This is a story about a man and three women. The man's name is Francis (nobody ever calls him Frank). The women are Anne, dead, whom he loves; Judith, his wife, whom he also loves but not as he loves Anne; and Marie, Anne's oldest and closest friend, whom he is very fond of because when they meet, which is not often, he can talk to her about Anne. In addition he has two grown-up daughters, whom he adores and could not bear to lose. They won't figure much in this story, but they might. We might shift aside into their intersecting circle, have them at the centre, and wonder what the whole histoire has done to them. And Sophia, Anne's only child, what about her?
Francis is a big man, not at all corpulent, but very tall, very strongly and handsomely made. When Marie meets him—it is the first anniversary of Anne's death—he has to bow and she has to lift on tiptoe to embrace. How he stands out in a crowd! What a hopeless spy or suicide bomber he would make! The police, going through their miles of footage, would easily identify him. Assignations in the big city are an anxious business. It is hard to believe that the only person you desire to see will indeed appear among the thousands hurrying through the barriers or forcing up shoulder to shoulder from underground. Any small lateness and the faith lapses out of you like blood from a stuck pig. But meeting Francis does not make you anxious in that way. He is there first. And so prominent! Head and shoulders above the crowd. He wears a black overcoat and a black woollen hat. In the little restaurant—he has reconnoitred a quiet place—Marie is shocked to see how white his hair is now.
Francis has an open face. He looks like the honourable hero of a boys' adventure story; he might be called Sir Henry, out in Africa in the 1890s, obeying a simple code of honesty and decency among foreigners who live slyly. He looks so at risk. His bigness and candour must expose him to all manner of harms. That is the appearance he presents across the little table on 7th January, a year after the death of Anne, his lover, to Marie, her dearest friend. Candidly he tells her what she knows already—knows from Anne, from many conversations. That he can't stop lying. In that respect at least death has made no difference. Did you think it would?
That's what Judith says. Did I really think it would? She says I need my head seeing to if I ever thought for a minute it would make any difference, that woman being dead.
Judith is a psychotherapist. Her particular concern is children and what their parents do to them. She knows, says Francis. The problem is she doesn't know, says Marie. I mean she knows how the mind works or the soul, says Francis. But it does not do her any good.
Marie knows that Francis will have lied to see her. Her rare meetings with him are so clandestine, so hard to arrange—she may not write, email, phone him at home or on his mobile but must wait for the call—that she has felt, in those circumstances at least, like the continuation of Anne in his life, as though she, in the place of the dead woman, were now his lover. And sometimes she has wondered could she fall in love with him. He is in many ways lovable. Even in his lying he is more pitiable than detestable. She is sure he cannot be good at lying. Still, she is not inclined to love him. And he has never looked at her as though he might love her. Anne is the one. She is their beloved subject. And how rich Marie is in that respect! She had decades of the life of Anne. She pities Francis who had so little. Sometimes she feels him to be trying to increase his portion by asking her about the years before his time. Strange that we ever say the dead are at rest. Truly, death seems to goad them into more and more life, in us, who are left.
Marie was right to say that not knowing was Judith's problem. Which is not to say that knowing would have brought her peace. Francis began lying about Anne even before he suspected he was falling in love with her. For that he blamed Judith. I can't speak easily about any woman, he said, without her becoming suspicious. So even before he loved Anne he was watching Judith's face for the signs of suspicion. What exactly are you afraid of? Marie asked him. That she will kill herself, he answered. I see, said Marie. But having mentioned Anne a few times, as casually as possible, when he knew he loved her and she vanished from his speech, Judith wondered why, and asked. Then he began lying thoroughly and in earnest and she knew at once, by his bearing, that he was unfaithful, she knew the fact of his infidelity but none of the body of it, none of the details; and after that substance she hungered, and Anne's being dead made no difference to her hunger; if anything she got hungrier, she starved, because the fact of his faithless love was now unalterable, he would never fall out of love with the other woman and come home to her, faithful again and chastened and dutiful, he would always love someone else, who was now untouchable. She knows the fact but not the body and blood of it, not the living details, because he has always kept them to himself and lied, because, try as she will, she has never found them out, never enough of them. And what she hungers after is the full enormity, the fullness of its terrible power to hurt her. That, at least, is Francis's present understanding of his wife's tormented state.
Francis speaks most, Marie listens. Listens and thinks her own thoughts. Francis is just the sort of man a woman will think her own thoughts about as he talks, entirely involved in what he is saying, and she sits listening, sympathetic but at a slight remove. She knows a good deal about him, intimate things, from having been the confidante of the woman he loves. She knows of his passion and gentleness, and that his wife is frigid. Is Judith really frigid? He told Anne she was and Anne told Marie. Anne, almost to the end, believed that gave her an advantage in the struggle. When Francis compared the two women, the love he felt for them and the love they felt for him, relative warmth was a measure. Another was trust. One woman trusted him, one absolutely does not.
Still, it is strange to be hated by a woman she has never met but whom, through confidences, she knows intimately. And she knows me hardly at all. Only as agent and accomplice in her suffering. She has seen your photograph, says Francis. She went through my books the other day and found that photograph of you and Anne embracing and laughing in the sunshine with the big waves at your backs. It was on the table, on my plate, when I came down for supper. I could not think of anything to say. No wonder she hates me, says Marie.
Marie has tried to placate this malevolent spirit with pity and understanding, but in vain. Do you have a photograph of Judith? she asks. Judith has asked him the same question. Of course I do, he answers. And takes it out of his wallet hurriedly. Judith is standing outside the home, in the front porch, between her two daughters, holding them in against her. She is smiling, the girls are also smiling; but in Judith's look—she has a transparent beauty—Marie at least, knowing what she does, discerns fear and provocation in equal measure. I see, she says. And hands the photograph back to Francis.
Would Judith kill herself? Even now, with the rival already dead? Anne always doubted she would kill herself. Anne believed it to be the wife's gambit, in desperate self-defence. And she also believed—does Francis truly know this, does he carry it around in him, unsleeping, as betrayal?—that in the end he, Francis, would call his wife's bluff, risk it, move out of house and home and live with her, Anne. Many times she told Marie she was sure that would happen. By his assurances she was persuaded that he loved her more and more, that he was only waiting for the necessary courage to grow in him and spread till he was full of it. Then he would act. But she got ill and began to die. And Francis has not lost his wife, his beloved daughters and his home. Might he still? If he goes on grieving and secretly meeting the friend, the confidante, the accomplice, might Judith still not do it, feeling herself to have been defeated, knowing even without the body and blood of evidence that he lived with her, had children with her, but loved another woman with a romantic and ineradicable passion?
Marie wearies of Francis and Judith, stops eating, stops listening, and grieves over her dead friend. Francis runs on a while, he is possessed, but at length he notices that Marie has absented herself, and he halts. Forgive me, he says. I have nobody to talk to. It is all in hiding still. I daren't show anything that will betray me. Marie wonders at this. Would he not be better even now, even too late, in a room of his own? There he could have some mementoes of Anne on view around him and show an honest face to a mirror at least and sit and think about her and write about her whenever he wished. Would not that be a place where she, Anne, could visit? For she cannot visit him in his married home. Marie is about to say, Tell me, Francis, tell me truthfully (it troubles me), would you in fact in the end have left Judith and your children and gone to live with Anne, as she believed you would, had she not fallen ill and died? The sentence is formed, she is about to utter it, when he pre-empts her by asking, Did you bring the photograph with you? Marie takes what he wishes to see out of her bag. It is a picture of Anne in a forest quite close to the beach where she, Marie, had stood with her to be photographed by Francis on a background of the rising incoming waves. It might be a forest in Celtic legend. Indeed, they christened it Brocéliande. The trees are hazels, willows, small oaks, all draped in a sunny hoar frost. And the woman in this enchanted place is radiantly happy. When Anne smiles with happiness, as she did very often during her couple of years in love with Francis, it is whole and pure, without forethought, question or regret, it is entire and on the verge of laughter, the body and soul of this woman in love are lit up in the luminously shrouded Celtic wood with merriment, she is showing her lover what it feels like to be loved and what it feels like and looks like loving him in return. Yes, Francis, says Marie, kind to him again, that is what you made her feel like, it is ungainsayable. Can you not be comforted by that? Now take this photograph and hide it somewhere, if you must, and look at it very occasionally and be comforted. But Francis shakes his head. How white he has become. But not like an old man, he looks quite youthful still, like the hero of an adventure whose hair blanched overnight because of some horror he had to pass through. I can't, he says. You keep it for me.
The waiter clears away their plates. Will they have coffee? Francis looks at his watch. Yes, says Marie. Two espressos, please. Funny thing about lying, says Francis. I lie all the time now whether there's any need or not. Judith asks me did I see a certain colleague. No, I say, he was off sick. But in truth I stood and chatted with him in the staff room about the war. She asks did I come straight home. Yes, I say, though I got off two stops early and walked the rest for some fresh air. And so on. I live in fear that she will sit me down and unravel me.
Suddenly at the table or while they are sitting quietly together in the evening, she will ask him what he is thinking. He must guard his face so that it never looks absent. Lying side by side in the dark, neither sleeping, he fears she will begin to question him. There is a particular tone of voice, that of possession, of being ridden, of being entirely at the mercy, she shifts into another key, monotonous, the way the deaf speak, merciless to herself and to him. When he hears that tone of voice in the darkness he feels cold around the heart, all the courage goes out of him, he is mere bulk, waiting abjectly for torment. These passages are cumulative, each new one comes compounded with its predecessors. There seems to be no past tense, only present. It is now that she suffers and inflicts. I don't mind you fucking her, the voice says—but she does, oh she does, and besides the woman is dead—you're a man and that is what men do. But if you hold her hand in public or she takes your arm or you call her "my love" or any such thing or if you ever talk about me and tell her of my difficulties and pity me, the pair of you, and I find out for sure I'll kill you or I'll kill myself and it won't matter which. No, he says, none of those things. Swear it. He swears it, the liar. You're lying, the voice says, foreign, refracted away from both of them through the icy medium of her loathing, fear and shame. He has turned on the light, they have sat up in bed together, he has seen that the features of her face are like the voice, they have slanted away, they are a slant and helpless version of her beautiful face, ugly as a devil's, like the insult of a stroke. He takes her in his arms, he enfolds her in his greater strength, though she struggles, she wants none of him, so that his force is only another violation. He begs her to have pity on herself and on him. And sometimes she does, she will, the strength needed to torment them both goes out of her, and she weeps and begs him to be kind to her, to do as he must or as he likes, but be kind to her, love her, never leave her. So in love and pity he renews his promises.
Marie and Francis have finished their coffees. They get the bill. Marie sees that he is nervous about the time. Again her pity for him is wearing thin. What manner of memorial is this for her dead friend? At least I nursed her, he says, when it was already too late, I was resolute then, I called every evening after school, sat with her, held her hand, read to her, saw she was comfortable, carried her through from the sitting room to the bed, she was nothing in my arms, she was as light as the wing of a swan that has been severed and the wind and the sun have wasted it, my strength was out of all proportion. I gave her the morphine. I settled her to sleep. I waited till her daughter came or the night nurse. Judith knew. I said nothing, I answered nothing, she knew and I let her suffer it. I know that, says Marie. I do know that. She takes his big hand between hers. His face looks like that of a large beast, bewildered by its captivity and torment.
The street is heaving, the people are all in a hurry. Francis covers his white hair, bows down to Marie who lifts on tiptoe into his embrace. Bon courage, she says. Then he turns and leaves her, forcing through the crowd, head and shoulders above them. And long before he goes out of sight—has he no shame, is he so helpless?—he claps his left hand to his ear and Marie knows he is answering a call from Judith who is asking why for an hour and seventeen minutes his phone has been switched off. Marie remembers the funeral service, in the church with which Anne had no living connection. Anne's husband stayed away on principle. He is an atheist Marxist materialist and will have no truck with foolery. But their 16-year-old daughter Sophia was present, on the front row with Marie, looking quite lost, as though she had years of catching up to do. Until the service began Marie turned round continually to see had Francis come. Then she desisted, let him and his problems go, took Sophia by the hand, and concentrated wholly on the coffin. Only when it was over did she look round for Francis again. And there he was, standing at the door, bare-headed in his black overcoat, almost gigantic over the mourners sitting or kneeling. Seeing her he hid his eyes, then all of his face, like a child, behind his hands. Then he fled. Marie, leaving Sophia, hurried down the aisle and out. But all she saw of him on the street was his flight, and his left hand clapping the phone to his ear.
Marie stands aside from the crowd, against the window of the restaurant. They are thousands, pushing through and on and on, and beyond them the traffic, the noise. And a feeling she knows and fears begins to take hold of her: that it doesn't matter, that nothing and nobody matters, all mere complexities, all mire and blood, the more or less of misery, the more or less of happiness, such meagre portions, it does not matter. All the trouble, for what? All the hours of talk and brooding over it. Nothing but noise, confusion and pointless hastening. So many people, rising, passing, descending. Marie's friend is dead and now she must fag to a railway station and catch a train to the other end of the country.
Part II
In early March, on a morning that feels like spring, Marie receives two letters, one from Sophia, the other from Francis. She opens Francis's first, because she has not heard from him since their anniversary meeting; also because she has a hope in Sophia's letter which, if it is disappointed (as it has been before), might make the letter from Francis harder to bear.
Inside his letter Francis has enclosed a sheet of paper with a poem on. The paper, torn from an exercise book, has been screwed up into a ball and then smoothed out again. It has been inside a fist and wears a thousand creases. The poem, in Francis's handwriting, is this:
You fetched me up by force of the will
Of magic out of the grave.
You heated me with your lust and can't
Quench it now I'm alive.
Fasten your mouth on mine, human
Breath is heavenly stuff.
I'll drink your soul up, every drop.
The dead can't get enough.
Marie sets the poem aside and reads Francis's letter. In haste, he writes. I copied the poem out of an anthology that Anne used to like. I don't say she especially liked this poem. But I do. It says it all, don't you think? (PLEASE DON'T WRITE BACK.) But I was careless again and Judith found it in my pocket. She scrumpled it up and threw it in my face. She says she can't win. She says for the rest of her life she will be eaten up by that woman—Anne—who can't get enough. Tell her she got more than I got, Judith says. She got your love. How do you think I feel about that? I could live to be a hundred with you, which God forbid, and all those years and all the years before still wouldn't weigh a pennyworth against any one of your afternoons in bed with her. So Judith says. Howls really. Marie, she actually howls. And any minute the girls were arriving for our wedding anniversary. She says the cancer that ate Anne is eating her now. Only it's not a cancer, it's the woman herself, Anne, eating away at her, Judith, the wife, for vengeance. I tell her she's ill. She says indeed she is but who's making her ill? You and her have made me ill, the pair of you. And then she says a cancer is one thing, everybody sympathises if you get a cancer, because there it is, you can prove you've got it, your pain is reasonable. But what I've got won't show up on a screen. You're like everybody else, she says, you don't count sickness in the soul, you don't think it's real. Well I've got a sickness in my soul and it's real enough, whether it shows up on a screen or not. Your woman is eating me.
There is more of this. Francis writes as though he were Judith's medium. He opens his mouth and she howls through him. Marie skips some. Finally Francis leaves the subject of Judith and recounts what he calls "the fiasco of the ashes." Anne's husband, the materialist Marxist atheist, had agreed to let him have a half of Anne's ashes. Weighing the lover's brief passion against the husband's long affection, he thought that fair. So it was agreed, the rest was practicalities. Francis had decided that he would take his half all the way to the luminous hoar-frost forest and scatter them there, among the Celtic trees. But after months of rearrangements and prevarications—imagine what it cost him in lies and effort!—when Francis, without an appointment, finally called on the husband in his very comfortable flat, he was told, cheerfully and with not a word of apology, that he, the husband, had disposed of the ashes, all of them, himself. He would not say where. He said it was wrong to be sentimental about such things. The dead are dead, he said. And that is that. So now he, Francis, doesn't know where Anne's ashes are. Which means she is nowhere. Which is to say everywhere. So Judith and the poem are right, Anne is a wraith of starvation, she is in the winds and the waters and hungry everywhere.
Marie shakes her head. But she finishes Francis's letter. He has been re-reading The Dead. He is haunted by the spectre of Michael Furey at the bottom of Gretta's garden in the rain. He has an idea to adapt it for his drama group. There will be three characters: Gretta, Michael Furey and the generous Gabriel. Also a chorus of perhaps half a dozen voices. They will recount and comment on the tragic action. Perhaps they will seek to make it less unbearable. Francis has a hope—far-fetched no doubt—that in time, if he is patient and gentle, he may induce Judith into the generosity of Gabriel. The dead are not implacable, he says. If Anne appears vengefully that is because she, Judith, will not permit her to be at peace in the little bit of life she shared with me.
Marie is angered by the letter. She has tears of sorrow and pain in her eyes for her dead friend. She has a mind to scrumple up the letter and the enclosure and hurl it at the pair of them, for what they are doing to Anne. So now she is a female Michael Furey, starving to death at the bottom of the garden. She is a vampire, a visitation like cancer in another woman's life. I won't have it, says Marie aloud. That is not how she was and is. True, she didn't get her due of happiness. True, in her last weeks she grieved that she was stinted. (And Marie grieved with her, held her, cradled her, lamented with her over the cruel fact of it.) But this was a beautiful, brave and intelligent woman. How chic she was, even near the end. How funny and scurrilous, lively and careless. Such a talker, such a cheering arrival in any company. Did anyone ever laugh with such free merriment? In a trice, no magic, no evildoing, Marie can conjure up her dead friend's gaiety: arm in arm on the street with her, men stopping in their tracks, men turning their heads, amused and glad; or in the restaurant, always in the window if possible, so that in the midst of conversation, she would have the street to watch, its myriad lives, to recount and further enliven. Of course she was hungry for life, she died wanting more of it. But hear this, says Marie, indignant, even when she was dying, when the game was up, when she knew she would never get her proper share, in any interlude without pain, in the kindness of morphine, she asked after my life, after its fullness, blessed it without envy, always glad for me, never once did she begrudge it me, never once turn it to wormwood in self-pity.
Marie opens Sophia's letter, hoping for the best. She is not disappointed. In childish big handwriting, with strange formality, Sophia thanks Marie (who held her the day she was born) for her kind invitation and says that she will be glad to spend Easter with her and her family. Good, says Marie, there at least something can be done.
