‘I’ve got someone to see,’ she said. I glanced down and noticed that she wore a ring made of three interlinked gold hoops on her little finger.
‘Who?’ I said in mild alarm, as it occurred to me again that of course she had a life outside her flat and her writing and her meetings with me. The idea made me immensely uncomfortable. ‘Who?’ I said again in disgruntled tones.
‘It shouldn’t matter to you,’ she said.
‘Well,’ I said, taken aback, ‘it does.’
‘Then you have no right,’ she said.
I pulled her to me and hugged her, aware of her fine-boned body, the delicate lines beneath her understated clothes.
‘You know that we shouldn’t even do that.’
‘No,’ I said, my heart plunging.
She was silent.
‘Well, it is somewhat ill-advised, I suppose,’ I said in a cavalier manner.
A thought suddenly hit me: what if Catrin saw us again? What if – as was just as likely – Lelia saw us? I looked at my watch.
I glimpsed someone from the news desk passing on the street outside; I lowered my head, and I understood with a twinge of self-disgust that if I was about to be unfaithful, I was doing nothing new. I remembered Wharton’s Newland Archer experiencing the very same realisation, that this was a tired path he trod, littered with subterfuge and deceit.
I could think of nothing to say. Monologuing cabbies outdroned local women in tracksuits.
‘What were you doing with Peter?’ I said suddenly, turning to her.
‘Who?’
‘Peter Stronson. The literary editor.’
‘Oh. Talking.’
‘About work?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, don’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘It pisses me off,’ I said.
‘Why would it do that?’
‘I’m jealous of other bastards printing you. And very jealous of him talking to you.’
‘Other people talk to you,’ she said. ‘Other people have you.’
‘Yes,’ I said. Our arms touched.
A small hand found mine under the table. Unreasonable delight rose through me. I was a simple creature, a mere receptacle for her whims. I held the hand and pressed it, and moved my fingertips over her palm.
‘You’re married–’
‘As good as,’ I said, bowing my head as if courageously acknowledging the undeniable.
‘And she’s lovely. I like her. Tell me her name again. Lee …’
‘– lia.’
‘Yes.’
There was silence.
‘I’ve been thinking about you, madam,’ I said. ‘A lot.’
She withdrew her hand from mine. ‘So have I,’ she said, looking straight in front of her. ‘I do think of you, and I ought not to.’
‘Oughtn’t you? Shouldn’t you?’ I said dully.
‘You know the answer to that,’ she said.
‘Yes, well–’
‘But it’s difficult. You know, when you find that understanding; when you seem to recognise each other–’
Do we have that? I wanted to say. Or do I just imagine the beginning of it? Do you feel it like I do?
‘Do you remember, that evening I met you?’ she said.
‘I was drunk,’ I said. ‘I remember you–’ I frowned. ‘I think I remember you in the hall. It’s really not good enough, is it?’
‘I remember you,’ she said. ‘So very well. I thought you were funny.You talked a lot. I thought you were handsome.’
‘I find you – beautiful,’ I said, and as I said it, I knew that it was true. She seemed unmoved, as though used to the description.
I put my arm around her, and she leaned towards me hesitantly, without passion. She sat there, straight-backed with my hand on her waist, as though she had never been touched by me but was willing to tolerate the sensation. Her habitual alternation between intimacy and cool self-containment predictably hooked me as it maddened me. And yet I thought that there was an ache in her, a sorrow to her that moved me further.
She talked. She looked in front of her and talked in the way that she wrote, ornately and easily, until her throaty-sweet voice filled my ears; but still she didn’t move. Eventually, pretending that I required sugar, which I then didn’t take out of obstinate pride, I removed my arm. She turned away from the window.
‘What?’ I said.
‘There’s someone I don’t want to see.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh,’ she said, a flicker of distaste on her face. ‘He follows me.’
‘What? Who?’ I said.
‘Oh, just an – ex.’
‘An ex!’ I said.
‘Don’t even talk about him,’ she said, her full top lip curling.
‘Well, I want to,’ I said forcefully.
‘Oh, Richard.’
Next time, she had said. I remembered, like a shot in the air, those two words murmured into the skin of my neck. Here we were; and next time was now.
‘But,’ she said, continuing her conversation of before, ‘we don’t really know each other. I don’t know you, but in my head, somehow it’s you I turn to – by instinct – to share a thought. I wake sometimes in the night, with the oddest things occurring to me, and I feel as though I hear your voice. I do obscure things, madnesses–’
I waited. The opinions of taxi drivers merged around me. ‘What?’ I said. I could barely think. She had bitten the back of my neck and traced delicate patterns upon my thigh. I glanced at her fingers. Small, delicate, still.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Thinking the words for days of the week have colours. Favouring certain apples in a bowl and feeling sorry for others. My heart aching for a second if one’s left uneaten and has to be thrown away, wrinkly. Why that one? That poor one?’
An image of a Victorian child, a neglected child, came to me then, her voice winding around my ear, buzzing warmly in its various chambers so that I hardly heard what she said.
‘Over-identification with inanimate objects,’ I murmured. ‘I do it too, Sylvie.’ I recalled her fingers pattering over my thigh.
‘Oh, hush, you!’ she said, nudging me. Pathetically, my nerves sprang to life.
‘No, I do. Synaesthesia. And games in my head, self-rewarding games.’
‘And so do you do this? It’s when I didn’t quite catch something someone said, or can’t be bothered to re-read something that’s slightly confused me, and I wonder for a moment whether I’ll be frustrated by not knowing for the rest of my life. Will I regret it for ever, when I could easily say, “Sorry?” now, or re-read the section; but I let it pass, still fixated on it?’
‘Me too. Was that a Great Dane or some vast kind of wolf thing that just trotted past on Hampstead Heath? Can I be bothered to crane my head round? If not, will I always wonder?’
‘Let’s go to Hampstead Heath one day,’ she said.
‘Yes, let’s fucking go.’
‘Or fuck,’ she said.
I froze. A vast clattering of crockery – heaven, suspended there in the steam; surely it will break, all that white vitrified ware they hurl together? – and a cacophony of glottal stops.
I coughed. ‘Or fuck,’ I said.
The espresso machine whined.
I turned slowly to the young woman beside me: pale skin, bruised eyes, dark schoolgirl V-neck. It was the subtlety that I wanted to taste, the tiniest markings visible against that pale skin, the miniature perfection of her. She was still composed, now opening a menu with slender fingers. The faintest suggestion of a smile was detectable on her mouth. I took her shoulders, the width of them together so surprisingly small, in both my hands.
‘I think about you all the time,’ she said, her tone unchanging.
‘And so do I,’ I said. ‘I’ll meet you at Pryors Field. Do you know that place? It’s not one of the obvious ones. And we’ll – walk.’
‘I do know it,’ she said. She glanced up. The espresso machine’s steam-engine shriek
filled the room.
‘You have to go,’ I said, to pre-empt her, because I couldn’t bear the tension any more. She nodded. For the first time, she turned to me. She swept her eyes up at mine, as though scanning me. We kissed. Replaying it, replaying it all afternoon with a queasy punch in my stomach, I didn’t know who moved towards whom. Despite all those people at the tables, despite the proprietors and the waitress and the possible proximity of colleagues, we kissed, my breath caught and flailing. I felt the spinning of oxygen deprivation in my head when I sat up again.
‘Now I’ve let you in,’ she said.
I nuzzled her ear and her neck, breathing in the skin. We kissed again and murmured, secretive, half-laughing.
She leaned towards me, and her voice was hot yet lulling in my ear. ‘If you take me,’ she whispered. ‘If I take you. If – if one day – I want it to be wild.’
I let out a tiny, involuntary groan. I murmured assent through my nose. ‘Yes,’ I said.
She stood up, holding my hand, and I saw her to the door; we brushed each other’s sleeves with our fingers, and I sank back down in the same seat, staring across the room.
Hampstead. I fantasised about it that night A wild heath, so tangled and brackened and howling, high and boar-ridden in the blue transparency of winter afternoon. I went to bed early to postpone guilt and think about Hampstead Heath. Why had I chosen a place where gay men met? Why had I chosen the tufty exposed slab of land that was Pryors Field? There were better places: divings of bush below Parliament Hill; gnarled old oak clusters, a delightful dairy. It didn’t matter. The heath wailed at me: The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, The Return of the Native. There I would take her. Lelia lay beside me. She had come to bed early.
‘No – read,’ I said to her.
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I want to be with you.’
My own stream of thought continued as she murmured, found her book, murmured again.
She cuddled up to me. For pleasurable seconds, I incorporated the whispering passing of cloth against skin into my fantasy. She bit my shoulder. She gave a pretend bray: one of the animal noises that we found ourselves making in bed for no remembered reason.
I luxuriated. I lay back with my legs lying casually open and loose at the hips like a frog’s. Every time I pictured that slender pale thing meeting me on the heath, a hot metallic spasm seemed to seize me, as though I were a teenager and could barely control my desires. What day would it happen? Tomorrow? Tomorrow was too soon, too terrifying. I needed to delay it and savour it, but not for too long. Wednesday? My diary lay open in my mind, blank and ready. Any day, any day I would meet her there as dusk began to hide us: I had no work, no life, that would stop me. I lay in bed calculating the logistics of escaping to Pryors Field on press day.
Lelia wanted sex. I couldn’t; I simply could not. I stayed pinned to the moment, her hand moving across my chest as I pictured the outer grounds of Kenwood, the ponds in ice, the hilly dive near South End Green.
Experimentally, I touched Lelia, my hand sinking into the hot folds of her nightdress. She wore billowy nightclothes, as though she were vast with child already. Even that fact seemed tiresome to me. Her breasts were ripe. She was vivid where Sylvie was subtle. I couldn’t do it. Sylvie appeared from the hedgy shadows on Pryors Field. Lelia’s lips opened. Her dark hair on the pillow.
We hugged. She brought her mouth to mine. The pleasing scent of her pheromones was all about her breath, her tongue.
An urchin girl, dodgy as a photograph by Lewis Carroll, shadowed Pryors Field just as I had thought she had failed to turn up, and became more womanly and refined the closer I came to her. Lelia’s thigh pressed between my legs. I couldn’t marry the two. I couldn’t offer Lelia Sylvie Lavigne’s erection.
She was pulling me on top of her. My erection subsided. Desperately, I summoned images of loose women, sailor boys, raddled old screen goddesses; anything that would keep me hard. A ghost wandered through Hampstead Heath. I would not chase it.
The monthly nurse had been engaged. I seemed to hear a baby’s cry, but it was in my head only, or it had flown ahead of time from its briny home to taunt me. The boy-to-be had placed a glow-smile on its mother’s mouth like a kiss.
I tried every day to be better, by creeping and learning and disciplining myself. I sewed samplers for her. I hid and stitched in the day nursery. If I met her eye, I caught glances in return like speckled fish, darting distaste beneath the mud. I tried to remove myself from her as much as I was able. I thought that if I laced myself in so that I was as small as my body would let me be and made myself invisible and studied harder and more harshly until my mind was half-maddened with learning, then one day I could find a corner of the world that was mine.
Emilia and I practised. When I dressed as a gentleman, and we became married, then I could make her cry out and sigh.
It was dark in the early mornings. I got up, checked my computer and read Sylvie’s anonymous emails, perversely hooked in my fascination with their sender. At other times, I skimmed their opening lines before deleting them, unwilling to allow my mental picture of her to be ruffled for the day by this disturbing aspect of her psyche. Although it was hard to fathom what she was on about, those creepy little segments of melodrama bothered me; yet I would never probe, just as I avoided a number of subjects for fear of frightening her off.
I waited, in frustration, for Hampstead Heath, but Sylvie Lavigne was as elusive as I was careful by necessity. The weather was still icy, tiny remnants of children’s clumps of snow preserved in the shadows. I propped notes on the table and left for work when Lelia was half-asleep: poor Lelia, trying to ward off the moment when she must face her nausea because the child of both of us grew inside her. I clenched my fingers in horror at my own behaviour. Soon this would stop, I thought. I would make myself stop it, because it was wrong and unfair; it was despicable. It would stop, and everything would be normal, and I would attempt to be a good husband.
I frequently took detours, almost without noticing I was doing so, yet pleasurably nurturing some vague, talismanic notion that I might see her as I walked among postmen and street cleaners and early vibrating buses. I knew now where her block of flats was, and I edged towards Endsleigh Street, skimming the south end of Tavistock Square before turning back. I went past Gray’s Inn Gardens, the magical land now muddy and ice-spiked. By mid-morning, I had usually contacted her.
We drank terracotta tea in a roar of taxi drivers many times during those winter days. Smoky boltholes full of grease and bursting sausages that seemed safe from colleagues and passing friends and Catrin, though I kept a perpetual nervous eye upon the street. With a stab of sorrow, I was reminded that Lelia liked greasy spoons as much as I did, understanding their glories, grabbing their stained tabloids and revelling in their cuisine as MacDara and no doubt Sylvie never would.
As we perused smeared menus over the steam of tea, we murmured about books and people and obscure notions, and she spilled fragments of her life: surprising splinters of revelation among all that was private and withheld. There were indications of another world she inhabited, another past, a life that I wanted to penetrate and possess that featured friends and exes and shadowy unwanted suitors and conversations with Peter Stronson, but much as I tried, I could never pin it down. Different locations were mentioned, then rarely referred to again. I caught echoes of her lunatic’s novel in her fleeting descriptions of her childhood: her mother, a source of unexplained grief, appeared to be as absent as her father and sister. Her apparent alienation from her family bothered me, but I swallowed my sense of disquiet, just as I was forced to accept her evasions and refusals. She clearly had some kind of minimal private income that sustained her through her academic work, and money appeared to be a source of anxiety, but even that she wouldn’t explain to me. Yet in her presence, I was blessed; I was understood; we understood each other, she said. ‘You are like me,’ she said. ‘“I am Heathcliff”,’ I said, teasing her. ‘
“… a very respectable man, though his name was Richard”,’ she said, teasing me back.
She asked me about my life, and my childhood, and all the moments that had made me before I had met Lelia. And then, sometimes, she would tell me more – a thought she had had, a certain aspect of her girlhood, a notion about writing – and I would listen through the scream of bus brakes, enthralled, as though I were being read a novel, the Italian dialect that she partly understood all around us, the catch in her voice near my ear. I luxuriated in her atmosphere and her tones and the smell of her hair, each clean strand of scent as subtly different as varying shades of colour.
She would look at me levelly and say things I did or didn’t want to hear, as if viewing our insular land with an outsider’s objectivity, and I was discomfited, and invigorated. ‘Your gay boss,’ she’d casually begin a sentence.
‘What?’ I said, a barely conscious suspicion flaring into life. ‘Is he gay?’
‘Of course.’
‘How do you know?’
‘But of course he is,’ she’d say, then continue her theme, quite unemotionally, with a discussion about my own hypothetical homosexual existence. ‘If you were a poof, you’d fancy MacDara,’ she said.
‘I would not!’ I said, shouting with laughter at the idea.
‘Yes you would. He’d drive you to acts of violence, but you’d be eternally, grudgingly wedded.’
‘Bollocks, Sylvie!’ I said.
‘He’d be your kind of man,’ she said, raising one eyebrow. ‘Always warring. It’s probably because you half-hate your father.’
‘Do I?’ I said wonderingly.
Or she would ask, in matter-of-fact tones, ‘Why are you so fixated with your siblings’ finances?’, or tell me that I was kinder than I knew, or brusquer, and then suggest that my sailing obsession, charming though she found it, was an excuse not to engage fully in the desk-bound occupation I had chosen for myself. ‘I think that you’re very clever but you pretend not to be,’ she said. ‘You celebrate the lowbrow.’
‘Do I?’ was all I could say, somewhat stunned.
‘Yes. Who are you protecting with it?’
Sleep with Me Page 13
