT ONE,” Julia explained, shuffling the empty ice cube trays and half-crushed foil takeaway containers in Philip’s freezer until she’d cleared space for the fish pie. “It’s got ketchup in it, which sounds suspicious, but we had it last night and it wasn’t bad, if I do say so myself, I just made a bit too much. You can put it in the oven frozen.”
“Thank you, maidele. Whatever you make is always wonderful. Now tell me, you said you’re finally going back to Verbier this year; I’m thrilled. Who is playing in the festival?”
“Everyone worth hearing, I just wish James could come. He’s on call that weekend but in any case now, with everything . . .” She drifted off. “My lovely Emmeline Whitten has a master class on the Sunday morning, which is the only reason I’m still going, and we’ll all have dinner that night, and I’ll fly back Monday.”
“I think the last time I heard Emmeline was when you took us to the Wigmore.”