by Sarah Rayne
‘I honestly think that talking to you has been,’ says Clive, staring at his dew-darkened shoes, ‘you know, it’s very much like your show, I mean, er, a problem shared . . .’
Xavier thinks of Murray, who sometimes cracks a joke relating to this cliché – that a problem shared makes two people miserable, which is a cliché in its own right.
‘I haven’t really done anything.’
‘Well, I’m very . . . I’m very grateful. I didn’t mean to keep, as it were, brow-beating you by phoning the show. And all the emails, and so on. I just didn’t honestly know what to do.’
‘I’m glad to have been able to help.’
‘You must be very used to this conversation.’
‘Not really.’ Xavier toes the grass with the tip of his shoe. ‘Until fairly recently I tended to think that pretty much nothing I said had much of an effect. Or at least – that it was a kind of . . . theoretical exercise. You know. I lost touch with the idea that I could actually make a difference. It was just my job.’
‘And what happened to make you think otherwise?’
‘It’s a long story.’ Xavier rubs his nose. ‘It’s to do with a cleaner.’
This is where the story could end, but it doesn’t; life isn’t so neat. The thousands of tiny consequences of Xavier’s non-intervention in the bullying of Frankie Carstairs, eight weeks or so ago, continue to spawn thousands more, which spawn thousands more again, which run unchecked around London. Still, for now, Clive Donald feels differently about his relationship with the world. A virtual stranger, known to him only as a voice on the radio, has come personally to his aid. Without directly absorbing it, he realizes that every person is connected to every other, and therefore that every lesson he teaches – all those poxy graphs, those weary reprimands to the fat-necked youth eating crisps at the back – has its consequences. Everything has a chance of mattering.
‘How are you going to . . .?’ Clive begins to ask Xavier, when they finally go back inside, stamping off the dew on the doormat. It is almost nine now, and too late for him to get to school even if he had a last-minute attack of conscience. This irreversibility is comforting. Already, the playgrounds will be full of blazers and ties and shouts, energetic cursing, accusations of homosexuality, football games descending into wrestling. Julius Brown, who secretly credits Clive Donald with his success, will be walking more upright than usual through the gates, bag slung over his shoulder, and an engraved maths trophy sitting on his desk at home.
Xavier orders a cab. The two men, never to meet again, shake hands in the hallway.
‘Stay in touch. Email, or call. You don’t have to call the show. Just stay in touch.’
‘I will.’
Clive waves as Xavier opens the car door, crunches it shut. There is a bark from the dog three houses away, as if in deliberate bookending of Xavier’s visit. The cabbie, too, is the same man who brought Xavier here. Xavier gives him the postcode of his flat. The car eases into the stream of just-past-rush-hour traffic sinking slowly into the city’s digestive system. The earlier haze is gone now, and the daylight seems, to Xavier’s eyes, unnaturally bright, almost showy, like the light that greets afternoon cinema-goers when they leave the building.
As often happens, the night without sleep has left Xavier, not exhausted, but full of a confusingly unfocused energy. Home, he looks back on the hours just gone with a strange mixture of incredulity – did I really go to a stranger’s house and act as his counsellor? – and an almost euphoric sense of having done a solidly good thing, the kind of thing he’s rediscovered the joy of doing. He finds it hard to settle down to any other task, even one so simple as pondering what he will say to Murray tonight by way of explanation. He goes to the corner shop and ends up chatting to the Indian man for almost twenty minutes, eagerly learning details of the forthcoming wedding, the terrific wealth of the groom’s parents, who have a house in Surrey with ‘three cars and a fabulous garage’. Even though he’ll be working until 4 a.m. again tonight, Xavier doesn’t want to sleep; he wants to share what happened last night, not just the story, but the feeling that its aftermath has produced. What I really want, he realizes, is to be with Pippa.
‘So this fella you’ve never met is depressed, and you go to his house?’
‘Well, it was a bit more complicated than that . . .’
‘The line’s not too good, pet. I’m on a bus.’
When Xavier calls Pippa she is, of course, on the way to work, or rather leaving work hurriedly in order to go to work somewhere else. The rich client in Marylebone has gone skiing with her partner and child, and Pippa is to give the place the usual three-hour clean in their absence.
‘What, even though they haven’t been at home? What does she expect you to do? Make a mess yourself just so you can clean it up?’
‘She can afford it, though, so why not,’ Pippa snorts. ‘You know, she could probably afford to buy a new house each time the old one gets messy.’
‘Where did she make her money, this woman?’ asks Xavier, unconsciously imitating his mother. He can hear, down the phone, Pippa’s irritated sigh: in her view it’s a waste of time asking where people get money, some people simply have it and other people have to do things to get it off them.
‘It’s a pain that you have to go and clean it even when she’s away, though.’
This is intended to be helpful but, again, it seems to strike a wrong note.
‘It’s not a pain. I’m lucky she’s that stupid that she’ll pay me. I need it.’ The P of stupid disappears in the angry lick of her accent.
In the course of the conversation, conducted over a sonic backdrop of bus sounds – irritable voices, doors creaking open, the sigh of the engine, like an ageing pair of lungs – it becomes clear that Pippa has no time to see Xavier today, and can’t really commit to tomorrow. He feels as if he’s been back-pedalling since he dialled her number, and can sense the glow of the day fading.
It’s time for another gamble.
‘Why don’t I come with you?’
‘What?’
‘Tell me where you’re working and I’ll come and help.’
‘I don’t think I want you to see me at work, pet.’
‘I’ve seen you at work. Remember? You’ve worked in my flat.’ But the memory is still somehow embarrassing, and he tails off.
Then: ‘All right.’ Pippa sighs, making a show of indulging him, and suddenly Xavier is encouraged again. ‘All right. If you’re stupid enough to come to fucking’ – her voice dips a couple of volume notches – ‘to Marylebone, just to see me looking like shit, on my knees with a dustpan and brush, then be my guest.’
Xavier grins.
‘Great. I’ll see you there.’
‘So, he calls the radio show so many times you think he might be dangerous, and he talks about doing away with himself . . .’
‘He just kind of hinted at it.’
‘Hints about doing away with himself – hold this – and you decide the best way to deal with it is to go round his house in the middle of the night?’
‘Well, I wasn’t sure it was the best way, but it did . . . it did seem to work.’
‘Hold this.’
Pippa jiggles the keys in the lock, muttering idle curses to herself, ‘Fucking double lock, fucking door.’ Xavier stands, the blue-and-yellow laundry bag heavy in his hands (how the hell does she cart this everywhere, he wonders), feeling that he would have done better to tell his story when she was not distracted: it’s been rather wasted. The door swings open and they are in a large, opulent hallway, a luxuriously carpeted staircase rising up and away to the right, and above their heads an enormous, glittering chandelier.
‘Well, here it is.’
They stand in the hallway, Pippa surveying the wooden panelling, the expansive tiled floor, and the high arches above the doors, with something like affection: the strange affection of the hunter for the prey.
‘Right. I’m going to start with the living room. Break the back
of that.’
‘I’m serious about helping, you know. What do you want me to do?’
She looks at him, her pale blue eyes amused and disdainful.
‘Do you honestly think you’re at the ability-level we expect in this company?’
‘By “this company” you mean yourself?’
Pippa throws a playful punch to his arm which, catching him on the bone, hurts only slightly less than a non-playful punch might. ‘Remember what your flat was like before I came along?’
‘Yes, I do remember, because it’s getting that way again.’
‘Exactly. Grubby. Do you think I can risk you leaving even an inch of this place grubby? This woman is an important client.’
‘At least let me hoover, or something. Anyone can hoover.’
‘Not anyone can hoover, by any means. You might as well say anyone can play the piano.’
‘Give me a probationary period.’
Pippa shakes her head despairingly.
‘It’s in that cupboard there. Try doing that room. You’ve got ten minutes.’
As he propels the whining machine over the heavy green carpet, Xavier remembers, as a nine-year-old in the passenger seat, being allowed to take the steering wheel of the family’s old Holden as they drove along a country road on some holiday or other.
What would Dad think of this, he wonders, angling the nozzle of the Hoover into a corner made by the edge of an antique bookcase, housing antique books which are never read. I moved to England – almost fifty years after Dad, as he saw it, rescued Mum from it. I don’t have a car; to him, that would have been as unthinkable as not having a roof on the house. And I’m hoovering a rich woman’s house, in order to impress another woman.
‘Stop, stop right there.’ Pippa, her white-blonde hair now scraped back with painful-looking hairclips, sweeps into the room and jolts him out of these thoughts. She bends down and pushes a button to silence the machine. ‘See what I mean? Look. You’ve missed a bit there.’ Out come her indignant fingers for counting. ‘A bit there. You’ve not even gone there. This is hopeless. I could have vacuumed this room better with my feet.’
‘But I did go there. And there.’
‘Then there’s something wrong with your action, pet. Come on. Look.’ She replaces the hose in Xavier’s hands, and lays her hands on top of his, like someone teaching first tennis strokes to a child. ‘We’re going to walk through it.’
With a toe, she presses the button again, and the Hoover roars at the thick carpet. Xavier feels Pippa pressed in behind him, the fullness of her breasts against his back, her hands on his. She says something which he loses under the noise.
‘What?’
‘I said,’ she says, louder, ‘you are lucky to get this sort of training. I could charge for this. Look. Push down on it. Force it to take the dirt in. Don’t just trust it. Force it.’
‘Can you say that again, “Force it to take the dirt in”?’
‘Why?’
‘It was kind of adorable, with your accent.’
‘You are a patronizing fucker,’ mutters Pippa into his ear, and the suddenness of the contact is one intimacy too far.
Xavier pivots and kisses her. She closes her eyes; her hands search out the buttons of his shirt.
In a stranger’s house for the second time in twenty-four hours, Xavier, naked, stares up at the woman straddling him. His hands reach around to grasp her back, the curve at the tops of her buttocks; his fingers, as if equipped with sensors, search for freckles, moles, every tiny detail of her skin. He feels, with a wild joy, the weight of her on top of him. Helplessness, in sex, is something he has never known. He starts to speak, but Pippa leans down and silences him with a kiss. Her strong hands are on his chest. He looks up at the ornate ceiling, a stucco, he thinks it’s called. His brain focuses on whatever it can.
She grits her teeth and sighs deeply, as, inside her, Xavier moves. He is shaking; his whole body feels like a bag about to burst. He feels as if no one has ever done anything as good as this.
Edith Thorne will never have sex with anyone other than her husband again. She knows she has acted inexcusably and jeopardized everything. She broke it off with the politician instantly: it was in his best interests, too, in fact it was the only way he could maintain any sort of career, and he aims to be in the Cabinet in five years. Edith and her agent Maxine have won, with bribery and threats, the silence of a couple of other people who know things. But there is still the barman, Alessandro.
He won’t accept that it’s over. He’s texted and called her almost non-stop these past five days. She has had to block his number from her phone, but the texts still arrive, and if Phil were to go through her mobile – which he’s a lot more likely to do, in the light of recent events – there could be further disaster.
They met in the bar at a wrap party for a mini-series Edith presented, about people obsessed with celebrities. Alessandro, six foot three, olive-skinned, was done up as Clark Gable with a joke-shop moustache and bow tie, his hair gleaming with gel. He was well over ten years younger than Edith, and as soon as she saw him, she wondered what it would be like to fuck him, even if he did look ridiculous at that moment. Later, on her way back from the toilets, she walked past the staff room and saw him, clocking off, pulling his shirt over his head to reveal a smooth, muscle-bound chest, and wondered even more. The answer was that it was very good, extraordinarily good, that night and on several other nights, and yes, maybe she did tell him she loved him.
And so, although she’s been putting it off, she owes him at least a goodbye. In the basement of the £1.2 million house – whose value, neighbours mutter bitterly, must be a bit less than that now, since the area became infested with photographers – she dials the blocked number, holding her breath, hoping for his voicemail. But no, she should have waited till tonight, when he’ll be working.
As it is, he answers on the second ring.
‘Edith, at last. Thank fucking God.’
His English is good, but heavily influenced by American cinema, and as a result – especially because of his accent – he often sounds like an actor in a TV movie.
‘Alessandro, listen . . .’
But it’s even harder than she expected to explain; the silence on the other end is even chillier. Braced for an argument – she’s in practice for those – she instead has to deliver her justifications into a wall of ice. I have to think about my family. I shouldn’t have said I love you. I shouldn’t have led you on. It’s been an amazing adventure. I think in life you have to just let things happen sometimes. She speaks for two long minutes unchecked.
‘So . . . so I’m saying goodbye.’
‘This is bullshit.’ Alessandro’s voice is angry, but a quiet, measured anger, worse – thinks Edith – than hysteria.
‘I know I’ve handled things really badly.’
‘Yes. You have handled things really badly.’
Pause.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Edith, I need you.’
She wasn’t prepared for this. The guy is twenty-two, for Christ’s sake; they met in a bar and had casual sex.
‘Well, you can’t have me.’
The muffled sound of sobbing comes shuffling through the phone.
‘Alessandro . . .’
‘Please, Edith, if you change your mind—’
She won’t change her mind, she says. She ends the call, and vows to ignore the phone for the next hour.
Edith leaves for the show feeling somewhat shaken, forgets to lock the front door, and then on returning to it realizes she’s left half of her gym clothes in a bag next to the washing machine. She sits in the back of the car – its driver professionally tight-lipped again – and thinks about Alessandro. She’d been familiar with the hazards of sleeping around, the scandal and shame that have now caught up with her, but she never expected someone to, of all things, fall in love with her. And of all people, a tall, masculine Italian who looked like the perfect caricature of a guy who
would sleep with you and leave before you woke up, and yet is now crying himself through the afternoon. She feels sorry for him for a few moments, and then gets out a mirror and applies lipstick, and brings the notes for today’s show out of her bag. It’s a pity, but she can’t be responsible for everyone’s feelings. Really, you can’t be responsible for anyone’s feelings, thinks Edith, approving of her face in the mirror. You can’t be responsible for what happens to other people. You just have to live your life.
X
While the nocturnal version of London sleeps, snacks, paces, sweats, shits, fights and breathes its way through another midweek night, events domino mercilessly on.
In a rented studio flat in Tottenham, Italian barman Alessandro Romano is heartbroken when he returns home from work at two in the morning, because he was dumped by his lover Edith Thorne, because she had to save her marriage, because she’d been exposed by the journalist Stacey Collins, because her friend Maggie lost faith in her job and decided to spread dirt about her clients, because an estate agent called Roger was ratty with her, because he’d accidentally received a nasty text message from his colleague Ollie who was using an unfamiliar phone, because his BlackBerry had been stolen by a fat kid, Julius, because the kid needed money for a gym membership, because he was sacked by egotistical restaurant owner Andrew Ryan, who was overreacting to a harsh review, which was penned by Jacqueline Carstairs, who was in a bad mood because her son Frankie was beaten up, because Xavier didn’t stop the bullies from doing so. Alessandro, the eleventh person in the chain that began that cold day, looks around his poky flat somewhere between distaste and desperation.
Xavier has, by now, forgotten that original incident once again. At two in the morning, he lies with Pippa in the bed where they have spent a large portion of their time since that first, ungainly, wonderful sex in the home of one of Britain’s foremost female entrepreneurs.
A fair amount of that time has of course been taken up with more sex. Xavier loves having sex with Pippa. He loves her superior, almost intimidating, bodily strength; the way she sometimes stands completely naked before they begin, next to the bed, looking straight at him, daring him to look straight back. He adores the fact that she is the hungriest, most visceral lovemaker he’s ever known, and yet her peculiar sense of decorum, her faintly old-fashioned commitment to common sense and not making a fuss, keeps intruding; she flames a delicious colour, looks faintly appalled to find herself crying out, and afterwards forbids all talk of what has happened. There is no reviewing, it is briskly filed away with the rest of the day’s completed tasks. Indeed, Xavier thinks wryly, sex is one of the only things she doesn’t talk unstoppably about, though he feels guilty even thinking, let alone vocalizing, the joke. They often make love in the afternoons, between her cleaning appointments, before his evening with Murray and his listeners, and her return to the side of her needy, now heavily pregnant sister Wendy.
