Faithless by Alice Nelson

Author:Alice Nelson [Nelson, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Of course, I never spoke to you about my financial constraints, Max. A few years into our relationship, I remember once you were giving a lecture in Edinburgh and you suggested that I take the train up and join you for the weekend. It was for a conference on museums and ethics, and you weren’t yet well known enough for it to be risky for us to be seen together. I did not have the money for the fare, and when I was forced to confess this, you seemed baffled, as if it had never occurred to you that I would be tethered by material concerns. By mentioning money it felt as if I had brought something distasteful into consideration.

You had been to my quarters in Cambridge, to the series of flats I rented over the years in London; you had seen the scarcity of my circumstances, but you never seemed to take much notice of the external landscape. Delightful, you once pronounced a decrepit bedsit in Brixton I had sublet for a summer. And it’s true that the room was delightful when you were there, Max – a shaft of sunlight falling across the sheets, a glass of wine, a heel of bread with some cheese; when we were together the simplest of meals felt like enormous plenitude. We had everything we needed.

But I was as poor as the proverbial church mouse, and it made the world narrower. There were times when I felt overwhelmingly constricted by what was not allowed me because of my lack of money. So often it seemed to me that the greater part of my energies was given over to complicated practical navigations: finding flats I could afford to rent, scrimping and saving and stretching my meagre and erratic income to pay the gas bill or buy my weekly Tube pass. I did not starve; my poverty was of the genteel, privileged kind, but there was no romance to it. There were no trips to Italy to look at Renaissance paintings, no travel at all, apart from the weeks I spent in France each year at La Mirande, which felt like another world entirely, and seemed to recede as if they had been a dream as soon as I stepped off the train at St Pancras Station.

More and more, Sylvia’s pronouncements about you began to sound like cold truths. Her greatest concern, she told me over and over again, was that my fixation with you was keeping me from knowing real love, a real relationship. There had been affairs with other men across the years, though I never spoke of this part of my life to you. It would have felt like an intolerable infringement on all that was between us. How did we decide these things, Max? Once or twice you alluded to ‘the suitors’ and joked that I must spend all my time fending them off. But I was never your Penelope.

There was a Latin tutor at Cambridge, an Israeli translator, an American novelist I met at a literary festival.

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