I felt as though I had burrowed into a hole and was lost there. We suffered secrets.
The phone in the flat rang, and I took it downstairs.
‘Catrin!’ I said.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘I’m really sorry. I called you back, but then you were away. It’s been weeks, hasn’t it?’
‘It’s OK,’ she said. Laid-back, passive Catrin.
I glanced at my stomach in the mirror, to see how much it was growing. I stroked it. ‘And …’ I said, desperate to tell someone new. ‘I’m pregnant!’ There was a pause. Languid old Catrin was incapable of rising to the occasion. ‘Oh!’ she said finally. ‘Wow,’ she added flatly. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I–’ she said. There was silence.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve felt so sick. I–’ I waited.
‘Yes,’ said Catrin. ‘I mean, well, what I was going to say was …’ She paused.
I waited. ‘What were you ringing about?’ I said patiently, slowly, as if stirring mud. I raised my eyebrows at myself in the mirror, raised them higher to see how far they would go.
‘I don’t know. I – well…’
‘Really?’ I said, suddenly curious. ‘You know – you’ve called a couple of times.’
‘Are you coming to MacDara’s birthday party?’
‘Yes, yes, I think so. I’m pretty sure Richard can. But what were you going to ask me?’
‘Oh, that. That,’ said Catrin. ‘Sorry I was just ringing. I had to – I have to get an idea of numbers early.’
I paused. I laughed awkwardly, through my nose. ‘Wasn’t there anything else?’ I said eventually.
‘No,’ said Catrin, now distant, as though her mouth was further away from the receiver. ‘No, no. Just that. I hope you can come.’
Fourteen
Richard
The phone started to ring as I threw my coat on the sofa. My shattered nerves raced in unison. Catrin had returned sometime before to London, yet Lelia had said nothing more about her. I steeled myself, as I still did every time the phone rang. It was MacDara, pestering me for an answer to his birthday party invitation.
‘Yeah, yeah, Mac,’ I said.
‘Well, you git. Are you coming?’ he bellowed above ringing phones.
‘Next month’s pretty busy,’ I shouted, rapidly running out of excuses. ‘I’ll try.’
‘You’d better bring me a fucking good present after this,’
he said.
‘I’ll adopt you a hippo from the zoo or something,’ I said, and burped.
‘Two,’ barked MacDara. ‘A mating couple.’ He put the phone down.
Lelia wasn’t there. I walked over to the window, threw it open, and paced around the flat. It seemed bigger without her. Chilled air sliced through the window, and I let it flood over my skin. It felt as though I were tacking through a high wind. I glanced at the gardens. The extreme coldness would end at any minute, and the unreal state in which I was suspended would melt and collapse. It made me feel sick.
‘Darling!’ said Lelia, walking in. ‘I thought you wouldn’t be here yet.’ She dropped her gaze.
We hugged. She looked tired, genuinely tired: there was no trace of the Blessed Virgin expression.
‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘OK,’ she said. Our eyes met. There was knowledge in her gaze. Fresh panic gripped me. But I knew Lelia. She kept a lot to herself, my Cleopatra with her denial: I sometimes suspected that she was even better than my mother and my mother’s war-generation friends at repressing troubling facts, but with a matter like this, she would inevitably confront me, shouting and weeping the moment she heard.
For a moment, I almost relinquished control and said, ‘Oh look, let’s talk about it.’ I heard my own voice forming the sentence in my head. It would be horribly easy to echo it out loud. I saw myself pulling her to me and laying my head on her shoulder and telling her, and the sobs and the lancing and the mess.
She caught my eye again. The hurt there was blanketed. Madonna of the Rocks had expired. We knew each other too well. For a moment, I wanted to say it out of recklessness, to throw a hand grenade into our relationship and watch the interesting explosion. Beyond that, I wanted to rid myself of the repulsive tension with which I lived. The moment passed.
‘MacDara’s party’s on the fourteenth,’ she said.
I hesitated. ‘Is it?’ I said. ‘Oh yes.’
There was a small silence. ‘It’ll be her anniversary,’ she said, pointing to her stomach. ‘Fridays.’
‘Of course,’ I said, and I kissed the stomach and stayed there, bowed, for a moment, and as I rose, my head felt granular with treachery.
‘And then – spring. And then June,’ I said awkwardly. Neither of us had mentioned our marriage.
She nodded.
‘June the twenty-sixth,’ I said.
‘Let’s talk about it later,’ she said.
By the day of MacDara’s party I was still in merciful, terrifying limbo. I dressed and shaved and grimly prepared to face my fate. Just before I left, I received an email from the Hotmail address.
The Hindoo could recite screeds of verse by heart as I could, and knew much of foreign lands, and when I saw her kissing Emilia, I wanted to claw her and choke her, or bring her to me. But Emilia was my maiden, and we twined and flew together to places that even the Hindoo couldn’t reach. It was all practice, practice, practice for the time, one day after that, when I would hang myself for my Mama, or when I would save myself another way. And so we worked and starved and stifled with much discipline.
I skimmed the email, deleted it, and joined Lelia on the stairs. She was dressed in colours and lavishness, and she looked beautiful. The journey to MacDara’s reminded me of the taxi ride at Christmas – in a different era, so long ago – but this time, we were not in the grip of sex, I was not about to meet a mouse, and I knew now that there was a baby growing inside her. Something bothered me. Just as I sometimes woke in the morning with a sense of unease and had to search my brain for the source of anxiety, I was unsure of what it was that disturbed me. Then I remembered. It was Sylvie’s novel.
MacDara let us in. I steeled myself for my encounter with Catrin. I had planned and rehearsed my entreaty, and at the first possible moment I would throw myself at her mercy, abandoning all pretence. The prospect was alarming. I chucked MacDara his present en route to the kitchen, and started drinking.
This, I thought, standing under a row of concealed spotlights angling on to a glimmering pale blue Smeg, was what it was to be rich. I felt a spasm of jealousy, followed by grudging admiration. I had spent my twenties faintly pitying MacDara his lack of artistic impulse. Now here were the rewards for the course he had chosen: a thundering great four-storey early Victorian number in Islington stuffed with modern classic furniture from Heals and a couple of motherfuckers by Ren, and carpet that was so thick, I wanted to get down on my knees, chew its fibres and choke on it. I would never have all this. I no longer found it quite so funny to live in a garret. I had, with my lofty and impractical ambitions, fucked up. All my grand plots, hatched with earnest passion in youth, had been at best semi-realised in a haphazard fashion. And then there was Ren. Ren, who had toiled all these years before turning his hobby into a commercial enterprise without a squeal of artistic agony or any apparent sense of compromise. And suddenly, quiet, unassuming Ren in his suburban semi was raking it in. With a sense of panic, I warded off feelings of inadequacy. I might live in a ship’s cabin of a flatlet, I thought, but I had my security – my love, my Lelia – and that was worth infinitely more. Then I remembered.
A shock of realisation juddered through me, as though I had lost my foothold and the world had tilted.
I lost my glass and fumbled for another – no stacks of serrated plastic for MacDara – and I chucked down wine to fuel myself for the confrontation with my enemy Catrin. Someone turned the music up. I hid, pressing myself against the faintly v
ibrating Smeg as I kept a watch for her. I was relatively safe: I could see the sitting room through the arch of the kitchen, and only the odd waster like me would dive into the fridge for beer, since MacDara, the rich cunt, was bound to have the bath full of champagne on ice to demonstrate his nonchalance, his munificence.
I saw Catrin. She crossed the room, pale and wholesome as ever, yet trailing a whiff of madness beneath all her cool Celtic calm. My heart was banging like a lunatic’s. I took another swig, felt its fire suffuse my head, and bravely lurched into the sitting room. She turned from her guest, but she didn’t even glance at me.
‘Catrin,’ I said, too quietly. She continued to ignore me.
I looked at Lelia, at her familiar and dearly beloved features.
She was worth the rest of them put together. I started to walk towards her, but Catrin moved in the same direction, as though planning to engage her in conversation. ‘No!’ I wanted to squeal in panicked falsetto. I hesitated, almost spinning on one foot in indecision, and then bolted between them. Catrin turned away, still ignoring me.
‘Darling,’ I said, barely able to breathe.
‘What are you doing?’ said Lelia, laughing at me.
I put both hands round one of her shoulders and pulled her to me. She looked surprised. Catrin fiddled with a dimmer switch, and the room became darker, and then the bell rang. Excitable cries were audible from the hall. I kissed Lelia on the cheek that was near me, and encountering that smooth plane of flesh with my lips was a surprisingly unpleasant sensation, our most casual greetings involving a brush on the lips. I felt like an abusive Edwardian father. I turned her mouth to me and kissed her again. Her lips didn’t move.
‘I love you,’ I said.
Her beautiful tilted eyes betrayed nothing, but I knew what lay beneath them. I had hurt and displeased the person I most wanted to protect.
‘Look, I love you,’ I said almost angrily, sinking my nose on to the springy depths of her hair.
She said nothing. I kissed her head.
‘You’ve been distant from me,’ she said.
‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘I–’ I shrugged.
‘I don’t like it,’ she said, her tone unchanging. She turned from me. She gazed ahead, as though I wasn’t there and she could live an independent, quite different life without me. She might leave me, I realised, and I understood it properly for the first time, my scalp shivering with a contraction. The fact that I could lose her had seemed the mechanical, storybook result of infidelity, and as impossible as the state of limbo in which I was frozen.
I asked her about the baby. She brightened. The possession of such power felt akin to cruelty.
I stroked her tummy. She held my hand, though she wouldn’t look at me. I kissed her again. Every aspect of her was so carved into my consciousness, her earrings instantly recognisable though I had never knowingly seen them. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘It can’t bite you through my cervix, you fool.’ She turned from me again with the cold expression that changed her face.
I would have to give up Sylvie. She was my last, pathetic stab at freedom: a childish act of late-flowering rebellion before I committed myself for ever. Just as I sometimes wanked over the idea of Nicole Kidman, or over the mature and womanly sadists who had littered my youth, in particular the married minor actress, once beautiful in a vampiric manner, a sighting of whose press photograph briefly resuscitated old fantasies: just as such women drifted harmlessly through my night-time thoughts, half known about and laughed over by Lelia, so Sylvie Lavigne would have to live as a frustrating sexual spur in my memory alone. I had never planned to be the kind of man who has affairs.
‘Are you going to marry me?’ I said, but even as I asked her, even as I attempted to appease her, the terrible knowledge that I might not be able to give Sylvie up hit me. My heart sank at the acknowledgement of addiction. Perversely, the almost unbearable existence of the unmentionable Charlie continued, despite my anger, to stimulate a new strand of interest.
‘Will you marry me?’ I said, taking Lelia’s hand. I pushed Sylvie to the back of my mind, and stamped on the image.
Lelia hesitated.
“‘Yes,’” I said.
She hesitated again. Her mouth twitched in resistance, a gesture I dreaded.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said. I wondered whether her eyes were shiny. She looked away. It sent a pang of sorrow through me.
‘“Yes, yes,”’ I said.
She paused. I saw a thought occur to her. Amusement flooded her face. Relief sank through me.
‘Yes,’ she said, and I pulled her more forcefully towards me. ‘But I don’t know.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know whether it would be a good idea.’
‘Why not?’
She buried herself in my neck, and we clasped each other, suddenly talking, finishing sentences, words, kisses for each other. I spoke loudly, so that she couldn’t answer my question.
I found a bottle on the window-sill and poured more wine into my glass. I tried to pour some into hers.
‘No,’ she said, putting her hand over the top, like a slap.
‘Why not?’
She looked at me. Disapproval, or pity, tinged her eyes.
‘Fuck!’ I said. ‘I’m crap, aren’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve got amnesia. I’m a victim. You’ve got to look after me until I come out of my coma.’
‘You fool,’ she said.
‘Actually, I want to look after you, missus. Let’s go on a little trip. Let’s get away from here.’
‘I can’t till the holidays,’ she said.
‘Throw a sickie. A long weekend.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Are you ever going to understand that I’m pregnant?’
‘Yes,’ I said solemnly. ‘I’m really sorry.’
I looked around. Catrin, whose movements I had been tracking while I guarded Lelia, was not in the room. I saw MacDara mid-bluster, gesturing at a woman I didn’t know. He looked animated; his eyes were fiery. I wondered whether she was MW, about whom he was so unnecessarily and irritatingly vague.
‘Imagine MacDara if Catrin were pregnant!’ I said rashly. ‘He’d be far worse than me. He’d be doing deals with Japan all night and sloshing rum into her coffee.’
Lelia winced.
‘He’d forget to turn up for the birth!’ I continued, ploughing on in the face of her silence. ‘Look at him, the clumsy great bull.’
‘If you were like him,’ she said calmly ‘I’d have thrown you out in the first week.’
‘But I’m a blundering buffoon who can’t get baby dates into my thick head. Just remember I’ve got a brain tumour. Oh, let’s bugger off and go somewhere romantic. A windmill in Norfolk? Norfolk? Or that pineapple house? Come on, let’s. Or a hotel nearer London. Damn the expense. Will you come with me?’
‘Let’s see what happens,’ she said, and she looked away. When she turned back, I caught her with a kiss, and then we hugged, and I knocked back more wine.
‘Taste it. Cheat! Taste it on my lips,’ I said, and kissed her. ‘Do it again,’ I said, and took a covert mouthful of wine, which I siphoned into her mouth when she opened it. She spluttered and laughed so that wine dropped on to my legs; I licked drips from her chin; she started to cough, shaking her head, and I tried to pass her another mouthful. She pushed me away, then tried to make me laugh so that I would spurt it out, but I swallowed it, and coughed and snorted, and she whispered in my ear, and I guffawed, and we began to bitch about the people at the party, using muttered shorthand to discuss disastrous clothes and covert gayness and assumed class categories, adopting our own strangely evolved language to talk about someone sitting right beside us.
I often thought, if asked to explain the codes and rituals that had sprung up between us by some mysterious organic process during our years together, we would sound totally disturbed. And that if in another world we were inexplicably sep
arated – by aliens, say – we would recognise each other decades later through a muttered half-reference to any of our secret rituals, such as the menagerie of animals – or, more accurately, animal-animal and animal-human hybrids – that seemed to make an appearance just as we were falling asleep. Entirely non-sexual, these creatures had their own voices, so that the half-horse-half-squirrel called Piebald that was Lelia spoke in what was largely a neigh, interspersed by the odd scampering noise as she scrabbled around, ate proffered nuts, and displayed a rudimentary character. A speaking tadpole resided in our bath for a few months before we forgot about him, while I had somehow become a furry half-tiger-half-human called Pierre with a rich forties actor-style voice and a universe of his own, including a kindhearted trainer, a group of circus pals, a selection of dietary preferences and, eventually, a repertoire of songs. Yet our main mode of communication was through donkey sounds.
I would often bray on greeting when I picked up a call from her, just as she would mention my hooves and refer to supper as oats, and every few months we would suddenly hear ourselves afresh amidst wide-eyed spurts of embarrassed laughter.
I eey-ored into her ear and then kissed it. Catrin came past. She still refused to look at me, the sadistic dipso. I froze. She walked over to the other side of the room and started to change the CD.
‘Just going to the loo,’ I said to Lelia, and even a tiny falsehood – infinitesimal in comparison with the vast lie of omission under which I lived – hurt as I sullied her with it.
I wandered across the room, hesitated, and then walked swiftly towards Catrin, stumbling a little.
Sleep with Me Page 15
