Machines Like Me

‘Indeed. I’d like to meet one. Do you know any?’

Simon was emphatic. ‘No, sir. Absolutely, I do not.’

I raised a hand in farewell and thanks and, taking Adam by his elbow, guided him towards the door.

*

It was a cliché of romantic love, but no less painful for that: the stronger my feelings, the more remote and unattainable Miranda appeared. How could I complain when she was attained that very first night, after dinner? We had fun, we talked easily, we ate and slept together most nights. But I was greedy for more, though I tried not to show it. I wanted her to open up to me, to want me, need me, show some hunger for me, some delight in me. Instead, my initial impression held – she could take me or leave me. Everything good that passed between us – sex, food, movies, new plays – was instigated by me. Without me she drifted in silence towards her default condition upstairs, to a book on the Corn Laws, a bowl of cereal, a cup of weak herbal tea, curled up in an armchair, barefoot and oblivious. Sometimes, she sat for long periods without a book. If I put my head round her door (we now had keys to each other’s places) and said, ‘How about an hour of frantic sex?’ she would say calmly, ‘OK,’ and we would go into her or my bedroom and she would rise splendidly to her pleasures and mine. When we were done she would take a shower and return to her chair. Unless I suggested something else. A glass of wine, a risotto, an almost famous sax player at a Stockwell pub. OK again.

To everything I proposed, indoors or out, she brought the same tranquil readiness. Happy to hold my hand. But there was something, or many things, I didn’t understand, or she didn’t want me to know about. Whenever she had a seminar or needed to use the library, she returned from college in the late afternoons. Once a week, she came back later. It took me a while to notice that it was always a Friday. Finally she told me that she went to the Regent’s Park Mosque for Friday prayers. That surprised me. But no, she wasn’t thinking of converting from atheism. She had in mind a social-history paper she might write. I wasn’t convinced, but I let it go.

What we lacked was conversational intimacy. We were closest when we argued about the Task Force. When we went to a bar, her conversation was general. She was happy with her solitude or with lively chat about public matters, but there was nothing personal in between, except her father’s health or his literary career. When I tried to ease us towards the past, perhaps angling in gently with something about myself or a question about her own history, she reached quickly for generalities or an account of the earliest years of her childhood, or an anecdote about someone she knew. I told her about my idiotic excursion into tax fraud, my experience of court and the tedium of my hours of community service. I would have told her anyway, but the story was my pretext to ask if she herself had ever been in court. The answer was abrupt. Never! And then she changed the subject. I’d been in various promising affairs and in love, or almost in love, two or three times before, depending on definitions. I fancied myself an expert and knew better than to put her under pressure. I still thought I might get more out of Adam on the Salisbury affair. If I didn’t know her secret, at least she didn’t know I knew she had one. Tact was everything. I still hadn’t told her that I loved her, or divulged my fantasies about our shared future or even hinted at my frustration. I left her alone with her books or her thoughts whenever it suited her. Though the subject was not in the line of my interests, I worked up an acquaintance with the Corn Laws and developed some ideas of my own about free trade. She didn’t dismiss them, but nor was she impressed.

So here we were upstairs at dinner in her kitchen, which was even smaller than mine. The table was of white moulded plastic, just big enough for two, probably stolen from a pub garden by a previous tenant. Standing at the sink, up to his elbows in suds, Adam dealt with the plates and cutlery we’d handed him at the end of our meal – toad-in-the-hole, baked beans, fried eggs. Student food. On the windowsill, where yellow gingham curtains hung still in our late-summer heat wave, a radio was playing the Beatles, recently regrouped after twelve years apart. Their album, Love and Lemons, had been derided for its grandiosity, for failing to resist the lure and overreach of an eighty-strong symphony orchestra. They could not master such forces, was the general drift, with half a lifetime’s store of guitar chords. Nor did we wish to be told again, the Times critic complained, that love was all we needed, even if it were true, which it was not.