MIRROR, MIRROR

He had often reflected on the nature of beauty and concluded that it was like that line in Schubert's song, The Wanderer: "There, where you are not, is happiness." It was something you might aspire to possess, but if you succeeded, you would find that it had evaporated, leaving something different and inferior. Beauty was there to be looked at, nothing more. Women were beautiful until they spoke, or at least until you understood what they were saying, since the sound of the voice itself might also be beautiful, but not the words it uttered.

Though words themselves could be beautiful - otherwise he would not have been a publisher's rep, travelling from place to place, peddling them. But these were words on their own, separated from the nasty, smelly human being who had created them. Unless the author were dead, or had become the creation of his or her own work and therefore also left reality behind, he made a point of "forgetting" to carry with him all the publicity material relating to him or her. Requests for signing sessions he passed on to head office disapprovingly and made sure he was never anywhere near.

Beauty for him was detached. It was in the moment of unspeakable shock. It was characterised by the excision of all that was superfluous. Beautiful women lacked a past and a future. Even though real, they were like photographs. Their whole being was concentrated into that second of being beautiful, of being perceived as being beautiful. The line of the cheek. The curve of the nose. Where the light fell. The shadow round the eye. The wisp of hair, that the wind was bound to move again, to just the wrong position, while now, just now, it was perfect.

He liked bodies, too. But only certain kinds. Merely the sight of naked flesh was not enough. Both the lean and the opulent could please him, but they had to be angled correctly, breasts and nipples fitting an aesthetic rather than a merely sexual scheme. The same model, in a different picture, could strike him as disappointingly ugly, betraying herself and him by her ordinariness.

This perfectionism was necessarily restricted to a small area of life, for he realised very clearly that beauty, in all its forms, could never encompass more than a tiny fraction of existence. The very ordinary house on which he now paid a mortgage, after a succession of increasingly larger rented rooms and shared flats, contained beautiful objects, but they were not displayed beautifully. Rather, the detritus of life surrounded them, and, to a person as sensitive as he was, set them off by virtue of the contrast. Anyone else might have said that the general messiness spoiled their effect. But there was seldom anyone else in the house to make such an observation.

He needed the house to have space for the things he valued, particularly his collection of books. A bibliomane rather than a bibliophile, his delight was in finding the rare, the unusual, the unexpected - as a cheap paperback at a church bazaar or a primary school fete. Buying a missing and long-sought-after volume at an inflated price from a specialist book-seller was against his faith, that life brought you, in the long run, what you deserved to have, and that deliberately seeking these things out and putting yourself in the way of them with every prospect of success was in fact simply cheating and merited disappointment and disillusion.

This was why he sought and found female beauty in chance encounters - the girl on the other platform in the Tube, travelling inevitably in the opposite direction, or leaving the bus while he entered it, driving away from the supermarket just as he parked. They were always more attractive than the ones beside which he found himself and with whom he might so easily have struck up a conversation. He may, at some stage, have come to just such an insight himself, but if so, he no doubt suppressed it, for that would have meant acknowledging that this "fact of life" was only "a fact of his life", a choice of his and hence within his power, whereas he wished to believe that things happened as they did because that was the way the universe was made, and that he alone (or perhaps he, and a few authors of whom he approved) appreciated the nature of its construction and drew pleasure from it.

The car, like the house, was anything but beautiful. He would have found it strange to mingle such a quality with the naked functionality of such a vehicle, whose purpose was primarily to take him from one bookshop to another in the course of his work, with the occasional excursion to places where the landscape, at certain times of day, in certain lights, and in certain seasons, corresponded more or less to his sense of the beautiful. Beauty was always external to the conveyance, just as it was essentially external to the person through whom it was conveyed.

The car fitted his job. Too good a one meant that the publisher's profit margins were so high, he must be exploiting the poor bookseller - too shabby, and bankruptcy, remainderdom and unfilled orders would be looming. The car's price also fitted very well into those prerequisites by which he lived his life, and since its roadworthiness was certificated not only in the fashion required by the law, but also by the small garage which he had patronised for the past ten years, he was happy with it, in the way that one is happy with things and people that do not interfere with the even passage of one's life, or make one pay any more attention to them than they require for their own similar effortless and trouble-free functioning. It never entered his head to wonder why it had been so cheap.

Driving, like travel on the Tube, afforded him the opportunity for those minimal encounters from which he derived what he would have admitted, had he thought about it, to be an inordinate amount of pleasure. Sitting at traffic lights behind another car, he would often find himself admiring the back of the woman driver's head, and wondering what her face might be like. Sometimes, he was able to discover that, without her seeing him, by means of her driving mirrors, the one above her head or the one on the driver's door, which framed her countenance and flung it back to him, slightly rounded and slightly magnified by the glass's convexity, and separated from the person herself in exactly the right way to appeal to his very personal taste for beauty thus presented. Sometimes, even, the reverie this induced in him would be so strong that repeated hooting from less patient and less infatuated road-users was required to make him respond to the luminous indication that forward motion was now, once again, permitted.

It must have been some three months after buying the car that he found himself at the head of a queue waiting at the lights, and chanced to check - not the normal driving mirror, nor the one on his own door, but the one mounted on the passenger's side. In it, he saw a face of such stunning, compelling beauty, that he did not even begin to ask where the actual woman could be positioned in order to send him this bewitching image of herself. Instead, he simply relished it - until his fellow-travellers made clear the necessity for him to clear the junction and let them pass on their way to their mundane and piffling destinations. Obliged as he was to concentrate on the road ahead - though every moment expecting the woman in the mirror to shoot past him, bronzed and lithe-limbed, on a drop-handled racing-bike - or at least to appear, in a similar form, through his rear-window - it was some minutes before he was able to pull into a lay-by (after a very late and inadequate signal) and look for her again in the mirror. But she wasn't there.

However, her appearances, though irregular, became more frequent. Her expression ranged from impassivity, through happiness and laughter, to an appealing mournfulness and melancholy, and even, on certain occasions, approached an open-mouthed sensuality which more than once had him half up on the hard shoulder desperately trying to control the car while lorries whizzed by hooting and flashing. He had discovered by simple trial and error that whenever the car stopped, her image vanished, and these glimpses of her, whatever her mood, had become, in a short space of time, so vital to him that he did not scruple to endanger his life and those of others in order to prolong them, even if only for a few moments. In other circumstances even those adversely affected by these occurrences would not have hesitated to attribute such behaviour to that passion which is least tangible in its nature and most tangible in its effects, namely love. But when the object of devotion was no more than a reflection of someone who, in reality, was not there...

He mentioned it to no one. There was no one for him to mention it to. He quizzed the people from whom he had bought the car. He quizzed the people from whom they had bought it. And the people before that. Before that, it had been disposed of by the police through a car auction. He had no contacts to search any further. But the car had moved from owner to owner with considerable speed, not to say acceleration, though he, despite his well-documented characteristics, would not have sold it for ten times what he paid for it.

There had been times in his life when he had made special efforts to catch particular trains, to be on a platform at a particular time, just to catch sight, for a few seconds, of a special someone, until she wore the wrong hat, or had been on holiday and spoilt herself by the tan she had acquired. Now he drove along roads where he remembered having been able to see her, one eye to the front, one to the side. Sometimes he was rewarded, sometimes not. The very unpredictability meant she took his breath away and left a yawning space where his stomach had been. That, too, made the car difficult to control. but he succeeded, and survived. He owed it to her.

One autumn day, a bright Saturday after a week of rain during which the mirror had often been too speckled with drops to let him see clearly whether she was there or not, he drove out for the first time in a long while to one of his favourite spots, a cliff-top with a fine view across to the Isle of Wight. It was almost as if he wanted to show it to her.

At holiday-time it was often very busy, and officious attendants directed one willy-nilly into the car-park on the landward side of the road. Out of season, it was possible (though no doubt illegal) to park on the grass of the cliff-top, and enjoy the view from one's car. Only one other person was there, a young woman eating sandwiches and drinking coffee from a thermos while she sketched the view on an A4 block.

He sat and waited, but nothing happened, while the clouds scudded across the sky and the sun flashed on and off like a celestial lighthouse and the shadows raced across the wind-ruffled grass. The young woman, whose face he could not see, continued sketching intently.

After some three quarters of an hour of stealing indirect glances at the mirror, (even though he knew she never appeared when he was stationary) the notion entered his head that maybe he should turn the car round, that perhaps she was jealous of the attention he was paying the view. He did so, gingerly, aware of the sogginess of the turf under his wheels, and sat for another three-quarters of an hour. Finally, overcome with impatience and pique and a sense that he had been stood up on a date, he decided to call it a day and go home.

This was the moment when he discovered that his rear wheels had sunk into a muddy dip. Fortunately he had feared just such an occurrence and had barely let in the clutch before he was sure of what had happened, so that there had been no wheel-spin to dig him in deeper. A little gentle rocking, he was sure, would get him out of trouble. For a moment he thought of asking the woman who was still sketching if she would help him, since he noticed that the slope towards the cliff-edge was a little steeper than he had realised - but she seemed so absorbed in contemplation of the natural beauty that he was unwilling to interrupt her.

And when he leant forward, dug in his toes and put his weight to the car - all idea of calling to her for help disappeared, because of what he could now see in the mirror. She was there again, smiling - more particularly smiling at him. None of his visions of beauty had ever engaged with him, had ever really looked back, taken notice, realised he was there and smiled not just at him, but to him and for him. She was there. She was there. It was almost as if she were reaching out. He saw, for the first time, her arms, stretching towards him, stretching forwards very much as his arms were now doing as he tried to push the car. He knew that he wanted nothing except to be in those arms.

Then everything happened very quickly. He heard a scream from somewhere further along the cliff-top and jumped up to follow it with his eyes and see what was going on. As he did so, the car rolled with frightening rapidity backwards past him and over the edge. No sooner had he turned to watch it, than the woman who had been sketching was at his shoulder, hanging on to him and trembling with shock.

"What happened to her?" she said. "Where is she? Did she go over?"

"Who?" he asked.

"The woman who was helping you push the car - I thought I saw someone - "

"I was quite alone. It must have been my raincoat flapping. Here. Come and sit down. You seem to be more frightened by the whole thing than I am."

Which was true. And in its way quite reasonable. For underneath it all, he was someone who liked to understand. And now he understood. Not only that, but the final sight of the face in the mirror, contorted with pain and horror at the realisation that her own car was about to run her over, had been enough to cure him of his infatuation. If cure is the right word. If the infatuation was indeed a kind of illness. Those who share his perfectionist attitude to beauty will readily comprehend how all those months of love were instantly wiped out. Those more romantically inclined might accuse him of being fickle.

The answer to both groups has to lie in his marriage a year later to the woman who was sketching on the cliff, and who had sense enough never to ask him why, when he ought to have been in a state of numbed shock, he climbed briskly down to the wreck of his car (there was a quite straightforward path, and the tide was out) to retrieve (of all things) the mirror from the passenger's side. Nor, although she made quite a bit of order out of his house, did she query the mirror's presence among that rather eclectic group of "objects of beauty" to which he clung so obstinately and which he defended so tenaciously against the depredations of their three children, until, in the course of a massive clear-out for re-decoration, he himself consigned it, without urging and with much other lumber from which he could not consciously bear to be parted, to the garage, where one of the cats, in pursuit of a particularly large spider, knocked it down and smashed it, but remained, so far as one could tell, totally unaware of and unaffected by the seven years of misfortune which its action should have entailed.

10th October 9.30 p.m. to 11th October 12.45 a.m.

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