Such Visitors Read online

  She flipped through the typewritten agenda. The conference was to last three days, although her own visit was to be brief. Her lecture was at eight p.m., after supper: she would return home on an early train tomorrow. She observed that many subjects, popular at such gatherings, were to be lectured upon by a dozen experts she had never heard of. And then, curiously, she saw the name of Ivan Whiteham-Jones, described in the programme as the definitive writer on Elizabethan literature. What on earth …? It seemed, even more peculiar, he was to give a talk on Messages in the Modern Novel and How to Detect Them. Quite outside his own subject. Perhaps, thought Miranda, Mr W-J found, like her, the need for money meant that the quality of an audience could not always be a consideration.

  Ivan Whiteham-Jones was engaged to speak today, at four p.m. Now, in fact, Miranda realised, looking at her watch. Even now the eminent man was in some lecture hall enchanting an audience of aspiring writers. Miranda had watched him with admiration on many occasions on the television, and had read every one of his books. But she had never had the opportunity to hear him lecture. That chance had now gone. It was time for tea. Annoyed with herself, Miranda left the room.

  In the canteen, she found rain slashing against the vast plate-glass windows with all the viciousness of storm waves against a pier. Miranda sat alone at a table, drinking tea from a plastic beaker. All round her, dozens of mature students enthused about Ivan Whiteham-Jones. His lecture had been a great success, it seemed.

  ‘I was so carried away I never took a note,’ confessed a nearby grey-haired woman. She patted at her crocheted jersey as if to calm the excitement of her skin that the lecture had caused her. Lucky Mr W-J, Miranda thought. He could now go home.

  She saw him at the end of a long queue, waiting for tea at the canteen, and the vast room responded lightly. Back to her, she could see his concentration on a tray of doughnuts was interrupted several times by congratulations. In acknowledgement, he nodded politely, untouched by the appreciation. Miranda found herself critical of the cut of his trousers, the dreadful diamond pattern of his lambswool jersey, the rubber soles of his clumsy shoes. Other people’s clothes usually made little impact on her. Why was she so perturbed by Ivan Whiteham-Jones’s lack of sartorial instinct? And another question: why, like her, had he chosen to ignore the special room for lecturers, and come to the canteen?

  Ivan Whiteham-Jones turned, eyes upon his tray of tea. Miranda could now quite clearly see his face, familiar from television – dark eyes, hair falling over his forehead, extraordinarily beautiful mouth. A small quickening, she felt, and stirred her tea. Her eyes followed him to a far corner of the room. He sat at an unoccupied table, drank gloomily, studied the agenda. His air of preoccupation was plainly designed to deter students from eagerly seeking further advice.

  At six-thirty in the large hall, Miranda found that she and Whiteham-Jones were placed next to each other at a long table on the platform, both part of a panel to answer random questions from the students below. Yellow-grey light squeezed through the high, prison-like window. The audience itself was a little blurred, as if seated in mist. Their waves of earnest anticipation rustled between the walls of the ubiquitous breeze block. They scrutinised scraps of paper on which they had composed very long and serious questions.

  Ivan Whiteham-Jones shook Miranda’s hand. Smiled. Mockingly? It was so quick a smile Miranda could not be sure.

  ‘Glad I’ve been put next to the star turn,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted to hear your Hardy. Delighted to meet you.’

  There was no time for Miranda to convey her own delight. The chairman was on his feet, clearing his throat, polishing his hands.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, writers all,’ he began, with the professional tact of one bent on raising the fee for next year’s conference. Twenty minutes later the questions began.

  ‘Could anyone on the panel be so kind as to tell me if publishers would prefer us to send in our work double-spaced on A4 paper, or would it go against us if we wrote on a small size? You see, I can never get used to an A4. It hinders the flow, somehow, I find.’

  The questioner had a chestnut rinse and a melon-pink tracksuit. She was plainly a veteran conference-goer, not afraid to get the whole thing off to a good start with an apt question. For a moment she basked in sympathetic murmurs all round her. Then she took up her pencil, poised to record the answer she was about to receive.

  Miranda noticed the chairman looking with unconcealed desperation along his panel of experts. It was as if he had hoped the opening question might have started on a higher level… though experience had taught him how obsessed with practicalities these mature students could be. Ivan Whiteham-Jones obligingly caught his eye. At the same time, W-J’s clenched fist gently bounced on Miranda’s hand, signal of some private joke. Having come all this way, I for one am prepared to enter into the spirit of the thing, he seemed to say. In a trice, he was on his feet, and dealt masterfully with the problem of the typing paper most likely to succeed. Having eloquently put the worried lady’s mind at rest, he sat down again, turned to Miranda. Her heart was beating ludicrously fast. She met his smile.

  The questions finally over, members of the panel were shown into a room of yet more whitewashed breeze block, though here there had been some attempt to enliven the walls with abstract paintings, the work of past students. A long table was laid with sullen salads, hard-boiled eggs humped under lustreless mayonnaise, pallid pink meats faintly mottled and thinly sliced, bowls of tinned fruit: the kind of food not enhanced by overhead lighting. Miranda had no appetite. She found Ivan at her side, holding out a glass of white wine.

  ‘Grab something to eat and let’s make for that corner,’ he said.

  Miranda chose a slice of stale French bread, a minuscule packet of butter in gold paper, and a sliver of cheese.

  ‘I suppose you’re off any moment,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I missed your lecture.’

  ‘No, I’m here for the night, in fact. Appointment nearby, in the morning. So at least I’ll be able to hear yours.’ He gave a brief, restless smile. ‘You didn’t miss anything not coming to mine – not my normal subject, as you can imagine. But I had to be here anyway, so I did it as a favour to Jack.’

  He nodded towards the chairman, who, far, far away among the other lecturers, poked at his food, sipped his wine, laughed politely under the vicious white lights.

  They sat on low chairs of acrylic tweed, their plates on a lower table between them. Miranda knew she would remember for ever the feeling of the scratchy stuff behind her knees, and the geometric patterns on the plates.

  ‘I was supposed to have rung my wife an hour ago,’ Ivan was saying, looking at his watch, ‘but I couldn’t find a telephone that worked.’ There was purpose in his voice.

  ‘Maddening,’ said Miranda. She sipped at her wine, ignored the bread and cheese.

  ‘So,’ said Ivan, another limited smile uptilting his bewitching mouth, ‘here I am, meeting you at last. I’ve read all your papers, you know. You could say I was quite a fan. But I’d always imagined you … well, older, I suppose.’

  Miranda felt the blood rushing to her face and lowered her head.

  ‘I’ve read all your books, naturally,’ she said.

  ‘Have you really?’

  He sounded surprised. His eyes were so hard upon her she was forced to raise her own and meet them. She put down her glass with a shaking hand. Her heart was battering audibly. She knew Ivan observed all this.

  ‘Look, my hand’s shaking too,’ he said, quietly. ‘Now isn’t that indeed a peculiar thing? How do you explain that? Two people shaking, and they’ve scarcely met.’

  Miranda gave a slight laugh. She tried to compose herself, resist this dangerous ground.

  ‘I’d like to take my chance,’ she said, ‘to talk to you about Donne. I mean, about anything. But particularly about Donne.’ She cursed herself for her own confusion.

  ‘Ah, Donne.’ Ivan sighed. ‘Well, Donne would call this “our first str
ange and fatal interview”, wouldn’t he? Don’t deny it, now.’ He laughed, lightening the moment. ‘Listen, there’s so little time. To hell with Donne when there’s so little time. Unless that’s what you’d really like. Is that what you’d really like? Tell me, honestly.’

  ‘No, no,’ conceded Miranda, and they both laughed.

  What I’d really like, a voice within her said, is to take a speedboat to the moon with this man, talk to him for years, say things I’ve never said before which would need no words. I’d like to walk on beaches with him, climb hills, sit by fires while he read poems in that dappled voice … All that sort of fantastical rubbish. She twisted herself upright with a jerk, reclaimed her glass with a hand that was still shaking.

  ‘Alas, the negotiating of souls needs a little time,’ Ivan went on, ‘once the light has struck blindingly. There you are, some Donne for you mixed with a pinch of Reid …’ They both looked up to see the chairman approaching. ‘But promise me, afterwards, a drink somewhere?’

  Miranda smiled brilliantly at the chairman. She wanted, dottily, to let him know of her irrepressible exhilaration.

  ‘You two known each other long, have you?’ he asked.

  ‘For ever and ever, in a way,’ said Ivan.

  * * *

  As she stood on the platform looking down at a blotched mass of faces she could not distinctly see, Miranda felt nervous. Her hands were still shaking. She held them behind her back, and leaned against the bare table to steady herself. Eventually, the shuffling and whispering and the squeaking of chairs ceased, and the silence in the hall was rampant, white-lit, frightening. The Dark in Hardy, Miranda said to herself. Ivan was somewhere at the back. She could not see him, and was glad. The silence continued, but the familiar opening words of the lecture she had given a dozen times had quite disappeared from her mind. Then she heard a distant voice, her own, and was aware that the quality of her audience’s listening was almost tangible.

  ‘Why did you give no hint that night,’ she began in a low voice,

  That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,

  And calmly, as if indifferent quite,

  You would close your term here, up and be gone

  Where I could not follow

  With wing of swallow

  To gain one glimpse of you even anon?

  Never to bid goodbye,

  Or lip me the softest call,

  Or utter a wish for a word, while I

  Saw morning harden upon the wall,

  Unmoved, unknowing

  That your great going

  Had placed that moment, and altered all…

  She stopped abruptly.

  There had been no time to think. She had begun quoting spontaneously, some instinct telling her to send a private message to Ivan. There was no need to go on.

  ‘That was the beginning of a poem called “The Going”,’ she said, ‘which, I think you will agree …’ She was off, back in command, no longer shaking, her audience in her hands.

  When the applause was over and the listeners all gone, Miranda found Ivan waiting for her by the door.

  ‘We’re invited,’ he said, ‘to join the others for a nightcap back in that sterile room. But we won’t be doing that, will we? We’re going somewhere else. It won’t be the sort of place I’d like to take you, but anything to get out of here.’

  They hurried from the relentless white of the college building, down a deserted High Street, into a crowded pub of amber lights and glinting tankards on tartan walls. Miranda scarcely took in the practicalities. Somehow they were at a small, beer-ringed table, with two glasses of whisky.

  ‘That was very, very good,’ Ivan said. ‘I could have listened all night. You had the old things absolutely enraptured. But I don’t want to talk about Hardy, or Donne, or even Shakespeare, if you don’t mind.’ Against the background thump of taped music it was quite hard to hear his voice. He clenched his fist, thumped the table. Then he placed it on Miranda’s hand, and left it there.

  ‘I’m a happily married man, at last,’ he said.

  ‘And I’ve been a happily married woman for seventeen years,’ responded Miranda, her voice unwittingly shrill, defensive.

  ‘There we are then, in precisely the same situation. That’s good.’ He sighed. ‘It’s funny, though, isn’t it? You come to a conference, expecting nothing. I never expect anything. And then the gods play tricks on you. Show you temptation. Upset the equilibrium. Physically shake you. All in – what? A matter of hours. What’s it all about? Don’t just widen your pretty eyes at me like that – tell me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Miranda.

  Ivan was standing, restless. Barely ten minutes in the pub, Miranda noted.

  ‘Come on. We must go back. I’ve a mass of stuff to read before the morning.’

  He took her hand and led her through the bright, laughing people to the sharper air of the car park. A discreet moon lit geometrical shapes on the metal of the cars. In the office blocks that jutted up all round them the uniform windows were stuck in flatly silvered rows, sharp as flints.

  ‘Let’s pretend we’re not here,’ said Ivan. He kissed her, kissed her.

  When eventually they pulled apart, Miranda knew that nothing had been intended, and they were a long way from doing anything more. Ivan’s face was mostly in shadow, but splinters of moonlight flared in his eyes. He spoke quietly, all the brusqueness gone.

  ‘I’ve always had this thought, you see, that we’re all such visitors in each other’s lives – mere visitors. Even husbands and wives. Visitations are all we can manage, really: perhaps all we should require.’ He paused. ‘I know what I’d like, of course. Apart from anything else, I’d like to come and find you one day, spend a little innocent time with you. But I don’t believe in acting wilfully against the grain, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Endangering things?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So this visit, this short, short visit, has to be over. I’m sorry.’ He kissed Miranda again, lightly on the forehead this time, and put a hand on her neck. ‘There’s a dreadful irony, isn’t there, in the two faces of recognition?’ He gave a small laugh. ‘On the one hand, the joy. On the other, such sadness, having to deny … But still, the fact is, we’ve met. At least we’ve met.’

  ‘We’ve met, yes,’ said Miranda.

  In silence they walked back to the college, swung through the plate-glass doors, stood dazed for a moment by the unkind whiteness of the lights. Ivan touched her chin with a teasing finger, smiled.

  ‘Never confuse me with a pure Elizabethan,’ he said. ‘Hardy’s my man, just as much as yours, that’s why I’ve always read you with such interest. And Hardy it was who said – didn’t he? – “Goodbye is not worth while”.’ Then he turned away quickly and was gone, dissolved into the glare of the long white corridor, on his way to some single bedroom identical to Miranda’s own.

  She sat up, awake, all night, watched the morning harden, allowed herself a few fantasies about Ivan Whiteham-Jones, and then attempted to discard them. She arranged herself to go home, and when she arrived there she was pleased, as always, to be welcomed by her husband and her daughter.

  Somehow, she did not mention to Jim that she had met Ivan. They were long past the stage of reporting what had gone on at each other’s conferences. Besides, there was nothing of substance that could be told. But in the rhythm of normality that swiftly returned, the glint of possibility she had now experienced flickered its small light in her soul, reminding her in some disturbing way that it had ‘altered all’. As she continued in her happy marriage, Miranda found herself hoping, for a while, there might be some word from Ivan, and then she found herself surreptitiously looking out for him. Once she heard him (that voice!) on the radio; another time she caught his last few moments on a television programme. At Christmas, as a sort of politeness, and to show she had not missed whatever had been recognised and denied at the conference, she sent him a card, care of his university. He did not send
one back, but then she did not expect he would. None the less, she could not quite forget this brief visitor, this man who, in another life, might have been hers.

  The Weighing Up

  ‘The last time I weighed myself, yesterday morning to be precise, the scales registered twelve stone and one ounce. That is not a record. I have been several pounds heavier. On rare occasions, these last five years, and quite by chance, I’ve also been a pound or so lighter.

  You may be surprised by my saying this, and possibly not believe me, but I am not depressed by my weight. Passing shop windows, or the occasional glance in a mirror, confirm that all hope of ever retrieving my old, slight shape, has quite gone. And I don’t mind.

  The funny thing is, nor does Jeremy. We married twenty-three years ago when I was a mere slip of a thing – an old joke was that he referred to me as a slipover rather than a pushover. Food, then, did not concern me much. I cooked because I had to: meals for the children, dinner for Jeremy on the rare occasions he was home. But I did make quite an effort, for years, with Sunday lunch. There were constant disputes about whether it should be chocolate pudding or Brown Betty (as a family, we all love apples) each week. I made whatever they finally decided upon, and enjoyed their appreciation.

  It was after Sam and Kathy left for university and only Laura, our youngest, was left at home, that I became unstuck. The trouble was, used to making enough for five healthy appetites, I miscalculated when cooking for two. I always made too much, to be on the safe side. There were always things left over. Remembering the post-war economy of my own childhood, and not liking to see things go to waste, I found it hard to leave them in the fridge or larder to await reheating. It became impossible to throw them away. Finishing them off myself – cold rice pudding for elevenses, cold chicken curry for tea, time doesn’t matter to an anarchistic eater – became my habit.