The Indian Clerk (33 page)

Anne doesn't laugh. It's late morning in the flat near Regent's Park. Across the room from where Littlewood's sitting, across
a shaft of sunlight that penetrates the window like a saber, she's pinning up her hair.

"If you want to know what I think, they should just turn all those boardinghouses into brothels," he says.

"That's a bit callous of you," she says, taking a pin from her mouth. "Those women depend on the students for their livelihood."

"Only a joke," he says. "What's become of your sense of humor?"

"Nothing seems very funny to me at the moment."

"If you can't laugh, you'll go insane, is what I say," he says. And he lights a cigarette. Although Anne's nearly dressed,
he's still in his shorts and vest. He's postponing as long as he can the moment when he'll have to put on his uniform, because
putting on his uniform will mean that his leave is really over and that he must return to Woolwich. And not only that, Anne
must return to Treen. If "must" is the right word. In fact she seems impatient to get away. Why, you'd think (he thinks) she'd
be happy to have three days with me. Instead it's been all worry. Worry about the children. (One had a toothache.) Worry about
the dogs. Worry that her husband would find out she's not, in fact, visiting her sister in Yorkshire. Nor has she wanted sex
much, which isn't in and of itself a catastrophe—they are well past the phase where sex is a necessity to them—and yet one
would hope she'd realize that after all these weeks cooped up with a bunch of men, he might appreciate the chance to run his
hands over a woman's body. Which Anne hasn't much allowed. So has she stopped loving him?

The thought pierces him as the beam of sunlight pierces the window, cleaves him, passes through the other side. Impossible.
Impossible.

She finishes doing her hair. He stubs out one cigarette; lights another. "Care for some breakfast?" he asks.

"No thanks, I'll be late for the train."

"Tea then?"

"Ugh, the thought makes me sick."

He laughs. "One would think you were pregnant."

"I am, actually."

The cigarette hangs from his lips. "What did you say?"

"I wasn't planning to mention it, but now that you've brought it up-"

"Pregnant!"

"Don't sound so surprised. It happens to women."

"But how—"

She does up the buttons of her blouse. " Jack, I know boys of your generation grew up in virtual ignorance of the laws of
nature, but really, one would assume that by now—"

"Don't be ridiculous—Of course I—" He stands, looks around as if he's forgotten something. And then he realizes that what
he's forgotten is joy. "Darling!" he says. And he embraces her. "But this is marvelous, marvelous!"

"Steady on." She pushes him away. "It complicates things."

"Why?"

"Arthur."

"But you're not saying that you and Arthur—"

"Of course not. Don't be daft. Arthur and I haven't—well, for years. And that's just the trouble. He'll know it's you. So
things could get a bit sticky."

"But shouldn't we get married?"

She turns to face him. "What are you saying, Jack?"

"Well, why not? You and Arthur—as you say, you haven't—"

"But you never said anything about marriage before."

"I know. But now—"

"Because I'm pregnant?"

"No, of course not. It's that your being pregnant—it makes me realize how much I love you, how much it matters. This."

"You could say that with a little more conviction."

"I'm absolutely convinced."

"You don't sound it."

She's right. He doesn't sound it. Quick, he must find a reason for her not to think him despicable.

"That's only because it's such a surprise. I've hardly had a chance to get used to it."

"What will Arthur say? Will he be angry?"

"Probably. And if he is—well, there's nothing to do about it, is there?" She picks up her hat. "The child will be raised as
his. He or she will think of him, Arthur, as his father, and you as Uncle Jack. Just like the others."

Littlewood puts his hand to his forehead. Much to his own astonishment, he is weeping. "I don't know what to say," he says.
"I don't know how to get used to this."

"You've got used to worse things. We all have." She kisses his forehead. "And now I must go or I shall miss my train."

"But it's my child too!" He says this as if he has just realized it.

"Our child," she corrects.

"Will nothing change?"

"Oh, everything will change." She is at the door now. "Though not necessarily for the worse."

"Anne—"

"No," she says firmly, suddenly prim. And then she's gone.

Quickly as he can, he washes, puts on his uniform, and packs his bag. On the way downstairs, he passes a woman carrying a
parcel of groceries. She looks him up and down as if to say, I know which flat you're coming out of. She has a scarlet birthmark
on her left cheek, a sort of permanent flush that he finds strangely attractive. But when he offers to help her with the groceries,
she says no, thank you, and hurries past him up the stairs.

He steps outside. It's cold and raining a little. A gust of wind hits him in the face like a fist, like the knockout blow
he knows he has coming to him, that he deserves and even desires. Soon the left side of his face is numb. He walks—street
follows street, namelessly—and then he stops walking and looks at his watch. Four hours and twenty minutes until he's due
back at Woolwich, one hour and twenty minutes until he's due to meet Hardy at a tea shop near the British Museum, seven minutes
until Anne boards her train. And how is he supposed to face Hardy—dry, sexless Hardy—and talk mathematics, or Trinity politics,
or cricket, now that Anne has torn a gash in the very fabric of his life? His life: a surface that stretches without tearing,
a surface "the spatial properties of which are preserved under bicontinuous deformation." Topology. That's how he's thought
of it until this morning. But then Anne tore a gash right down the middle. He wants a beer. He can't face Hardy without a
beer.

He goes into the first pub he sees. It's noon exactly. These days, thanks to the Defense of the Realm Act, pubs are only open
from noon until two-thirty and then from six-thirty until eleven. He downs a pint, then orders another. He thinks: what am
I to her? To him, she is a mystery. She always has been. They met more or less by accident, five years ago, when he was in
Treen on holiday. There was a garden party, and she was there with Chase, who had heard of Littlewood from Russell, and started
up a conversation. Obviously Chase wanted to make an impression, but it was his wife, obliviously capering with a dog, who
made the impression. While Chase talked, she danced the dog up onto its hind legs, and kept it standing on its hind legs—he
counted—for a full forty-five seconds, simply by dangling in front of its face an imaginary bit of something, conjured up
between her fingers. She had brown, freckled skin. Shoes looked wrong on her somehow. She seemed so much a part of the shore
outside the window, the rough surf and the sand and the rocks, that he assumed she had been born and raised in Treen, when
in fact she had grown up in the Midlands. She had only come to Treen after marrying Arthur, to whose family the house belonged.
"No one believes it," she told him when they finally got to talk, "but until I was seventeen I'd never seen the sea. And then
I came here, and the moment I stepped down from the carriage, I knew I'd found the place I belonged. I consider myself extremely
fortunate. I have a theory that for each of us there's a place in the world where we belong—only very few of us ever find
it, because God is capricious. No, not capricious. Malicious. He scatters us over the earth at random, he doesn't plant us
in our places. And so you might grow up in Battersea and never know that your true place, the one place you belonged, was
a village in Russia, or an island off the coast of America. I think it's why so many people are so unhappy."

"And are you happy," he asked, "now that you've found your place?"

"I would be happier," she said, "if finding it didn't require me to give something else up. But perhaps we're all doomed to
such bargains."

The morning after he met her, much to his regret, he had to return to Cambridge. He was eager to get back to Treen, though,
and when, a few weeks later, he wrote to tell her that he was planning another visit, she invited him to stay as her guest.
And then he arrived, and conveniently—it seemed suspiciously convenient at the time—Arthur was not there; at the last minute
a medical emergency had obliged him to stop the weekend in London.

"You're my place," he said to her that night. It was true. Much as he liked Treen, it was not Treen to which he belonged.
It was to Anne. She seemed an extension of the coast, as if a beach, fleeing the advances of a sea god, had taken human form
and stepped up onto the earth on shaky legs of sand. In this myth that Littlewood invented, you could recognize the beach
naiad by the sand that she always left in her wake, no matter how far inland she journeyed, the sand that you could follow
backward, like a trail of breadcrumbs, to the cliffs and the beaches of Cornwall. Somehow he knew, even that first night,
that he would spend whatever he had left of his life, or much of it, trying to trace that trail back to its source.

After that, they settled into an adulterous routine. Commitment, for both of them, meant routine. Most Fridays he would take
the train down to Treen. She would meet him at the station, feed him a late supper in the sitting room. The next day, at eight
precisely, coffee in bed, then, in the morning, work on the sun porch, sitting on a broken chair, his feet on a log and his
papers held down by stones gathered from the beach. At noon he would take a swim of twenty minutes, timed exactly. Then lunch.
Then a rest. Then, in the afternoon, another swim, or, if it was too cold out, a walk. After tea, patience.

After patience, dinner with beer. After dinner, more cards, more games, sometimes with the children. More beer.

More beer! That's what he needs! He orders a third pint. Those weekends before the war, he always slept in a spare room on
the third floor, away from the children. She would join him there after putting them to bed, returning to her own room just
before dawn. Arthur (somehow this was understood) would come down the third weekend of each month, and that one weekend, Littlewood
(this was also understood) would have some pressing obligation that kept him away. For it was clear that she had made a contract
with Arthur, that somewhere in the depths of the bedroom they shared (as far as he knew they shared it), words had been traded,
perhaps recriminations, negotiations entered into and terms agreed upon. Just exactly what those terms were he didn't ask:
it was part of her arrangement with him that he would not ask. Nor was protest to be tolerated. For he sensed that if Anne
accepted as inevitable a certain equalizing, a balancing of pleasure with sacrifice, it was because she believed that such
a balancing was part of the natural order. Anne wanted Treen and she wanted Littlewood. She got both, but how much she had
to give up in return she would not say.

And now she is pregnant.

He finishes his third pint; looks at his watch. In twenty minutes he's due to meet Hardy. A bother. So he pays his bill and
steps back out into the cold. Once again, the wind punches him in the face. Now it is his right cheek that goes numb. He crosses
a street. A motor car passes by, so close he can feel the metal graze his skin. The driver shouts at him: "Bloody idiot, watch
where you're going!"

Another motor car flies past. Across the street from him a woman is walking a dog that resembles that one Anne kept on its
feet for so long, dancing. As she has kept him dancing.

Curiously, in his youth, he hardly ever worried about God. But then he met Anne, and Hardy, and now he is convinced that God,
on His throne, whiles away His off-hours mapping out those routes by which His subjects will be led most quickly to unhappiness.
Human souls tossed willy-nilly over the face of the earth, connivances with nature to insure rain at cricket matches. And
in Littlewood's case? Passion for a woman he can never possess, combined with attachment to a place he can never own. A sort
of doomed, perpetual bachelorhood.

Once again, he looks at his watch. Twenty minutes to twelve. Soon he will have to meet Hardy. Does he dread it? No. To his
surprise, he finds that he's rather looking forward to it. For he will never marry Anne. He will never have a child who bears
his own name. But Hardy—Hardy isn't going anywhere. Hardy is permanent. Spouse or collaborator, it comes to the same thing.
And there is work to be done. Always, always work to be done.