the team who’d called him in, some sort of thank you for that, which seemed excessive. A couple of days later, another gift: areferee’s whistle. He rang his contact in the team, who denied it. Then he told Paddy that someone had asked for his address, the girl who’d played for them, Bridget.
The idea that he was being pursued produced conflicting emotions. Partly it was the Groucho Marx line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have me as a member. More strongly, the aphrodisiacal effect of flattery. Or simply that of curiosity. He wondered about her body. She was almost his height. Previously he’d observed the four-inch rule or whatever it was.
The boy thrashing away on the beach didn’t look their way even though they were the only people visible. The horses had evaporated. He worked that aerial.
There was a scene he thought of, from the pivotal hotel night duty period. It was the morning and Bridget was going to work just as he was coming home. They met in the kitchen where he was hesitating in front of the cereals. Paddy said that it was hard to know what to eat and this gave her an opportunity to renew the attack. But why say ‘attack’, these were reasonable questions. He was a parody of male inconstancy. Years later when his sister, Stephanie, was left by Paul Shawn, Paddy experienced a shudder of knowingness. He hated Paul and the situations weren’t the same at all and Paul’s behaviour was far worse than his own since it involved small children and boundless and ongoing deceptions, but he recognised himself somewhere in that mess. Paddy had a sense of the mechanism at work. Was he having a crisis? Bridget asked. Was he seeing someone else? Was he losing it? Was he taking Vitamin C? He looked pasty, she said. He looked dreadful. He smelled of hotel.
‘What does it smell like?’ he said. It seemed the only part of the conversation that he could enter safely.
‘Air,’ she said flatly, ‘air conditioned air. Tell me when you’ll quit. Give me a timeline for this crisis at least, so we can plan.’
The shift-work made Paddy even more sharply her opposite. States of mind that were interestingly dreamy then oddly particular had begun to affect him. Sometimes he felt on his head for a cap he wasn’t wearing. He had to repeat the action a few minutes later. He believed he was wearing glasses and reached to take them off. He said to Bridget, ‘Have you ever seen in movies from twenty, thirty years ago, how they walk along the corridor of a hotel at night and everyone’s put their shoes out?’
‘No,’ she said.
He could see his reverie was almost physically painful for her but he went on. He was sure they’d watched these movies together. Part of his Pygmalion phase perhaps. He’d rented the videos and sat on the sofa, her feet in his hands. She always had sore feet, his Eliza. ‘It was a common practice. Perhaps someone came and shined them in the night, it was a service offered. But there are those scenes in movies, showing neat pairs of shoes outside each door. Someone walks along, trying to figure out who’s behind each door from their shoes.’
‘What’s the relevance to you wasting your life? You’d like to shine shoes now?’
‘No but I find that a very powerful and moving image somehow. The empty shoes of those sleeping guests.’ He had other things he wanted to say but she cut him off.
‘I don’t know if you’re even awake right now.’ She peered into his eyes. ‘Why is your hair all grey? Where is your hair gone?’ She was studying him up close. ‘Patrick,’ she said, with a sudden and sincere curiosity, ‘why do you hate me so much?’
This was the cue for them both to burst into tears. Simultaneously they gave way to an unacknowledged grief, which was both surprising and obvious. Oh yes, this. This pain. Their marriage had become a question circling each of them in isolation. Paddy saw the question as a particularly vicious and persistent
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