Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

  “On a variety of subjects.”

  “Well, maybe he should work here. They love a policy debate around these parts, they really do. Your first interview, for example …” Lawrence looked at his clipboard, searching for a name.

  “I’m sorry?” I said. “I thought you were my interview.”

  Lawrence looked up. “Ah,” he said. “No, I’m just the warm-up guy. I’m sorry, I should have explained.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well don’t look so disappointed. I’ve fixed up a good day for you, I really have. You’ve got three heads of department lined up, and a real live permanent undersecretary. I’m sure they’ll give you more than you need for your piece.”

  “But I was enjoying talking to you.”

  “You’ll get over it.”

  “You think?”

  Lawrence smiled. He had curly black hair, quite glossy but cut disconcertingly short around the back and sides. His suit, too—it was a good one; Kenzo, I think—and it fitted him well, but there was something arresting about the way he wore it. He held his arms a little away from his body—as if the suit was the pelt of some suaver animal, recently slain and imperfectly cured, so that the bloody rawness of it made his skin crawl.

  “They don’t really like me talking to the visitors,” said Lawrence. “I don’t think I’ve quite perfected the Home Office voice.”

  I was surprised to find myself laughing. We walked on down the corridor. Somewhere in between the Criminal Records Bureau and the Forensic Science Service, the mood changed. People ran past us down the corridor. A crowd clustered around a television monitor. I noticed the way Lawrence put a protective hand on the small of my back as he steered me through the sudden press of people. It didn’t feel inappropriate. I realized I was slowing down to feel the pressure of his hand on my back.

  BREAKING NEWS, said the TV monitor: HOME SECRETARY RESIGNS. There was footage of the man looking haggard and climbing with his guide dog into the backseat of a torment that for the moment still resembled a ministerial car.

  Lawrence inclined his head toward the others, who were staring raptly at the monitor. He spoke close to my ear.

  “Look at these bastards,” he whispered. “The man’s being crucified and these people are already excited about what it means for their jobs.”

  “What about you? Don’t you care?”

  Lawrence grinned.

  “Oh, it’s bad news for me,” he whispered. “With my brilliant track record, I was next in line to be the man’s guide dog.”

  Lawrence took me to his office. He said he had to check his messages. I was nervous, I don’t know why. There wasn’t anything of Lawrence on the walls—just a generic framed photo of Waterloo Bridge, and a laminated card showing the mustering points in the event of fire. I caught myself checking my reflection in the window glass and then thinking, Oh don’t be so silly. I let my eyes change their focus until they rested on the flat gray wall of the neighboring office building. I waited while Lawrence scrolled through his e-mails.

  He looked up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re going to have to reschedule your interviews. It’ll be chaos around here for the next few days.”

  The phone went and Lawrence listened for a moment. He said, What? Shouldn’t someone more senior be doing that? Really? Oh, great. How long do I have? He put the phone down on the table and then he put his head down on the desk. In the corridor outside the office there were sounds of laughing, shouting, doors slamming shut.

  “Bastards,” said Lawrence.

  “What is it?”

  “That phone call? Off the record?”

  “Of course.”

  “I have to write a letter to the outgoing home secretary, expressing our department’s deep regret at his leaving.”

  “They don’t sound particularly regretful.”

  “And to think that but for your journalistic sensitivity to detail, we’d never have noticed.”

  Lawrence rubbed his eyes and turned to his computer screen. He laid his fingers on the keyboard, then hesitated.

  “God!” he said. “I mean, what do you write?”

  “Don’t ask me. Did you know the man?”

  Lawrence shook his head. “I’ve been in rooms he was in, that’s all. He was a twat, really, only you couldn’t say that because he was blind. I suppose that’s how he got so far. He used to lean slightly forward, with his hand on his guide dog’s harness. He used to lean, like this, and his hand would sort of tremble. I think it was an act. He didn’t tremble when he was reading Braille.”

  “You don’t sound as if you’ll miss him much either.”

  Lawrence shrugged. “I quite admired him. He was weak and he turned that into a strength. A role model for losers like me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re doing self-deprecation.”

  “So?”

  “So, it doesn’t work. Studies have shown. Women only pretend they like it in surveys.”

  “Maybe I’m only pretending to do self-deprecation. Maybe I’m a winner. Maybe becoming the Home Office’s press bitch was my own personal Everest.”

  He said all this without facial inflection. He stared into my eyes. I didn’t know where to look.

  “Let’s bring this back to my article,” I said.

  “Yes, let’s,” said Lawrence. “Because otherwise this is going somewhere else, isn’t it?”

  I felt adrenaline aching in my chest. This thing that was happening, then, it had apparently slipped quite subtly over some line. It had become something acknowledged, albeit in a relatively controlled form that both of us could still step back from. Here it was, if we wanted it, hanging from a taut umbilicus between us: an affair between adults, minute yet fully formed, with all its forbidden trysts and muffled paroxysms and shattering betrayals already present, like the buds of fingers and toes.

  I remember looking down at the carpet tiles in Lawrence’s office. I can still see them now, with hyperreal clarity, every minute gray acrylic fiber of them, gleaming in the fluorescent light, coarse and glossy and tightly curled, lascivious, obscene, the gray pubic fuzz of an aging administrative body. I stared at them as if I had never seen carpet tiles before. I didn’t want to meet Lawrence’s eyes.

  “Please,” I said. “Stop it.”

  Lawrence blinked and inclined his head, innocently. “Stop what?” he said.

  And, just like that, for the moment, it was gone.

  I breathed again. Above us, one of the fluorescent tubes was buzzing loudly.

  “Why did the home secretary have to resign?” I said.

  Lawrence raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you don’t know. I thought you were a journalist.”

  “Not a serious one. Nixie does current affairs the way The Economist does shoes. On a need-to-know basis.”

  “The home secretary had to resign because he fast-tracked a visa for his lover’s nanny.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I don’t really care one way or the other. But he never seemed that stupid to me. Oh, listen to them.”

  From outside Lawrence’s door there was laughing and shouting. I heard the sound of paper being scrunched into a ball. Feet scuffed on the carpet. A paper ball clanged into a metal wastepaper basket.

  “They’re playing corridor football,” said Lawrence. “They’re actually celebrating.”

  “You think they set him up?”

  He sighed. “I’ll never know what they did to him, Sarah. I didn’t go to the right schools for that. My job is just to write a good-bye letter to the man. What would you put?”

  “It’s hard if you didn’t really know him. I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities.”

  Lawrence groaned.

  “But I’m terrible at this,” he said. “I’m the sort of person who needs to know what I’m talking about. I can’t just write some spiel.”

  I looked around his office.

  “I’m in the same position,” I said. “And like it or not, y
ou seem to have become my interview.”

  “So?”

  “So, you’re not making it easy for me.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, you haven’t exactly personalized this place, have you? No golf trophies, no family photos, nothing that gives me the slightest clue who you are.”

  Lawrence looked up at me. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities,” he said.

  I smiled. “Nice,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  I felt the ache of adrenaline again.

  “You really don’t fit in here, do you?”

  “Listen, I very much doubt I’ll still be working here tomorrow if I can’t think of something suitably noncommittal to write to the old boss in the next twenty minutes.”

  “So write something.”

  “But seriously, I can’t think of anything.”

  I sighed. “Shame. You seemed too nice to be such a loser.”

  Lawrence grinned. “Well,” he said. “You seemed quite beautiful enough to be so mistaken.”

  I realized I was smiling back at him. “A little blond of me, you think?”

  “Hmm. I think your roots are showing.”

  “Well I don’t think you’re a loser, if you must know. I think you’re just unhappy.”

  “Oh, do you? With your gimlet eye for emotional cues?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Lawrence blinked and looked down at his keyboard. I realized he was blushing.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “God, I shouldn’t have said that. I got carried away, I don’t even know you, I’m so sorry. You look really hurt.”

  “Maybe I’m just doing vulnerable.”

  Lawrence drew in his elbows—drew in all of himself in fact, so that he appeared to withdraw into his body on the royal-blue upholstery of his swivel chair. He paused, and tapped out a line on his computer. The keyboard was a cheap one, the kind where the keys have a high travel and they squeak on the downstroke. He sat there so long without moving that I went behind his desk and looked over his shoulder to see what he had written.

  You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen_

  That was the unfinished sentence that stood, without resolution or caveat, on his computer screen. The cursor blinked at the end of the line. From outside in the street, police sirens screamed in and out of phase. He turned to me. The bearings squealed in his chair.

  “So tell me something,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Is it your husband who makes you unhappy?”

  “What? You don’t know anything about my husband.”

  “It was one of the first things you said to me. About your husband and his opinions. Why would you mention him to me at all?”

  “The subject came up.”

  “The subject of your husband? You brought it up.”

  I stopped, with my mouth open, trying to remember why he was wrong. Lawrence smiled, bitterly but without malice.

  “I think it’s because you’re not very happy either,” he said.

  I moved quickly out from behind his desk—my turn to blush now—and I went over to the window. I rolled my head on the cool glass and looked down at the ordinary life in the street. Lawrence came to stand beside me.

  “So,” he said. “Now it’s me who’s sorry. I suppose you’ll tell me I should leave the close observation to you journalists.”

  I smiled, despite myself. “What was that line you were in the middle of writing?” I said.

  “You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen … I don’t know, I’m going to say, still to be seen what great fruits your work will bear, or still to be seen what the successes of your hard work will be. Something open-ended like that.”

  “Or you could just leave it how it is,” I said.

  “It isn’t finished,” said Lawrence.

  “But it’s rather good,” I said. “It’s got us this far, hasn’t it?”

  The cursor blinked and my lips parted and we kissed and kissed and kissed. I clung to him and whispered in his ear. Afterward I retrieved my knickers from the gray carpet tiles, and pulled them on under my skirt. I smoothed down my blouse, and Lawrence sat back at his desk.

  I looked through the window at a different world from the one I had left out there.

  “I’ve never done that before,” I said.

  “No, you haven’t,” said Lawrence. “I’d have remembered.”

  He stared at the screen for a full minute with the unfinished line on it and then, with my lipstick still on his lips, smashed down a full stop. You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen. Twenty minutes later, the letter was transcribed to Braille and put in the post. Lawrence’s colleagues hadn’t cared enough to proofread it.

  Andrew called. My mobile went in Lawrence’s office and I will never forget the first thing Andrew said: This is fuckin fantastic, Sarah. This story is going to be full-on for weeks. They’ve commissioned me to write an extended feature on the home secretary’s downfall. This is pay dirt, Sarah. They’ve given me a team of researchers. But I’m going to be in the office all hours on this one. You’ll be all right looking after Charlie, won’t you?

  I switched off the phone, very gently. It was simpler than announcing to Andrew the change in our way of life. It was easier than explaining to him: our marriage has just been mortally wounded, quite by accident, by a gang of bullies picking on a blind man.

  I put down the phone and I looked at Lawrence. “I’d really like to see you again,” I said.

  Ours was an office-hours affair. A long-lunches-in-short-skirts affair. A sneaked-afternoons-in-nice-hotels affair. Even the occasional evening. Andrew was pulling all-nighters in the newspaper’s offices, and so long as I could find a babysitter, Lawrence and I could do what we liked. Occasionally in a lunch hour that had extended almost to teatime, with white wine in my hand and Lawrence naked beside me, I thought about all the journalists who were not receiving guided tours, all the meet-the-media breakfasts that were not getting planned, and all the press releases that were waiting on Lawrence’s computer with the cursor blinking at the end of the last unfinished sentence. This new target represents another significant advance in the government’s ongoing program of_

  Handing out in-flight meals in a plane crash. That’s what our affair was meant to be. Lawrence and I escaped from our own tragedies and into each other, and for six months Britain slowed incrementally during normal office hours. I wish I could say that’s all it was. Nothing serious. Nothing sentimental. Just a merciful interruption. A brief, blinking cursor before our old stories resumed.

  But it was gorgeous. I gave myself completely to Lawrence in a way that I never had with Andrew. It happened easily, without any effort on my part. I cried when we made love. It just happened; it wasn’t an act. I held him till my arms ached and I felt agonies of tenderness. I never let him know. I never let him know, either, that I scrolled through his BlackBerry, read his e-mails, read his mind while he slept. When I started the affair, I think it could have been with anyone. It was the affair that was inevitable, not the specific man. But slowly, I started to adore Lawrence. To have an affair, I began to realize, was a relatively minor transgression. But to really escape from Andrew, to really become myself, I had to go the whole way and fall in love. And again, I didn’t have to make an effort to fall in love with Lawrence. All I had to do was to permit myself to topple. This is quite safe, I told myself: the psyche is made to absorb the shock of such falls.

  I still cried when we made love, but now I also cried when we couldn’t.

  It became a source of worry, hiding the affair. The actual assignations were simply concealed from Andrew, of course, and I made a point of never mentioning Andrew or his work when I was with Lawrence, in case he himself got too curious. I put up a high fence around the affair. In my mind I declared it to be another country and I policed its border ruthlessly.

  Harder to disguise was the incontrovertible change in me. I felt wonderful. I
had never felt less sensible, less serious, less Surrey. My skin started to glow. It was so blatant that I tried to conceal it with foundation, but it was no use: I simply radiated joie de vivre. I started partying again, as I hadn’t since my early twenties. Lawrence got me in to all the Home Office events. The new home secretary loved to meet the media, to tell them over canapés how tough he was going to be. There were endless soirees, and always an after-party. I met a new crowd. Actors, painters, businesspeople. I felt a thrill I hadn’t felt since before I met Andrew—the thrill of realizing I was attractive, of knowing myself irresistible, of being half drunk on champagne and looking around at the bright, smiling faces and giggling when I realized that suddenly anything could happen.

  So I should hardly have been surprised when it did. Inevitably, at one of those parties, I finally bumped into my husband, crumpled and red-eyed from the office. Andrew hated parties—I suppose he was only there on some fact-finding mission. Lawrence even introduced us. A packed room. Music—flagship British music—some band that had made it big on the internet. Lawrence, beaming, flushed with champagne, his hand resting riskily on the small of my back.

  “Oh, hi! Hi! Andrew O’Rourke, this is Sarah Summers. Sarah is the editor of Nixie. Andrew’s a columnist for The Times, terrific writer, strong opinions. I’m sure you two are going to get on.”

  “So was the priest,” said Andrew.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “He was sure we were going to get on. When he married us.”

  Andrew, lighthearted, almost smiling. Lawrence—poor Lawrence—quickly removing his hand from my back. Andrew, noticing. Andrew, suddenly unsmiling.

  “I didn’t know you’d be here, Sarah.”

  “Yes. Well. I. Oh. It was a last-minute thing. The magazine … you know.”

  My body betraying me, blushing from my ankles to the crown of my head. My childhood, my inner Surrey, reawakened and vengeful, redrawing its county boundaries to annex my new life. I looked down at my shoes. I looked up. Andrew still there, standing very still, very quiet—all the opinion, for once, drained out of him.

  That night we stood on the empty foundation at the end of our garden where Andrew was planning to build his glasshouse, and we talked about saving our marriage. Just the phrase is excruciating. Everything Andrew said sounded like his Times column, and everything I said could have been ripped from the agony page of my magazine.