Transit(45)

Eloise stood up to greet me. The other two women stayed where they were. Eloise was elegantly dressed and her face was carefully made up; her two friends also wore dresses and high heels. They looked like they were all waiting to go out to some grand party rather than remaining here for the evening in the dark, fog-bound countryside. It seemed a waste that there was no one to admire them. Eloise drew close and plucked at my clothes, tutting.

‘Always so dark,’ she said. I could smell her perfume. She herself was wearing a soft knitted dress made of cream-coloured yarn. She drew still closer, scrutinising my face. She brushed her fingertips over my cheek and then stood back to examine them. ‘I just wondered what you were wearing on your skin,’ she said. ‘You’re very pale. These –’ she plucked at my clothes again – ‘are draining you.’

She introduced me to the two women, who didn’t get up but stretched out their bare arms from the depths of the sofa to shake my hand with varnished fingers. One of them was a dark, very slender woman with a fleshy lipsticked mouth and a long, narrow, bony face. She wore a clinging leopard-print dress and a heavy gold collar-like necklace around her sinewy throat. The other had fair flossy hair and a severe Nordic beauty, accentuated by the white sheath in which she was encased. The children were becoming restive in their corner and presently a little girl with a pair of wire-and-muslin wings attached to her back extracted herself from the group and came to stand beside us. The fair woman said something to her in a foreign language and the girl replied petulantly. Then she began to clamber up on to the back of the sofa, a development the woman did her best to ignore until the little girl was behind her and threw herself down on top of her with her arms wrapped tightly around the woman’s neck.

‘Ella!’ the woman said, startled. She made an ineffectual attempt to release herself. ‘Ella, what are you doing?’

The child laughed wildly, sprawled across the woman’s back with her mouth open and her head thrown back. I could see the white stumps of her small teeth in her pink gums. Then she climbed over the woman’s shoulder and, still hanging from her neck, flung herself heavily into her lap, where she writhed and kicked her legs unconstrainedly. I saw that the woman was either unwilling or unable to take control of the situation and had therefore left herself with no alternative but to act as though it wasn’t happening.

‘Did you drive here from London?’ she asked me, with difficulty, while the child writhed in her lap.

It was hard to participate in her pretence, as the child had her arms so tightly around her neck that she was visibly throttling her. Fortunately Lawrence passed by at that moment and, easily detaching the girl, wings and all, from the woman’s lap, cheerfully carried her suddenly limp and unprotesting form back to the other end of the room. The woman put her hand to her throat, where a number of red marks remained, watching him.

‘Lawrence is so good with Ella,’ she said. She spoke mildly, almost disinterestedly, as though she had observed the scene that had just occurred rather than participated in it. She had the very slight drawl of an accent. ‘She recognises his authority without being frightened of him.’

Her name was Birgid: she told me that she had become a close student of Lawrence’s behaviour and character over the past year, since he had taken up with Eloise. Eloise was one of her oldest friends; she had wanted, she said, to make sure that Lawrence was good enough for her. At first he had bridled at her scrutiny and the way she challenged what he said and did but in the end they had grown close, and frequently stayed up and talked after Eloise had gone to bed. Eloise was often very tired, Birgid added, as her younger son had sleeping problems and woke up several times a night; the older one, meanwhile, was struggling at school. Eloise didn’t have the energy to challenge Lawrence – who liked to get his own way – herself, and so Birgid did it for her.

‘I have seen it before with Eloise,’ Birgid said. ‘Men like her because she gives the impression of independence while being in fact completely submissive. She attracts bullies,’ she added, wrinkling her small nose. ‘Her last husband was an absolute pig.’

Birgid had extraordinarily long and narrow eyes of an unearthly pale green colour. Her hair was pale too – almost white – and in the candlelight her skin had the seamlessness and solidity of marble. I asked her where she was from and she said that she had been born and brought up in Sweden, but had lived in this country since she was eighteen. She had come here to university and had met her husband – a fellow student – in her first term. They had got married during the university holidays and had returned, much to the bewilderment of their student peers, man and wife. Jonathan had been unable to come this evening, she added. He had too much work to do, and also he thought it would be good for her and Ella to take the trip together. She had decided not to drive because she had never driven anywhere alone with Ella before. Instead they had taken the train.

‘That’s why I asked if you had driven,’ she said. ‘I was afraid to drive.’

I said she had been right to be afraid and she listened to me with an inflexible composure, shaking her head.

‘When you are afraid of something,’ she said, ‘that is the sign that it’s something you must do.’

She herself had always lived by this philosophy, she added, but since the birth of Ella she had observed herself repeatedly failing to adhere to it. Jonathan and she had waited a long time to have a child: she had found out she was pregnant on her fortieth birthday. You could say, she said, that we waited until the last possible moment. It wasn’t biologically impossible, of course, for her to have a second child – she was forty-four now – but she had no wish to. It had been hard enough to accommodate Ella in their lives, after more than two decades of it just being the two of them. They were no longer fluid, as they had been at eighteen. To introduce a new element into something that has already set is extremely difficult. Not that Jonathan and I were fixed in our ways, she added. But we were very happy as we were.