A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [112]
Then she would telephone. The knowledge that I was still needed would be like satisfaction enough, and would be converted, while I waited for her in the flat, into irritation and self-disgust, which would continue right up to the moment when, after pattering up the external staircase, she came into the sitting room, all the strain of Raymond and the intervening days showing on her face. Then very soon, in my own mind, the intervening days would drop away; time would telescope. Physically now I knew her so well; one occasion would very soon seem linked to the last.
But that idea of continuity, however overpowering at those intimate, narrow moments, was an illusion, as I knew. There were the hours and days in her house, with Raymond; there was her own privacy, and her own search. She had less and less news. There were events now we didn’t share, and there were fewer things that could be told me without some gloss or explanation.
She telephoned me now every ten days. Ten days seemed to be the limit beyond which she couldn’t go. It occurred to me on one of these days—when, the big foam bed already straightened, she was making up her face and considering parts of herself in the dressing table mirror, before going back to the Domain—it occurred to me then that there was something bloodless about our relationship just at that moment. I might have been a complaisant father or husband, or even a woman friend, watching her prepare herself for a lover.
An idea like that is like a vivid dream, fixing a fear we don’t want to acknowledge, and having the effect of a revelation. I suppose that, thinking of my own harassment and Raymond’s defeat, I had begun to consider Yvette a defeated person as well, trapped in the town, as sick of herself and the wasting asset of her body as I was sick of myself and my anxieties. Now, looking at Yvette in front of the dressing table mirror, seeing her bright with more than I had just given her, I saw how wrong I had been. Those blank days when she was away from me, those days about which I didn’t inquire, would have been full of possibilities for her. I began to wait for confirmation. And then, two meetings later, I thought I found it.
I knew her so well. With her, even now, I had never ceased to look outward from myself. No other way would have had meaning, no other way would have been possible. What she drew out of me remained extraordinary to me. Her responses were part of the gift, and I had grown used to them as they had developed; I had learned to gauge them finely. On each occasion I was aware of her sensual memory of me beginning to work, linking the present to the past. But now, on the occasion I speak of, her responses were confused. Something had intervened; some new habit had begun to form, breaking up the delicate membrane of older memory. It was what I had been expecting. It had to be, one day. But the moment was like poison.
Afterwards came that bloodless interlude. The big foam bed had been made up—that housewifely service still, after what used to be passion. I was standing. She was standing too, considering her lips in the mirror.
She said, “You make me look so good. What will I do without you?” That was a standard courtesy. But then she said, “Raymond will want to make love to me when he sees me looking like this.” And that was unusual, not like her at all.
I said, “Does it excite you?”
“Older men are not as repulsive as you seem to think. And I am a woman, after all. If a man does certain things to me, I react.”
She didn’t mean to wound me, but she did. And then I thought: But she’s probably right. Raymond’s like a whipped boy. It’s all he can turn to now.
I said, “I suppose we’ve made him suffer.”
“Raymond? I don’t know. I don’t think so. He’s never given any sign. Of course, he may tell himself something different now.”
I walked with her to the landing: the shadow of the house over the yard, the trees above