by David Szalay
To his surprise she phones him later. They talk for a long time. He tells her about the last meeting of the season at Plumpton, about how they have to sell the mare. He is lying on the sofa. The vent is open in the skylight.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ he says eventually.
‘Staying in, I think.’
‘You don’t want to meet up?’
‘No,’ she says.
‘How about tomorrow?’
‘I can’t tomorrow.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m seeing someone else.’
‘Maybe in the week then, or next weekend?’
‘Maybe,’ she says.
6
She is in the National Gallery when he phones. She has looked at Piero della Francesca’s half-finished Nativity and tried, as usual, to put her finger on what it is about the picture that fascinates her. It seems to tease her. There is something wrong with it—the elements do not seem properly integrated—and yet it still fascinates her, still maintains the hold on her imagination that it has had since she was at school and there was a small, pale reproduction of it on the wall. Its modesty was what used to trouble her then, studying it while some teacher spoke—even the singing angels, such a modest little quintet. The whole scene one of hardscrabble poverty. Franciscan. It had disturbed her teenage sense of propriety.
Now she is standing, with a few other people, in front of the equally familiar image of The Arnolfini Portrait. It exerts a similar fascination to the Nativity. It too seems to have something wrong with it. The figures of the fifteenth-century financier and his wife medievally large, the space flat—except for the profound shadows of the mirror—and yet the plain light so true. The light from the window specifying the texture of their few small luxuries. The light was the same then… She answers her phone.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m okay,’ she says.
‘I’m not sure,’ she says a few moments later.
One of the blue-uniformed museum attendants, having left his seat and tiptoed up to her, whispers something.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘I have to go. I’m in the National Gallery and they’re telling me I can’t use my phone in here. I’ll call you back. Okay.’
She spends another minute looking at The Arnolfini Portrait. Strange, she thinks, this practice of looking at pictures, standing there ogling and hoping for some sort of effect—waiting for something like Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ perhaps to pop fully formed into your head. ‘About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters…’ Slowly she makes her way down the wide stairs and out of the museum into the sunlight of Trafalgar Square. Traffic, tourists, fountains, statues, sky. Four o’clock faintly audible—a fine wind pushing the fountains’ spray. She puts on her sunglasses. She was here last night, or not far from here. She and her mother saw The Marriage of Figaro, at the ENO. It is the sort of thing they do once a month—spend the afternoon shopping, then an early supper and the opera or the theatre or some hirsute intense Slav playing the piano in the Festival Hall. They parted on St Martin’s Lane at twenty to eleven.
Standing on the pavement in front of the Sainsbury Wing, she phones James. They had a tentative plan to see each other today. She is not sure she wants to. She would not have phoned him if he hadn’t phoned her first. In fact he says he has a hangover and suggests they meet tomorrow instead.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I have things to do tomorrow.’ And then, ‘I’m going to Greece on Monday.’
‘Greece?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
She has written a letter to her employer. She has not sent it yet—first she has taken the two weeks’ holiday they owe her, and she will spend those weeks in Greece, looking for somewhere, some idyllic shore, where she might open a small hotel. Then she will work her month’s notice while the people from Windlesham Fielding find tenants for Packington Street. There is plenty of equity in the property, and the loan forms are waiting on the table in the living room. Her father has promised to invest too, if she finds somewhere with potential. This she explains to James.
‘So…’ she says.
‘Well…’ He sounds shocked. ‘Let’s meet tonight then.’
For a second she says nothing. She wishes that he had not phoned her, that he had not put her, just when things were starting to seem simple, in this infuriating position of not knowing what she wants.
*
Last night, drunk, Freddy fessed up. He told James about his ten days in Paris—about that young American, that fantasy of freckled, milk-fed wholesomeness, with her spangled exiguous dresses and eight-inch heels, her thousand-watt smile in the plutocratic settings. The money from the touch all spent. Wondering whether the story furnished an example of utter foolishness or sublime wisdom—he was simultaneously envious and extremely pleased that he was not in Freddy’s position—James said, ‘What the fuck are you going to do now?’
And Freddy said—surprisingly—that he intended to go into posh primary schools and take photos of the pupils in their ties and haircuts and milk teeth, and then send watermarked samples to their parents, offering proper prints for a substantial fee. All he would have to do, he seemed to think, was persuade the school authorities that he was not a paedophile and he would be able to take thousands of pounds per school. ‘The point is,’ he said, smiling, ‘it’s a test of love, isn’t it. For the parents. They won’t want Toby to be the only kid in the playground whose parents don’t love him enough to get a photo of him. That’s why they have to be fucking expensive—if they’re not expensive enough it won’t work, it won’t be a proper test of love.’
Later, somewhere noisy and subterranean in Notting Hill, they found ‘Alan-friend’.
Fey and palely Oriental, Alan-friend stood on his own, occasionally snapping his fingers and shuffling his feet to the music. In the old days, he was there every night, and every night he was on his own, a strange figure of metropolitan loneliness. James and Freddy used to wonder who he was. The insane offspring of a Hong Kong trillionaire was a favoured explanation; the insanity having less to do with the senior naval officer’s uniform he was always wearing—though that was not particularly sane—and more to do with the fact that he spent every night in that one Notting Hill venue and never spoke to a single person there—and if you did speak to him he turned out to be a total fantasist, explaining with quiet seriousness that he was involved in the development of various spaceships and futuristic weapons systems and other top-secret science-fiction nonsense. So last night, for old time’s sake, they talked spaceships with Alan-friend for a while, and Freddy asked him if he wanted to invest in his new business, and Alan—in his vice-admiral’s uniform—said without hesitation, without even knowing what the business was, that he would be happy to, that he was always looking for ‘opportunities’. They agreed to meet and talk about it ‘seriously’ at some point in the near future.
Leaving Alan to his liqueur—he tippled weird liqueurs, though he never seemed even slightly drunk—James and Freddy ended up in some place in South Kensington where Freddy knew the eponymous proprietress, a middle-aged American woman who had had some famous lovers in the past. The photos of these lantern-jawed men—half-familiar faces from the Eighties, politicians, newspaper editors, presidential emissaries—were on the walls.
In the morning James had a stinking hangover, which worsened until he switched off the TV and just lay there on the sofa. Later he took Hugo for a walk. He stared into the empty fridge. He had a shower. He phoned Katherine.
They went to the Old Queen’s Head. She was in a surprisingly talkative mood. She was frolicsome. She was tipsy. He insisted on paying for the food and drink, and produced a huge wad of money from inside his jacket—a market trader’s wad that made her laugh out loud. He was just like the men she saw in Chapel Market, she thought, those sharp-eyed men, forever permutating over their stalls of tat. She smiled and let him hold her h
ands over the tabletop. He was nicer than that, of course. He had been telling her about starting a business, the things she needed to think about—he himself had been starting businesses since he was seventeen. She liked the way he had done it, without patronising her, or not much. Now he was talking about his friend Freddy, how he had spent thousands of pounds—the money he won on their horse—on a single week in Paris, and about some prostitute he seemed to have fallen in love with… It was a funny story. It made her laugh. Perhaps that was why, looking at her watch, she said, ‘Do you want to watch a film or something?’
Walking down Packington Street in the hook of his arm, however, she started to wish she had not invited him home. She even wondered, unlocking the front door, whether to say to him, Look, I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to watch a film. I want to be on my own. Instead, she preceded him into the downstairs hall, pressed on the timed light, and started up the thin stairs. She said, ‘What do you feel like watching?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t mind.’
He made himself at home. Took off his shoes. Flopped down on the sofa, feet on the pouf.
‘I don’t have anything to drink,’ she said.
‘That’s okay.’
She turned on the TV. There was some film on TV, and they just started to watch that. Obviously feeling encouraged, he tried to kiss her at various points, tried tentatively to start undressing her. Each time, she went along with it for a minute, then fended him off, and there was another stretch of staring at the television, until he tried again. In fact she was no more interested in the film than he was and in the end she let him undress her. Sometimes she had to augment her lover with her own finger to make herself have an orgasm, and that was obviously easier if he found his way into her from behind, and easier still if he forewent her sex altogether. This she encouraged him to do, awkwardly using her unseeing hand to alter his angle until he understood what she wanted. ‘Please,’ she said. For a while she felt the floor’s nap under her face. Then, starting to hyperventilate, she did not feel it. She felt nothing. There was only light, and pleasure.
Finding her suddenly limp and heavy, he finished with a few hurried movements, immediately toppling over and experiencing a soft occipital tingle as the blood flowed once more into the parts of his head that think.
They were lying on the floor.
The film was just ending. Worried now about stains, she sat up and looked at him, lying there naked, his hairless thorax still heaving.
*
In the morning the light was white. The light was tender, like something unhealed. She woke with the first twinges of period pain and Fraser in her formless thoughts. She lay there, encircled by James’s arms, thinking for a few moments, as the sleepworld faded, of Fraser. He kissed her neck. He said quietly that he had to leave, and finally unsqueezing her, he left the bed and started to dress. There seemed to have been so many mornings like this. Him leaving early, perforce, to walk poor Hugo. It was later than it usually was when he left. It was eight. ‘Do you want some coffee?’ she said. He did and while he was dressing she went to make it.
There was a Sunday-morning quiet. The espresso maker mumbled on the hob and she looked out the window. Packington Street. The weather still making up its mind what to do.
They drank their coffee in the white kitchen. They did so in silence.
When he had finished his coffee he put his arms around her and she put her head on his shoulder.
She said, ‘Don’t you want to know what happened with me and Fraser?’
He shrugged. ‘Okay. If you want to tell me…’
‘It’s not that I want to tell you!’ she said impatiently, almost pushing him away. ‘Do you not want to know? Are you just not interested?’
‘No, tell me,’ he said, holding her. ‘Of course I’m interested. Tell me.’
‘We went to Edinburgh,’ she said, putting her head on his shoulder again. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t let him have sex with me. I know it’s… important to men.’ He said nothing. ‘Isn’t it? Fraser was jealous when he heard about you.’
‘Was he?’
He felt her head nod on his shoulder.
‘So you went to Edinburgh…’
‘It was depressing,’ she said.
‘Why was it depressing?’
‘I don’t know. Fraser was depressed.’
She put her feet on his—her naked feet on his larger socked feet. He was looking down at them. For a long time he looked down at them.
‘And now?’ he said finally.
‘Now?’
‘M-hm.’
‘I don’t know. I’m going to Greece.’
He sighed. Tired and sad and slightly exasperated. Still looking down at their feet, he said, ‘I just wish it was…’
‘Simpler?’ she suggested.
‘Yeah.’
She nodded.
‘Will I see you later today?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I have loads of things to do.’
‘What time’s your flight tomorrow?’
‘Nine o’clockish. From Stansted.’
‘I wish I could spend the whole day with you…’
‘No.’
He squeezed her firmly for a second or two, then went into the hall to put on his shoes. ‘I’ll phone you when you get back from Greece,’ he said, stooping.
‘Okay.’
‘When is that?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘What do you mean—you’ve only got a one-way ticket?’
She nodded.
His shoes were on. He straightened up and put on his jacket, which was there on an overloaded peg. ‘Okay…’ he said. ‘Well… have fun.’
‘Okay.’
What to do now? They were standing in the hall. There seemed to be no natural way for him to leave, nothing that would do justice to the situation as he saw it, nothing that would not seem hopelessly peremptory. Finally—it was hopelessly peremptory—he just kissed her passionlessly on the mouth and said, ‘Bye.’
‘Bye,’ she said, and opened the door for him.
He was halfway down the stairs, halfway to the narrow hall, where the ownerless sideboard was swamped with letters for people who no longer lived there, when she shouted his name. In the shadowy space halfway down the stairs they kissed properly, for a whole minute perhaps, while the wind fiddled impatiently with the street door.
‘Okay,’ she whispered unentangling herself. ‘See you.’ She scampered up the stairs and went into the flat, leaving him to take the final steps, to pause in the familiar stillness of the hall, and then to pull open the door—even the way it stuck for a moment as he pulled it was familiar, seemed like something he had once loved—and step out into the light.
While he walked to the tube station, she was upstairs leaning over the pummelling tap. With her hair tied up, she stirred the water with her hand. She was thinking of tomorrow morning, of the taxi to Liverpool Street. Of the train through east London and the flat landscape of Essex. Of the light-filled airport.
Acknowledgements
As always, I would like to thank Dan Franklin, Alex Bowler and everyone at Jonathan Cape, and my agent, Anna Webber.
David Szalay was born in Canada in 1974. He is the author of London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Innocent. In 2010, the Telegraph listed him as one of the twenty best British novelists under forty. He lives in London.
Book design by Palimpsest Book Production Limited. Typeset by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
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