In prospect, another one of those too long, dim summer evenings of low cloud. Total darkness would have suited her better. When she passed a key-cutting shop, she made her heart beat harder imagining a shouting row with Jack about the lockout, face-to-face in the square under the dripping trees, overheard by neighbors, who were also colleagues. She would be entirely in the wrong.
She turned east, passed the LSE, skirted Lincoln’s Inn Fields, crossed High Holborn, then, to delay her arrival home, went west again, down narrow streets of mid-Victorian artisanal workshops, now hairdressers, lockups, sandwich bars. She crossed Red Lion Square, past empty wet aluminum chairs andtables of the park café, past Conway Hall, where a small crowd was gathered waiting to go in, decent, white-haired, careworn people, Quakers perhaps, ready for an evening of remonstration with things as they stood. Well, she had her own such evening ahead. But to belong to the law and all its historical accumulation bound one closer to things as they stood. Even as you resisted or denied it. More than half a dozen embossed invitation cards lay on a polished walnut table in the hallway at Gray’s Inn Square. The Inns of Court, the universities, charities, various royal societies, eminent acquaintances, calling on Jack and Fiona Maye, themselves crafted through the years into a miniature institution, to step out in public in their best clothes, lend their weight, eat, drink, talk and return home before midnight.
She went slowly along Theobald’s Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, whether it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought. To be caught out enacting her part in a cliché showed poor taste rather than a moral lapse. Restless husband in one last throw, brave wife maintaining her dignity, younger woman remote and blameless. And she had thought her acting days ended on a summer lawn, just before she fell in love.
As it turned out, coming home was not so difficult after all. She was occasionally back from work before Jack, and it surprised her to feel soothed as she stepped into the sanctuary dimness of the hall and its scent of lavender polish, and half pretend to herself that nothing had changed, or that it was about to come right. Before she turned on the lights she put her bag down and listened. The summer cold had brought on the central heating. Now the radiators ticked unevenly as they cooled. She heard the faint sound of orchestral music from a downstairs apartment, Mahler,
langsam und ruhig
. Less faintly, a song thrush pedantically repeating each ornamental phrase, the sound conducted cleanly down a chimney flue. Then she went through the rooms, turning on the lights, even though it was barely seven thirty. Back in the hall to retrieve her bag, she noticed that the locksmith had left no trace of his visit. Not even a wood shaving. Why should he, when he was only changing the barrel of the lock, and why should she care? But the absence of any trace of his visit was a reminder of Jack’s absence, a little tug downward on her spirits, and to counter it she took her papers into the kitchen and skimmed through one of the next day’s cases while she waited for the kettle to boil.
She could have phoned one of three friends, but she could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real. Too soon for sympathy or advice, too soon to hear Jack damned by loyal chums. Instead, she passed the evening in an empty state, a condition of numbness. She ate bread,cheese and olives with a glass of white wine, and passed an interminable period at the piano. First, in a spirit of defiance, she played through her Bach partita. Occasionally, she and
She turned east, passed the LSE, skirted Lincoln’s Inn Fields, crossed High Holborn, then, to delay her arrival home, went west again, down narrow streets of mid-Victorian artisanal workshops, now hairdressers, lockups, sandwich bars. She crossed Red Lion Square, past empty wet aluminum chairs andtables of the park café, past Conway Hall, where a small crowd was gathered waiting to go in, decent, white-haired, careworn people, Quakers perhaps, ready for an evening of remonstration with things as they stood. Well, she had her own such evening ahead. But to belong to the law and all its historical accumulation bound one closer to things as they stood. Even as you resisted or denied it. More than half a dozen embossed invitation cards lay on a polished walnut table in the hallway at Gray’s Inn Square. The Inns of Court, the universities, charities, various royal societies, eminent acquaintances, calling on Jack and Fiona Maye, themselves crafted through the years into a miniature institution, to step out in public in their best clothes, lend their weight, eat, drink, talk and return home before midnight.
She went slowly along Theobald’s Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, whether it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought. To be caught out enacting her part in a cliché showed poor taste rather than a moral lapse. Restless husband in one last throw, brave wife maintaining her dignity, younger woman remote and blameless. And she had thought her acting days ended on a summer lawn, just before she fell in love.
As it turned out, coming home was not so difficult after all. She was occasionally back from work before Jack, and it surprised her to feel soothed as she stepped into the sanctuary dimness of the hall and its scent of lavender polish, and half pretend to herself that nothing had changed, or that it was about to come right. Before she turned on the lights she put her bag down and listened. The summer cold had brought on the central heating. Now the radiators ticked unevenly as they cooled. She heard the faint sound of orchestral music from a downstairs apartment, Mahler,
langsam und ruhig
. Less faintly, a song thrush pedantically repeating each ornamental phrase, the sound conducted cleanly down a chimney flue. Then she went through the rooms, turning on the lights, even though it was barely seven thirty. Back in the hall to retrieve her bag, she noticed that the locksmith had left no trace of his visit. Not even a wood shaving. Why should he, when he was only changing the barrel of the lock, and why should she care? But the absence of any trace of his visit was a reminder of Jack’s absence, a little tug downward on her spirits, and to counter it she took her papers into the kitchen and skimmed through one of the next day’s cases while she waited for the kettle to boil.
She could have phoned one of three friends, but she could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real. Too soon for sympathy or advice, too soon to hear Jack damned by loyal chums. Instead, she passed the evening in an empty state, a condition of numbness. She ate bread,cheese and olives with a glass of white wine, and passed an interminable period at the piano. First, in a spirit of defiance, she played through her Bach partita. Occasionally, she and
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