That weekend, I opened the books pages of the Sunday Times, and there beneath a short review of a paperback were the initials ‘SL’. My eyes darted to the bottom of the page to check the contributors’ names. Sylvie Lavigne, it said. A small sound escaped from me. Lelia looked up from her paper and said nothing. Sylvie Lavigne. How dare she? How the fuck dare they? She had virtually told me as much, but I had expected her to write for minor academic publications rather than a national broadsheet. She was my discovery, my inexperienced nonentity cleverly plucked from the bloody slush-pile of life. What would she have to show other than work she had done for my pages? The idea made me want to roar. Sylvie Lavigne, who’d never been to a publishing party in her life, and wouldn’t spot a contact if it was trying to shag her, had somehow wormed her way into a paper other than mine. I’d given that reticent neophyte one inordinate great leg-up, and then managed to humiliate myself and frighten her off in the process.
‘What?’ said Lelia.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Your breathing’s funny.’ She looked back down at her paper.
A headache hovered by my temples and then began drilling into my forehead. The snow still hadn’t arrived. It was about to fall. I could see that it was ready. ‘It’s going to snow, isn’t it?’ the mouse had murmured in her husky voice, three days before. The snow had hesitated for three days, like pre-storm silence. Like the silence of Catrin whatever-her-Welsh-name-was. I wanted it to come. I wanted Catrin to call, and get it over with; or to have a lobotomy and continue to hide behind blankness for the rest of my life.
‘Are you ever going to do that cupboard?’ said Lelia, raising one eyebrow and not moving from her work as I opened the sports section.
I sighed, suppressing it, immensely irritated. I slapped my hand on the table. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, you don’t have to,’ said Lelia. ‘Just do it or don’t. But then don’t go on about it.’
‘I thought it was you who went on about it,’ I said, feeling anger rising inside me.
‘Don’t do it, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s have an infested cupboard that gives our floorboards woodworm, covered in flaking maroon paint.’
‘Right,’ I snapped. I stood up. I made a face at her. She pulled one back at me. The tension subsided. I gathered a couple of old newspapers from the table to protect the floor, and glanced at a sliding pile of post and receipts beneath them. On the back of an envelope Lelia had scribbled ‘Catrin.’
I froze and checked again. It definitely said Catrin. I half-glanced at Lelia. I turned and walked out of the room, towards the study. I appraised the stupid junk-shop cupboard, but I felt sick. I had to get it over with. I returned to the main room, and pretended to look for more newspaper.
‘Catrin,’ I said, and picked up the envelope, my mock-casual tones so strained I had to clear my throat.
She said nothing.
I stood there.
‘Mmm,’ she said.
‘What does she want?’ I said into the thin air between us.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Lelia. I paused minutely. ‘Why?’
‘What?’ said Lelia, frowning and looking up from her marking. ‘Oh, I don’t know. She left me a message. But she’s away.’
‘How do you know?’
‘What?’
‘Well, that she’s away.’
‘Because her voicemail says so. Why?’
‘Nothing.’
Lelia read.
‘Wonder if MacDara’s away too, then?’ I said feebly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘How long for?’
‘What?’
‘How long’s she away for?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’
‘I just wondered. I – could, you know, meet up with MacDara. Nothing. Where’s that old paintbrush?’
I looked out of the window at the black swollen twigs huddling together. The sky was so weighted and still and grey, I wanted to kick it to puncture it and release the snow. I slapped poisonous chemicals on wood in a careless fashion, half-hoping to splash my skin for distraction and tension relief, and gulped cold air from the open window. I went online the moment I had finished.
My mother was ridiculous with child. Her belly was the rump of a market animal. I wanted it to start: I wanted her cow-sick with love for the thing inside her, so that what I dreaded would come true.
We were left alone in the house with only the nursemaid downstairs to watch us, so Emilia and I went to the little room with cream walls to practise. What we did, I can hardly say. We practised, for marriage. I was the gentleman who had come to take her away, and she a maiden, pretty as I was plain.
I knew what it was to be small, and invisible, but she made the fire come to my cheek, a pink dusting rising from my chest to my neck. I rode a sore red wave that carried me to such pleasure I sobbed. There was no air up there where I took her. We flew together, like gulls through arcs of blue. The rustling of calico was loud in my ears. My petticoats peeled from me like skin. When I could no longer breathe and the blood was black in front of my eyes, my body understood ecstasy and I cried out.
The Hindoo, spying upon us, overheard us.
In the morning, the bedroom was filled with glaring stillness. I felt a child-like swoop of exhilaration. The world had turned white. Branches were intricately stacked with snow, and cars bore rugs. My study was a cold, light cell that seemed quite altered. ‘Oh God, how beautiful,’ said Lelia, and vomited into the loo.
She wiped her mouth with paper, and smiled. ‘That feels so much better,’ she said.
I kissed her, breathing in the smell of sick but not caring. I steadied her and took her to the kitchen. Something from the night before was flickering through the edges of my mind. I remembered what it was. ‘The Hindoo’. The term bothered me. I wondered whether she had chosen it as an obscure racist insult towards my girlfriend. I felt momentarily uncomfortable, ferociously protective towards Lelia. I put my arm around her and stroked her shoulders.
We drifted with ease through such bright, calm air. A neighbour stood in his shirt sleeves, drinking from a mug as he watched the square. A single bird crossed the sky. I had never seen such snow in central London. Lelia had been working on the flat – her ‘nesting instinct’, she said – and the floorboards were glowing mellow slabs of age, and there were new curtains. We put the espresso maker on the stove and the air smelled of coffee and snow and warm wood, and I was reminded of being in the forests of New England in winter, and she brought out checked napkins – ‘gingham’, she, the inveterate clothes shopper, said – and I wanted to nestle back in bed with her and watch the brilliant iced day on our ceiling and have time to think.
She was calm and milky, her hair roughly pulled back into a chopstick, her newly larger breasts visible at the opening of her dressing-gown. I hoped we wouldn’t have to talk about the baby. She washed an apple and threw it haphazardly at me for my journey to work, opening her mouth in mock surprise as I caught it, and I thought, perversely, how pleasing it would be after all to have our child, kicking, smiling, grizzling in this warm place that we had made.
I stepped out into the cold morning. The air penetrated my clothes, and amorphous sex thoughts stirred inside me. The crystalline light hurt my eyes. Lelia tapped on the glass when I had taken a few steps, and I turned, and we waved at each other.
Where was Sylvie Lavigne? I didn’t care. Her smaller footprints could be here on the snow, but I wasn’t interested. People on the street half-smiled at one another in passing. A man leaned out of his window on Guilford Street, smoking and hammily singing. I walked slowly to work. People were laughing in the office, as though Christmas had returned, a simple change in the weather infecting the day with new significance. I wanted to ring people, merely to talk about the weather. At lunchtime a snowball fight began on the flat roof above our Sunday paper’s offices, adults becoming hysterical and aggressive as they ducked and doubled up with laughter, their hacking coughs sounding
through the cold air. Cigarette smoke drifted into the sky The prissy old education editor’s glasses were dripping with melted snow; secretaries and senior staff pelted one another in a licensed outpouring of grievance or desire, and we yelled and laughed with growing exhaustion. The cars hooted on a stretch of black below; the dome of St Paul’s ghosted through the sky.
As snow smashed into my teeth, I felt happy for the first time for several days. Catrin and Sylvie couldn’t get me up here. Disaster couldn’t happen in the face of such boisterous mania.
We trailed back down, catching our breath, my hair wet and my forehead still prickling with snow, and there across the office was a slender figure with brown hair, talking behind a glass partition to the Sunday’s literary editor.
My breathing stopped. What? I thought.
I watched in disbelief. I felt like punching the wall. What in hell’s name was she doing talking to Peter Stronson? How dare she; how bloody dare she?
The others tramped down, still out of breath, leaving ridges of snow on the carpet and talking loudly. I waited as they piled into the lift or went to the staircase. I didn’t know what to do. Sylvie Lavigne. I wanted to staunch my humiliation. I wanted to collar her in indignation. I wanted to hear her voice again. I waited until the last lift was filled, and she began to walk in my direction, still talking, gazing into the middle distance as she spoke. She said goodbye briefly to Peter Stronson, and walked along the passage towards me.
She looked delicate, the shadows below her eyes somehow appealing in a faintly consumptive way. Her brown-green irises were vivid, almost amber-flecked in the snow-light from the window, and contrasted with her pale skin. She caught my eye and gave me a radiant smile. Elation soared through me. I felt humble, grateful, inordinately pleased. Instinctively, I moved towards her, and we hugged, and kissed each other on the cheek in a normal social fashion, as though she were a normal social being.
‘Where are you going?’ she said.
‘Out with you,’ I replied automatically. I was both impressed and alarmed by my own boldness.
She dropped her gaze. ‘Oh, I–’ she said. She swung her arm, and her fingers brushed the back of my hand. The feeling of her skin on mine shocked me.
‘Come on,’ I said, and grabbed her arm. ‘It’s beautiful. We can walk – where? Through Gray’s Inn Gardens …’
We got into the lift. I guided her along our floor, steering her away from my desk along a route obscured by a passage of cloth-covered partitions, and out past reception.
‘Won’t you get into trouble?’ she said. I could hear amusement in her voice.
‘Probably.’
I led her along Clerkenwell Road where we opened our months to catch the flakes that fell silently from a white sky, and into the great smooth expanse of Gray’s Inn, where the scars of lunchtime footprints were already filling with new snow, and black-clothed lawyers walked past Georgian terraces rising from the whiteness, and we could have landed in any century.
I loved Lelia. I had a different woman on my arm. Insanity had found me and taken me, and yet I floated, obstinately and criminally unthinking, as if the magic that protected me from Catrin would shelter me once more. To my relief, I was reminded again of Sylvie’s reserved demeanour and muted appearance. I knew that other men would never even notice her, though I occasionally wondered whether someone else – some amorphous, perceptive rival – might, after all, see what I saw. I promised myself that I would do nothing with her, and was comforted by my resolve. We would merely walk. And I would explain myself to her, and then consider the problem of Catrin.
She was silent.
‘What is this novel you’re writing?’ I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t dare, in case I alienated her by enquiring and she left me.
She seemed calm and self-contained, taking small steps through the snow and looking all about her. I glanced at her. I wanted her to do something: to desire me, or to tell me never to kiss her again, but she did neither. She ignored me, her features clean-cut in profile, never turning to me or seeking response. I found myself inventing comments to amuse her, or to interest that clever mind. Her mouth was composed, her lips slightly parted in relaxation. A snowflake lay on the faint gleam where her upper lip met her skin. I wanted to lick it. I wanted to shake her into a display of emotion.
Do something, I thought. Turn to me. Please me. Chide me. Say something. She didn’t. Her lips moved faintly into a smile: at nothing, at the air, but she ignored me still. Her simple refusal to respond goaded me. I wanted to push her into the snow and delve through all those layers of clothes and take her, there and then. A deep moan formed in my mind.
‘When a woman falls from purity there is no return for her as well may one attempt to wash the stain from the sullied snow,’ she said in her sweet, catching tones. ‘That was written in the 1860s, but I think there’s still truth in it now. Don’t you?’
I turned to her, taken aback, but she carried on talking as though she had merely commented on the weather. The amplified compression of snow beneath our feet rang in the silences between her words.
I wondered what it would be like. The small body, the sudden neat flare of hair. The idea, so inappropriate, made me quiver. I imagined rocking against those narrow hips, her chaste self-containment worryingly novel. It would resemble a different season, a different world.
The barristers drifted like ravens across the snow to their chambers. Our breath merged.
She was delectable, I thought. She was not plain. I let the realisation take hold. She was fine-boned and subtle and scented; she held secrets. She possessed her own slender perfection, with her smooth white skin, her slanting dark eyebrows, her small private chest. She smelled of almonds and milk. Her shapes fitted together once you looked: her delicate hands, her wrists, her ankles, her movements.
Lights came on in the windows. The hiss of a bus beyond the railings. Nothing. Nothing else. Just us and trees, and berries gleaming through the snow.
She talked on in her enthralling, surprising voice.
My crotch tightened.
‘My hands are cold,’ she said.
‘No gloves. Cold little paws,’ I said, feeling a terrible, fleeting stab of treachery. ‘Put this one in my pocket.’
I glanced at her again. She looked ahead. She was spiky, unimpeachable. The idea of being close to that alabaster skin was almost impossible, yet here she was, calmly referring to illicit sex in the lulling tones she might employ to tell a child a bedtime story
She put her hand in the deep pocket of my coat. She moved about, resettling her fingers, the cloth whispering against my hip bone. She was motionless again. I wondered if our gait had caused the movement. Then I felt the faint drift of her hand, as though she stretched her fingers out into a star, and drew them back. Her fingers moved across me in firm, small patterns, seemingly incidental. The nerves at the top of my thigh sprang to life.
‘A bench,’ I said, nodding. We sat on snow below trees in a white cave, our merging breath forming another wall in front of us. We were alone. I pulled her small body towards me in one movement and tried to kiss her again. This time she responded. Blood rushed to my head. As if in a dream, we kissed hotly, deeply, for time-warped moments, then she pulled away.
She pulled away, yet her hand was still inside my pocket, and moving, making rings of my own blood. My head felt light. She stopped, arching one eyebrow. My mouth opened. I made myself still again. She inched towards the corner of my pocket, her fingers stretching out and whispering patterns, her nails dragging against the cloth until my skin goose-pimpled and I almost cried out. I tightened my grip, pulling her further towards me so that her head settled against my neck. She stopped the movement of her hand. ‘Be still,’ she murmured.
‘No,’ I said.
She bit me on the back of the neck. I gasped. The small pale ghost of a girl sucked my skin in one shocking stab of pain. I was indignant; I cried out; she bit harder, keeping her mouth attached to me until the pain was s
harp and numbed, and distinct pleasure rose to mingle with its after-waves.
Snow fell on to us, sliding on to our clothes from the trees. She ran her finger through it and pressed it into my neck, murmuring laughter as its needles shot coldness into my skin. I turned to her. I could not stay still. Every instinct in me made me want to take control. But if I moved, she stopped. She gazed at me steadily, her bruise-shadowed eyes disconcerting but lovely in the winter light. She said nothing, her full mouth composed as she traced whorls on my thigh that made my breathing turn shallow. It was impossible. I turned to her and embraced her. She laid her head delicately against my neck and suspended the movements of her hand.
‘Please,’ I whispered, the end of the word emerging as a bullish croak.
‘Next time,’ she murmured into my neck.
The snow had stopped, and the afternoon had become a luminous blue. I turned once and watched her back disappearing and emerging again as she walked along the street towards home. She had gone. At that moment, I felt like fucking a prostitute. The desire had previously hit me only as the most hypothetical and tawdry fantasy. Now I wanted to disappear into one of the prim Georgian houses that lined my path and fuck out my orgasm with someone bodily and garlicky and unsubtle, before returning in a cleansed and tranquil state to contemplate Sylvie again in the snow. The thought made me laugh, just as it made me shudder.
I strode into the office, explaining nothing, and dealt with the pile-up of messages that had accumulated in my absence. I had to put my pages to bed the following day, and I was ridiculously behind. Six o’clock arrived. I emailed MacDara. I was unable to contemplate what I’d done, my thought processes a dislocated sequence of exhilaration and terror that couldn’t yet be put into language. I had to delay seeing Lelia.
I chose a loud and grotty Italian a few streets away where MacDara and I could speak at a normal level and get drunk in a corner. We both grinned when he walked in, delighting in each other’s company, and began to talk before he had sat down.
Sleep with Me Page 11
