‘You’re not frightened, are you?’ she said, looking at me beadily.
I found myself telling her about an evening some years before, when I was alone at home with my two sons. It was winter; it had been dark since mid-afternoon and the boys were becoming restless. Their father was out, driving back from somewhere. We were waiting for him to come home. I remembered the feeling of tension in the room, which seemed to be related to the provisionality of the situation, the fact that we were waiting. The boys kept asking when he would be back and I too kept looking at the clock, waiting for time to pass. Yet I knew that nothing different or particularly important would happen when he got back. It was merely that something was being stretched to breaking point by his absence, something to do with belief: it was as though our ability to believe in ourselves, in our home and our family and in who we said we were, was being worn so thin it might give way entirely. I remembered the pressing feeling of reality, just under the surface of things, like a secret I was struggling to contain. I realised that I didn’t want to be there, in that room. I wanted to go out and walk across the fields in the dark, or go to a city where there was excitement and glamour, or be anywhere where the compulsion of waiting wasn’t lying on me like lead. I wanted to be free. The boys began to argue and fight, in the way that they often did. And this too seemed all at once like a form that could be broken, could be suddenly and shockingly transgressed. We were in the kitchen and I was making something for them to eat at the long stone counter. The boys were at the other end, sitting on stools. My younger son was pestering the older one, wanting him to play with him, and the older one was becoming increasingly irritated. I stopped what I was doing, intending to intervene in their fight, when I saw my older son suddenly take his brother’s head in his hands and drive it down hard against the countertop. The younger one fell immediately to the floor, apparently unconscious, and the older one left him there and ran out of the room. This show of violence, the like of which had never happened in our house before, was not simply shocking – it also concretised something I appeared already to know, to the extent that I believed my children had merely acted in the service of this knowledge, that they had been driven to enact something that they themselves didn’t realise or understand. It was another year before their father moved out of the house, but if I had to locate the moment when the marriage had ended it would be then, on that dark evening in the kitchen, when he wasn’t even there.
Eloise was listening with a sympathetic expression on her face.
‘Was he all right?’ she said. ‘Did you have to take him to hospital?’
He was shocked and upset, I said, and he had a big lump on his head, but he didn’t need to go to hospital.
She was silent for a while, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes downcast. She wore numerous delicate silver rings on her fingers, and the big dazzling gem Lawrence had given her as an engagement ring.
‘You don’t regret it, though, do you?’ she said. ‘It must have been right, or you wouldn’t have done it.’
I said I had no answer to that, because I still didn’t know precisely what it was I had done.
She gave a mischievous little smile and peeped up at me from beneath her short pale lashes. She had been meaning to introduce me, she said, to some of her single male friends. There was one in particular she had in mind – he was very good-looking and very, very rich. He had the most stunning flat in Mayfair – he was an art collector – as well as a house on the C?te d’Azur. Lawrence, who had by now sat down beside us, groaned.
‘Why are you always trying to palm Freddie off on your female friends?’ he said. ‘He’s an absolute lout.’
Eloise pouted and gave a little sniff.
‘All that money,’ she said. ‘At least it would be going to a good cause. It seems such a waste.’
‘Not everyone cares about money as much as you do,’ Lawrence said.
Eloise didn’t seem offended by this remark. Instead she laughed.
‘But I didn’t care about it,’ she said. ‘That’s the whole point.’
Lawrence had served everyone with slivers of foie gras surrounded by little balls of choux pastry.
‘What’s in here?’ Eloise’s older son called out, holding one up in his fingers.
‘Bone marrow,’ Lawrence called back unrepentantly.
He had become increasingly interested in cooking, he told me, and had even started growing things in the garden – rare herbs, esoteric vegetables – that were difficult to find locally. This transformation had occurred after he had been sitting in his office one day mechanically eating a cheese sandwich he’d bought from a shop, and the realisation had struck him that he could have been eating something better. That was about eighteen months ago, he said, and it had had some interesting consequences, one of which had been his experiencing an intense craving – after six months or so of eating finer foods – for the very cheese sandwich that had caused him to forswear mindless eating in the first place. He had become so used by then to reading the subtle impulses of his own desires – often not eating at all if he couldn’t lay his hands on the very thing he wanted – that he automatically set out to act on this one, regarding it as some kind of pun or beau geste his now more sophisticated appetite had thought to come up with. He had gone to the same shop and bought the same sandwich, and out on the street, as he opened his mouth to take a bite, he was suddenly overwhelmed by sense-memories: of the malty dustiness of the sliced bread, the tang of the processed cheese, the thickness and whiteness of the mayonnaise coating the shreds of lettuce. My mouth, Lawrence said, was literally watering. In those seconds he went further, into the memory of biting and chewing the sandwich, of swallowing it and feeling an obscure relief momentarily flooding his system. Then, Lawrence said, I put the whole thing back in its package and threw it in the bin.