by Julie Cohen
‘Muddle?’ asked her mother. ‘As in confuse?’
Polly grunted and poked mint into the glasses. She poured rum and soda and tried a sip. ‘This just tastes of rum. How come they tasted so good in the bar? Maybe they need sugar, do you think?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Emily. ‘I’ve never had one.’
‘I’ll go get the sugar bowl. But then the ice is going to melt. Oh, bother.’
‘Put the glasses in the freezer,’ suggested Emily.
Polly snapped her finger. ‘My genius sister.’ Balancing four glasses in her two hands, she went into the house.
‘Do you think your sister will ever settle down?’ her mother asked. ‘You were married at her age.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ said Emily, wondering at this idea: her mother asking her for advice or reassurance.
‘I suppose she hasn’t met a Christopher yet.’
‘Perhaps she doesn’t want a Christopher.’
Emily glanced at her husband: tall, lean, his legs pale in his shorts. She hardly ever really looked at him; he had been a fixture of her life for so long. Here by the side of the pool, holding a Cuban cigar he had no intention of smoking, he looked so very English. Much more English than he’d ever looked in Bolivia, where he’d always had a purpose and didn’t wear things like shorts. He laughed at something that her father said: his polite English chuckle.
He adored her. She knew that he did, although he never said anything of the sort. She caught him looking at her, sometimes, late at night when she was lying beside him in bed reading a book, when he thought she wasn’t paying attention. He loved her so very much and had loved her since they had met when they were students together at Cambridge, although he had gone for a long time without telling her. Bolivia had been her idea, not his.
And yet he didn’t know what was in the corners of her mind. The way she could still feel Robbie’s lips under the pads of her fingers.
Christopher didn’t know. He was going on loving her, without knowing. He had gone on not knowing for ten years.
‘Will you speak with her?’ her mother asked her.
‘With who?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Your sister. She won’t listen to me, or your father. I worry that she’s so . . . frivolous.’
‘That’s Polly.’
‘She admires you so much though. She’s always hero-worshipped you. You could have a word.’
Polly came back outside with the bottle of rum and an empty glass. ‘I can’t make it taste good,’ she announced. ‘We might as well drink it straight.’
‘All right,’ said Emily. ‘I’ll speak with her.’
‘You what?’
Polly leaned on the sink, peering in the mirror as she applied a thick swoop of black eyeliner.
Emily shut the bathroom door behind her, speaking quietly. ‘I told Mum and Dad and Christopher that I’m going out with you tonight.’
‘You are?’ She grinned and started on the other eye. ‘That’s fantastic! All you’ve wanted to do since we’ve got here is sleep in the evenings. I was beginning to think that Bolivia had sucked all the fun out of you.’
‘Are you . . . you’re thinking of staying out quite late, aren’t you?’
‘It’s not a night out unless you’re on the beach when the sun rises. I’m excited you’re coming with me!’
‘The thing is, Polly, I’m not.’
Polly put down her eyeliner. She reached for the cigarette she’d left burning on the side of the sink and took a puff from it. ‘You’re not coming out with me? Then why did you say—’
‘I need you to cover for me.’
‘Cover for you?’
‘You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want. I’ve already told Mum and Dad and Christopher. You don’t even have to agree. We’ll go out together, and I’ll call a cab to pick me up on the corner.’
‘Em, why do you have to—’ Understanding dawned in Polly’s eyes. ‘Oh no, you’re not seeing him, are you?’
Emily didn’t reply. But her cheeks flushed bright red.
‘You can’t. You can’t! He’s . . . what about Christopher?’
‘Christopher will never know,’ she whispered. ‘You can’t tell him. It would make him very upset.’
‘Don’t do it, then! Emily, this man is bad news. You’ve been fine without him for ten years.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I do understand. I understand completely!’ She ground out her cigarette in the sink. ‘Bloody hell, Em, he told me he just wanted to see you to apologise. I shouldn’t have given him the phone number.’
‘It’s not your fault. It has nothing to do with you, Poll. I just need to see him.’
Polly looked hard at her. Emily did her best to look steadily back.
‘You’ve seen him already, haven’t you?’
‘You don’t understand. I need to see him again. I need to, Polly. Only once, I swear.’
‘I’m not going to lie for you.’
‘You don’t have to lie. You don’t have to say anything at all. Just go out and have a good time. I’ll be back home before you are.’
‘But Christopher,’ Polly said. ‘He’s a bit of a bore but he loves you, Em. He really really loves you.’
‘He will never know,’ Emily repeated. ‘Not unless you tell him. And even if you won’t help me, I’m going out tonight. I’ve made my mind up. All you’re doing by agreeing is helping Christopher not to get hurt.’
Polly frowned at her. ‘This doesn’t even sound like you. You’re not manipulative, or secretive. You’re not like this.’
Emily thought of the love for Robbie she’d kept secret in her heart, every day for ten years. Secret, most of the time, even from herself.
‘I’m like this now,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The hotel was out near the airport: a newly built box, squat and ugly. They signed the register as Mr and Mrs Smith and they took the lift to the top floor. There was an elderly couple in it with them, not saying anything, and Emily shifted from foot to foot, certain that the couple knew that they weren’t married to each other, that they should not be together, that they were here to do something wrong. It was in the way the man of the couple stared at the closed doors, careful not to catch their eye. The lift stopped on the third floor and the couple got out before them and Emily walked beside Robbie in the other direction, glancing back over her shoulder to see if the other couple was watching them. They weren’t.
Her skin itched, her heart pounded. She couldn’t catch her breath. It was the way she had first felt at altitude in La Paz, arriving from a place where the air was normal to a place where it was rare and thin.
She’d got used to that eventually. Would she get used to this?
This was against everything she believed in. She had worked so hard to make her life a good one.
Robbie held the hotel room door open for her and she went in first. Ten years ago they had done this. A different country, a different decade, an old hotel with a pink ruffled bedspread and the sound of seagulls outside the window. Back when there had been no one else, just the two of them. They had joked with the desk clerk and used Robbie’s real name. Her cheeks had tingled with sunburn and excitement.
This hotel was new and the only sound was of planes overhead, going somewhere else. Her fingers were numb.
He shut the door behind them. They stood, several feet apart, looking at each other.
‘What did you tell him?’ he asked her.
‘That I was out with my sister. What did you tell her?’
‘I didn’t tell her anything. I’m . . . often out.’
‘This is wrong,’ she said. ‘It’s wrong for us to do this.’
‘We’ve done it before.’
‘That was different.’
‘But you want to. Or else you wouldn’t have come.’
She nodded.
He reached out and touched the tips of her fingers. She shivered.
‘Emily,’ he murmured. ‘I love you. I still love you, all this time, since the first moment I met you. Nothing else can matter, can it?’
‘Please. Please don’t say anything.’ She stepped forward; close enough so that she could feel the heat from his body. ‘Please just kiss me.’
That last time in that hotel in Lowestoft, ten years ago, she had made him promise not to promise anything. She had not known if she was ever going to see him again. She had taken refuge in not thinking, only feeling. Living right here, now in the moment. Robbie was the only one who could make her feel that way.
He looked down at her. In the dark brown of his eyes she saw the decision that they had made, and that could not be unmade.
Then he bowed his head and kissed her.
It happened instantly. As soon as his lips touched hers, as soon as his breath touched her face, she was aflame, eager, desperate. She clenched her hands in his shirt and pulled him closer, as close as he could get, and he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her closer too. It had never been like this with Christopher, never like this. She didn’t have to close her eyes and she didn’t have to try to feel anything she didn’t. She felt Robbie’s body against hers and she tasted him with her tongue and touched him with her hands and everything felt monstrously, hideously, perfect and right.
She was clumsy with desire and could hardly negotiate the buttons of his shirt, but when she did and touched his chest and shoulders, his skin was hot and smooth and so entirely familiar and she remembered how she had dreamed about it, and woken herself up to try to forget. The memory of his skin had never left her, even though she had tried to make it disappear.
‘Emily,’ Robbie murmured against her lips.
They were hurting others. They were hurting themselves. He was close enough so that he was a blur of darkness and light, hair and eyes and skin, the scent of salt and tobacco. He smelled and he felt exactly as he had been ten years before, when they hadn’t hurt anyone, when all of the pain had lain in their future.
She tugged at his clothes and her fingers touched an unfamiliar patch of skin. Something she didn’t remember, something new. It was pitted and tight, at the top of his thigh, and when she drew back a little bit to look at him, he pulled her closer to kiss him again. He grasped her hand gently and put it on his chest, away from his scars.
Later, when they were naked, when they had made love and were lying side by side on the bed, the air conditioning cooling their skin, Emily ran her fingers over his scar again: the shrapnel wound from Vietnam. He never looked at it, made sure his shorts were long enough to cover it, but when she touched it, he glanced down. It was a burn and a puckered puncture and a smooth white line: the outward signs of everything that had happened to them while they were apart.
This time he let her touch it. He watched her face as she touched him and he felt her fingertips on the skin that was strangely both sensitive and dead, as if there were a thin and brittle sheet of glass laid over his raw nerve endings.
‘Did it hurt?’ she whispered.
‘They gave me a lot of morphine.’ It was his standard answer for when he talked about it, which was never.
‘But it must have hurt.’
‘It felt like a punishment that I deserved.’
She looked into his face, and he saw there were tears in her eyes. ‘Robbie, you could have died and I would never have known. I never would have found out.’
‘I was mostly numb,’ he told her. ‘I was numb my whole time over there. I had to be, to see what I saw. And do what I did.’
‘I can’t imagine you numb. You’ve always been the most alive person I know.’ Her touch on his scar was like a balm, warming and softening the tightened skin.
‘We were going up the Mekong River to rescue a patrol boat that had run aground. We stopped a sampan, a routine check. There were children in it. The man had a grenade. I tried not to . . . you couldn’t . . . if I felt the truth of everything that I saw then I would have . . .’ He swallowed. ‘I don’t talk about it. There are no words, anyway. Just a . . . noise. And a scent.’
A peppery scent, heavy, catching the back of his throat, making his tongue clumsy. Hammering of guns, the giant footsteps of shells exploding. Screams.
‘There’s a scent to the slums in La Paz,’ she said quietly. ‘There are all the normal human scents, cooking and sweat and urine and faeces, and another scent. Like rotting flowers left too long in a vase. Rotting funeral flowers. There was a girl . . . a pregnant girl with a rat-bitten foot. I couldn’t help her.’
Her sigh feathered on his skin. He put his hand over hers, both of their palms together covering the twisted skin on his leg.
‘I can still smell it now,’ she told him. ‘Even though I’ve left. Sometimes I can taste it.’
He nodded.
‘Bourbon drowns out the taste,’ he said. ‘For a little while.’
‘And what about the noise?’
‘I sail. When I can. It’s quiet on the water.’
‘Is it quiet now?’
‘Yes.’ He rolled on to his side, and kissed her. ‘With you, it is.’
‘You could have died,’ she said again, ‘and I would have never known.’
‘You would have known,’ he told her. ‘We’ll always know.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Christopher was asleep when she returned. It wasn’t late, hardly past midnight. Polly was still out. She had showered in the hotel, but she showered again before she went to bed.
Her husband didn’t stir as she climbed in beside him and turned her back on his sleeping form. Without moving, her hands rehearsed the way she had touched Robbie; her lips remembered their kisses.
She was exhausted, but she didn’t fall asleep for a very long time.
Marie was sitting at the kitchen table when he got home. She had a cup of coffee and a full ashtray. ‘Hey,’ he greeted her as he walked in and got a glass down from the cupboard to fill at the sink.
‘There isn’t any beer,’ she said.
‘That’s OK, I’m good with water.’ He took a drink and Marie lit another cigarette. She was staring at the wall, a line dug between her eyebrows.
‘Well, guess I’ll give him a kiss and turn in,’ he said, heading for the door.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ she said.
He paused.
‘Do what?’ Though he knew.
‘I can’t sit here and wait for you to come home, not knowing what state you’ll be in.’
‘I’m not drunk.’
‘You’re not drunk tonight, maybe. But you usually are. When you even come home at all.’
‘I didn’t know you waited for me,’ he said, knowing he was changing the subject unfairly. ‘I thought usually you were asleep.’
‘You don’t know anything half the time. I know why you do it.’
He thought of Emily, thought about lying beside her on top of the sheets in the hotel room. The way she had touched him and made years disappear as if they had never been. Made his scarred skin feel whole again.
‘Do you believe in God?’
He was surprised by the question, and a little relieved. He thought she’d been going to ask him if he loved her.
‘You know I’ve never been one for religious stuff,’ he said.
‘But you believe in sin.’
Emily believed in sin. She thought they had done wrong.
‘I . . . don’t know,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I thought you’d decided you were done with all this, Marie.’
‘Everything that you do is dragging us down with you,’ she said. ‘You don’t care that you’re putting William and me in danger.�
��
He sighed. ‘This is from your parents, isn’t it? They never liked me.’
‘I’m the mother of your child. I’m your wife. And you have no respect for me at all.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Then why are you out every night? Down at JB’s or wherever you go? And the nights you’re here, even if you’re not drinking, you don’t look at me. You don’t talk to me. I might as well not exist.’
There was no answer he could give her that wasn’t either cowardly or hurtful. So he said nothing.
She stabbed out her cigarette half-smoked, next to the other cigarette butts, each imprinted with the coral of her lipstick.
‘I’m through with it,’ she said. ‘I’m finished. I can’t live like this any more.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ he said to her. ‘It really isn’t your fault at all, Marie.’
‘I know. It’s yours.’
He nodded.
This was a relief, really. To have it spoken out loud, everything he had been thinking, that he wasn’t sure that she had noticed. But of course she’d noticed.
‘But it’s over,’ she continued. ‘It’s over. I can’t put up with this any more. I don’t deserve to be treated like this.’
‘No, you don’t,’ he said, honestly.
‘So I’ve made a decision. Either you’re here with us, Bob, or you’re not. If you want to be a family, be a family.’
‘I want to be William’s father,’ he said. Wishing he had a beer in his hand.
‘That’s the thing, Bob. William comes with me. We’re a package deal.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that either you start acting like a real husband, or William and I are leaving.’ She knocked another Winston out of the package and struck a match. He noticed that her hands were jittery, but her face was closed. Chin out. Eyes hard.
He remembered when he had first met her. It had been Fourth of July weekend in Peacock Park, with picnic blankets spread out everywhere, radios blasting out competing music. They’d both been drunk. Her hair was longer, long enough for her to sit on, and it had been in Pocahontas braids with coloured ribbons on the ends. ‘Catch this!’ she’d yelled to him in her Midwestern accent and she’d tossed him a beach ball and he’d bounced it off his head. His leg still hurt back then, but he’d forgotten it for a little while when she’d laughed.
