Laughter infected her. She looked for its source. Her thin pale hair moved with nervous flicks of her head; her face was pale, too. A couple of teenagers, a slender boy in tired clothing, faded denim, and a buxom girl with a white tee-shirt with crude slogans; they were holding hands, smoking, laughing together. It was as if they wanted to infect the rest of the station concourse, bored, waiting, people. They wanted to make everyone feel left out of the joke. Her pale face looked towards them, a small smile emerging, half conveying that she approved and encouraged them. The long line of her nose wound itself, as it were, through the intervening air and prodded exploringly into their space. But she was also beyond, outside their entangled gaze.
Then she moved. The angle of her direction swung, like a searchlight, picked out a man way beyond the line of battered seats. He was solemnly and studiously looking in a book by the bookstall, a relaxed traveller looking for a cheap novel for the journey. Her inviting half-smile winged towards him through the air, but unnoticed.
A curious observer, observing her wan smile and the distant concentration of her sight, would by now have sighted her small toddler pulling at her fawn linen skirt. He reached wobblingly to put his hand in the large linen bag hanging from her shoulder. He could feel something there. She brushed his chubby hand aside as if it was an invading insect. Her distant line with the bookstall began to falter. The perturbations broke into it as the hopeful book reader moved away to find his train. She turned, slightly sharply, to her toddler, repulsing his more demanding efforts to get onto her lap, to explore her inviting bag. He perched unsafely on his stumpy legs clinging to her knee with his hand and looking perplexed at the wooden response from his mummy. His face began to pucker as if in distress, but partly as if he'd learned the power of noisy crying. She put her hand in the bag and withdrew her camera, giving it to him, whilst holding on to the short cord strap. He immediately went to put it back in her bag - to restore his fascinated project of discovery, which she had uncomprehendingly wiped out so easily. It wasn't the camera he wanted so much as the exploration, the discovery of it, within her. As the cord loop was still caught in her fingers, he could not get the camera back inside, and he began intelligently to explore the means of attachment of the camera to her fingers, pulling this way and then that in random expectation. During all this she continued a similar random prodding of the air with her directed attention to various corners of the railway station.
Our observer of this observing woman would have been pained by the insensitive mis-contact - the toddler intent on exploring his mother; mother intent on probing the contents of the distant air. Not long after this, the observer would have seen her pick him up as a surprised bundle and pop him carefully into the straps of his pushchair and begin to move off to a crescendo of protest from his affronted dignity and frustrated purpose. Such an observer would have been tempted to emerge from the crowd with words of advice and chastisement on her lips for this absent-minded mother. But she would have been stopped with the words unspoken, by a surge of people crowding from the gate of one of the platforms; and from the midst of the surge a male arm rose in greeting to wave to the woman's equally welcoming wave, whilst the little child screwed round in his entrapping harness more desperate than ever to find where his mother with her interesting bag had vanished to.
The threesome united. The woman's half-inviting smile welcomed the man, whilst the wooden posture of her body remained unaltered. It was a cooling unresponsiveness to his embrace. His glowing smile keyed immediately into her immobility. His eyes became momentarily glazed and fixed. They turned to the screaming toddler, a joint protest, how unreasonable when Daddy had come. He quietened quickly in his pushchair when she attended to him for a moment instead. She lifted him up. His face transformed into a strange stare; either deeply puzzled or suspiciously curious, or simply a silent paralysis of fear. She lifted him in her hands, raising his face level with hers and announcing that his Daddy was here. Then she handed him into the father's arms. They hugely enfolded him like a protective coat of love. His stiff little face smoothed a little, and his hand began an intense exploration of Daddy's ear. Daddy laughed, and ducked as his little son's hands chased his various features, ear, hair, spectacles. Mother laughed, and he turned with his own happy gurgle to see his mother's face come to life.
Our observer might at this point have bitten her tongue, relieved that she had been prevented from interfering with chastising words in this now gloriously happy, and mutually infected, family scene. She would have found herself inspired, bursting out laughing too.
....ooooOOOOoooo....
If our dark observer from the vantage points she has had could sprout wings, she could have followed the movements of this family unit through London; the taxi, the early morning coffee and croissants in Bayswater, the playing with the toddler in Kensington Gardens whilst the grown-ups began to talk earnestly, albeit interspersed with her instant laughs, joyous but forced, whenever he chuckled, or the toddler coo-ed. If our fascinated observer had achieved invisibility - shall we give her a name, shall we call her Mary, perhaps - if Mary's skin, already so Africa-black, had gone one step further and become a skin of invisibility, then she could have drawn close and begun to hear their earnest thoughts.
....ooooOOOOoooo....
Over lunch the mother, now we shall call her Marie, her thin wild hair, loose, carefree, magnificent, and her complexion a little pink with the tension of the day, the excitement, the prospects of the next four days, sat opposite the man, the father of her first child. He, in his pressed suit, slightly self-conscious and with his glowing smile, which, at times, encouraged himself as well as her. Our invisibly present observer sat on the fourth side, opposite the toddler clattering and clamouring happily in his high chair, and charming the bright Italian waitress.
"It is not," she said "a matter of respect - though I do. Enormously. You know that. We wouldn't be here otherwise."
"I know, my dear, I know." He said. Our puzzled observer – she, a Mary – studied the smooth features of his white face. Their very smoothness seemed to imply that he was actively smoothing out some inner turmoil. The woman – our Marie – seemed to notice the same, and she reached out her hand across the table-cloth to put her fingers loosely over his. She was, Mary noticed, almost gazing into him. His ever-present, playful smile relaxed a little. "We don't talk about love, do we? My dear Marie; only of respect."
"No," she said, glancing quickly at her toddler who was investigating bread, which now lay in crumbs on his plastic tray, "We can't. We know that. Love is not part of it." The momentary contact was lost; some balance between them had changed. Her hand remained covering his, but it was a meaningless gesture now. He moved his hand to grasp her fingers. They had returned to wood. Mary, our perceptive observer, felt chilled suddenly at this lost contact, as if it were a real death; she looked at the woman's fingers without a wedding ring.
....ooooOOOOoooo....
What Mary struggled to learn from their earnest discussion were the many unspoken concerns, memories, secrets and wishes that Marie and Jacques negotiated - or were failing to negotiate - at this little restaurant table.
One such might have been Marie's long-felt pain as the youngest child brought up in the sandy fields of coastal Suffolk; the daughter of a disaffected Church of England minister with sharply declining congregations in his cluster of rural parishes. They lived most of her childhood in a once magnificent half-timbered Tudor rectory, with a jutted upper story. It was supported by rotting oak corbels some still proudly showing deeply grained carvings of smiling faces. The crumbled plaster walls still showed some decorative pargetting because the inclement North Sea weather had not yet got its final grasp on all the fine surfaces. Her big brother's bedroom still sported the opening of the primitive ‘guarde l’eau’ covered by a makeshift trap door of modern plywood. In mischievous moments on bored holidays, he would lift it, lie in wait till his little sister moved past on the flagstones underneath, and subject her to a sharp deluge from the upstairs commode. Her wetness was then accompanied by a shriek of his excited laughter. If she could leap aside, or he missed, she would retaliate with a shriek of her own equally excited mocking.
Her father's magisterial aloofness rode above the grinding decay of his house and of his congregations. He did nothing about it; but it was an acute, corrosive pain for his youngest daughter. The decay was a visible sore festering on her father's pale countenance. Later on, as they grew up, his pained silence greeted the contemptuous rebuffs from her brother, and they seemed to hasten her father's decay, his patrician stoop, his gratefully early retirement and his subsequent sudden death. Decay was inherent in her heart. A pickling agent seemed to turn everything she touched into a dusty relic of what it should have been. She survived, as it were, a life-time series of those cold douches, a lifetime of turning them aside with her caustic gay laugh. Instead of a real movement into joy, those childish laughs turned her away from herself.
....ooooOOOOoooo....
Still seated in the bright restaurant, she sat back slightly, "We must be practical." She smoothed back her hair in an elegant movement with her free hand; "Practical, considerate of each other." She seemed to be struggling for words. He was looking for something from her. She knew there was a male pride, that she must not harm. Yet his word ‘love’ was too simple for how complicated it was. "My respect for you," she continued earnestly "is because we, you and I, can think out things practically. It is what we are good at." She was gazing right into him. He felt her closeness. But also, it was still somehow unmanageable. Her fingers softly caressed his again as she felt safer. He smiled in relaxation. She suddenly sat right back and laughed happily, "I love that puzzled look of yours, Jacques, I love it." She emphasised the word ‘love’ as if it was a huge joke.
The waitress came quickly, spotting her moment to take the order.
Mary, observing all this, could have been a little irritated, the hesitation, the to-and-fro, so much numb contact -- a dinghy and a jetty jostled each other in a high sea. By now Mary had learned that Jacques was an affectionate acquaintance from Paris. He had been recruited to the project again, to provide a little brother or sister to the toddler.
....ooooOOOOoooo....
Marie's finding her older sister in bed with her brother one winter night after their father had died, was only known to observer Mary because she had found a route into Marie's secret knowledge. Mary knew, too, that the tickling and squealing laughter from the bedroom had been a mystery for a long time before that, both fascinating and unaccountably exciting. Agitated as a child, Marie had never been able to penetrate their shut door with her enquiring eyes. Nor to ask anything or anyone about it. She remembered those excited squeals like a repeated dream from her childhood.
Here she was with Jacques, the child, and similar squeals of laughter. Only Mary knew how they linked up.
....ooooOOOOoooo....
In the evening at the end of the day, the toddler had been bottled and powdered and put to bed, Marie and Jacques sat in adjacent armchairs, silently contemplating what came next. Dark Mary, invisible in the recesses of the room, had noticed how their conversation - through the day, over the elaborate and celebratory meal - had petered into desultory attempts to fill in silence. The practical intimacy in the morning had faded to the stillness of the evening. The joint project had seemed to come apart: he had been flattered in the anticipation, but had now come to feel impersonal, more flattened. She organised and energised in the initiation and arrangements, but was now tensely aware of the penetration that she would be subjected to. What once seemed a resounding climax of rationality, could now be an uncalculated animal moment. He felt put on his metal, his performance mechanically required, not cherished. Mary's impatience with this pair made her laugh unkindly. She could not discern any charge in the atmosphere; no passion in either of their loins. Contempt for them was possible. But somehow sympathy came out in Mary, too.
After minutes of separate silences, Jacques came to the point, "My dear Marie, shall we get on with it?" Marie, appalled at his lack of passion - but equally relieved that she would not be a vessel to collect a spilling sentimentality - led the way to the bedroom. They took off their clothes. He folded his neatly on a chair; she carefully sorting certain items for the laundry basket, to wash tomorrow. They lay on the bed. His erection came with certainty, it pointed a direct line to Marie's inside. She flinched but braved it.
Afterwards they slept; she deeply, almost as a protection against the proximity. He, fitful, wondered hazily why this had been important for him. Mary watched over them as if a guardian angel, for the next three days. Nights in the same bed, but during the days Jacques went into London, researching motorboats for the magazine he wrote for. Marie spent the days looking after the toddler, taking her turn in the playgroup. Mary watched her, watching the sad decline of spirit. The project was biology, not a love-child, like the first; this time a test-tube performance.
Mary felt a closeness to Marie; yet put at a distance, outside effective influence. Mary's disembodied sadness seemed lost on Marie who rehearsed her sensible reasons continuously in her mind. How sensible as she had been not to make a relationship before it had been time to become a mother. One parent, especially a mother, is as good as two - the independence and therefore the extra attention her children would benefit from. Frankly, the liability a man is, in a woman's life… ! Mary knew of these arguments, their use to bolster up this lonely woman. Marie would not yet know what Mary knew about her. Mary's sadness was that Marie yearned for more than she thought she'd settle for, and her sadness was what Marie does not yet know. Further, Mary was sad that she was neither a help nor yet truly a relief from Marie’s loneliness.
....ooooOOOOoooo....
On the fourth day Jacques left in the morning. Marie fumbled with her camera and snapped him, holding in his arms the indifferent toddler, an effigy. Perhaps Jacques had left another inside her. We will not know yet awhile. In the meantime, Marie went back indoors to continue her own life - as if never interrupted. Her shadow, Mary, decided to remain with her. The sadness had moved a little nearer. Mary accompanied Marie almost touching now. Their twinning had become apparent. Marie, fully alone again, turned to her radio, she laughed desperately at the frenzy of the chattering disc jockeys. She frowned at the news broadcasts, hummed and thrummed with the spreading music. But sometimes she wondered at the new sad presence in her house, as if she were no longer alone. Then her nervous laughter calmed.
In the evening after the toddler had been bathed and bedded, more protesting than usual at his pre-occupied mother, Marie also took herself gratefully to bed. She lay down and her dark sadness lay down beside her. Mary's laugh, as silent as she was invisible, drew a direct line into Marie's inside. Marie and Mary made a form of love together. Their silent laughs mingled in rest at last.
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