A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [113]
And it was only some days later that I thought how strange it was for us to have talked of Raymond at that moment. I had talked of Raymond’s pain when I was thinking of my own, and Yvette had talked of Raymond’s needs when she was thinking of her own. We had begun to talk, if not in opposites, at least indirectly, lying and not lying, making those signals at the truth which people in certain situations find it necessary to make.
I was in bed one evening, about a week later, reading in one of my encyclopaedia magazines about the “big bang” origin of the universe. It was a familiar topic; I liked reading in my encyclopaedias about things I had read in other encyclopaedias. This kind of reading wasn’t for knowledge; I read to remind myself in an easy and enjoyable way of all the things I didn’t know. It was a form of drug; it set me dreaming of some impossible future time when, in the middle of every kind of peace, I would start at the beginning of all subjects and devote my days and nights to study.
I heard a car door slam. And I knew, before I heard the footsteps on the staircase, that it was Yvette, wonderfully arrived at this late hour, without warning. She hurried up the steps; her shoes and clothes made an extraordinary amount of noise in the passage; and she pushed the bedroom door open.
She was carefully dressed, and her face was flushed. There must have been some function she had been at. Dressed as she was, she threw herself on the bed and embraced me.
She said, “I took a chance. All through dinner I was thinking about you, and as soon as I could I slipped away. I had to. I wasn’t sure you would be here, but I took the chance.”
I could smell the dinner and the drink on her breath. It had all been so quick—from the sound of the car door to this: Yvette on the bed, the empty room transformed, Yvette in that exclamatory, delighted mood which was like the mood that had overtaken her the first time we had come back to the flat after dinner at the Domain. I found myself in tears.
She said, “I can’t stay. I’ll just give the god a kiss and go.”
Afterwards she remembered the clothes of which so far she had been quite careless. Standing before the mirror, she raised her skirt to pull down her blouse. I, at her insistence, stayed in the bed.
Holding her head to one side, looking at the mirror, she said, “I thought you might have been in your old haunts.”
She seemed to be talking more mechanically now. The mood she had brought to the room had left her. At last she was ready. When she looked from the mirror to me she seemed once again, though, to be genuinely pleased with herself and with me, pleased at her little adventure.
She said, “I’m sorry. But I have to go.” When she was almost at the door she turned and smiled and said, “You don’t have a woman hidden in the cupboard, do you?”
It was so out of character. It was so much the kind of thing I had heard from whores who thought they should pretend to be jealous in order to please. It blasted the moment. Opposites: again this communication by opposites. That woman in the cupboard: that other person outside. That journey out from the Domain: that other journey back. Affection, just before betrayal. And I had been in tears.
It exploded then, all that had been building up in me since she had begun to straighten her clothes. And I was out of the bed, and between her and the door.
“Do you think I’m Raymond?”
She was startled.
“Do you think I’m Raymond?”
This time she was given no chance to reply. She was hit so hard and so often about the face, even through raised, protecting arms, that she staggered back and allowed herself to fall on the floor. I used my foot on her then, doing that for the sake of the beauty of her shoes, her ankles, the skirt I had watched