William Boyd - Stars and bars

This woman’s name was Agnes Brown; its very drabness summed her up perfectly. It had been his sole occasion of marital infidelity and to this day he wondered how they had so fatefully contrived to find themselves in bed together.

Agnes was a faintly grubby woman who always seemed harassed and overburdened with chores and extra work. She was somewhat older than Henderson, a divorcee with three young, noisy and potentially neurotic children. Henderson and Melissa had come to know her quite well — as next-door neighbours will — but he had never entertained even a half-hearted sexual or erotic fantasy about her, for, in Agnes, Henderson recognized a fellow sufferer: Agnes Brown was shy. She confessed as much to Henderson and Melissa on numerous occasions, bemoaning her disability and the obstacle it posed to her ever finding a new husband.

For such people often the only means to physical contact is a collision, and one rainy afternoon she and Henderson collided. She had come to borrow one of Melissa’s bright American magazines. Henderson picked it up, turned too quickly and bumped into her.

Why had he kissed her? In the intervening decade and a half that question had been asked hundreds of times, with no satisfactory answer. There was even less likelihood of explaining the fumbling embarrassed haste with which they had fallen on the sofa and the chilling, semi-clothed shuffle into the bedroom some minutes later.

At first he told himself that he must have felt like a final dose of European grime before exposing himself to the gleaming hygiene of the New World, but as a motive it rang a little false. He knew that he had done it because he was shy too — though not as shy as she was. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The same power-equation applies to the parish of the mild, he now knew. There the modestly emboldened exercises real sway. Modestly emboldened, he seized the opportunity: he simply didn’t have the confidence to say no. The truth was, he thought, remembering the wet, rather sore clash of mouths, she was keen on me and I was flattered and weak. This was the fearful side-effect of shyness. Because he lacked the confidence to disagree, to spurn, to go his own way, it was always easier to conform. He wasn’t making love with Agnes that ghastly afternoon when Melissa breezed in to discover them, he was conforming.

And Melissa had gone by that evening. Infidelity was the one unforgivable crime. Henderson never got to the States that summer. Instead he received an alarming transatlantic battery of legal threats, injunctions and instructions. Somehow, somewhere (Reno? Mexico?) he and Melissa were swiftly divorced.

As inadvertent consolation and second best course of action — something he and Agnes Brown were naturally inclined to accept as their lot in life — they joined forces for three years. But the hyperactive, squalling children and the doomed nature of their alliance (it got off to a bad start and seemed threatened thereafter) made a parting inevitable. It came — with sullen resignation, no tears — and Henderson moved to London to begin what he now termed the lost decade. He founded his ‘reputation’ by writing his three books on the Impressionists, composed sundry articles, co-edited an art magazine for four years, spent 1976 in France on a foundation grant, lectured on art history in art schools throughout the south-east of England, edited a festschrift for an old professor, wrote introductions to numerous catalogues. It was a flat, joyless and rather lonely time, of hard work and monotonous insolvency only periodically relieved by the odd financial windfall (two coffee-table books for a Swiss publisher, and the saving of half his foundation grant which went towards the purchase of a small flat in Baron’s Court). It ended — officially — in 1981 when Thomas Beeby — an old friend of his mother — offered him a job as a valuer at Mulholland, Melhuish.

He liked deliberately to think of the ‘lost decade’ before he saw Melissa because it reaffirmed his new commitment to her and their eventual re-marriage. Thus committed, he gave his name to the doorman, who phoned up, and looked suspiciously at him before allowing him to enter the lift. As it moved steadily up to the fifth floor Henderson reflected that although his professional life (prior to Mulholland, Melhuish) had attained some sort of meagre plateau his emotional one had faltered and all but died after his divorce. Strangely, it was after Melissa’s departure that his insomnia developed, the most persistent reminder of his foolishness that afternoon.

It seemed that there was no European equivalent of what Melissa had given him; or rather his maddened regret at his fall from grace punished him further by making all substitutes unsatisfactory. As time moved on from his divorce, his one year of marriage came to assume in his memory an almost legendary brightness and bliss, especially when compared to the few brief and sad affairs he experienced (with a brittle academic, a pretty but dull student, and an ambitious sub-editor at a magazine he wrote for). His fault, he admitted. He became, for steadily longer periods of his life, a sort of asexual. Sex played a minor, or solitary, role in his life: the eternal substitute at the football match, only rarely called from the benches and instructed to warm up beside the pitch. It took off its track suit, ran up and down the sidelines, but it wasn’t really in the game any more.

Melissa stood at the doorway to her apartment. At her ankles two pekingese barked shrilly.

“Hello,” he said, leaning forward to kiss an emerald earring.

“What have you got there?” Melissa asked.

“My sabres.”

“How dashing,” she laughed and pushed him in the chest. He rocked back on his heels. “My God, you’re a funny man, Henderson.”

He followed her into the Wax domain.

“Gervase, Candice, stop that!” she said to the dogs, still barking annoyingly. “It’s Henderson. Say hello now.” The dogs growled. “Say hello to them, Henderson. They’ve got to learn the sound of your voice.”

“What?…You mean, say hello to those dogs?”

“Yes. Come on, just say hello.”

“Hello, Gervase. Hello, Candice.”

Melissa bent down and scratched their crowns with long nails. “Come on, babies, it’s Henderson. Keep talking, Henderson.”

Muttering greetings to the dogs he followed her through the hall.

Shortly before Beeby had offered him the New York job he had heard from Melissa. She wrote to tell him of her second divorce — from Mr Wax — and obliquely to let him know that bygones were bygones. By the time of his third letter — a one-sided correspondence had begun — he was able to tell her of his impending arrival in New York — the ‘astonishing coincidence’ that would bring them together again.

He had taken it, of course, as another sign, another portent and blessing on the enterprise. His memories revived and amplified themselves: a new print was made of his year of marriage. The reunion, and the several dinners afterwards had been warm, pleasingly coy, maturely reflective. Mentally, the way had already been prepared: it seemed entirely natural that they should seek to recapture their former happiness together. There had been no swooning revelation, no ardent campaign on either side. Their first kiss had a dreamy predictability about it to Henderson; he had been rehearsing it for weeks. The hints about consolidating their reconciliation had followed soon after.

The trouble was, Henderson now realized, that he had allowed himself to be driven on too easily by his own lonely aspirations rather than by any realistic assessment of what it involved or of life’s many contingencies…He frowned and looked at her neat legs. For example, he had never remotely taken into account the possibility of an Irene emerging. Or of the fact that both he and Melissa were now different people. And Melissa had changed radically too, in some ways. The dark glossy brown hair had gone for a start. It was now blond, a streak job, shoulder length and held in place by fearsome mastic sprays. She was, if anything, slimmer, wore light expensive colours and was a little too heavily tanned. But the moral imperatives remained implacable, however. She had married Irving Wax a year after leaving Henderson. Wax was very big in concrete and an exceedingly rich man. She had divorced him the year previously. “He was fucking his secretary, Henderson. What could I do? Really, you men are impossible.”