Nicola was still standing in the doorway when Jonathan began to speak: she hadn’t had time even to take off her coat. It was a cold spring evening: one still needed a coat out of doors after dark.
She was standing there in the sitting-room doorway, her hands in her pockets, holding on to the packet of cigarettes she had gone out to buy, and the loose change, and the keys; she hadn’t had time even to put these things on the table, and take off her coat, and sit down, because Jonathan had called out to her as soon as she’d shut the front door behind her. ‘Nicola?’ But in a tone of voice which seemed odd to her: too sharp, too urgent: and she’d stood, perplexed, in the doorway, her fingers having suddenly tightened around the cigarettes, the keys, the loose coins: ‘What is it?’ she said. Is something wrong?
Jonathan was sitting at the far end of the sofa; he turned his head just enough to enable his eye to catch hers. He gazed at her for a moment and then he spoke again. ‘Come in here,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’
What was he saying? Nicola was paralysed by dread – a dread which in weaker doses had become almost familiar to her during the past few months: now, with this preposterous invitation, Come in here (for where else might she have gone?), this ominous announcement, I want to talk to you, she saw that something wholly dreadful had at last begun. She saw this, but part of her mind failed truly to grasp it. So she stood, dumbfounded, in the doorway. ‘What is it?’ she asked again. ‘What’s wrong?’
Wrong is one of those words which sound like what they signify, not by virtue of onomatopoeia, but by virtue of a more subtle correspondence: the same being true, to a lesser degree only, of right. There is right and there is wrong: the knowledge that there is right and wrong is part of one’s English-speaking birthright: these attributes could not imaginably achieve the same terrible finality in another formulation. This is right, said the Anglo-Saxon warrior, and that is wrong. And to be in the wrong is to be cast into a waste of ice and darkness which is the ultima Thule of devastation. One might nevermore return. ‘Is anything wrong?’ She could see as she uttered the word that something was, indeed, wrong. The ice and darkness filled the room.
Jonathan shrugged very slightly and then got impatiently to his feet. He leaned an arm against the mantelpiece; if there had been a fire he would certainly have poked it. As it was, he looked unseeingly at the objects at his elbow and moved a china poodle dog. Then he looked up at her again. ‘There’s no nice way to say this,’ he said. ‘But I’ve decided – that is, I’ve come to the conclusion – that we should part.’ The ice and darkness were now inside her: all her entrails froze.
‘I think I’ll sit down,’ she said. Her entrails had frozen, but her ankles had turned to water. She walked unsteadily over to the sofa and sat down, huddling her coat closer around her. Her hands were still in the pockets, still holding on to the cigarettes, and the loose change, and the keys. She dared not look at him, and yet she knew she must. She saw that Jonathan’s face was a perfectly composed mask of calm assurance.
There was still a part of Nicola’s mind which did not believe that this conversation was really taking place, and so it was possible to enter further into it. It was a sort of joke, it was the sort of joke which might be perpetrated in a dream: in the alternative reality where there was no right, no wrong. There’s nothing wrong, she found herself thinking: this is just a sort of joke which I haven’t yet understood. ‘I don’t think I understand,’ she said. ‘Could you just say all that again?’
Jonathan had been looking downwards, as if in search of the atavistic poker, the atavistic fire; he now looked up once more. ‘I want you to move out,’ he said. ‘Sorry – there really isn’t a nice way to say this, as I said before. Sorry. It just isn’t working. I mean, you must know that as well as I do.’
‘Move out,’ Nicola repeated dazedly. There was this dreadful lurching feeling in her stomach and she had begun to tremble. Her fingers closed more tightly around the keys, the money, the cigarettes. This was a very nasty kind of joke; it did not seem possible that it could ever become funny.
‘Yes,’ said Jonathan. ‘Well – that is – I’ve thought about this, obviously—’ He was suddenly on much firmer ground: he was down to brass tacks, now. Brass tacks were his stock-in-trade, he being after all a lawyer. ‘I mean, yes, I could move out, of course, and you could stay here, if you wanted to, but I just assumed you wouldn’t want to take it on. I mean, I’m offering, obviously, to buy you out.’
Her state of shock was only intensified by each succeeding sentence. He was offering – obviously! – to buy her out. She had said nothing, and so he went on. He was looking carefully at the china poodle dog. ‘I’m assuming, of course, that you wouldn’t want to buy me out.’
Couldn’t. He means, couldn’t. How very tactful. Of course she couldn’t. Nicola worked in the publications department of a famous, but medium-sized, arts organisation. She found that she was not trembling quite so much now, and might dare to speak.
‘No,’ she said, quite evenly. ‘I wouldn’t.’ There was a very brief pause: you could hear the silence. ‘In fact,’ she went on, ‘I wouldn’t want you to buy me out either. In fact, Jonathan, I don’t believe I know what you’re talking about. I don’t believe this conversation is really happening.’ She got up. ‘Look, I’m going to hang up my coat,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to make some tea, okay? And then you can tell me all about it. Because just at this precise moment I don’t understand what the fuck you’re on about. Excuse me.’ And she left the room.
And although she was still in a state of extreme shock, and still trembling, she was beginning now to see – to realise – to understand – that the thing which was truly wrong was not so much the dreadful scene into which she had just been precipitated, as the misapprehension (whatever it might be) which had given rise to it: she was beginning now to understand – and she became more certain by the minute – that Jonathan’s ‘conclusion’, however rational in itself, could have derived only from a hugely wrong, a wholly false, initial assumption, and that all that was now necessary was the careful discovery of this assumption and the calm revelation of its falseness. Now that she knew what she must do there was nothing truly to worry about, nothing truly to fear. She had stopped trembling; she went and made the tea, and took it into the sitting room.
They were both silent while she poured it out; she handed Jonathan – still standing at the mantelpiece – a cup and then she began to take the cellophane off the cigarette packet.
‘I’ve asked Winkworth’s to send