‘Ow,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant. Be careful.’
‘Yes,’ I said, having forgotten again. I was amazed at my own capacity for amnesia. ‘How are you feeling?’
She glanced at me. Her Blessed Virgin expression. ‘Fine. A bit sick.’
‘Listen,’ I said, getting up and walking into the big room. ‘Let me get you something. Ginger tea?’ I scooped some gunk out of the sink and winced.
‘Tea, please. Tea tea.’
‘Yes, none of this lesbian herby bollocks. Some good tannin for you, my girl, then it’s back to bed with you.’
I walked to the office, the pain of the cold already ringing through my feet as they hit the pavement. I pulled my coat collar up, cheerful in the face of minor adversity. I arrived impressively early, and therefore made my presence felt by offering drinks on my way to the machine. A cup of tea safely in hand, I sat down at my computer. I had five reviews to pull into shape and a loathsome contributor with whom to wage battle, but I went straight to my emails. There was nothing from Sylvie Lavigne. I was somewhat amazed. I hit Read messages again and scanned my list of incoming addresses. There was nothing. Not a single one of her strange mind-reader’s emails. There was no text from her either. I didn’t want to think about it. I needed distraction. I got straight on to the phone to MacDara, who had been at work for three hours already, earning five times my salary.
‘Mac,’ I said. ‘I’m bored. Today’s instalment?’
‘Nothing. She can’t always talk.’ The sound of ringing phones and shouting traders filled the receiver.
‘It’s still early in the morning for normal people, MacDara.’ I waved at my friend Jim from the arts desk as he arrived. A stray smoker wandered past the door of the smoking room: I longed to leap up and talk to her. Anything, anything but sit here and fiddle with work.
‘She can’t talk a lot of the time because of him.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said.
‘The git. The bastard,’ he said.
‘But you’ve got a girlfriend, you fool,’ I said. I laughed.
‘Yes,’ said MacDara in sullen tones.
I suddenly found his situation marginally less amusing. He would probably lose the essentially decent Catrin, wish he hadn’t been such a fuckwit, alarm old married Mystery Woman by being single, then go through a bit of a sorry-for-himself alkie phase, break apart our group, end up with someone we didn’t like, and live in regret. The whole predictable process struck me as futile.
‘Who’s the husband?’
‘I don’t know – I don’t want to ask too much. She doesn’t talk about Catrin. We’ve got a tacit agreement, I suppose.’
‘What’s this chick actually look like? You never tell me.’
‘Oh, like–’ He made an appreciative moaning sound. ‘Well, no. But – yes. Skinny, though.’
‘Articulate as ever.’ A sub slapped a proof down in front of me.
‘She’s not – she’s not my usual type, even. Not at all. But – what a bitch. She’s got me by the mind, balls, stomach, I don’t know.’
‘Where’s this going to go?’ I said, maniacally see-sawing a pen above my desk. The furniture the subs had added to my page was execrable.
‘Fuck only knows,’ he said in a mutter, and coughed. I could hear him drawing on a new cigarette. ‘You think I’m just an idiot, don’t you, Fearon?’ he said grumpily. He paused. ‘I am. But – she’s gorgeous. No, she’s not gorgeous at all. Well, she is. She’s hot. She’s cold. She’s–’
‘A married woman who blows hot and cold. It’s not exactly unique, is it, MacD? No contact today,’ I snapped, my new power so easily wielded.
‘Bastard.’
I laughed as I put the phone down. Three new messages had appeared for me. I scanned them quickly. Ren, and a couple of hopefuls suggesting themselves for work.
I had an image of myself: a man poised ready to run, agitated and indecisive on a late-afternoon street, heart inexplicably thumping.
When you go through the streets / no one recognises you … no one looks at the carpet of red gold / that you tread as you pass, I thought, a poem half-known coming back to me.
A message came up. I tapped on it. It wasn’t from her.
I began to write to her. I stopped myself and edited half a review. Impulsively, I started again. Where are you? I wrote.
By midday, there was no reply. A few weeks before, I had bumped into this woman with tiresome regularity. She had then sent me further suggestions for reviews, having clearly called in all the book catalogues and scoured them in standard hack fashion, a method surprising in a reserved academic; until gradually our emails had become regular and frequent.
There was still silence. I waited. What was the matter with me? Perhaps I didn’t have enough work. Yet proofs were piling up, writers were beginning to bother me tentatively for a response to their reviews, and I had barely begun to edit the week’s pages. I felt as though I was going slightly mad. A message came up. It bore her name. I clicked on it.
Oh! Your voice just came to me on screen. I dreamt of you, you might be amused to hear, last night. It was as though I’d seen you somewhere in the day. I dreamt I’d caught sight of you, but when I looked, you weren’t there. Where were you?
I’m all disorientated – I’ve been working on something, and I just emerged, haven’t dressed, haven’t eaten – it seems to be afternoon … I hope you’re very well. I’ve been thinking about you. With love, Sylvie.
The foggy voice with its slight formality and faint, indefinable accent ran through me. I wanted to hear the catch in that voice, to see the plain, pale face. I felt a sudden urgent desire to meet her again, and yet I really didn’t know why.
Laughter emerged from the desk further along, followed by cheering. My phone rang. I let my voicemail take it.
I looked up her number and rapidly tapped it into the phone. I gazed, distracted, at the pile of letters and press releases that had come with today’s post, and I couldn’t imagine working through the afternoon without seeing her first, as if to satisfy some unknown imperative akin to deep curiosity. I held the receiver rigidly, each ring bleeding electronically into my ear followed by an echoing pause that lasted minutes. I could put the phone down at any time, I reminded myself.
She picked it up.
‘Hello, it’s Richard Fearon. Hello. Come to lunch,’ I said in a gabble. I coughed. I sounded like a lunatic.
She paused.
‘Isn’t it a little late for lunch?’ she said.
‘I haven’t had any. You said you haven’t eaten. If you came now, we could still get something.’
‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘I shouldn’t. There’s someone–’
‘Why not?’
She paused.
‘I never speak to you,’ I said. ‘We email all the time. It’s getting ridiculous.’
‘Is it?’ she said lightly.
‘I think so.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I could come, very quickly. I have work to do.’
‘Reviewing?’ I said.
‘Well, I don’t – yes,’ she murmured.
‘Who for?’ I said in amazement. ‘Not someone else?’
‘Well–’
‘The bastards.’
She laughed.
‘They can’t. Do more for me.’
‘I’m quite busy’, she said.
‘Busy!’ I roared. ‘I discovered you, girl! Loyalty. How long will it take you to get over here?’ I barked. ‘Fifteen minutes?’
‘Twenty,’ she said.
Twenty minutes. I glanced at the clock on my computer.
It was already quarter to two. I had done virtually no work. I ripped through some post with alarming efficiency.
I met her at the same gastro pub along the street, where no one would even look at her. She sat there, pressed among others, serene but almost invisible. I had forgotten the essence of her; or the surface of her. I hesitated slightly.
Her hair was pulled back into a strict, sleek ponytail. It made her straight nose dominant. It made her mouth stand out. A sexy mouth, I thought suddenly. I had never consciously noticed. She didn’t colour it, like other women did. What a perfect little blow job of a mouth she had, its pale raspberry curves picked out in the light. ‘I thought of– I remembered – a poem by Neruda today,’ I said. ‘When you go through the streets / no one–’
‘… te reconoce,’ she said. ‘Nadie ve tu corona de cristal...’
‘Bloody hell,’ I said.
She gazed at the people milling past.
The pub was crowded and smoky, even then. We sat beside each other on the only seat available, an old church pew, and others sat at their own spindly tables along the same long bench. Her arm touched someone else’s jacket; she was intermittently pushed closer to me, and through the smoke and wine and char-grilling I could smell her own scent.
Talk to me, I thought, recalling all the words that she sent me, casual yet formal at once, as though she were half-lodged in a different era.
The man next to her gestured, pushing her, and her shoulder pressed against my upper arm. A sudden ripple went through me. She was closer now, and I could smell the scent which seemed to rise from her neck and I floated on her voice, and I wanted her to touch my arm again. Touch it, I thought, to my own amazement. The man moved, and so did she, and my skin rippled in response.
‘I don’t know how to be with these people,’ she said calmly.
‘Don’t you?’ I said.
‘Their haircuts. Their language – their intonation, even. Their very way of life is beyond – anything I know.’
‘Tossers,’ I said.
‘You know how to deal with them. With anyone.’
I sat there, and warmth gradually suffused me, as though red wine were trickling into my senses, yet I had drunk nothing. She never seemed to drink. We talked. I felt as though all my day-to-day movements were choreographed in water, and I could free-associate and say anything that occurred to me, so perfectly would I be understood.
‘But do they cry at night?’ she said.‘When I meet someone whose life seems so much more sorted out than mine, I wonder – but do they cry at night?’
It was as though my arm swam, encased in bubbles. A feeling of exquisite arousal rose through my body.
‘Do you cry?’ I said.
She smiled. I smiled at her.
I did nothing. We sat and we talked, interrupting each other. I waited, and then my nerve endings twitched in sequence, the electric ripple travelling to my shoulder and across my chest. I tilted my face towards her hair to smell her, because I liked her smell. Subtly, through the smoke, I breathed it in.
The man next to her half-turned to call over a waiter, and his movement pushed her, unbalancing her momentarily so that her hand jolted against my thigh. My skin leapt to life. She snatched her hand away. An unreadable expression flitted over her face. The same poem came back to me. There are lovelier than you, lovelier… And when you appear all the rivers sound in my body. It was twenty-five past four. I had to make myself leave. We said nothing. I stumbled a little as I rose to return to work. We said goodbye briefly, and she disappeared down Clerkenwell Road, as expressionless as a little white statue.
Our flat was glowing in the dark when I got home. LeHa had cleared up, she said, and there was the smell of something hot and floury in the oven, which was unusual, since she rarely cooked. It was luxuriously warm, as though she had kept the heating high all afternoon, and the lamps were on, every bright little lamp casting a bright circle on the wood. It was as though we lived in a crooked treehouse swaying in the sky above Mecklenburgh Square, I thought: too small for us, yet breathing with wood. She sat curved on the floor among cushions, clicking her thumbnail between her teeth in front of her computer screen. Her hair was tethered with a pencil, yet she was as beautiful as I had ever seen her. I looked at her in the lamplight and was struck anew, as I was every few weeks, by her face; by the particular rightness, to me, of her obviously good looks.
She smiled at me, her Madonna of the Rocks expression absent.
A curl of raindrops blew against the window; something metal fell with a bang outside. Recent weak sunshine had retreated back into winter. I glanced at the mobile blue-black air outside. I felt glad. Someone else had understood the sentiment recently. Who? A starburst of rain hit the glass. Sylvie. The long curtains gathered a little fringe of dust.
I wanted to howl, suddenly, with emotion for Lelia. I wanted to shout out, Never leave me, I’m your one, marry me.
‘Marry me,’ I said. My voice broke up with a sort of gulp as I said it. It sounded abrupt in the silence between wind gusts. Did I mean it? I stood there, momentarily panicking. Did I mean it?
‘Really?’ she said. She turned to me. Her eyes – those long big eyes – swallowed me. I soaked myself in their brown substance.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You mean it, don’t you?’ One side of her lip twitched nervously. She seemed to hesitate.
‘Of course, of course. I always mean it. Every time we say it. But I want to do it now. What on this earth are we fannying around for? Let’s get married now.’
‘Now?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Don’t you have to book? Anyway – drag witnesses off the street, you mean? I don’t want to do it like that. I want it to be Mum who’s with us.’
‘OK, OK. Next week, then. Tomorrow.’
‘I will, I will, but why do we have to rush? Oh, not not because of this? Surely not?’
‘No, no,’ I said impatiently, following her hand as she stroked her stomach. The air gushed and turned outside, curling in cold breakers into the room. ‘I just want to. Enough is enough. I feel this urgent great need to do something about my love for you, Lelia Guha.’ I sat down and took her shoulders, quite roughly.‘We’re never going to have a spare fifteen grand just knocking around, and I bloody well want to marry you. Give me a date, then. Just give me a date.’
She hesitated again. I frowned, affronted.
‘June the twenty-sixth,’ she said.
‘Why? It’s a long time.’
‘It was – don’t you know?’
My thoughts revolved; I set them speeding. One of Lelia’s impossible tests that always caught me short and needled me. ‘Um,’ I said.
‘Dad’s birthday,’ she said.
‘Of course it was,’ I said. Her mouth had set a little. She glanced to one side. Any moment now, Madonna of the Rocks would appear. I swallowed the thought. ‘Do you want to do it then?’
‘Yes, I’d like to.’
‘We will, we will. Will you marry me on June the twenty-sixth?’
‘Yes.’
I waited, raising my eyebrow at her.
‘Will you marry me?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. I pulled her to me, and kissed her.
We ate the ciabatta that she had put in the oven, and searched around in the fridge to find pieces of cheese and hummus two days past its sell-by date and some horrible vegetarian sausages, then we went to bed early, running from the cold bathroom and piling the bed with dressing-gowns.
‘I keep thinking,’ she said.
‘What, my love?’ I said vaguely, trying to blow billows of warm breath on to us under the duvet.
She pressed herself into my arms.
‘An image keeps coming into my mind.’ She was murmuring into the duvet, so I only half-heard her.
A seagull wheeled and cried its mournful cry. Who had mentioned the seagulls in Bloomsbury? I remembered. I dismissed the thought. I stroked Lelia’s thigh. She quivered, and unexpectedly, she turned towards me. I had thought her settled for sleep in my arms. I stroked her back through her nightdress. ‘Against my skin,’ she said.
I put my hand under the cotton and felt her shoulder blade. It was hot. I ran my hand down her back. She shifted on her hip towards me.
‘This image,’ she said, moving closer to me so that her br
easts were pressed against my chest. ‘Two bodies, rubbing together.’
I closed my lips against her ear lobe. ‘Hmmm …’ I said.
Her breath heated my neck. ‘Well…’ she said. She flicked my nipple.
‘Tell me, then,’ I said. I kissed her breast. Her breathing began to change.
‘I think of bodies together,’ she said. ‘Not ours.’ I pulled her to me and pressed my mouth on her neck. ‘Mine, perhaps, but so much younger.’
‘Faithless,’ I murmured.
‘Two – almost children. They’re together.’
‘Huh?’
‘Richard,’ she said, and I heard the click of separating saliva as her mouth opened. Her breathing changed again. She lay on her back, inviting me. ‘Press me.’ She moaned lightly as my fingers inched downwards. She murmured in uneven tones as I stroked her more rapidly, more lightly.
‘You’re a secret goer, Lelia Guha.’
She laughed. She buried a groan in my neck. She was alive, scented, hot. Her very enthusiasm perversely subdued me.
‘What’s the rudest thing you’ve ever done?’ she said, her bright tones a laughing curve in my ear. ‘Apart from everything you’ve told me.’
‘Oh God,’ I said. She flexed her fingers against my buttock. I was barely stirring. ‘I don’t know. Threesome?’
‘I’m sure there’s more,’ she said.
I lay there on my stomach. A memory of a pale, proud wraith pressing against my arm flashed through me and leapt to my groin. I grunted involuntarily and shifted against Lelia’s hip. I threw away the image. It came back to me, shooting ripples. I lingered upon it for long seconds before I obliterated it again, then I opened my eyes and looked at Lelia with her tilted dark eyes, and shut out the ghost.
‘That’s better,’ she murmured, and moved her thigh against me. ‘Harder,’ she said. I sucked her skin until she cried out.
‘My shoulder hurts,’ she said, her voice rich, encouraging me.
‘I’ve never known you quite like this,’ I said.
She smiled into the darkness. She murmured, her words barely audible.
I ground against her with my thigh.
‘Yes,’ she said, her breath emerging in a small explosion like a hiccup.
I licked her shoulder where I had bitten it. She exhaled sharply. The spectre glimmered.
Sleep with Me Page 9
