The Other Hand/Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

  From outside Lawrence’s door there was laughing and shouting. I heard the sound of paper being scrunched into a ball. Feet scuffed on the carpet. A paper ball clanged into a metal waste-paper basket.

  “They’re playing corridor football,” said Lawrence. “They’re actually celebrating.”

  “You think they set him up?”

  He sighed. “I’ll never know what they did to him, Sarah. I didn’t go to the right schools for that. My job is just to write a good-bye letter to the man. What would you put?”

  “It’s hard if you didn’t really know him. I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities.”

  Lawrence groaned.

  “But I’m terrible at this,” he said. “I’m the sort of person who needs to know what I’m talking about. I can’t just write some spiel.”

  I looked around his office.

  “I’m in the same position,” I said. “And like it or not, you seem to have become my interview.”

  “So?”

  “So, you’re not making it easy for me.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, you haven’t exactly personalized this place, have you? No golf trophies, no family photos, nothing that gives me the slightest clue who you are.”

  Lawrence looked up at me. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities,” he said.

  I smiled. “Nice,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  I felt the ache of adrenaline again.

  “You really don’t fit in here, do you?”

  “Listen, I very much doubt I’ll still be working here tomorrow if I can’t think of something suitably noncommittal to write to the old boss in the next twenty minutes.”

  “So write something.”

  “But seriously, I can’t think of anything.”

  I sighed. “Shame. You seemed too nice to be such a loser.”

  Lawrence grinned. “Well,” he said. “You seemed quite beautiful enough to be so mistaken.”

  I realized I was smiling back at him. “A little blond of me, you think?”

  “Hmm. I think your roots are showing.”

  “Well I don’t think you’re a loser, if you must know. I think you’re just unhappy.”

  “Oh, do you? With your gimlet eye for emotional cues?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Lawrence blinked and looked down at his keyboard. I realized he was blushing.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “God, I shouldn’t have said that. I got carried away, I don’t even know you, I’m so sorry. You look really hurt.”

  “Maybe I’m just doing vulnerable.”

  Lawrence drew in his elbows—drew in all of himself in fact, so that he appeared to withdraw into his body on the royal-blue upholstery of his swivel chair. He paused, and tapped out a line on his computer. The keyboard was a cheap one, the kind where the keys have a high travel and they squeak on the downstroke. He sat there so long without moving that I went behind his desk and looked over his shoulder to see what he had written.

  You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen_

  That was the unfinished sentence that stood, without resolution or caveat, on his computer screen. The cursor blinked at the end of the line. From outside in the street, police sirens screamed in and out of phase. He turned to me. The bearings squealed in his chair.

  “So tell me something,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Is it your husband who makes you unhappy?”

  “What? You don’t know anything about my husband.”

  “It was one of the first things you said to me. About your husband and his opinions. Why would you mention him to me at all?”

  “The subject came up.”

  “The subject of your husband? You brought it up.”

  I stopped, with my mouth open, trying to remember why he was wrong. Lawrence smiled, bitterly but without malice.

  “I think it’s because you’re not very happy either,” he said.

  I moved quickly out from behind his desk—my turn to blush now—and I went over to the window. I rolled my head on the cool glass and looked down at the ordinary life in the street. Lawrence came to stand beside me.

  “So,” he said. “Now it’s me who’s sorry. I suppose you’ll tell me I should leave the close observation to you journalists.”

  I smiled, despite myself. “What was that line you were in the middle of writing?” I said.

  “You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen…I don’t know, I’m going to say, still to be seen what great fruits your work will bear, or still to be seen what the successes of your hard work will be. Something open-ended like that.”

  “Or you could just leave it how it is,” I said.

  “It isn’t finished,” said Lawrence.

  “But it’s rather good,” I said. “It’s got us this far, hasn’t it?”

  The cursor blinked and my lips parted and we kissed and kissed and kissed. I clung to him and whispered in his ear. Afterward I retrieved my knickers from the gray carpet tiles, and pulled them on under my skirt. I smoothed down my blouse, and Lawrence sat back at his desk.

  I looked through the window at a different world from the one I had left out there.

  “I’ve never done that before,” I said.

  “No, you haven’t,” said Lawrence. “I’d have remembered.”

  He stared at the screen for a full minute with the unfinished line on it and then, with my lipstick still on his lips, smashed down a full stop. You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen. Twenty minutes later, the letter was transcribed to Braille and put in the post. Lawrence’s colleagues hadn’t cared enough to proofread it.

  Andrew called. My mobile went in Lawrence’s office and I will never forget the first thing Andrew said: This is fuckin fantastic, Sarah. This story is going to be full-on for weeks. They’ve commissioned me to write an extended feature on the home secretary’s downfall. This is pay dirt, Sarah. They’ve given me a team of researchers. But I’m going to be in the office all hours on this one. You’ll be all right looking after Charlie, won’t you?

  I switched off the phone, very gently. It was simpler than announcing to Andrew the change in our way of life. It was easier than explaining to him: our marriage has just been mortally wounded, quite by accident, by a gang of bullies picking on a blind man.

  I put down the phone and I looked at Lawrence. “I’d really like to see you again,” I said.

  Ours was an office-hours affair. A long-lunches-in-short-skirts affair. A sneaked-afternoons-in-nice-hotels affair. Even the occasional evening. Andrew was pulling all-nighters in the newspaper’s offices, and so long as I could find a babysitter, Lawrence and I could do what we liked. Occasionally in a lunch hour that had extended almost to teatime, with white wine in my hand and Lawrence naked beside me, I thought about all the journalists who were not receiving guided tours, all the meet-the-media breakfasts that were not getting planned, and all the press releases that were waiting on Lawrence’s computer with the cursor blinking at the end of the last unfinished sentence. This new target represents another significant advance in the government’s ongoing program of_

  Handing out in-flight meals in a plane crash. That’s what our affair was meant to be. Lawrence and I escaped from our own tragedies and into each other, and for six months Britain slowed incrementally during normal office hours. I wish I could say that’s all it was. Nothing serious. Nothing sentimental. Just a merciful interruption. A brief, blinking cursor before our old stories resumed.

  But it was gorgeous. I gave myself completely to Lawrence in a way that I never had with Andrew. It happened easily, without any effort on my part. I cried when we made love. It just happened; it wasn’t an act. I held him till my arms ached and I felt agonies of tenderness. I never let him know. I never let him know, either, that I scrolled through his BlackBerry, read his e-mails, read his mind while he slept. When I started the affair, I think it could have been with anyone. It was the af
fair that was inevitable, not the specific man. But slowly, I started to adore Lawrence. To have an affair, I began to realize, was a relatively minor transgression. But to really escape from Andrew, to really become myself, I had to go the whole way and fall in love. And again, I didn’t have to make an effort to fall in love with Lawrence. All I had to do was to permit myself to topple. This is quite safe, I told myself: the psyche is made to absorb the shock of such falls.

  I still cried when we made love, but now I also cried when we couldn’t.

  It became a source of worry, hiding the affair. The actual assignations were simply concealed from Andrew, of course, and I made a point of never mentioning Andrew or his work when I was with Lawrence, in case he himself got too curious. I put up a high fence around the affair. In my mind I declared it to be another country and I policed its border ruthlessly.

  Harder to disguise was the incontrovertible change in me. I felt wonderful. I had never felt less sensible, less serious, less Surrey. My skin started to glow. It was so blatant that I tried to conceal it with foundation, but it was no use: I simply radiated joie de vivre. I started partying again, as I hadn’t since my early twenties. Lawrence got me in to all the Home Office events. The new home secretary loved to meet the media, to tell them over canapés how tough he was going to be. There were endless soirees, and always an after-party. I met a new crowd. Actors, painters, businesspeople. I felt a thrill I hadn’t felt since before I met Andrew—the thrill of realizing I was attractive, of knowing myself irresistible, of being half drunk on champagne and looking around at the bright, smiling faces and giggling when I realized that suddenly anything could happen.

  So I should hardly have been surprised when it did. Inevitably, at one of those parties, I finally bumped into my husband, crumpled and red-eyed from the office. Andrew hated parties—I suppose he was only there on some fact-finding mission. Lawrence even introduced us. A packed room. Music—flagship British music—some band that had made it big on the internet. Lawrence, beaming, flushed with champagne, his hand resting riskily on the small of my back.

  “Oh, hi! Hi! Andrew O’Rourke, this is Sarah Summers. Sarah is the editor of Nixie. Andrew’s a columnist for The Times, terrific writer, strong opinions. I’m sure you two are going to get on.”

  “So was the priest,” said Andrew.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “He was sure we were going to get on. When he married us.”

  Andrew, lighthearted, almost smiling. Lawrence—poor Lawrence—quickly removing his hand from my back. Andrew, noticing. Andrew, suddenly unsmiling.

  “I didn’t know you’d be here, Sarah.”

  “Yes. Well. I. Oh. It was a last-minute thing. The magazine…you know.”

  My body betraying me, blushing from my ankles to the crown of my head. My childhood, my inner Surrey, reawakened and vengeful, redrawing its county boundaries to annex my new life. I looked down at my shoes. I looked up. Andrew still there, standing very still, very quiet—all the opinion, for once, drained out of him.

  That night we stood on the empty foundation at the end of our garden where Andrew was planning to build his glasshouse, and we talked about saving our marriage. Just the phrase is excruciating. Everything Andrew said sounded like his Times column, and everything I said could have been ripped from the agony page of my magazine.

  “At what point did we forget that marriage is a commitment for life?”

  “I just felt so unfulfilled, so downtrodden.”

  “Happiness isn’t something one can pick up off the shelf, it’s something one has to work at.”

  “You bullied me. I just never felt loved or supported.”

  “Trust between adults is a hard-won thing, a fragile thing, so difficult to rebuild.”

  It was less like a discussion and more like a terrible mix-up at the printers. It didn’t stop till I threw a flowerpot at him. It glanced off his shoulder and smashed on the concrete base and Andrew flinched and walked away. He took the car and drove off and he didn’t come home for six days. Later I found out he’d flown over to Ireland to get properly drunk with his brother.

  Charlie started nursery that week, and Andrew missed it. I made a cake to mark the occasion for Charlie, alone in the kitchen one night. I wasn’t used to being alone in the house. With Charlie asleep it was quiet. I could hear the blackbirds singing in the twilight. It was pleasant, without Andrew’s constant bass line of gripes and political commentary. Like the drone note of bagpipes, one doesn’t really realize it’s been playing until it stops, and then the silence emerges into being as a tangible thing in its own right: a supersilence.

  I remember scattering yellow Smarties over the wet icing while I listened to Book of the Week on Radio 4, and suddenly feeling so confused I burst into tears. I stared at my cake: three banana layers, with dried banana chips and banana icing. This was still two years before Charlie’s Batman summer. At two years old, what Charlie loved most in the world was bananas. I remember looking at that cake and thinking: I love being Charlie’s mother. Whatever happens now, that is the one thing I can be proud of.

  I stared at the cake on its wire tray on the work surface. The phone rang.

  Lawrence said, “Shall I come over?”

  “What, now? To my house?”

  “You said Andrew was away.”

  I shivered. “Oh, goodness. I mean…you don’t even know where I live.”

  “Well, where do you live?”

  “I’m in Kingston.”

  “I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

  “No, Lawrence…no.”

  “But why? No one will know, Sarah.”

  “I know but…wait a minute, please, let me think.”

  He waited. On the radio, the continuity announcer was promising great things for the next program. Apparently there were many misconceptions about the tax credit system, and their program was going to clear up a good few of them. I dug my nails into the palm of my free hand and fought desperately against the part of me that was pointing out that an evening in bed with Lawrence and a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé might be more exciting than Radio 4.

  “No. I’m sorry. I won’t let you come to my house.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because my house is me, Lawrence. Your house is your family and my house is my family and the day you come to my house is the day our lives get more tangled up than I’m ready for.”

  I put the phone down. I stood quietly for a few minutes, looking at it. I was doing this to protect Charlie, keeping the distance between me and Lawrence. It was the right thing to do. Things were complicated enough. It’s something I could never have explained to my mother, I suppose: that there are circumstances in which we will allow men to enter our bodies but not our homes. My body still ached from the sound of Lawrence’s voice, and the frustration rose inside me until I picked up the phone and smashed it, again and again, into my perfectly iced cake. When the cake was quite destroyed I took a deep breath, switched the oven back on, and started making another.

  The next day—Charlie’s first day at nursery—my train was canceled so I was late back from work. Charlie was crying when I picked him up. He was the last child there, howling in the middle of the beeswaxed floor, smashing his little fists into the play leader’s legs. When I went to Charlie, he wouldn’t look at me. I pushed him home in the buggy, sat him down at the table, dimmed the lights, and brought in the banana cake with twenty burning candles. Charlie forgot he was sulking and started to smile. I kissed him, and helped to blow out the candles.

  “Make a wish!” I said.

  Charlie’s face clouded over again. “Want Daddy,” he said.

  “Do you, Charlie? Do you really?”

  Charlie nodded. His lower lip wobbled, and my heart wobbled with it. After the cake he got down from his high chair and toddled off to play with cars. A peculiar gait, toddling. A sort of teetering, really—my son at two—each step a hasty improvisation, a fall avoided by luck as much as by judgment. A sort of
life on short legs.

  Later, with Charlie tucked up in bed, I phoned my husband. “Charlie wants you back, Andrew.”

  Silence.

  “Andrew?”

  “Charlie does, does he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what about you? Do you want me back?”

  “I want what Charlie wants.”

  Andrew’s laugh down the phone—bitter, derisory.

  “You really know how to make a man feel special.”

  “Please. I know how badly I’ve hurt you. But it’ll be different now.”

  “You’re bloody right it’ll be different.”

  “I can’t raise our son alone, Andrew.”

  “Well, I can’t raise my son with a slut for his mother.”

  I gripped the phone, feeling a wave of terror rise through me. Andrew hadn’t even raised his voice. A slut for his mother. Cold, technical, as if he had also weighed up adulteress, cuckolder, and narcissist before selecting precisely the most apposite noun. I tried to control my voice but I heard the shake in it.

  “Please, Andrew. This is you and me and Charlie we’re talking about. I care so much about both of you, you can’t imagine. What I did with Lawrence…I’m so sorry.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “It was never meant to mean anything. It was just sex.” The lie came out of my mouth so easily that I realized why it was so popular.

  “Just sex? That’s the convention, isn’t it, these days? Sex has become one of those words you can put just in front of. Anything else you’d like to minimize at this time, Sarah? Just unfaithfulness? Just betrayal? Just breaking my fucking heart?”

  “Stop it, please, stop it! What can I do? What can I do to make it right again?”

  Andrew said he didn’t know. Andrew cried down the phone. These were two things he had never done. The not knowing, and the crying. Hearing Andrew weeping over the crackling phone line, I began to cry too. When we both dried up, there was silence. And this silence had a new quality in it: the knowledge that there had been something left to cry over, after all. The realization hung on the phone line. Tentative, like a life waiting to be written.