She turned and merely stretched her narrow shoulders back, tracing an arc in the sand with her foot. The water crept beside her shoe.
‘What are you doing down here?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Writing your creepy fucking novels about my wife?’ I said, my words emerging unevenly.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I came–’
‘Why?’
She seemed edgy, her features inscrutable in the night.
‘I’ve been staying with a friend.’
‘I’m sure you have!’ I said with a cynical bark of laughter. ‘The kindness of strangers. Why don’t you get back to Charlie’s granny flat?’ I said, and felt a pang of shame at my own rudeness.
She hesitated. ‘I’m not going back to Bloomsbury.’
‘Oh really?’
‘I don’t want to see you and Lelia everywhere. Taken. I wouldn’t make myself do that. I wanted to say goodbye.’
‘Where’s Lelia?’
‘She’s – with a friend,’ said Sylvie quietly.
‘Who?’ I said loudly, turning to her. ‘Where is she?’
She looked apologetic. She paused. ‘She’s with–’
‘Who?’ My voice travelled through the expanse of water and paling.
Sylvie gazed out at the river. She hesitated. ‘I don’t know how to say it,’ she said. She was tense and nervous; she kept glancing up at the walkway.
‘What?’ I said fiercely.
‘She’s with someone else.’
‘Oh what?’ I said. I sounded, to my own ears, like a seal barking. ‘What? What? Who?’
She shook her head.
‘Jesus,’ I said. My brain felt light and granular, as though it filtered out the horror of what she was imparting. ‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve been – we’ve been quite friends,’ said Sylvie.
‘Where is she?’ I said, my voice now high-pitched and uncontrolled, my position as supplicant angering me in the face of her slight hesitation so that I wanted to shake her, or punish my fragrant, disturbed messenger.
She wrapped her arms around her own waist. I saw her small hand flutter as she pressed the side of her body.
She shook her head. ‘She doesn’t want to see you,’ she said.
‘But where is she?’
‘I don’t know. The last I knew, they were together.’
‘Oh, God. No,’ I said. I kicked a rock. It stubbed my toe. I yelped, shamefully, then kicked it again, yanking it out of its muddy anchorage and sending it scudding into the water.
‘Please, Sylvie. Who is it?’ I howled in outrage and pain. ‘No, no. Lelia. God, no. Who is it?’
Sylvie shook her head. ‘I don’t know–’
‘You don’t even know his name?’ I said. I grabbed her arm, bringing my face close to hers. She seemed perturbed beneath her show of calmness.
‘No, really–’
‘You’ve never seen him?’ A gargantuan red-skinned caricature of a jock kicked his way into my mind.
‘I haven’t. Truthfully’ she said.
‘She’s pregnant, for fuck’s – so you know nothing about him?’
‘Just about her. I think she’s been – she’s been very caught up …’
I stared at her. The temptation to kick something, to sink my knuckles into a paling, left me almost breathless.
‘So it’s serious.’
Sylvie hesitated. ‘I – I think so,’ she said gently.
‘Jesus.’
‘Richard.’
‘She’s pregnant.’
‘I think – they thought they’d bring the baby up together.’
‘No they will not. No fucking way,’ I shouted in an explosion of possessive rage. ‘Jesus – just get me to that bastard. That is my baby. I’ll have as much fucking access as I want, and Lelia would never stop that.’
‘No.’
‘So she’s – she’s left me. Good God. Good fuck.’ I started to sob, loudly and jerkily. It was the clarity of the image of her that came to me – calm Lelia, my Lelia, pregnant and animated and moody and herself; Lelia who was mine - that made me want to roar with disbelieving fury. She was mine. I’d had her. That was not going to change; it was a given in my life, a blessing. Someone else, some marauding animal, had fooled her into temptation. It felt as though she had died, been taken from me, snatched from me, when I loved her. A shadow passed over us, making me jump: a gull, night-flying.
‘You romanticise her,’ said Sylvie. Her voice thinned. She sounded momentarily vulnerable.
‘What do you mean?’ I said sharply.
‘Everyone has flaws. Even Lelia.’
Rage caught me again. ‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘Leave her right alone. God,’ I said, fragments of her novel coming back to me and sticking like leeches on my brain. ‘Hindoos. Dainty-wainty Victorian maids in nighties strangling each other. Baby falling roly-poly down the stairs. It makes me feel sick.‘
‘Why are you being like this?’ she said simply.
‘She’s left me,’ I said, my shoulders trembling and sinking, and I began to pick my way over the stones and old cups, the sand wetter beneath my bare feet, turning to mud, to stray brick and rock as I walked faster. I felt my foot bleeding;
I was pleased. Sylvie lost her balance a little as she walked beside me. She caught my arm. I let it rest there. We stumbled towards the wall of the walkway. A siren squalled along the bank behind us.
‘I hate this,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Seeing men crying,’ she said, and she put her arm around my shoulders with a tentative movement. ‘It’s so sad.’
‘Sorry’ I said. ‘I just–’
‘I have to go back soon,’ she said. She sounded nervous.
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, and I sat down in the shadows beneath the hulk of concrete, looped with swags of chain, that led to the walkway. I sank my head into my hands. My skull seemed close to my fingertips, and hard and human, and old. This is what it felt like, then, to be a man left by his wife. I wondered whether I might choose to die. There was that comfort, that despair. The Thames’s muddy gleam rolled ahead of me where it lapped the shore. A couple walked across the Millennium Bridge, pressed close together.
‘Please don’t cry’, she said. ‘I can’t bear it. I’m sorry to – I’m sorry it was me who told you. You’re amazing, Richard. You will always be. And then you’ll have your child – the most important thing you could have in your life. You’ll have that still–’
‘I want Lelia,’ I said, my voice low and mechanical and seemingly separated from me. A train hissed as it juddered over the bridge. I fixed my eyes on the bobbing sinister shape of a mooring midriver. The sky was vast above me, like a country sky smudged with city light.
‘I know,’ said Sylvie. ‘I understand.’
She took me in her arms, and I rested my head against her chest so that her clavicle pressed into my closed eyelids and I could see nothing but blood pulsing against my vision, its blackness forming stars that exploded with the motion of a crazed screensaver, and beyond that, the horror of what was happening darkening and spreading like some unending night ahead of me.
She stroked me. I let myself be stroked. I thought of my mother, who’d pulled my hair off my face in lulling clean sweeps when I couldn’t sleep, miserable with flu and summer nights.
I began to sob again, unashamedly.
‘Where can I find her?’ I said.
She shook her head, still stroking my hair. She looked at me with an apologetic expression, and her female loyalty infuriated me and enraged me, as Lelia’s always did, even as a part of me admired them for it.
The air was restless in its dying warmth. I smelled her smell. It still, in itself, bewitched me for a fragment of a moment, like an electric current in the air that flickered and disappeared. It seemed faintly repulsive to me as well, as though the scent had been treasured for too long and had gone off. Its mixture of dissonance and allure settled on my senses. Sobs still
rose, humiliatingly, through my chest as she held me.
She whispered to me; she breathed in my ear; she offered me endearing words of comfort, and I was grateful for them when they surfaced through the clamour of my thoughts. We sank back against the wall, beneath the wet shadows of the overhanging walkway, and held each other, and talked. Her hand was on my chest. She kept speaking to me, her sweet comforting murmurings just reaching me, and once I thought that she was crying too. She pressed my big wet animal’s head against her shoulder, and when I shifted I felt a trace of warm liquid on my ear.
‘I’ve loved you,’ she said eventually, after she’d spoken to me about all I had in my life, and all I would have, and the funny silly things I’d done, and how what I said still made her laugh, and recent books she’d read, and thoughts she’d had.
‘You’ve loved many others,’ I muttered, still soothed, not wanting to break the rhythm of the comfort she gave me as she pressed my back, dispersing tension in my shoulders and touching my neck with her fingertips, such pleasure as horribly temporary as any appeasement could be. I hadn’t been touched for so long that I stayed motionless, willing the relief to continue and continue and calm my mind. Her fingers pressed the indentations along my spine, one by one, prodding tiny vibrating currents, her foggy voice small and quiet like an incantation against my skin.
She turned to me. I was close to her. I could hear the water, fingering pebbles as the tide turned. I could see only her mouth, large against my eyes. The instinct to move towards it rose as a fully formed image to my mind. I pulled back.
‘Are you crying?’ I said.
She shook her head.
‘Don’t,’ I said. I pulled her further towards me. I stroked her. ‘Please don’t.’
‘It makes me sad,’ she said. ‘All this.’
‘Don’t.’
‘It does,’ she said. She rested her head on my shoulder.
‘I can understand …’
She kissed me. There was sand on her lips. It pressed against mine. It scraped against my teeth.
‘We can’t,’ I said.
‘We can’t.’
Her skirt was tangled in damp ridges against her legs. Gravelly sand gritted her calves. She leaned to one side, her jaw straight and fine. She looked dead, lying against me; she looked beautiful.
I felt her teeth on my lower lip, the sudden cool wetness of her mouth. A pheromonal surge shot through me. It plucked a terrible sob in me again as I thought of Lelia.
‘Shhh,’ she said, stroking me, ‘shhhh,’ and she kissed my ear, and we held each other. Her hand drifted over my thigh. I was sobbing again, blubbering gibberish.
She gazed at me. Her mouth was open: dark lips, a dark space between; a perfect, scrolled oval. It was like a viola, blood-black against the pallor of her skin. I stared back at her. My mouth was closed. I felt myself breathe through my nose, my chest rising and falling as I was crying, cursing, almost laughing. Heat rose from somewhere indefinable in my body; I pulled away. The shape of her mouth stirred old memories. We kissed suddenly, her saliva pure and cold on my mouth. I thought of the agony to come.
I wanted to bawl out my pain.
‘We love each other too,’ she said.
I murmured something, the kind of sound I made to myself out loud when I was imagining speech.
‘It takes more than one,’ she said. She was crying. Her skin scent threaded the air. ‘It wasn’t all my fault. There was someone else. Not everything is as–’
‘Oh–’ I said, frowning, confused. ‘What–’
‘Not now.’
We arched back against the rock, its surface damp and hard on my spine. Stones and river detritus clustered around us in jagged outcrops in the shadows. Her mouth came towards mine as a parting of hot breath pressed lightly on my lips. There was sand in her hair. We were moving now, twisting and breathing, our mouths finding each other’s necks as she cried out, and she licked my skin, and I kissed her, my lips on her mouth and her shoulder. She drew me to her. I tilted her hips. She pressed herself against me. With a flooding of warmth, I was enveloped. It was so sudden, it took a short time to realise it had happened. The moment of tightness was like diving; a fragment of heat and sliding; I fell headlong. The glory scudded, held fast, rippled in one glistening net of nerve endings.
I cried out.
A party cruise boat travelled past the far bank, distant whoops and lights carrying across the water. I pulled Sylvie to me, catching my breath, kneading her shoulders without stopping as though I possessed a useless tic, stray spasms still threading through my limbs.
‘Let’s go,’ she murmured.
‘Where?’ I said, bewildered, breathing into her neck as I turned to her, my body stripped of strength and suddenly shivering. Reality was flooding back into my brain. Oh God, I thought. Lelia. Lelia was leaving me. A lump formed and hurt in my throat.
‘Oh, Richard, let’s just leave right now.’
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere. Yours. Somewhere else – new.’
‘God,’ I said. ‘Sylvie. You know–’ I stroked her.
‘We can make a go of it,’ she said, her eyes made immense by darkness as she gazed at me and I stared back, transfixed and slack-mouthed and batting away the shame that was beginning to pool at the base of my brain. I felt as though I had woken with a hangover, the disturbing facts of my life just beginning to re-establish themselves in my consciousness with the pain and persistence of a drill.
‘Now’s the time,’ she said. ‘We could.’ She kissed my jaw, my cheek, my ear, and again she pushed hard into the ridges and knots below my neck, easing the tightness, and for a moment, pressed against her, our skin heated and wasted in the cooling pre-dawn air, I wondered whether we could after all run away together: I could invert my destiny and take a risk with this faithless, fascinating oddity who would evade me and interest me and turn me on. No one else wanted me. In madness and sadness, I could cast my lot with her.
‘Let’s do it,’ she said with the rising, enticing enthusiasm of the inspired.
I hesitated. ‘We can’t,’ I said.
‘Why?’ she said, her lips parted.
‘You know that,’ I said, and I kissed her. Her open mouth remained still. ‘You would never quite have me. I certainly wouldn’t have you.‘
‘You would, you would–’
I laughed. ‘Charlie,’ I said. ‘Peter Stronson. MacDara–’
‘Charlie’s been – very good to me,’ she said defensively, moving her leg, stroking my chest. ‘But that was over a long time ago.’
‘Was it?’
‘I hardly know Peter Stronson. MacDara–’
I laughed.
‘Do you think I care about MacDara?’ she said, circling my wrist.
‘I really don’t know,’ I said.
‘I had to – be appealing to him – to get to you, your world, to get to–’ She hesitated.
‘To whom?’
The pit of my stomach felt queasy. She gazed evenly at me, her lips still slightly parted. She said nothing.
‘This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, is it?’
‘Don’t–’ she said. ‘Don’t say these things now.’
‘There’s always been some entree, some Ren, some MacDara, hasn’t there? There’s always some group of fools ready-made for you–’
‘Of friends.’
‘In one country or another.’ I laughed slightly.‘To win over.’
She said nothing, as she so often did. She stroked my chest, my shoulders.
‘When did it happen with MacDara?’ I said, desperately, hating myself, unable to stop.
‘Last – last year–’
‘My God. Before – before Christmas? Me? You were you knew him first?’
‘He and Catrin were kind – good to me. They let me stay with them in the first few weeks here. I didn’t have money. I didn’t know anyone–’
‘My God,’ I said slowly. ‘Sylvie–’
The ri
ver dragged its tow of sand as the tide began to inch towards us, oily and light-streaked in its darkness. The grit was damp beneath my toes.
‘I loved it that he was called MacDara,’ she said, looking at the river. ‘I love some people’s names – Lelia. That’s so beautiful. There’s an island off the Connemara coast where they celebrate St MacDara’s day. He didn’t even know it … They have an open-air mass in Irish.’
I could imagine her murmuring stories to him as he lay in her arms. Residual anger rose up inside me.
‘The fishermen dip their sails in the water when they pass the island. I love to think of that.’
‘I’m sure they do. What’s he like? When did you see him?’
I persisted.
‘I never – I never truly did,’ she said. A dog came down on to the beach. It trotted past. From far above us came its owner’s voice, shouting.
‘Never actually fucked him?’ I said abruptly.
She was silent. She shook her head slightly.
With an immense and invigorating rush of pleasure, I let out a roar of laughter. My anxious post-coital shame was alleviated with a momentary swoop of triumph. I pictured MacDara’s face. I laughed again.
‘What else was I supposed to do when I first came here?’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t understand, do you?’ she said, turning to me, her face gathered and sharp and made more beautiful in the concentration of her sudden rage.
‘What?’
‘Charlie’s isn’t what you would call a home,’ she said abruptly. ‘You don’t understand that. You could never understand that, could you? You with your Cornish rabble and your salary. All your bohemian chaos.Your beloved mummy’. She glanced nervously at the walkway above us.
I stared at her, stung, at a loss for a response.
‘Leave with me, then,’ she said, calmly.
‘Sylvie,’ I said. ‘Oh, God.’
‘I think we should. After all this…’
Sleep with Me Page 25
