The Bed I Made

by Lucie Whitehouse

  ‘Are you having fun? Are you – really? I don’t think you know what you’re doing these days. You work all day and all night, or not at all. You drink far too much – I know you don’t tell me the truth about it. And this isn’t the first time you’ve done this recently, either, is it?’ She waved her hand backwards.

  ‘Oh come on, it’s not like I do it often.’

  ‘There was that guy two weeks ago.’

  ‘That was different, that was . . .’

  ‘How was it different?’

  There was a few seconds’ silence and for the first time in our fifteen years of friendship, I saw how I could dislike her. ‘Just forget it,’ I said, and my voice sounded cold even to me. ‘I’ll speak to you later.’ I turned away from her and walked back in. Just inside the door, I glanced back to see if she was still standing there but she had already gone.

  His friend seemed to have disappeared, too, but my man was standing just where we’d been before. He’d been to the bar again and I took a mouthful of gin from the glass he handed me.

  ‘Not going home then?’ he asked.

  Later, the cab dropped us outside a red-brick mansion block. Soho had been busy still but once the sound of the taxi’s engine had faded into the distance, his road was quiet. The streetlights shone bleakly down a long avenue lined with BMWs, Mercedes, Jaguars. Nothing moved, not a car, or another person, or even the leaves on the trees. He closed the front door behind us and put his hand in the small of my back as we climbed the wide staircase to the first floor and went along the corridor. The door of his flat opened into a hallway almost as large as my bedroom. On the wall there was a single picture, a stark black-and-white line-drawing which looked Japanese. Through a door to the right, I could see a dining room: a glass table with an iron structure, eight matching chairs. The carpet was cream.

  He snapped another switch and we went through to the sitting room. Most of the rooms I knew were full of stuff: soft chairs, candlesticks, piles of books and magazines, lamps, prints on the walls; this one had two low black leather sofas and a glass coffee table. There was a flat-screen television and an expensive stereo on the shelf by the fireplace but otherwise the room was empty. For a reason I couldn’t identify, the difference was exciting. He came up behind me and turned me around, putting his hands around my face, pressing his thumbs behind my jaw, moving his tongue into my mouth.

  Later, pinned under him, I pushed his shoulder, making him stop.

  ‘I don’t know your name,’ I said.

  ‘Richard.’

  ‘Kate.’

  ‘Nice to meet you.’ He raised one of his eyebrows and the challenge was there again. I narrowed my eyes a little and looked straight back at him.

  In the morning I woke up alone. I ran my palm over the bed where he had lain and took a handful of the sheet and pulled it to my nose. It smelt of his body, a light soap scent mixed with a deeper musk note and sweat. I lay in bed for a minute, remembering. We hadn’t slept until the alarm clock on the night table had read half past five and the gap in the curtains began to let in the first grey dawn light. I thought about the muscles in his shoulders and how his back had tapered to his waist and the cleft in his buttocks. It was clear he went to the gym. Black hair covered his chest and ran in a line from his navel into his groin. I thought about how he had held my hip, his thumb pressing the bone, his fingers reaching round to dent the flesh of my backside.

  Suddenly afraid that he would come back and be annoyed to find me lazing presumptuously in his bed, I swung my legs over the side. The varnished floorboards were cold on my feet and the insides of my thighs ached. I bent slowly down to pick up my skirt and heard footsteps outside the bedroom door.

  ‘You’re not going yet,’ he said.

  I turned, unsure whether or not it was a question. He was leaning against the jamb, a large towel tucked in around his waist, his hair wet and slicked back. His eyes moved over me, making me acutely conscious of my nakedness. The satin skirt with its peacock-feather pattern hung limply between my fingers, its rich blues and greens contrasting with my pale flesh.

  ‘Stay for breakfast – I’ve been out to get it. The bathroom’s down the hall.’

  I hesitated, then laid the skirt gently on the edge of the bed. By the doorway he stood aside to let me pass and I tried to look as though I were confident, walking naked past a man whom I’d known fewer than twelve hours and yet who had spread me across his bed like a merchant laying out a piece of cloth.

  The bathroom was humid with the rosemary scent of expensive masculine unguents. I rubbed the steam off the mirror and looked at my face. I had a glow to which I had no right after so little sleep. In my eyes there was a strange light and it took me a few seconds to identify it: a mix of pride at my daring with a small measure of exhilarating fear. I opened the glass door of the shower cubicle and stepped on to its slatted wooden floor. A storm of water fell from the ceiling and I turned my face up into it. I searched my mind for the name of the feeling that coursed through me and found that it was a vivid awareness of being alive.

  As I was using the comb that he had left by the sink, there were footsteps in the corridor. ‘There’s a dressing-gown on the back of the door,’ he said.

  It was the sort found in expensive hotels: a waffle fabric in heavy white cotton. Helen had one just like it, and I had always coveted it. I tied the belt tightly round my waist and went through to the kitchen where he was making an espresso with a Gaggia machine not much smaller than the one in my local Italian coffee shop; engine-like, it covered four feet or more of the lovely marble work top. I stood awkwardly for a moment taking in the expensive sparsity of the room, the butcher’s block, the Sabatier knives on the metal strip above the counter, until he turned from the melon he was slicing and ushered me on to a chair at the table. A minute or so later he slid the chopping board on to the table and sat down next to me. It struck me that there was something practised about his ease.

  ‘Do you do this often – go home with strange girls from bars?’

  He laughed. ‘Of course not – do you?’

  I pulled a mock-offended face. ‘Are you surprised I came back with you?’

  ‘What you really want to know is whether I think less of you for it.’

  ‘What makes you think your opinion carries any weight with me at all?’ I said, raising my eyebrows at him.

  He looked momentarily taken aback, then laughed and leaned across to kiss me, putting his hands on either side of my head. The odd excitement that I’d felt in the pit of my stomach the previous evening renewed itself. After a moment, he pulled away and looked at my face. Again, the intensity of his stare was like a beam of light, so strong it was disorientating. Then he stood and scooped me up, lifting me from the chair and carrying me across the room to the counter. He set me down on the edge of it and kissed me again before pushing me backwards and parting the dressing-gown. His mouth hovered over me. For a second, I thought he was going to bite me. Then, glancing up and smiling, he lowered his head.

  Later I left his flat and stepped out into the bright light of a Sunday afternoon. My low-cut top and the peacock skirt were obviously evening clothes; everyone who saw me would know I hadn’t been home. My high shoes and the ache in my thighs limited my steps. A couple were unloading boxes from the back of a Mercedes estate and I stopped to let the woman cross the pavement in front of me. In the back of the car there was a small boy strapped into a seat and he watched me impassively through the glass. I caught his gaze and smiled but his expression remained solemn, dappled by the patterning of the leaves of the cherry tree overhead.

  I was in no hurry to find the Tube station. He had offered to call me a cab but I wanted to walk. The world felt distant, removed from me by lack of sleep and by my unfamiliarity with the area. The distance gave me a feeling of power, a sense that the world was a backdrop against which I could act, rather than an unchangeable fact of which I was an insignificant feature. Just around the corner there was a café and a
t one of the tables on the pavement a couple was reading the papers, both comfortable in jeans and T-shirts, she holding a mug between her hands, he leaning on his elbow, absently pressing up the crumbs of a slice of cake. They looked at ease, contented, but I didn’t envy them. I felt wanton and electrified.

  Chapter Five

  The fog that had swallowed the Island had cleared entirely by the morning, even over the estuary. In its place was a sullen dank that darkened everything: the walls of the buildings where I cut through to the newsagent’s seemed damper than before and the tarmac in the Square shone a wet charcoal grey. It was colder, too; coming into the café on the corner, the contrast between the mordant wind and the muggy warmth inside had momentarily taken my breath away.

  I watched as condensation ran in lines down the plate-glass windows. From my table at the back, the whole interior of the little café was visible, all the heavy pine tables with their cruets and the miniature model lighthouses holding the menus in place. In the small glass cabinet by the till was the selection of Danish pastries and cakes; behind it a doorway led away to the kitchen.

  It was late again: quarter to twelve. My body clock was completely out of kilter. Last night, the insomnia had been its worst yet; when I’d turned off the light and lain in the dark waiting for sleep, the moment on the down when I’d been drawn to the edge kept replaying itself in my mind. I was shocked by how close I had come: the memory of it had started my heart racing and then I had thought about Richard again. I remembered hearing the muffled sound of St James’s striking four o’clock.

  The smell of bacon filled the air and my stomach growled. When I’d finally come in from driving I hadn’t been able to make myself eat at all. Now a bacon sandwich seemed a good compromise between the breakfast which I’d slept through and the lunch for which it was still too early. The customers who had been in for coffee were slowly paying and leaving and the waitress circulated, clearing away their dirty cups and wiping the tables with slow arcs of her cloth.

  The local television news last night hadn’t mentioned Alice Frewin and there was no radio in the house. I’d been to buy a paper before coming in but discovered that the County Press only appeared weekly. I bought a copy of The Times instead and now had it spread out on the table in front of me like a prop. In London I thought nothing of sitting in cafés on my own but here I felt oddly self-conscious. I was twenty years younger than anyone else in the room and the only person alone; the other customers were in pairs or threes and greeted the waitress by name. Several times I looked up, aware of eyes on me.

  I’d finished my sandwich and was attempting the crossword by the time they came in. The room was busier again with the start of lunchtime and the table in front of mine was now the only one free and clean. They were a pair of women in their late sixties, I guessed; through the window I had seen them greet each other in the Square. The one who sat on the side of the table nearest me had been lagged like a boiler in multiple jumpers and a green quilted jerkin but quickly began shedding layers once inside. They broke off from their conversation about the cold to order omelettes and tea and I went back to grappling with the crossword. I was months out of practice.

  A few minutes later I heard it, a voice lowered and confidential: ‘Well, something must have been wrong.’ Without moving my head, I flicked a glance in their direction. It was the one with all the jumpers who’d been talking, leaning forward so that her bust rested on the edge of the table.

  ‘I don’t like to think about it,’ her friend said quietly. She had a neat grey page-boy cut and her fringe swung as she shook her head.

  ‘I can hardly think about anything else. I saw her in that boat a thousand times, in all weathers. Rain, wind – it hardly seemed to matter to her, did it? Maybe I even saw her that morning, going out – I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. And to think that that might have been the last time . . .’

  ‘Margaret! Don’t be ghoulish.’

  ‘Well! How am I ghoulish?’ came the response in a quick whisper. ‘It’s no good pretending to me that you’re not thinking about it. And thinking’s not going to influence anything, is it?’

  The waitress appeared at the end of my table and reached across for my plate. ‘Can I get you anything else?’ she said. The woman with her back to me turned a little to look at me, as if she’d only now become aware of my presence.

  ‘Another coffee. Thanks.’ I wasn’t ready to go yet. I lowered my head and wrote out the letters of an anagram on a paper napkin, hoping to disappear into the background again or at least to look preoccupied and oblivious. A minute or two passed and I thought they’d stopped. I worked out the anagram and was writing it in when the voices were lowered again.

  ‘That poor man, though,’ said the woman with the page-boy.

  ‘Poor? Do you think so?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Why would a woman up and do that all of a sudden – do away with herself? What made her?’ Margaret’s voice was full of wondering conspiracy.

  ‘You can’t think he had anything to do with it, surely.’

  ‘Well, something happened.’

  ‘He treated her like a queen. That was plain. That house, the boat, all those foreign holidays – money no object.’

  ‘How long have they been married?’ Margaret said. ‘No children.’

  ‘It’s that generation, isn’t it? They all leave it late; jobs, careers – that’s what’s important to them. My daughter-in-law’s the same – career, career, career. She’s thirty-seven now, been married for eight years. I’ve stopped asking.’

  ‘She didn’t work, though, did she? She wasn’t one of those.’ Margaret lowered her voice still further.

  The waitress brought my new cup of coffee and in doing so drew the attention of the neat-headed woman. I caught her eye as I looked up from the paper and I saw her realise I’d been listening. Pointedly she turned back to her friend and changed the subject. ‘The bins were kicked over again last night – did you see? Rubbish all up the street. It’s time someone gave that boy a proper hiding.’

  I left the café and went back down Quay Street. At the bottom, a few people were waiting by the gate to meet foot passengers from the ferry just arriving. I stood and watched as the handful of cars loaded for the return sailing and then crossed the road on to the quay wall. The water in the harbour was steely green today, taking its grey from the sky, and the wind rocked the boats on the moorings, making an eerie staccato music through their rigging. The lifeboat was in, tied up in its bay. Just ahead of me, a seagull landed on the path, its object an abandoned sandwich. It anchored the bread with its foot and tore at the crust, gulping down the pieces with a singular lack of elegance, regarding me all the while with suspicion, as if I might try and challenge it for the meal.

  As I came back through the door of the cottage, my mobile rang once to tell me I had a text message. I took it out of my bag and looked at the envelope on the screen, hesitating. It was getting harder to ignore him. Now I wanted to dial his number and scream at him: ‘How could you do this to me? This is me.’ Shamefully, though, the ebbing of the fear had also left room for the insidious part of me that wanted just to erase the past week and go back to how we had been before. I wanted my Richard. The thought sent a stab of pain through my chest.

  I locked the door behind me, sat down at the table and opened the message.

  I’m at the airport now, coming back today, and I need to see you. What I did was wrong but let me apologise, Katie. I love you – you know I do.

  Wrong? What he did was wrong? I threw the phone on to the table. Katie. He was the only person in the world who called me that apart from Dad and Matt. It was so calculated: in that one word he knew I would hear his voice, the low tone suggesting we shared things that no one else did, the echo of all the times he had murmured my name into my ear. I imagined him in the departure lounge only a few seconds earlier, thumbs moving over the keys of his phone with customary speed, the second of his early-mornin
g double espressos in front of him. I sat back heavily, winded.

  After supper, I sat in front of the television and tried to concentrate on the news. I’d been here for five days now but I still didn’t feel even slightly comfortable. During the afternoon I’d been at my desk again but it had been impossible to focus on work; instead I had surfed the internet, read halves of articles on the Atlantic Monthly site and looked at the programme of films I was missing at the BFI, all the time trying to work out where he would be, whether his plane would have taken off, whether he was halfway yet. He would certainly have landed by now, past nine o’clock, so where was the barrage of calls? I had pictured him going through his usual aeroplane routine: turning his phone on as soon as the wheels touched the tarmac, standing up before the seatbelt signs were off and then agitating around the baggage carousel, incensed at being held to anyone else’s timetable even for a few minutes, dialling my number over and over.

  Why hadn’t he rung? My mobile was on the pine dresser by the sliding doors, moved deliberately out of my direct line of sight: while it had been on the arm of the sofa, my eyes were flicking on to it every few seconds. Now, suddenly, in the semi-darkness of the corner of the room, the screen started to flash blue. I stood up immediately, feeling sick. The number wasn’t his, however. It was Esther’s.

  ‘Kate?’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘There was a guy here.’

  ‘What? There – in the flat?’

  ‘He rang a few days ago – he thought you were still here. I wouldn’t have let him in just now but he surprised me – he buzzed, said he was passing and thought he’d try and pick up the book he’d left, to save you asking me to post it on.’

  ‘Which book?’

  ‘I didn’t see. Look, I probably wouldn’t even have rung you but – well, it was weird. He didn’t go straight away. He went downstairs but then he just stood on the pavement opposite, looking up at the window. He was fine when he was up here – quite charming, actually – just came in, took the book off the shelf, said thank you at the door and went. But then . . .’