And then the Easter holidays started: so elaborate, so devout, their Paques, and her neighbour, a grave, strange and sweet-natured boy, returned home from his boarding school, and everything changed. I lost my penfriend. She was round at the big shuttered doctor s house by the junction where he lived. They were white-gloved, page-boyed Catholics, exploring each other’s bodies in a dressing room, and I was a sans-papiers, a muddy heathen dribbling my sadness into the water.
The memory of a baby smell still preyed on me now. The Clemenceau cottage had been scented with a French supermarket smell: ironing-board covers and ready-make cakes rather than baby. I tried to think. I felt sick. I stopped. I halted myself, keeping suspicions away by leaving them wrapped. Richard would call me Cleopatra.
The doorbell rang. She had been so fast. Of course, she only lived two or three squares away, up there among the mansion blocks and Georgian terraces.
‘Hello!’ she said. She was out of breath, her laughter rapid and husky at the top of the stairs. She looked about twenty.
She smiled. ‘Here,’ she said, holding out her present. I unwrapped it, and a pile of soft cotton fell on the table: doll-sized vests bright white, and a little violet body suit, and some bibs, with different shades of piping at the edges. I pressed them to my face, inhaling the shoppish clean scent of them.
‘Thank you,’ I murmured through a vest. I kissed her, still a bit shy of her. ‘That’s my first present.’
‘Not your mother?’
‘No one else knows. Let me make you tea.’
‘I’ll make it for you,’ she said.
She filled the kettle and fetched cups, and then pressed herself against the radiator. She must be cold, I thought, looking at her, her ankles in thin tights, slender and goose-pimpled as she sat down. It was January. She wore a thin pale top with a dark jumper slung over her shoulders. Her hair was hooked behind one ear, the other side falling dark on her face beside her full scrubbed mouth.
I knocked the computer mouse as I passed it, and the screen saver cleared, revealing my Google search. She turned, and looked at the monitor.
‘“Sophie-Hélène + Clemenceau”,’ she read in her calm, distinctive voice. She glanced at me and looked away. The sound of the name pronounced in a seemingly perfect French accent made me jump, as though Sophie-Hélène herself had come back to me. Sylvie looked straight at me with her brown-green eyes.
‘Is there a French Friends Reunited?’ I asked
‘What’s Friends Reunited?’
‘Well you might ask,’ I said, as I thought of Richard, entrapped by the website when I came across him in the evenings, cackling in pleasure or shouting with scornful laughter as he read a new entry. He cut and pasted information and emailed it to his old schoolfriends, or turned sulky and paranoid when he found an unexpected success story. His large body looked wrong bent over a computer, as addicted to a screen as he’d once been to seas and sailing boats.
Even his clothes seemed to belong somewhere else: he threw on his father’s old navy-blue Guernseys, like the richer, older girls at my school had worn on field trips, and his shirts were soft, much-washed cotton, surprisingly well ironed by him. He wore jeans and faded tops, and however long he’d lived in London, there was something rural or nautical about him. I had bought him stripy tops over the years, knowing that he would like them, and I had tried to replace his holey socks. I bought him black shirts and the odd openly trendy man gift, but he rarely wore them, and I was somehow glad, because he was surrounded by media workers in black shirts. He was entirely lacking in vanity, I had realised early on: he never noticed when he needed a haircut until I instructed him to have one, but he had the confidence that came from being tall, and from having been a loved child who was allowed to run wild by the sea, with hot meals and stories to return to. I had only once, ever, seen him sail a boat, through a bat-laden dusk in Cornwall; he had glided, his back to me, out of the estuary, and in those moments I had the strange realisation that I could lose him one day.
Sylvie pulled her knees up to her chin in one movement, revealing the noticeably good legs that she hardly ever showed; she looked very young, but there was something subtly polished or exact about her that gave her a more womanly air, so that her appearance was not like some nubile teen’s, but like a child-woman’s. Her appeal to men, if she had any, would be of a slightly worrying kind.
‘You look very lovely now,’ she said, her gaze fixed on me again. ‘I think the glow hormones have kicked in.’
‘I’ve just bunged on some lipstick,’ I said.
‘Well, I like it. But you’re always well dressed and–’
‘I’ll put some on you!’ I said.
She hesitated.
‘OK then,’ she said.
I leaned over her. I tried a couple of shades and I painted her mouth. She opened her eyes and glanced at me.
‘Now,’ I said. ‘Whoever you like – if there’s someone you like – they should see you now.’
‘Really?’ she said, and with that full curving mouth as a focus, she looked more knowing. The effect was a little alarming, as though an innocent had become a courtesan.
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Is there–?’ I began, but I halted in the face of her privacy. To enquire was to invade.
‘Someone?’ she said.
‘Yes…’ I said into the silence.
‘There’s someone I – like,’ she said. ‘Understand.’
‘And does he understand you?’
‘I hope so. A little. I think so. As far as anyone ever can.’
‘Are you – seeing him?’ I asked, attempting to perpetuate her minor flurry of confession.
‘I wait to hear from him.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
I got up and took her cup. She half-circled my wrist as I passed. ‘And you,’ she said in a murmur. ‘Have you – loved someone, anyone? Much? Many times?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Oh yes.’
‘How many times?’
‘Three. Two and a half, really’
‘Really?’ she said. She moved her hand from my wrist and touched my palm, then dropped her hand. ‘Richard.’
‘Oh yes. Richard. The most. By far the most. But my first proper boyfriend – what a little bastard, really – I thought I was earth-shatteringly in love with him at the time. And then there was an older man later, and – just horrible things happened, but I was totally caught up with him. Fixated! It was somehow obviously linked with my father, who had died when I was younger. A horribly Freudian cliche. Then lots of things. Then Richard.’
‘Love and death,’ she said, her full red lips mesmerising. ‘Liebestod. There’s often a connection.’
‘Is there?’ I said. ‘Have you had – had a death happening to you?’
‘A long time ago,’ she said.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ she said. ‘Please–’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, and touched her arm.
I wanted Richard to come back. But even when he did return – smelling of offices, his hair unkempt, energetically making me tea even though he felt tired – he would pretend a little. He’d ask me how I was with a short list of questions he’d prepared on the stairs, anxious about my well-being but detached from that smear of a baby inside me. I suddenly felt, for the first time since I had met him, that I was on my own.
‘You look pale,’ said Sylvie. ‘Sit down again. Come on, you have to sit. Are you warm enough?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then sit there. Lie on the sofa, and I’ll read to you from – this,’ she said, reaching out and selecting a novel randomly from the bookcase. It was Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. She found some lime cordial and made me a glass of it, then sat beside me holding my arm and read to me in her hoarse-sweet voice, and I drifted, lulled by the words, and I almost slept, until I was in a different time and a different place, and I was fourteen again.
Nine
Richard
>
She won’t leave my mind alone, wrote MacDara.
I snorted. Never realised your mind was connected to your dick, I wrote.
Ha, he wrote.
You’re only allowed a limited amount of contact today, and then there’s a ban for two days, I wrote, enjoying the sensation of wielding power over MacDara.
How much?
One brief phone call/send one email and receive two max. What’s MW got to say that’s so fascinating anyway?
Don’t know, don’t know, she’s just got me. I want to talk to her all night – yes, Fearon! – if I can’t fuck her all night.
And haven’t you?
No no no no. She’s stalling. She’s stoking me up to this bloody great fever. I hardly see her. How can I ever concentrate again? Nothing’s happened yet.
Nothing?
Well, almost. I’m left high and dry like a fucking teenager. If I’m not checking my voicemail, I’m 1471-ing.
I laughed. To your desk, MacD, I wrote. I have a living to make.
I was addicted to emails. There were other messages waiting for me: a dozen or so from my freelance writers, and two from Sylvie Lavigne. Somehow, we had got into the habit of emailing each other every day, Sylvie Lavigne and I. I hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, and I had stopped bumping into her since our meeting in John Lewis, but I felt I could hear her voice enunciating the words that leapt to the screen.
That evening, I walked over to Marchmont Street to buy some hooks, and I saw the back of a head. Brown. Brown hair falling to the shoulders. A slender little back in a mac. She walked swiftly through the orange-lit gloom. My heart began to thump. My breath left me momentarily, making me falter before I called out. A taxi passed, obscuring her from me.
‘Sylvie!’ I called. She hesitated. She half-turned, then walked on.
‘Sylvie!’ I called again, more loudly, but she continued as though she hadn’t heard me, and turned the corner. I tore towards her. I stopped. What was I doing? I took a few more steps, my feet flapping on the pavement. I stopped again. My heartbeat was ragged. What are you doing, you fool, you fucker? my own voice muttered in my head. I stood, tense, outside the dry cleaner’s. I saw myself in the window: a frowning madman, half-poised for flight, feet flailing cartoonishly. What on earth was I doing? I walked, breaking into a run, speeding and gulping air until I reached Mecklenburgh Square.
The door was closed with only one lock, yet there was silence in the flat. I realised Lelia was asleep. I tried to catch my breath, still feeling like a lunatic. I shut out thoughts of Sylvie Lavigne. I blanked them, like cloud cover obscuring the sky, and I caught my breath and looked around. The radiator ticked. Little packages sat by the kettle, their tops closed with plastic clips, Lelia fashion: crystallised ginger, ginger nuts, ginger tea, Rich Tea biscuits. Each packet opened and resealed, bought by Lelia to ward off her sickness. She had gone, alone, to a shop and bought the things she needed for her condition. Alone – and, I realised with a surge of sorrow, lonely. I should have bought those things for her, or accompanied her on her poor search. It had never even occurred to me. I was a pig, a snuffling, selfish pig who couldn’t remember the sensation of nausea unless my head was down a lavatory.
But then I remembered the look she’d started to shoot at me from the moment she’d found out about her pregnancy. I thought of it as her Madonna of the Rocks face – holy, hurt and fantastically guilt-inspiring, an expression that repelled me even as it sent me scurrying round for drinks and useless cushions. Her reaction to her pregnancy secretly annoyed me. So what? I wanted to bark out in less charitable moments when I’d just crashed in from work and felt an obligation to do everything. Get over it. Hadn’t any other woman in the history of the world been pregnant? Her tiredness, inexplicably combined as it was with a new interest in sex, was hard to read accurately, and so a small and nasty part of me failed to believe in it.
I looked around again. I saw the food clips. Guilt fingered me. A deep sadness came in its wake. A pregnancy book lay open on the table. Another one sat on the sofa arm. I had never looked at them; they were invisible, indeed repugnant, to me. I picked up one of the packets of ginger and smelled it, and decided that, bastard as I was, I would make a huge effort to improve.
I crept up the stairs, the wood creaking under my clumsy feet, and I found her asleep in the bed, calmly rosy as a cartoon heroine, her breath soft and steady between parted Ups, her eyelashes long against her cheeks, so beautiful, and gold and raspberry and sleep-flushed, and I leaned over her to smell her and breathe her in, tense in case I should wake her and shock her. I contemplated her every feature, the tiny hairs on her face, the rhythm of her breath. Was I dismissive at some dreadful and deeply hidden level because she was clearly half-Indian? Because she was female? Because I nurtured some vague class superiority? Was I in fact a racist, sexist bigot? I suddenly snorted with laughter. I tried to force myself to examine my thoughts, my head spinning, and found no answers.
Then slowly I stroked her hair until she woke with a small jump. I curved my body round her and took her into my arms. Sylvie Lavigne briefly flickered through my mind. I got rid of her.
Later in the night, Lelia woke. ‘I was dreaming …’ she said.
She stroked my back. It was comfortable. I grunted. I stirred, leaning towards her. A small gurgle of laughter came from under my armpit. Her teeth clamped on to my nipple. I woke, and stroked her hair and kissed her. She quivered under my arms. Her skin felt hot. Beneath the duvet, I caught a faint scent of her.
‘Come here,’ she said, feeling for me.
‘Lelia!’ I said, and she put her hand against me.
‘I want you in me now,’ she murmured.
‘What?’ I whispered.
I tried. I skimmed my hand across her breast. ‘Lelia, I can’t,’ I murmured, and laughed.
She laughed too, pressing her pubic bone against me. ‘Are you too sleepy?’ she said, her tones curving in my ear as she tickled her fingers against the back of my neck.
‘Yes,’ I said. The smell of her rose in hotter waves. I was tempted. I didn’t move. ‘I have to sleep,’ I said.
‘Oh, darling!’ she said, laughter in her voice. ‘But I’m so . . :
My fingers drifted further down. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, lifting her hips impatiently against my hand.
‘What’s got into you?’ I said. ‘Have you had a randy little dream? Have you got a crush?’
She laughed. ‘Press me, touch me. Hard, hard,’ she said.
‘Well?’
‘A crush on you,’ she said between uneven breaths.
She pushed my hand away, and she made herself come with rapid movements, juddering and crying out.
‘Sweetheart!’ I said.
‘Mmm,’ she said, and turned, hot and damp, into my arms and fell asleep.
There was a frost in the morning. I rose earlier than her, and cranked up the radiators, and found one of my old fishing jerseys from Cornwall to keep me warm. I shivered as I shaved, and nicked myself and swore. It was a cold February. I glanced at my computer, twitching a little in my impatience to get to my work emails, and decided to go online before I left for the office, though I had a stack of copy to edit. The Hotmail address was there. I grunted, and read the message half-reluctantly.
I spied Mama once from behind the curtains when her maid was dressing her, and I saw a swelling as pale and bulbous as a mushroom. She had become the casing for a perfect fat baby, as though her body were trying to correct the mistake it had made with me. I found a deeper place inside me – tucked away, beneath the entrails – in which to bury myself.
If I had given birth to the runt that was me, I would have loved it and nurtured it, and gazed into its ugly puggy face while I fed it milk through a reed and kissed and kissed its silver-veined skin. I would have poured my spirit into it as it quivered with the effort of life. I would dress it in a bonnet. I would hold it close to me and never let go of its poor bald body. But my mother had not wanted the unde
rsized thing that had once grown inside her. For who would want a plain girl? Hair the colour of the servants’ tub water. Small sharp triangle of a face, eyes hungry despite the effort to dull them. Who would want her? No one. Except one.
The only friend, Emilia. And Emilia and I drew closer, until our bodies and souls were almost one. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I muttered. I paused momentarily, then deleted the file.
Lelia wandered into my study, rumpled and sleep-cross. Her breasts were larger.
‘I really hate computers,’ she said in a croaking morning voice, glancing at my screen. ‘How do I “refine my search”, or whatever it’s called?’
I laughed at her intense expression.
‘Everything leads me to complete rubbish and repetition,’ she said indignantly. She yawned. ‘Why are you online?’
‘I’m looking for a Ladyboys and Chicks with Dicks website.’
‘Richard, you talk like this,’ said Lelia, flicking my shoulder. ‘But where are you when I want you?’
‘Listen, you,’ I said, ‘if you suddenly want to get jiggy in the middle of the night, my love, you can’t guarantee that I’m on standby like a crazed bull.’
‘Can’t I?’ said Lelia, raising one eyebrow.
‘Well. Not always,’ I said, smacking her buttock in passing. ‘Women always do that!’ I was suddenly indignant. ‘They go on and on about how men – the beasts! – don’t want foreplay – we’re not even supposed to use that word, are we? – and write great long diatribes about it for magazines, and then they want you straight in there, rearing like a bloody Italian stallion without a moment’s notice.’
She hesitated. ‘Shut up,’ she said lazily, and put her arm around me. I tweaked her nipple.
Sleep with Me Page 8
