At night, the choking dive or plain little bakery with tables in which I had felt her skin against mine that day returned to me. Hampstead Heath came to me as a promise once made, rearing above me like some precipitous, craggy terrain still held evasively, maddeningly, at one remove; and then I tried to sleep to drown guilt and marital sex.
‘The French girl, Sylvie,’ said Lelia one Monday morning in March.
‘What?’ I said, abruptly. ‘Is she French?’ I added, to soften my tone.
‘Well, partly. She must be,’ said Lelia.
‘Right,’ I said. I felt my face twitch involuntarily.
‘I know, I know, boring academics and all that. I saw her from the window the other day.’
My heartbeat took a ragged leap.
‘I waved, but she didn’t see me.’
‘Right,’ I said again.
‘I’d just been wondering about her. I was wondering how she was. I got her a pass for Senate House ages ago.’
‘Did you?’ I said, surprised.
‘Yes.’
‘Right:
‘It was strange. I was always worried that she was somehow a recluse. But then she referred to living with someone, and I saw her quite differently after that. I think she’s just–’
‘What?’ I said.
Lelia looked at me. She raised her eyebrows questioningly. ‘Well, just secretive. Not lonely at all.’
‘No, I mean – she doesn’t, can’t live with anyone! She’s just a pale-faced little spinster, for God’s sake – an – a spinster – living somewhere in some granny flat.’
Lelia laughed. ‘She does, though. Someone called Charlie. I was surprised, too.’
‘Well, who the fuck is he?’ I burst out, barely able to control my tone.
‘No, no, it’s a woman – just her flatmate.’
‘Charlie?’
‘Yes.’ Lelia frowned. ‘Well, I assumed so from the way she said it.’ She paused. ‘Oh. I suppose – Charlie. It could be either. I don’t know. Perhaps she was being coy, and he’s her boyfriend.’ She shrugged.
‘Impossible!’ I burst out, my heartbeat accelerating to dangerous levels.
Lelia glanced at me, and laughed again. ‘You really do think she’s dreadful, don’t you? A dull little virgin, like my worst schoolfriends, thanks so much. I wouldn’t be so sure.’
‘Oh, fuck knows,’ I said, regaining a semblance of composure. ‘I don’t know. I don’t care. How are your nipples? How’s your puking? Let’s have coffee.’
The bitch, I thought as I left to walk to work. The two-timing, treacherous, cunning little bitch. Hampstead Heath, I remembered. My legs weakened with a stab of lust: in a return to youthful habits, I was perversely piqued by rejection. I stamped upon such emotion. I refused to countenance it. The lying little bitch could go to hell. I opened my diary at work and began to fill it. I emailed Ren and suggested meeting him on Wednesday night. I rang my old college friend Katarina and arranged lunch. I called MacDara, who was shouty mid-deal and barked unpleasantly that he would call me back. I agreed to lunch with Sophie from the features desk, and then hacked my way through some of the work that had accumulated during my latest period of distraction. Yet I had to find out whether Sylvie Lavigne lived with some randy bastard who murmured coded intimacies into her ear while he fucked her – or a sallow–skinned no–hoper who hung her tights on the radiator and nurtured resentments over the phone bill.
After a fairly riotous lunch with Sophie, I returned to continued silence. This, I had finally realised, was her way. It had been going on for weeks, months. I pulled a stack of proofs from my desk, scanned some press releases, then found a note written in small, scratchy writing on a piece of lined paper torn from a reporter’s notebook. Hello, it said. It’s me … Greeting you as you work, whatever you’re doing when you find this. Love. I plant kisses on you. S.
My breathing stopped momentarily. I paused, my mind speeding. When had she left it? How had she come into the office? I read it again. My heart gave an involuntary soft swoop. So that was her handwriting: mousy little academic girl writing. I realised she’d never handwritten me anything: she texted; she emailed. But somehow the writing looked vaguely familiar.
Lelia had said, within a couple of days of our meeting, ‘How weird I feel like this about you already, and I don’t know your birthday or your middle name yet. I don’t even know your handwriting.’
It was true. Those indices of intimacy, soon to be known for ever, lurked there, ripe for discovery. Lelia’s handwriting was now as familiar to me as my own, even if she tried to disguise it for Valentine’s cards. I knew the style of her capitals, her numbers, even her commas. Then I remembered why Sylvie’s was familiar. It must have been because I’d seen it long ago – seemingly so long ago – in Marine Ices, when she’d handed me her name and number in tiny writing. I probably still had that piece of paper somewhere in a ragged pile in my study.
‘Listen,’ I snapped when I next saw her.
I hesitated. My fabulously damning phrases shrivelled, replaced by a childish blurt. ‘Why don’t you get back to Charlie?’ I asked.
Her eyebrows formed a jagged line as she appraised me with a look of scorn.
I floundered. ‘Well?’ I said angrily.
She turned away, her nose faintly aristocratic.
‘In all this time. You never told me.’
‘You never asked me.’
‘I – but you never told me.’
‘You never asked. You assumed.’
I shook my head faintly.
‘Didn’t you?’ she said. ‘You assumed that I didn’t have anyone.’
I opened my mouth.
She said nothing. Her pale skin enhanced her coldness.
‘Well, who is he?’ I said eventually.
She shook her head minutely. ‘We were together …’ She tailed off.
‘You used to be together?’
She glanced at me in assent.
‘But now he lets you stay there?’
She said nothing.
‘Out of the kindness of his heart?’
‘I–’ she said. ‘Charlie’s very kind to me.’
‘Oh, is he? Who is dear Charlie?’ I said aggressively. ‘Your boyfriend or your flatmate? Fucking partner or cooking partner?’ I went on, growing bolder.‘Or,’ I added, remembering Lelia’s assumptions, ‘is it just a woman? Then why didn’t you tell me you had a flatmate?’
She looked at me askance. ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ she said.
‘Well, who is he?’ I persisted.
‘It’s complicated,’ she said.
‘Is it?’ So you live together?’ I asked, aware that my allotted time was running out.
‘We’re not together a lot of the time,’ she said evasively. ‘Oh right. So you and Charlie–’
‘You,’ she said imperiously, ‘have a flat. Have a wife. Girlfriend. Lover.’
I paused, deflated. I searched for words.There was nothing to say. I felt a muscle in my neck twitch like an irritating tic.
‘And double standards,’ she said. ‘Really, unforgivable double standards.’ There was a weakening to her voice that she tried to disguise. She spoke more forcefully. ‘It’s just horrible. You shouldn’t shout at me like that. I hate it. You can’t do that. Leave me alone.’
I turned to her and saw her pale, pained face. I caught my breath. I pulled her to me.
‘It isn’t fair,’ she said into my chest. ‘You’re – established. You’re married. And you will marry her, won’t you? I know you will.’
I pulled her away from me to kiss her, and a tear beneath the corner of her eye caught the light. She tried to wipe it away.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Please don’t.’
‘You will, won’t you?’ she asked, scanning my face, and she looked vulnerable and desperate as I’d never seen her before. ‘I know you will.’
I didn’t know what to say. I pulled her towards me. Another tear was spilling over her ch
eek. She swiped at it with her sleeve. I looked at her and caught her eye, and saw unprecedented signs of panic in her, as though she were a trapped animal. I wanted to take away all the pain. She put her arms around my neck and pressed her mouth to mine suddenly and urgently. We stood there, kissing, the wetness of her cheeks mixing with the wetness of our mouths, and as she sobbed and I kissed every part of her face, in the midst of my pity for her, I was suffused by a strange sense of relief at the revelation of equality. I was now only wronging one person. Here was my conspirator, my little companion in crime: we were behaving badly together and, both culpable, we would play out our lust until one day – one day very soon – we would end it. The criminal seeks justification in any guise.
Thirteen
Lelia
All my life, I was haunted by the uneasy conviction that I could cause death. I was surrounded by its odours: my father on his stretcher as disinfectant stained the air; that same smell vibrating through the back of my nose and settling on my tongue after miscarriage. In France, I had to test my power, to prove that I didn’t own it. The jury in my head – virtually voices in my head by this stage – weighed up all the evidence. Feeling like a mad girl, I wrote notes in French about birds and frogs my eye had caught in the garden, and buried the paper, experimenting on small creatures to find out whether I could cause their poor animal deaths just by writing about them. I searched for their corpses among the dew.
I prodded at the idea of death, because my father had gone there, and I could hardly believe that here I was, a stout, lively girl, moving and breathing and eating and shitting when he was cremated granules in the wind, or had vaporised to nothing at all. As Sophie-Hélène murmured her tales of pleasure in the garden dusk, we practised the rituals of adolescence: levitation, and fainting games involving hyperventilation followed by the holding of breath until blackness squiggled across my brain and made my father disapper. She whispered tales of asphyxiation in the bushes, hissing above the tumble of water. We enacted fragments of her descriptions of her daytime activities with Mazarine in a state of excitement.
‘Like this, like this,’ said Sophie-Hélène, her blue moon eyes dark above me, a finger on my neck and mouth as she told me what they had done; and I was the audience given only a glimpse of what had gone before; I was the poor second, pis-aller. We went higher and higher as we deprived ourselves of air and lost consciousness for seconds that stretched into darkness, just as she and Mazarine had done, the stifling pain sleeking into stars.
In the morning, Sophie-Hélène disappeared with her companion as she always did, while I was silent and alone, a woolly-haired specimen caught in a cage in a white town. My bathroom in Mazarine’s house with its map stains and archipelagos turned into Africa in the bamboo afternoon light. In shadows sat pith helmets and hunters. I heard Mazarine and Sophie-Hélène coming up the stairs. I felt almost toxic with jealousy. I sometimes cried. I wanted to glimpse them, net them, keep them stuffed on a shelf in the sunlit dust and share their pleasure. I wanted his approval; I wanted him to look at me.
The mother went out in the afternoon: I saw a packet of X-rays delivered from Gien waiting for her, untouched, on the hall table. A furious whispering began on a high flight of stairs. They came pitter-pattering along the corridor. I crept to the door. I watched them mounting the stairs, quite naked. Sophie-Hélène was taller, with small cones for breasts. I looked at Mazarine. A flat chest, a neat parting where the legs met, like a sexless doll. I stared as two almost identical white bodies turned a corner.
Mazarine was a girl. The shock of arousal was so delicious and repugnant, I never stopped dreaming about it.
I dreamt about it while my ordinary life went on. I think I always wanted quite ordinary things. Or I made myself want ordinary things because of fear of failure. I would never be an actress like the blessed group of girls who ruled our school, with their TV producer fathers and modelling contracts and Suffolk houses; I would never be a criminal lawyer or a doctor, especially not a doctor. I wanted a career for myself, but I wasn’t ruthlessly ambitious or even focused in one single direction. I think, unfashionable as it was, that what I mostly wanted was a home: a home in which there was a man who didn’t die, and a baby.
I spent a lifetime reading, and thinking that I would be a certain kind of person, and make myself very clever, and that one day, when I was somehow evolved enough, I would find love. And when, after so many mistakes, I met Richard, the realisation was so swift that there was a moment, the day after I had first seen him, just before lunchtime, when I knew. I knew with a sense of amazing certainty, never previously experienced, that I’d met my love.
‘You did,’ Richard always said. ‘I did. Don’t forget it, bride.’ We first saw each other on a boat. We referred to it as the love boat after that. It was called Glencora, a name (fadingly painted on the prow) that I never forgot but never repeated to anyone, even Richard, out of a superstitious wish to preserve the love. We were both in Norfolk, at Blakeney, there beside the samphire beneath the prehistoric sky, and we got on to the same boat together to see the seals in the early morning. Neither of us was interested in seals: I was fleeing failed romance, and he, always drawn to the sea, viewed a seal trip as a small sop before he could rent a fast dinghy later in the day.
I was still vaguely attached to an archaeologist called Paul who had begun to bore me; who had, thank God, eaten dubious prawns in a pub the night before, and from whose combination of illness and lust I had then escaped. Richard was there on a press trip begged from the travel desk, his ancient actress holed up in his hotel. He nearly missed that boat. If Paul hadn’t eaten prawns, and Richard hadn’t been drawn to the window, I would never have met him. He had been lingering in bed, he told me later, hoping to seduce his ageing girlfriend into morning sex, but the flat gleam of the sky and the call of the oyster catchers had pulled him to the window, where he spotted a boat jerking at its moorings, a movement ingrained in his mind since childhood. And he had quickly shaved and pulled on clothes, and run to the quayside. He had so nearly been forced to wait, eating crab on a bench with the water-logged breeze in his hair before setting out with a different group of people. I sat alone on the far side of the boat, and as the rope was snaking from the post, Richard Fearon, breathless, his hair untidy, bounded on to the deck, and laughed as the boat left its moorings with a jolt just as he landed.
He turned to me. ‘Can I sit next to you?’ he said, a look of enquiry upon his face.
‘Yes,’ I said.
He sat down. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like the look of the tracksuits over there, but I’m desperate to avoid the squealing sou’westers.’
I followed his gaze as he frowned against the mud brightness. He wore faded corduroys and a nondescript mac, against which his eyes were bluish-green, though they contained aspects of grey and bronze that revealed themselves later. I noticed then that they were beautiful eyes.
‘Look at them,’ he said. ‘The whole of Chiswick’s here.’
‘I was thinking Putney,’ I said.
He turned to me and smiled, and we talked over the sound of the engine, the salt-marsh water lapping just below our elbows, droplets spraying us as the gear changed and we gouged an arc through the estuary, and he looked as though he were in an early, strangely coloured film, with the louring bright sky above us, the water churning and plant-heavy. I could smell the foam of his recent shaving, see speckled evidence of his haste. He reminded me of photographs of young men in the fifties, with his traditional mac, his emphatic nose and wayward hair and slightly untamed eyebrows, and a mouth which, when still, possessed that fatal male hint of sadness. He had nice hands. I liked his voice: it was resonant and full of laughter, and he asked lots of questions for a man.
He turned to frown at the chattering crowd. ‘I didn’t only want to escape the blazers and Carolines,’ he said. ‘I wanted to grab you as my seal partner.’
‘I see,’ I said, and we talked for the two-hour trip, our sen
tences overlapping each other’s and emerging faster and faster as we laughed and interrupted and – already, even then – teased each other with increasing rudeness. We threw the seals a cursory glance. The gulls arched above us; the boat chugged diesel and hot plank; the morning air brightened. I wondered how we would we see each other again, the question drilling through my brain with growing urgency and almost silencing me as the boat vibrated among the salt marshes along the final stretch and the quay loomed into sight.
‘We could both get back to London tonight,’ he said. ‘And then meet tomorrow.’
‘Yes,’ I said, frozen in terrified happiness.
‘Let’s meet for breakfast before work.’
‘Where?’ I said, for something to say.
‘Soho.’
‘OK. Yes.’
‘Can you get back tonight?’
I nodded.
I dragged Paul the archaeologist, confused and objecting, away from Blakeney before breakfast to preserve the morning spell, and spent the day in Wells, in Burnham and Cromer so that I wouldn’t bump into Richard and make him disenchanted with me, with my wind-pinked skin or unchallenging boyfriend or sudden inarticulacy I still glanced at boats in different harbours in case Richard was on them, and cut short the long weekend as we had both arranged to do by returning late that night in the face of mounting suspicion and objection from Paul. Heartlessly, I stored the argument as ballast for our break-up.
Richard and I met at eight the following morning, and we wandered round town, never stopping, alighting on cafe tables like impatient birds, then upping and leaving and walking miles and miles; and both of us skipped work and arrived back full of excuses after lunch, by which time I was a welling creature, a tidal wave inside me. I cried that afternoon, because there was no other way to express the emotion. I saw him that evening. I moved in with him after a fortnight.
That winter, when Richard began to come back late from work and barely had sex with me and forgot about our baby, his neglect was the fulfilment of what I’d always feared, while hoping that the fear itself would protect me from the reality. I had always assumed that this restless, confident, tiringly energetic person would slowly grow blank towards me, because I was just an obscure little nothingness from the suburbs. And worse than that: I was cruel, there were those aspects of myself that I couldn’t face and couldn’t explain to him. Every year, I promised myself I would think about it: by the end of January; by the end of summer; and by the time November arrived, that promise tipped itself into the following year, my round of old worries dismissed as paranoia, and still I never told Richard what I feared.
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