My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  His head turns back to her. She breathes in, the material tightening around her.

  ‘Is that new?’ he says, his hand poised to dial.

  ‘What?’

  He points. ‘The dress.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’ His face is distracted, slightly perplexed. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen it before.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nods. ‘It’s…it’s beautiful.’ Then, drawing his hand across his eyes, he dials the number. ‘Hello? I’d like to order a takeaway.’

  Aidan turns from the window and picks up the ringing phone. ‘Aidan Nash.’

  There is an explosion of laughter. ‘God, you sound so serious. What are you doing? Solving world peace?’

  His heart punches his ribs. He’s been thinking about her so intensely he is finding it hard to believe it is actually her on the phone, calling him, not just some projection of his imagination.

  ‘Hi. Sorry. I was…er…I was miles away.’

  He had been thinking about when he and Marcus first met her. How he’d been up helping Marcus with some designs. How they’d taken a break, early afternoon. How they’d met someone in a queue for a sandwich in a delicatessen. Someone Marcus knew. And this guy had known someone else who knew about a party and why didn’t they come along. Tonight. East, beyond the park. Just say they were friends of Sinead. There’d be no problem. Sinead? Yeah, Sinead. Tall girl, curly hair. There’d be no problem, he’d said again.

  And about the day she’d called him and said, you knew, didn’t you, and the way he’d held the receiver clamped to his ear, trawling his mind for explanations, excuses, but found only questions: where are you staying, do you need anything, where are you, we can’t talk about this now, tell me where you are and I’ll come and find you.

  ‘…never thought you’d be at work so late, but I just wondered if we were still on for tomorrow.’ Her words puncture his reverie.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ He snatches upon the word. Had they arranged to see each other? What day is tomorrow? What had they planned to do? ‘Fine.’ He gropes around his desk for his diary, encountering memos, computer discs, pens, staplers, then, mercifully, the hard edges of his diary, under a sheaf of film stills. He grabs it and flips it open. Tomorrow. Saturday. The oblong of the day on the page is completely white. ‘That would be great.’ In the lineless space he writes the word ‘sinead’ in red ink. ‘What sort of time?’

  ‘About midday?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘So what are we doing?’

  ‘Um…it’s a surprise,’ he improvises. He’ll think of something.

  It’s quiet for a Saturday morning. Lily is leaning alone on the counter at the front of the cubicles, surrounded by lingerie, frilled like sea creatures. There are only two customers in, and other people are seeing to them. Christmas music spirals from the ceiling. She can see herself in the reflection of a picture frame opposite, containing an advert for ‘natural, stick-on, peel-off implants’. She is practising: I’m leaving you, her mouth is telling her silently. Too melodramatic. I’m going. No. I think I should go? Lily sighs and squints more closely at the image of her mouth. What do you want, it asks her, why—–

  The phone in front of her rings, making her jump. She flings aside the bra and string set she’s holding, lifts the receiver to her ear and before she can even say the department how-may-I-help-you spiel, she hears the fuzzing line of a mobile phone and: ‘Lily? It’s me.’ Marcus.

  ‘Hi,’ she says, ‘how—–’

  ‘Guess where I am,’ he says over her.

  Lily hates games like these. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Go on. Guess.’

  ‘The flat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your office?’

  ‘No.’

  Just tell me, she wants to shriek. ‘Istanbul?’ she says, exasperated.

  ‘No. Do you give up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your shop.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m near your shop. About ten minutes away. Do you want to have lunch?’

  Aidan sees her before she sees him. He is waiting in the traffic, engine churning over, while she is standing on the corner they’d decided on. Her mobile phone is clamped to her ear. He can tell she’s agitated – walking in tight, controlled circles, her free hand jerking in the air then raking through her hair. Who is she talking to? He leans briefly on the horn as his car eases forward and she looks his way, recognises the car, but doesn’t break off her conversation.

  As he pulls over to the kerb, she is there, opening the door and climbing in. Tears are streaking down her face and the finger she holds to her lips, warning him not to speak, is shaking.

  ‘No…no…I don’t care…’ she is saying into the phone in a strangled voice. ‘I’m going now. No…that’s none of your business…no…I don’t want to talk about it any more…Goodbye…I’m not interested in anything you have to say…Goodbye.’ She drops the phone into her lap and clenches her hands around her face.

  ‘Was that who I think it was?’ The words are barely out of Aidan’s mouth when the phone in Sinead’s lap trills into life.

  ‘Shit,’ she says, and looks down at it. Then she stabs the divert-call button. There is a moment’s silence and the phone trills once more. ‘Bastard,’ she shouts, and slams her hand into the button again. This ritual repeats itself over and over again.

  ‘Give it here a sec,’ Aidan says, and she hands it to him. ‘You can bar calls from his phone, you know,’ he says, as he fiddles with the unfamiliar buttons at a traffic light.

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘It’s really easy, look.’ Aidan shows her how to enter Marcus’s number, press a button and get the message ‘Call Barred’ appearing in tiny, squared-off letters on the screen.

  Sinead stares at it. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘That’s fantastic.’

  ‘Well, he may get wise to it and call from somewhere else, so be careful.’

  Sinead is scuffling about in her pockets for a tissue, mopping her face and peering at her reflection in the mirror above her seat. ‘He’s driving me mad,’ she mutters.

  ‘What was it about this time?’

  ‘The usual, to begin with. Whingeing on and on about would I come back, and why not and how he made a mistake, blah blah blah. And so I confronted him about Lily.’

  ‘Lily?’ Aidan is thrown. ‘I didn’t know you knew about Lily.’

  She gives a short laugh. ‘That’s exactly what he said.’

  ‘But how…I mean, who told you?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Then…’

  She sighs as if she doesn’t want to go over it, doesn’t want to think about it. ‘I called the flat once and hung up when I heard a woman answer. Then…’ she sighs again ‘…when Marcus called me I asked him about it – stupidly – and he told me this girl had moved into my…the room. And, you know, I could just tell. I could just tell from the way he said her name, that kind of falling intonation he has when he’s talking about something he’s not particularly proud of…’

  Aidan, changing gear, nods.

  ‘…I could just tell he was fucking her.’ She clears her throat. ‘Then I met her.’

  ‘You met her?’ The car swings into the wrong lane. Someone behind hoots and gesticulates in the oblong of his rear-view mirror.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you serious? You met Lily? What do you mean? When? Where?’

  She is staring fiercely out of the window, her hands gripped around her knees. ‘Aide, I’d rather not…’ she begins unsteadily. ‘I’m sorry…I don’t want to talk about it…if that’s OK with you.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Then she is turning her head; Aidan turns his quickly and their eyes meet for a second.

  ‘So where are we going today, then?’ she says shakily, pulling her face into a lopsided, unconvincing smile.

  They walk along the black iron railings of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Lily drags a
gloved finger over their even rhythm. Next to her, Marcus is holding a bag of crisps between them and, with her other hand, she puts them into her mouth. It feels strange to have one bare hand and one gloved.

  She is having one of those days where everybody looks like somebody else. This morning on the bus she thought she saw her aunt who lives in Devon, a boy she knew from chemistry lessons at school, and a newsagent from Ealing. Each time, she’d been convinced, for a split second, maybe more. Then they’d moved or the bus had swung round into a differently angled light, and their familiarity had shifted and slipped away. Just now, she’s walked past someone she could have sworn was a man she’d been in love with at university. But when they got close he looked nothing like him – hair another colour, nose too long, face too wide, an inaccurate version of him.

  Marcus is taking her to the John Soane Museum. She’s been before, years ago with her mother, but doesn’t say. The house is cool, dark and tomb-still. A group of Americans, large in coloured jackets, keep appearing and disappearing from view through the many doorways and windows in the Chinese-box structure of the rooms. A green-suited attendant, sitting on a slender-legged chair, cleans his nails with a piece of card. They walk through a dark carpeted drawing room, through a narrow wooden passageway, past small gardens with sanguine-faced statues, through rooms filled with broken bits of classical buildings, pots, paintings, velvet-covered furniture.

  ‘He placed mirrors in odd places,’ Marcus tells her. ‘In alcoves. Panels. False window-frames. To give the impression of distance and space where there wasn’t any.’

  These mirrors disconcert her: she keeps glimpsing slivers of a woman who looks disturbingly like her before her brain catches up and tells her, it’s only you. In some obscure way, these reflections frighten her: she’s not expecting them, they don’t look the way she thinks she does, the women in the mirrors seem trapped, shocked and cold behind the glass. She’ll glance sideways and see herself turning away from herself. ‘Are you all right?’ Marcus asks her at one point and, in a fragmented portico above their heads, twelve Lilys nod back at him.

  In a small, high-ceilinged room, he hooks out of the wallpaper a brass handle and tugs at it. The wall seems to come away in his hand, swinging out into the room on a hinge, unfolding like a book to reveal panels hung with strange, faded, meticulous drawings of Grecian buildings, one after another after another. They make her mistrust the building, these traps set into its architecture. She doesn’t want to touch anything in case it gives and she is swallowed up in its hidden mechanisms. She walks carefully down the corridors, not touching the walls, thinking of that children’s story where a kitten gets trapped behind the wainscot and captured by a grinning, thin-tailed rat.

  At a railing, they stand and look down into the room below, and into the hollow of an Egyptian sarcophagus.

  ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ says Marcus softly. ‘Alabaster. Makes it seem almost worthwhile dying, don’t you think, if you get to lie in that?’

  ‘Yes, but…’ She’s not sure why it makes her feel ill at ease. Why is it here? She imagines John Soane packing it tightly into a crate with deft, acquisitive fingers and lowering it on to a ship. Who was buried in it and what did Soane do with the body?

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t really be here.’

  ‘Why? Where should it be?’

  ‘Egypt, of course. I mean, don’t you think it seems, I don’t know, inappropriate here?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

  Then Lily sees, walking below them, around the sarcophagus and across the room, a curly-haired, tall woman. Her hands grip the rail. She can’t see her face properly. Is it her? And if it is, is it really her or the other her? She turns her head and looks at Marcus. Did he see it? Can he see it? She wants to blindfold him, shield his eyes from the possibility of her. But he is talking about the hieroglyphics inscribed in the alabaster and, when Lily looks down again, the room is empty.

  ‘It says here,’ Sinead says, ‘that these frogs hold enough poison in their sacs to, and I quote, “fell an average man”.’

  Aidan peers into the murky tank at a frog the size of a pencil sharpener, green-black with a lurid blue mark on its back, symmetric as an early Christian cross.

  ‘What is an average man, do you think?’ she continues. ‘Do they exist?’

  Aidan adjusts the focus of his vision and sees, in the reflection in the tank, that two men are staring at Sinead. ‘Maybe only in Brazil,’ he says.

  ‘Brazil?’

  ‘Where the frogs come from.’ He touches her lightly on the shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s go upstairs.’

  They pass through the aquarium room, with groups of people huddled round tanks, set like bright, lit windows into the wall. Aidan glimpses, for a second, in the side of a huge tank containing shoals of flitting angel fish, an image of him and Sinead, walking side by side. His brain snaps shut on it, wanting to hoard and preserve it – her next to him, holding up the leaflet about Kew Gardens to show him something. It occurs to him for the first time that when they are together like this people must just take them for a couple.

  The stairs, winding like those in a castle, lead to the biggest palm house with arched white struts like the ribcage of a dinosaur. Large spread-leaved plants strain up and out towards the light. The air is as humid and heavy as Tokyo. He tells Sinead this and she looks at him for a moment then asks him questions: how he liked being there, did he mind the travelling, was Japan beautiful, had he ever been to the mountains there, did he ever get lonely, could he speak Japanese, did he prefer working with Japanese or Americans, would he feel trapped now he was based in London.

  They wander out of the narrow, white doors of the palm house, and walk past oblong flower-beds, lakes sprouting fountains, a line of very vocal pink-footed geese, a sound garden (which Sinead pronounces a ‘load of new-age shite’), a bank full of prickling, thorned cactuses, a high pagoda, a winding pathway through dense foliage, bouffant rhododendron bushes, and giant lilypads a metre in diameter that make her lean over the barrier and pull them up from the water to see what they look like underneath.

  He notices that her hair has curled tighter in the humidity of the palm houses, that she bites her lip when she’s thinking, that she touches the leaves of the plants she likes, that she walks faster than most people, that one of her shoe soles is slightly more worn down than the other, that she wears a gold ring on the smallest finger of her right hand, that her ear-lobes have been pierced three times but she doesn’t wear any earrings, that she carries four books in her bag, along with several lipsticks, a notebook, a pair of retractable scissors, a picture of her brother aged four, and a cowrie shell.

  As the light drains from the sky, they sit on a bench, hands tucked into their coats for warmth, at the edge of the gardens. Sinead brings a polished aluminium flask from her bag and they pass a cup of hot chocolate between them that tastes slightly metallic but burns a path down Aidan’s chest. Above their heads, planes come into land at Heathrow, stitching the sky with threads of white. They talk about jobs and Aidan’s flat and her lectures and her friends and, eventually, Marcus. She doesn’t weep, and tips back her head to look at the planes when she says, ‘I think if someone rejects you like that, it means they’re not right for you, doesn’t it?’

  When he doesn’t reply, she looks over at him and asks: ‘Do you think it was out of character?’

  Aidan swirls the dregs of chocolate around the base of the cup. A dark slurry of grains has coagulated there, bleeding into the liquid. He knows that it’s been inevitable that they would have this conversation at some point. And he knows she wants him to say yes, that she wants to be vindicated for loving him.

  ‘I think,’ he begins carefully, ‘I think that he’s always been rather…focused on his own needs.’

  She looks away, starts playing with the laces of her boots, untying them and retying them, her face confused and miserable. He can bear anything but th
at. It makes him want to comfort her, touch her, take her in his arms – and that he really shouldn’t do. He puts down the cup and takes a deep breath. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘two things about Marcus. First, he’s very impulsive. Agreed?’

  She nods.

  ‘Which can be a good thing,’ Aidan continues, ‘a very good thing. But it can also be annoying. He always has to satisfy his urges immediately, have you noticed? He can’t wait. If he’s hungry, he has to eat right there and then, no matter what. He can’t think about anything else until he has whatever it is he wants. He was the same when he met you. And I think that has relevance to…what happened in New York.’

  She isn’t looking at him, but he can tell she’s listening.

  ‘Second,’ he says, ‘he has this spooky ability to completely compartmentalise his life. I’ve had loads of arguments with him about this, over the years, and I’m sure you have too. If there’s something upsetting him or making him unhappy, he can just switch it off. Just like that. And get on with his life as if nothing at all has happened. I don’t know anybody else who has that capacity. I’ve always found it very disturbing, that he can just put things in a box and shut the lid. And I think…’ He trails off, suddenly wondering if she really wants to hear this.

  ‘…that’s what he did with me,’ she finishes for him.

  Aidan nods. ‘Yes.’ He picks up the cup again, swirling it around in his hand. ‘I also think that what he did is a bit like the Ancient Mariner shooting the albatross.’

  She turns her eyes on him.

  ‘That he just did it. It was an action empty of reason. He did it because he did it. And that he – and you – will never really know why.’

  She doesn’t speak for a long time, and when she does, it is to tell him how, when she was a little girl, she always used to climb up this one tree, a sycamore tree it was, when she was in trouble. And how her parents used to stand at the bottom, shouting at her to come down, but she never would. One day, after she’d been up there for hours, her father had gone to the garage, ripped the chainsaw into action, climbed the tree and lopped off the top half with one swipe. It looked dreadful for years, she says, that half-tree.