My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Lily’s cheek is pressed to his, her head drooping. She is staring at the ridged, whorled flesh of his ear, inches from her mouth. She could strain forward and touch it, brush her lips against it, take its lobe between her teeth. Whisper something – anything – into that small, black hollow. The message would reach him instantly.

  Beneath her, his lungs inflate and deflate, raising her ever so slightly up, then letting her down. The water-weight of her breasts is flattened against the dense, fleshless hard of his chest, his hair leaving menhir swirls on her skin.

  What would she say? She flexes her tongue between the cage of her teeth. One of his hands is pressed against her lower back. The other lies limp on the mattress beside them. If she elongates her foot, ballet-style, she could touch the round, hard bone of his ankle. He swallows, the muscles at the side of his head tensing.

  I know what you did.

  It would be so easy. The words are there, ready to be carried out on the carbon dioxide she’s returning to the air. Her heart makes flailing punches at him through the arched tent of her ribcage. His eyes open and flutter, his lashes scything at her neck.

  I see her. I see her everywhere.

  Lily rolls away, sees his ear and his face pull out into distant focus. The sheet beneath her feels cold, starch-sharp.

  ‘You must be Aidan.’

  He looks up. Standing in front of him is a petite, untidy-looking blonde woman in a blue coat.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I am.’

  ‘I’m Ingrid.’ She offers a red-gloved hand, and when Aidan takes it, the wool feels rough and cold to the touch. ‘Sinead told me to look out for you.’

  They are in a café off Tottenham Court Road. Aidan is waiting for Sinead, who is late. Ingrid strips off her gloves, unbuttons her coat, drops her bag on the floor next to her chair, goes to the counter and orders a coffee, then sits down.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ he says. ‘Sinead’s told me all about—–’

  ‘We’ve met before,’ Ingrid interrupts him, rather accusingly.

  ‘Have we?’

  ‘Yes. A long time ago. At a birthday party.’

  ‘You mean—–’ He stops.

  ‘I do mean.’ Ingrid nods. ‘That party. The one where she met him. Thingy. Whathisname.’

  ‘Shitface,’ supplies Aidan.

  She smiles, at last. ‘Yes,’ she says, with relish. ‘Shitface. How is Shitface these days?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘I thought you and he were best buddies.’

  ‘We were.’

  ‘I see. It’s like that, is it? You’ve taken her side?’

  ‘Um. Kind of.’ Aidan is anxious to change the conversation. ‘So you were at that party?’

  ‘I lived in the house. I was Sinead’s housemate. Well, one of them.’

  ‘I’m not sure if I remember you.’

  ‘I had long hair then,’ she says, her grey eyes moving restlessly over his face, as if collating information in order to assess him at a later date. ‘We met again, at Shitface’s place, a few years ago. You were with your friend.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Josh? No…John,’ she says, pointing a finger at him as if daring him to correct her. Her hair is so blonde that it’s almost white at the temples, where the hairs starts flecking out from the skin. He wonders if she’s Scandinavian by origin. Could be with a name like that. He considers asking her, then rejects the idea.

  ‘You’ve got a good memory,’ he says instead.

  ‘You and him and Shitface were all sitting around the table and Sinead and I came in. We’d been out shopping, I think. Your friend John had made lots of paper animals – what do you call them? origami – out of some newspaper and was talking about some girl he’d just fallen for, and agonising about the fact she wasn’t Jewish. Or something.’

  Aidan nods slowly.

  ‘We were all giving him advice – probably not very useful advice.’

  Aidan clears his throat. ‘I remember.’ He nods again. ‘You did have very long hair. Sinead had bought a juicer thing and kept squeezing oranges for us all.’

  The waiter places Ingrid’s coffee in front of her and removes Aidan’s cup. She keeps her hands flat on the table, her head on one side, considering him.

  ‘So,’ he says, uncomfortable under her scrutiny, ‘you’re an academic.’

  ‘And you’re a bit of a mystery,’ she returns.

  ‘Am I?’ He is taken aback. ‘Why?’

  ‘The tall, dark and mysterious friend. Always talked about. Never there. Always away. Has some vaguely glamorous job in film.’

  ‘It really isn’t glamorous at all.’

  ‘I bet it’s more glamorous than what I do.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m an academic.’

  ‘I know that. I meant what’s your subject?’

  ‘History.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘North London.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes. D’you like your job?’

  ‘Yes.’

  For some reason they smile at each other. Ingrid lets a heaped spoonful of sugar slide into her cup. Aidan feels as though he’s passed some obscure test.

  ‘So how do you think she is?’ she asks, stirring her coffee vigorously.

  ‘She…Very up and down. But on the whole, I’d say…pretty bad. Like someone who’s had a section of themselves removed.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll get back together?’

  ‘What?’ For a moment he can’t think who she means. ‘Sinead and Marcus?’

  Ingrid frowns. ‘Who’s Marcus?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he is distracted by the thought, unable to formulate an answer, ‘I mean Shitface. Well…I don’t know. I doubt it. I mean…I don’t think she’d have him, would she? Why? Why do you ask? Do you think they will?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugs, blows on her coffee, ‘I really don’t know. I obviously would never speak to her again, but he can be very persuasive.’

  ‘She’d never do it,’ he says. ‘Surely.’

  ‘I hope you’re right. Though I wouldn’t bank on it. She still loves him. It takes more than behaving like an oversexed imbecile to change that. And amore does occasionally vincit omnia.’ Ingrid puts down her cup and starts folding a napkin into pleats. ‘You’ve heard the latest, I suppose? His little consort’s been stalking her as well?’

  ‘You mean Lily?’

  ‘Whatever,’ says Ingrid, dismissively, then looks at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Of course,’ she says, ‘you must know her.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t exactly say know her. She moved in while I was still living there. That’s all.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She ruminates on this for a moment, still raking him with her gaze.

  ‘Anyway, what do you mean, stalking?’

  ‘Well, apparently he—–’ she breaks off, staring through the window. Aidan follows her gaze. In the distance, it is just possible to make out a figure running along the pavement towards them. Sinead. The evening is darkening and something she is holding flutters white against her clothes. ‘Here comes Wilson,’ Ingrid says, getting up, ‘and it looks like she may have some news for us.’

  ‘News?’ Aidan says. There is something in Sinead’s euphoric expression, and the paper she’s holding that makes his pulse quicken with a kind of dread. ‘What news?’

  ‘Did you get it?’ Ingrid shouts, hands cupped around her mouth. The waiter glances over, peeved.

  ‘Get what?’ Aidan asks.

  Sinead bounces up the steps of the café, beaming, and wrenches open the door.

  ‘You got it?’ shrieks Ingrid.

  Sinead nods. Ingrid flings her arms around her, laughing and shouting congratulations, I knew you would, I knew it.

  ‘Got what?’ Aidan asks again.

  ‘She got it, she got it!’ Ingrid is chanting.

  ‘I just heard,’ Sinead is babbling, ‘I checked my e-mail before I l
eft, just in case. I didn’t really think it would be there, but it was! I can’t believe it! I printed it out for you, look.’

  Ingrid grabs the paper and scans it quickly. Sinead laughs, watching her, and claps her hands.

  Aidan catches her by the elbow. ‘Sinead, what is it? What have you got?’

  ‘Oh, Aide,’ she wraps her arms around his neck and smacks a kiss on to his cheek, ‘the post I applied for. Didn’t I tell you? Maybe I didn’t. It’s in Sydney. Literature and Gender. Teaching and research.’

  ‘Sydney? As in Australia?’

  ‘It’s not exactly my field, but—–’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘A year. Two years. Who knows? It all depends on whether or not…’ She trails away, staring at his obviously blank face. ‘Aidan, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It all happened so fast. The person they had pulled out last weekend and they called me and asked if I’d be interested, and it seemed like just what I needed. I just have to get out of London, what with…everything. You know. I’m sorry. You’re not angry, are you?’

  ‘Angry? No, no, not at all.’

  Ingrid thrusts the paper into his hands and hugs Sinead again. ‘I’m so pleased! I’m so proud of you! It’ll be fantastic.’

  ‘You will come and stay, won’t you?’ Sinead is saying. She is clutching both of their hands, her fingers curled into his palm. He is reading the lines of the e-mail, but is unable to get beyond the first lines. Dear Dr Wilson. Dear Dr Wilson. We are delighted to inform you. Delighted. Dr Wilson. We are delighted.

  ‘I’ve never been to Australia,’ she is saying. She turns to him and as she does so, her hand slides from his grasp. ‘Have you?’

  Lily has bought herself a new lipstick. In the loos, she swivels it in and out of its metal case, its glistening column of colour rising and retracting. The walls are covered in tiny pale green mosaic tiles. She stares at them, wondering who would have been patient enough to line up these minute squares in such neat, regular rows. Then she leans in to the mirror and applies the lipstick, smoothing the colour to the edges. She rips sheets from a loo roll and dabs at her lips, leaving tissues with dark purple mouths strewn along the shelf. They look too personal, too strange to leave there, so she sweeps them into her bag and zips it up.

  She’s wearing new, sleek boots with steep, slender heels. Her feet seem narrower and longer, and her ankles ache as she climbs the stairs back to the main room. She’s at the opening of an architectural exhibition. Why? She’s not sure. Sometimes, when she tries to explain herself to herself, there is a gap, a crevasse before which her comprehension falters.

  She sees Marcus at the far end of the room, talking to an Asian man with an exaggerated, spiked hairdo and thick, black-framed glasses. The drawings on the wall confuse her: a swarm of lines, axes, angles, measurements. Some bleed into smudgy, sketchy impressions of buildings that look dark and gloomy to her. But the models, on long tables down the middle of the room amaze her: tiny replicas, like dolls’ houses, built in white card, complete with stairs, doors and acetate windows. Leaning over them, she feels the glee of perfection run through her; she can bend over and peer into their white, empty, people-less rooms, run her finger down the roofs and, if she wanted, crush them with one blow of her fist.

  The room is littered with people. None of them look at the exhibits. The man who opened the show earlier with a short speech that Lily, standing at the back, couldn’t hear is in the centre of a group of people, flushed, drink in hand, the other hand whirling in the air as he relates some complex thing to his listeners.

  Marcus is still some distance away, one hand shoved into his back pocket, still talking to the spectacled man. A woman with blonde hair falling straight down her back has joined them. She has her forearm resting on Marcus’s shoulder in a way that Lily can’t decide is matey or possessive, and is bent at the waist, her head close to Speccy’s, saying something into his ear.

  Lily feels a weariness in her arms and shoulders. It suddenly seems a long time since this morning, since she left the house. She’s going to go to Marcus and tell him she’s going home, but there are so many people between them it’s going to take an extra push of effort to get to him. Then she realises that because the room is really two rooms knocked into one, she can disappear through one door, walk along the corridor, and reappear next to him through the other.

  She slips through the door into the stilled hush of the corridor. Papers and notices on a pinboard rise and stir as she passes. As she reaches the door she hears Marcus’s voice, and the mention of her name makes her stop.

  ‘Do you know what Lily said when she saw that building in the AJ?’

  ‘No. What?’ The blonde woman.

  ‘She said, “It looks like a sauna.”’

  Marcus gives her a high-pitched, squeaky voice, almost a whine. They all laugh. Lily hears a slapping, as if someone has thwacked their palm against their leg.

  ‘A sauna!’ Marcus is repeating his punchline again, and everyone laughs back: hegh hegh hegh hegh, says the speccy man, hee hee hee, says the woman, ha ha ha, says Marcus.

  ‘The lay-woman,’ Blonde says, each word savoured in her mouth like a taste.

  There is a pause. Lily realises she is on the opposite side of the wall to them, their mirror image. She is just putting up her hand to touch the width and mass of the bricks and mortar separating them, when she hears the speccy man: ‘Now don’t be unkind. That’s not all you use her for, is it, Marcus?’

  Again, there is a heartbeat of silence. Then her skull is filled with their laughter: great whooping jerks, high giggles, low coughs, and in among it the broad sound of Marcus’s ha ha.

  She stands there, stupid in her new shoes, her nails just touching the plaster of the wall enough so that when she turns to go there is the roughened, emery-board sensation of them scraping along the paint, before her hand falls back to her side.

  When she arrives in Ealing later, her mother’s hall light is on. The pavements have a thin sheen of ice and she has to walk carefully down the path. When Diane opens the door, her face for a second looks troubled and worn before she sees who it is.

  ‘Hi,’ Lily says, and her mother takes her by the hand.

  ‘I was just about to get the Christmas decorations down from the loft,’ she says, as they walk through the hall. ‘You can help me if you like.’

  They stand in the sitting-room together. The house feels cold, Lily notices, and the sofa has been moved.

  ‘Are you staying over?’ her mother asks, her head on one side.

  Lily nods. ‘If that’s all right.’

  She calls in sick, sits in her room, stares out at the swollen grey sky that threatens snow. She goes for a walk on the common with Sarah, who whips twigs against the stacks of wet, disintegrating leaves and shouts, ‘Lay-woman, my arse!’ at the trees. She cooks dinner for her mother, dusts the house, paints the downstairs toilet, stews apples from the garden in saucepans with cinnamon and raisins. In the room that used to be her father’s study, a long time ago, she lets the globe spin under her hand, countries, oceans, mountain ranges, continents, islands, latitude lines skimming past her fingertips.

  She clears out the garden shed, mends her mother’s bike chain. She covers a chest of drawers in woodworm repellent, a thick, tawny mixture the consistency of treacle. She plays a new game with the globe – letting it spin and then stopping it and seeing where her index finger is. She hoovers.

  After a while, she creeps back up the rickety stairs in the middle of the day when she knows he’ll be at work. Everything is the same, which somehow amazes her. It’s only been a few days, not even a week, since she was here, but already it seems like a different lifetime. Sunlight stretches along the floor and over the furniture; the tap drips in the sink. The plants droop, yellowing and curling.

  There is a low, regular murmur coming from somewhere. She turns her head, glances about. The phone extension cord runs the length of the space and disappears under Marcus’s door. She
approaches on the balls of her feet and presses her ear to the wood of the door. ‘No. Please,’ she hears. ‘Just listen. What I did was stupid, so…so fucking stupid and I am sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Don’t take this job. Please. I couldn’t bear it. Just give me another chance. I know I don’t deserve it, but please. What can I do to make you come back?’

  As a child, the boldest thing she’d ever done was, one day after baby Mark had died, she’d gone to the triangular cupboard under the stairs where they kept their coats. It was dark and smelt of old, pungent wood. She’d taken her stiff woollen coat off the brass peg that was hers and was screwed into the wood at her height, except that was last year and she had grown by now, buttoned it up and walked to the front door. She’d stood in the porch for a moment, then yanked at the front door, which had blurry glass shot through with a wire mesh. She’d first seen Mark through this glass, a hazy bundle with – the surprise – red hair, as she stood in the hall waiting for her mother to bring her new brother in from the car. She walked away down the front path fast, thinking, I’m leaving, I’m leaving, the words turning over in her head like wet clothes in a washing-machine. She got as far as the first road, where she was hesitating because she knew she wasn’t supposed to cross it on her own, before Diane caught up with her. Her mother snatched her off the pavement and pressed her to her, saying her name over and over. Don’t go, her mother said, in tears, don’t ever go. Lily could never get over that her mother had somehow known that she was running away, that she didn’t just think Lily was going for a walk.

  She takes her hand off the door-handle and tiptoes away. In her room, she looks about: books, shoes, papers, makeup. These she shovels into bags, quickly and quietly. Her clothes she drapes over one arm. She leaves Sinead’s dress, just as she found it.

  She walks back through the flat. Marcus is crying now, heaving deep sobs down the phoneline. At the door, she turns. ‘’Bye,’ she says, to the empty air. She looks around. Nothing. The windows, at either end, are open-eyed to each other. A mass of cloud passes, slow as a ship. ‘’Bye,’ she says again. A lampshade moves at the other end of the room. Without thinking about it, Lily moves towards the phone point, a white box low on the wall. Her fingers close over the small plastic plug and flick it out of its socket. She straightens up and waits. Marcus’s voice blunders on, unchecked, oblivious, into the silence. She steps out over the threshold, closes the door and drops the keys back through. She listens for metal hitting wood, then withdraws her hand from the jaw of the letterbox.