A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas
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her for buying the cinema tickets, and they would go off for their evening together.
She waited, but there was only silence and the closed door. It was impossible to imagine what Leo and the tall, thin girl were doing on the other side of it.
Slowly, silently, Harriet closed the outer door too and stood in darkness again on the wrong side of it. She didn’t bother to press the switch for its premonitory click. She went quietly back down the stairs, with her hand pressed flat against the cold, shiny curve of the wall to guide her.
Harriet didn’t remember, afterwards, how she got home. She supposed that she must have followed the route mechanically, borne along by the homegoing tide.
When she reached the flat she found herself walking through the rooms, touching things, picking up vases and books and ornaments as if she had never seen them before. She went to each window and pressed her forehead against the glass, looking out at the familiar vistas. She found it hard to believe that she had lived in this place for four years, ever since her marriage. It seemed unfamiliar now, the house of strangers. She didn’t know what to do with herself in these rooms. There was no food to cook; usually one of them shopped on the way home. Tonight, there would have been the Thai dinner.
At last, she sat down in a Victorian chair that she had recovered herself. She ran the tips of her fingers over the smooth heads of the upholstery tacks, looked out of the window at the changing light. The day was ending and the sky was thinly clouded, suffused with pink.
Harriet felt the fingers of shock beginning to loosen their hold on her. She began to think, effortfully at first, as if she had forgotten how to do it. The flat was silent, even the road outside seemed unusually still.
She thought about her marriage to Leo. She wondered how long it was exactly since they had stopped making each other happy, and then found that she couldn’t recall the precise dimensions of happiness at all. She knew, in the same way that she knew the multiplication tables or the words of certain songs, that they must have been happy together once. Leo was Jewish and his prosperous parents had been opposed to their only son marrying out. Their opposition had only strengthened Harriet’s and Leo’s determination to marry at once. They had been happy then, in their blithe certainty. And afterwards? She could remember certain times, a holiday when it had rained and it hadn’t mattered at all, a long drive that they had made together, little domestic events that she could no longer recall, only the joy that went with them. That had gone. She wished she could at least remember when. They lived together now, but that was only living, the plain mechanics of it.
Harriet wondered how long her husband had had other women. How many, and how often? The memory of the tall girl with her planes of light and shadow came back to her.
Harriet thought about Leo himself. Leo was handsome, stubborn, amusing. Women were always drawn to him, as she had been herself. He was a man like others she had known, who found it difficult to put his feelings into words. Or perhaps not even difficult, but unnecessary.
The light was fading fast. Harriet had the sense of ordinary life fading with it, the edges of reality softly crumbling and falling away into fine dust. It made her feel sad, the more sad because it was irrevocable.
It was dark when she heard Leo’s key in the lock. She had sat on in the darkness without moving and now she felt stiff and cold. He came in, clicking the light on at the door so that she blinked in the blaze of it.
They looked at each other, trying to gauge the precise gradations of mutual hostility. Harriet knew Leo well enough not to have expected contrition. Like a small boy, Leo would cover his guilt with defiance. But now she couldn’t read him at all; his face was flat and cold. She heard the smallest noise, the ground around them softly crumbling into dust.
‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ Leo said stiffly. ‘You should have telephoned, or rung the bell.’
There was no tentative bridge in the words, if that was what she had hoped for. She knew, in any case, that there were no foundations for a bridge. Harriet said the first thing that came into her head.
‘You looked ridiculous.’
He stared at her. ‘You’re such a bitch, Harriet, do you know that? You’re cold-hearted and self-righteous. You operate like a machine.’
Probably he was right, Harriet thought. She didn’t believe that she was any of those things, but she was willing to accept that they might know each other better than they knew themselves.
‘Have there been other times, Leo? Before tonight? Could you tell me the truth, please?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, you’ll tell me the truth, or yes, there have been other girls?’
‘There have been other girls.’
‘How many? How long have you been doing this?’
‘Three or four. Eighteen months. Perhaps two years.’
‘Don’t you even know for sure?’
‘Does it bloody well matter?’
Harriet stood up abruptly. She went to the window and looked out. The streetlights had come on, but there was still a child skateboarding on the pavement. She watched him weaving in and out of the lamp-posts. She wanted to close the curtains, but she didn’t want to shut herself in here, in this flat. Behind her she heard Leo go into the kitchen and take a beer out of the fridge. He came back into the room, dropping the ring-pull into the nearest ashtray with a tiny clink. Harriet turned to face him. Her legs and back ached with sitting motionless for so long.
‘So what do you want to do?’ she asked him.
She felt the ground dropping away, faster and faster, in ragged chunks now. Chasms had opened up everywhere, and there was nowhere to put her feet.
‘Do? I don’t know. What is there to do?’
Harriet’s lips felt stiff. In their quarrels before now she had made similar suggestions but it had been to test him, even to test her own aversion to the idea. But this time, when she said, ‘Call it a day, Leo. Agree to separate,’ she spoke the words flatly because she knew what would happen was irrevocable. Tonight they had passed the last possible turning-point.
Leo’s bounce, the cocksureness that had been a part of him for as long as she had known him, seemed to have drained out of his body. He sat down heavily in the Victorian chair, his hands dangling loosely between his knees.
‘If you want to. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.’
‘Are you unhappy?’
‘Yes, I’m unhappy.’
‘So am I,’ Harriet whispered.
But there was no path left that they could safely tread to reach one another. In the silence that followed Harriet went into the kitchen and began mechanically to tidy up where no tidying-up needed to be done. After a moment or two, the telephone rang. She glanced at the digital clock above the door of the oven. It was ten past eleven. Late, for a social call. She lifted the receiver from its wall socket, leaned back against the counter-top.
‘Harriet, I’m sorry, were you asleep?’
‘Charlie?’
It was Charlie Thimbell, husband of her old friend Jenny. Charlie was a friend, too.
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘It’s late, I know it’s late.’
Harriet gripped the receiver tightly. ‘Charlie, what’s happened?’
‘It’s Jenny. She started to bleed.’
Jenny was thirty-two weeks pregnant. Harriet had begun to count the days with her.
‘When?’
‘Tonight. Seven o’clock. The ambulance came, rushed her in.’ Harriet could tell that Charlie was shaking. Even his voice shook. Harriet was aware of Leo appearing in the kitchen doorway, his eyes