'Yes…'
'I've been having a terrible pain in my back, right here.' She rubbed her side.
'Perhaps it's a strain. I could take a look,' he said and she burst out laughing.
'My dear, how very sweet. I have a friend who always says that when she meets a doctor, it must be so irritating.'
'Occupational hazard,' he said.
'Really?'
She took his arm. Mother was radiant with a lingering tan from five days skiing in Gstaad and must have spent an age on her hair and makeup. She turned to me, her eyes going up and down over the green dress and jacket.
'You look very pretty, dear, is this his influence?' she inquired, taking in Tom's seen-better-days jacket over a denim shirt.
'Thank you,' I said, dodging the question. Pretty for Mother didn't mean pretty, it meant not quite right. 'How was the tennis?' I asked, and she glanced at my father.
'Don't we have a table booked?'
'Yes, we're a bit late.'
'Well, come on then,' she said, and spoke over her shoulder. 'We beat Sylvie and Milly Dupont, they've won the doubles more times than you can count. It bodes well. Is that the right word, Kate?'
'Yes,' I said, but she wasn't listening.
Mother smiled and waved at friends. She stopped to kiss the cheeks of the man in salmon-coloured trousers. People called out Happy New Year and I remembered the Christmas trees left in the street.
The table was waiting for us, starched linen, shiny silverware. Mother gave us a blow by blow account of the tennis doubles as an agonizingly thin waiter waited with a pad, pencil poised, a blank expression. Mother had seen herself in the dominatrix from one of my books. I must have drawn subliminally on her character, punished her in fiction for some injustice, real or imagined, for which she still had not forgiven me.
The laughing man from the bar joined a table occupied by friends with the same leaning to the red side of the spectrum in trousers, men with amplified belly laughs issuing from ample bellies, minor public school rowers, good drinkers, doubles of Dylan Thomas. I always felt on these occasions like an outsider. But the feeling was at odds with the reality. I was, from the cradle, an insider. I had never quite shaken off the shadows of the past and father, with his round glasses shiny in the overhead lights and paperback in his jacket pocket, was the same, a minor cog in the machine of entrenchment. I am sure he tossed handfuls of sand in that machine when he could, as did I with my feeble writing. But the machine was like the tide, like the turning of the universe, inescapable, unstoppable. There was a long tradition of men going from Cambridge into the Foreign Office to change the world and failing utterly. We had never spoken about his beliefs, his politics, but by giving me Hesse, Camus, Orwell, he had opened the window to a view I was only now beginning to see with any clarity.
Mother finished her tennis tale on a self-effacing note. We ordered. I drank a glass of white wine and listened as Tom provided an abridged version of his life in Sri Lanka. Mother asked questions, but her eyes glazed as he answered. She found it difficult, or absurd, to be curious about things outside her own interests.
'You're returning soon?' she said to Tom but glanced at me.
'Yes, in a few days,' he replied and a little barb scratched inside my chest.
'There,' she continued. 'We are in the same boat, Kate. Your father has already packed his bags for China.'
'Singapore,' he corrected, and she turned in her seat.
'You know what I mean,' she said. 'Aren't they all Chinese?'
'Yes, that's true.'
'When are you leaving, Daddy?' I asked, and he did that thing, removing his glasses for a polish.
'Tomorrow afternoon,' he replied.
'That's so soon.'
'Not soon enough for your father.'
He put his glasses back on and glanced around the room as if seeing it for the first time. Did Mother know he had a lover in Singapore? Did she care? She had her own life. They stitched a veil of deception from each other, from themselves, and I wondered if love was like the earth's resources, doomed eventually to run out.
I ate asparagus with vinaigrette and parmesan shavings, roast cod with sticky rice, a spoonful of Black Forest gateau. The men at the next table laughed their big laughs, and Matt appeared, looking about the dining room as if for a seat on a full train. He was wearing a white shirt, the collar twisted, a short jacket, and red skinnies. He was beautiful like a new puppy with green eyes peeping through a hedge of hair. Matt had the air of being a rich man's son without being one, and Mother adored him for his small failures, his similarity to her, his dependence on her. She stared up with an impatience that revealed more than concealed her love and he bent down to whisper something that I didn't hear.
After the handshaking and kissing, the thin waiter appeared with a chair and we shuffled around to widen the circle before ordering coffee.
'You look like you've just got out of bed,' Mother remarked, and Matt pushed back his hair with his two palms.
'It's my hairdresser, he's such a prima donna,' he said.
We laughed. Matt ordered a glass of red wine. My little world was around one table in a moment of happiness, something you have to grab hold of and hang on to, something that comes when it comes and can't be chased or hunted or pinned down or imprisoned.
19
Everyone is Waiting for Something
Darkness was lifting. A dull green glow touched the horizon. Aircraft lay everywhere, like my shoes on the day of the great cull, and I imagined girls wearing them in the broken streets of crowded cities in Africa and Asia.
A plane sped along a corridor of amber lights and took off, sliding through the haze before vanishing from view. I stood with a blanket around my shoulders, my forehead resting against the thick panes of glass. I could smell him on my flesh, on the sheets in the hotel bed where countless couples must have spent restless nights waiting for the alarm.
The control towers became more defined against the rising light. Vehicles moved like busy ants on a landscape fragmented by wire fences. There were no trees, just steppes of cement with buildings the same colour. Another plane rolled into position ready for take-off. The room was muggy, airless, but a chill ran through me. I pulled the blanket closer. It was hard to imagine a place on earth more grey and mournful than Heathrow on a bitter January morning.
There was a knock on the door, a double tap that made me jump.
'Breakfast, please.'
I pushed my arms into a robe and opened the door to an Asian man with a white splash of teeth between shiny black cheeks and a white jacket a size too big for him.
'Thank you very much,' he said.
He placed on the table a tray containing two glasses of orange juice, two cups, a pot of coffee, milk and two croissants wrapped in paper napkins.
'Wait,' I said.
I gave him a £10 note, his smile broadened and his head pivoted from side to side like it was on a spring.
'Thank you very much. Thank you very much.'
I poured coffee and warmed my hands on the cup as the plane on the runway took off. Another rolled into position, people coming and going, our nomadic genes replayed in this endless shift of humanity, that sense that there is a place where we should be and we spend our entire lives searching for that place.
From The Hurlingham we had rushed home and made love, the sand hurrying through the hourglass making the vacant space seem all the more empty. He held me so tight I felt like a tiny creature in a cocoon.
'I wish you weren't going.'
'So do I.'
'You have to?'
'I have to.'
'People are relying on you?'
'I'll be back. It won't be so long.'
He ran his hand down my thigh. We were whispering as if what we were saying was unformed; secret. His hand was warm. I could feel each one of his spread fingers like lines of sunlight.
'Don't stop,' I said, and he carried on stroking my leg. Then he paused.
'Yo
u must finish your book.'
'Yes.' The light was fading, the shadows growing longer. 'I will wrap it in a reed basket and float it down the river.'
He kissed my eye-sockets. 'Then start another,' he said, and my shoulders went up in a shrug.
'Who knows.'
'I love your collar bones,' he said and paused. 'You have to, it's who you are.'
'Or who I was? Everything that begins must end.'
'Not everything,' he said. 'They never finished the Great Wall of China.'
'That's because they forgot why they started building it.'
He stretched and straddled my waist between his knees. 'You know something, I think I detect a faint smile on those beautiful lips.'
'That's because you always have an answer for everything.'
'You're one to talk.'
He reached under the bed where the mask had remained out of sight. He pulled the elastic over the back of his head.
'Who do I remind you of?'
I shook my head. 'Give me a clue.'
He cupped my face in his two palms. We kissed and the feel of the fascia against my skin was cool as he slithered down my body. He drew my legs apart like curtains, hooked my thighs over his thighs and dipped into the pool of our juices. The tip of his tongue stroked my clitoris, my eyes pressed shut. For a moment the grains of sand in the hourglass slowed in their race. I was about to climax and he stopped, he always knew when to slow, slow and gradually cease, how to suspend orgasm. He must have had a superb teacher.
'I'd like to take this little part with me,' he said, and I could see myself in the mask as I opened my eyes.
I was panting for breath, floating.
'Just one part?'
He kissed my pubis, my belly, my breasts. 'This part and this part and this part.' He took my right hand and kissed the little finger. 'And this part.'
He slid up inside me and we rowed down the river to the sea.
Next morning, he went to the office for a couple of hours. I met him there and he led me around the corner to a store where he bought a video camera. He asked the assistant to show me how it worked and didn't part with his credit card until he was sure I'd got the hang of it. I held the bag containing the box containing the camera as if it were a talisman, a curl of hair in a locket, a fetish gone digital.
'Thank you,' I said.
'I couldn't think of anything else.'
'You didn't have to buy anything.'
We wound our way through the windy canyons of tall buildings to the Millennium Bridge and crossed to the Tate, a new exhibition, I can't recall what, one last dip in London culture before he entered the desert.
The Thames was gun metal grey. We walked without talking. We lunched without eating. We made love in front of the mirror, watching our reflections as if they were movie stills and I locked him inside me as if I never wanted to let go. His body on me was a second skin pressing down in such a way that it was impossible to find a gap between us. Love is possession, a sort of vanity. I remembered the nuns at school with their neat nails and sour expressions. They loved God because they were unable to open themselves up to let love in. They compelled us to believe and we came away from five years behind the convent walls believing in nothing.
My breath had misted the window. I had never before stayed at an airport hotel to stretch the seconds and it made the seconds after the last kiss last longer. The clock on the TV read 5.41. The sealed room was colour consistent, functional, containing everything and nothing. I showered and tubed back to Hackney, ninety minutes in which a kaleidoscope of morning workers passed through the hissing doors with coffee cups and Kindles, coats smelling of charity shops. A black woman in a nurse's uniform leaned across the narrow space between us.
'Here, take this, dear,' she whispered, and gave me a Kleenex.
Tears rolled down my cheeks.
'Thank you.'
She smiled, and I felt ashamed of my lack of spleen, of purpose, of what I wasn't entirely sure. I had never been tested.
The carriage sucked in passengers and pushed them out again like a bellows. I was normally sleeping at this time of day. I never saw the nurses and cleaners, the teachers and tradesmen, the call centre girls, the office boys in cheap suits who churned through the revolving doors in the glass-walled buildings that reflected each other with sly narcissism, the oil that greased the wheels and kept everything running. I changed at South Kensington on to the District Line, racing east underground as he was flying east into the sun.
He'd stayed every night and his presence remained like someone who has died. The camera he'd bought was on the table, still in the box, and one of his shirts was balled up in my laundry basket. I changed, made fresh coffee, took two Nurofen and opened my laptop.
I went back to the beginning of the novel I'd been writing with a sense that it had been composed by someone else. I usually work at night and surprising the manuscript when it wasn't expecting me uncovered the flaws and excesses inscribed by the person I had been with last year's genes and bulging closets. I watched the word count recede and felt lighter and ready for lunch.
Rain was in the air like spray from an atomiser. The plastic sheet over the newspapers was sheened in damp. I reached for The Guardian and the bell rang as I entered the shop with its towers of magazines like a shrine to consumer society. Mrs Patel was on her knees, adding fresh offerings, and her daughter was breaking open a carton with the word Cadbury's along the side. Mr Patel grinned red-stained teeth.
'Filthy weather. On your own?' he asked.
'Yes,' I replied. 'Tom's gone back to Sri Lanka.'
'Ah, yes, very sensible. He is a wise and clever man.'
I found the café in the street lined with horse posts and ordered avocado salad. I read about a woman in Norwich who had raised her mentally handicapped son of fourteen alone. The council had provided respite care four hours a week, allowing her to go out, have her hair done, buy a new skirt. Austerity cuts had brought the care package to an end. The woman felt unable to cope and was considering having her son taken into care. The cost of respite visits four hours a week was £100, which she could not pay herself. The cost of residential care was £500 a week, which the council would be obliged to pay if she did place her child under their protection.
An experiment in Cambridge showed that when numerous metronomes were placed on a stage and set off at different times, they quickly lost their individuality to connect to the rhythms of those around them. I paused and was struck by a blend of grief and relief that I felt no nostalgia for my university years. Golden ages always belong to other times. The past isn't another country, it is Atlantis, sunk beneath the sea. There is nothing beyond now. Rain pattering the windows. The newspaper folded. Warm air from hidden vectors.
The waitress came to the table with bread on a tray. I hovered over the warm slices of wholemeal made on the premises and plucked up a chunk of white bread instead. The couple by the window waved their arms about as they talked. The girl was young, early twenties, with strong features and a wide mouth. The boy was wearing a fur hat with flaps over the ears and a grubby white fisherman's sweater. Syria, Pakistan, a car bomb in Baghdad, another in Kabul. It all seemed so hopeless.
My hand froze as I turned to the arts pages. In the bottom right hand corner there was an advertisement with the heading 'Marie-France Durfort Live in Concert' above a photograph of her playing the cello, face drawn, intense. I studied the picture as if it might contain a message, then called to book.
'How many?'
'Two, please,' I heard myself say.
'Centre of the balcony? They're excellent seats.'
'Perfect. Thank you.'
I scrolled down my list of contacts, paused at Julian Rhodes, as you may tarry on the climb up a long flight of stairs, and went on to Lizzie Elmwood.
'I've got two tickets for a concert Friday. Will you come?'
'Has he gone?'
'At daybreak.'
'How fitting. Perhaps you'll get back
to normal.'
'Will you?'
'Me? Get back to normal?'
'No, will you come?'
'What kind of concert? Rock, pop, jazz, classical, choral, bagpipes…'
'A cello recital…'
'A what?' she said, and her tone changed. 'It's not the French tart, is it? The one he was screwing before you broke your finger?'
'Yes, actually.'
'You are in a state. Katie Boyd loved to fuck, fucked by love.'
'Very clever.'
'Where? When? What time?'
'Cadogan Hall. I told you, Friday, half past seven. I've already got the tickets. My treat. I can book a table at Colbert for after.'
'French cellist. French food. I'd better wear Yves Saint-Laurent.'
When you are expecting a call and the call that comes is someone else it feels like a practical joke, an intrusion. Evelyn Talbot at Evelyn Events wanted to know if I was 'still resting' or whether I would deign to make myself free on Saturday.
'At the Shard,' she added. 'Close to where you live.'
'Bankers?'
'Does it make any difference? And, no, architects, developers, that lot.'
'Why not?'
'Black skirt, white top. You know the drill.'
'Tight skirt, plenty of cleavage?'
'If you've got it, dear, flaunt it, and if you haven't, buy a Wonderbra. I'll text the details.'
Friday concert. Saturday, Team Talbot. Things to look forward to. This is what patience looks like, I thought, and placed the phone beside the man smoking as he waited beneath the Victorian lamppost. I had a zero-hour contract with Evelyn. No obligations appealed to me, although I knew it didn't suit girls who needed regular hours, a reliable income. The men at these events, it was mainly men, behaved with a bullying sense of entitlement that would have been amusing if they weren't pulling the strings of those who had created zero-hour contracts in the first place.
I remembered Daddy at the Hurlingham saying the same group of people always get their hands on everything and won't let go. He was a chameleon, a shapeshifter. Whenever I thought I knew him he surprised me and became someone else. I had been trying to work out the similarities between my father and Tom and perhaps that was it, nothing to do with appearance, nothing incestuous or clichéd, just two men aware that the spirit level had tipped too far in one direction and were quietly doing what they could to rebalance it.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 23
