‘I wasn’t expecting that,’ he said.
He’d have to think about my question, he went on. There was probably an element of selfishness to it, he could admit, as well as immaturity. But really, if he were honest – honesty being tonight’s theme, he said, with a barking laugh – it was fear.
Of what? I said.
He looked at me with a strange grimacing smile.
His father, he said after a while, had had a propensity to behave in public situations in a manner that caused the utmost embarrassment to the people with him. In restaurants and shops, on trains, even at school parents’ evenings: there was no knowing what he might do. Any such occasion could only be viewed in advance with dread by the members of his family. But the Chair had dreaded it more than the others.
I asked what exactly it was his father did that was so embarrassing.
There was a long silence.
I don’t know, said the Chair. I can’t explain.
Why, I asked, did he think he suffered more anxiety than, say, the sister he had mentioned earlier?
I don’t know, the Chair said again. I just know that I did.
He didn’t know why he had told me that, he added after a while. It was something he didn’t usually talk about. His foot was still swinging back and forth and I watched the slender, beak-like toe as it advanced and retreated. All this time the Chair had been pouring wine into our glasses and now the bottle was empty. I said that I ought to be going back to the hotel: I had to catch an early train the next morning. The Chair reacted to this news with obvious surprise. He looked at his watch. His wrist, I noticed, had strong knuckle-shaped bones and the white skin was covered with vigorous black hairs. I saw thoughts passing through his mind but I didn’t know what they were. I guessed he was calculating whether he was too late to join the others at the club. He stood up and asked which hotel I was staying in.
‘Can I walk you back there?’ he said.
I repeated that there was no need, if he had something else to do.
‘You haven’t taken your coat off all evening,’ he said, ‘so I can’t even help you on with it.’
Outside it was so dark that it was barely possible to see the pavement in front of us. The rain had stopped but water dripped thickly from the foliage overhead. In the darkness the mass of heavy trunks along the roadside with their serpentine roots seemed impenetrable as a forest. The Chair took out his phone and used the light as a torch. We had to walk very close to one another to be able to see where we were going. Our arms and shoulders were touching. I felt a realisation begin to arise, a dawning of understanding, as if some incomprehensible component had suddenly slotted into place. We crossed the road into the brighter light that came from the hotel. I opened the gate and the Chair followed me into the gravelled courtyard. There was a flight of wide stone steps that rose to the front door. I paused at the bottom. I thanked the Chair for bringing me back and I turned away from him and walked up the steps. He followed me up; I felt him just behind me, a dark attendant shape, like a hawk hovering and rising. When I turned around again he took two rapid strides towards me. He seemed to be crossing some unfathomable element or chasm-like space, where things fell and broke far down in the darkness against its deeps. His body reached mine and he pushed me back against the door and kissed me. He put his warm, thick tongue in my mouth; he thrust his hands inside my coat. His lean, hard body was more insistent than forceful. I felt the soft, expensive clothes he was dressed in and the hot skin beneath them. He moved his face away from mine for a moment in order to speak.
‘You’re like a teenager,’ he said.
He kissed me for a long time. Other than that remark, no one said anything. There were no explanations or endearments. I became aware of my musty, damp clothes and my tangled hair. When our bodies eventually came apart I moved away and twisted the door handle and opened the door a few inches. He stepped back; he seemed to be grinning. In the bright darkness he was a silhouette filled with white light.
Goodnight, I said.
I went inside and closed the door.
The student’s name was Jane. She was sitting on the sofa, apparently not noticing that it – and everything else in the room – was covered with white dust sheets.
Thank you, she said, accepting a cup of tea and placing it carefully on the floor beside her.
She was a tall, slim, narrow-bodied woman with surprisingly generous firm breasts that her tight turquoise sweater accentuated. She smoothed her lime-green pencil skirt frequently over her thighs. She wore no make-up: her bare, lined face with its neat features was like the face of a worried child. Her pale hair was piled on top of her head in a way that revealed the elegance of her long neck.
She was grateful, she said, that I’d agreed to work with her – she’d had a suspicion they would try to palm her off on someone else. Last term she’d had a novelist who kept trying to make her rewrite the endings of other people’s books. The term before that it had been a memoirist whose own life had so preoccupied him that he never actually managed to attend one of their meetings. He would sometimes call her from Italy, where he kept going to see his girlfriend, giving her exercises to do over the phone. He always wanted her to write about sex: perhaps it was just a subject that happened to be on his mind at the time.
The thing is, she said, I know what I want to write about. She paused and sipped her tea. I just don’t know how to write it.
Outside the sitting-room windows the afternoon sky was a motionless grey blank. Occasionally sounds came from the street, the slamming of a car door or a fragment of passing conversation.
I said it wasn’t always a question of knowing how.
She arched her eyebrows, which had been plucked into fine, dark, perfectly drawn curves.
Then what is it a question of? she said.
The material, she went on, which she’d been collecting for the past four or five years, had by now grown into a set of notes more than 300,000 words long: she was keen to start the actual writing. It concerned the life of the American painter Marsden Hartley, someone surprisingly few people here had heard of, though in the States his work could be found hanging in most of the major galleries and museums. I asked whether she had been there to look at them.
I’m not that interested in the paintings, she said, after a pause.