cologne. There was an old bottle in the wall cabinet.
He went back to the bedroom. She was still asleep. He found his dressing
gown and cigarettes and sat in the upright chair by the window.
I was pretty terrific in bed, he thought. He knew he was kidding
himself: she had been the activist, the creative one. On her initiative
they had done things which Tim could not suggest to Julia after fifteen
years in the same bed.
Yes, Julia. He gazed unseeing from the first-floor window, across the
narrow street to the red-brick Victorian school, its meager playground
painted with the fading yellow lines of a net ball court. He still felt
the same about Julia: if he had loved her before, he loved her now. This
girl was different. But wasn’t that what fools always told themselves
before embarking on an affair?
Let’s not be hasty! he told himself. For her this might be a one-night
stand. He could not assume she would want to see him again.
Yet he wanted to decide where his aims lay before asking her what the
options were: government had taught him to brief himself before
meetings.
He had a formula for the approach to complex issues. First, what have I
got to lose?
Julia, again: plump, intelligent, contented; her horizons contracting
inexorably with every year of motherhood. There had been a time when he
lived for her: he bought the clothes she liked, he read novels because
she was interested in novels, and his political successes pleased him
all the more because they pleased her. But the center of gravity of his
life had shifted. Now Julia held sway only over trivia.
She wanted to live in Hampshire, and it did not matter to him, so they
lived there. She wanted him to wear check jackets, but
Westminster chic demanded sober suits, so he wore dark, faintly
patterned grays and navy blues.
When he analyzed his feelings, he found there was not a lot to tie him
to Julia. A little sentiment, perhaps; a nostalgic picture of her, with
her hair in a ponytail, doing the jive in a tapered skirt.
Was that love or something? He doubted it.
The girls? That was something else. Katie, Penny and Adrienne: only
Katie was old enough to understand love and marriage. They did not see
much of him, but he took the view that a little father-love goes a long
way, and is a great deal better thin no father at all. There was no room
for debate there: his opinion was fixed.
And there was his career. A divorce might not harm a Junior Minister,
but it could ruin a man higher Up There had never been a divorced Prime
Minister. Tim Fitzpeterson wanted that job.
So there was a lot to lose–in fact, all he held dear. He turned his
gaze from the window to the bed. The girl had rolled onto her side,
facing away. She was right to have her hair short–it emphasized the
slender neck and pretty shoulders. Her back tapered sharply to a small
waist, then disappeared beneath a crumpled sheet. Her skin was faintly
tanned.
There was so much to gain. “Joy” was a word Tim had little use for, but
it entered his thoughts now. If he had known joy before, he could not
remember when. Satisfaction, yes: in the writing of a sound,
comprehensive report; in the morning of one of those countless small
battles in committees and in the House of Commons; in a book that was
correct or a wine that was right. But the savagely chemical pleasure he
had with this girl was new.
There; those were the pros and cons. The formula said, now add them up
and see which is greater. But this time the formula would not work.
He had acquaintances who said it never did.
Perhaps they were right. It might be a mistake to think that reasons
could be counted like pound notes: he was reminded, curiously, of a
phrase from a college philosophy lecture, “the bewitchment of our
intelligence by means of language.”
Which is longer–an airplane or a one-act play?
Which do I prefer–satisfaction or joy? His thinking was getting woolly.