It was a nice idea, but it couldn’t be true, and it didn’t explain all the cats around us. There were now about twenty, and somehow that was too many. Not for my taste, but for common sense. Where the hell were they all coming from?
‘But they didn’t have cats in those days,’ I said, nervously. ‘Not like this. This kind of cat is modern, surely. An import, or crossbreed or something.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s what they say,’ she said, ‘and that’s what people think. They’ve always been here. It’s just that people haven’t always known.’
‘Alice, what are you talking about?’ I was beginning to get genuinely spooked by the softly milling cats. They were still coming, in ones and twos, and now surrounded us for yards around. The canal was dark apart from soft glints of moonlight off the water, and the lines of the banks and walkway seemed somehow stark, sketched out, as if modeled on a computer screen. They’d been rendered well, and looked convincing, but something wasn’t quite right about the way they sat together, as if some angle was one degree out.
‘A thousand years ago cats used to come to this hill, because it was their meeting place. They would come, and discuss their business, and then they would go away. This was their place, and it still is. But they don’t mind us.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I love you,’ she said, and kissed me for the first time.
It was ten minutes before I looked up again. Only two cats were left. I pulled my arm tighter around Alice and thought how simply and unutterably happy I was.
‘Was that all true?’
‘It’s true that I love you,’ she said, and smiled. ‘The rest was just a story.’ She pushed her nose up against mine and nuzzled, and our heads melted into one.
At two o’clock I realised I was going to have to go home. We got up and walked slowly back to the road. I waited shivering with her for a mini-cab, and endured the driver’s histrionic sighing as we said goodbye. I stood on the corner and waved until the cab was out of sight, and then walked back home.
It wasn’t until I turned into our road and saw that the house lights were still on that I realised just how real the evening had been. As I walked up the steps the door opened. Nancy stood there in a dressing gown, looking angry and frightened.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she said. I straightened my shoulders and girded myself up to lie.
I apologized. I told her I’d been out drinking with a male friend, lying calmly and with convincing determination. I didn’t even feel bad about it, except in a self-serving, academic sort of way.
Some switch had finally been thrown in my mind, and as we lay beneath the duvet afterwards I realised that I wasn’t in bed with my girlfriend any more. There was just someone in my bed. When Nancy rolled towards me, her body open in a way that suggested that she might not be thinking of going to sleep, I felt my chest tighten with something that felt like dread. I found a way of suggesting that I might be a bit drunk for anything other than unconsciousness, and she curled up beside me and went to sleep instead. I lay awake for an hour, feeling as if I was lying on a slab of marble in a room open to the sky.
Breakfast the next morning was a festival of leaden politeness. The kitchen seemed very bright, and noise rebounded harshly off the walls. Nancy was in a good mood, but there was nothing I could do except force tight smiles and talk much louder than usual, waiting for her to go to work.
The next ten days were both dismal and the best of my life. Alice and I managed to see each other every couple of days, occasionally for an evening but more often just for a cup of coffee. We didn’t do any more than talk, and hold hands. Our kisses were brief, a sketching out of the way things could be. Bad starts will always undermine a relationship, for fear it could happen again. So we were restrained and honest with each other, and it was wonderful, but it was also difficult.
Being home was no fun at all. Nancy hadn’t changed, but I had, and so I didn’t know her any more. She was a stranger who was all the worse for reminding me of someone I had once loved, and of someone I had once been. The things that were the closest to the old ways were the things which made me most irritable, and I found myself avoiding anything that might promote them. Any signs of intimacy, or real friendship, in other words—the only things which make a relationship worthwhile.
Something had to be done, and it had to be done by me. The problem was gearing myself up to it. Nancy and I had been living together for four years. Most of our friends assumed we’d be engaged before long: I’d already heard a few jokes. We knew each other very well, and that does count for something. As I moved warily around Nancy during those weeks, trying not to seem too close, I was also conscious of how much we had shared together, of how affectionate a part of me still felt towards her. She was a friend, and I cared about her. I didn’t want her to be hurt. I wasn’t just her boyfriend. I knew some of the reasons her eating was as bad as it was, things no-one else would ever know. I’d talked it through with her, and knew how to live with it, knew how to not make her feel any worse. She needed support, and I was the only person there to give it. Ripping that away when she was already having such a bad time would be very difficult to forgive.
And so things went on, for a little while. I saw Alice when I could, but always at the end I would have to go, and we would part, and each time it felt more and more arbitrary and I found it harder to remember why I should have to leave. I grew terrified of saying her name in my sleep, or of letting something slip, and felt as if I was living my life on stage in front of a predatory audience waiting for a mistake. I’d go out for walks in the evening and return as slowly up the road as possible, stopping to talk to the cat, stroking her for as long as she liked and walking up and down the pavement with her, doing anything to avoid going back into the house.
I spent most of the second week looking forward to the Saturday. At the beginning of the week Nancy announced she would be going on a team-building day at the weekend. She explained to me what was involved, the chasm of corporate vacuity into which she and her colleagues were cheerfully leaping. She was talking to me a lot more at the time, wanting to share her life. I tried to take in what the day’s programme would be, but I couldn’t really listen. All I could think about was that I was due to be driving up to Cambridge that day, to drop work off at a client’s. I’d assumed that I’d be going alone. With Nancy firmly occupied somewhere else, another possibility sprang to mind.
When I saw Alice for coffee that afternoon I asked if she’d like to come. The warmth of her reply helped me through the remaining evenings of the week, and we talked about it every day on the phone. The plan was that I’d ring home early evening, when Nancy was back from her day, and say that I’d run into someone up there and wouldn’t be back until late. It was a bending of our unspoken ‘doing things by the book’ rule, but it was unavoidable. Alice and I needed a whole afternoon and evening together, if I was ever going to be able to psych myself up to doing what had to be done.
By mid-evening on Friday I was at fever pitch. I was pacing round the house not settling at anything, so much in my own little world that it took me a while to notice that something was up with Nancy too.
She was sitting in the living room going over some papers, but kept glancing angrily out of the window as if expecting to see someone. When I rather irritably asked her about this, she denied she was doing it, and then ten minutes later I saw her do it again. I retreated to the kitchen and did something dull to a shelf that I’d been putting off for months. When Nancy stalked in to make some more coffee she saw what I was doing, and seemed genuinely touched that I’d finally got around to it. My smile of self-depreciating good nature felt as if it was stretched across the lips of a corpse.
Then she was back out in the lounge again, glaring nervously out of the window, as if fearing immanent invasion from a Martian army. It reminded me of the night I’d seen her standing by the window, and it was a little scary. She was looking very flaky that evening, and I’d
run out of pity. I simply found it irritating, and hated myself for that.
Eventually, finally, at long last, it was time for bed. Nancy went ahead and I volunteered to close windows and tidy ashtrays. It’s funny how you can seem most solicitous and endearing when you don’t want to be there at all.
What I actually wanted was a few moments to wrap a novel I was going to give to Alice as a present. When I heard the bathroom door shut I leapt for the filing cabinet and took out the book. I grabbed tape and paper from a drawer and started wrapping. As I folded I glanced out of the window and saw the cat sitting outside in the road, and smiled to myself. With Alice I’d be able to have a cat of my own, could work with furry company and doze with a warm bundle on my lap. The bathroom door opened again and I paused, ready for instant action. When Nancy’s feet had padded safely into the bedroom I continued wrapping. When it was done I slipped the present in a drawer and took out the card I was going to give with it, already composing in my head the message for the inside.
‘Mark?’
I nearly died when I heard Nancy’s voice. She was striding through the kitchen towards me, and the card was still lying on my desk. I quickly yanked a sheaf of papers towards me and covered it, but only just in time. I turned to look at her, my heart beating horribly, trying to haul an expression of bland normality across my face.
‘What’s this?’ she demanded, holding her hand up in front of me. It was dark in the room, and I couldn’t see at first. Then I saw. It was a hair. A dark brown hair.
‘It looks like a hair,’ I said, carefully, shuffling papers on the desk.
‘I know what it fucking is,’ she snapped. ‘It was in the bed. I wonder how it got there.’
Jesus Christ, I thought. She knows.
I stared at her with my mouth clamped shut, and wavered on the edge of telling the truth, of getting it over with. I’d thought it would happen some other, calmer, way, but you never know. Perhaps this was the pause into which I had to drop the information that I was in love with someone else.
Then, belatedly, I realised that Alice had never been in the bedroom. Even since the night of the canal she’d only ever been in the living room and the downstairs hall. Maybe the kitchen, but certainly not the bedroom.
I blinked at Nancy, confused.
‘It’s that bloody cat,’ she shouted, instantly livid in the way that always disarmed and frightened me. ‘It’s been on our fucking bed.’
‘What cat?’
‘The cat who’s always fucking outside. Your little friend,’ she sneered violently, face almost unrecognizable. ‘You’ve had it in here.’
‘I haven’t. What are you talking about?’
‘Don’t you deny, don’t you…’
Unable to finish, Nancy simply threw herself at me and smacked me across the face. Shocked, I stumbled backwards and she whacked me across the chin, and then pummelled her fists against my chest as I struggled to grab hold of her hands. She was trying to say something but it keep breaking up into furious sobs. In the end, before I could catch her hands, she took a step backwards and stood very still. She stared at me for a moment, and then turned and walked quickly out of the room.
I spent the night on the sofa, and was awake for hours after the last long, moaning sound had floated out to me from the bedroom. I felt I couldn’t go to comfort her. It may sound like selfish evasion, but the only way I could make her feel better was by lying, so in the end I stayed away.
I had plenty of time to finish writing the card to Alice, but found it difficult to remember exactly what I’d been going to say. In the end I struggled into a shallow, cramped sleep, and Nancy was already gone by the time I woke up.
I felt tired and hollow as I drove to meet Alice in the centre of town. I still didn’t actually know where she lived, or even her phone number. She hadn’t volunteered the information, and I could always contact her via the courier firm. I was content with that until I could enter her life without any skulking around.
I remember very clearly the way she looked, standing on the pavement and watching out for my car. She was wearing a long black woollen skirt and a thick sweater of various dark browns. Her hair was back-lit by morning light and when she smiled as I pulled over towards her I had a moment of plunging doubt. I don’t have any right to be with her, I thought. I already had someone, and Alice was far and away too wonderful. But she put her arms round me, and kissed my nose, and the feeling went away.
I have never driven as slowly on a motorway as that morning with Alice. I’d put some tapes in the car, music I knew we both liked, but they never made it out of the glove compartment. They simply weren’t necessary. I sat in the slow lane and pootled along at sixty miles an hour, and we talked or sat in silence, sometimes glancing across at each other and grinning.
The road cuts through several hills, and when we reached the first cutting we both gasped at once. The embankment was a blaze of poppies, nodding in a gathering wind, and when we’d left them behind I turned to Alice and for the first time said I loved her. She stared at me for a long time, and in the end I had to glance away at the road. When I looked back she was looking straight ahead and smiling, her eyes shining with held-back tears.
My meeting took just under fifteen minutes—a personal record. I think my client was rather taken aback, but I didn’t care. Alice and I spent the rest of the day walking around the shops, picking up books and looking at them, stopping for two cups of tea. As we came laughing out of a record store she slung her arm around my back, and very conscious of what I was doing, I put mine around her shoulders. Though she was tall it felt comfortable, and there it stayed. We fit.
By about five I was getting tense, and we pulled into another café to have more tea, and so I could make my phone call. I left Alice sitting at the table waiting to order and went to the other side of the restaurant to use the booth. As I listened to the phone ringing at the other end I willed myself to be calm, and turned my back on the room to concentrate on what I was saying.
‘Hello?’
When Nancy answered I barely recognised her. Her voice was like that of a querulously frightened old woman who’d not been expecting a call. I nearly put the phone down, but she realised who it was and immediately started crying.
It took me about twenty minutes to calm her even a little. She’d left the team-building at lunchtime, claiming illness. Then she’d gone to Sainsbury’s. She had eaten two Sara Lee chocolate cakes, a fudge roll, a box of cereal and four packets of biscuits. She’d gone to the bathroom, vomited, and then started again. I think she’d been sick again at least once, but I couldn’t really make sense of part of what she said. It was so mixed up with abject apologies to me that the sentences became confused, and I couldn’t tell whether at one moment she was talking about the night before or about the half-eaten packet of jelly she still had in her hand.
Feeling a little frightened, and completely unaware of anything outside the cubicle I was standing in, I did what I could to focus her until what she was saying made a little more sense. I gave up trying to say that no apology was needed for the previous night, and in the end just told her everything was alright. She promised to stop eating for a while and to watch television instead. I said I’d be back as soon as I could.
I loved her. There was nothing else I could do.
When the last of my change was running out I told her to take care until I got back, and slowly replaced the handset. I stared at the wood panelling in front of me and gradually became aware of the noise from the restaurant on the other side of the glass door behind me. Eventually I turned, and looked out.
Alice was sitting at the table, watching the passing throng. She looked beautiful, and strong, and about two hundred thousand miles away.
We drove back to London in silence. Most of the talking was done in the restaurant. It didn’t take very long. I said I couldn’t leave Nancy in her current state, and Alice nodded once, tightly, and put her cigarettes in her bag.
She said
that she’d sort of known, perhaps even before we’d got to Cambridge. I got angry then, and said she couldn’t have done, because I hadn’t known myself. She got angry back when I said we’d still be friends, and she was right, I suppose. It was a stupid thing to say.
Awkwardly I asked if she’d be alright, and she said yes, in the sense that she’d survive. I tried to explain that was the difference, that Nancy might not be able to. She shrugged and said that was the other difference: Nancy would never have to find out. The more we talked the more my head felt it was going to explode, as if eyes would burst with the pain and run in bloody lines down my cold cheeks. In the end she grew business-like and paid the bill, and we walked slowly back to the car in silence.
Neither of us could bring ourselves to small talk on the journey, and for the most part the only sound was that of the wheels upon the road. It was dark by then, and the rain began before we’d been on the motorway for very long. When we passed through the first cut in the hillside, I felt the poppies all around us, heads battered down by the falling water. Alice turned to me.
‘I did know,’ she said.
‘How?’ I asked, trying not to cry, trying to watch what the cars around me were doing.
‘When you said you loved me, you sounded so unhappy.’
I dropped her in town, on the corner where I’d picked her up. She said a few things to help me, to make me feel less bad about what I’d done. Then she walked off around the corner, and I never saw her again.
When I’d parked outside the house I sat for a moment, trying to pull myself together. Nancy would need to see me looking whole and at her disposal. I got out and locked the door, looking half-heartedly for the cat. It wasn’t there.
Nancy opened the door with a shy smile, and I followed her into the kitchen. As I hugged her, and told her everything was alright, I gazed blankly over her shoulder at the room. The kitchen was immaculate, no sign left of the afternoon’s festivities. The rubbish had been taken out, and something was bubbling on the stove. She’d cooked me dinner.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 43
