The Codes of Love

by Hannah Persaud

  ‘Damn it.’ He bends painfully to rescue the box, but he can already see that the cardboard is soggy at one end and the photos that have fallen out are sodden. Lifting them carefully, he places them on the table. He’ll dry them later by the fire.

  Another knock comes from upstairs and looking upwards, he sees something small moving across the top stair. It drops noisily onto the next before continuing its journey towards him. Roll, drop, clatter. Roll, drop, clatter. It ends its descent at his feet. He bends to pick it up. A marble. He wraps his hand around it. It’s been a long time since he held a marble. It was his thing when he was a kid. He loved the smooth hard shape of them and played with them for hours. It drove his father mad, like everything else. The marble is the size of a small plum, and orange flecked with amber that reflects the light. It warms in his hand like an ember. He puts it into his pocket. It must have been dislodged from somewhere when Ada found the box.

  He waits for Ada’s return, but there’s no sign of her and the shutter needs to be closed, as the temperature is dropping by the minute. Hopping on one leg, he moves to the bottom of the stairs and leans forward. He swings himself up step by step, dragging his damaged right foot behind him. At the top he pauses. He wants to remember this, his first time upstairs since the staircase went in. With its beams restored and exposed, the room seems larger. The lime-washed walls are bright and the sloping floor and leaning walls give the room a quirkiness that is slightly unsettling. At the end of the room the shutters are wide open, the green wooden doors blending into the trees outside. Hobbling forwards, he reaches the windowsill and grasps it, leaning out. He inhales deeply. The gulls screech warnings from the sea. A storm is coming. Does it never stop raining? He wants to linger but he needs to sit down, the nausea returning. Where is the nearest hospital, anyway? There are so many important things they haven’t considered. On the way back to the stairs he catches the edge of Ada’s bag and her washbag falls out. The zip is open and a pot of pills spins along the floor. He sidesteps over to where it’s nestled against the wall and crouches down, grabbing it with one hand. Holding it up to the light, he turns it until he can see the label. Then he changes his mind and drops it quickly back into the bag. As he does so a tube of something catches his eye and before he stops himself he reads the label. Vaginal lubricant. He’s never known Ada to use it with him. What if she’s not as into him as she seems to be? What if it’s an act? He pushes the thoughts away.

  He hears the car pull up and decides that he won’t say a word; the last thing that he wants to be seen as is needy. Of course she’s into him. She wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t. Ada opens the door, laden with shopping bags.

  ‘I’m so glad to see you,’ he says as she kisses him on the cheek.

  She’s amazing. It’s only mid-afternoon and she’s unpacked all of their stuff from the caravan and filled the fridge and kitchen cupboards with food. Candles flicker on the table and the fire is lit, warm flames licking the cold hearth. Upstairs she has improvised a bed with the mattress from the rust hut. Already it seems less damp, more solid. He’s full of painkillers and wine and his mouth waters as she works in the kitchen, making a paella. The smell of onions and saffron waft out of the tiny lean-to, and he hears her humming to herself. She’s super-fucking-human and he’s lucky to have her.

  ‘I love you,’ he tells after they have eaten and are sitting side by side watching the fire. He glances sideways at her profile and waits for her to speak, but the only sound is that of the wood slipping into the golden furnace.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ he asks, reaching for her hand. She allows him to hold it, her fingers cold and motionless against his.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ she asks. Her face is masked, with no trace of her laughter from just moments ago.

  ‘Do what?’ he says.

  ‘That.’

  ‘Can’t I speak the truth if the moment takes me?’

  ‘It hasn’t been the defining virtue of our relationship so far …’

  ‘What hasn’t?’

  ‘Truth,’ she says, pulling her hand away and placing it on her lap.

  ‘Speak for yourself. I’ve been honest.’ The space between them grows thick.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ada says at length, drawing her shawl closer to her chest. ‘For telling me.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘You didn’t just expect me to say it back, did you? We’re not in primary school.’ It’s his turn to move now, tilting his body away from hers, the movement restricted somewhat by his bandaged ankle, which rests on a side table.

  ‘It’s just that …’ He speaks slowly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I thought that – with all this …’ – he gestures to the room – ‘I thought it had become something more than just, you know.’

  ‘Stop talking in riddles. More than what?’ He can’t believe she’d be so cruel.

  ‘More than just an affair,’ he says quietly.

  ‘I told you: no promises for the future, no past – did you forget?’

  Seven months have passed and so much has happened, yet nothing has changed.

  ‘I thought that with our decision to buy this, things would be different. We’re committed …’ he says, aware that he is whining. He is embarrassed. Why couldn’t he just have kept his mouth shut? What if he’s ruined it?

  ‘I am committed,’ she says, softness squeezing between her words. ‘But when you label something it breaks it. Like a bubble when it’s touched.’ She rises from her chair and stands in front of him, bending to kiss him on the lips. ‘Let’s not ruin it, please?’

  Rules of an open marriage #12:

  Have no secrets from one another

  London, April 2016

  It’s falling apart. Emily sits in her office staring at the screen of her laptop. A mug of coffee is beside her and the house is quiet. She needs to write this report for Professor Dean, though she doesn’t want to. She cringes when she thinks of their meeting yesterday, his knock on the door of her office. She’s started to dread the days she is at work, feeling constantly on edge.

  ‘So, in your own words, you need to tell us what happened.’ Professor Dean’s words reverberate in her head. She stares at the blank Word document in front of her. It wasn’t enough that she’d already talked him through her interactions with Leo from the day that he started in her class.

  ‘We need to understand the full extent of the relationship,’ he’d said. ‘In writing.’

  Relationship. How easily he’s made it something that it’s not. Her finger hesitates over the keyboard. The danger of putting something into writing is that it cannot be unsaid. The permanence of the written word is open to corruption and misinterpretation. Were she to write that she cared for Leo, this could be misconstrued. A maternal concern or something else? they’ve already asked her. How to define all the facets of emotion, professional and moral obligation, into one clear sentence?

  ‘It’s not a story,’ she’d insisted angrily, ‘with a clear beginning, middle and end.’

  ‘You of all people should know that a story does not need to be linear, nor do the characters’ motives need to be succinct,’ was Professor Dean’s reply. ‘We’re not looking for a story, we’re asking for the truth.’ Then, when she’d pressed her palms against her eyes, her throat aching from the defiance of tears—

  ‘We’re not saying you’ve done anything wrong, Emily, your professional record is flawless. But we do need to hear your version of events. His allegations are serious – abuse of your position, seducing him, manipulation of his emotions.’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ she said again.

  ‘These documents suggest otherwise,’ he’d pointed to the sheaf of emails that lay in front of her.

  ‘They don’t prove anything.’ She’d stood then and paced between the window and the door.

  ‘Not conclusively, no … But it doesn’t take a huge imagination to consider the possibility of something going on outside of this co
rrespondence, to fill in the gaps.’

  The gaps. She’d met Leo six months ago at her first lecture of the term. He’d waited for her after class, introduced himself. He loved her writing, had read her short-story collection. She was flattered; it had been so long since she’d written anything of worth. He was in his final year of his English degree and planned to start working on his own novel soon. He’d love to hear her thoughts, he said, on his outline. ‘Hard to judge,’ she’d said, when she didn’t know his writing. But one term later she’d been convinced. He was talented. There was a starkness that reminded her of Carver. He was intense and focused, unlike the other students.

  In the canteen at lunchtime one day, he’d invited her to join him at his table. He’d told her about his idea for a novel. It was going to be from the perspective of a woman. ‘Brave,’ she’d commented. ‘Hard to do.’ It was an ambitious idea, a woman and the disintegration of her marriage. ‘Easier to write about things you have experience of,’ she’d said. ‘Have something to draw on, even if it’s a metaphor.’

  ‘I like a challenge,’ he’d said, holding her eye until she turned away.

  Later, she’d read his opening chapters and given him feedback.

  ‘Why did you tell him personal details about your own marriage?’ Professor Dean asked her. ‘Didn’t you think that was crossing a line?’

  Leo was upset with her feedback, couldn’t handle the criticism – ‘It’s the biggest hurdle of being a writer,’ she’d told him, ‘you need to get over it.’ He’d missed a couple of her lectures, and when she bumped into him in the library, she’d explained that his writing was superb, but some elements of his marriage construct were clichéd. ‘It’s what I told you,’ she said, ‘about having experience.’

  ‘Tell me then,’ he’d said, ‘what’s it really like?’ She’d been reluctant to span the gap between lecturer and student and she told him so. But he was persistent. It seems foolish now that she shared so much, but he was good at listening and once she started talking she couldn’t stop. He didn’t judge.

  She needs a coffee. From the kitchen she can see snowdrops hunching in the corners of the garden. Spring is arriving, though the ground is still frozen in the mornings. Last week she came off her bike, didn’t see the black ice until it was too late. She was lucky, thirty miles an hour downhill and she skidded on a bend, spinning into the opposite lane. She picked herself up shakily and looked up to see the driver of the car she narrowly avoided standing over her. Embarrassed, she refused the offer of a hand and stood, trying hard to pretend that the world was not ebbing around her. Her helmet was cracked and her left thigh is still purple from hip to knee, but it’s nothing compared to what it could have been.

  At night she wears leggings when she sleeps; she doesn’t want to give Ryan cause for concern, or worse, another lecture on responsibility. He already thinks her reckless, biking too fast, braking too little. He’s away much of the time, but when he’s home she finds herself tiptoeing around him. How quickly their home has become a storage place for secrets. Better this than an argument though, the inevitable descent into blame. When he returned from Plymouth she asked him how his hotel was, the one he hadn’t stayed at. ‘Fine,’ he’d answered, disappearing into his office. He still doesn’t know about the issue with Leo. She is glad now that she didn’t tell him while they were in Venice. The growing chasm between them has made a liar of her when she checks her email and takes calls from her boss. This is how a relationship erodes, layer by layer, like rust.

  Back at her desk, she stares again at the blank screen. She needs to get her timelines right if she is to do this properly. First she read his chapters, then in the canteen she told him about her marriage. No, that’s not right – perhaps it was over coffee at her house? She can’t remember the decision to invite him over. No law against it. He admired their house as they sat in the kitchen, hands wrapped around steaming mugs. He’d asked her about the photographs of Sam and Tom. Only a few years younger than him, they looked childish. She’d lent him a pile of books to study first-person narrative and the art of building suspense. When she walked him to the door, he’d kissed her on the cheek. A civilised parting. She’ll leave out that detail – no need to feed their theories with red herrings.

  The doorbell rings and she jumps. She’s not expecting anyone, the boys are in college and Ryan is in his London office today, though he’ll be home later. They’re out for dinner tonight with Georgia. Padding down the hallway barefoot, she looks through the blinds to see who’s there. Leo. Hair falling across his eyes, blocking the door. He rings the doorbell again. She shouldn’t answer it, should walk away back down the hallway into her office and shut her door. But anger propels her forward. Leo looks taken aback.

  ‘Emily? I—’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, Leo, not after everything you’ve done.’

  ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘We’ve talked too much,’ she says, one hand on the wall and her leg wedged in the gap between them. The door handle catches her bruised thigh and pain shoots through it.

  ‘I can explain,’ he says, moving forward.

  ‘No, you can’t,’ she says. Her voice is bitter, sharpened.

  ‘I didn’t mean for it to escalate, I’m sorry. It’s just—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it, Leo, this is my fucking career you’re playing with here. All I did was help you.’

  ‘I know, I …’ He’s crying and Emily peers beyond his shoulder. They can’t be seen from the road, but she can’t leave him crying on her doorstep. She opens the door and ushers him in, aware of how he towers above her. She puts the latch on the door and leads him to the kitchen. He follows. She passes him a tissue and a glass of water and seats herself at the far end of the table.

  ‘They’ve asked me to write it down,’ she says. ‘They don’t believe that nothing happened between us.’

  ‘Depends on your definition of nothing, I suppose,’ he says. And still he insists. Fury peppers her stomach and she walks to the kitchen counter and places it between them.

  ‘Depends?’ she says, her voice edging towards hysteria. ‘I put myself on the line for you, Leo, and this is how you repay me?’

  ‘I thought I meant something to you,’ he says, ‘like you did – do – to me.’

  ‘You were my student and my friend, Leo. But this is not how friends behave.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me. I’m not a kid.’

  ‘Well, that’s how you’re behaving.’

  ‘How am I behaving like a kid?’

  ‘Throwing a tantrum because I wouldn’t let you get into my knickers? Very mature, Leo. Well fucking done for handling rejection so well. Full marks for manipulation.’

  ‘I couldn’t stop thinking of you after I saw you in Dulwich,’ he says. The hours that she has forgotten rise up, dark and shapeless. She recalls speaking to him and saying goodbye and nothing more. The memory is lost. He pushes back his chair and walks towards her and she puts her hands up in front of her, palms turned towards him.

  ‘One step closer and I’m calling the police.’ She knows this is absurd. It would be professional suicide. For them to find her here with her accuser in her own house with no sign of forced entry. He walks closer until his chest is level with her hands.

  ‘Look at me,’ he says, taking her hands in his and pushing her palms against his chest where she can feel the warmth of his body through his shirt and his heart beating. She hates the tug of desire. She steps back, snapping the moment.

  ‘You have to tell them that nothing happened. Please, for me and my family.’

  He scoffs. ‘Now you care so much about your family.’

  ‘I have always cared about my family.’

  ‘Even your husband who doesn’t deserve you? Where is he is now, away again? You’re the one who told me about the loneliness of marriage, the sacrifice, the baby machine you felt like …’

  ‘Yes, for your book, to be authentic. You’re not my shrink – I was helpin
g you. Helping your character.’

  ‘You knew how I felt about you; don’t pretend you didn’t know. You knew it from the start.’ She knew. The lingering glances, the gentle concern, his leg pressed too closely to hers when they sat. The press of his shoulder, the join between them electric at the slightest brush. But it was wrong; he was her student.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she says now, all sentiment strained from her voice. ‘And if I had, I would have stopped our meetings.’ Leo leans with his hands upon the counter, shoulders slumped towards the floor. The muscles of his back are outlined through the checks of his shirt.

  ‘All I want is for you to acknowledge what there was between us,’ he says, ‘that I didn’t make it up. That I’m not going mad.’

  ‘And how would that help you?’ she says, more gently, He meets her eyes and his anger pulses between them.

  ‘How can you ask me that?’ he says.

  He walks to the table and picks up his glass, takes it to the sink. He runs the tap on warm and washes the glass carefully with the sponge, then dries it with the tea towel that hangs from the oven. He holds the glass out to her.

  ‘We wouldn’t want there to be any evidence of inappropriate behaviour, would we?’ he says. She takes it carefully, though she longs to hurl it across the room and see it shatter. He walks to the door.

  ‘Goodbye, Emily.’

  ‘Leo, wait …’