“What the fuck are you doing?”
I froze, said nothing.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s dark,” I whispered.
Oliver picked his watch up off the bedside table and threw it down. “Jesus Christ, it’s five o’clock in the morning. I’ve only been asleep half an hour. Thanks.”
I stayed where I was till he settled down, then carried on towards the door. It was closed. I turned the handle very, very slowly and pulled. It let out a long, loud creak.
A book flew across the room. I slipped out and shut the door behind me.
In the kitchen I made a cup of tea and went through into the living room, where my tapes and books were now arranged in alphabetical order.
I had been looking forward to Saturday night all week. That was my date with Oliver. He was a busy man. He liked to sleep with me, and seemed keen on me, but he didn’t have time to see me more than once a week. I understood, of course I did. I was lucky to be sleeping with Oliver Marchant. Hermione was positively green. Sex was all the more wild and exquisite because I was unsure of him and had to wait. It was the fruit of days of fantasies. I used to feel him inside me and think I was still dreaming.
The relationship seesaw: What would you do if it was perfectly balanced? I thought. Sitting there, suspended boringly, legs dangling in the air. Much better to be slightly at a disadvantage; so much more fun that way, swinging to and fro trying to get a bit higher. Much better to have those passionate, tantalizing thrills than endless boring TV suppers, sitting snuggled on the sofa in jeans and an old cardi, not caring what you looked like because inside you were so sure he loved you just for you. I looked at the trail of stockings and suspenders on the living room floor and burst into tears again. What you don’t want is to be on a seesaw with a maniac like Oliver, who keeps lifting you up high then banging you down on the tarmac, so that all your most sensitive inner parts are bashed about and broken. I knew that I should dust myself down, thumb my nose at him and walk away. I couldn’t do it.
*
On the Friday he had called me at the office and said he was sorry, he’d forgotten, he had a party on Saturday night.
“Oh, great. That’ll be nice, whose party?”
“Rosie, the thing is, it’s just a small do, invitation only. I mean I don’t really want to go but . . .”
So I couldn’t come. Saturday night was off. Every time he did this I thought he meant it was over. Hermione was listening.
“That’s fine. No problem,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Look I’ll call you tonight. OK?”
“I thought you were busy tonight?”
Why couldn’t we go out tonight instead?
“Look, I just need a night in, all right, it’s been a long week.” So why not have a night in with me, watching telly on the sofa? I said nothing.
“I’ll call you tonight.” He was angry now. I had offended the mysterious unwritten code.
“I might go out tonight.”
“Who are you going with?” he said angrily.
I said nothing, startled by his tone.
“OK, if that’s the way you want to play it. I’ll call you in the morning. Bye.” Slam.
“All right, that’ll be great. I’ll see you then. Yes, lovely. Talk to you tomorrow,” I said to no one, smiling at no one, looking up at Hermione. “Bye, sweetheart.”
That night I went round to Shirley’s and moped a bit, had a bottle of wine with her, giggled about men—“Men? Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em”—tried clothes on, went home in a taxi and a good mood.
When I got in there was one message on the answerphone.
“Hello, my little Devon plumpkin. Just wanted to hear your voice. Sorry I was so vile this afternoon. It’s been a filthy week. I’ll tell you about it. Mmmmm. Wish you were here now. Give me a ring when you get in if you like.”
I was a bit drunk. I called him. He was sweet, we talked dirty. We arranged to have lunch on Sunday. We talked dirty some more. I felt romantic. Poor old thing, with his pressures and horrible work and social demands. He said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll come round after the party tomorrow. I won’t be late. It’s just a duty job.” And I thought, Why not?
*
On Saturday I spoke to Rhoda. She was going to the same party as Oliver. It was in an old church in Notting Hill. Five hundred people were expected. Maybe he didn’t realize. Maybe it didn’t seem like that on the invitation.
“Ditch him, girl,” said Rhoda.
I stayed in. I thought he’d come round before midnight. At eleven, I slipped into a little black silk teddy and stockings. He really liked stockings, Oliver did. At one o’clock, I got into bed, still in the stockings. I slept in fits and starts. I was awake at three when the doorbell rang. He was rolling drunk. This time, even when we were having sex all over the living room, I was annoyed.
When we lay in bed afterwards I asked him about the party. “Were there a lot of people there?”
“Yeah, er, no, actually. Not really.”
“Who was there?”
He told me about it as if he was telling a story.
“. . . and it was then Vicky Spankie rather fell for my charms.”
“What do you mean? I thought you didn’t like her.”
“Hey, hey, come on, I was just dancing with her and talking to her. She’s a sweet girl. It’s completely absurd her being married to that opportunist Indian idiot. I’ll give it three months. He’ll take her for everything she has.”
“I thought that was what she’d done to him.”
“Do I detect a note of jealousy, my plumpkin? No need, no need. She has got nice tits, though.”
He fumbled drunkenly at my breasts. I felt cold as a lump of dough.
*
When I crept back to bed from the living room at six he didn’t wake. He didn’t wake when I got up at eleven either. I faffed around the flat for a couple of hours, trying to read the papers, not settling to anything. The only thing that cheered me up was a piece in one of the tabloids, called “Twenty Facts You Never Knew about Rain Forest Indians.” There was a composite picture of Vicky Spankie and Rani at the top of the page with Vicky looking in the direction of Rani’s loincloth with an expression of some dismay.
Oliver still wasn’t awake at one. It was a lovely hot day outside. I imagined all the other people in London, all happily paired off, girls with lovers who wanted to go out with them, lying in parks in the sunshine reading the papers, holding hands, jumping into cars and driving off to country pubs. And here I was, creeping round my own flat in my powder-blue wrap, alone but trying not to make a noise in case I woke him and made him furious, unable even to wash my hair and get dressed.
Sod this, I thought. I started running a bath. I heard the sounds of stirring in the bedroom. I went to get the hair dryer and my clothes.
He was under the duvet like a beast in a lair. His eyes were red, his chin was covered in stubble. He looked at me as if he hated me.
“I am trying to sleep,” he said.
I picked up the clothes and the hair dryer without a word.
I sat miserably in the bath. I was fed up, fed up, fed up. I hated my job, I hated Hermoine, but most of all I was angry. I had no strength. I had to fit in with what he wanted or he would leave me. I had no bargaining power except to leave him and I couldn’t do it because I was in love with him. I got out of the bath, put on my makeup, got dressed, and dried my hair.
I decided that I had to make myself ditch him. I would go out and walk around in the sun, then I would come back and wake him up and throw him out. I was just writing a note when he appeared in the doorway, wearing trousers and no shirt. His cheeks were flushed and his black hair was all sticking up on top, like a little boy’s. I saw him clock my mood. He came and knelt on the floor in front of me, nuzzling my breasts. Then he took my face in his hands and stroked it with his fingertips.
“Rosie,” he said, quie
tly, earnestly, “you are such perfection.” I was weakening. I didn’t want the pain of leaving him, I wanted warmth and love.
“I’m going out,” I said uncertainly.
“Going out? Why?”
“Because it’s a beautiful day.”
“Darling, darling, I’m sorry. I was a horrible dormant beast. You look wonderful. Come on, let’s have a cup of coffee and sit on the terrace.”
I stomped into the kitchen and started making coffee. I did not know what to feel. I felt one thing and then I felt another thing. When I went into the living room he had tidied up all the things from the floor and he held his arms open wide to me. He was a very, very beautiful man. Still I did not respond. He got up, took the coffee cups out of my hands, put them down, took me in his arms and started crooning in a French accent. “You must reeemember zeees, a keees is just a keees, a smile is just a smile.” I didn’t want to laugh but I did. Then he swept me up and carried me to bed. It is hard to believe that someone does not want you when they make love to you as if they love you.
This time when we lay back on the pillows he did not light a cigarette and I did not snuggle up to him. I was in the after-sex state where your whole body feels as though it has undergone a fabulous, glorious chemical change. Part of me was still entirely besotted with him, part of me wanted to throw my arms round him and tell him I loved him so much. But the rest of me was still hurt and filled with foreboding.
I could tell he wanted me to lie on his chest like I always did. He reached out and tried to put his arm round me, but I pulled away.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Nothing.” I was so frightened he would stop being nice that I couldn’t explain.
He stroked my hair and mumbled something which sounded like “I love you.”
“What?” I said.
“I love you,” he said. It was the magic formula, the lure, the bargaining counter: the overloaded phrase which meant everything and nothing. It did the trick, as he knew it would.
“I love you too,” I said, because it was true.
That afternoon we spent a lot of time talking about Oliver’s problems, his pressures at work and why he found it so difficult to have relationships. I cooked him a nice supper, listened to him, and sympathized, and it seemed that things would be better between us. He just needed a bit of love and understanding, I decided. We spent the next night together too. It was the first time we had spent two nights together on the trot.
*
“Ah. Come in, come in. How’s it goin’? Any news from Marchant?”
“I . . .” I could swear Sir William knew what Oliver and I had been doing last night. I had a vision of Oliver coming towards me under the duvet, ready to take me.
“What’s the matter, gel, cat got yer tongue?” The trouble was Sir William’s literary mercy dash had become a taboo subject between Oliver and me.
“I don’t think they’re going to come out and film in Africa,” I hedged, “but I think they might include you in the discussion. We should get some decent coverage in the papers anyway.”
“Hmm. When’s it supposed to be?”
“Six weeks’ time.”
“Well, if the damn thing’s not going to be on TV there might not be a lot of point in me goin’. Might have to send you out on your own.”
“What?”
“Might have to go on your own, gel, and see to the photographs.”
This was the first he had mentioned my going at all. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. I’d never been outside Europe before. But over the next few weeks, the idea began to seem more and more alluring.
*
“Ah, it’s about tonight.” It was Oliver’s assistant, as usual.
“Oh, hello, how are you?”
Hermione looked across at me and sniffed.
“Fine, thank you. Now about tonight. It’s dinner at Richard and Annalene’s for the Dalai Lama.”
“Sorry, Richard—?”
“Richard Jenner. You’ve seen his film?”
“Not all the way through. I mean, actually no.”
“Oh. Well. Don’t worry. I’ll see if I can have a cassette biked round to you. How about that? So Oliver will pick you up at eight. He said don’t overdress.”
Oliver rang me half an hour later, pretending it was just to chat, but I suspected it was to check on what I was wearing. It was two weeks after we had spent that whole Sunday together, and this was our first formal outing as man and girlfriend. He said he would come round at eight-fifteen. When my doorbell rang, it was eight o’clock. I was still drying my hair, and only halfway through my dinner party homework watching Jenner’s truly terrible film which featured his girlfriend Annalene as a Polish waitress. I was nervous as hell. I was gulping at a gin and tonic to calm myself. When I got to the front door there was no Oliver but another driver in a hat.
We drove for a long way down into Docklands, stopping in a narrow alley between black warehouses. At the entrance to the building, an arch had been cut away and replaced by glass. Inside was a flag, which said, “Show Flat,” stuck in a pot full of tropical plants.
I pressed the bell marked “Jenner,” and became aware of a lens pointing at me out of the bell paraphernalia: a video entryphone. After a while a female voice said, “Hello?”
“This is Rosie Richardson. I’ve come with Oliver Marchant but he’s running late in the studio.”
“Come on up, it’s the third floor.”
It buzzed, but I pushed instead of pulled and missed it. I had to ring again.
“Hello?”
“I’m sorry, it didn’t—”
The buzzer went again and I still didn’t catch it in time, so I had to ring again, getting an extremely exasperated voice on the other end. This time I made it in—into a foyer which smelt like a hotel and had gray carpet climbing up the walls. When I stepped out of the lift at the third floor I could hear party sounds coming from an open door along the corridor to the right.
It led onto a tiny platform at the top of a spiral staircase. Below was a cavernous space with one wall made entirely of glass looking out onto the Thames. The whole floor was suspended on metal poles and surrounded by railings with another floor below. In the center you could see down to an unusually long thin swimming pool. Everything else was painted white.
There were about thirty people on the platform, a little group of them looking out over the river, another group peering down at the swimming pool, and the rest seated in a circle in some very, very odd chairs, which were like wrought-iron sculptures with cushions. From above it looked like a surrealist painting, with the guests molded into unusual shapes and forms by their chosen seat. I could see Richard Jenner, a tiny, wizened pixie of a man, lying on a peculiar chaise longue that positioned him with his legs higher than his head.
I set off down the wrought-iron staircase making too much noise with my heels. When I got to the bottom I didn’t know what to do. I could see several famous faces, but no one I knew. The groups looked pretty locked in, with large expanses of floor between them. No one was wearing any shoes. I stood there awkwardly, then Jenner caught sight of me, did a sideways roll out of his chair onto one leg, and scurried towards me, grasping my hand, talking in a low, nasal voice.
“Hello, my darling, have you got a drink? Hazel—drink, drink, drink,” he said, gesturing to a girl in a French maid’s outfit standing by a table full of colored drinks. “Come in, come in, sit down, meet some people, now you are?—tell me remind me.”
“I’m Rosie Richardson, I was invited by Oliver Marchant.”
“Of course, my darling, of course, we’ve met before, of course.” We hadn’t. “Lovely to see you again. Here you are, one of my specials.” He handed me a peach-colored cocktail. “Oliver has just called. He won’t be long. Now, my darling, would you mind taking your shoes off? We don’t want to mark the floor.”
In fact I minded very much because there was a hole in the toe of one of my stockings, but I took off m
y shoes obediently, feeling suddenly small and dumpy, and handed them to the waiting maid.
“Thank you, my darling. I’m afraid the Dalai’s having a bit of a nightmare fitting everything in and he’s probably not going to make it. But we will have Mick and Jerry—fingers crossed—and we’ve already got—Blake, Dave Rufford and Ken,” he said conspiratorially, waving a hand towards the window. There indeed, in a little group all on their own, were a pushy young Liberal MP, the drummer from a seventies rock band, and a commercials director who had just made the leap to the big screen with a movie set in the drains beneath London.
My appointed seat was a giant version of an ordinary kitchen chair, cast in wrought iron. I had to climb onto it, and I sat feeling like a baby in a high chair, swigging at my cocktail. It was black-frock house, as far as the women were concerned. Colors other than black did not feature in the outfit choices. A woman sitting below me craned her neck round, framed her mouth into a smile which had no effect on her eyes and was kind enough to ask me what I did. “I’m in publishing.”
“Oh, really? What do you do?”
Her interest was not able to surmount the fact that I was only in publicity and after a stilted exchange she turned away with a distracted smile. The only other conversation I had until Oliver arrived was thanking the cocktail waitress. It was impossible to communicate with anyone else in that position, but climbing down was too much of a performance to entertain. So I just sat quietly and listened.
Hughie Harrington-Ellis was perched uncomfortably on the edge of a cast-iron stool, talking to another seventies musician who seemed to be called Gary. I couldn’t place him precisely but I knew he was from a band who still performed together in spite of middle age. To look at him, he could have been a bank manager. Dave Rufford came to join the group with his wife. He was tall, with a long gaunt face. He was wearing sunglasses, and a dark-green baggy suit. His wife, who was around forty and extremely smart, was holding a baby.
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