by David Szalay
The Italian tilers had started work, and the two women were standing on the edge of the future deep end, watching them mark things out with their spirit levels. James was surprised to see Isabel. She said she was there to talk to Thomasina about the wedding. Her wedding. Isabel’s wedding. Isabel was wedding Steve that summer—finally, they had been together for more than twelve years—in the south of France. Specifically, she wanted to talk about the dress. Thomasina had some sort of fashion diploma from St Martin’s, and still tinkered sporadically with her portfolio. They had been upstairs in the echoey living room, talking about it, when the tilers turned up.
That James and Thomasina now lived in a sort of palace was still something of a novelty. It still felt a bit strange to be standing there next to the single-lane swimming pool. To Isabel it just seemed slightly silly, preposterous. And what was even sillier—what was much sillier—what was almost too silly to think about or understand—was that when the floatation took place in the summer and James sold fifty per cent minus one share of Interspex (which had not even existed two years ago), he would ‘net’—as the papers might put it—or ‘pocket’, or ‘trouser’, £125,000,000. Isabel had made it pretty plain, only half in jest—less than half in jest—not in jest at all, in fact—that when it came to the wedding present she was expecting something quite special. A house in Sardinia. Something like that. What Thomasina made of it, she did not know. She had been trying to work it out just now when they were upstairs drinking Nescafé out of mugs. Thomasina was quite inscrutable, in her way. On the surface, she seemed oblivious to the sheer strangeness of it all. She was probably still in shock. She floated around the huge house—smiling and laughing in her shy sweet vague way—one of the super-rich… Oh insane! Fuck. It was insane!
For a few seconds some howling tool obliterated their small talk. The lower floors of the house were full of tattooed men in eye-shields operating howling power tools; and when the tools fell silent, there was the permanent tinny whiffle of paint-flecked radios—the same ten simple songs, the same ten news stories, ad nauseam. It was not a nice way to live, and James was starting to wish they had stayed in the flat in Islington until the place was totally finished.
They were standing on the edge of the swimming pool watching the Italian artisans at work. Isabel had a swig of Diet Coke to try and fend off the vertiginous feeling that had just wobbled her. Yes, she was jealous. Sure. That was normal. It would be weird if she wasn’t. And she was pleased for him too. She was proud of him. When people at work pointed to something in the paper and said, ‘Isn’t that your brother?’ she was proud of the fact that it was. It was just that this sudden surreal display of wealth seemed to be threatening to upstage the fucking wedding.
‘What do I do with this?’ she said, offering the empty Diet Coke can to no one in particular.
Thomasina took it.
‘I have to go back to work.’
‘And we have things to do as well,’ James said—properly smugly, his sister thought—squeezing Thomasina’s shoulders. ‘Which way are you going? Do you want a lift?’
There was a sapphire-blue Aston Martin parked under the white apple blossom in front of the house. That was a bit vulgar. And when she noticed the number plate she laughed out loud. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit…’
‘Tacky?’ James suggested.
‘No? Isn’t it?’
Thomasina evidently thought it was.
‘Yeah, it probably is a bit,’ James said, smiling. He didn’t seem worried about it. Why would he be?
Isabel had to fold herself into the minuscule leather slot of the back seat. They dropped her at High Street Ken tube, and went on their way—looking, she thought meanly, like the fucking Beckhams. Except that James did not look much like David Beckham, except for those shades, and Thomasina looked absolutely nothing like Posh.
* * *
Forrest and his party had long since helicoptered back to London and were sitting down to one of those meals that’s so expensive it becomes a minor news story when the eastbound National Express snorted out of Cheltenham in the dark. They almost missed it, James and Freddy, sprinting with their packages of hot starch. Later, the coach spent two unscheduled hours inching towards a pile-up on the M4 that had shut several lanes of the motorway, and when he phoned Katherine, about an hour into that experience, to tell her that he would be late into London, probably too late to see her that night, she informed him that he would not be seeing her tomorrow either—she was going to stay with a friend in Kent. He had just been weighing up the state of his life, with her and the weekend they were about to spend together on one side and more or less everything else on the other. Even so, he sounded no more than slightly petulant when he said, ‘Well… I thought we were spending the weekend together…’
‘Well, I’m just sitting at home now,’ she said with a laugh. ‘You’re the one who isn’t here.’
He said, ‘What about Sunday then?’
‘I won’t be back in London till lunchtime. And I have to see someone in the afternoon anyway.’
‘Who?’
A friend who was moving abroad, she said.
So when they did finally meet, in a pub near his flat, their weekend together had been pared down to the pathetic rind of Sunday evening. He was a few minutes late, and was withdrawing some money when she sent him a text asking what he wanted to drink.
Mysteriously, in the pub there was no sign of her. He did notice two untouched pints—a pint of lager and a pint of Guinness—on an empty table. It was the Guinness that threw him. He had never known her to drink Guinness.
She answered her phone in the Ladies and said that yes, those were their pints, and she would be with him in a minute.
Ten minutes later she sat down opposite him.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
She had put a yellow Selfridges box, wrapped up with black ribbon, on the table. It was not for him, as for a moment he fondly imagined. It was a present from her friend, the one who was moving abroad—a pair of ivory silk pyjamas, neatly folded in tissue paper.
Later, in the forty-watt light of his bathroom, she would put them on. There was a lot that had to happen first, however.
They had to talk. Small talk. The house in Kent woodland where she had spent Saturday night. Her friend Venetia lived there with her fiancé and his eccentric father. She had quit her television job in London and now spent her time working in the woods—kerfing and piling and pollarding. She was not quite as happy there as she had hoped she would be. She had suggested to Katherine that she move into one of the old oast houses on the property—a suggestion that Katherine was apparently not dismissing out of hand. On Saturday there had been some sort of party. There had evidently been single men there, which made James short with jealousy for a minute or two. She wasn’t talking about the men, though, she was talking about the woodland. She was full of praise for that old woodland, which she said was on the point of exploding verdantly in super-super-slow motion. She said he would have loved it there.
He offered to make some supper and they walked slowly home. They walked through Mecklenburgh Square, hooked snugly together at the shoulders, the waist. For a few moments, there, in Mecklenburgh Square, everything seemed okay.
She stepped out of her sopping shoes while he turned on the electric fire in the living room. It was an old-fashioned one, made to look like a hearth of coals. It was ticking and starting to pulse with orange light when she sat down on the sofa and pulled her legs up underneath her. The drizzle whispered on the skylight. The fire ticked. Hugo yawned. There was something nice about it. There was something so nice about it…
‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ he said.
‘Okay.’
He went to the kitchen, and a minute later shouted, ‘I’m going to put the water on for the pasta.’
He had just done so when he turned and saw her standing in the doorway. ‘James,’ she said.
&n
bsp; ‘Yes?’
‘I don’t want to be your girlfriend.’
When he said nothing, she laughed nervously and said, ‘You probably don’t want to make supper for me now.’
When he still said nothing, she said, more seriously, ‘Do you want me to leave?’
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry, James. I’m sorry I’m so shit at this…’
‘Why?’ he said.
She said, ‘I… I’ll tell you.’ It was a struggle though. She stood there opening her mouth and shutting it. She laughed. ‘I’ll spit it out,’ she said. Even then, it took another minute. She was looking off to the side when she finally said it. ‘I… I want… to see… Fraser.’
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
She said, ‘Should we have a glass of wine?’
The initial shock was subsiding. And it might have been worse. It was just Fraser. Fraser. There had been trouble with him before.
It was true that this did seem more serious. She was sitting there on the sofa saying things like, ‘I know I shouldn’t have started this in the first place. I wasn’t emotionally available. It was selfish of me. She looked very solemn. ‘I haven’t been honest with you, James. I’ve never been honest with you. I’m sorry.’
His most immediate concern was what would happen that night—the prospect of not spending the night with her that night was an utterly terrible one. He needed her more than ever that night, after what she had said. The prospect of spending the night alone… The prospect of her just leaving… He might eventually fall asleep, and then wake a few hours later, in the desolate misery of first light, with the whole day waiting there… He poured more wine.
Now she was talking about the oast houses. There were a few of them on the property in Kent, and she was saying that she wished they could all—he took ‘they’ to mean the two of them plus Fraser—live in their own oast house ‘and just visit each other when we wanted to’. Though why he and Fraser would ever want to visit each other… And what would happen if he wanted to visit her and found Fraser already there, in her oast house? Or if one night together they should be interrupted by Fraser’s heavy knock?
She was quite tipsy now. She stuck out her glass for more wine. ‘I’m sorry, James,’ she said. She smiled wistfully. Then she kissed him, properly and at length, on the mouth. ‘I want to stay the night,’ she whispered. ‘Is that okay?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I want you to.’
‘It would be just too sad otherwise.’
Once that was settled, they ate a piece of Parmesan and finished the wine. Then she went and put on her new silk pyjamas. Then he took them off. And what followed was ferociously heightened with the sense that it was now in some way illicit, with the furious, urgent sense that it might be the last time.
*
In the morning everything seemed evanescent. On the point of evaporating. Outside time. They lay there holding each other in the halflight.
She said, ‘What do you think I should do?’
There was a whole minute of silence.
(A minute, he now thinks, in which everything stood still, and everything was still possible, waiting to hear what he would say…)
Finally he sighed with what seemed like frustration or impatience and said—‘I don’t know, Katherine. I don’t know.’
She squeezed him.
‘Will you make some coffee?’
When he had made it he let in some more light, and they had it sitting side by side, propped on pillows.
‘What time is it?’ she said.
He picked up his watch. ‘Eight fifteen.’
‘I have to go.’
He watched her leave the warm sheets and tiptoe out. Heard her exchange a few words with Hugo. Listened to the shower’s feeble sputter. To the quiet when it stopped.
Still wonderfully, luxuriously naked (her nakedness seemed like a wonderful luxury now) she sat down on the edge of the bed, in the soft shaft of London light that seeped down from the street. ‘I might not see you for a while,’ she said. He nodded. With his knuckles he stroked her sternum. She kissed him. Then she went to the living room to dress, and left.
In fact, they saw each other the very next day. Toby invited them for a drink—together, as if they were an item—near his Finsbury Square office. When Toby left, they stayed for another drink. In fact, they stayed until kicking-out time, by which point a tacit understanding seemed to have emerged that they would spend the night at her place.
They had to take two buses to get there. The first was totally empty as it leaped and jittered over the tarmac of the New North Road. They sat on the lower deck, near the door, kissing quietly in the harsh damp light. From Essex Road station they would have walked if it wasn’t pouring so determinedly, if there weren’t streams in the streets and waterfalls plunging into the drains—it was only two short stops on the 38 that emerged from the turbulent opacity of the night, and then a sprint down Packington Street which left them soaked. In the kitchen they stuffed their faces with a pack of saucisson sec. Once upstairs, they spent a lot of time, in various states of undress, looking through some photo albums she had produced from somewhere—earlier versions of Katherine Persson. He was still looking at them when she said (she was far from sober), ‘What happens here?’ and poked his hairy perineum.
‘Nothing,’ he murmured, still looking at the photos.
‘No…’ she mused, leaning over him, tickling it. ‘I suppose not. With me it all happens there…’
‘Mm…’
‘It’s funny to think that nothing happens there with you.’
‘No…’
‘With you I suppose it happens here…’
He left early the next morning—Hugo was in Mecklenburgh Street—with a perfunctory halitosis-laced kiss in the steady headache of first light. Still, so much for not seeing him for a while. The question was—what now?
On Friday he sent her a hopeful text—See you this weekend?
There was silence until Saturday morning, when this popped out of the ether—No honey sorry doing things this weekend x
He wondered what she was doing. It occurred to him, of course, that she might be with Fraser. In a strange way, he hoped she was. Fraser was somehow part of the furniture. He had probably been sharing her with Fraser, without knowing it, for weeks. He was used to that idea. It was the idea that she might be with someone else, someone other than Fraser—or even on her own—that was the heavier thought. And it did weigh on him, as that Saturday wasted away unused. Partly it was just a matter of knowledge. He was very keen to know what she was doing. To know whether she was with Fraser, or with someone else, or on her own. Not knowing was what was hard.
3
1
Friday morning the wind was screaming and yelling, screaming and yelling at him to shake a leg. He pressed out his Silk Cut and flung off the duvet. Today was the day. Today was the day he had been waiting for for more than a year. In the white nook of the kitchen, where the wind was fighting the unsnug window, he took the Tropicana from the fridgelet. The fact was, they were destined to be together, in spite of everything that had happened. It was pretty simple. He loved her, she loved him, and it had been like that from the very first moment. The moment when she looked up from the front desk, her manner as intimidatingly poised and together as always, and saw him there…
Pow!
A coup de foudre. (Or Cupid’s twang.) Love at first sight. That never happened to some people. Some people never had that. Then last year he had nearly fucked it up—no, he had fucked it up—and now fate was offering him a second chance. So do not fuck it up again, Fraser, he instructed himself, pissing noisily in the wind-hammered suntrap of the bathroom.
He took a shower.
They were just so wonderfully easy, those long talks they had on the phone practically every night now. It was as if nothing had happened. Everything forgiven and forgotten. Amor vincit omnia. The
y still laughed at the same things. The same things made them happy. The same things made them sad. They understood each other. Soulmates. That was so obvious there was no fighting it. There was just no fighting it.
‘Let’s try again, Katie,’ he had said last week, when they had just laughed at something together.
And then, ‘Hello? You still there?’
‘Yes, I’m still here.’ Her lovely English voice.
‘So,’ he said, ‘are we gonna try again?’
And she said. ‘What exactly would that entail?’
‘What would it entail?’… He said, ‘Why don’t we go away somewhere. Why don’t we go away for a weekend somewhere. No pressure. Just see where things stand.’
He did not expect her to say yes straight away, and she didn’t.
First she just laughed as if the whole thing was a joke.
Then she made him wait a few days.
She was stronger than he was. He knew that. Smarter and stronger. (Some men would find that hard to take—a smarter, stronger woman.) Strong as she was, though, she was suffering too. And she was doing all sorts of things to try and numb that suffering. That was her way. She wouldn’t just suffer passively, like he sometimes did. She would never do that.
Towelling his furred solidity, his thoughts touched with a new twinge of shame on the incident that had provoked all this suffering. It was an incident that had preoccupied him much since last fall—sleepless nights and such—and specially the last few months. It was tough for a man like him to be married and do that sort of work. You know the sort of work. The model taking off one set of underwear and putting on another on the other side of the screen, talking merrily. Only the two of them in the windowless studio with the stainless-steel sink in the corner. And then she steps out from behind the screen and he tells her to lie down on the furskin and look sexy, or strike a Christine Keeler pose and look sexy, or use some prop and look sexy… Part of the trouble was he found women like that—women like Felicity, for instance—very easy to engage with. They liked him. They liked his energy; they liked his playfulness. It’s fair to say there were typically a lot of warm feelings in that studio. And a lot of flirting—which was part of the job. The job was to make them look sexy, and to make them look sexy he had to make them feel sexy, so he had his professional patter. The thing is, when you say stuff like that, even if you don’t mean it, even if you’re just saying it, it has its effect. There is no such thing as a purely professional situation. That was something he had learned. He knew that all too well.
