‘You know – you know that wouldn’t be right.’
‘Once,’ she said, and she paused. ‘I really loved – I think I’d have done anything to be with you two, you three. Stay with you.’
‘Don’t,’ I said. Pity tightened my throat. A streak of rank briny air cooled my face. ‘Which three?’
‘You’re not going to come with me?’ she asked in a small, calm voice, but she was trembling.
‘It won’t – it wouldn’t work–’ I said hopelessly.
‘Then I need to say goodbye,’ she said, close to my ear. She put her head in her hands. ‘But I can’t really bear to.’ She rested her forehead on my shoulder. She stroked me. I could hear, now, that she was crying, her words emerging in a staggered fashion as she attempted to control her breathing. ‘I thought, after all these years of looking, that finally, perhaps, it would be–’
‘Look,’ I said, my voice a dry croak. ‘We couldn’t. Sylvie. I’m so – look, I’m sorry. I’d be a hopeless tosser. Completely useless. I can’t – you know. It wouldn’t be right.’
‘No. I know.’
‘I’m in love with Lelia,’ I said quietly.
‘So am I,’ she said.
I paused.
‘Sorry?’ I said. I laughed, embarrassed.
She was silent.
I frowned. ‘What did you say?’
‘I love Lelia Guha. She loves me.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said, my brain cantering uncomfortably through a series of surreal possibilities.
‘Exactly that.’
‘You’ve got a – a – is that why you’re writing about her? You’ve got some kind of – a thing for Lelia?’
‘Not a thing. She’s been my lover.’
‘What?’ I said with a bemused laugh.
‘She has,’ said Sylvie. She stood up, plucking at the muddy folds of her skirt. ‘Until, until today. That’s it. We were lovers. We’ve been lovers,’ she said, a small smile of triumph, or excitement, animating her face.
‘How the – fuck–’
I gazed at her body. She gazed at me. She seemed like an angry, elegant child in the flat light. Her bare legs looked thin, planted on the sand. Her eyes had seen a naked Lelia; the glorious arrangement of curves that was her mouth had met Lelia’s in some kind of lesbian passion; she had bestowed upon her that soul-stirring illusion of unique understanding. It seemed ghastly and alien. Perverse trails of lust shot through my shock. I stared at her, layer upon layer of consciousness opening up in my brain, and it was as though the earth had slipped, and then slipped again, while I flailed and gawped and stumbled. And I was a fool, a bigger fool than anyone I had ever met. There were facts, aspects to life, horrible truths, that other people comprehended while my own brain simply failed to work. I was a child, a gibbering idiot; I should be stuck in a jar and studied by Victorians. I could trust no one. My world had turned inside out to reveal its maw and then its secret teeth. It was as though my mother had informed me she was a man or Ren had confessed to a past as an axe murderer.
‘When?’ I said.
‘A long time,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘I had to,’ she said. ‘I had to be with her. She was mine. I just – I just love, loved her.’ Her face crumpled a little. ‘I’ve always loved her.’
‘Like you’ve loved so many,’ I said in sarcastic tones.
‘Only really her,’ she said.
More layers of understanding slowly surfaced in my brain, as though manually slotted into the head of a robot.
‘I wanted her. She wanted me,’ she said, a combative, triumphant expression momentarily passing over her face again.
‘I’m not even – I’m way down,’ I said, almost laughing. ‘I’m so far down your pecking order. After all that. After all you and I …’ The full bathos of it hit me. I wanted to laugh loudly. There was a masochistic element to the situation that almost turned me on, just as the image of those two women together made me want to grab my dick even as I shouted my outrage aloud.
‘So this man,’ I said, ‘this man – is you?’ I barely had the language with which to process my bewilderment.
‘There was only me,’ she said in cool, calm tones. ‘Me and her. That’s all we wanted. We didn’t need – you. Or anyone. We lived together.’ She shivered. ‘We looked after the baby together.’
Along the Thames, a barely perceptible stirring in the sky seemed to hold the idea of the coming light. She glanced nervously at the walkway.
‘Did she know about us?’
‘No.’
‘And there’s no man?’ My thoughts fragmented again before they settled, and then inexpressible relief flooded through my confusion. I tried to absorb the fact that my wife had left me for my mistress. She was not holed up with some snake-hipped, moneyed, pillaging brute after all. Joy in its most distilled form shot through me. ‘Lelia,’ I said.
Pain passed over Sylvie’s face. She glanced at the concrete steps. She turned back to me with a calmer expression.
‘I loved you too.’
‘My arse, frankly.’
‘I truly did,’ she said simply.
‘God, Sylvie. All those months–’
‘I’m leaving now,’ she said.
‘Where is she?’
‘She’s up there,’ she said, and she started to climb the concrete steps in her stained dress. I followed her wet legs with my muddy, bleeding feet, just as once, long ago, when she was someone else altogether, I had followed her upstairs to MacDara’s loft. She pointed to a tower block rising behind the clutter of buildings around the Tate.
‘It’s Flat 221.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘I’m going to go.’
‘Yes.’
‘I really am,’ she said, the strained lines returning to her forehead. ‘Leave me alone now.’
I nodded. I paused. ‘OK,’ I said.
‘Look after her,’ she said, a last strand of her hair scent twining with the mud breath of the river. ‘And your baby as I would. Look after it properly.’ She suddenly seemed tearful, and anxious.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course.’
She hesitated. She looked down. ‘I – well, I made myself a life.’ She looked at me. ‘Didn’t I?’
I paused. I attempted to suppress my impatience as I glanced at the block of flats.
‘You did,’ I said, and then I held her. We kissed each other.
‘I do still,’ she said, glancing in agitation at the tower block. ‘Go up there now. Hurry.’
Twenty-Two
Richard
I sprinted towards the block, surpassing any burst of speed ever achieved in my adult life in my impatience to find Lelia, and I stood gulping for breath outside the stained concrete entrance. My nervous excitement at the thought of seeing her again made me feel as though my entrails were floating, bilious and untethered. The block was vaguely familiar to me, I realised: I had a distant memory of dropping something off here with Lelia in the early days, when we were greeted by a small Indian woman in her seventies or eighties who had been kind to us, to a couple newly in love and no doubt transparently impatient to walk along the river and flirt over drinks. The simplicity of that time seemed as long-gone and unformed as a version of childhood.
I pressed the bell. Nothing happened. The sound of my heart booming waxily somewhere in my ear drums seemed to deafen me. It occurred to me that it was much too early for normal people to rise. But I had to see Lelia. I pressed it again.
After a pause followed by electric crackling, an old man’s voice barked, ‘Yes?’
‘Is Lelia there?’ I said.
There was a wheezy silence. ‘She’s coming down,’ said the unexplained pensioner in Lelia’s love nest, his breathing trailing strands of electronic interference.
I waited, confused. I pressed the buzzer harder. Light was just softening the shadows along the street, every bird noise loud and vivid during those God-given moments before I found Lelia again. I pee
red through the wire-threaded windows of the hefty security door and as I stood watching, the lift opened.
She was there, crumpled and haggard and barely dressed under the strip lighting.
‘Lelia!’ I shouted. I thumped on the glass. ‘Lelia!’
She was ill. She was panting and calling out, propped up by a tiny wizened man in his pyjamas. She bent over and lowered herself to the floor. The pensioner went down on his knees and awkwardly held her shoulders, an act of kindness for which I would always be grateful. I shouted for her again. In staggered movements, she made her way towards me.
‘Darling,’ I croaked, pulling her into my arms. ‘Shit. Christ.’
‘Richard,’ she said. ‘Rich–’ Her mouth opened in a slack howl of tears as she sank against me.
‘Is it the baby?’ I said.
‘You took so long.’
‘She only just told me. Jesus,’ I said, kissing her neck, pulling her closer to me, kissing her all over the wet skin of her face and ear, knowing the heaven of holding her even as the baby was torturing her. ‘I’m her husband,’ I gabbled to the old fellow, by now clearly overwhelmed. ‘Thank you,’ I said. I clapped him on the back; I grabbed his hand and shook it like a maniac. ‘Thank you.’
He nodded. He took one last look at poor Lelia, then returned, head bowed, to the lift.
Lelia moaned and leaned over, pushing against me, nearly unbalancing me. She was silent for seconds, merely breathing, and I held her, talking to her in a smooth rush, instinctively rubbing her with hard and regular strokes as she crooned and shouted and cursed. A man looked up from his street-cleaning vehicle and went on brushing.
‘Have you called an ambulance?’ I said rapidly.
She nodded, wincing. ‘The neighbour.’
‘It’s OK, darling, it’s all right,’ I kept saying, holding her and steadying her.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she said, her words barely audible against my chest. ‘I needed you, I needed you. Richard, my baby – how many weeks is it?’ She looked up at me, her expression imploring and helpless. I didn’t know what she meant.
‘Where is it?’ I said urgently, scanning the street and considering running for the car. ‘Let’s call a taxi.’ I clumsily stabbed at numbers on my mobile, and she turned over on the steps, and I rubbed her from the base of her spine as I called a cab. An orange light coasted along the other end of the road, slowing to turn the corner. ‘Taxi!’ I roared. I put my fingers to my mouth and let off a piercing whistle, and the cab switched off its light and trundled over to us.
I hurried Lelia into the back, aggressively ignoring the driver’s protesting glances, and switched on the cold air to dull the volume.
She lowered herself on to the floor, clinging to me so that I crouched down beside her; she shook me off and leaned over the seat. She moaned.
‘I know, I know,’ I said in pity. ‘Oh, darling, you’re brave. Just keep going. Good girl. You’re so brave. We’ll be there soon.’
‘She left me,’ said Lelia, looking up at me wildly.
‘Who? Oh–’ An ambulance streamed past us in the opposite direction.
‘She – you know – she left me, she left me there. On my own. She stopped me coming to the hospital.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t think she called. She could have killed – it’s too early – It hurts.’
‘She knew you were in labour?’
She let out a long low cry, nodding by pressing her head into the seat. ‘It stinks. This seat stinks,’ she said, looking up at me in distress. I kissed her tears; I curved my arm and chest around her back. I wanted to merge my body with hers to absorb her pain.
‘You were like this when she left?’ I hissed.
‘Yes,’ she said.
My mind, already set spinning at vertiginous speed by Sylvie’s shifting versions of reality, now jolted into a sickening counter-rotation that made me reel once more.
‘She’s mad; she’s mad,’ I said, my voice rearing into a semi-falsetto.
Lelia pulled herself up and squatted on the floor, clinging to me, gripping my arms as we swung round a corner. The driver had switched on Capital FM.
‘Darling, we’re getting there,’ I said, holding her body tightly, supporting her weight by spreading my knees out on the floor.
‘She’s mad.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘Why did you take so long?’ she said, her head butting against me, her eyes disturbed and imploring.
‘She only just told me.’
‘Where were you?’
‘By the river with her–’
‘By the river?’ said Lelia uselessly, a groan emerging from deep inside her abdomen.
‘She lied to me. She’s gone. She’s gone. She’s left. We don’t have to see her any more.’
‘I was so frightened.’
‘Look, she’s gone. I’ll never speak to her again. She’s we’ll never see her, I promise. I’m so sorry.’
She moaned.
‘She lied–’
‘I know, darling,’ I said, repositioning my hands under her armpits as she swayed. ‘She–’
‘You lied,’ she said, her forehead ridged with distress, her voice rising weakly. ‘Being un – unfaithful. You fucking – you – I was pregnant.’
‘I’m know,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I’m so sorry–’
‘What were you doing by the river?’ she said wildly, clutching at me. Her eyes were large and frightened.
‘I–’ I said, and I glanced at the ground, and then at her. I felt my Adam’s apple rise. She knew me; even in terrible pain, she knew me.
‘What?’ said Lelia.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Never, ever again. She’s gone now.’
She turned to me. Her mouth opened. Her skin, pallid and streaked with shadow, had paled to a new kind of yellow.
‘She’s not a threat,’ I said desperately. ‘She’s a drab little–’
She let out a loud laugh, shocking and uncontrolled, that turned into a wail.
‘No,’ she said. She turned from me; she half-laughed again, then sobbed. She turned back to me with a rapid movement and held my arm so that it hurt. Her eyes seemed unfocused. Her mouth was loose and formed a different and disturbing shape. She groaned as she bent double, arching her back like a cat.
She was breathing noisily.
‘It can’t be,’ she said finally in a tiny, tight voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I held her. I rubbed the length of her spine. I gripped her torso as we came to a swaying halt in a hospital car park. ‘Lelia. My love. You too …’ I said lightly. ‘Look, we can’t talk about it now. We’ve got for ever to talk about this.’
‘Shut up, shut up!’ she said. ‘Not now. You cunt. Not now.’ She bent towards the edge of the taxi as the driver opened the door and she staggered out.
Birth was a ritual whose sheer brutality required it to be enacted in private, in a windowless chamber where the sounds of other women’s agony trailed along corridors in an echo of Lelia’s. My love was wired and girdled and electronically monitored; she was injected and penetrated and medicated, while bizarrely dated machines spewed out wonky screeds of graph paper and Antipodean agency workers drifted in and out with their clipboards through the dawn, and only an unemotional doctor seemed to know exactly which dipping foetal heartbeat and sudden emission was standard or problematic as Lelia rocked and vomited her way through a session of torture.
She cried out for her baby, and for a different baby: some infant from her past who appeared in her garbled shoutings; and for a disturbing period, I wondered whether she was anthropomorphising her miscarriages. She cursed Sylvie, and intermittently cried for her; she cursed me, informing me that I was faithless and cruel and a swine; she pushed me brutally away; she pulled me to her and told me she loved me, and had always loved me more than anyone. She referred to Sylvie, and to me, to us together, and even to their own coupling, with obscenities that I had ne
ver heard her use: an alien language, medieval and misanthropic and savage. When she appeared actually maddened with pain, the medical staff and I clearly removed from her blurred consciousness, she seemed to be making peace with herself, muttering about her father, and about someone called Agnes. She gabbled a few words that I struggled to follow, saying that she was sorry, and promising to look after her baby. She appeared to be making some pledge, fragmented and monotonous, as though she muttered a liturgy.
I watched her with stunned admiration, perceiving her as a Trojan, a brave battler, the most beautiful, deranged and refined spirit. And in moments that transcended the fact of her poor pain, I thought, here we are, Lelia Guha and I, in a room together. That was all I wanted. I frantically thanked any god I had ever known, from the man with the beard so at odds with the sylvan deities and aboriginal spirits favoured by my Cornish neighbours, to some less precise mental blur that presided over me in times of need. I wept a little. Thank you, I said, and tacked on a quick prayer for the baby.
And still in my heart I felt ambivalent about that baby. I didn’t want Lelia to fall for it. I knew that the further it bored its way out of her body, head scrunched and inexorably hormonally propelled, the more firmly I was shunted back a notch in her affections.
Though gripped with protective fear for the unknown creature as I heard the murmured consultations about its distressed heartbeat and Lelia’s early labour; though I wanted to weep for her as I held her head and she vomited, blotched and bloody, over a cardboard container, a series of unhealthy and inappropriate thoughts threaded through my barrage of powerless sympathy, reminding me of the selfish deliberations about the timing of funerals and the necessity of flowers that emerge fully formed after a death. An absurd and parochial sense of disappointment flickered through my mind when I remembered that my child would not be born in the heart of London as planned, but here, here, south of the river. Less fittingly still, Lelia’s face mid-push reminded me, during a cruel fit of detachment, of a fluffy tooth-baring monster on a children’s morning television programme. Worst of all, I felt an almost manic desire to catch the headlines on a porter’s abandoned newspaper, their link to the world at large disproportionately delicious. From time to time, I simply wanted to opt out of the attenuated drama and catch a snooze.
Sleep with Me Page 26
