A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas
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dust showed where pictures had hung on the cream walls. Harriet and Leo were dismantling their four years.
Leo abruptly stopped packing books into a box and sat down on the sofa. He was listening to Harriet opening and closing drawers in the kitchen. Goaded by the sound he shouted at her, ‘Your mixer, my toaster, is this what everything’s come to between us?’
Harriet appeared in the doorway. She looked tired.
‘This is the nasty but inevitable aftermath of something that has already happened, don’t you understand? Who owns what isn’t significant. You can have the whole lot, if you want. But the flat has to be cleared because we’re selling it, and all this stuff has to go somewhere. Why don’t you help instead of sitting there?’
‘I don’t want to help. I don’t want us to do it. Can’t we stop, and forget about it?’
Wearily, because they had travelled this ground a dozen times already, Harriet said, ‘It isn’t forgettable. You know it, and I know it.’
They had fenced with each other, like this, for weeks. They had met only a handful of times but each time they had trodden the same exhausting paths.
Leo wanted to go back to where they had been, before Harriet had seen the play of light and shadow over the girl’s body in his studio. He wanted to pretend that nothing had happened, obliterating by denying, and he wanted to compound the deception by pretending that they had been happy except for his own insignificant lapse. He talked about babies, fantasising himself into fatherhood, reproaching Harriet for her refusal.
Yet Harriet knew that his insistence on all these things grew out of his need to oppose her, on any grounds. Bitterness had driven between them. If she had wanted to stay, she thought, to cling to the debris, it would have been Leo demanding brutal severance. There is no such thing, Harriet reminded herself, as an amicable separation. She clung to her decision with a steeliness that surprised her. She remembered, too, that her husband had accused her of coldness and rigidity. Well then, she was only behaving in character. And she was glad, with chilly relief, that there were no children to witness or to be hurt by this disengagement.
Leo looked up at her. She thought he was going to take her arm and pull her down beside him, and stepped instinctively backwards.
‘Don’t do that,’ Leo whispered. ‘Don’t act as if I’m going to hurt you.’
You have, Harriet answered silently. You won’t, any more.
‘Harriet.’ Leo had never had to beg for anything before. It was clear that he was making his last bid. ‘Stay with me.’
She knew his insistence was based on a false premise, because she didn’t love him any longer. Nor did she believe, although his obstinacy prevented him from seeing it for himself, that Leo loved her either. The finality of it was sad, the insignificance of what was left was pathetic.
‘I can’t.’
Leo scowled. He looked like a small boy who had unexpectedly been denied a treat. That was it, Harriet realised. She had spent four years of her life married to a twelve-year-old boy. A twelve-year-old, tricked out with broad shoulders, a rakishly tumbled mop of black hair, and a well-developed libido. Unbidden, but as sharp as one of his own photographs, her last sight of his most prominent feature came back to her. And the vision of her husband trying to hide it behind his shirt.
A tremor passed through Harriet. It rose from her chest and concentrated at the back of her throat, and then escaped as a short burst of guilty laughter. Her hands flew up to her cheeks as she tried to suppress it.
Leo stared at her, dislike clearly visible in his face. ‘I think you’ve gone mad.’
‘Just the opposite, I think,’ Harriet said. ‘If you really won’t help, I’ll have to divide things without you.’
She turned away from him and went back into the kitchen. Sabatier knives, maple chopping board, Le Creuset casserole dishes. Harriet felt faintly shocked herself as she laid them out. There was nothing to laugh at, Leo was right. In truth she found this dismemberment of their domestic life, the lifting of utensils from hooks and extraction of cutlery from snugly shaped trays, as painful and difficult as anything she had ever known.
As suddenly as the laughter had come, she felt the weight of tears in her eyes. To hold them back she stopped work and went across to stare out of the kitchen window. The view was familiar in every detail from married hours spent at the sink, filling kettles, washing dishes, preparing vegetables. The dingy curtains in the opposite windows would be taken down, and fresh ones put up by new owners. The flowering cherry on the corner would blossom and shed its leaves, but Leo and she would not be here to see it. She turned her back on the view. She hadn’t cried, and she wouldn’t cry now.
It would be easier to stay, of course.
She knew their life, and the patterns of it. Leo provided a husbandly shelter for her, for all his faults. She was used to being a couple, to parties and holidays and Christmases spent as one half of a whole. It would be simpler to stay in the shelter and look out on the world, believing her husband’s assurances.
Only it would be wrong.
It would be a capitulation, and Harriet in her controlled and decisive way hated capitulation.
She bent to the job again. She took up a melon baller that had been a Christmas present from Averil, never used, and hovered with it between Leo’s packing case and the one intended for herself. After a moment she put it with her own things. There came another irrational urge to laugh. She was sending back the son, but she didn’t want to give offence by rejecting the melon baller as well.
When she looked up again she saw that Leo was watching her from the doorway.
‘You’ve made a terrible mess.’
‘Completion of the sale is in ten days’ time. We have to empty the place by then. There isn’t any point in maintaining the House Beautiful, Leo. It’s all over.’
Seeing his face, she thought for a moment that he too might be going to cry. They faced each other awkwardly, and then Harriet picked her way through the coils of newspaper packing. They put their arms around each other and then stood still, looking in different directions, saying nothing.
At length Leo let her go. He picked up a coffee-pot, asking ‘Where’s this going?’
‘With you, if you like. If you’ve got room.’
Leo was partly living in his studio, partly still at the flat, and spending an occasioned regressive night at his parents’ house in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Harriet had rented a basement flat in Belsize Park. It wasn’t convenient for the shop, and north London felt like foreign territory after the west, but it belonged to a friend of hers who had gone to Paris for a year, and it was cheap because two cats came with it.
‘I don’t want it,’ Leo answered. ‘I’ve got one at the studio.’
He hovered beside her, getting in the way, taking out utensils that she had already packed and staring at them as if he had never seen them before. She worked on a few minutes, controlling her irritation, then gave up.
‘I’ve got to go soon. There must be a carload here anyway.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home.’ She meant Belsize Park, said it defiantly. ‘To drop this off and change, then I’m going to Jane’s. She’s having a party.’
In the past, of course, Leo would have been coming as well, even though he and Jane had never felt much affection for one another.
‘Yeah. Well, I might have a night out too.’
‘Good idea.’
They were defending themselves, and masking the defence with cheerfulness. Harriet wanted to get away.
Leo helped her to carry her plants and cardboard boxes down the stairs to the street. Harriet felt humiliated by this public admission of their