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

threshold into the bedroom, a feeling of great joy came into him.
    They entered then on a phase of rapidly deepening intimacy. Was this possible, at the age of fifty, to have desire suddenly running through your days like a torrent from some underground spring? Such things apparently had a life and logic of their own. Before long every trace of reserve had vanished from their love-making. No woman Conrad had known before, not even Margot, seemed quite so sheerly, so poignantly naked as Lydia when she undressed, and none had ever come to his bed with such open delight. The effect on Conrad was intoxicating. He walked into his office each morning feeling as though he had spent the night drinking at the fountain of youth. That winter he proposed and was accepted with an unhesitating serenity that seemed to confirm his feeling of a deep judiciousness in the prospect of their union, a convergence with the forces of destiny.
    Meanwhile the greenhouses were finished: four in a row, the clean panes of glass glittering in the steel frames of their walls and pitched roofs. A Mexican foreman had been hired, and he and his workers had planted several hundred shrubs in the carefully prepared soil. There was a gravel courtyard out front with a fountain in it that sent up thick, petal-shaped curves of water from a granite bowl. At night the water was lit from below with a powerful crimson light. The women had seen such a fountain at one of the greenhouse operations they had visited in the course of planning their own and had resolved to build one just like it. Now, as you approached the house along the winding county road after dark, you saw first the reddish gold glow of the night growing lights illuminating the sky above the treetops, then the sparkling, light-filled glass of the greenhouses themselves, with the fountain in front shimmering like an enormous, glowing rose.
    There was some discussion about where they would all live after the wedding, which was set for the following April. Conrad had assumed that Lydia and her mother would want to move into his house, which was larger and grander than theirs, but they wouldn’t hear of moving away from their greenhouses.
    “No, no. Not move,” the old woman said, wagging her finger at him as though he had threatened her with forcible transfer.
    “You move here, my darling,” Lydia said. “We’ll build an addition if you like.”
    Her firmness surprised him, but the more he considered it, the more reasonable it seemed. He had given no thought, he realized, to any awkwardness Lydia might feel moving into the house he had shared with Margot. Spending nights there as his lover was one thing, but living there as his wife was no doubt a less enticing prospect. It came to him that if he was to make a go of this new life, he needed a clean break from all the old trappings of his life with Margot. He would sell the house, he decided, auction off the antiques, get rid of all those dusty wreaths and garlands. The decision—he was driving to work as he made it—sent a strange, vertiginous excitement through him. He sped forward, pressing the accelerator as though to drown out any doubt or resistance inside him. A few minutes later, entering his office, he picked up the framed photograph of Margot. She was standing on the balcony of a hotel in Costa Rica: smiling, her dark hair tumbling in the sunshine, blue flowers trailing from the wrought iron bars either side of her. It was shortly after they had returned from this vacation that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she had died later that year. With an abrupt, almost violent gesture, he thrust the photograph, frame and all, into a padded envelope, and carried it down to the storage locker he rented in the basement, where he placed it in a cupboard filled with old contracts and prospectuses. Back upstairs he stood at the window, astonished at what he had done but telling himself that the agitation inside him would soon pass. He