I had always wanted to do that to someone. The crunch of my knuckles against hard flesh was an invigoratingly satisfying sensation, almost sexual in the pleasure it afforded me. I would for ever remember the fibrous impact. Blood shot out of MacDara’s nose.
‘Richard, what are you doing?’ screamed Lelia, running up to us. Blood caught the hem of her dress. The multitudinous seas incarnadine, was all I kept thinking, repeating it in my mind like a madman as I turned to her, my mouth open.
MacDara was reeling. Snot bubbled out of his nose. A drop of blood spread over his collar. Guests were beginning to gather around us. He was uncannily silent. I wanted more. I lifted my fist again. But MacDara lifted his at the same time, and Lelia stepped between us.
‘You idiots!’ she said. Her voice was high. She was crying. ‘Stop!’
I hesitated.
‘How can you?’ she said.
‘Keep your fucking hands off her,’ I shouted at MacDara.
‘What?’ said Lelia. I took her waist.
There was a noise from the people around us. Several gazes turned from MacDara to Lelia in slow motion, cartoonish amazement scrawled across features. I watched them. A thought arrived slowly in my brain. Scrabbling for salvation like a man about to be hanged, I clumsily took advantage of the situation.
‘Just fuck right off out of it,’ I snarled at MacDara. We stared at each other, panting. My head was tight with incandescent rage towards him. Blood covered his chin. Finally, he wiped it away.
‘What?’ said Lelia, no longer crying but looking at me with an expression of fury.
‘MacDara’s a total cunt,’ I said flatly. ‘He shouldn’t–’
‘Not on our wedding,’ hissed Lelia. ‘Whatever this is. Tomorrow.’
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘He’s just stepped out of line.’ I caught Lelia by the shoulder and turned her around.
‘What are you doing?’ said Lelia as I dragged her away from the tree.
‘He was eyeing you up,’ I said in desperation, my lie emerging with the smooth, hot quality of a child’s.
‘No he wasn’t!’
‘Yes, the git.’
‘He quite patently was not! Richard, don’t be such a fucking idiot. MacDara has never seen a hint of sexual promise in me in his life.’
‘I think he fancies you,’ I said, ever more pathetically.
‘Whatever you say. Whatever you say, Richard,’ said Lelia sarcastically. I looked at her in surprise. The sounds of cheering came from the bushes. I glanced up. I couldn’t see Catrin anywhere. Nor the bitch Sylvie.
‘What’s the matter with you today?’ I said.
‘Well,’ she said, and a splinter of terror cut through me as she paused. ‘As well as you doing that – what on earth was that about? I’ve never seen you hitting someone. God, Richard – as well as that, well, I’ve been bleeding.’
‘Yes, I know, I’m sorry. MacDara’s swinish nose. It’s revolting. I’ll try to wash it off.’
‘No. Bleeding. I’ve been bleeding a bit.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Yes, well.’
‘Oh, but that’s OK. I’m sure that’s OK, darling.’
‘How do you know?’ said Lelia.
‘Well, it’s probably just something – natural. Some juices coming down. Bit of a period.’
‘I just don’t believe you. What does a period mean? I’m pregnant. I don’t believe you,’ she said, shaking her head. She was trembling.
‘Oh, Lelia, I’m sorry. But you know what I mean. It’s probably perfectly normal. Something from the womb.’
‘Well, exactly. Something from the womb. Think what that was last time, Richard.’ She paused. A sob caught her voice.
‘Oh, darling,’ I said, pity suddenly taking hold of me. ‘Oh, darling. It’s probably all right.’
‘Are you a gynaecologist? Are you?’
I shook my head. ‘Darling–’
‘Bleeding – any bleeding – can be the start of miscarriage. I should know. I’m twenty-eight weeks; it’s too early. I just–’ she said, catching an in-breath, ‘I just knew you wouldn’t understand. At all, you know. Not at all.’
I took her in my arms. My radar, still barely consciously tracking Sylvie, knew that she wasn’t around. MacDara had disappeared somewhere, probably to staunch his stinking blood. My poor Lelia felt broken in my arms.
‘We can go to the hospital,’ I said, holding her and stroking her head. ‘What’s all this stuff in your hair? It’s just around the corner. Shall we go?’
She shook her head. ‘Only if there’s more.’
‘Yes, darling. Well, if there is, just tell me, and we’ll race straight over there. It’s two streets away. I’ll carry you. You’ll be OK, darling. I promise. I’ll look after you, and there’s all this medical help so near.’
‘Why? Why did you do that?’ she said.
‘Oh,’ I said, swiping a hair from my forehead with my sleeve. ‘I’ll tell you later. I promise. He’s been being stupid, and I suddenly got pissed off. It’s all right. He’s drunk. I’m a bit drunk. No one gives a toss.’
‘Of course they do,’ said Lelia, her voice distant in the still air. ‘They just pretended not to. They think you’re mad.’
‘Well, fuck ’em,’ I said.
She appraised me.
‘I thought he was eyeing you up,’ I gabbled disastrously to break the tension. My forehead sweated. ‘I got angry.’ I could hardly even enunciate the feeble words. My voice tailed off.
‘Richard,’ she said. ‘The man is clearly having an affair.’
She turned her back on me. I thought about killing myself. I pictured my arm picking up a flint from a flowerbed and plunging it into my own chest, and then, in my death throes, swiping at MacDara. The blood. The spurting pain. The demented pleasure. I muttered strangled obscenities and decapitated a shrub with my foot, and ground its medicinal-smelling leaves under my shoe until its juices bled into the earth.
Lelia was now behind the marquee talking to her queeny friend Enzo from university.The blubbery milksop was probably consoling her by telling her that he – he, the screaming poof – had never thought I was good enough for her anyway. Well, it was a bit fucking late.
Where the hell was Sylvie? Slowly, as if collecting and distilling in my brain, my anger began to turn towards her. The shocking little traitor. She was not what she seemed. She was not at all what she seemed. Charlie. MacDara. My God. Another thought slammed itself into my brain. Had she actually fucked MacDara? No. No. She was – I slithered around in my memory – still holding off; as of the week before she’d buggered off, she was still resisting. Just as she had with me. But now she was back. When had she come back? I would never know. MW had supposedly been in Canada with her husband during that time. I had felt unspoken, half-amused empathy with MacDara while Sylvie was holed up in Scotland. The treachery of it made me feel breathless. I was a brain-dead fool. My mouth fell open like the slotted aperture of a puppet’s.
I began to walk. I walked faster, half-running through the dusk, swerving under the shivering line of lime trees. The lights in the houses were now all dead but one. That sole glow gave me a nasty taste. How on this earth could MW be Sylvie? MW was some bewitching married blow-hot-blow-cold sex symbol, not a chilly little nonentity inexplicably fancied by me. My mind span. Married. Sylvie was not married. I nurtured a moment of hope. But it was Charlie. That was who he meant. Oh, God. I stormed through the garden. Nothing. She had disappeared, just as she always did. I asked a couple of people if they had seen her. Only Peter Stronson seemed to know that she had left. Slowly, it dawned upon me that Sylvie had been talking to him. She had spoken to him and a couple of other editors who were there. I punched a lime tree. Its bark stubbled my hand, woody fragments lodged in the punctured skin.
We spent our wedding night with a scanner attached to Lelia. The ante-natal unit wanted to keep her there, waiting, scanning and waiting, until the early hours of the morning when they discharged he
r with warnings to rest. We walked in silence along Torrington Place, through the bird-stirring light before the dustbin vans had appeared.
At home, we climbed into bed, and soundlessly we found each other, half in despair. She was curved and scented and hot-skinned. She slid smooth heat over my torso; her breasts were compressed against my chest. A different scent, one that pleased me and reminded me of inexplicable happiness – strands of the past, or youthful lust, or simple completeness – clung to her. I began to remember what the smell reminded me of. It was somehow an echo of Sylvie’s smell, that fragrance that hooked me into helpless addiction.
‘You smell different,’ I murmured into her neck.
She moved her hips against me and we lay together. I felt relieved that she didn’t want sex on her wedding night.
‘You smell different,’ I murmured again. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s all that hair stuff,’ she said. ‘Shhh …’
‘Mmm,’ I said. I kissed her. I gave in to it. I chased the scent of Sylvie. That was all it took, I thought. I suddenly fancied my wife. It was easy. This was the way it would be for ever.
‘Use it, I like it,’ I said, a pang at my own treachery making me hug her harder.
I held her from behind, and kissed and kissed her, and tried to battle away the angry questions about MacDara and the thoughts about Sylvie that ran like acid through my mind. I pressed myself into her neck and smelled her Lelia smell and told her that I was so fucking happy that she was my wife.
She slept. I began what seemed to me to be my life sentence as an insomniac.
In the morning, as I hung up my wedding jacket, I found a note in small writing in one of the pockets. Wanted you, it said.
Seventeen
Lelia
I like to think about it all now. How we met. How we loved. What we thought when we first glimpsed each other.
When we went out for coffee the day I discovered I was pregnant, and when she arrived at my flat with baby clothes, she affected me by being reserved; or perhaps I felt shy because she had already begun to move me. She read me Angel as I lay on the sofa, and then I slept. When I woke, I wanted her to stay with me and carry on talking to me in that foggy little voice of hers. Eventually, her reticence left her, and we talked, on and on, as I’d only ever done in a London bedroom with friends of a particular age and time, and one French Easter by a stretch of river. I wanted to carry on talking like that all night. She played with my hand as she spoke.
Later, we wandered around Mecklenburgh Square gardens. We stopped by a horse chestnut, then paused again by the gate, carrying on talking while our bodies were poised to leave. I felt the embarrassment that goes with the knowledge that a great friendship has just started – the meeting of kindred souls, with a lifetime to discuss so many urgent issues – and though we spoke at length, we could hardly meet each other’s gaze in our awareness of that discomfiture.
I kept glancing at the street in case Richard was walking back. I tried to make myself leave before he saw me and wondered what I could possibly be doing with a supposedly dull semi-stranger on a dark winter’s evening. Then, after all our procrastinations, we parted abruptly, almost rudely, with a jerky leaving, a backward wave, another embarrassment that I replayed in my head.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Richard said when he returned and I was sitting on the sofa sorting through some timetables.
‘Nothing. My schedules,’ I said.
He narrowed his eyes at me.‘Liar,’ he said.‘You’re worrying about something, aren’t you? My worrywart… What’s the etymology of that?’
‘Ask C. T Onions.’
‘One day, I’ll find something you don’t know about me,’ he said, and then, totally uncharacteristically, he reddened.
I raised one eyebrow at him.
I thought about all the times I’d seen her. I’d caught sight of her once in John Lewis and, flustered, I’d chosen to ignore her just because it was easier to do so. I’d seen her twice on the street, and once I’d even spotted her on our square from the window, and I’d felt strange about her, as though she ruffled me but I didn’t know why. There was an intensity to our friendship, even at the beginning, that was absent with other women I knew.
After we had walked around Mecklenburgh Square, she sent me a text. I was touched, and flattered; I texted her back, and then something else occurred to me, and I rang her that very night, slightly pushing myself to call her so soon, while Richard was on his computer. She sounded noticeably pleased to have been rung.
She texted me a couple of days later. I texted her. The electronic beep of my mobile at intermittent points in the day made me smile. I rang her one morning on the way to work, and arranged to meet her after a seminar in the canteen at Senate House. A couple of my students were still with me when she arrived, and we sat there together in a high net of noise above the trees of Russell Square.
‘I keep thinking my phone will beep and it will be you,’ I said to her while my students talked together.
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘But when I’m not talking to you, I miss that.’ She paused. ‘I even seem to talk to you in my half-sleep.’
‘Do you?’ I said. Her intensity sometimes disarmed me.
A colleague came over with her tea tray and sat down, and then my snatched meeting with Sylvie became a social event in which students, all volume and nerves, made the standard undergraduate attempt to please yet mildly shock us with their irreverence. Sylvie said very little, but her silence, I knew, came as much from self-containment as reserve. The students talked, the lively, light-toned speed of their speech registering with me through her ears – had I once talked like that? – and Sylvie occasionally made a comment or simply looked to one side, complete in herself; and suddenly, I saw her for the first time as a being – a vibrant physical presence – who was somehow rare and needed to be courted.
Before her next visit, I cleared up. I was nervous. I worried in case the ease of our conversation in Mecklenburgh Square had disappeared, and we were awkward again, and everything was stilted. I was unusually flustered: I flitted from room to room, removing piles of paper, switching on lamps.
She arrived at twenty-five to five, in a narrow black dress with her hair back, which made her look more striking. She smelled strongly of cigarette smoke, and I teased her.
‘How’s the baby?’ she said. She reached out and cupped her hand over my stomach.
‘The baby’s lovely,’ I said. ‘Well, she’s there. She’s growing.’
‘Is she a she?’
‘I don’t know. I feel like I arrogantly know.’
‘A daughter,’ she said. ‘She’d be plaity and sweet – strong and fierce – a little you.’
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I always think of plaits.’
‘Has she got them already?’ She bent over and lifted up my top and pretended to look through my stomach, her delicate fingers cold on my skin, and then kissed it.
We wandered around, talking. ‘And another thing …’ we kept saying.‘And another thing …'As we walked from room to room and picked things up, pausing and talking, I felt once again a heightened awareness of her – of her breath and her voice, of the quiet magic of her, the hidden cleverness of her mind. There was an understanding between us. Its flow was very clear and strong. I knew that if I felt this with her, then other people would too: it would not be unique; she would have the same effect on others once they looked beyond her understated exterior.
The lamps all shone, little pools splashing the dark floorboards and wintry walls of the flat. I left the heating on high, not wanting to leave the room at the front where we talked to adjust it. I had cooked cakes for her, and they scented the hot air. We talked still, we paddled over objects with our fingernails as we spoke. She looked at me in glances. There were further pauses. A terrible tension was beginning to form. The radiators seemed to tick with dust-scented heat that sat on my throat. I lifted my hand to pull my hair away from my flushed forehead.
‘What is?’
‘That. Your hair. How it falls.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. I tried to picture my own waves moving. Would they catch the light, then? Is that what she would see? The tension hummed: it was almost audible. She is going to kiss me, I thought with a shock. This woman will kiss me. My heartbeat escalated in panic. It beat faster. Seconds passed. I wanted to shout, to puncture the tension. She would move towards me. I would resist her, or –
‘I–’ she said.
I stuttered. I was frozen in silence.
We caught each other’s eye. Cars edged past on Guilford Street, distant sirens, the throb of a taxi. I tried to look out of the window to calm myself with normality. There was a whole world out there, the floodlit tennis courts, the pale battlements of the Brunswick Centre.
We stood there together in the bedroom. The tension was noisy in the air, but somewhere in its centre, I floated. I felt so alive, it was as though I had been dying and not known it. Excitement trickled through me. It seemed to be the excitement of a long time ago: of sex first starting, and obsession, and betrayal. Adultery, delicious adultery. Sex with someone illicit – a teacher, or a friend’s father, or another girl.
Sleep with Me Page 18
