Trespass by D. J. Taylor

Author:D. J. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504015189
Publisher: Open Road Media

Q: Did you ever see her again?

A: Oddly enough, yes. Quite by chance. I was in one of the big West End stores around Christmas time, a year or two later, and literally walked into her.

Q: Did you speak?

A: Of course. After all, she had been my wife. Still was, in fact, at that point, as we hadn’t been formally divorced. And I didn’t feel any anger towards her. I was more afraid she’d feel anger towards me.

Q: And did she?

A: Not really. Some, perhaps. I remember she said she’d had trouble selling the house in Redbridge. I think that annoyed her.

Q: What did you talk about?

A: I don’t know. What do people who haven’t seen each other for years talk about? I remember her being interested in my uncle’s business. We’d had a fair amount of publicity by this time, to the extent of getting our pictures in the paper fairly regularly, and I imagine she’d noticed this.

Q: Did she have any regrets about what had happened?

A: Again, I don’t know. There may have been another man on the scene by this time. There certainly had been in the past. I think we swapped phone numbers and talked about meeting again, but I never tried to contact her. Or her me. Later I remember trying to get in touch about some legal thing, but she’d moved by this time and I had to send the letters care of her parents.

Q: What feelings do you have about her now?

A: Whatever feelings I have about her are coloured by the fact that it was all my fault. Well, mostly. (Pause.) Obviously it takes two people to contract a marriage, but it need only take one to ruin it (laughs). It was my fault because I stuck out for something I already knew it was foolish of me to want. That it could only end in tears. I think she was slightly stunned – and a bit anaesthetised – by my persistence.

That aside, I think I thought that she was rather complacent in the way that middle-class people of that kind sometimes are. She assumed that people like her parents and herself had a kind of God-given right to have comfortable jobs and live in comfortable suburban houses, and watch ineffable TV programmes, and not really care about anything else. But I also thought that she was slightly angry, and that the anger was to do with all that not being enough. I suppose that was part of the attraction.

Q: The rest being?

A: You have to remember that, with the partial exception of my mother, she was the only woman who had ever taken an interest in me. I mean, taking an interest to the extent of wanting to know what I thought about things, and not seeming to mind spending time with me. You can put up with quite a lot on the strength of that.

Q: But it was all your fault?

A: Oh yes. Well, at least I think so. I mean, it would be very odd if it weren’t.

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