‘Like I fucking would! “Oh, Catrin, yes, yes, fine, thank you. MacDara’s having an affair with this woman. Dark, curvy, name of – blah.”
‘Don’t,’ he groaned.
I pictured Catrin’s reaction. She had already suffered a tangle with alcoholism and a broken marriage, yet she seemed calm, almost motherly in her composure. She was one of those Celtic chicks whose colouring always got to me a bit, with her white skin and her contrasting dark hair so long it reached her bum. Somehow, I could imagine infidelity tipping her back into her former, less tranquil ways.
‘Have you never, in all this time?’ I said. ‘I can’t remember now. You did though, you rutting old goat.’
‘Once,’ he hissed. ‘One fuck, once. Never saw her again. Eight years, and that’s it. I don’t want to do this. Complete bloody madness.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Try not to.’
‘But you will, won’t you? You randy bastard.’
He shook his head. Wine stuck to the stubble on his upper lip.
‘How do you manage to see her?’ I said.
‘I don’t, very much. It’s all quite recent. You know – we talk. Phone calls and stuff. She’s got me by the bloody balls. I swear, I swear. I want to stop it right now.’
‘Well, perhaps,’ I said, and a cough stuck in my throat, ‘you’d better.’
‘I can’t,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Make me,’ he begged, turning to me, his eyes drooping like an ageing dog’s.
I laughed. ‘I’ll try,’ I said. I took a gulp of wine. ‘But it would be so much more interesting for me if you did. I could hear all about it, and stay smug and safe. I’d like daily instalments.’
‘You complete prick,’ he said.
‘Look, we’ll do a twelve-step programme, then,’ I said. ‘One day at a time. Don’t contact her tomorrow, and report to me by the end of the day with your progress. I’ll go all draconian on you. That should turn you on enough, since you’re a bit of a perv, and then you can maintain your conscience, marriage, social standing, etc., etc.’
He smiled slightly. He stopped. ‘I – it’s really serious. I don’t know what to do,’ he said, his mouth slack. ‘I know I’m going to – whatever. Fall. Fuck. Yes! Oh Christ. And I shouldn’t. You know, apart from Catrin I mean, she’s got responsibilities–’
‘Children?’
MacDara put his head in his hands and didn’t look at me.
‘MacDara?’ I said.
He said nothing.
‘She’s married, isn’t she?’
He nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘She’s got me by the balls,’ he said in a muffled voice.
‘Sounds bad,’ I said, and began to laugh, unable to stop myself.
‘It’s monstrous,’ he said, and started to laugh as well.
‘Report to me tomorrow. What will her name be, then? Madame X?’
He gazed into the distance. He nudged an almond across the table. ‘No. Not that,’ he said.
‘Mystery Woman, then,’ I said. ‘She can be MW. You look like a bloodhound.’
He smiled. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But office email only – both of us. For God’s sake.’
‘Oh, I’d thought Globals, to be sent to Catrin, Lelia, your boss, your sister, your neighbours, etc. Calm down, MacDara. First report tomorrow.’
I cut through Laystall Street and along Mount Pleasant, the Art Deco gleam of the post office floating in the cold. The day had been furred with sun; now, in the eight o’clock darkness, the cold rang and tightened and smelled of iron, my breath steaming all around me, and I was excited. I was gripped, as though by a soap opera. Pity for Catrin was uncharitably submerged by pleasure in drama. I didn’t even envy MacDara, as I once would have done; I felt sorry for him, and amused, and unhealthily engaged by his predicament. Lights burned in windows along Gray’s Inn Road. I walked faster, perversely inspired by MacDara’s unwise dilemma so that I had a sense of life being good, of events about to happen.
I ran up the stairs at Mecklenburgh Square, my lungs hurting with crystals of air, and I hugged Lelia in an envelope of coat-trapped coldness like a blast of snow. We fell on the sofa together, and I jerked her further up my legs so that she was sitting on my lap, and she nuzzled my cheek from above. Her neck smelled of bath oil and deeper tones of warmth and skin: the Lelia smell. I breathed it in.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.
I fell from a high wall, tumbling through trees, tearing leaves, sky, snapshots of my life.
‘Are you sure?’ I said sharply. I heard it as I said it: my automatic and inappropriate response. ‘I mean–’
It was too late. A film of tears sprang to her eyes and she turned away from me.
‘Yes. I’m sure,’ she said with horrible slowness.
There was nothing I could do when she used that voice. ‘Oh, Lelia!’ I said. I kissed her, all over her neck, over her cheek, feeling like a slobbering hound as she sat there stiffly, refusing to turn to me. ‘Oh, darling,’ I said. ‘Oh, that’s – oh, well done, you’re so clever, you’re so beautiful. Our baby!’
I wanted the moment to stop. I wanted to shake time and jolt myself back several minutes in my life. Surely it was possible? Laughably simple, even? To return to the navy frozen air and the traffic rumbling past, and me, speeding back with cigarette smoke in my hair and the taste of Salice Salentino somewhere in my mouth, and my great friend on the verge of an interesting mistake, and a book to write, and a girlfriend to love. Me and her. The flat in Bloomsbury. The last remnants of our youth. Was this it, then?
Rapids, I thought uselessly. The rapids. I had never been white-water rafting. As a boy who had sailed, I had always, always wondered what it would feel like to raft over tumbling white rapids. Just as, when the seasons changed in Mecklenburgh Square, the smell of earth and leaves made me want to flee, eat earth, mount a tree, do anything but sit in London and watch my life dribble away.
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ she said. She sat, an unmoving weight on my lap.
‘I am!’ I said, but my words emerged sounding stiff and stretched. I tried again. I stopped. My voice wouldn’t work properly.
‘I was longing – I was longing to phone you. But then I put it off, because I wasn’t quite sure. I had this horrible feeling. This horrible – feeling you wouldn’t be pleased after all.’
‘Oh but I am, I am!’ I said desperately. ‘I love you. Please, darling, look at me.’
I imagined myself. A dad in a jersey. A messy, stooping old fool making an idiot out of himself for comic effect and sent off to mend the broken bicycles while his wife phoned her friends about the PTA. I felt sick. I was angry, at myself or the world. I still felt as though we’d all only just finished our A levels, and were playing at having our own homes and might, with time, become fabulously successful. Another part of me felt weary and worldly-wise.
Lelia kept her head turned away from me. I tried to stroke her cheek, to pull her face around, but the attempt felt brutal as I pushed against her stiffness. I stopped. She turned her head. Tears had spread over her cheeks.
‘Oh, darling!’ I said. I was shocked. I pulled her face down towards mine and kissed the side of her mouth, her ear, and nuzzled her, her wet skin coating my hair and creating new friction there. ‘Darling, please! I love you. Well done, well done. What can I say? I’m so pleased.’
‘You’re not,’ she said.
‘I’m just, I’m just taken aback. And – what happened to you before.’
‘This feels different. Let’s just hope.’
‘I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all. I didn’t realise.’
‘I told you. I warned you.’
‘Yes, I know, but I didn’t really think. I didn’t quite believe, I suppose. How are you feeling? Are you – are you thrilled?’
‘Yes,’ she said in a little voice, and I pulled her to me, and as she bent her head against my neck, I felt the strange, unaccustomed feeling of tears in my own eyes. I droppe
d my coat on the floor, and we went and lay in bed, and talked and held each other very hard until we both fell asleep at nine o’clock. In the night, we woke, and extravagantly ordered Chinese takeaway that didn’t arrive till almost one, and ate it in bed.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I said, our conversation eased by darkness and forgiveness now seeping into the bed. ‘Of course I’m pleased. I just – oh, Lelia, I can hardly imagine it. A baby of ours!’
‘You and me,’ she said. ‘If it – if it happens. It’s us. Us whisked together, and then someone else again. I love you. Look after me.’
‘Of course I will,’ I said, pity plummeting through me. I put my arms around her shoulders. I stroked her stomach. ‘Don’t,’ she said.
I bit back annoyance. I kissed her head instead. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I’m so sorry this wasn’t – how you expected. I’d do bloody anything for love of you.’
We fell asleep in a sticky, sweaty mess. Later, a snort jolted through me and woke me as I shifted, mid-snore. The moon was large, and I could see Lelia quite easily lying there, her nightdress glowing under the transparent dark blue of the sky. She lay very still, a little twisted in her light cotton, breathing peacefully, and I gazed at her with both a sense of awe and a secret thread of distaste that flickered through me as I realised that she was the repository of a new life. A life composed of us. New limbs. New webby, yolky sacs and weavings, new beatings and flutterings as the creature calmly created its underwater life. It could have freak limb stumps, or an animal body: there was a little alien, lying inside my bride Lelia. A police helicopter thrummed across the sky. Go away, go away, I thought. Don’t wake her. And I knew even then that I would protect her and the little thing she carried inside her with my life. She murmured in her sleep. I leaned forward and breathed in her breath, already warm and human with night saliva.
I barely slept, and woke later with the granular hangover of extreme tiredness. She – they – were already up.
I knew, I knew with all certainty that my mother was with child before the servants did. I knew it before my father was told. After the stillbirths and infant deaths that had followed my coming and granted me a merciful gap of some years, she was filled once more with a child. Where there was once a grille in front of her eyes when she looked at me, there was now a prison door.
There was a sole companion: a friend. Emilia. I clung to her ever harder. But the next threat that came then made me weep. It nearly unravelled me. A new friend of Emilia’s was visiting her house: a little Hindoo, freshly orphaned, neat as a stuffed squirrel in her alpaca petticoats, yet wild.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said. I couldn’t even finish the email. I pressed the Delete button and grabbed more coffee before I went to work. I had a headache. I didn’t want any more talk of pregnancy, and I didn’t want more weird gobbets of fiction. I wished the nutter would dump it on someone else. I addressed an email to MacDara, and wrote, Well?
Office computer only, he wrote back instantly.
It’s only me who uses this address, I replied.
She called, he wrote.
‘Richard!’ Lelia shouted.
I deleted MacDara’s message and went offline. ‘Sweetheart! I thought you’d gone,’ I called.
‘My first student’s cancelled. Not till eleven.’
‘How are you feeling?’ I said. I went into the main room and put my arm around her.
‘OK,’ she said, looking up at me with a flicker of a glance.
‘Are you?’
‘I’m sorry. I – I was just feeling super-sensitive last night. You know how – mad I get.’
‘God, no. I’m sorry. It all came out wrong.’
‘Did it?’
‘Yes. You know when you can’t just can’t say what you’re feeling. It was impossible. I’m like a blundering beast. I’ll kill myself if you want. I love you. You’re pregnant! How are you?’
‘Oh, Richard!’ she said.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m OK. I feel fine. I don’t feel sick or anything.’
‘Good. I’d better make you – some posset or something, though.’
‘No! You madman.’
‘Come on. Curdled – curds?’
‘Oh, Richard, please. I will start feeling sick in a minute.’
‘Hot milk grated with nutmeg and honey? Good baby food. Freshly squeezed, er, Seville orange juice?’
‘Tea.’
‘I’ll get you tea.’
Dumped Christmas trees lay on pavement corners on the way to the office. Most people were in by the time I got there. I felt drained, as though we had spent the night drinking. The first trolley was already going round. I grabbed coffee, a muffin: things other people bought that I usually spurned. The reassurance of colleagues talking on the phone and an interview to commission made me feel normal again. The absurdities of office life entertained me immensely: an unwanted, seven-foot, inflatable purple palm tree sent by a PR had been propped up by a photocopier since the summer, inspiring jokers from the travel desk to place its accompanying pink coconuts on editors’ chairs. I loved my job with a grudging and inconsistent passion, despite my complaints about restricted writing time. I sometimes made myself perceive with a sense of amazement that I, the scruffy boy from Cornwall with his half-baked bohemian upbringing and state schooling, was sitting in the offices of a national newspaper. The rest of the time, I cheerfully grumbled along with everyone else and suffered from the inevitable terrifying pressures and crass editorial decisions.
There were several messages from MacDara. I grinned. Where are you? he said. I opened his subsequent messages. I’m resisting. Call me back. Where are you, you fucker? Stop press: MW’s suddenly coming on strong. I laughed, immensely cheered, and suddenly less tired. MacDara’s imminent affair, the tone of his messages, all seemed childish and somehow vastly amusing, reminding me of notes passed on torn-off pieces of jotter at school.
Get a life, I emailed back.
Fuck you, he answered.
I punched through some other messages. There was an address I didn’t recognise. It was an email from Sylvie, containing her review.
‘Shit,’ I muttered. I had forgotten all about it. I reflected momentarily on what I had done. I had never in my life seen fit to commission a review from an amateur. It was only tiny, I reminded myself hastily. I could simply spike it, blame it on space, apologise, and pay her a kill fee. I delayed looking at it. It bothered me. I winced, and opened the attachment.
Several hundred words appeared on my screen. I emitted a muttered groan. I read the first two sentences. They were good. It occurred to me that she had got someone else to write the review. I snorted. While meaning to stop, I read further. The prose was animated, persuasive and eloquent, qualities almost entirely lacking in its putative creator. The piece was untamed, its elegance edged with excess, but it was compelling, and almost affrontingly erudite in its references. Some old hag who had passed me by was presented as a major rediscovery whose tenets chimed thrillingly with the Zeitgeist. A passing reference to Iris Murdoch made me smile: I read it again, and saw that it had been designed to make me smile. I hesitated. Was my own judgement slipping? I checked my schedule. I could get it cut by a couple of hundred words, tidy it up, and run it in mid-February. I made a note.
I turned to a more recent paperback round-up. My mind drifted back to Sylvie’s review. I pulled down her email. Sylvie Lavigne, it said. The name somehow suited her. I replied to her with a tone of cautious encouragement. Another thought struck me. She must have written her review yesterday afternoon, or during the night. She was a faster worker than I was. PS, I wrote, somewhat rudely, I’d never have guessed this was written by you. Do you employ a ghost writer?
I called Lelia. I always rang her a couple of times a day from the office anyway. It was only as the phone was ringing that I remembered I had to ask her about the baby, and I swallowed a stab of panic, followed by guilt. My own blankness surprised me. I had consid
ered myself an over-emotional type: a hormone-ridden male, pragmatic, yet given to bouts of tortuous analysis and regret. Perhaps there was a monster in me after all, a hard and inhuman beast that I had merely suppressed. The phone rang a few more times. She answered. I softened at her voice. ‘I was having a bath,’ she said.
An email appeared in my inbox. It was from Sylvie Lavigne.
A message from MacDara appeared while I was reading. I haven’t contacted her all day, he wrote. It’s fucking killing me. Tell me what to do. Give me some bribe. An alternative.
A prostitute? I wrote.
But she’s fucking with my mind, replied MacDara. Find me a solution to that. She’s married – as good as. Find me a solution to that.
One day at a time, MacD, I wrote. Cold turkey today. Might allow one phone call tomorrow. Report to me first thing in the morning.
I smiled. My heartbeat speeded momentarily as once again I experienced a sadistic surge of interest in MacDara’s predicament.
I pressed Reply on Sylvie’s message. On the contrary, I wrote. Thank you.
Lelia rang. I saw the number on my phone screen. ‘Love line,’ I answered.
Her voice thickened with a return smile. ‘I want to go to John Lewis,’ she said. ‘It’s late-night opening.’
‘Do you? Is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s nothing I’d like less,’ I said cheerfully.
‘Oh no, I know,’ she said, half laughing. ‘I know. It’s going to bore you stupid. But I’m going mad here. I want to have a scan, or tell everyone, but I can’t. Oh, Richard, I really, really want to go and just buy something, just a tiny token that’s not tempting fate too much. Come with me. Or shall I go on my own?’
‘Of course I’ll come,’ I said, my evening already written off. A couple of big bound proofs had come in I really needed to read. I found I was gazing at the duck-egg coloured partition that separated me from the film editor. Over in the smoking room, where the best conversations always took place, a lively discussion was under way, the volume so raised that it was audible across the desks.
Sylvie Lavigne’s name came up again in my inbox.
Sleep with Me Page 6
