As the emotions of the moment sank in I couldn’t directly look at her. The effect of her proximity, femininity and kindness would, I knew, prove too potent for me to resist. To avoid looking at her, I leant in to her. She nuzzled her nose against the top of my head. The fire crackled, enhancing the sound of her sleeve moving, as she brushed a lock of hair from her ear. Violet sighed. Our faces began to turn to each other, I felt something in her yield.
‘You look like you’re going to kiss me, Ben,’ she whispered.
I knew that in the shy smile of this young woman was the energy to defeat an army. ‘You know I want to,’ I said. ‘But - I can’t. It feels right, now. But in a day or so it would cause such pain to other -’
‘I know. Then don’t,’ she said, her smile broadening.
Looking around she saw that we had the room to ourselves and she lay her long legs over mine. The flesh under her tights was softer, more fragile than I had somehow expected. Her fingers gripped mine, and the fresh buzz of her perfume made me feel weak. The fire, shining through her hair, seemed to illuminate a new future. It was an era that I knew we could usher in with a single kiss. Every time I looked at her she moved to kiss me. The fire raged, its tongues scorching the wood. Every time her face tilted to me, like a flower towards the sun, I thought of the pain I would cause to Juliette if I gave into temptation. Then there was a moment, when my mouth flashed over hers, and I resisted again. She smiled, bashful.
‘Why do you think we are in each other’s lives now?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you find it a little sad that we can’t do what we both want to do?’
‘I agree.’
I looked down.
Violet’s approach was slow, and even the sudden crack of the fire didn’t dissuade her. She turned her face towards mine. As she did, I remembered that Juliette had pushed me away, and the memory stung. Violet kissed me tenderly, her hands resting on my lap. Both of us seemed to be restraining so much passion during that kiss, resisting the urge to push our bodies together. The urge to press myself against her was so pure and strong that I now felt cowardly resisting it.
‘You don’t need to feel guilty, Ben,’ she said.
Violet’s flat was on the first floor of a slightly disheveled, modern block. As she searched, at the front door, in her handbag for keys I was conscious of the illuminated apartments overhead, watching us. I had been surprised to hear myself accept her offer of a drink, but with there being so sign of Phillip I let myself go with the momentum of the evening.
Walking into her apartment was like stepping back in time, into a student era that I never got to fully imbibe the first time around. In her small, dimly lit hallway wooden racks were stuffed with paperbacks and laced with fairy lights. My eyes skittered over books about witchcraft, punk music, criminology. As I walked into the adjoining living room I saw the walls were decorated with posters of bands. Mick Jagger peacocked around on a stage, and Bowie stepped off a Berlin train, pensive and ambitious.
I sat on her sofa and watched her through the frosted glass boil a kettle in her kitchen. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I shouldn’t be sat amongst the buttery scent of her living room, in the low light of this sanctum. I shouldn’t be able to cast my eye over the black and white pictures of her, arranged carefully into diamonds on the wall. In which slender female friends wrapped their arms around each other in nightclubs. Why was she allowing me to feast on all this? For a moment I felt suspicious.
We drank tea, and as late night radio burbled from the kitchen, her legs began to enmesh with mine again. She rested her head on my shoulder. Even as I found myself pressed against the flesh of her thigh, this sequence of events felt natural. I felt as if for the first time in my life I had entered a landscape which I could identify as mine. One in which books and old records were the absorbent walls of an idiosyncratic life. I would gain sustenance from her intelligence, and indulgently help her whenever a kick of gratefulness happened to surge inside me.
‘I should go,’ I said, during a moment in which the candle of intimacy threatened to flicker out. I began to stand up, and she seized my wrists.
‘Stay a little longer,’ she said.
I nodded, and as if she was comforting someone, she pulled me into her. Our limbs found a way to receive each other and she kissed me. After the shock of the soft collision her mouth remained slightly open, as if she was stunned into submission. As I kissed her again, she began to rhythmically kiss me back, a sense of expression easing into our embrace. We pressed against one another, the proximity accelerated by lust. I suggested going into her bedroom. She nodded.
Entering Violet’s room was like walking into a labyrinth of cultural references that had long glowed in my heart. There was a large Bob Dylan poster over her bed, in which a dark-haired women grasped the troubadours arm. A nest of flowers- pink and purple-filled the fireplace. As she busied herself in the bathroom, I took in the arrangement of concert ticket stubs and polaroids on the wall. I pushed a button on the bedside stereo, and soon Mazzy Star oozed from the speakers. The sound of thumbed acoustic guitars and low, sensual vocals absorbed the space. I could detect the scent of vanilla lip balm in the air of this elegant, feminine, netherworld. I moved to look at another array. It was a collage of pictures in which a caramel-skinned Violet was frolicking in a bikini.
‘Checking out the pictures of me almost naked?’ she asked, stepping lightly into the room in a white silk nightdress. She was barefoot, and the lightness of her steps made my heart quicken.
She poured us both a glass of wine, from the drinks tray by her bed. She handed me the vintage goblet and we took a gulp. Her eyes leveled with mine as we drank. She placed the glass on the floor as I set mine down, and she pushed me onto the bed.
‘You should have just asked,’ she said, straddling my waist. Violet pulled the thin white strap of her nightdress over her shoulders, to reveal the taut, blushing skin above her breasts. She lay against me and I felt a knife of pleasure surge through me. I caught a scent of roses as Violet looked down on me with her impatient hand unbuttoning my trousers. I noticed that her eyelashes were almost too long for her face.
With our clothes loosened, and her eyes blazing, she rolled onto the part of the bed exposed by the gathered duvet. She pulled me under the bed sheets. As I gathered the long flow of her hair, she took a deep sip of wine from the goblet on the floor. I admired the fine cut of her back, this sensual, subtle question mark, before she turned. Laying back down she unbuttoned her dress and without raising a hand I felt my heart thunder. With her swooping contours revealed her warm body rested against mine, fingers stepping over my midriff. When she kissed me again a hunger rose in my mouth and she seemed familiar with the feminine need to yield to it. I pinned her to the bed, kissing her neck as she murmured in almost imperceptible agreement.
I eased my way down her body. ‘Keep going,’ she urged, her hips creasing the sheets as they bucked upwards.
The muscles of her stomach rippled with pleasure, the fine brown skin shimmering under the low light. Given her entreaty I was surprised at how slowly her thighs parted. My lips found the source of her pleasure, and Violet let out a low moan as I embraced her. I wondered how deeply she had been lost in books, as her moan was the sound of a distant tide crashing on an inevitable shore. Her fingers scrabbled through my hair, urging me to explore her more ravenously. My body responded, as I twisted in the sheets. At her insistence, I eased my body against hers. Her expression was one of beautiful compliance, a misty-eyed admission. Her fingers rested against my hips and her eyes met mine as I eased myself into her. I was surprised by her delicacy, and heat. She responding sensuously to my movement as she let out a low moan, widening her eyes as she draped a slim arm over my shoulder. Her eyes became transfixed on an interior landscape, and her sudden absence was sharply arousing. As she guided me, with one hand on my hip, I found the rhythm I wanted, savoring the sensations of her opening flesh. I willed myself to respond to her pleasures, and in the instant that I
did she clenched her arms around me. She kissed me, the tingling shock still present in our mouths. She seemed desperate to keep up the contact between our lips. She drove me on, her fingers clamoring at my back. The sudden contraction of her belly made her cry out as she was rocked by an orgasm that seemed at once knife-like and satisfying. Looking up at me, her eyes glowing decadently, I urged myself into the exquisite geometry of her neck and thighs, encouraged by the gentle entreaties of her hands on my back. It was the wildest, most outrageous indulgence, to find the nuances of my own pleasure inside her body. As I did I had the sudden sense that I was drinking greedily from a fountain. The sheer gratefulness that bubbled through me was hard to contain. The sudden, hot-mouthed embrace, combined with a sudden bucking of her hips made my body shatter.
I awoke at three in the morning. A thin wave of cold air was shimmering through a gap at window. Violet was a voluptuous crescent in the sheets next to me, breathing softly. I rolled onto my back, and exhaled as quietly as I could. A powerful sense of self-loathing bloomed inside. I felt as if I had torn something that I would never be able to perfectly stitch up. It would always sit there, a high scar on my flesh. I quietly wondered if I had lost my family forever.
‘You alright?’ Violet whispered, turning over.
The morning light revealed a light spattering of freckles on her nose. ‘I hope so,’ I said, ‘after what I’ve just done.’
She caught her breath. ‘Don’t talk about me like I’m an accident, Ben,’ she said.
FIFTEEN
MY FIRST MEETING with Art took place two days later.
Juliette and I had exchanged brief, terse texts in the interim. They related purely to the enquiry and suggested that she clearly wasn’t about to invite me home. In a strange way I was glad, because I hadn’t yet been able to process what had happened with Violet. To try and make sense of it all, I continued to walk numbly around the city during the intervening days. I was sure that with enough concentration I could formulate a plan to figure it all out. But the city seemed like a set of narratives that didn’t form a story; a set of cultures placed uncomfortably close to one another. Its muggy streets and urban wastelands offered me no solace. No matter how many times I tried to solve the complex equation of my life there was always some parts of the formula left unblended.
I’d return back to Phillip’s flat hot and flustered. He’d usually be watching a comedy DVD, a tumbler of whisky in one hand. He didn’t enquire about what happened with Violet on the night of his show. I suspected he thought I had made my way back to his place without her. But his assumption that Violet wouldn’t be interested in me, and that I was too blindly loyal to Juliette to be interested in her, still smarted.
On my third night there we were watching a Clint Eastwood Western when he looked up from his phone and told me Violet would be joining us. As the TV screen flickered I silently wondered if he had asked her over, or if she had invited herself. I hoped that I wouldn’t give myself away when she arrived.
Violet didn’t seem to have any such qualms. The subdued, dimly lit room became less somber the moment she entered. She keenly accepted Phillip’s offer of whisky. Phillip’s eyes played on the back of her head as she kissed my cheek in greeting and sat down on the sofa next to me. Philip threw himself into the armchair in front of the television. The three of us sat watching the screen, as the bottle of whisky on the table was slowly drained.
‘When did you two meet?’ she asked, looking between us.
‘We were roommates at university. Though Ben spent more time in the library than in our room.’
Violet smiled kindly at me.
‘And Phillip spent more time in bed than in the library,’ I said.
‘You were a lazy student?’ she asked him.
‘He’s referring to the amount of time I spent chasing women,’ Phillip said.
‘You fancied yourself as a lothario?’ she asked. ‘I can’t imagine you being one, somehow.’
‘Oh yes,’ I heard myself say. ‘Phillip had a different woman every week.’
Phillip shot me a look. ‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration. There weren’t that many women. It’s just Ben wasn’t very good at telling them apart.’
‘You two obviously go back a long way,’ she said. ‘Moving back here must be like being at university again!’ she said.
‘In so many ways,’ I answered, glowering.
‘Except now,’ Violet said, dangling her glass, ‘Ben has every right to feel a little more confident of himself.’
I shot her a glance, but she seemed to enjoy the look of panic on my face.
As Violet nursed the remains of her tumbler, Phillip and I scoured the drinks cabinet in the kitchen for any booze we’d overlooked.
‘Feel free to get an early night, if you want,’ he said. ‘I know you’ll want to be fresh as a daisy for our trip to London tomorrow.’
‘You’re coming with me to meet Art?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Didn’t your parents ever tell you to always introduce strangers to one another?’
‘That’s good of you,’ I said. ‘But I can’t go to sleep just yet. I need to let the alcohol to do its work first.’
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘It’s just - I wouldn’t mind having a few minutes alone with Violet.’
He peered through the crack in the door, where Violet’s heels were just visible on the table. ‘I think tonight might be the night,’ he said. ‘I sometimes really think I can imagine her taking Christine’s place.’
‘You don’t think that’s asking too much of her?’
‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.
‘No reason,’ I said.
+ + + + +
As the lush, wet countryside streaked past the train window I closed my eyes and sat back in the seat. The heave of forward motion had shaken up a sense of nauseating hollowness. What was I doing? Taking career advice off an intense university student, and a provocative comedian? Was I really now expecting a celebrity agent to offer the solution to my situation?
I had a strong desire to get off at the next stop. To go home and to try and beg the school, and Juliette, to take me back. I missed Christian and Juliette ravenously. Missed having her body curled up against mine, and his dismissive chuckle. It seemed to make much more sense to let the enquiries run their course, and in the meantime to focus simply on staying away from the bridge. But it was a couple of emails, which until then I had not yet read on my phone, which changed my mind.
Over the last few days I had realized that I needed to message some former colleagues about retrieving my possessions from work. Their responses, which came belatedly, surprised me. The first email that I opened, from Colin, mentioned matter-of-factly that my desk had been cleared, and that an agency-appointed member of staff was now taking my class.
I felt unable to type a response. I could not believe how ruthlessly Kraver had prised me from my job. Even at my most cynical I hadn’t expected the final line of the next email I got:
Kraver told us to not expect you back.
I hadn’t expected an outpouring of loyalty from the other teachers. But I was not prepared for the blitheness of their responses either:
‘Sorry to hear it hasn’t worked out. All the best.’
‘You’ll bounce back mate. These things happen.’
These were people who I had rushed to help when they had found a class too difficult to manage. People who’d later hugged me and thanked me for supporting them, who’d told me they’d ‘always be there for me’ if I needed them. Who had praised me, privately and publically, for my teaching methods.
Given the sense of comradeship I had felt during the most challenging days of teaching, this galled me. I knew, deep down, that I would never have allowed Kraver to trample over any one of them like this. I started to suspect that Kraver had sent a missive out to all of them, frightening them into not contacting me. Kraver would have known that if the teachers joined together his accusations would soon buc
kle under serious scrutiny. His plan had worked. I was now not only isolated from my job, and my family, but from my colleagues too. All I had was Phillip and Violet- and even that dynamic was fragile enough to break following a single indiscretion.
‘You having doubts?’ Phillip asked, from the seat opposite. He’d worn a suit for the occasion, and it looked like he hadn’t slept.
I shook my head. ‘No. Not at all,’ I said.
+ + + + +
‘Phillip has described you as ‘a good man in free fall,” Art said, leaning over a clear glass desk opposite us.
His face evoked a cartoon goblin. This impression was enhanced by the half-moon spectacles perched on his nose. Art’s appearance, ironically, created the sense that he must be honest to have succeeded in spite of such a comically mischievous image.
‘Is this a good description of you?’ he asked. His voice, with its Hollywood pretensions, seemed to pinch, raising an octave as it sharpened towards a question.
Art’s office was a world away from the cramped classrooms that I was used to. The clean glass and smooth chrome suggested any purpose could be directly achieved, if he was inspired to try.
I looked sideways at Phillip, who carefully placed his fingertips together. We were five floors up, and through the clear glass behind Art, I could see London. Spinning, bickering, maneuvering.
‘I think I am honest. But it can take only one transgression for you to start to wonder,’ I said.
‘Transgression?’ Art was savvy enough to know that such a comment revealed hidden secrets. ‘So, if you have transgressed at all I need to know now,’ he continued, ‘so we are prepared if it gets used against you. Believe me, Ben, they’ll be rooting around in the dirt as we speak.’
Phillip shot me a look. ‘Take it from me,’ he said, ‘Ben has not transgressed. If he’s told to not walk on the grass, he forgets grass exists. There’s nothing they can get him on. Right, Ben?’
An Honest Deceit Page 11
