The Glamour

I

For the first few miles after leaving the hospital the roads were narrow and twisty, leading between the high Devon hedges. Because of the number of farm tractors that regularly used these lanes the road surface was muddy and slippery in the rain. Sue drove nervously and hesitantly, braking sharply as they approached corners, and steering around them with elaborate caution, craning her neck to see ahead. It was always dangerous for her to drive, demanding constant concentration, but these lanes presented an extra hazard to her. Fortunately the few oncoming cars they met were being driven slowly, so there was never any real danger of a collision, but the car felt large and unfamiliar and she wished they could reach the main road.

Richard was sitting beside her in the passenger seat, staring ahead and speaking hardly at all. He held the crossover seat belt with one hand, keeping it from pressing against his body, but whenever she braked for a corner he jerked forward with the momentum. She knew that he was tense because of the way she was driving, and that the lurching of the car was probably painful, but trying to compensate for this only made her more nervous.

A few miles beyond Totnes they came at last to the main A38 road, a modern two-lane highway with no sharp corners and only gentle gradients, and almost at once she felt more confident. She accelerated to a comfortable cruising speed of around sixty miles per hour. A fine drizzle was falling, and whenever they overtook a truck or some other large vehicle the windshield was blurred with a muddy spray. Once past Exeter the road joined the M5 motorway, leading directly via a link with the M4 to London.

At her suggestion Richard leaned forward and switched on the radio, tuning it to a number of stations before finding one they agreed on.

“Let me know if you’d like to stop somewhere,” she said.

“I’m all right for the moment. I think I’ll have to get out and walk around in about an hour.”

“How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

Sue felt fine too, glad to be returning permanently to London. She was exhausted by the frequent journeys to Devon in recent weeks. Richard had been walking unaided for almost a month now, and they had both grown impatient for his discharge. It was Dr. Hurdis who had delayed matters, saying he was unconvinced that the traumas had been dealt with. There had been several more sessions of hypnotherapy, but these, like the first, had been inconclusive. Richard himself was apparently untroubled, and anxious to be finished with the treatment.

Sue’s own dilemma was that she agreed with Hurdis; she knew for her own reasons that Richard had not yet come to terms with his past, but she was convinced that nothing more could be gained from conventional therapy. She had her own indecisions on this, a reflection of her personal needs. Richard had lost his glamour, and knew nothing of hers.

Adding to their wish to leave had been the practicalities of seeing him at Middlecombe. The deception of Middlecombe was that it looked like and felt like a hotel, but was of course a hospital. The comfortable surroundings, the discreet furnishings, the steward service, the haute cuisine food raised hopes of privacy and personal freedom, but the reality was that they rarely had a chance of being alone together. Walking in the grounds was the only time they had to themselves, but they could not do too much of this. And for the same reasons, Sue could not actually stay at Middlecombe and had always had to find lodgings outside, sometimes in Kingsbridge, once or twice in Dartmouth, and this had added to the expense of the visits and made further inroads into their time together.

In all her several visits, they had been alone in his room just once. Then, very tentatively, they had tried to make love. It was a failure; they were both too aware of their surroundings, the bed was functional hospital apparatus, and his body was still sore and stiff. Through the thin partition wall they had been able to hear two of the other patients speaking in the next room, and the need to be quiet became another inhibition. In the end they had settled for lying naked in each other’s arms for a few minutes. Even that had provided her with shocks: until then she had no notion of the extent of his injuries, and she was horrified by the scars from burns and operations. It marked a fresh phase in her feelings for him: the sheer scale of the hurt he had suffered awakened a new tenderness.

But now Middlecombe was behind them, and her own personal dilemma about Richard became pressing. What she wanted most was a clean start, a second chance, and on the surface there seemed no reason why this should not be. She still loved and needed him as much as ever, and simply because Richard had no memory of what had torn them apart before, the best thing she could do would be to build slowly from here.

She was rid of Niall at last. The accident had apparently destroyed Richard’s glamour. The emotional turmoil of finally breaking with Niall and of hearing about the car bomb had shocked her out of her own glamour.

Everything she had hoped for in the old days was now hers.

Richard, though, was intent on rediscovery. He wanted to know what had happened, how they had met, how they had loved, what had pulled them apart. She was terrified of his finding out, and had no idea what to do.

In this sense the glamour still united them, and still threatened them.

“I’m beginning to feel stiff,” Richard said, shifting in the seat and trying to readjust the position of the safety belt. “Shall we stop soon?”

They had been silent for most of the journey, listening to the classical music on Radio 3. She wondered what music he liked best, whether it was just classical music or if his taste extended to pop too. There were so many small things they did not know about each other, swept aside by the urgencies of love. What she remembered most about him was his passion, his exciting declarations, the impromptu of his feelings. In the hospital all this had been restrained by the conditions, but once they were home would she see this side of him again?

They were approaching Bristol, and just before the Avon Bridge she turned off the motorway and drove into the service area. After parking the car she went around to the passenger door and stood by it while Richard climbed out. He was able to do this on his own, insisted on it, but she wanted to be close by him. She reached into the back of the car for his walking stick, then locked up.

It had stopped raining, but the tarmac of the parking area was wet and scattered with puddles. A cool wind blew in from Wales, just across the Severn estuary.

She bought two cups of tea and some biscuits, and took them to the table where Richard was waiting. The cafeteria, brightly lit and garishly colored, was crowded with other motorists. She had never seen one of these places empty. From outside they could hear the electronic groans and whines of the video machines.

“Are you looking forward to being at home?” she said.

“Of course I am. But it’s been a long time. I keep thinking about what the flat was like when I bought it. It had just been modernized, and it was empty. It’s difficult to imagine it with furniture.”

“I thought you said you couid remember it?”

“My memories are all mixed up. I keep thinking of the day I moved in. I’d put the carpets at the back of the van, so I had to move all the furniture again. And I can remember later, when you were there, but it doesn’t feel like the same place. I can remember them simultaneously, one on top of the other. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not really,” she said.

“You haven’t been back there, have you?”

“No.” It had actually occurred to her once that she ought to call in to see if everything was all right, but she had never done so.

Since making her visits to Richard in Devon her life had been afflicted by two mundane problems: lack of time and lack of money. He actually knew very little of this, because in the early days he had been so suspicious of her excuses. Since then she had tried to minimize her problems to him, in the greater cause. He paid for everything he knew about: her travel expenses, the lodgings in Devon, car rental, meals whenever they were together, but these had very little to do with the central problem. She still had to find the rent, she had to eat, pay for heating, had to move around London, clothe herself.

Her working life had been thrown into chaos by her frequent absences from London. The studio seemed less and less inclined to commission work from her, because she had become unreliable, and she had no time to go out and look for alternatives.

The fact that she had supported herself for some years was a matter of considerable importance to her. It had always been precarious, but she had survived somehow. Independence and honestly earned income were identified in her mind with her growth away from Niall’s influence, three or four years ago, when she had started to reject his way of life.

But the temptations were constant because the solution was within reach. Niall had taught her the techniques of shoplifting, and she knew she could still use them. Her glamour was much weaker, but it was there to be used if she needed it. So far she had resisted it, and Richard knew nothing of the struggle she had waged.

When she told herself that her past was behind her, this was exactly what she meant. Petty crime was a negative function of the glamour, and it was the negatives that had ruined everything before.

They left the cafeteria and returned to the car. Richard carried his stick rather than used it, but he was walking with a limp. She watched over him protectively as he lowered himself backward into the passenger seat, then swung his legs one at a time into place. These efforts at normal movements touched her, and after she had closed the door on him she stood for a moment, staring vacantly across the car’s metal roof and remembering, briefly, a moment from their first affair when she had seen him running.

Soon they were back on the motorway, heading for London.

II

She found his apartment with some difficulty, in spite of his directions. She had always been scared of driving in London. After a wrong turn into a one-way system and several near misses with oncoming cars in the narrow back streets, she found the road and parked the car not too far from the front of the house.

Richard leaned forward and peered up through the windshield at the houses.

“It doesn’t seem to have changed much,” he said.

“Were you expecting it to?”

“It’s been so long since I was here. I somehow imagined it would look different.”

They left the car and went to the house. The main door led to a tiny hall with two more doors, one for the ground-floor flat and one for his own upstairs. As he fumbled with the key ring Sue watched his face, trying to judge his feelings. He revealed no expression, perhaps deliberately, and slipped the Yale key into the lock and pushed the door open. There was a rustling, scuffing sound and the door jammed briefly. He pushed again, and this time the door opened fully. On the floor at the bottom of the stairs was a huge pile of letters and newspapers, mostly newspapers.

He said, “You go first. I can’t step over those.”

He moved back to make room for her and she went in first, pushing the papers to one side against the wall. She scooped up as many of them as she could, and cradled them in her arms.

Richard led the way up the stairs, taking the steps slowly and carefully. She followed, thinking how strange it was to be here again, when for a time she had thought she would never even see Richard again. The place had memories for her.

At the top of the stairs he halted unexpectedly, and because she was right behind him she was forced to take a step down.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“Something wrong. I can’t tell what it is.”

There was a frosted-glass window built into the wall beside the stairs, but because all the room doors were closed the landing at the top was in semidarkness. The flat felt chilly.

“Would you like me to go first?” she said.

“No, it’s all right.”

He moved on, and she followed him onto the landing. He opened one door after another, peering inside, then moving to the next. Apart from the kitchen and bathroom, immediately to the right of the top of the stairs, there were three main rooms. The doors were old-fashioned and paneled, stained dark brown, giving the apartment a dinginess that reminded her of childhood. She remembered his saying once that one day he would get around to stripping the doors and repainting them.

She went into the living room and dumped her armload of newspapers and letters on one of the chairs. The air in the room had that indefinable smell of someone else’s home, but there was also a sense of neglect, that the air had not changed in a long time. The curtains were half drawn, so she pulled them back and opened one of the windows. Street noises came in. On the sill in front of the main window was a sad row of house plants, all now dead. One of them was one she had given him as a present, Fatsia japonica, the castor-oil plant, but most of the leaves had fallen off and the single remaining one was brown and brittle. She stared at it, wondering whether to touch it and make it fall.

Richard walked in from the landing, looked around at the furniture, the bookshelves, the dusty television set.

“Something’s different,” he said. “It’s been moved around.” He swept his hand through his hair, lifting it away from his eyes. “I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what’s happened.”

“Everything’s the same.”

“No. I knew it was different as soon as we walked in.”

He swiveled around quickly, balancing his weight on his good hip, and went out again. Sue heard his irregular pace as he went down the thinly carpeted landing.

She was thinking about the first time she had been here, soon after they met. Because it was summer the room had been full of light, and the newly painted walls had seemed bright and refreshing; the same walls now looked drab and cold, needing some pictures or wall hangings to cheer them up. The whole flat wanted cleaning and reviving. It brought out domestic instincts in her, but the thought of doing housework for someone else was daunting. She was tired from the long drive, and felt like going out for a drink.

She heard Richard moving around in the next room, where he kept his pieces of antique film equipment, and she went in to talk to him.

“There’s a room missing, Sue!” he said at once. “Down at the end, next to the bathroom. There used to be a spare room!”

“I don’t remember that,” Sue said.

“I always had four rooms! This one, the living room, the bedroom and a spare. Am I going mad?” He went down the corridor and gestured at the blank wall at the end.

“That’s an outside wall,” she said.

“You’ve been here before … don’t you remember it?”

“Yes. But ,it was just like this.”

She went to him and squeezed his arm gently. “Your memory’s playing you tricks. Don’t you remember this morning, on the motorway, you said you were remembering the flat in two ways?”

“Yes, but now I’m here.”

He stumped away from her and limped down the landing. Sue wondered what she could say. Unknown to Richard she had had a private meeting with Dr. Hurdis the day before. The psychiatrist had gone to some pains to warn her that Richard’s restoration of memory might be only partial, in spite of what he claimed. Hurdis believed that there were still gaps, and that some misremembered details might be thought of as actual memories.

“But what am I to do?” Sue had said.

“Use your judgment. Most memory loss concerns small, irrelevant matters, but they can be very perplexing.”

As perplexing as a room missing from a flat he thought he remembered?

Sue walked into the bedroom. Another room that smelled musty. She opened the curtains but the windows here were swollen, or seized with paint, and she could not shift them. A small fanlight opened for her. The bed stood against the wall, just inside the door. Someone had made it up, far more neatly than either she or Richard would have done it. Who could it have been? She knew the police had visited the flat after the car bomb, and suddenly she had a bizarre mental image of two uniformed policemen in helmets, painstakingly smoothing the sheets and pulling up the covers, tucking in the blankets. She smiled.

She pulled back the bedclothes, and found that the sheets were far from fresh. While Richard moved around in the other rooms she stripped the bed and struggled to turn over the mattress. This too smelled stale, but there was nothing she could do about that. She remembered there was a small airing cupboard in the bathroom, over the hot-water tank. In this she found a complete set of sheets and pillowcases, none of which smelled of damp. While she was there she switched on the electric immersion heater, thinking how, piece by piece, a home was brought back to life. With the same thought she plugged in the fridge, but nothing happened. The compressor did not start and the interior light would not come on. She went out to the landing, found the fuse box, and turned on the mains supply. The overhead light came on.

In the kitchen the fridge was whirring, but when she looked inside she discovered the white insulated walls had grown large areas of spotty black mold. A bottle of milk had separated Out into a yellow liquid and a foul-smelling brown scum. She poured it away, and rinsed the bottle under the tap. She was kneeling on the floor, wiping away the mold with a damp cloth, when Richard came in.

“I suppose we ought to buy some food,” he said. “Or shall we eat out this evening?”

“We could do both.” She rinsed the cloth in clean water, then wiped the surfaces of the fridge once more. She stood up. “Let’s get some food in for tomorrow, but eat in a restaurant tonight.”

“Does that mean you’re going to stay?”

“Probably.” She kissed him lightly. “We ought to get your stuff into the flat. I’ve got to return the car this evening.”

“While it’s still ours, why don’t we drive over to collect mine?”

“Where is it?”

“The last time I used it I parked it in the road outside your place. Unless it’s been stolen, it should still be there. The battery’s almost certainly dead.”

“I don’t remember seeing it.” She frowned. “It’s bright red, isn’t it?”

“It was. it’s probably covered in leaves and dirt now.”

She said no more, but she was certain his car was not there. It had figured large in her life, and she would recognize it anywhere. He normally kept it in a rented lock-up, and she had been assuming it was there.

“Are you able to drive?” she said.

“I don’t know until I try, but I think so.”

The next hour was occupied with domestic tasks, and after they had returned to his flat and put away the groceries they set out on what she was convinced would be a wasted journey to find his car. The evening rush hour had begun, and driving across north London was a minor nightmare for her. At last they escaped the crush of traffic in Highgate and crossed the Archway into Hornsey. She drove slowly down her street, bringing the car to a halt outside the house.

“It’s farther down,” Richard said. “On the other side.”

“I can’t see it.” But she drove the length of the street, and at the end executed an awkward turn.

As she drove back, Richard said, “I distinctly remember that I left it here. Under that tree, where the Mini is. And when I left I was too upset to drive, and walked home.”

“Could you have come back for it later?”

“No, that was the day of the car bomb.”

They reached her house again, and because there was a parking space opposite she pulled in and switched off the engine. Richard was obviously confused by the absence of his car, because he turned in his seat and was looking along the row of parked cars.

“Let’s go back and at least look in your garage,” Sue said. “It might have been moved by the police. They had all your papers, didn’t they?”

“Yes. Maybe you’re right.”

She opened the driver’s door. “I’m just going to go inside and see if there are any messages for me. Do you want to come in too?”

“I think I’ll stay here.”

A sudden tension in his voice made her glance at him, but his expression revealed nothing. He was scanfling the parked cars that could be seen. She left the car and went to her house, searching for the keys.

Inside, she found two scribbled messages on the communal notice board beside the phone; one was from the studio, and her immediate instinct was to call them back at once. She looked at her wristwatch and realized they would have left by now. The message was undated, so it could be up to four days old. When she went into her room she found everything as she had left it. She was hardly ever here now. She took a change of clothes and underclothes from the wardrobe and thrust them into her holdall. She had everything else she needed in her overnight bag at Richard’s flat.

Alone for a few moments, she stared around the old familiar room remembering how it had felt when she first moved in, three years earlier. That had been her first real attempt to reject Niall and the way of life into which he had led her. By then she had already made the decision which was only implemented when she met Richard, allowing Niall to hover around on the fringe of her life all that time. She knew when she moved in that there was more to life than Niall’s way. The art-school education her parents had given her was being wasted; she was growing up and wanted more than a life of petty crime and useless drifting. This room, legally rented, and paid for with work professionally earned, had marked a new turning. But with time it had simply become the place she lived in, symbolic of nothing.

She returned to the car. They drove back to West Hampstead; the traffic was lighter now, and she was beginning to learn the way, but he had to direct her to the exact location of his garage. When he unlocked the door they found the car inside. Two of its tires were flat and the battery was dead, but otherwise it was just as he must have left it, all those months ago.

III

They went to a Chinese restaurant in Camden High Street, then returned to his flat. Using jump leads from the rental car, they had managed to start Richard’s and he had tried driving it. He took it as far as the nearest filling station, where they pumped up the tires, but after that he had been too fatigued for more driving.

This aside he seemed relaxed and happy, and for the first time since leaving Middlecombe he became talkative. He said he wanted to get back to work, perhaps overseas; he had always enjoyed travel. When they were back in the flat they watched the evening news on television, and he talked interestingly about the style of television reporting and how there were subtle differences between the British and American ways. He had had to learn the American style while working for the agency. After the program he even talked about trying to find a full-time job once more.

Then they went to bed, and of course she could not help thinking about the past. The physical act of love was a reminder for them both: how long ago it had been, how good it could be, how much it mattered. Afterward she lay close against him, resting her head on the side of his chest. She could see none of his scars from this position—an illusion of the past, because his injuries affected everything in the present. It had been here, in this bed and possibly in the same sheets, that they had first made love.

Neither of them was sleepy, and after a while Sue left the bed and made some tea for herself and took a can of beer from the fridge for Richard. Because the room was chilly in spite of the electric heater, she pulled on a sweater and sat facing him while he propped himself up against the pillows.

“You never did redecorate this place,” she said, looking around at the room in the low light from the bedside lamp. “You said you were going to.”

“Did I? I don’t remember that.”

“You said you’d put up some wallpaper. Or paint the walls a better color.”

“Why? They look all right to me.”

She smiled at him, half sitting, half lying, the beer can held in his fingers. There was a pink latticework of graft tissue around his neck and shoulder.

“Don’t you remember this?” she said.

“Have we talked about this before? The color of my walls?”

“You said you had regained your memory.”

“I have, but I can’t remember every tiny detail.”

“This isn’t a detail.”

“But it can’t matter, Sue!”

“How many more tiny details have you forgotten?” She said the words, not thinking of the warning from Dr. Hurdis until too late. And not thinking either of her own resolve to let the past lie.

“The main thing was for me to remember you. That’s all that counted.”

“We’ve got to put the past behind us.”

“I can’t, because I fell in love with you then and I want to remember how.”

She felt again the familiar perverse excitement of their previous affair, knowing how dangerous it was to go back, yet still fatally drawn to it.

She said, “I just want to start again.”

“That’s what I want too. But remembering how we met, what we did together, that’s crucial to me.”

“You’ve got to let it go.” He had already finished the beer, and he put the empty can on the tray she had brought for herself. “Do you want another?” she said.

“I’ll get it.”

“No, stay there.”

She walked into the kitchen and took two more cans from the fridge. She had had to get away from him for a moment, because she felt the rapture in her, the risky thrill of wanting to try again. She stared blankly into the interior of the fridge, holding on to the open door, feeling the refrigerated air circulating down and around her naked legs. Maybe she was fooling herself to think they could be together without the glamour to link them. It had always been the condition of them, intrinsically fascinating. Richard had lost the glamour, or it had been forced out of him by the shock of his injuries; would knowledge of it now restore him to her?

She closed the fridge, went back to the bedroom. She put the two beer cans on the table next to him and sat again on top of the bed, crossing her legs and pulling down the front of the sweater into her lap.

She said, “Do you remember everything about me?”

“I thought I did. You’re making me wonder.”

She moved closer to him and took his hand. “You haven’t really got your memory back, have you?”

“Yes I have. Most of it … the important events. I remember that you and I fell in love, but you had a boyfriend called Niall who wouldn’t let you go, and in the end he split us up. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

“That was the result, yes. Maybe that’s how you remember it now.”

“I remember being with you in France.”

That startled her. She said, “But I’ve never been to France. I’ve never even been out of Britain. I don’t have a passport.”

“That’s where we met … in France, on a train going to Nancy.”

“Richard, I’ve never been to France.”

He shook his head and drank more of the beer. “I’ve got to have a piss.”

With some caution he swung his legs out of the bed, then limped from the room. She stared after him, trying to understand. He left both doors open, and while she waited she could hear him in the bathroom. After the toilet flushed there was just the sound of the water. At last he came back into the room, and returned to his position leaning on the pillows.

“Is that true—you’ve never visited France?” he said.

“I’ve never lied to you, Richard.”

“All right, then where did we meet?”

“Here in London. A pub in Highgate.”

“That can’t be true!”

He had closed his eyes, and turned his face to the side. She felt a sudden fright, thinking how unqualified she was to cope with something like this. The doctor had been right: he had been discharged too soon; his memory was permanently affected. She looked at his scarred body, his trunk and arms not only stouter than before, but weaker too through lack of exercise. Was she wrong to challenge his memories? Were they as valid in their own way as hers? Why should he think they had met in France? It was a shock to learn this, something she could not even begin to work out.

All she knew was her own truth, the one dominant influence on her, and, in the end, on him.

She said, “Richard, do you remember the glamour?”

“Not that again!”

“So it means something to you. Do you remember what it is?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know!”

“Then I’ll show you.”

A decision made, and she scrambled away from the bed, charged with purpose. The rapture of their past together had fixed itself on her, and she knew everything had to wait until this was settled. It was their condition.

“What are you doing?” Richard said.

“I want something bright-colored. Where do you keep your clothes?”

“In the chest of drawers.”

But she already had one of the drawers open and was hunting through it. Almost at once she found a woolen sweater, a rich royal blue. She pulled it out. He must have used it for jobs about the house, because one of the elbows had frayed away and there was a smudge of dirt across the front. It gave her a strange, dangerous feeling to hold it, knowing that it was a dark color, something she would never choose for herself. It had a sexual quality, like picking a dress that was cut too low, or a skirt that was too short. She felt giddy.

“Look at me, Richard. Watch everything I do.”

She pulled off the beige-colored sweater she was wearing, and tossed it on the bed. For a few seconds she stood naked, turning out one of the sleeves of the blue sweater so she could put it on. She pulled it over her head, wrestling her arms against its weight. As it passed over her face she briefly smelled him in it, his body, overlaid with the faint mustiness of months untouched inside the drawer. She brought her head through, and pulled the sweater down over her breasts. It was too large for her, and reached to her thighs.

“I preferred you naked,” Richard said, but it was a weak joke. He was avoiding the truth of what she was about to do; he knew what was going to happen, he knew. It was too important for him to have forgotten. He blocked it in his mind, he somehow forced it out of his memory, but Sue knew he would remember again. Already he felt the same rapture. The peril of what she was doing coursed through her, exhilarating her.

“Look at the sweater, Richard.” Her voice had thickened with her excitement. “See how dark and strong it is. Can you see?”

He was staring at her, and he nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Watch the color, don’t lose sight of it.”

She concentrated, thinking of the cloud, recalling the glamour to her. Once it had always been there, but now she had to force it. She felt the cloud gathering around her.

She became invisible.

Richard continued to stare at the place she had been as she moved away, unseen by him, walking to the other side of the bed.

It was always thus, like stripping in front of strangers, like those dreams of nakedness in public places. The half-guilty surge of sexual arousal, the sweet desire of becoming vulnerable. The first time you showed your glamour was always like first sex, a sudden revelation of a new self, a sacrifice, a loss of defense. Yet invisibility was secure, a concealment and a hiding, a power and a curse. Once before there had been a first time with Richard, but because he had forgotten, because his mind had been changed, there was this second first time, and the heady, sensual abandonment was there again.

She said, “Do you remember the time you saw Niall?”

And Richard turned his head sharply, a shocked expression on his face, and he looked toward the place where now she stood, invisible to him.