The House of Sleep (3 page)

‘No.’ Gregory had undressed to his underpants by now, and he slid a hand absently down the front of Sarah’s nightdress, resting it on her breast.

‘You haven’t spoken to him or anything?’

He sighed. ‘Sarah, I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m going to live in London. Why would I waste my time getting to know people I’m never going to see again?’

He removed his underpants, climbed on top of her, and then pulled down her nightdress so that her breasts were fully exposed. He took hold of her nipples and began to tweak them simultaneously. Sarah examined his expression as he did this, trying to remember where she had seen something like it before: his brow was furrowed with both impatience and concentration, much as it had been the other evening while she had watched him twiddling the contrast and vertical-hold knobs on the television downstairs, trying to get a good picture for
News at Ten.
That, she recalled, had taken him about two minutes, but less than half that time was up before he
took her tiny wrists in his hands, pinned her arms to the pillow behind her head, and entered her swiftly. She was dry and tight, and found the sensation uncomfortable.

‘Look, Gregory,’ she said, ‘I’m not really in the mood. In fact, I’m not in the mood at all.’

‘It’s all right, I won’t be long.’

‘No.’ She took a firm hold of his hips and stilled their rocking motion. ‘I don’t want to do this.’

‘But we’ve had the foreplay and everything.’ His eyes were wounded, incredulous.

‘Get out,’ said Sarah.

‘What – of you, the bed, or the room?’ His confusion seemed genuine.

‘Of me, initially.’

He stared at her for a second or two, then tutted to himself and withdrew gracelessly, saying: ‘You can be
so
inconsiderate sometimes.’ But he remained on top of her, and she knew what was coming next. ‘Close your eyes a minute.’

She stared back at him, defiant but powerless.

‘I spy? With my little eye?’

‘Gregory,
no.
Not now.’

‘Go on. I know you like it really.’

‘I do
not
like it really. I’ve never liked it. How many times do I have to tell you that I’ve never liked it?’

‘It’s just a game, Sarah. It’s about trust. You do trust me, don’t you?’

‘Let go,’ she said. Both her hands were enclosed in one of his, and were still pinned to the pillow. His other hand was now hovering above her face, the first and second fingers extended, getting closer to her eyes.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Show that you trust me. Close your eyes.’

The tips of his fingers were now so near that she had no option: she closed her eyes as a reflex action, and then screwed them tight. Soon she felt the pressure of his two fingers against her shielded eyeballs – gentle at first – and she stiffened, a
familiar terror stirring inside her. She had developed a method of dealing with this sensation, which involved emptying her mind of all ideas relating to the present moment. Time, for Sarah, was halted as Gregory crouched over her, and if her thoughts turned towards anything at all, it was towards what seemed (for now) the distant past: the very beginnings of their relationship, when she had so enjoyed his company, before they had become locked into this pattern of self-perpetuating quarrels and weird bedroom rituals.

How had they managed to get from there to here?

She had a vivid recollection, still, of the first time she had met him, during the interval of a concert, at the Arts Centre bar. She had not intended to go to this concert, but ticket sales had been extremely low, and the box office staff were reduced to the expedient of handing out free tickets to passers-by shortly before it started, in order to make up the numbers and spare the visiting performer from embarrassment. The programme consisted of J. S. Bach’s
The Art of Fugue,
a work of which she had no previous knowledge, performed on the harpsichord in its entirety. The only other person in Sarah’s row was a tall, gangly student, his dark hair cut into a severe short-back-and-sides, sitting bolt upright in his chair, wearing a tweed jacket, an old school tie and a yellow waistcoat with a fob watch, who listened to the music with rigid concentration and once or twice sighed loudly or clicked his tongue in exasperation for no apparent reason. Since he seemed to be taking no notice of Sarah, it was a great surprise when he came to sit at her table during the interval, and an even greater surprise when, after a strained silence of perhaps two or three minutes, he suddenly addressed her in a clipped Scottish accent with the words: ‘Preposterous tempi in the eleventh
contrapunctus,
didn’t you think?’

They were the most peculiar, least comprehensible words that had ever been spoken to her: but they did lead to a conversation, of sorts, and that in turn led to a relationship, of sorts. In all her five terms at the university Sarah had never
had a boyfriend, and her social life, such as it was, tended to consist of the occasional rowdy evening out with large groups of friends who had never (she felt) invited her wholeheartedly into their circle. To be asked out to dinner by Gregory, to accompany him to the cinema or theatre, was for a while a new and blissful experience. Most often they went to concerts, and if she noticed that Gregory’s tastes in music showed a marked tendency towards pieces that were dry, academic and emotionless, she did not allow it to bother her. Not, at any rate, until she discovered that these same qualities characterized his lovemaking.

Sarah lost her virginity to Gregory, about six weeks after he had started taking her out. It was a difficult and painful experience, much as she had been expecting; what she had not been expecting, however, was that all their subsequent encounters would be equally lacking in pleasure. Gregory made love with the same cool, intelligent efficiency he found so admirable in the most rigorous of Bach’s keyboard exercises. Tenderness, flexibility, expressiveness and variations in tempo were not among the items in his repertoire. The best that Sarah could expect – the best she had to look forward to, after several months of these couplings – was the moment of post-coital fatigue, when Gregory, his performance executed and his energies spent, would sometimes speak to her in a cajoling, intimate way she found untypical and delightful. It was on one such occasion that he had asked her an unexpected question.

They were lying in bed together, deep in the middle of a still, airless night, hotly entwined, her head on his shoulder. And Gregory had asked her, seemingly from nowhere, what she thought was the most beautiful part of his body. Sarah had looked up at him in surprise, and told him that she wasn’t sure, she would have to think about it, and then he, much to her relief (because she couldn’t, to be honest, think of any part of his body that was especially beautiful), had said, ‘Shall I tell you what is the most beautiful part of your body?’ and
she had said, ‘Yes, tell me,’ but for a little while he had made her guess, and they ran, giggling, through the obvious possibilities, but it was none of those, and finally she gave up, and then Gregory had smiled at her and said, quietly, ‘Your eyelids.’ She hadn’t believed him at first, but he had said, ‘That’s because you’ve never seen your own eyelids; and never will see them, unless I take a photograph’ (but he never did take a photograph), and so she asked him, ‘Well, when have you become so intimately acquainted with my eyelids?’ and he answered, ‘While you were asleep. I like watching you when you’re asleep.’ And this was the first intimation she had had, the first hint, of his liking for standing over people in their beds, looking down on them as they slept, something she had regarded as interesting at first, the sign of an enquiring intelligence, until she began to wonder, in the end, whether there wasn’t something sinister about it, fetishistic almost, this desire to look down on people as they lay helpless, unconscious, while he, the watching subject, retained full control over his waking mind.

It was harder to get to sleep after that, knowing that at any point in the night he might climb out of bed and stand over her, watching her sleeping face by moonlight. (And that was before she had further aroused his interest by telling him about her dreams, her dreams so real that she could sometimes not distinguish them from the events of her waking life.) But she got used to the idea, as she supposed one gets used to most ideas, and her awareness of Gregory’s watchful presence did not unduly disturb her sleeping patterns for several more months (or was it weeks?) until she awoke screaming, in the early hours of one December morning, from one of her recurring nightmares about frogs. This one concerned a man-sized frog which had been squatting by the side of the campus ring road as she tried to hurry by: it had croaked horribly at her and then fastened on to her eyelids with the twin ends of its forked tongue, one on each eye. Sarah had struggled to wake from the nightmare but then began to cry out in even
greater panic as she realized that, even though the dream was over, the sensation of pressure against her eyelids wasn’t going away: there really was someone, or something, fastening on to them. She tried to open her eyes but found that she couldn’t. Something was obstructing the movement of her eyelids. Then the obstruction was removed swiftly and she opened her eyes to find Gregory sitting close beside her, his face bent intently towards hers, his hand – with first and second fingers outstretched – suspended in the air only an inch or two from her eyes.

‘What the
hell
were you doing?’ she asked, about ten minutes later, when she was fully awake, her breathing and heart rate had returned to normal, and she was convinced, finally, that there were no giant frogs in the room with them. ‘What were you doing back then?’

‘Nothing,’ said Gregory. ‘I was just watching you.’

‘You were touching me,’ said Sarah.

‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’

‘Well then, you shouldn’t have put your bloody fingers in my eyes.’

After a pause Gregory murmured, ‘I’m sorry,’ very softly – meltingly – and squeezed her hand. Then he leaned forward and kissed her. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you,’ he repeated. ‘I had to touch them. It’s incredible…’ in the half-dark of the bedroom she could sense his smile ‘… there’s so much
life
going on behind your eyes when you’re asleep: I could see it. And I wanted to touch it: I could feel it, in my fingertips.’ He added: ‘I’ve done it before, you know.’

‘Yes, but… it frightened me. It felt so real.’ Meekly accusing, she said: ‘You were pressing quite hard.’

He smiled again. ‘Yes, but you do trust me, don’t you? Not to hurt you.’

She felt her hand squeezed, her wrist stroked. ‘I suppose so.’

‘I suppose so?’

The weight of his wounded silence was too much to bear.
‘Yes, of course I do. But that’s not really the point, is it?’

‘I think it’s very much the point. What did you think I was going to do to you?’

As he said this, he brought his hand close to her face again. Her eyelids closed of their own accord, and he pressed against them with his fingertips.

‘I spy,’ he whispered, ‘with my little eye. You’re not scared now, are you?’

‘No,’ said Sarah, doubtfully.

Then he pressed harder.

‘And now?’

And that was how it had begun, the thing they came to refer to as ‘the game’, and which became more and more closely associated with their lovemaking; until they began to play it (or rather Gregory began to play it, for Sarah was never anything more than his passive accomplice) not just post-coitally, but even during the act itself; so that it was not uncommon for him actually to reach his climax while lying on top of her, poised above her face, his first and second fingers pressed ever more firmly, ever more testingly, against her closed eyelids.

All of which Sarah remembered now, in the few instants she lay beneath Gregory tonight, as he adopted this position for one more time. For the last time, as it turned out: because all at once, possessed by a spirit of rebellion and a physical strength which surprised them both, she then let out a thin, final shriek of ‘No!’ and heaved Gregory away from her, so that he rolled off the bed and crashed naked to the floor.

‘Jesus Christ, woman!’

Sarah got out of bed and pulled her nightdress back on.

‘What the fuck was that for?’

Now she took her dressing-gown from its hook on the back of the door and struggled into it, wriggling to find the sleeves. Gregory knelt beside the bed, winded, cradling his forehead and struggling for breath.

‘Are you going to answer me or what?’

Sarah opened the door wordlessly and ran down the corridor towards the bathroom. She locked the door and sat on the toilet and wept. She rocked back and forth for several minutes. Slowly the crying and the rocking came to an end, and then she washed her face in cold water and looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her mouth was set in an unfamiliar, resolute line. She began to rehearse the appropriate phrases.

Gregory, I’m sorry but I’ve had enough.

I think it would be better if we didn’t see each other any more.

This just isn’t working, is it?

I think we should just try to be friends from now on.

Strangely, once she had composed the speech in her mind, she found herself looking forward to delivering it: or rather anticipating, with a faint, timorous glow, her sense of satisfaction at having upset at least one of Gregory’s most firmly rooted assumptions. In five minutes’ time, she told herself, it would all be over: and it seemed suddenly incredible that a relationship which had dragged on, now, for more than a year, bringing in its wake most of what she had learned about happiness but also – and more and more, in recent months –a good deal of frustration, could be brought to an end in a few moments, with a handful of well-chosen sentences: consigning her to – what? – freedom, presumably, the freedom to pursue other, more successful friendships (the names and faces of Robert and – to her passing, unexamined surprise –Veronica presented themselves for a moment). But that was all speculation: in the short term she could foresee nothing beyond simple emotional obliteration: a vacuum of feeling: blackness. And yet even this prospect had started to look inviting.