Porphyro's Steed

Sandrine slammed the door of the taxi and stood at the corner of Old Compton Street and Wardour Street. She wrestled with her green umbrella and her bulging black aniline briefcase, the driving rain lashing her long hair into her eyes, while theatregoers hurrying towards the bright lights of Shaftesbury Avenue spattered her ankles with mud. Head down, Sandrine sailed with the crowd. Suddenly a rogue gust of wind turned the umbrella inside out and, forced out of Sandrine's hand, it bounced along the river of liquid light that Wardour Street had become.

Sweating in her rain-soaked jacket, Sandrine felt the crowds surging past her. Slowly she turned back towards Soho to search for much-needed warmth and comfort. Her feet were wet and she was tired. Meeting Gilly to see yet another play about middle-aged couples cheating on each other had suddenly lost its appeal.

Once in Old Compton Street she decided she'd nip into a restaurant she hadn't been to in years, have a quiet drink at the bar and phone Gilly to say she'd been delayed at work. Then she’d eat a relaxed dinner before taking a cab home. Thank God for a reasonable salary and thank Him doubly for an expense account.

Sandrine got herself and her briefcase through the revolving doors of the restaurant on the third attempt and walked briskly through to the Ladies' Room. Tearing a comb through her thick black hair, that she'd only recently started dyeing, she called Gilly on her mobile.

‘So sorry, Gilly. I really did expect I could get away. I'm so sorry, I didn't realize. Oh, were the seats free? You didn't say. Well, anyway, I was looking forward to seeing it. Yes, I'd love to meet you all afterwards but I think I'll be too tired. Well, enjoy!'

She stuffed the phone back in her briefcase and heaved a sigh of relief. Now she could take the fake smile off her face and go and find something bracing at the bar. Bob wouldn't be home tonight. He was in Birmingham or somewhere with Joel or Toine or Alexis or someone else with a fancy architect's name. What Heaven! She could crash into bed early with a pile of magazines and something soothing on the stereo. God, why did men have to keep you awake half the night talking about their jobs or, not so usual nowadays, making extended foreplay when five minutes would have done?

Lights were blinking and winking welcomingly off the bottles behind the bar. From the pillars that acted as a doorway Sandrine glanced along the glass shelves in front of the highly polished mirrors. That it was all just as it had been twenty years ago was in a way comforting.

Then something she saw made her stop as if her feet were glued to the swirls on the blue and gold carpet. At the end of the bar sat Bob, his right hand stabbing the air as he explained something to his companion. But seeing Bob wasn't what made Sandrine stop, it was the girl he was talking to. She was looking not at a girl of twenty-five or so, but at herself as she had been twenty years ago. The girl had long straight black hair hanging heavily down to her shoulder blades and the palest of pale blue eyes under slightly arched brows. As Sandrine moved her head back and smiled she saw what she already knew was there, a sprinkling of light and dark freckles across her nose and a very slight gap between her front teeth.

Slowly, Sandrine moved to a spot almost behind one of the pillars so that the girl couldn't see her. Just then Bob leaned forward and kissed the girl on the lips, his hand under her chin as he gently pulled her face towards his. As the girl closed her eyes to receive Bob's kiss Sandrine's groin churned. It was how she and Bob had kissed in this very bar twenty years ago. Nothing had changed. Turning reluctantly away from the bright lights of the bar, and the longed-for drink, Sandrine walked back to the revolving doors, her briefcase clutched under her arm. 

She stood under the awning and tried to find a taxi to flag down in the mass of traffic. She had the uneasy feeling that she had died and come back to life as herself. The twenty years of life she'd put behind her, as well as her marriage, lay in shards on the carpet of the bar where she'd left it. Why, she thought, wasn't she angry with Bob? He had lied to her. But that wasn't new. He was obviously having an affair. But even that didn't surprise her. After all, isn't that what middle-aged men did? Plays, books and even poems were constantly being written about it. But it was his choice of girl that upset Sandrine. Did it have to be merely a younger version of her? Well, she comforted herself, he was never very original. He'd get an idea and flog it to death. She had to laugh out loud in spite of herself. Just then a taxi executed a splashy U-turn before picking up Sandrine and carrying her home to Putney.

 

***

 

As Bob's lips left hers, Emma saw a woman reflected in the mirror across the bar. She stood only a few feet away behind a pillar, watching them both. Emma froze with the shock of recognition as she identified the woman's long straight black hair, her palest of pale blue eyes and the smudge of freckles across her nose, even the gap between her teeth as she turned her head. Apart from what twenty years can do to even a good-looking face this was herself, Emma, twenty years on. The woman turned away, a dazed look on her face, and hurried down the hallway to the street door.

'Is little rabbit ready for another drink now?' Bob was stroking Emma's hair and looping it behind her ear.

'Not for me. I'm just going to the loo for a minute.' Emma squeezed his arm and saw the slightly disappointed look that had expected baby talk. She slid off the bar stool, ran past the pillar, down to the swing doors and out into the street.

The rain had stopped but the wet pavement was a mosaic of light reflections that changed with each movement of the woman’s wet shoes. Emma saw her clutching the large over-full briefcase under her arm as she hailed a cab and she ran right up to stand behind her. She wanted to detain her somehow. She felt if she lost sight of her that her whole future would ride away in the taxi, lost for ever, an unknown could-have-been. The taxi pulled in close to the kerb and Emma leaned forward. It came as no surprise to Emma when the woman gave Bob's address in Putney. Emma walked back to the bar to see Bob talking to a waiter at the entrance to the restaurant.

'Our table's ready, rabbitkins, where were you? The loo's out that way.'

He waved his hand towards the back of the restaurant.

'I went out to see if it's still raining,' she said.

Bob smiled at her indulgently and stroked her hair again so that it fell behind her ear.

'Let's eat. Munch, munch! Little rabbits need lots of lettuce. Especially now!' he fondled Emma's arm as he led her to their table.

Emma hardly looked at Bob. He had suddenly become someone she once knew and she found for the first time that his baby talk embarrassed her. She felt stunned, as if she had just experienced love at first sight. Could you be in love with a vision of yourself, she thought. She felt it as a premonition. If she was the woman, then the woman was her.

Emma clutched her stomach and felt the newly formed bulge of her four-month-old pregnancy. This is why Bob wants me and why he treats me like a baby, she thought. Emma wanted to cry but she knew now it was too late.

'I don't think I want anything to eat,' she said to Bob, closing the menu. 'I'm feeling a bit queasy.'

'Little rabbit!' Bob stroked her hair again, but now this gentle gesture annoyed Emma. She stood up.

'I want to go home,' she announced.

 

***

 

Three hours later Bob put his key in the lock with foreboding. Sandrine didn't expect him home tonight, but he'd had such a row with Emma there'd been no alternative but to leave her alone. She'd been in a strange mood ever since she'd come back from the loo in the restaurant. Perhaps she'd bumped into an old boyfriend.

The light was on in their bedroom and Bob felt a familiar feeling of peace as he walked down the hall. Then he saw Sandrine's pile of wet rain clothes and her briefcase with its spilled contents. Strange, he mused, Sandrine is so tidy. Then the thought came to him that she might have a lover and had frantically tossed off her outer garments before rushing upstairs to bed. He shook his head. First Emma, then Sandrine. He was imagining lovers all over the place. But Sandrine having a lover would make life a lot easier. Now that Emma was pregnant things were getting more pressing and she'd given him an ultimatum earlier in the evening. Sandrine would have to be told. Perhaps now could be the time.

Bob walked up the carved oak staircase in the house he had so carefully renovated to its original Pre-Raphaelite grandeur. I'll lose all this, he thought as he looked up at the stained glass windows. This was to be Keats' casement, high and triple-arched.  Bob smiled. Here was my Saint Agnes' Eve where Madelaine took off her warméd jewels one by one as she waited for her lover, Porphyro.  Sandrine will want the house, and she'll get it. She'll fight me until I give in. I always do. She knows my weak spots. My weaknesses that were our strength. I'll lose everything. I'll be living in a bedsit in Hammersmith before the baby's born. He continued towards the open bedroom door and knocked softly on one of the unvarnished wooden panels. Pushing the heavy door further open he saw Sandrine, apparently alone, her heavy reading specs on her nose. She looked up from a pile of lace pillows and magazines, a cup of steaming what he guessed was cocoa in her hand.

'Can I come in?' Bob threaded his way across the lambskin rugs to the high bed.

'Bob?' Sandrine looked over her glasses and put down the cup on a walnut bedside table.

'Indeed, the very same. Expecting something better?'

Sandrine pursed her lips at the slight edge in his voice.

'Birmingham over early?' she inquired.

'Something like that.'

'Can I get you anything?'

'Well, while you're at it, how about a divorce?'

Bob had meant it to come out as a jocular throwaway remark. But once said the words hung dangerously in the air between them.

'A divorce…' Sandrine's voice cracked as she echoed his words. 'Is that what you really want?'

Bob sat astride the stool in front of Sandrine's dressing table. He picked up a small pot of Clarin's Base Hydratante and rolled it round and round in his palm.

'I didn't mean it to come out so…you know…'

'Abruptly?'

'Yes, abruptly. But now it's out I suppose there's no going back.'

Sandrine slid her long legs out of bed and pulled a green silk dressing gown over her nightdress. Without looking at Bob she walked over to the window. She was a manager, in every aspect of her life, and she spoke slowly and calmly.

'If this isn't going to sound like a B film, I think we should say what's on our minds,' Sandrine stared down onto the moonlit grass.

Bob replaced the pot of face cream and absently picked up a pair of tweezers.

'Oh, Sandy. I'm really sorry.' He stared at his wife's silk-clad back.

'I knew this would come one day; it was only a question of time. But you know how it is, it all seemed to be going well enough.' Sandrine swallowed her tears with difficulty.

Bob dropped the tweezers on the kidney-shaped glass with a tinny clatter.

'For you and for me, perhaps. But now others are involved.' He knew he sounded as pompous as he felt.

Sandrine turned to look at him over her shoulder.

'Others?'

'Well, one other. One and a bit.'

'Your bit?'

'That's not amusing, given the circumstances.'

'Which are?'

'Which are, that someone I care about very much is pregnant.'

'And wants you to make it legit?'

'Something like that.'

Sandrine lowered her head and turned back to the window. A tear trickled down the side of her nose. Why hadn't she and Bob had any children? They'd always planned to have children but their careers were always at such a critical stage. Or rather, her career was.  And this house that they'd built for Madeleine and Porphyro, Keats' star-crossed Pre-Raphaelite lovers, as they'd seen themselves, would look incongruous with a pram in the hall and all that bright coloured plastic everywhere. She'd always imagined she and Bob would die young, like Keats, although without the TB. But they were young no longer. She was a Madelaine too sophisticated to dream of her palely loitering lover and Bob was a Porphyro who was no longer gallant enough to abduct his Madelaine from her kinsfolk and rush with her past the beldam telling her beads and the sleeping hound.

And so her lovely double was pregnant! What sort of chat up line had Bob employed, she thought cruelly: Can I sleep with you, you look just like my wife when she was young? Uncannily like her, in fact.

Bob watched Sandrine, lean and brave, gazing out at the garden. She loved him, he knew that. Just as he knew he loved her; her strength, her valiance. But the tension and excitement of their once-young love had settled into a merging of habits and arrangements. All that was to show for their twenty years together was, apart from a ramshackle country cottage, their Eve of St Agnes house. The house that was their only child. And these days when they talked there was often only bitterness and recrimination.

'You know that I'll never leave here.' Sandrine said at last, walking back from the window. 'This is my home.'

'Your home, you say?' Bob swung round on the seat to face her. 'Your home? I restored this house almost literally with my own bare hands. Every room has traces of my blood, my sweat.'

'God! Don't be so melodramatic! You know perfectly well whose money financed it all! The York stone, the cornice work, the panelling…'

'Oh, yes. I knew that would come up at some point. It always does. However hard I worked on this house it was always whose money that paid for it that counted! Your superior salary. Your superior inheritance. Your superior…'

'Taste?' Sandrine hated herself for her sarcasm, but she was riled.

'Taste! Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot. You're Miss English Rose Traditional Tapestry Armchair herself, and I'm just another failed interior architect who tried to create the house his heroine of a wife had in her mind since she fell in love with John Keats at school. Personally, I would have done much better to have gone along with post-modernism, but Miss Neo-Gothic Pre-Raphaelite persuaded me...'

Bob pulled himself to his feet feeling that he'd drunk more than he intended that evening. He knew he'd gone too far. Of course Sandrine had brought money into it. She must have been shocked on hearing about Emma.

'Oh, hell. I'm sorry, Sandy. Let's go somewhere else to talk about this.' Bob tried to comfort her by putting a hand on her shoulder. 'Let's drive down to the cottage,' he suggested.

Sandrine turned slowly towards him, rubbing her eyes. Her hair fell over her face and as she looked at him he saw Emma as he had left her an hour or so ago, tearful and bewildered. Strange, he thought, to love two identical women and neither of them knew about the other. He'd first seen Emma walking down King's Road on a Saturday afternoon and had been amazed when she walked right up to him and asked him the way to World's End. He'd been gobsmacked. She was Sandrine. That was why he could never call her by her real name and used those stupid baby names instead.

'Come on, let's go to the cottage. We can walk along the downs like we used to,' he urged Sandrine. Then he put his arms round her.

'Oh, Madelaine!' Bob crumpled inside as he said this secret name that for them had been almost foreplay. Sandrine was quick to reply.

'Porphyro!' She laid her head onto his shoulder. 'Oh, Porphyro, where is thy steed?'

 

***

 

Emma lay in bed the next morning long after the rain on the windowpane had woken her. It was Saturday and she could get up whenever she liked. She rubbed her hand over her smooth bare stomach and wondered how it would feel to have a baby lying here beside her. 

Then a small shiver ran between her shoulders as she thought about last night. Suppose Bob never came back? She'd called him everything she could think of and she could still see the bewilderment on his face.

'You're weak!' she'd shouted at him. 'You get thrown between her and me like an old velvet cushion.'

Emma was gazing out at the rain running down the window when the phone rang. She shuffled into the sitting room next door and as she picked up the receiver she saw it was ten o'clock.

'Em, darling? How's my lovely rabbity one this morning?' Bob's voice was breathy and there was a lot of background noise. Emma didn't know why but she felt a twinge of fear.

'I'm fine. Sorry I was such a whinger last night. It's probably something to do with being pregnant. And where are you? There's a lot of noise.'

'Oh, I'm in a newsagents, little bunny one. And don't you worry your rabbity nose about being a whingey girl now and again. You've