only person I don’t have to pretend with. With him there is a real me, which he evokes – a joyous, soaring, voyaging me…
I couldn’t go on. I was sitting in the drawing room, looking out on the last of the evening light on the bay. Mrs Mullins had cleared away the funeral drinks long before. I went to look for them. After a whiskey I read the passage again. Katie had prided herself on her honesty, but she’d been honest only when it suited her, and she was certainly fooling herself here.
She’d loved me all right, fully and honestly, for three years. You can fake pleasure in the act of love, but not the look of love in a person’s face. You can fake it in a letter, or in words, but not in a tone of voice, or in the eyes. I’d seen and heard her love in all these things, and I’d felt it just as much in bed with her, when she took my hand, falling asleep, fingers entwined. How her love was there even in sleep, when her body gravitated towards mine, loving me unconsciously, when she moved into my arms, hair askew.
As for her ‘pretending happiness’ with me on our trips away together – this was nonsense. She’d travelled joyously with me on scores of occasions, at home and abroad, in Paris, Ireland, and two years before in Italy, where I’d been teaching painting and sculpture in a summer art school in Carrara.
No, she hadn’t faked anything with me in those first three years, I thought bitterly. Everything we’d done then had been genuine. Instead, two years ago, she’d started to drop me. When I asked her why all she would say was that I was ‘difficult’, or some other even vaguer criticism, as if to define it would be to expose the shallowness of her complaint.
Now I saw there was a reason. It was here in the second part ofthe passage I’d just read, in this ‘only person I don’t have to pretend with’. Well, surely this must be another man. But who? The only other man she ever went out with was her father.
Yes, her father, the Major. I’d had my suspicions there already – if only because Katie’s sudden lack of interest in me had exactly coincided with her father’s return home from his travels. Now in his mid seventies, he’d been an army officer, out in India originally, and then Germany, married and divorced a first wife, returned to England, retired early, bought the house and some land near Chipping Norton, in what became the riding school, and had then married Katie’s mother. Ten years later he’d baled out and started his wanderings, in Scandinavia, the Middle East, back to India. Katie never seemed very clear about where he’d been, or what he’d been up to, except to comment on his interest in anthropology, ancient tribes or some such. Two years ago, feeling his age, I suppose, he’d returned to England, arriving out of the blue, just after we’d got back from the summer school in Carrara.
All this I learnt in an offhand way from Katie, and, in an even more offhand manner, that he’d been involved with half a dozen other women during his marriage to Katie’s mother, who had died some years before I met Katie.
By the sound of him, I hadn’t liked him. When I met him, as I did several times where he’d come to live again up at the riding school, I liked him even less. The feeling was mutual and the reason was obvious. I was Katie’s lover, and he was jealous.
Short, with neatly cropped white hair, he had a broken nose, fierce blue eyes and tanned skin. He was dominant in an old-fashioned , British officer manner.
He was called Hector – and he often did just this, once expatiating to me for a whole half-hour in his crisply enunciated tones on the prehistory of the British race. I saw them one time. She’d met him in the car park of a pub on the road to Cheltenham,high up on the wolds, and they’d gone off with her dogs across the winter fields towards a rise in the land, an old hill fort or long barrow. He was talking animatedly, pointing out something to
I couldn’t go on. I was sitting in the drawing room, looking out on the last of the evening light on the bay. Mrs Mullins had cleared away the funeral drinks long before. I went to look for them. After a whiskey I read the passage again. Katie had prided herself on her honesty, but she’d been honest only when it suited her, and she was certainly fooling herself here.
She’d loved me all right, fully and honestly, for three years. You can fake pleasure in the act of love, but not the look of love in a person’s face. You can fake it in a letter, or in words, but not in a tone of voice, or in the eyes. I’d seen and heard her love in all these things, and I’d felt it just as much in bed with her, when she took my hand, falling asleep, fingers entwined. How her love was there even in sleep, when her body gravitated towards mine, loving me unconsciously, when she moved into my arms, hair askew.
As for her ‘pretending happiness’ with me on our trips away together – this was nonsense. She’d travelled joyously with me on scores of occasions, at home and abroad, in Paris, Ireland, and two years before in Italy, where I’d been teaching painting and sculpture in a summer art school in Carrara.
No, she hadn’t faked anything with me in those first three years, I thought bitterly. Everything we’d done then had been genuine. Instead, two years ago, she’d started to drop me. When I asked her why all she would say was that I was ‘difficult’, or some other even vaguer criticism, as if to define it would be to expose the shallowness of her complaint.
Now I saw there was a reason. It was here in the second part ofthe passage I’d just read, in this ‘only person I don’t have to pretend with’. Well, surely this must be another man. But who? The only other man she ever went out with was her father.
Yes, her father, the Major. I’d had my suspicions there already – if only because Katie’s sudden lack of interest in me had exactly coincided with her father’s return home from his travels. Now in his mid seventies, he’d been an army officer, out in India originally, and then Germany, married and divorced a first wife, returned to England, retired early, bought the house and some land near Chipping Norton, in what became the riding school, and had then married Katie’s mother. Ten years later he’d baled out and started his wanderings, in Scandinavia, the Middle East, back to India. Katie never seemed very clear about where he’d been, or what he’d been up to, except to comment on his interest in anthropology, ancient tribes or some such. Two years ago, feeling his age, I suppose, he’d returned to England, arriving out of the blue, just after we’d got back from the summer school in Carrara.
All this I learnt in an offhand way from Katie, and, in an even more offhand manner, that he’d been involved with half a dozen other women during his marriage to Katie’s mother, who had died some years before I met Katie.
By the sound of him, I hadn’t liked him. When I met him, as I did several times where he’d come to live again up at the riding school, I liked him even less. The feeling was mutual and the reason was obvious. I was Katie’s lover, and he was jealous.
Short, with neatly cropped white hair, he had a broken nose, fierce blue eyes and tanned skin. He was dominant in an old-fashioned , British officer manner.
He was called Hector – and he often did just this, once expatiating to me for a whole half-hour in his crisply enunciated tones on the prehistory of the British race. I saw them one time. She’d met him in the car park of a pub on the road to Cheltenham,high up on the wolds, and they’d gone off with her dogs across the winter fields towards a rise in the land, an old hill fort or long barrow. He was talking animatedly, pointing out something to
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