Sylvia was very shy in herself. But she could command a strong presence at committees and meetings with her crisp, sharpened comments that silenced the most hesitant.

Sylvia was the most unresponsive to the smooth but unknown icon brought in by the corporation to run the investigation service of the company. Beneath labouring brows there had been a good deal of sly watching. Sylvia was no exception. More surreptitious than the others, yet, hidden, there was a response in Sylvia. Her quiet life was routinely served by sisters, nieces, a few ageing aunts and her wayward father. The youngest of a large family she perpetually had the attitude of the one left behind.

            Being the person who worked closest to Graham, and half aware of her own rough-edges, she needed to get him used to her slowly. The sparkle she felt was uncomfortable, and she denied to herself. A visceral plunge in her tummy was common with certain film-stars, and, in those faraway days, when she danced all night alone in the clubs. What Graham meant to her was simply a man taking over – a sleek suit, a club tie, a car always fresh from the carwash and... Graham as if always on tip-toe, clipped his sentences, had a silver tongue for the secretaries and flirted whenever it was necessary. These were the only features she allowed herself briefly to commit to paper in her regular letters to her relatives. She never remembered her dreams.

Sylvia was watchful; a watchfulness that meant distance; a scrutiny that restlessly absorbed those around her. She was no gossip. Her discretion was legendary.

Then she it began to surface, a dream she began to remember; one that seemed regular every few nights. One day, she realised it was happening. In the dream she saw an eye. A very large eye. She was close up to it and it pressed itself in on her with its very large proportions. It had the dimensions of a wall, a rock face, a sculptured relief in marble, an Assyrian frieze of ancient conquests. It was, as it were a blind, stone stare stretching above, to either side, blankly. There was nothing to do but curiously to watch it and, as she watched, its stillness broke. Rather below and to her left there was a sudden movement, a slight movement, a little, scratchy, swallowing movement. What had, to a glance, looked like features of the texture, the uneven face of the rock, now appeared as an organ, an aperture small but sinister. It was a mouth, a mouth of stone preparing to eat, stone lips of a square shape hardly opened, as if smacking together before a good meal; a small crushing sound as a stone slid upon stone, a tiny expression of a strength hidden in reserve. She felt it an alien. Impossible to confront, impossible to escape. It had paralysed her as a spider its fly, whilst it prepared its venom. She could merely wait whilst it waited, focus on that hungry patch of eye that held her relentlessly for an unhappy fate.

            She now realised she always woke from this dream with an alertness that precluded sleep. It forced on her the day’s worries instead. It had happened, it had regularly happened, time and again in the last months. It was since Graham had come to the office.

Nor was Sylvia a beauty. Somewhere in her mid-thirties, she had had a long war with her plumpness and had not won all the battles. In a way, something in her was relieved to be out of any competition, not that she could have told herself that. Yet, he seemed to like her. Graham’s slight swagger gave way quickly to a seriousness at work. When they were together - and often they worked closely because her responsibilities for day-to-day operations meant she reported to him more than the others - she saw a deeper side. Now and again that smooth confidence might snap. She quickly knew how to steer him through it. She felt her quietness understood. He saw her life in hiding. He was relieved by it.

            A shy deep smile came on his face when she met him. It replaced the cool charm that others got from him. He seemed to share a personal sadness. Each held a secret sadness never to be conveyed to each other. Over months working together, he too seemed surprised at a mysterious closeness they built up.

 

…..oo0oo…..

 

When he had been active with girls, Graham would not have interested himself in Sylvia. It was a kind of unthought cruelty. A disdain. He would not even have looked at her. Not considered her thoughts. He might have even felt a kind of insult if inadvertently seen accompanied by her ordinariness. Her lack of vivacious show.

            Had he got used to his abrupt celibacy?  After his obsessive sexuality in the army, his military career finished, and of course his career with girls. He was forced back on himself. Had he ever properly coped with that secret of his? How could he, you might exclaim; such a secretive secret. Unwittingly, Sylvia was drawn into the ramifications of it. It was not that he no longer looked at women, indeed he did. He often looked longingly. Their bodies, as if each an invitation. In the past, he would have planned approaches, smoothly, charmingly. Each time a new challenge. It had been a great shock to have found that having survived, his urges remained the same, just as obsessive. What had happened to him made no difference to his interest. That was the bigger cruelty of it.

            A good soldier for nearly sixteen years, he had never really mixed. He had forged a single direction. Some would say he exploited his string of partners of the night, almost anonymous, some he had known well till sexually consummated. Then he cast them off. So often before, he had assumed his conquest brought gratitude from the one he had conquered. Sylvia was different. She might he half-wondered - then banishing such an emboldened and reckless thought - be bringing to life a new side of himself. He could say that her dogged support of his work in the agency left him profoundly grateful to her. It was the only word for it. 

            He found himself chatting to her in personal ways, drinking tea together with no-one else around, out of sight of those who might be impressed – or scoffing. This new departure stirred other things. He became interested in her. Secretly, though unexpressed – even to himself – he could wonder what it was to be plain. Did she care?  It occurred to him for the first time that she may not view beauty as the compulsive pursuit above everything, as he did. But what then?  He could have wondered what pain she might have been through – have come through it and kept her strength of mind. There could, if he knew what it was, be something admirable there, something to respect. Was respect a completely new virtue for Graham?  He too had survived; but had he grown a strength of mind from it?

 

….oo0oo….

 

For Sylvia this suave man was a new encounter. But one like all other new encounters, to be confronted in the usual way; down-to-earth, practical, unsentimental; his perfect assistant, reliable, responsible, taking authority when required. His elegance, though, was a mystery, a land of different values -- on her part simply to be ignored. The place to be was where everything was in order, in place. Never in her life would she have allowed the view that she took after her mother in any way. It would merely have been the occasion for one of her precise and articulate retorts, facing the speaker up to his own mistakes. And yet. Family resemblances cannot be completely dismissed always, can they?  Her mother had run a neat but poor household. With every child she had she became tidier, more ordered, and more harassed – and indeed poorer as well. Everyone had their job around the house. As a girl, at the younger end, Sylvia cleaned the door handles every day. Great care was demanded of everyone to respect the door handles. In fact, nobody should open the doors with the knob, if possible. Similar rules of usage applied to the cooker - one ring only to be used if possible - the cutlery, the bathroom fittings; in fact everything touchable or dirtiable, including the cleaning implements themselves. “Why don’t we all where gloves, Mum?” Sylvia had once asked, in her familiar practical way even then. “You don’t wear gloves indoors. Don’t be silly, dear,” Mother had answered the question with a tired tolerance, in her usual bland but definite way. But however firm, her father took no notice, coming and going at whatever time of day, stomping about in clumsy boots, scraping and dirtying, and grasping door-knobs as he pleased - sometimes hanging onto them tight, of necessity, when he’d had a bit to drink. He was comfortably uncouth, indomitably loving in the teeth of mother’s gales of instructions that he was ignoring. But Sylvia would not have admitted to taking after him either. The only disaffection with her father had come when she had experimented, with the other girls at school, with cosmetics. Father had rather alarmingly reacted. Lipstick she discovered could be as forbidden as dirty door-knobs. In defiance, she had taken the advice of another troubled girl who told her you could make your lips red by biting them. Sylvia had done this for a while but shortly such a gesture towards bodily appeal had died out. And she had resigned herself as father had wished, to a comeliness of nature rather than an electricity of the body.

            It was therefore something of a surprise to find herself responding to Graham and his elaborate manners, with a warmth which would have only seemed natural to a different sort of woman altogether. Without experience of such things, Sylvia nevertheless made a gesture one day. She laid her hand purposefully on his. Without experience she did not know what to make of the rather violent withdrawal of the hand. Someone else might have regarded it as perverse. Graham’s assiduous manners, his shyly engaging glances, his courtesy, then followed by such a rebuff. Some might call it a rather cruel game with her. But Sylvia was hurled into uncertainty.

 

….oo0oo….

 

Perhaps it was the following from the reading list at school. Young minds exposed to John Fowles and his mysterious Magi:

I think anyone but a doctor would have fainted. I should have liked to have fainted. The room was bare. In the middle was a table. Roped to the table was a young man. The cousin. He was naked except for a bloodstained singlet, and he had been badly burnt around the mouth and eyes. But I could see only one thing. Where his genitals should have been, there was nothing but a black-red hole. They had cut off his penis and scrotal sac. With a pair of wire-cutters.

Too much for most people at the best of times, Fowles’ masterpiece had foolishly been set by his English teacher and Graham, as sensitive as any schoolchild of 15, had been spattered with the emotional fallout from it. Whilst the others in his class giggled in embarrassment and horror, Graham kept quiet for weeks, avoiding his mates. Alone he fought with a pervasive sense of having already been mutilated pointlessly by this vivid and explicit desctption. Imaginatively, we could perhaps wonder if that was a formative influence; one that led directly to his feverish philandering for many years.

            Of course, Sylvia knew nothing of these complexities in Graham. Of course, he said nothing. Indeed, he barely had words for them himself. To tell the truth his past was indeed obscure, as secret as an official secret, and locked away for thirty years in the public records.

 

….oo0oo….

 

Trips abroad for the company were occasionally required; a couple or so a year. Graham did most of them personally, and alone. Unless a camera was needed, and a man would fly out for a day (or a night as the case may be). Those occasions were only if people had to be tracked. For documents, mere print copy was sufficient. In fact, Graham was away at the time when he might have celebrated a first anniversary with the company. It was not that he celebrated such things or would even have thought of such a thing. Indeed, given the cynical nature of the business they were in, nobody else in the office was liable to such sentiment either.

            However, he was surprised to receive a `not to be opened till the first of the month; envelope. Obviously, a card inside it, and moreover with his name scribbled clearly in Sylvia’s handwriting. He had popped it into his pile for packing. And so quickly that he could overlook a momentary stir in his head. He had had to overlook a sharp pang of something mingled with his surprise. A pang. The point was that it was an unidentifiable pang, and therefore easily dismissed, rendered quickly momentary. But yet, to his surprise – it was thus a second surprise that it had registered as something. He was, though, honest enough to remember it a few days later. On the first of the month, rising early, the promise of a continental breakfast, croissant and coffee, and then a long drive south. He remembered, with an amused curiosity, to open the card. The sturdy characteristic cynicism of his current profession was a long haul from the world that Sylvia had stirred up in some distant ventricle of his heart or his brain. Graham was never one to pause for a precision in his feelings. He was confronted by a moment which wiped any amusement away and threw confusion in its place. He could not find the envelope. It was simply not packed with the rest of his things. He tried to think back to the last time he had had it. And think forward from there through all the possible alternatives. The only possibility in the dingy hotel room in Dijon was to look through all his bags and possessions that he had with him. A laborious process, that he at first hung back from. Was it that important. It seemed so. And he unpacked completely.

            So, he discovered, not the card, but how much it meant to him. It made no sense – only a sensation, as if some organ from the pit of his stomach was dislodged. Perhaps it was its senselessness to him that meant it could not be dismissed in an instant. It lasted for fully a couple of hours till he found a postcard, and a stamp, and composed a jolly message and had sought out a post-box to send it to her. Then he seemed to have exorcised something.

            Unfocussed and therefore unexplained, it continued as a disturbing memory for the rest of the day. Dimly, as a kind of sadness, a feeling of having let her down, of having been casual about something entrusted to him. He turned his mind resolutely against any suggestion that he should be responding in his own way to an intimate approach from Sylvia. Such a thought was not to be endorsed by thinking it. Telling himself that it was just one of those things – odds and ends do go missing when travelling. He returned home eventually with a feeling that something rippled in his relationship with Sylvia. Not admitting to himself that he was drawn in an old-fashioned yet quite impossible way. It was far more complex than the electric and quick-fire relations with his women in the past. It was both quite normal and quite forbidden. For Graham the past dominated everything.

 

….oo0oo….

 

That domineering past had been one of those impossible missions, in Connemarra, the wrong side of the border; living rough - bits of woodland for home. He went for three weeks at a time; on his own, no contact with anyone. No traces to be discovered – until they might emerge long after he had gone. He had done it, surviving himself, but tracking them, for months. In Guyana, in the Falklands, even in Iraq; he had been the expert. But never more than a month each time. But in the Irish Republic he had kept it up indefinitely, tracking the patterns of border crossings, transport movements, troop training. Till the IRA began putting together his own patterns. Then they made predictions. He was caught by dogs in the end. In fact, he might have killed them; one by one. But six dogs at once, he only dealt with four. It was their barking led the men with guns to catch up. They beat him physically and then pinned him to a broad-trunked tree with nails through various folds of skin - above his shoulders, beside his hips. They broke both his arms. The two men relaxed after their exertion. Graham, through the misty gales of pain, realised that their extreme energy with him had come out of their fear. Now he was broken that fear gave way to contempt. They smoked. “Will you look at that one over there,” the large man said pointing to one of the two remaining dogs. It was sniffing round one dead companion. It nuzzled the body as if trying to bring it to life again. “It’s looking for a copulation,” and both men laughed. The dog gave up shortly, lifted its leg against the corpse, and moved away. The men laughed again. Graham was barely looking on. The two dogs came up to the men, seeking, as if for their reward. One man looked at the other. “They’ll be wanting a morsel to eat. Will you cut them a little meat?”  The other man smiled and stood up. He took a woodman’s knife from his belt and sliced some meat from Graham. Graham’s scream echoed uselessly in the wooded landscape. Even his training could not stop that scream. The man nailed the small blooded pieces to a tree opposite. He sat down and the men jeered as the dogs jumped in the air to reach the morsel. The men laughed and threw sticks at the dogs. When finally torn from its nail, the two dogs quarrelled over it. It was hardly a meal for either of them. They seemed dissatisfied with the treat and sniffed around the men for more. Graham’s scream echoed still inside his head, an echo to continue for his remaining years. But his mouth had shut and his breath was all gone. The raw pain between his legs was twofold. One was physical, the other was… more ghastly.

            When the men left they piled the corpses of the four dogs round Graham’s feet.

            His preference, as they left, was to die. He could not conceive of recovery. But the Army was tipped off and a day later they retrieved his destroyed body.

 

….oo0oo….

 

The agency were later to meet their opposite numbers from a comparable German company in a European link-up. The whole world of investigation was broadening. The two agencies chose Athens to honeymoon their marriage. And on this trip Graham had his team of colleagues, half-a-dozen, amounting to half those in his office. And that included Sylvia.

            The trip was for five days. In the sun, the exotic food, the out-of-the-ordinary working, the team found themselves in a different daily contact with each other. And Graham found himself one evening still with the drains of retsina in a bottle staring across a white-clothed table in the Plaka, at Sylvia. The rest of the team had drifted off unconcerned in ones and twos. In that atmosphere, cooking smells in the open bustle of sauntering feet on the streets, the sharp and spicy wine still tasting, Graham found himself switching into an habitual charm with his female companion. Habits resurface.

            Equally, it was haphazard for Sylvia. Though she knew the persisting magnetism, there was, also, a draw of sadness between them. She allowed it to be. Her wine left her relaxed, open, for the first time in her life. Rather than taking any positive steps to react, to move forward, they found themselves – no other way of putting it – wandering in the narrow uneven streets, amongst the lit restaurants flowing onto the streets full of arm-in-arm lovers. The eager traders at once base and aloof. Towering enigmatic above, the shattered face of the acropolis, its arc-lit form, as a sign of the transitoriness of life and also the durability of its effects.

            They found themselves wandering - neither would remember how it happened – hand-in-hand. It had seemed so natural – the place, the warmth, the after-supper glow. Two hands that sought more than their owners knew – or could deliver.

            They clasped in the warmth and glow of the human bustle. And beneath the brooding feline presence of the stony relics above. She turned and stopped him. Her well-known earnestness ran as veins though her passion like a freely freckled marble. She explained in her blunt way the enduring innocence of her body – decent living, as she put it. She was pleased with the slightly archaic expression the ‘innocence of her body’. It spoke as it were in the idiom of the city. She would give herself, her body she vowed, if he wanted. Apologetic, too, she addressed the shame of her body she inhabited, its pressing plainness, a `lumpiness’ she called it. However, for what it was worth she offered it to serve his passions.

            Graham, drunk, was intoxicated too by his own confusion. The familiarity of a woman’s overture, of her abasement, of her confessional offering, of the gift of a body as if it were spirit; this all overwhelmed him with both its familiarity and its impossibility. He was drawn to his own familiar responses and was pulled by them. He assured, reassured, secured her loosened esteem and her uncertainty in desire. All familiar, a pattern, a reflex. And yet, the knowledge; at the same time the cruel, entrapping, obstructing knowledge of his maiming. He knew this sureness of his old touch; his stale relentless scripts could no longer succeed. In the past he had always known that whatever sour taste was left the morning after, it was short-lived compared to the joined movement of ecstasy the night before. Now, oh god, now it was only `as if’ he could lead her there. And the familiarity led him, despite his knowledge that the fate of this tenderness between them could only be implacable as stone.

            Sylvia in blunt fashion, stole a look at Graham and she announced their intention. Having her articulate sense so developed, she knew her desires in words as soon as she knew them. For Sylvia it was more to know them in words than in actual experience. It was not that she lacked experience completely. But it had always been furtive, hidden, hurried and totally unfulfilled. And above all a long time ago.

            “Graham. I’m not thinking about the work anymore. You’re about to become my lover.” Although it was half a question, she felt the relief at achieving such openness. It is what words do – keys to open doors in the mind. She was also surprised at herself – her confidence with words. But not only that, the words themselves implied a confidence with her physical body. It was not a confidence she was familiar with. It was a confidence that came embedded in the proximity of the words to her body’s contact with him.

            She knew Graham’s power, his intent look. Was it horror she saw in his face? Or was it desire?  He managed no more than an inarticulate, “Ah!”  She decided instantly that it was desire, such was the confidence he had created in her. And if it was horror, that was only the horror of his own desire.

            Not given to reassurance, she found herself talking to him about mixing pleasure and business. “Jennifer had an affair with one of the young `ops’”  They kept it quiet nearly till she left. There’s a lot that has gone on in the office. People get a bit nervous if they know. But mostly nobody knows.”

            “But people must talk,” Graham went along with her thinking in a lame sort of way. Though positively charmed by the openness he could never emulate. His conquest was complete. The triumph of the old habit, seduction.

            “Yes. People talk. But no-one knows. If people talk a lot... I mean if so much is talked about, nobody knows what to believe.”

            Together they started walking back down the bright little street. Soon, they would come to their hotel.

 

….oo0oo….

 

When they got there, the same haunted look crossed Graham’s face. But removed itself in a moment. He felt pressed by her, by what seemed to be her desperateness. It was hard to know if her directness of speech came from her innocence or alternatively from an unsuspected depth of experience. However, pinned in his own dilemma, which she could know nothing about, he still found a rising irritation. Graham’s bad temper worried him; there was a degree of vindictiveness in him which over the years he had been forced to acknowledge partially. It was an urge he knew had erupted so often in dropping his women over-quickly, unnecessarily quickly. He’d been inventive in providing himself with good reasons. One of them needed to be made less vain; another needed to be shown she could not control everyone; and so on, and so on, and so on, until the very inventions had themselves become suspicious, even to him. He could by now have had a fat dossier of letters expressing various unsolicited expressions of post-coital indignation against him; except that he had always scrunched them up in unceremonious contempt that the one in question could not learn the lesson he had been prepared to give.

            Now his rising justification was that she would only deserve any disappointment - deserve it for pushing and pressing him. It could not, even now, be quite recognised what this was; that it was in fact his own disappointment twisted into something different. Perhaps, even, he could be taking the opportunity to punish somebody, just anybody would do – just someone who happened to offer herself for the punishment – as a return for his own suffering. A suffering that had gone completely unavenged so far as he knew. In the charging panic of his feelings there was no chance he could unravel this tangle. He allowed, in a cruelly passive way, the usual course of events to take over.

            When they kissed, as they neared the hotel, Sylvia could feel the vibrating passion in this lovely man who was also her friend and colleague. Her body glowed for a moment with enduring ardour – a quiet, unhurried timelessness in his arms. She would give everything; and receive. Received the knowledge that she had pleasured him. Always so cautious, so tidy, she now knew she had loosened what goodness there was in her; free to be plucked by him. By the gracious goodness she knew in him.

            Graham’s regret at what he was doing to her amounted to a repeat of his own ineffable suffering. A perverse triumph lay in knowing that she too would soon be cut off in the midst of her winging expectation.

            At first, she did not notice, as he let her peel away the clothes from the fruit of her appetite, from the trusted altar she desired.

Did she see what at first she could not let her eyes focus on?  The raw red scar descending between his legs, veiled in his dark pubic hairs. Did she draw back quickly, as if in danger?  If she had been an emotional woman she might have screamed. The missing parts were, to her, a real presence. He watched, impassive from a great distance beyond screams. Every shade of her response, fascinated. He allowed her that momentary agony of loneliness.

            She looked up at his cold eye. Did he, she asked, find it funny?  Or, desperately looking for pity from her. If it had simply been told to her, she could have given her pity, her understanding. She could have consoled. Her heart prepared to tear in pieces for him. But she gained no clue. She was brutally alone. Desire mixed with a horror in an unmanageable concoction.

“You bastard,” she said softly. “You should have told me.”

Did a tear leak undisciplined from his eye?

            “Don’t cry on me,” she barked, and stood up. She bit her lip to control her own feelings. “I can’t stand this.”  She turned her back as if to make a wall between her and him. “So this is your secret. Everybody said you had a secret. You were too good to be true.”

            Graham had said no word. He had not moved, watched her with a distant fascination. She hurriedly put back her clothes on her cold body.

 

….oo0oo….

 

At breakfast they spoke together as usual. They were familiar colleagues. Her eyes were slightly circled in red as if needing more sleep. Her mouth chewed on the toast as if disconnected from the stony stillness of the rest of her face. He was pale. They worked on, as always, during the day. Her duties with polishing his broad outlines rescued her from the devouring poison of her own humiliation. His echoing scream went on unheard. He could believe in his triumphs and conquests as of old. Possibly this one even better than of old.

 

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