It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories by James Lasdun Page A

had since her death, the unaccountable tension between him and his daughter, eleven years old when her mother had died and now studying some subject he had never heard of at a college two thousand miles away. For her part Lydia had talked dispassionately about her impoverished childhood; her alcoholic father, who had died when she was young; her ex-husband, a former party official who had punched her in the stomach when she was pregnant, causing her to miscarry. These things she had described in a deliberately detached manner, with faint disgust, as if her father’s decline and the behavior of her husband were subjects that offended her because they reflected badly on herself. A woman of her worth, she seemed to imply, ought to have done better than this with the men in her life.
    All of which had made a strong impression on Conrad. The thought of this attractive, intelligent woman, whom nature had clearly designed for a life of luxury and ease, living under such circumstances had awakened a protective instinct in him, while her lack of self-pity filled him with admiration.
    Looking at her in silence now under the warm light of the pink-shaded lamps, her eyes resting candidly and unflinchingly on his own, he felt bewitched and at a loss for words. With every second the silence seemed to move them more deeply into a place of mysterious communion. It was Lydia who spoke.
    “Why don’t you show me your house? We’ve never been there.”
    “Now?”
    “It isn’t far ...”
    “All right. I will.”
    He drove her into Albany, her presence beside him registering itself as a bright vibrancy, the source of some new power that seemed to be surging into his life, driving out the heavy loneliness that had hung inside him like some gray immovable cloud since his bereavement.
    The house was on a quiet street in one of the older parts of the city. Lydia took his arm as they climbed to the front door. She stepped inside ahead of him, walking slowly through the downstairs rooms while he switched on lights behind her. The place was clean and orderly, furnished simply in Margot’s taste: a few primitives and Federal-era antiques; a porcelain washstand with enamel jugs and bowls; arrangements of dried flowers that she and their daughter used to make, from which all but the last ghost of color had faded.
    Lydia turned to him with a smile. “You haven’t changed anything, have you?”
    “Since Margot? I guess not.”
    “Do you feel strange bringing me here?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe a little.”
    “I would feel a little strange.”
    She moved on, climbing the stairs past the utility rooms on the first landing and on up the next flight, looking into the room Margot had used as a study, the daughter’s old bedroom, an upstairs parlor with a tiled Dutch stove, Conrad turning on the lights as she moved from room to room. At the threshold of the bedroom that he and Margot had shared he held Lydia back and placed a kiss on her lips. As she moved softly against him, he felt that he had been favored by fortune with a piece of extraordinary luck. He was not a gregarious man, certainly not the type who found it easy to strike up new relationships. The few women of his acquaintance who had flung themselves at him after Margot’s death had not attracted him, and despite a few brief affairs, he had begun to suspect he was too old or too uninteresting for the ones who did. He had his businesses to occupy him—shares in a carpet warehouse, interests in a chain of Laundromats and a storage rental company—and there were couples from the days of his marriage who still invited him to join them for dinner. But he had come to think of his life as a man, a member of the male sex, as essentially over. Now, however, as Lydia responded to his embrace in the doorway with tender, uncomplicated warmth, he sensed the possibility of this life beginning again, keen as ever, perhaps even richer for its shadows of loss and grief, and as he drew her across the