should meet. Roland was tall enough, smart enough, steady enough, good enough. Did it matter whether he was handsome? Walking along King Street the next morning after dropping Will at school, she decided that handsome wasn’t really the point. Up until now anyway, Gwen had never much judged people by how they looked. But he’s got a great face, she reflected. Solid, intriguing. A lot of texture to his skin, a real beard and a head of thick, dark hair, a kind of masculinity and force. Maybe she had never before considered Roland on the question of looks. Did she know him too well? When had she first looked at him? When had she ever looked at him? Six or eight years ago?
He had been introduced by Lawrence as an Ancient History colleague; one of the few colleagues who seemed to Gwen to be actually alive. So many of those Oxford types, Gwen thought, as she made her way towards a cash machine through the sparse, early scurry, existed only as their academic selves – a constellation of starred alphas, named memorial prizes, Oxford University Press publications, sherry-stained gowns, high-table ripostes. But she had liked Roland right away. At one of those wistful gatherings in a barnlike room, everyone standing because the chairs were so far apart, so stiff-backed and so sunken-seated, a hot little drink in the fist. He had made jokes and asked her direct, friendly questions about herself, real questions, that sought out what was inside her, not the windy senior-common-room cross-examinations that aimed to position you on an imaginary list and then dismiss you as falling below some necessary level of academic accomplishment on that list. What are you working on? they felt free to ask once they had established that she didn’t spend all her time looking after children, a house. Years ago, it had been her undergraduate degree in Greats. Then, when she gave up on that, she would answer, I paint. And it seemed to stump them. Hmm, they might reply, with a slight interrogative inflection, nodding vigorously, stretching the brows upward in a contortion of sympathy, optimism, goodwill. Some would venture on to a further question, What sort of things do you paint? Or even the informed probe, Figurative or abstract? But there the conversation would end. They couldn’t taxonomise this particular activity, landscape painting. It was easier to look upon her as a dropout.
But not for Roland. He was good for my self-esteem, Gwen reflected, and he’ll be good for Hilary’s. She fed her debit card into the machine, her PIN number circling through her brain like a glimmering fish until she hooked it, stabbed the digits into the hard little keys. Roland has the energy to take a genuine interest in anything, and he has the nerve, too. He knows that there is plenty of vitality and conviction outside the locus of clever, singular answers, outside the high-walled, ancient quadrangles. Those dons go head to head with each other so hard and so long that they forget everything else, the rest of the world, for instance, what it’s actually like. She bubbled with resentment, thinking about them. Their conversation, she thought, whatever the topic, is like a conversation about the weather, because they don’t actually want to make contact. Real contact. They might have to follow that up with some expenditure of emotion. They can’t afford to hear what you might have to say in case it doesn’t fit into their train of thought, in case it might disturb some theory they are pushing towards. Some simplification of life. How she had hated those gatherings in college, attended with universal joylessness, another fixed commitment during which it was possible to kill a little time away from books and pens, rest their mighty brains, while eating.
The cash wheedled out crisply as if it were newly printed expressly for her. Then there was the thump behind the screen, the personal vault slamming shut.
But they’re not all like that, she thought, folding the twenties into the pocket of her jeans, striding for home past the fountains playing over the smooth-paved piazza at her feet. Lawrence, Roland. Hilary will feel it right away. Roland’s curiosity and his warmth. Gwen smiled, picturing it. Hilary’s so tuned in. She’ll find out how widely read and how thoughtful Roland is. Older and wiser than Mark or Paul. Will Hilary think he’s too old? Lawrence’s age? Nearly fifty? A baby, compared to Doro.
She climbed the black-painted front steps, grabbing up the milk and pinning the bottle under one arm as she let herself into the colourless, empty stairwell, struggled with the keys to the stiff little door of the flat. As to why such a cultivated, lovable man wasn’t already involved with a worthwhile woman, Gwen glossed over it in her thoughts as she entered the ground-floor hallway, skipped down the basement steps to the kitchen. Or rather, she considered it rapidly as she flipped the fridge open and shut, and she decided, He hasn’t met a good one yet, a good enough one. The right one. In the back of her mind was the flattering certainty that Roland had always been quite attentive to her. From this, she concluded that he liked American women and that he ought to meet more of them. She looked upon his chivalry towards herself as a promise, even a guarantee, that he would like Hilary, indeed, that Hilary was exactly whom he was waiting to meet.
She put Will’s breakfast things in the dishwasher, walked around to the clammy back room, and started dragging towels and sheets out of the dryer, heaping them on the ironing board in crackling electric mounds so she could transfer the wet things in from the washing machine. She stopped to find Roland’s number in the kitchen drawer, dialled it, and kept the phone clutched against her ear as she went back again to the laundry room.
‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’ She felt unexpectedly shy – bent double, arse up, at the mouths of her machines, struggling one-handed to weed out little cotton items to dry on the rack, her knickers, a bra, falling on the dirty floor as they came untangled from the wet lump in the bouncing, perforated drum.
But Roland welcomed it. ‘I’ll drive down with Lawrence,’ he said. ‘Any day this week apart from tomorrow. It’s only the freshers arriving now.’
‘Lawrence thought he might be staying up for a couple of nights.’
‘I’ll give him a ring, shall I? And we’ll fix it.’
That was it. She chucked more laundry into the washing machine and turned it on with the dryer, leaving the folding for later, everything churning.
Mentioning the arrangement to Hilary, Gwen was casual. ‘There’s a friend coming to supper. It’s just the four of us.’
Hilary was horrified. She had woken up late and swayed down into the kitchen in her pale blue-and-grey-striped men’s pyjamas with a black V-neck sweater over them. Her dark tendrils of hair were pulled into a bright red scrunchie at the back of her head so that her whole face was revealed in the morning light, flushed, puffy around the eyes, but smooth with deep, long sleep.
She came on with a spoiling chill. ‘I don’t want to meet anyone, Gwen. I’m a wreck. I need to recover. I need time to – figure out what’s going to happen.’ In her alarm, she pulled her hair loose from the scrunchie, scowled as she plucked at its ends.
Gwen just looked at her for a few seconds, trying to tell from Hilary’s half-veiled face why she seemed to be receiving the effort as an insult. But she couldn’t see Hilary’s eyes. An insult to grief? Gwen considered. Or to the seriousness of what’s happened to her? How much time would Hilary need to mourn the end of her engagement? Gwen lifted her eyebrows and, at the same time, she blinked, indicating doubt, an attempt to be patient. She didn’t speak.
‘Don’t get mad, Gwen.’ Hilary dropped into the same chair where she had sat last night, reached for the box of Weetabix sitting on the table, studied the package.
‘I’m not mad.’ Gwen was trying to suppress her sense of investment in sorting Hilary out. She was thinking, It’s a problem to be solved, let’s get the ball rolling. Why dawdle and agonise? But she said, as casually as she could muster, ‘Do you want me to postpone it?’
‘I guess. I don’t know.’ Hilary looked a little dazed. ‘Do you think I’ll like this cereal? I never tried it all the time I was staying here. It looks so weird.’ Hilary thought she was off the hook.
‘It
