My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  This night is the saddest. Or so it seems. What she doesn’t know yet is that there will be a long, long string of sad nights, some of a different kind, some worse. What she doesn’t yet know is that ending a relationship cannot be done in one conversation over one evening, that such extrication takes days and months and sometimes years.

  When she reaches the bedroom, she doesn’t know what to do. She stands in the middle of the floor, arms crossed behind her body. She feels confused, divided, unreal, as if her actual everyday life has been stopped somehow and she is being forced to act out this strange scene belonging to someone else. It’s as if she’s mouthing along to a script she doesn’t understand and wants no part in. She wants to return to her other life, to step back into it, but doesn’t know how.

  She hears Aidan come in, close the door behind him; Marcus’s voice saying hello and then a rumbling, inaudible exchange between them. Feet over the floorboards, the slam of Aidan’s doors. More feet. Her door opening. Someone stepping into the room.

  There is silence between them for a while. Marcus sits at the desk by the window, Sinead on the bed. He runs his thumbnail along the edge of the desk. She cannot stop swallowing, as though she has eaten something she cannot digest. She draws her knees up to her chest, pulls the duvet around her: a shivering chill has settled into her bones. Some corner of her mind tells her that she must talk, find things out, to cross somehow this crevasse that has opened up between them, but she can’t think of anything to say.

  She clears her throat, tries to focus her thoughts. Lots, he said. There were lots. In New York. ‘When did you,’ she begins, unsure of how the sentence will end, unsure of what it is she’s asking, ‘when was the first one?’

  ‘Um.’ Marcus thinks. ‘Just after I’d arrived,’ he almost whispers.

  ‘And did…how long did…it…go on?’

  ‘The…the whole time.’

  Sinead thinks about all the letters and the postcards that dropped through the door, the e-mails that she’d picked up at the end of her working day, the phone calls that came twice, sometimes three times a week, sometimes in the middle of the night. Were they ever there when he was talking to her? Did he ever call her from their apartments? Did they listen in the background? Did they read the letters she sent back? Did he ever call after—–?

  ‘The whole time?’ she repeats, as if for herself. ‘The whole time you were away?’

  ‘What’s the G for?’

  He raised his head lazily, running his finger down the knuckles of my backbone. ‘Huh?’

  ‘The G.’ I flapped the passport at him. A picture of him, sealed under plastic, younger, with that soft-edged look that teenagers try in vain to rid themselves of, flicked past. ‘Marcus G. Emerson,’ I read.

  ‘Promise not to laugh?’

  I smiled. ‘No.’

  ‘I can’t tell you, then.’

  ‘Go on. It can’t be that bad. What is it? Gerald? Geoffrey?’

  ‘Gabriel.’

  I laughed. ‘Gabriel? Are you serious?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes. My mother has a bit of a New Testament thing.’

  I dropped the passport back on to the table, that picture of him, longer-haired then, winking at me. I pulled myself over the bed towards him and laid myself along the length of his back, my head in the curve of his neck. His heartbeat was slower than mine.

  ‘Do you know what?’ he said, and his voice rumbled through the mattress. ‘There’s this artist who did a whole study into the physiognomy of angels. He did research into flying creatures – birds, bats, you know – and worked out that if angels were to fly, they’d have to have a breastbone one metre thick for their wings to support their body weight. At the end of it, he painted a physiognomically correct version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, with these weird, stocky, deformed-looking creatures winging their way about the celestial skies.

  ‘Imagine it,’ and he turned over. I slid off his back. Sweat had pooled between us where our bodies touched, transpiring against each other. ‘One metre thick.’ And he held his hand out from his body to demonstrate. I narrowed my eyes, tried to visualise it, but couldn’t make the leap, couldn’t imagine him any different.

  She is staring at him, and he looks unfamiliar to her, as if she’s never met him before, as if she’s seeing him for the first time. Her imagination wriggles out from under her control, and begins to flash her a series of single-frame images: him thrusting into a woman on a bed, him with a different woman up against a desk, a woman on top of him, a woman bending over him, his hands on another woman’s waist, his head resting in the neck of a faceless female, him on—–

  It all disappears when, suddenly, it hits her that, a few minutes ago, they were…that he was…on the sofa…they were…

  ‘How could you?’ she blurts, and her voice cracks, choked by shock and disbelief. ‘How could you sleep with me after that? How could you do that?’ She hears her words rise to a wail and her limbs twist and convulse in bodily horror at the recollection of him on her and in her, as if daubing her, smearing her with traces of those other women. ‘How could you?’ she shouts again, looking around her, as if for something to hurl at him. She wants to hurt him, to mark him.

  ‘I…I didn’t…’ he stutters, ‘I didn’t mean to…it just—–’

  ‘Happened?’ she yells over him. ‘Is that what you were going to say?’

  He darts a look at her then at the door. ‘Hush,’ he says. ‘Aidan will hear.’

  ‘Aidan?’ she splutters, struggling off the bed. ‘Do you think I give a shit if Aidan hears?’ Her feet move under her as she paces around the boards and the walls of the room constructed for the life she used to have veer around her giddily.

  ‘Sinead,’ he reaches out for her as she passes him, but she swings away from him and his hand closes around empty air, ‘please don’t shout,’ he begs. ‘This has all,’ he presses his fists into his eyes, ‘come out wrong. Let’s just…let’s just talk about this.’

  ‘Talk?’ she says. ‘You want to talk? OK. Let’s talk. Why don’t you tell me what it was like, and whether it was any good, and whether you feel like a big brave man now, and was it better than it is with me, and how you could come back from that and sleep with me before you had the decency to tell me, and…and why you didn’t tell me.’ Strength and words ebb out of her. Silence, after the tumble of her speech, pulses between them. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she whispers.

  He rubs his fingers across his forehead, not looking at her but at the walls, his feet, the desk.

  ‘Why, Marcus? Why leave me all that time, thinking that everything was the same?’

  ‘Everything is the same,’ he says quickly.

  She gives an incredulous laugh, then looks at him, trying to see if he’s joking, if he really means what he just said. His eyes, a deep navy blue in this light, look back at her, unwavering.

  ‘Nothing has changed,’ he insists. ‘Nothing. I promise you. All that didn’t mean a thing. It had nothing to do with you and me. Nothing. I love you. You know that. I always will.’ He is crushing her hand in his, the ring he gave her a year ago pressing painfully into the flesh of adjacent fingers.

  ‘Marcus,’ she flounders, unnerved, ‘that’s ridiculous, I—–’

  ‘No, it’s not ridiculous. It’s not ridiculous at all. You and I couldn’t live without each other. You know that. Nothing could ever come between us, or change how we feel about each other.’

  Cross now, she wrests her hand from his grasp. ‘Really? Is that what you think? That you can behave exactly as you like and I’ll just accept it? That you can go off and screw your way around New York City and I’ll just be here when you get back saying, “Oh, Marcus, do what you like because I’ll love you no matter what?”’

  He is still looking at her with that unblinking, wide-eyed stare, but there is now a hint of desperation in his voice. ‘I missed you so much,’ he says softly.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she spits out. ‘How dare you say that to me
?’

  He stroked the tips of my hair with the fingers of both his hands. I was impressed that he knew straight away how to touch it: some men were overawed by it and never went near it; others tried manfully to run their hands through it, which was impossible, not to mention painful. I had one man who wanted to brush it. I think he thought it would be a romantic gesture. I tried to explain that you couldn’t brush my hair, that I never did, that it wouldn’t work, that it was too difficult and the results too horrific. He went on and on about it and, close to the end of our affair, I seized a brush and showed him why, dragging the nylon bristles through the ravelled curls, transforming my head into a huge, crackling, electrified tumbleweed.

  But Marcus, that first afternoon, just explored its properties, didn’t force it when one spiral refused to part from its neighbour, didn’t try to run his fingers from root to end. He held it to the light, where I knew that he’d be looking at it sparking brown and gold. He spent ages playing with one ringlet, stretching it out to its fullest length down my back before letting it ping back.

  ‘Wow,’ he murmured eventually. He elongated it. I felt the ends whisper on my back.

  ‘Imagine if you could harness the energy in your hair.’ He released it and it sprang back to nestle among the rest. ‘If there was some way of wiring it up to the National Grid you could power the whole country.’

  He pulled it straight again.

  ‘Who were they?’ she says, standing in front of him, hands behind her back.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He reaches out for her. She steps back.

  ‘It does matter. It mattered to you at the time. Tell me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to know.’

  ‘Sinead, it’s not important. Believe me, it doesn’t matter. They don’t matter.’

  ‘They mattered enough for you to fuck them. Just tell me. Were they people you were working with?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do I know any of them?’

  He hesitates, looks away.

  ‘Do I?’ she persists.

  ‘Sinead—–’

  ‘Tell me. Do I know any of them?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘But you’re not sure.’

  ‘I…’ he waves a hand around his head ‘…I thought for a minute you might have met…one of them, but then I remembered you…you weren’t at that particular party.’

  ‘So one of them you knew from London.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But she was in London.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, impatient. ‘She was here briefly a few months ago for…something…work, maybe, or friends, or something.’

  ‘And you planned to sleep with her when you saw her then?’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  ‘So where did you find the others?’

  He puts his hands to his head. ‘I really don’t think—–’

  ‘Where, Marcus? In bars? In clubs? Where do you go if you want to find women?’ Something occurs to her. ‘I take it they were women?’

  He looks at her, outraged. ‘Of course they were.’

  ‘Well,’ she gives a bitter laugh, ‘I just wondered if you had any other bombshells you wanted to drop.’

  She does another circuit around the room. Anger leaves her and settles on her within seconds. ‘Did you plan to do this before you went?’ she asks, bewildered.

  ‘Um…I…’

  ‘Did you? Were you planning this before you left?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t.’

  ‘Then when did you decide?’

  ‘When I was there…when I…I don’t know…it wasn’t something…I mean, it isn’t like I decided to do it, not like I made a decision or anything.’ He suddenly bows his head, as if overcome, burying his face in his hands. ‘Sinead,’ he cries, his voice breaking, ‘this is awful. Awful. None of this is coming out right. I never meant…I didn’t think you’d react this way. I—–’

  She gives a short bark of laughter. ‘Why? How did you think I’d react? That I’d welcome you back with open and forgiving arms?’

  He stares at her for a second, his face wild and miserable. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he whispers hoarsely. ‘I don’t think I’d…thought it through properly.’

  ‘You haven’t thought any of this through, have you? That’s always been your biggest problem. You know that? You have this incredible inability to understand causality. You can never make the connection that if you do A then B will happen. You have this…’ she has that feeling of having hit her stride now, as she does at the midway point in her lectures, words and ideas pumping together like blood and oxygen ‘…this pathological blindness to the most basic mechanisms of human nature. You’re always so focused on the realisation of your own bloody desires that you can’t stop and think about what the results might be. You didn’t stop, did you, when you were climbing into bed with some woman in New York, you didn’t pause for a moment and think, I wonder what Sinead will say when I tell her about this, I wonder what effect this might have on my five-year relationship?’ She stops, breathless, suddenly struck by the weirdness of talking about her own life in this way, and not just some text. ‘Did you?’

  He doesn’t move.

  ‘Did you?’ she shouts.

  He gives a minute shake of his head.

  She strides to the window, stares out unseeing, then strides back. Something is preventing her keeping still. Between the bed and the wardrobe, she stops and turns back. ‘Were you always going to tell me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Were. You,’ she says, with sarcastic slowness. ‘Always. Going—–’

  ‘Yes!’ he exclaims, with an unconvincing vehemence, not meeting her eye.

  She feels oddly calm and somehow unsurprised by this new discovery. ‘You weren’t, were you?’

  He doesn’t reply.

  ‘That’s why you haven’t thought it through. Because this was never part of the plan.’ In a flare of fury, she kicks the base of the bed. But everything she does somehow feels divorced from her, has a tinge of forced theatricality to it, as if she’s just following directions, behaving in the way you’re supposed to behave when you find out about infidelity. ‘You shit,’ she says slowly, ‘you utter, utter shit. You were going to just come back and pretend nothing had happened. What made you change your mind, Marcus? Last-minute nerves? A sudden pang of conscience? Or were you scared I might find out anyway and thought the best thing was just to come clean?’

  He’s still silent.

  ‘Hmm?’ she persists, then suddenly pulls away from the subject, abandoning it, tiring of it, knowing she’ll never get an answer. ‘Just how many are we talking about?’ she asks, quiet now.

  He sighs unsteadily. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Come on. You must remember.’

  ‘I don’t. I don’t want to think about it.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that,’ she snaps. ‘Come on. Think. More than ten? Less than twenty?’

  Marcus hesitates. Scratches the back of his neck. ‘I can’t remember. A lot.’

  She sinks down to the edge of the bed, scuffing the woodgrain in the floorboards with her bare feet. Marcus hasn’t moved from his seat at her desk. His back, usually straight, is curved, and he rests his elbows on her desk, his face averted. He looks tired – jet-lagged and pale under his tan. She is overcome with an urge to press her palm to the dip between his shoulder-blades, to curl her fingers around his shoulders. But she can’t. She can’t ever again.

  ‘Why?’ she says, very quietly. ‘Why did you do it?’

  We peeled ourselves from the sheets, forced out of bed by hunger and the airlessness of the room. When I stood up, my head stuttered and blurred, as if filled with fluid. Our clothes lay together on the bare boards, the arm of his shirt across my crumpled shorts.

  ‘It’s not that bad.’ I protested, as I ransacked my things for a towel. ‘I don’t
spend my life sitting about discussing the finer points of Chaucerian English, you know. And anyway,’ I said, flapping a skirt in the air to shake it of its creases, ‘I love my job.’

  ‘But aren’t all your friends academics as well?’ His voice came from the far side of the room, where he was unpacking his bag.

  ‘No,’ I lied, with my back to him. ‘Not at all. I know lots of people who…who do ordinary, normal jobs in the real world.’

  ‘But don’t you wish you lived in London?’

  ‘No,’ I lied again. ‘I like it there. It’s…small and…and friendly.’

  ‘I don’t know how you stand it. Everything closes down at eleven o’clock. You can walk across it in twenty minutes. You never meet anyone who isn’t attached to the university. It’s just a campus that’s built like a town.’

  ‘You can’t say that!’ I turned round. ‘You’ve never even spent any time there.’

  ‘Maybe I will now,’ he said, his voice suddenly serious.

  I faltered when I tried to look at him. It was far too early for that kind of talk.

  It’s a question she can’t let alone. ‘But why?’ she says again. ‘I don’t understand why you’ve done this. Are you not happy with me any more?’

  ‘No. I mean yes, of course I am.’

  ‘Was it a way of ending things with me?’

  ‘No! Absolutely not.’

  ’Were you bored with our sex life?’

  ‘No. No,’ he appeals to her, holding out his arms. ‘No. Sinead, how can you say that?’

  She stays where she is, on the bed, ignoring his gesture. ‘Then what? What went so wrong that you…that you couldn’t talk to me about it?’

  He lets his arms fall to his sides. ‘I…I…Nothing,’ he says firmly. ‘Nothing went wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she demands. ‘Something must have gone wrong for you to do this.’

  ‘No, no, it didn’t.’

  She gives an exasperated click with her tongue, gets up, walks around the bed once, then turns back to him. ‘Then why? If nothing went wrong and you’re still happy with me, why did you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, with a strange, almost surprised look on his face. ‘I really don’t know why I did it.’