Machines Like Me

Did I sound tetchy? By the early eighties we were long used to talking to machines, in our cars and homes, to call centres and health clinics. But Adam had weighed up my chicken from across the room and apologised for the extraneous advice. I glanced back at him again. Now I noticed that he’d pulled up the sleeves of the sweater to his elbows to expose powerful wrists. He’d interlaced his fingers and was resting his chin on his hands. And this was him without a personality. From where I stood, with the light picking out his high cheekbones, he looked tough, the quiet guy at the bar you’d prefer not to disturb. Not the sort to hand out cooking tips.

I felt the need, rather childish, to demonstrate that I was in charge. I said, ‘Adam, will you walk round the table a couple of times. I want to see how you move.’

‘Sure.’

There was nothing mechanical about his gait. In the confines of the room he managed a loping stride. When he’d been round twice he stood by his chair, waiting.

‘Now you could open the wine.’

‘Certainly.’

He came towards me with his open palm extended and I placed the corkscrew on it. It was of the articulated, cantilevering kind favoured by sommeliers. It gave him no trouble. He raised the cork to his nose, then reached into a cupboard for a glass, poured a half-inch and passed it to me. As I tasted it, his gaze on me was intent. The wine was hardly of the first or even second rank, but it wasn’t corked. I nodded and he filled the glass and set it down carefully by the stove. Then he returned to his chair as I turned away to prepare a salad.

A peaceful half-hour went by and neither of us spoke. I made a dressing for the salad and chopped the potatoes. Miranda was in my thoughts. I was convinced I’d reached one of those momentous points in life where the path into the future forked. Down one route, life would continue as before, down the other, it would be transformed. Love, adventures, sheer excitement, but also order in my new maturity, no more wild schemes, a home together, children. Or these last two were wild schemes. Hers was the sweetest nature, she was kind, beautiful, amusing, vastly intelligent …

At a sound behind me, I came back to myself, heard it again, and turned. Adam was still in his chair at the kitchen table. He had made, then repeated, the sound of a man purposefully clearing his throat.

‘Charlie, I understand that you’re cooking for your friend upstairs. Miranda.’

I said nothing.

‘According to my researches these past few seconds, and to my analysis, you should be careful of trusting her completely.’

‘What?’

‘According to my—’

‘Explain yourself.’

I was staring angrily into Adam’s blank face. He said in a quiet sorrowful voice, ‘There’s a possibility she’s a liar. A systematic, malicious liar.’

‘Meaning?’

‘It would take a moment, but she’s coming down the stairs.’

His hearing was better than mine. Within seconds there was a gentle tap at the door.

‘Would you like me to get it?’

I didn’t answer him. I was in such a fury. I went into the miniature hallway in the wrong frame of mind. Who or what was this idiot machine? Why should I tolerate it?

I wrenched the door open, and there she was in a pretty pale blue dress, smiling merrily at me, a posy of snowdrops in her hand, and she’d never looked so lovely.

TWO

Several weeks passed before Miranda was able to work on her share of Adam’s character. Her father was ill and she made frequent journeys to Salisbury to look after him. She had a paper to write on nineteenth-century Corn Law reform and its impact on a single street in a town in Herefordshire. The academic movement known generally as ‘theory’ had taken social history ‘by storm’ – her phrase. Since she had studied at a traditional university which offered old-fashioned narrative accounts of the past, she was having to take on a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking. Sometimes, as we lay side by side in bed (the evening of the tarragon chicken had been a success) I listened to her complaints and tried to look and sound sympathetic. It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.