4

With every minute spent in this man's company I despise him more. When he looks in a mirror I look away — not literally, of course, because I don't have eyes to look away with. But what I do is avoid contact with those parts of his brain that register, through his eyes, his reflection. And I especially avoid those areas of his brain that give a little tremor of self-satisfaction at what they see.

Oh, the pleasure I could have with this fool if I dared to turn the search-light of my scorn full blast on to his furtive inner self: the shabby secrets, shoddy thoughts, the narrow and self-serving aspirations that he passes off as honest ambition. My God, is this what we're all like inside? Are we really taken in by the external charades we put on for each other? Or do we just pretend to believe each other's lies? And if so, why? Do we need companionship that badly?

I can't — won't — believe that that's all there is to this thing we call 'society'. There's got to be some hope, surely. Even the fact that I want there to be hope is itself a kind of hope. But my God, it's a pretty thin basis for optimism about the future of humanity.

I said it again: 'My God'. Am I becoming religious?

Are You there? Is anybody there?

Silence. What did I expect?

I expected silence.

No, I'm not becoming religious. I'm no more (and no less) religious than anybody else when faced with the gross, apparent meaninglessness of existence. Why, we ask ourselves, do we search for meaning if there is none? Where does the idea come from? The fact that we think of it means it must exist somewhere — bingo, God!

On the other hand, perhaps meaning isn't 'out there' to be found, but is something we create for ourselves. In that case does it have any meaning outside our need for it? Does our need give it meaning?

Search me.

Somebody once said that no man is a hero to his valet. I've never had, or been, a valet; but I can tell you with some authority that no man is a hero to anyone who knows what he's thinking.

Enough! What right do I have to this superior moral tone?

Just because I have this bird's (or worm's — birm's?) eye view of Richard A. Hamilton doesn't make me any better. I'm looking out of myself at the inside of him. How do I know there isn't somebody doing the same inside me, and feeling just as repelled? After all, Richard A. Hamilton is me, or a near enough facsimile to be embarrassing. Count your blessings, Rick: list the differences.

I've already mentioned one — he takes no exercise. I find that very hard to understand. How can anyone who's almost me be so unphysical? I'm not trying to imply I'm Mr Universe or anything, or that he's a slob with a gut hanging over his belt. He dresses carefully and, knowing he has a tendency to run to fat, he watches his weight more closely than I do. He actually lunches quite often in one of those restaurants where they give you a calorie count of your meal with your bill. I couldn't help letting out such a snort of derision the first time we went there that he almost heard me.

Secondly, he has no children and shows no interest in having any. All right, I can understand that people on the whole don't miss what they've never had. Nobody has an obligation to breed, in fact they're probably doing the world a favour by avoiding it. All the same it drives a wedge between us: I with the joy I found in parenthood, and he with the dull satisfaction he finds in playing the market and getting asked to the right parties.

Thirdly he has — are you ready for this? — political ambitions! Now listen, I won't deny I've thought about it. Be honest — who hasn't? At the very least you tell yourself you could do better than those fools on the Hill, in the Oval Office, the Governor's Mansion, wherever. And you probably could — if you went in there right now, today, as you are. But of course you can't. To get even a shot at the job you have to go through years of compromise and concession that leave you virtually undistinguishable by the time you get there from the people you're replacing.

This guy knows that, and it doesn't bother him. He accepts it. He actually has a game plan. You could call it half-baked or opportunistic, depending on how seriously you took him. It involves him making a lot of the right moves over the next few years and winding up as Governor. If it weren't for the fact that he was born outside of the United States, he'd be looking toward the Presidency. I can't believe this guy.

Actually I am the one fly in his ointment so far. The other day I listened in on a conversation between him and Harold that I was frankly hard pressed to believe. Harold is the one person in the world to whom he has confided these ambitions — apart from Anne, but he talks of them to her only in vague and general terms. But he and Harold are co-conspirators. Clearly Harold would be in line for a very senior post if things worked out.

The other day he sat down with Harold over lunch (at the calorie-counting place) and asked if in Harold's opinion his recent spell in the psychiatric clinic may have harmed his political prospects in the long term. Harold had obviously given the matter some thought already. His considered judgment was that probably no harm had been done. It wasn't as though Richard had been admitted for any actual illness. He hadn't suffered a breakdown or fallen prey to a depression that might raise questions about his fitness for high office. All that had happened was that he'd been in a car accident and suffered post-shock trauma brought on by a blow to the head. It wasn't exactly a plus factor, but the damage was controllable — especially if they managed to suppress the story of how he was found one night prowling around some strange house peering in the windows. If he were to become dubbed 'The Prowler' or, even worse, 'Peeping Tom' by his enemies, then the game would be up. But Harold was sure they could get over that problem by spreading a little money in the right places and getting a few signed undertakings from key witnesses.

Sometimes I worry about Harold — this Harold. I cannot believe that 'my' Harold would have taken such a cynically pragmatic view. Maybe lawyers just mirror the values of their clients.

But is that what friends do? I thought friends were supposed to tell you when you were talking bullshit, not just sit there nodding sagely and counting up their calorie intake. I thought Harold had standards.

And then there's Anne. What to say about Anne? Where to start? I've already mentioned the most obvious differences: the hair, the clothes. But there's also the body. It's the same body, it weighs the same, it goes in and out in the same places, but it's in better shape. Not that my Anne was in bad shape by any means. On the contrary! But my Anne didn't jog, didn't have an exercise bike in the bathroom, didn't go to the gym and work out with weights at seven in the morning. This one is, if I may put it so, more like me than I am.

All that is minor, however, by comparison with the differences I am now becoming daily more aware of. For one thing I see less of her than I used to. That is to say that she and Richard spend less time together than Anne and I did. She has a full calendar. When she's not organising a fundraiser for the opera house she's doing it for the symphony orchestra, the art museum, or some hospital or university trust. Anne is into fashionable charities in a big way. I think, although I know she would hotly deny it, that she calculates the amount of effort she puts into a cause by the amount of cachet she expects to get out of it. I know it doesn't make her any different from most of the other women she sits on these committees with, but it's a terrible thing to say about someone you love.

Oh, yes, I still love her. I've tried not to. It would be easier if I didn't. I tell myself that she's a social-climbing phony married to an ambitious creep — and that's where my righteous indignation falls apart. Because it's all clearly his fault, and — I have to be honest about this — as there's something of me in him and something of him in me, I must accept my share of the responsibility for what he's made of her.

You may ask why, if Anne is still essentially and inwardly the woman I think she is, she doesn't simply rebel and refuse to play the role of rising social matron that he wants of her? Frankly, I don't know the answer to that, and it troubles me. Is this really the direction she wants her life to take? Could I, if I were Richard, have done this to my Anne? I find it hard to believe. My Anne has — had — more strength than that. My Anne would not have married this man. She would have laughed at his pretensions and gone her own way. Is it possible that the two Annes are as different as Rick and Richard?

How far I am from home.

I must hold on. I must not despair.

Their lovemaking is the hardest thing to live through. They're not as good together as we were, and that makes it worse. They have their routines. He knows what she likes, she knows what he likes. They don't talk about it, they don't ask each other questions the way we sometimes would. It's good sex, but ours was great. It's frequent, four, five times a week, but ours was more frequent. We never counted, it was just part of being together. Sometimes — this is the worst thing — he fantasises. He isn't making love to her at all but to some pornographic image in his mind. When we — my Anne and I — had fantasies we'd talk about them, play them out, enjoy them. His are sordid secret things. Sometimes he thinks about a woman that he's met or just glimpsed somewhere and her image takes the place of Anne. Other times he invents them. Does Anne do the same? I wonder.

One thing I know for certain: he doesn't chase after other women. I might respect him more if his reasons weren't so cowardly. Fundamentally he's too lazy. Also he's afraid of scandal. And disease. And there's a pragmatic streak in him which knows he'd be damn lucky to wind up with anyone better than Anne.

It's not good enough. It's unbearable. Here I am stuck in the recesses of his consciousness while he paws and grunts and sweats all over her. I feel like a voyeur, a sick pervert. When he has an orgasm, I don't. It happens in his body and his brain, not in me — whatever I am. All I'm aware of is the synaptic convulsion of his climax. It could as well be a sneeze as an orgasm for all it means to me. How I long to feel what his hands feel, to experience what his body is capable of offering, to mould and guide his movements to awaken in her the raw, real passion that I know is there — must be there. She isn't my Anne, but she's close enough. I love her and I want her. I could change her. I could make her mine.

But I can't.

Enough. Change the subject. Anything.

I must be clear and firm of purpose. My only hope is to find some way of communicating with him that will not set off the kind of panic that happened before. I could destroy him, and it would give me some satisfaction. But that would mean destroying myself too. It's a horrible dilemma. I must hold on.

What can I do?

***

Something awful has happened. It left me stunned, numb with shock, for half the day. But gradually I came to realise what I must do. It is my only chance.

Richard sleeps, I don't. Whatever it is that makes corporeal brains and bodies need those daily hours of oblivion doesn't affect me. While he sleeps I spend my time probing those regions of his mind that I'm afraid to enter while he's awake for fear of arousing his suspicions. Sometimes my movements trigger dreams in him, but dreams are acceptable. He knows about dreams. We all think we know about dreams. We take them for granted, however extraordinary, and push them aside when we wake. I've even tried talking to him in his dreams, hoping that maybe I could establish some kind of bridgehead between us. It didn't work. Part of him realised what was happening and the panic started up again. I had to stir up a quick smokescreen of all kinds of irrelevancies so that he passed the incident off as a standard nightmare.

I've combed back and back through his memory banks, comparing them with my own, noting where he made one decision where I had made another, or where things had happened to him slightly differently from the way they happened to me. The similarities between our lives are overwhelming, which makes the differences between us all the more extraordinary. I was just beginning to think that if the same was true of my Anne and this Anne, then there was hope yet that I might in time elbow this lumbering hulk of Richard aside and find a way to rebuild between us, her and me, the relationship we had enjoyed in that other world. We might even — I don't know how these things work exactly, but our genes must be pretty much identical to what they were in that other world — we might even be able to have Charlie, or at least a child almost identical to him.

Then it happened, this terrible thing. It involved Anne.

Richard was due to fly to Chicago and stay overnight for a business meeting. His plane was in the early evening, but by mid-afternoon it was obvious that he was coming down with flu. He thought about calling Harold to have him go in his place, then remembered that Harold was in Phoenix working on an acquisition for another client. So he cancelled his meeting, cancelled his flight, and went home.

Anne was out — probably, he thought, at one of her committees. He left a note for her just inside the door, swallowed some aspirin and vitamin C, and put himself to bed.

By the time she got back he was already half-asleep. I heard her come in, but he didn't. I heard her say something under her breath when she read his note and put her head into the bedroom. It sounded like she said 'Oh, no!', but very softly, barely a whisper.

She came closer and must have been standing over him for several moments before he sensed her presence and opened his eyes. She kissed and fussed over him and asked if she should call the doctor. He said absolutely not (he was a coward about doctors — more so than ever after having been shut up in that clinic). All he wanted, he said, was to sleep it off, maybe spend tomorrow in bed, then he would be fine. It was a twenty-four-hour thing that half the people in the office had already had. He apologised that probably she would catch it now and she told him not to worry about that, just get well. She said she'd let him sleep and look in later to see if there was anything he needed.

I've no idea how much later 'later' was. He was in a deep sleep by then and I was going over his memory of an important conversation that he'd had with his father when he was fourteen. I'd had the same conversation with my father — ostensibly about career possibilities, but really about what a man searches for in life — except for certain tiny details. I was trying to figure out if these details had ultimately led to some of the major differences between Richard and myself, when I heard the door open and Anne's footsteps come softly across the carpet.

His eyes were closed, so I couldn't see anything, but I could hear her breathing as she leant close. I supposed she just wanted to make sure that he was sleeping peacefully before going back to whatever she was doing. But just as she turned to leave the telephone rang.

To say it rang is an exaggeration. It had a soft tone which at the best of times would take some moments to penetrate even a light sleep. This was because Richard preferred to be coaxed awake rather than startled. On this occasion it barely even hinted at a first ring before — she was standing right by it — she picked it up.

She answered softly so as not to wake him, but as soon as she heard who it was she became flustered and afraid to talk. She needn't have worried. There wasn't even a flicker of response in Richard's brain. He was sleeping so heavily that a fire alarm wouldn't have roused him. Even I, fully awake, couldn't hear much — except that it was a man's voice at the other end.

'I can't talk,' she said in a muffled, urgent whisper as though her hand was shielding her mouth. 'He's here. I've been trying to call you. No, he didn't go, he's sick. I'm in the bedroom — wait.'

Very quietly she put down the phone, tiptoed out, closing the door with barely a sound, and presumably continued the conversation on a safe extension.

Richard slept on. But I . . . you can imagine how I felt. You can imagine how much I would have given for the use of his hands to pick up that phone and find out what was going on.

But I knew what was going on. There was no mistaking that tone of voice, that intimate conspiratorial guilt.

Anne was unfaithful.

***

Richard spent the next day in bed with a temperature, no appetite and a headache. Agnes the housekeeper stayed on a few hours extra to keep him supplied with mint tea, vitamins, and whatever else he needed during the day while Anne was out.

I, meanwhile, was near demented. Not only was the pain of what I had discovered all but unbearable, but my impotence to do anything about it was driving me to distraction. I paced, metaphorically, back and forth in his brain for hour upon hour, wringing my hands and cudgelling my brains for an answer.

While he lay there like a sack of potatoes, sipping lemon-flavoured flu remedies, blowing his nose and blearily watching daytime television, I was being driven insane by lurid fantasies of where Anne might be, what she might be doing, and with whom.

In a sense, of course, it was none of my business. These people's lives were their own affair and I had no right to interfere. But, like all moral arguments, such a proposition had little or no place in the real world in which I found myself.

I was aware — how could I not be? — that the true source of my anguish was not what this Anne was doing, but what my Anne might have been capable of, might even have done, without my ever knowing. Could I have been living in a dream world, a fool's paradise all that time? Was — Heaven forgive me for the thought — was Charlie mine? There was no way now I could know anything for sure, but the more I could find out about this Anne in this life, the more chance I would have of understanding my own Anne in our life. I was fully aware that I might come up with some things about her which I had not previously suspected and which would be painful to confront. But I had no choice. I had to know.

And this passive, flu-ridden, steaming lump of lard had to find out for me. If that meant his finding out some painful truths for himself, so be it. I was ruthless in my desperation.

But how was I to make him do it? He suspected nothing. Nothing! It had never crossed his impossibly complacent mind that his wife might be unfaithful. To him their lives were on track and headed towards their preset goals. I wasn't even sure, when I came to think about it, how he'd take the news that he'd been cuckolded. Would he be devastated? Philosophical? Indifferent? Dangerous?

Supposing he committed suicide? Blew his brains out — and me with them.

I was facing a double problem: how to alert him to what was going on; and how to exercise at least some control over his response.

And suddenly — Eureka — I saw that I had stumbled on the answer to all my problems at once. Even before the shock of Anne's betrayal I had been searching for a way to communicate with Richard without throwing him once more into panic and confusion. Now I had it. I had the means not only to open a dialogue but also, I was fairly sure, to influence his behaviour. I saw now how I could make him accept me as a natural part of himself that must be listened to, not some alien invader to be fled from and resisted.

I would be the Voice of Jealousy.

The whole plan unfolded in my mind with an appalling simplicity. After all, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a voice in your head saying 'I am your alter ego from another universe' is not necessarily to be trusted, and you may be wise to avoid operating heavy machinery until it goes away.

But the still, small voice of jealousy, that worm of doubt eating away at the back of your brain, that is a voice with a name to it, a voice you know about. Listening to that voice does not necessarily mean you are going crazy. Cloaked in that universal metaphor, I could step forward with confidence to centre stage and make my presence known at last.

Being feverish, Richard was in a particularly vulnerable state of mind. It seemed natural that thoughts should float into his consciousness from heaven knows where, trailing with them strings of free association leading to destinations as unknown as their origins. His resistance was low, he was suggestible. He thought he could indulge himself in fantasy and discard it when it suited him. He was wrong. This thought, my thought, once planted would not go away.

Within an hour I had convinced him that he, not I, had overheard that snatch of conversation between Anne and her lover on the telephone. He couldn't be sure whether he'd dreamed it, or whether it had actually happened while he was half-awake. That doubt would not let go of him. I had him.

Towards the end of the afternoon Harold, back from Phoenix, called to ask how he was. He'd heard from Richard's secretary that he was ill and wanted to know if there was anything he could do. Richard almost asked him to come over right then so that he could pour out his wretchedness to the one man he had always trusted. At least Harold would know the name of a discreet private investigator should he need one. But he checked himself and merely mumbled rheumily that he expected to be over the worst by tomorrow.

Would that were true.

Anne seemed unaware of the suspicion in his eyes when she arrived home. She had a sparkle and a glow about her that deepened his depression into a despair. He tossed two effervescent vitamin Cs listlessly into a glass of water and stirred them with a pencil, which Anne took from him, saying that he'd get lead poisoning. She was telling him about her day, but he couldn't bring himself to listen. Too much of it might be lies, and he still couldn't bear to let her lie to him.

That night Anne, at his insistence, slept in the guest room because his wheezing and his coughing and his endless turning would only have kept them both awake. He couldn't face a night-long, sleepless silence between them.

I used the long dark hours to good advantage, filling his fitful sleep with graphic dreams of Anne in strangers' arms (culled from my memories of her times in mine), and his waking hours with the taunting voice of sexual self (or so he thought) mockery at his own inadequacies. The process afforded me no pleasure, but the situation offered no alternative.

By morning Richard A. Hamilton was my surrogate.

As predicted, the worst of the flu was over in twenty-four hours. Richard, however, instead of rushing back to the office as he had intended, decided to spend another day at home to recuperate fully. At least that was the story he told Anne. He also told Agnes that she needn't stay on any later than usual, he would be quite all right alone.

He spent the afternoon in a frantic search for incriminating evidence of Anne's secret life. The backs of shelves, the bottoms of wardrobes, the deepest recesses of her clothes closet, purses, luggage, pockets, bedside tables, bathroom cabinets and kitchen drawers. Nothing. My ingenuity was running out, as his had long since. Only my insistence kept him going. But he was beginning to resist. He wanted to believe he was mistaken, that his suspicions were no more than the product of a flu-ridden, feverish imagination. He was trying to turn his back on the awful doubts that had beset him.

But that, of course, was an impossibility. We can no more ignore doubt than we can pretend we feel no guilt or superstitious fear. It is one of those plants that flourishes without our help, mocking our attempts to stifle, poison, starve, or cut it down. Richard knew that the failure of his search proved nothing — except, perhaps, the carefulness with which she was conducting her affair.

Or affairs, plural. Oh, yes, yes, yes, I still had him by the nose, his bid for freedom swiftly curtailed by the nagging Voice of Jealousy that threatened to follow him wherever he ran.

The next plan was surveillance. If we followed her for, say, a week or two and found her behaviour irreproachable, then even I might be willing to reinterpret what I had heard of that phone call in a more favourable light. Of course I didn't believe for a minute that this would be the case, but the assurance helped Richard get over his scruples about stooping so low as to spy on his wife.

One thing I was determined he should not do was hire an investigator. If I was to maintain and strengthen my hold over him, the last thing I needed was an outside confidant entering his life. I was already doing my best to dissuade him from talking to Harold — on the grounds that he would look a fool if his suspicions did in fact prove to be unfounded. Only if I had him to myself could I achieve what I needed to achieve.

So Richard took to playing detective. He had a dismally feeble imagination, but again I was able to prod him towards some kind of organised plan. Obviously it was impossible single-handedly to mount a twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance, even though, anyway, at least twelve of those hours were spent in our company. The trick lay in divining through casual conversation, along with the odd furtive dip into her calendar, where she was going to be at different times of day — those endless meetings and committees, workouts and luncheons which were the fabric of her life. Then a phone call to leave a casual message, a drink with an acquaintance who had also been there, a suggestion that he pick her up for dinner at such and such a time and such and such a place — all these little strategies, put together, made it inevitable that very soon any lies she tried to get away with would begin to stand out like fingerprints on glass.

During all this time — about ten days — I was surprised by how well Richard withstood the inevitable stress and strain involved. To say that I felt a hint of admiration for him would be going too far, but I began to suspect that my previous scorn for his lack of moral courage may have been fractionally exaggerated. Outwardly he appeared utterly untroubled. Anne, I am sure, suspected nothing. When they made love — which they did three times during the period in question — he performed faultlessly and, if anything, with slightly more enthusiasm than normal. Only I knew that he had stepped into a porno theatre the previous Thursday and was reliving the main feature with gusto.

In the end, however, the turning-point came with surprising speed. He was just beginning to suspect that this whole thing had been a storm about nothing (and, to be honest, so was I; I was beginning to wonder what new disguise I could adopt after the Voice of Jealousy had been finally and firmly set aside) when all the little red flags that I had planted in his head stood on their ends and quivered.

Nine days earlier Anne had made a strange mark in her diary: 'B.M.', with a line running through the whole of Tuesday afternoon. Normally she wrote down enough to make clear what she was referring to — this committee or that friend, or such and such a restaurant or somebody's house. But 'B.M.' stood unqualified and cryptic in its isolation. Casually over dinner one night he had led the conversation by circuitous routes around to that particular afternoon, and had divined that she had lately been elected to a special steering committee for the forthcoming charity ball in aid of the City War Museum — a great honour, for which he expressed his approval. Naturally he didn't ask what relevance 'B.M.' had to the event, since this would have meant admitting that he had pried into her calendar.

But when the same 'B.M.' appeared again two days later, with yet another line scratched through the afternoon, he knew now that he must verify her story.

This time, in response to his subtle, cautious questioning, she said that she had spent the afternoon with her friend Valerie looking at collections of fall fashions. He didn't know Valerie well enough to call up and check, but he didn't need to. The inconsistency was proof enough. The iron fist of jealousy tightened its grip, and he prepared himself for a final confrontation with the truth.

It came the following Monday. 'B.M.' once more made its appearance in the calendar, accompanied as ever by the firm line announcing the exclusive, all-embracing nature of the rendezvous.

He asked no questions, carefully said nothing to indicate his suspicions . .. and followed her in a rented car, wearing dark glasses and with a hat pulled low over his brow.

Balthazar's Motel was at the upper end of the scale of those establishments advertising X-rated movies and waterbeds. The word 'Adult' winked knowingly in pink neon outside the manager's office.

From his vantage point in the parking lot of the 7-11 across the way, he saw that she had no need of management's assistance in securing a room. She had her own key in her purse and went directly to the door of, he discerned through his binoculars, cabin number nine.

It was, as he had feared, as unlikely a location for a meeting of the steering committee for the War Museum Charity Ball as for a showing of even the most immodest collection of fall fashions.

He waited, his heart palpitating and his breathing shallow, his camera with its long-range lens at the ready on the seat beside him.

Five minutes and forty-eight seconds later another car drew up and parked a few spaces away from Anne's. He recognised the shiny BMW at once. He clutched for a split second at the one last straw of hope: that Harold had lent his car to a colleague or a friend and knew nothing of the perfidious use to which it was being put.

But no. The driver was Harold himself. He got out, locked the vehicle, and went straight, eagerly even, to the door of number nine, and entered without knocking.