Nightshade

by Annalena McAfee

  At the door, standing with his colleagues, he answered one of her unspoken questions: he was going back to Archway, he said, in a voice that seemed a little too loud to be casual. The cruel message was as much for his colleagues’ ears as for Eve’s.

  She watched him leave and her desolation was total. She felt like weeping. Like screaming. Instead she went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. She couldn’t bear to go into the bedroom, to look at the scene of last night’s bliss-filled abandonment, transformed to a seedy site of betrayal. She’d been deluded and she hated herself for it. The boy had been playing with her, idling away the time, of which he had an abundance. It meant nothing to him. She threw the wine down the sink, called a cab, put out the studio lights and returned to Delaunay Gardens.

  9

  The Tube slows to a halt—between stations, again—and again the lights flicker. We’re always seconds, inches, away from total breakdown but if we dwelt on it we’d never get out of bed: why bother with that strenuous interlude—the demanding middleman—between birth and death?

  A swaying figure looms in her peripheral vision then sits down heavily next to her; another breach of etiquette on a comparatively uncrowded train. There are three empty seats further down the carriage. Why couldn’t he sit there? He’s about her age, with the profile of a dissipated Roman noble, shabbily dressed in a frayed moleskin jacket and stained slacks. Once he might have been handsome but tonight he’s a ruin of a man. He smells strongly of drink—whisky, she guesses—and he gazes, abject, at his feet in their battered brogues. The evil imps of age and alcohol have done their work. Suddenly he slumps sideways, resting his head on her shoulder and, for a second, they are a Gillray caricature of companionable dereliction. She jumps up, horrified, and moves further along to one of the empty seats.

  She looks back down the carriage and sees he’s now sunk further in his stupor and hasn’t noticed her leaving. What misery is he anaesthetising himself against? The lost jobs, failed marriages, estranged children, vanished dignity. She should feel some kinship but she’s repelled.

  Even in the more rule-bound days of her youth, she has to acknowledge, there were daily transgressors. The old are prone to golden-age delusions and the tendency needs to be watched. It’s another trick of the light—those days were gilded by nothing more than the reminiscer’s youth. In the sixties and seventies, in rush-hour carriages murky with tobacco smoke, few women Tube travellers under thirty could escape a journey without some stranger slyly squeezing their buttocks or cupping their breasts. Today, faced with the same opportunist gropers, Nancy’s lot would be calling their lawyers, venting on social media and embarking on ten years of therapy.

  Eve’s gaze falls on the elderly couple opposite. She has to watch that designation—elderly—too. One person’s old age is another’s prime. They’re probably in their mid-seventies, a mere fifteen years older than her—half the age gap between her and Luka. They smile at her sympathetically; they must have witnessed the scene with the drunk. Dressed in hikers’ fluorescent waterproofs and orthopaedic shoes, they’re holding programmes, large and garish as pizza menus, for a West End musical. There was another thing Eve and Kristof had in common—they couldn’t bear musicals.

  The couple weave swollen-knuckled fingers to link hands. They’ve made it through; their marriage a steady ship chugging through calm waters. These ancient mariners never dared the high seas. But what does she know?

  * * *

  —

  Hers wasn’t a bad marriage. She and Kristof had what was known as a “strong” union. They weathered standard difficulties and indiscretions over the years. Kristof was a child of the sixties, able to recall marijuana-infused days in a Venice Beach bungalow with Tibetan mandalas on the wall, Hindu prayer mats on the floor, and the Doors’ portentous anthems booming from the hi-fi. Eve came of age in the seventies, when interior design and music took a more dystopian turn. But for both of them in their youth, in their different countercultural circles, the slogan “property is theft” had currency. “Property” included any claim on another person: loyalty, honesty, even the expectation that they might turn up at an agreed time and place. Stephen Stills’ lyric, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with,” was the soundtrack to many light liaisons, before and after marriage.

  When property ceased to be theft—Kristof turned out to have a genius for acquiring, designing, renovating and reselling it at profit—sex was, at least in their first torrid decade together, still up for grabs, however constrained by new precautions in those plague-ridden days. It was rarely about the other, this wild reel with interchangeable partners; more an interior journey and a means of self-discovery—a high-intensity programme of masturbation in company.

  As a couple, they reconciled themselves calmly to material acquisition but they held out on formal marriage. Then one afternoon, ten years after they first met, following too many drinks at a West Village restaurant, a mad impulse saw them paying a few dollars for a wedding licence. The next day, animated by a sense of irony, they were married at City Hall.

  Kristof’s affairs were more numerous than hers, which from this distance seemed retaliatory workouts—effortful, sweaty and repetitive—bringing little satisfaction in the way of vengeance. Back in London, she was thrown by his fling with Mara. Eve arrived home in Delaunay Gardens a day early from the Venice Biennale and surprised the pair in the marital bed. She left the house without saying a word, returning in the evening once Mara had gone. After a spell of tight-lipped “mature discussion,” some manoeuvring, and an excruciating tit-for-tat weekend in Rome with Mara’s then husband, a garrulous, good-looking “society naturopath” who couldn’t believe his luck, Eve managed to keep her poise and preserve her marriage, as well as her relationship with Mara, whose own marriage didn’t survive the fallout. Eve felt a degree of schadenfreude when her friend came weeping with news of the naturopath’s defection. But really, Eve had done her a favour so it hardly counted as retribution. More satisfyingly, three years later, on the best-eaten-cold principle, she exacted exquisite revenge, deploying a long-range guided missile on the complacency of her treacherous friend. Now, finally, they were even.

  Kristof’s interludes were mostly with low-status young women from the office—easy come, easy go—though it was a dalliance with an au pair that nearly broke their marriage for good. Once it was out in the open, it was clear that Elena could no longer work at the house. Kristof was obsessed with her: striking and sinewy with dark corkscrew curls and lapis lazuli eyes. He wouldn’t give her up. Kristof even invoked the sixties by proposing a threesome.

  “We don’t have to be bound by the old rules,” he said. “Why can’t it work? I love her…I love you…You love me…”

  “Don’t count on it,” Eve replied.

  A job was found for the girl in a local nursery and Kristof paid the deposit on a rented flat near the park. For a month, he operated by his self-devised new rules, shuttling between two women. At Delaunay Gardens, Eve, quietly simmering, insisted that he sleep in the attic guest room. In silence, she took stock. She loathed hapless Elena, she loathed Kristof, and she entertained murderous fantasies—she would let herself into the flat with a stolen key and lay slow and methodical waste to them both with a scalpel. She’d start with that Medusa hair and go on from there, setting them out like two plants on her dissecting table, stripping them down to stalk and pith.

  She did nothing, said nothing and sat it out. There was always the nagging sense that her fury was just a touch bourgeois. Couldn’t she be more French about it? If she wanted to keep her marriage, and her life, wasn’t this how it had to be? It was, though, a close-run thing and she confided in Mara, seeking a recommendation for a divorce lawyer. Mara, of all people, knew the score—she’d done rather well out of her own divorce from the numbskull naturopath—and it was pleasing to see her beginning to run to fat, miserably alon
e and puffed up with jealous indignation at the news that this lightweight girl had captivated Kristof, the former lover who’d discarded her so lightly.

  Eve finally booked an appointment with a solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn. But then Elena undid the affair all by herself by turning up at Delaunay Gardens after midnight, hammering on the door, pleading and railing. Kristof’s new rules weren’t working out for her either. She’d missed the sixties by several decades and was too young for “mature discussion.” Kristof was her man, her property, and she’d come to claim him. She matched and magnified Kristof’s sexual obsession, venting the fury of a bambina viziata, unable to accept that she couldn’t have her way. Neighbours were woken, the police were called. Kristof, horrified, bought her a one-way ticket back to Bologna. She was never spoken of again. Only Nancy missed her. Given Elena’s pathological immaturity, it was hardly surprising she’d been so adept at childcare.

  What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger—one of the insufferable platitudes Mara used to invoke. The affair with Elena certainly stiffened the heart. But Eve’s marriage was more than a fragile fortress constructed from error piled on forgiveness, or forgetfulness, piled on error. It wasn’t simply an alliance of convenience. The little lies, honed during those affairs, were grace notes—disgrace notes—ornamenting the simple melody of their union. They got on, Eve and Kristof. They were alike. They shared a love of order and disdain for mess—emotional and otherwise. Their interests overlapped: art, naturally; mid-century design; jazz; opera. They had that querulous daughter, with her constant needs, in common too. Then there were the friends, the houses, the paintings and sculptures, the holidays. How could you even begin to unpick all that?

  It proved to be easier than Eve could ever have imagined: she tugged at one thread and the whole tapestry unravelled.

  But, eight months ago, on the cab ride home to Delaunay Gardens, tortured by the thought that Luka had walked out on her after one miraculous night, she counted up the virtues of her marriage like an old nun telling her rosary beads.

  She couldn’t give up the boy. But he had given up on her. And so soon. She had thought the night’s pleasures were reciprocal. The morning kiss in the shower seemed to seal it. He didn’t have to do that. If he was dissembling, he was a master of deception. But then, how could she be so foolish as to believe that a beautiful boy—from her perspective, he was still, at thirty, a boy—should feel desire for a woman of her age? His arousal, though—he couldn’t have faked that. She felt feverish, oscillating between rapt memories of the night and the racking certainty that Luka had gone from her life as suddenly as he’d arrived. It was as if she’d stumbled across a remarkable new pigment, not a blend of old familiar hues but a unique and blinding primary glow that suffused the world, illuminating its darkest corners. And now, a switch had been flipped, every colour had drained away and, like an old movie, life would have to spool on in black and white.

  The cab pulled up in Delaunay Gardens. She hesitated before pushing open the gate and walking to the front door. She turned her key in the lock and braced herself to step into that familiar place knowing that everything had changed. She had changed. Nothing could be the same.

  Kristof was smiling when she walked in: “Eve! Good news!”

  He kissed her on the cheek and slipped his arm round her waist, leading her down into the basement kitchen. He was celebrating. He’d won the contract for the Imperial Straits Bank headquarters in Singapore and tonight he would cook dinner—fish and samphire, bought by his personal assistant from Billingsgate market. He opened a bottle of Sancerre, talking breathlessly of his success and the politicking necessary to achieve it.

  He didn’t notice his wife’s altered state. Eve felt so transformed, so different from the cool, controlled woman whose last exchange with her husband was over the coffee machine yesterday morning—procedural groundwork for the little lie necessary to explain in advance last night’s absence—that she might as well have had a tattoo across her forehead. A tattoo of Luka’s name. In the space of twenty hours she’d experienced rapture and humiliation, climbed Everest and plumbed the Krubera Cave. How could she be the same?

  Yet, against the odds, she went on to enjoy the evening. Her appetite was good, an echo of that other reawakened hunger, and if at times she was bored by Kristof’s boasts of business prowess, didn’t fully follow his narrative and couldn’t take in the cast list—numerous warring board members, conniving marketing people, rival firms—his monologue gave her permission to mentally retreat, nurse memories of rapture and try to protect herself against despair.

  Her husband talked on then got up to fetch another bottle of wine from the cellar.

  “This will amuse you,” he called over his shoulder. “The office has had an enquiry from Wanda Wilson. She wants me to pitch for a commission for a new $42 million immersive performance space on her Art Ranch in Connecticut.”

  “Wanda?”

  “Yes. There are two others in the frame—a new Japanese architect and Bertoli, the Italian firm. I think we could really do something there, though. That’s if it’s not a problem for you.”

  Why should it be a problem for her? That stuff with Wanda was so long ago—nearly forty years. She’d moved on. It seemed Wanda had moved on too—her approach to Kristof was proof of it—and the bunkum business was clearly booming. If Eve was really looking for problems she wouldn’t have to go far. She smiled and nodded at Kristof, and tried out a sad scenario on herself; yes, Luka had gone. For him, their night was an act of wild folly. His admiration for her art—a sweet youthful hero worship—had, under the influence of wine and her attention, mutated into a kind of lust; the star-struck boy had wanted to pleasure his heroine and, in the process, had a reasonably good time himself. But, after that night, out of bed and dressed, with the pitiless morning light flooding the studio windows, reality had set in. In her paint-stained overalls, strands of hair unravelling from a hastily pinned bun, Eve was a tired old woman doing her best, engaged in the futile struggle to outrun the clock. How could he desire her?

  “Are you okay?” Kristof asked.

  “Yes. Go on…”

  Luka had gone. But her memories of that one night would be a comforting keepsake, a talisman to see her through the sterile years ahead.

  Later that night, in bed with Kristof, she reconciled herself to the status quo. The ageing warrior was still full of boardroom battles but those of the bedroom were behind him. Their marriage was mostly comfortable. That, at this end of life, with the grave yawning at her feet, may be the best one can hope for. There would be no more imperilling spikes in blood pressure or lurching accelerations in heart rate. She fell asleep finally, resigned to unthrilling contentment.

  Just after dawn, she woke with a start, and in the grey light, lying next to her sleeping husband, she reckoned it all up again and knew that the accumulation of years, the shared experiences and entanglements, the weight of jointly acquired stuff, could never stack up against that one night of pure feeling. But it would have to do.

  10

  They’ve reached Notting Hill.

  “Change here for the Central Line and trains to Ealing Broadway and Epping.”

  The recorded female voice is low, with a chummy Estuary twang. Once the announcer would have been male, and his accent patrician BBC—the clipped voice of authority to Eve and her art school crowd, who were intent on shaking things up and breaking down barriers: class, sexual mores, gender roles. That project didn’t go so well either. She stands up, as do most of the passengers in the carriage. They are all changing here. She inserts herself in the crowd, moving along narrow, low-ceilinged corridors—static tubes—up an escalator then down, to the eastbound Central Line platform. She has just missed a train. She sits on a bench to wait for the next.

  * * *

  —

  After her night with Luka, as she lay awake next to her sleeping husband
in Delaunay Gardens, Eve knew it was futile to count her losses. She’d chosen ease over passion when she married and this was where it got her. Too late to change now. Let sufficiency be her succour. For exaltation, she would look to work. Home offered composure. And composure was not nothing.

  But later that same morning, it all changed again in an instant when she walked towards the studio and saw Luka, standing there waiting for her with a backpack slung over his shoulder.

  “I went back to Archway to get some things,” he said.

  She hesitated, taking in his words. Was he saying what she thought he was saying?

  He frowned: “You did mean it? About the job? That you wanted me here? That’s still on? Right?”

  There was a note of panic in his voice. Now he was anxious and she had the power. He didn’t just want to work in the studio, he wanted to move in. He was one step ahead of her. Was she ready for this? So soon? She hesitated. Let him feel the desolation that wrecked her sleep last night. Just for a moment. She didn’t say a word, turned the key in the lock and they walked into the empty studio. She couldn’t hold out for long. She answered his questions with a lingering kiss.

  They only had an hour alone together before Josette and Glynn were due to arrive, but in that time Luka made his commitment clear. Her resignation to a half-life at Delaunay Gardens and unconvincing resolutions about strength in solitude—who was she kidding?—vanished.

  * * *

  —

  The Tube indicator board flashes then goes blank. She winces at the screech of a tannoy. Everyone looks up expectantly, as a male voice (live, not recorded, and not patrician BBC) announces: “Due to a person on the line, Central Line services have been suspended. Passengers are advised to find an alternative route.”