The red Jaguar pulled up. Rachel’s dark glasses stared straight at me. DeForest was so keen not to stare straight at me that he scraped against one of the stone urns in the porch.
‘Hello,’ I said.
DeForest chose to stay in the car.
I led Rachel to my room in businesslike silence. She sat on the bed and dug a cigarette from the handbag on her lap, taking her eyes off me for a moment. I found I was unsurprised and unfrightened. I pretended to be both.
‘Did you get my letter?’
‘Yes, I did.’ She was trying to be officious, as if my letter had threatened imminent legal proceedings and she wasn’t about to be fucked with. ‘Yes, I did, and that’s why I’ve come here to see you. Do you think you can —’
But she soon faltered. Her head dipped and she lifted a hand with a crumpled Kleenex in it to steady her sunglasses. Her shape seemed to recede before my eyes.
Now I go over and pick out the single cigarette-end from the wastepaper basket. It has a brown smudge. In an experimental spirit I lick the brown smudge. It tastes of ashtrays and I chuck it back. All the same, I think that that was quite a sensual and adventurous thing to have done.
I waited patiently for her to start crying, so that I could move in out of the painful, full-on gaze.
‘Why …’ She swallowed. ‘Why do you want to?’
Her nose shone.
‘I don’t know. But I do. I’m sorry.’
‘And that —’ She flicked off her sunglasses to get at her eyes. She was crying. I closed in. Rachel cried into her tissue, then on my shoulder, then into her tissue again. ‘That horrible letter.’ She shuddered.
And I stirred.
‘What was so horrible about it? It wasn’t meant to be horrible. What was it?’
She shook her head.
‘The content or the style ? I realize it might have seemed a bit short, even brusque perhaps. But that was because it made me very unhappy to write it.’
‘So cold,’ she said, as if recalling an Icelandic holiday.
I resumed: ‘Well, probably anything would have seemed “cold” after’ – I coughed – ‘what we’ve had.’
Three minutes to go. I return to the wastepaper basket and find Rachel’s mascara-ed ball beneath the layers of tissue steeped in my own snot and tears. I examine it, then let it fall
noiselessly from my hand. I cover it now with the Letter to My Father.
‘But, Rachel. I’ve been thinking and I’m sure that I can’t give you what you want and need. I don’t know, perhaps DeForest can.’
If only he didn’t have quite such a preposterous name.
Rachel gave me a fierce glance over her tissue, and it occurred to me that I had better start crying too. But that would create more problems than it would solve.
‘What can I say?’ I asked.
I wished she would go. I couldn’t feel anything with her there. I wished she would go and let me mourn in peace.
Five minutes later, she did. She left without telling me a thing or two about myself, without asking if I knew what my trouble was, without providing any sort of come-uppance at all. She left a present, though, and a fairly significant one. The Annotated Blake.
Which reminds me – I never did give her anything, did I ?
Six fifty to six fifty-five I had convulsions and I saw stars: vomitless retching, tearless heaves; I thought, I’m having convulsions and I’m watching stars.
By seven I felt fine. I considered Oxford, and I began to give the short-story competition some thought.
Now I go over to my desk and take a fresh quarto pad from the drawer. I wonder what sort of person I can be. I write:
In the dressing-table mirror Ruth saw her idiot teddybear and her idiot golliwog propped against the pillows, staring from behind. She put the letter back in the envelope and put the envelope back in the drawer. She looked down at the rubble of hopeless, pointless make-up, and up again. She leaned forward, fingering the barely perceptible lump on her chin. She smiled. If that wasn’t a premenstrual spot, she thought… what was?