The Bed I Made

by Lucie Whitehouse

  I had taken care with the wrapping and the parcels were neat as hospital beds, tied with ribbon. The first was a Ray Charles recording he’d been looking for, and his smile when he saw it made me smile, too. Next he opened the biography of Stalin which he’d mentioned and then the wallet in oxblood calfskin which I had wrapped only at the last minute because I had loved looking at it so much.

  ‘I’ll think of you whenever I use it,’ he said, putting his fingers against my cheek. He reached around the side of the sofa and pulled the bag forward. ‘These are yours.’

  Inside there were ten or twelve parcels of various sizes. ‘Are they all for me?’

  ‘Some of them are Christmas things but yes, they’re all for you. Leave this one till last.’ He reached in and took out a square parcel about four inches by five, then sat back while I unpacked the bag. There was a pot of Stilton and a bottle of brandy, Belgian chocolates and a box of biscuits. There was a large bottle of the scent I wore – he’d made a note of it, I thought – a Mont Blanc fountain pen, and a set of La Perla underwear in pale pink silk. ‘That’s to share,’ he said.

  When I’d opened them all, the table was covered. ‘It’s too much,’ I said.

  ‘I wanted to buy them for you.’ Then he handed me the small parcel which he’d kept aside. When I took the paper off, I saw that it was an old jewellery box, the tooled ruby leather beginning to wear at the corners. He watched my face while I struggled with the tiny catch, then took it back, opened it easily with a flick of his thumbnail and held it out to me.

  On the ivory satin bed inside there was a gold bangle. The band was plain, just a slim ring, but the clasp was ornate. I eased it out of the box. Each end of the oval finished in a lion’s head so that when, like now, it was fastened, they were muzzle to muzzle. I looked more closely at their faces – there was something human about them, the way the locks of engraved fur streamed back from their foreheads like hair and the expression in their eyes, not a brute rage but a savage, intelligent hunger.

  ‘Fierce creatures for my fierce creature.’

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ I said, without thinking.

  ‘I’m glad you like it. Here.’ He took it from me and I held out my arm while he put it on. I turned my wrist slowly, watching how the reflection of the lights from the tree gleamed on the gold. The lions faced each other off.

  ‘It suits you.’ He caught my hand again and stroked the inside of my arm gently with his finger. I wondered how his lightest touch could evoke such a rush of desire. He read it in my face and smiled knowingly. Then he pulled me round on to his knee and kissed me, fingers already reaching for the black pearl buttons down the front of my dress. The wrapping paper on the floor crunched as I stood up, one foot on either side of his knees, and he ran his hands up my thighs, lifting my skirt, then catching the sides of my knickers and pulling them down in one quick movement. I sidestepped them and lowered myself down over him, watching his face as he leant back and closed his eyes, his mouth falling slightly open. His hand skimmed up from my waist and slipped between the open buttons. I couldn’t have cared less that the blinds were up. I watched the different expressions of pleasure pass over his face like the reflections of clouds across water and my hair fell into his eyes.

  ‘Happy Christmas, sweetheart,’ he said afterwards, laughing against the side of my neck.

  ‘La petite mort,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what the French call it – orgasm. The little death. Because it’s the death of loss and desire – just for a second all human cares drop away.’

  ‘You never bore me, you know that?’ he said.

  I straightened myself out, did up my buttons and went through to the kitchen. As I lifted the roasting tin from the oven, the bangle moved down towards the back of my hand. I looked again at the two strange faces. Fierce creatures for a fierce creature, I thought. Of course he thought I was fierce, though. That was exactly how I had presented myself to him. I should be pleased – I wanted him to think that I was unpredictable and exciting, untamed.

  I owned almost no real jewellery, certainly nothing like this. For my twenty-first birthday, Dad had given me a single diamond on a fine white-gold chain that had belonged to my granny but, other than that, everything I owned was costume. That must be why this seemed strange. Also, though I was ashamed even to think it, it was a token of ownership, obviously a lover’s present, and I liked the thought of him making a claim on me, annexing me.

  He put on the Ray Charles and opened the second bottle of wine. He was trying to give up smoking but when I went through to the sitting room again, he had pushed up the sash and was leaning out of the window. Above the roofs of the houses opposite, the sky was navy. The street below was quiet and the streetlamps pooled their light down for no one other than the tabby cat from the ground-floor flat who stalked his territory undisturbed. Richard put his arm around my waist and squeezed.

  We got drunk that night, drunker than we’d ever been before together. By about three in the morning, all the lights in the flats were out and we were alone in the world, marooned on the sofa, he stretched to full length, I tucked in between him and the back, my head resting on his shoulder. The candles along the mantelpiece had burned down and now all the light in the room came from the tree, which sparkled now and again as the draught from the ill-fitting window-frame turned the baubles. I’d been hilariously drunk earlier on but was mellow now, two steps from falling into a happy sleep. I was wondering, though, about something he’d said.

  ‘Richard?’

  ‘Hmm?’ He was winding a strand of my hair around his finger.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever work less hard?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I don’t know – if you had a family, for example. I don’t mean taking on fewer projects, just delegating more, letting Neil do more of the travelling.’

  I felt him shift under me but kept my eyes closed.

  ‘You know why I have to work so hard, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You get it?’

  ‘I know why I do – because I need to prove myself, be as good as I can.’ I pressed closer to him again, the tops of my arms suddenly registering the falling temperature in the room. The heating had been off for hours.

  ‘Exactly.’

  A minute or so passed. He’d stopped playing with my hair. In the silence of the flat I listened to the sound of his breathing. If we hadn’t had so much to drink, perhaps I wouldn’t have asked. ‘Who are you trying to prove it to?’

  His answer was immediate. ‘My father.’

  I felt his chest rise under me. ‘Even now?’ I asked gently.

  ‘Oh, it’ll never stop.’ He seemed to spit the words out. ‘I go on thinking that if I hammer the point in enough perhaps the old bastard might be forced to acknowledge that he was wrong.’ He snorted. ‘Or maybe not – nothing I ever did when he was alive did it: results, Harvard, the first development.’ He sat up suddenly, dislodging me.

  I sat up, too, and put my hand on his shoulder. He was turned away from me now, sitting on the edge of the seat as if he might spring up at any moment. Instead he picked up his whisky glass and downed the last half-inch in one.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘imagine this. You’re twelve years old. One day you have an argument with your mother – she’s lost something, you get the blame again. Every little thing that happens, you get the blame. Anyway, you storm off up the garden to simmer down a bit and you fall asleep in the long grass. It’s late by the time you wake up, almost eight, and you know you’ll be in trouble again for staying out. You sneak back into the house through the back door but just as you get to the bottom of the stairs, you hear voices in the sitting room. And what’s your dear old dad saying? He’s telling your mother that he’s worried because he thinks there’s something not quite right about you. Can you imagine that? You’re twelve years old, for fuck’s sake. I felt like I’d been fucking branded.’

  The next day, Boxing Day, we had driven ou
t of London into the countryside, looking for a pub for lunch. I’d never been in Richard’s car before; in fact, I realised, I hadn’t even seen it. He had a navy blue Mercedes SLK whose inside was still redolent of fresh new leather, a different species of animal altogether from my battered Ford Fiesta. I watched him surreptitiously as he negotiated us out through West London. His leather jacket was laid on the back seat and he had the sleeves of his jumper pushed up to just below the elbow, the hair on his arms thick and dark. He drove with the focus I now thought of as particularly his, not letting his attention wander for a moment, cruising through spaces so narrow I feared for the wing mirrors, never ceding to anyone. Out on the M4, it occurred to me that he was playing the road like a computer game, changing lanes, overtaking, eating up other drivers like Pacman. He’d been quiet since we’d woken and I wondered if it wasn’t only the hangover, if he was regretting telling me about his father, revealing too much. I didn’t try to make him talk and there was silence between us for much of the way. I wondered what I could say to make him feel better. I didn’t mention our speed, which at times was frankly terrifying.

  The place we stopped at was a few miles off the motorway, not far from Marlborough. It was in a pair of old black-and-white cottages knocked through to make one, and while from the outside it had looked dark and old-fashioned, I realised as soon as we went in that we had stumbled on the local gastro-pub. The floorboards were exposed and the chalkboards made much of the menu’s organic sourcing. Richard’s Mercedes had been one of several in the car park. I thought about suggesting that we find somewhere less obvious but he had already pounced on a table that was coming free.

  After we’d ordered, I went to the loo and when I came back, I was surprised to find that he was gone. When he returned, it was not from the direction of the lavatories, as I’d thought, but from the front door. He was putting his phone into his pocket as he looked up and saw me. ‘My mother’s carer,’ he said, sitting down.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘I’ll see her tomorrow.’

  I hesitated. ‘It must be terrible.’

  ‘It’s very hard for her, obviously, but from my point of view, at least I had the years with her while she was well. That’s more than a lot of people.’

  I looked away. I was used to his questions about my life, his hunger for information, but though he’d alluded to my relationship with my mother several times since I’d skirted the issue at our first dinner, I’d never told him any more. Helen was the only person I’d ever really told. I knew there was nothing for me to be ashamed about but somehow I did feel ashamed. And I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me, either; I hated that. I pretended that I hadn’t noticed the hint, if that was what it was, and looked round instead. The place was packed, a number of the tables pushed together to accommodate large groups. Two little girls in matching woollen dresses and red ribbed tights were lavishing attention on the pub dog, an old liver-coloured spaniel who lay in his basket by the fire with a look of weary tolerance. The air was full of the smell of roast beef and the spices in the vat of mulled wine on the corner of the bar.

  We both had the beef, which was delicious, and Richard insisted I have a slice of lemon tart. He watched me while I ate it, amused by my enjoyment. In my early twenties I’d had a boyfriend who had always made me feel that liking puddings was symptomatic of unattractive gluttony and there was something liberating about not having to pretend about it. I felt a rush of appreciation for Richard and suddenly I knew I should tell him about my mother. If we were going to have a future, I would have to and telling him now was a way of letting him know, without saying it, that I trusted him. It might also mitigate his regret at telling me about his father.

  I took a large mouthful of wine and looked at him. ‘My mother left us,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ He was caught off-guard.

  ‘When I was ten and Matt was eight, she went back to France, shacked up with a man who owns a restaurant in Lyon. That’s why we stopped speaking French at home.’

  Now he was watching me intently, eyes moving over my face.

  ‘We hardly saw her at all. She used to come over once a year for a few days at Easter, bring us chewing gum that Dad didn’t like us to have, but that was about it. Dad looked after us.’ My face was red with the same embarrassment that had pierced me when, two days after it had happened, Josephine Wright had asked me about it at school straight out. ‘Is it true?’ she’d said. ‘My mum says your mum’s buggered off.’

  ‘It was dreadful for Dad. He used to be a research scientist but there wasn’t any money in it so he gave it up and retrained as a physics teacher so he earned a bit more and had the holidays. He’s shy, my dad – I think he found it really hard to start with, standing up in front of a room of teenagers day after day. He did it, though.’ Now I’d started, the story was coming more easily; it was spilling out. ‘He’s incredible – I didn’t realise till I got older how much he’d given up. It’s only in the past couple of years that he’s even had anyone else serious – he was single until Matt and I went to college, and even then he found it hard. I think it took him years to get over her and then he didn’t want to risk getting close to anyone again in case it didn’t work out. He wouldn’t have risked it, for our sake.’

  ‘Why did she leave?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. She met him – restaurant man. Maybe she thought she was too young to be tied down. Maybe we weren’t the exciting English life she’d had in mind when she came here.’

  ‘Was she happy? She must have regretted leaving you, surely.’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t care. She made the decision – the rest of us just had to live with it.’ The feeling I got when I thought about her was rising up through me and I didn’t want to talk about it any more. I took another sip of my wine and looked away, over to the fireplace where the dog, now abandoned in favour of ice-cream sundaes, was snoozing gratefully.

  ‘I’m glad you told me,’ said Richard. He half-stood, and leaned across the table to catch my face in his hands and kiss me. ‘It means a lot that you trust me.’

  ‘Urgh,’ said one of the little girls. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  Richard grinned and sat back down again. ‘Sorry,’ he said, nodding an apology to her. ‘But it was very important. I won’t do it again.’

  ‘OK, then,’ she looked away, suddenly shy.

  We had the heater on in the car on the way back and I leaned my head against the window and drifted in and out of a wine-induced doze while Richard gamed our way into London. He was humming quietly and I felt the strengthening of bonds between us, a drawing closer.

  When we turned the lights off that night, I lay awake. There was a breeze outside and the streetlamps around the garden square behind the building were casting shadows of the topmost branches of the trees on to the strip of ceiling in front of the arrow-slit window. I watched as they moved gently back and forth like stroking fingers. Richard was on his side facing me, his hand resting in its familiar place on my thigh. His eyes were closed but he wasn’t quite asleep. He’d been tender with me all evening and just now when we’d had sex, too, as if what I’d told him earlier had cracked the tough shell I’d presented him with before and made him aware that I, too, had fragilities. There was a dull ache in my torso that I couldn’t locate precisely to either my heart or my stomach and I realised that I was mourning these days already. ‘Wouldn’t it be good if we could be together like this always?’ I said quietly into the darkness.

  ‘Hmm.’ He was almost asleep now but his fingers moved across my skin and brushed lightly over my pubic hair, before resting there.

  ‘Why don’t we do it?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Why don’t we? Move in together?’

  His eyes came open immediately. I turned to look at him. The thin gap between the window and the blind let in enough light for me to see that he was suddenly wide awake. ‘Sorry – that was a bit of a surprise,’ I said.

  ‘It
certainly was,’ he said, and there was a touch of relief in his voice, as if he’d taken me for serious at first and now realised I was joking. The ache changed, became a pang of alarm. What I heard was distance, and a little of our new closeness seemed to evaporate. I knew I should leave it, have the conversation another time, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  ‘Is it a ridiculous idea?’ I said.

  He hesitated. I watched his shadowed face and it occurred to me that he was deciding how to compose it, how he was going to handle this situation that I had suddenly thrust on him when he was happy and comfortable, tired and slightly dazed with food and wine and sex. He was working out how to handle me.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, moving his hand back on to my thigh. ‘You know I’m not ready. I’ve just got out of a long-term relationship. I need a bit of time before I can commit to anything else. Come on, you know that.’ His voice was coaxing now, as if he was talking to a recalcitrant child.

  I felt a rush of anger and shifted, dislodging his hand. ‘Actually, I don’t know. I know you were in a long relationship but that’s all you’ve told me about it – in six months.’ I realised as I said it that it was true and also that I’d never asked. At the beginning I hadn’t wanted to press him until he was ready to tell me or to give him the upper hand in our semi-joking battle of wills by letting him know that I thought about it, and then, after time passed, I hadn’t wanted to think about him with another woman. ‘You can’t really expect me to understand when I don’t know what I’m supposed to be understanding,’ I said. ‘I mean, obviously it was important but I thought perhaps this might be important, too.’