Barefoot in the Dark

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘Dealt with what?’

  Madeleine flipped the banana skin back into shape and lobbed it into the bin. ‘With the jpeg, of course! He didn’t have our email address. What’s the –‘

  ‘Oh, God. Did he leave a message for me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well, only to let you know he’d called, of course.’

  Hope sat down before her legs had a chance to give way beneath her. ‘But you didn’t let me know! God, Maddie, you didn’t let me know!’

  ‘Hope!’ Madeleine said. ‘Remove your hands from your face and stop groaning like you’re giving birth to a wardrobe.’

  Hope removed her hands from her face and stopped groaning. What was the point? What was the bloody point?

  ‘That’s better,’ said Madeleine. ‘Now. What the hell is the matter?’

  ‘The matter is that I have just made a very serious error of judgement and I think it might be sensible for me to hand in my notice at this point as I have to go and kill myself. Now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Or Kayleigh.’

  ‘You can’t kill Kayleigh. She’s on a government youth training initiative and it wouldn’t go down well with the trustees. You can’t kill yourself, either. I’m way too busy to have my number two drop dead on me. Now, pull yourself together. Here. Have a banana. And tell me what in heaven’s name the problem is.’

  Ten past seven and Hope’s problem was simple. What to do with three containers full of gunk (bolognaise, chicken Marengo and goulash, according to the stickers) before heading off to Suze and Paul’s.

  She wrenched irritably at the first till it gave up its contents and they fell, with a guilt-making but nevertheless satisfying plop, into the bin. But how much more satisfying, she thought, as she picked up the next one, if she’d not agreed to go there at all. She could no more stomach Suze right now than her interminable culinary creations.

  Hope had never really got on with Suze. Though it was a truism that you didn’t get to choose your relatives, Hope had always assumed that her brother, who was nice, would marry someone else who was nice. Why she’d blithely assumed this, she thought now, was a mystery. Iain was a low life. And she’d married him.

  She extricated the contents from the other containers, then threw them all into the sink and trained the hot tap on them. She didn’t not like Suze – she considered it a failing to decide not to like people like them. There was almost nothing Hope did that Suze did not appear to know how to do better, or, if not better, at least more efficiently, from wallpapering an alcove to making guacamole, to getting toddlers to consume Brussels sprouts. It was only in the losing-of-husbands stakes that Hope had the upper hand and this, of course, made Suze doubly irritating; since Iain had left she’d adopted – or, more accurately, grown into – a whole new set of facial expressions, ones which made it clear that had Hope been just that little bit more like Suze in the first place Iain’s infidelities would never have happened.per se. You should try to like everyone, shouldn’t you? But in Suze’s case, it was taxing. This was partly because Suze was everything Hope was not (tidy, well organised, possessed heaps of bloody Tupperware) but mainly because she was also one of those women who seemed to want to make it their life’s work to organise those women who were not

  But families being families and Hope being Hope she had nevertheless agreed to go and have dinner with Paul and Suze, on account of lacking plausible excuses not to, or indeed, sufficient nerve to just say no. Or, indeed, to tell Suze that her perfectly prepared delicacies were now gently defrosting in Hope’s bin. She added washing-up-liquid to the containers in the sink. Not a good day.

  Earlier, she had explained all to Madeleine, tearfully, and in some detail. Including the bit about telling Jack how she wasn’t going to let her heart have unprotected sex with strangers, which made her howl uncontrollably until Madeleine – who was by now laughing like a drain and going ‘Priceless! Priceless!’ – grabbed her by the wrists and threatened to shake her. She had then made a resolution to ring Jack and apologise. That being the only sensible way forward, as Madeleine saw it. But as the day wore on it felt less and less like an option. What on earth would it achieve? He would just think she was even madder than he must do already. And not only mad, but a stalker. Were she him she was quite sure she’d never want to speak to her again. She didn’t want to speak to her again, for God’s sake. The bottom line was that she could hardly unsay all the dreadful things she’d said to him, could she? And even if she could, she wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t, deep down, believe most of them. OK, so he had called her on Monday, but what difference did it make? Had she taken the call would she have felt different? Any happier with her actions? Any less insecure? The water bubbled and frothed and she attacked it with her washing-up brush. Did she want to run such a gauntlet? No. When you totted things up, she had made every single move in his direction, and the thought of it still made her blood run cold. Forward was not a directional option. Of that she was almost certain.

  If only she could stop replaying and re-writing the script all the time. In her ideal scenario he would have had her home number, and he would have rung her on Sunday, and they would have arranged to meet up again – hell, even on Sunday – why not? – and he would have reassured her that no, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her leaping on top of him in such a bestial fashion on their first proper date – which wasn’t a date anyway, because he hadn’t even asked her to come round – she just had – which was… no, no, no! NO!

  No. He would have reassured her, would have told her he was just itching to be leapt on in a bestial way, and she would have fallen into his arms and then they would have made love again and everything would have been all right and she wouldn’t be feeling as if she’d done something wrong, because she’d be too busy feeling like her life was about to turn around just a little and that there was now A Vestige of Hope.

  Or not. Wouldn’t she still be writing the script of their ending, even before their relationship had begun?

  She finished washing the Tupperware, then rinsed and dried it. But what about him? The actual scenario was that he probably turned up on Tuesday worried that she’d snubbed him – what with her not leaving a note or anything on Sunday, and then not returning his call on Monday, and then – oh, God, it was all so obvious now – all that smiling at her and seeming so unsure of himself and bashful and asking her if she was doing anything on Saturday and looking so crestfallen when she’d – oh, it was just so awful it made her want to staple her tongue to the top of the kitchen table – and God, she’d been so, so, so, well – damn, it, frosty. She shovelled the boxes into a Sainsbury’s carrier. Late already. She’d have to get her skates on.

  Yes. Frosty. He was right. It was the only word for it. She had been frosty. And she’d been so hell-bent on letting him know how little she thought of men – of him – Christ, what made her think all those things? – and all he’d done wrong was to fail to have her home telephone number, and the misfortune to have called the office while she was down in bloody Queen Street with Mr sodding bloody Guttridge from the wretched bloody printers.

  She snatched up the carrier. It was all just a mess.

  Half an hour later, and she still felt no better. She parked, messily, outside Suze and Paul’s tidy front garden and stomped up the drive, drenched in gloom.

  Chapter 18

  Allegra lived in a tree-lined street in Pontcanna, in a tall skinny house with a big beech hedge outside that looked like it could have been in Chelsea. It was the sort of house Jack had himself once fancied occupying, before marriage to Lydia and the absolute necessity for a decent state school and a double garage had had her drag him out to suburbia.

  He had bought flowers – a small cellophane-wrapped bunch that he’d found in the supermarket, which he’d chosen because they were all the same colour – mindful of something Lydia had once said about style being all about understatement. They smelled nice, at
any rate. Allegra, who had expressed fulsome delight, had then given him a glass of white wine and ushered him into a sparsely furnished living room, the most arresting feature of which was the complete absence of anything that hadn’t been put there as decoration. There were bookcases but no books, a sound system but no CDs, coffee tables but no coffee. The only evidence that organic life existed in the place was the flower arrangement thing on the low table in the centre. But even here – it consisted of three stems of some outrageously enormous lily-type plant – the life that had created such magnificent blooms had been all but strangled out, for they were tied up with lengths of artfully twizzled copper wire and set rigid among a kilo of black pebbles. Jack wondered, not for the first time in his life, why on earth anyone would think that was nice. But thinking this, as usual, made him feel out of step with the world, and he now contemplated his own floral offering with dismay. He felt decidedly scruffy in his suede jacket and chinos. He was glad he’d worn a shirt, at least.

  ‘Great! Come to mine first,’ she’d said, when he’d suggested a restaurant, and Jack had immediately wished he’d thought of somewhere else. The Pot au Feu was currently the restaurant to be seen in in Cardiff. Not because the food was anything particularly special, but because it was the result of a much-hyped collaboration between an ex rugby international with a side-line in falling out of pub doorways and the ‘cockney charmer’ (so it was said) Jimmy Bath, the television embodiment of The New Estuary Cuisine. Jack had only been there once, on the night it had opened – some twot clearly thinking it would make sound business sense to send a freebie to a journo who wrote only about sport – and, like the hack he really was, he hadn’t been that impressed.

  He swilled wine around his mouth. He’d regretted his choice even before that, in fact, because he actually couldn’t afford it right now. And as she went there so often she’d hardly be impressed. But no, she was enthusiasm personified. ‘Perfect, perfect!’ she’d cooed at him. So here he was.

  He’d spent the preceding days in quiet and anxious conversation with himself about what exactly he had hoped to achieve by inviting Allegra out to dinner. It would boost his limp self-esteem to bed her, for certain, but beyond that he really didn’t know. Assuming they did have sex (come on, who was he kidding?) would she then expect to be serviced on a regular basis? Would she want to ‘go out’ with him? And if she did, would he want to ‘go out’ with her? He’d not quite thought that through. (No. Surely not. Allegra didn’t ‘go out’ with people, did she? She had lovers. Affaires. A different thing altogether, he thought.)

  There was a large gilt-framed mirror hanging above the fireplace. He looked at himself and saw the face of a man for whom indecision had long been the lifestyle of choice. It was the face of a worried man, the forehead etched with the rift valleys and tributaries of stress. As if every one of the pounds he’d shed since his divorce had been scooped out specifically with crenelation in mind. Was right now the start of his mid-life crisis?

  Another face came to join his. Allegra, who’d answered the door to him in a blink-making firework explosion of a kimono and a large helping of feminine fluster (she was not-yet-ready on purpose, he judged), had returned, primped and painted and ready for action. It may have been an illusion, but she seemed to have even less on now. It was only late March but she had nothing bar a length of green crepe stuff between her and the elements. It could have been a dress, or a top and skirt, or some altogether different variety of womenswear. He wasn’t sure. But, whatever it was, it shimmered and plunged and generally moved around her body as if busy making love to her itself.

  She popped her chin on his shoulder.

  ‘You look nice,’ he said. Meaning it. She generally did.

  ‘So do you,’ she said. ‘And I love that tie. Is it Hermes?’

  ‘No, it’s St Michael’s,’ he said. Which made her laugh. It was funny. Making Allegra laugh was something that came easily to him. He didn’t have to do anything funny. Didn’t have to think about it. Didn’t they say women got turned on by men that made them laugh? There had to be something in it, when you looked at Woody Allen. Jack didn’t think he was particularly funny, but perhaps that was why Allegra wanted to shag him so much. Right now, quite possibly. Because he could feel her hip bone pressed up right against his left buttock.

  ‘And you smell so delicious, too,’ she said, giving him his shoulder back and drawing alongside him in front of the mirror to roll her lips around a bit and poke at her hair. He resisted the urge to check if there was now a beige blob on his jacket. Her face did have an awful lot of powder on it. You didn’t see it from a distance, but up close she was seriously dusty.

  And she seemed shorter tonight than she usually did. She couldn’t have been, of course, and she was still in the spindly footwear she tended to favour. And he hadn’t grown, so perhaps it was just that she was stooping a bit, in an attempt to appear less scary. Whatever. It was cheering. And very much in her favour. She was scary enough at five foot seven, or whatever height she was.

  He drained his wine and she led him out into the hallway, where she put on a long black leather coat. She then spent some moments hoicking the sleeves up her forearms. It made her look as though she intended a veterinary diversion, to shove her arms up a cow’s bottom or something. Then she swirled a stripy woollen scarf around her long neck, and announced herself ready to go.

  It wasn’t a good choice, as it turned out. Almost as soon as they entered the restaurant people started waving and cooing at them – OK, mainly at her – and by the time their drinks arrived (together with a small white dish containing what looked like the droppings of a large, sick rodent, but were apparently date-and-cambozola hors d’oevres) it was beginning to feel as if they were not sitting in a restaurant at all, but behind a post office counter on benefit day.

  ‘Chester!’ she panted. ‘Adelia!’ she breathed. ‘Oh, Timmy, you old devil! I thought you were in Penang!’ It was pretty tedious. Even the arrival of an elderly lady in a poncho saying, ‘Goodness – Jack! How lovely to see you! I still listen in, you know,’ was insufficient to quell his increasing irritation. He didn’t like to tell Allegra that it was only Hil’s grandmother, who’d been a presenter there herself in about 1803. Jack didn’t like this sort of thing. No. He hated this sort of thing. He had forgotten quite how much.

  But Allegra was as astute as she was sociable, and when the oily waiter came up to take their order, she leaned across the table and beckoned him to do likewise.

  ‘Jesus, this is dire, don’t you think? Shall we just order main courses and head up to the Stones for a drink after?’

  He didn’t think she thought it was dire for one minute. You didn’t get to know almost the entire clientele of a restaurant unless you frequented it a very great deal. But that didn’t matter. He would much rather be in a saloon bar with a pint in his hand. Plus she’d seem less scary in the pub.

  Except that when they were finally in the pub, lubricated by two small buckets of wine, she became voluble and not a little amorous. She kept stroking his jacket, which made him feel like a Pekingese dog.

  ‘You,’ she said, prodding him in the chest with a fingernail, ‘have been a very very naughty boy, you know.’

  Jack slurped the head off his pint. ‘I have?’

  Allegra slipped her hand along his thigh and pinched his flesh. ‘For keeping me waiting so long.’

  They didn’t stay long. Half an hour after they got there a loud and drunken hen party fetched up. The women, who were mainly corpulent and plain, were all wearing big T-shirts with stupid slogans daubed on the back and, to a man, black stockings. The bride-to-be sported a range of flashing accessories and a novelty condom-based hat.

  ‘Home, I think,’ announced Allegra, after she’d been barged from behind for the third time. Jack nodded. There was no point in staying anyway. The DJ – who up until then had been tinkering listlessly with chart staples at low volume – clearly felt invigorated at the arrival of so many wom
en in suspenders (the lighting was dim), and had cranked up the music to a level where the only form of communication possible was semaphore or signing. Worse than that, he’d dug out a microphone from somewhere and four of the hen-ees, or whatever they were called, had mounted his rostrum, huddled sweatily around it, and were now massacring ‘Angels’ so loudly and comprehensively that Jack wouldn’t have been surprised if Gabriel himself had flown in from on high to tell them to shut the hell up.

  ‘Home,’ he repeated, though unsure which home she meant. But not for long. She had her hand under his jacket and was stroking his bottom.

  Allegra’s kitchen was like the flight deck of a cartoon spaceship. Everything was either white or silver, bar the contents of the chrome bowl that sat on the work surface. These were lemons and limes and oranges and grapefruit, all so artfully arranged and so unrealistically gleamy that he wasn’t sure they weren’t plastic. But, no, she plucked out a lime now and lobbed it playfully at him.

  ‘Deal with that, will you, big boy, while I go get the gin?’

  So he found a knife and cut two thin slices from the lime, while Allegra poured slugs of gin. Then she splashed in some tonic, said, ‘Upstairs, I think, don’t you?’ and led the way up her long hill of stairs.

  She kissed him a bit then, all citrus saliva, then slipped off her stilettos and went around lighting candles, before disappearing, purring at him, into the en suite.

  Marooned in the vast bedroom, Jack began to feel more than ever as if he was on the set of a stylish television drama, or strolling through the pages of a glossy magazine. The bed itself, low and wide, was heaped with jewel-coloured cushions and backed with some sort of padded hanging that was strung along an iron pole. It wasn’t a bed you could imagine eating toast in.

  Allegra returned from the en suite still dressed. He had been concerned on this point. She’d become so pointedly, aggressively sexual by now that he had half expected her to return completely naked, thus depriving him of the initiative and a chance to draw level on the lust front. She had, though, he noticed, removed her tights. Or stockings. He didn’t know which. Her slender legs were the colour of French mustard, and her long toes were painted a mother-of-pearl colour, as if they’d been trailed in meringue. She sat on the end of the bed and patted the space beside her.