by Sarah Dunant
He shrugged. “It costs an arm and a leg here. And not everything on the menu is worth it. I wanted to make sure we got the best we could. Anyway, it’s done now. So. Was it a flirt or serious?”
“What?”
“Your message.”
“I thought you could tell from the voice.”
“So did I. On the tape you said you had a life, but that you could do with another one, though not all the time.”
“Yes,” she said evenly. “Well, that’s more or less how it is.”
“Does that mean you’re married?”
“No.”
“Kids?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“One.”
“You want to tell me any more?”
“A girl. Six and a half. Lily.”
“Lily? Nice. Does her father help support her?”
“No,” she said, her irritation showing for the first time. “I do.”
“So he’s not in the picture?”
“Tell me, Samuel, what do you do for a living?”
“Unh-unh. Boring. We decided against that.”
“Excuse me. You decided.”
He paused. “I sell art. To companies.”
“How interesting.”
“No, it’s not,” he said abruptly. He sat back in his chair. “Would you like to start this again?”
The remark took her aback. “I don’t know. How far back could we go?”
He shrugged. “Well, we’ve ordered. We wouldn’t want to do that again, since it was almost certainly when the problem started. I am right, yes? That is when you got pissed off, isn’t it?”
She gave an exasperated laugh. “Let’s just say it was a little dull after the opening.”
“I know.” He sighed. “Food. My great failing. I have to say I like it almost as much as sex.”
“You eat regularly, do you?” she said dryly.
“Yep. But there’s always room for more,” he said, and this time he grinned, showing off those laugh lines at their best. I bet this has them eating out of your hand, she thought. Or maybe using their mouth elsewhere. Nevertheless, she was not having a bad time herself, although if she had thought about it she wouldn’t have been completely sure whether that was professional or personal.
“So how about you, Samuel? Are you married?”
He nodded. “Yes, I am.”
“Children?”
“No, no children.”
“How long have you been together?”
“Eight years.”
“That’s a long time. Is it successful?”
“More or less.”
“So is this the ‘less’ bit?”
“Not really.” He frowned. “Listen, in your message you made it clear you weren’t looking for a husband.”
“I’m not.”
“Good.”
She laughed. “Why, what are you looking for?”
“Same as you, I hope,” he said quietly. He broke off to fill her glass and then his own. “I’ll tell you how it is. I live abroad—in France—but I have to spend a couple of days in London every month on business, and during that time I feel . . . well, far away from home. Almost as if I was another person. I like that feeling. It makes me—I don’t know—more whole.” He paused, in case she wanted to add something, but she didn’t speak. “Last year I had an affair with a woman I met on the plane coming over. It lasted two months. I enjoyed her company and I was sorry when it ended. I’ve been rather hoping that I might do it again.”
“And you thought the dating ads were a good way to find someone?”
“As good as any, yes.”
She gave a little shrug. “Well, at least that’s honest.”
“I am,” he said, looking straight at her. “Honest, that is. Honestly. For some people it makes up for a lack of morality. Not for all, though.” Gauntlet down. He gave a wry smile. “Listen, as far as I’m concerned there are no rules, okay? So if this isn’t what you wanted, if it’s too much or too little, then you can call it quits any time you feel like it.”
She stared at him for a moment. Though his words were cynical they hadn’t come over that way. On the contrary his voice had considerable warmth to it. It could be argued that she was the cynical one; writing it all down in her head for further use later. “Thanks. I’ll remember that. Who’d be expected to pay for the meal, by the way? I mean, if I walked?”
He grinned. “Since I plan to try some of yours, I think it’s fair if it’s on me.”
She nodded. “And what happens if you’re the one who wants to leave?”
“I’d eat first.” He looked up at her. “But I don’t. Want to leave, that is. And if it doesn’t sound too bigheaded, I don’t think you do either. Not yet, anyway.”
She stared at him and the tiniest stab of desire registered inside her, somewhere around where the top of the cervix meets the womb. Biology, she thought, survival of the species. That’s all it is. Easily ignored.
She took a breath. “I love my daughter,” she said, absolutely not intending to.
“I know how you feel. I love my wife.”
She made a little clicking noise with her tongue, but it wasn’t exactly anger. “I don’t fuck my daughter.”
He missed a beat, but only one. “I don’t fuck my wife.” He smiled. “Well, not much. Not anymore.”
She didn’t smile back.
“But I have to tell you, Anna, I would really like to fuck you.”
Since he was too good to have made such an elementary error at this stage, he must have known that she’d be up for this. Or at the least not put off by it. You could easily stop now, she thought. You’ve got a great article here, you don’t need anything more. Unless there is something else here that you need—or want?
“You don’t think this could be reflex action on your part, do you?” she said. “You know, like hunger and then food?”
He laughed. “I grant you it may look pathological, but I assure you it isn’t. I would have no trouble leaving here alone. I’ve done it in the past.” He paused. “I warned you I was honest.”
“What? Same table?” she said, professing indignation.
He gave an apologetic shrug. “Last time I got number 110.”
She glanced in their direction. They were eating and talking, merry busy chat, so much to say; easy, domestic, rather than vibrant. A couple, whatever that meant.
“And what if it’s no good?” she said, turning back to him.
“The sex, you mean? Then we’d have had a decent meal and seen the view. But it won’t be no good. With the right person I’m better at it than eating. Trust me. Trust yourself.”
She sat back in her chair and stretched her legs out under the table. Her foot met his. For a moment he did nothing, then he slid his hand down and took hold of her bare ankle, slipping his forefinger under her foot and flipping off the shoe. He ran a slow, slick finger over her sole. Flesh on flesh. He knew what he was doing. She couldn’t claim it wasn’t nice. If maybe a little corny. “I’ve got a better idea,” she said. “Why don’t we just miss the meal?”
He stared at her, and for the first time she saw him confused, watched the contest playing out behind his eyes. Even his touch grew halfhearted. Once upon a time she had been good at combining mischief and passion; something about the confidence of not being hurt. I want it back, she thought. I’m ready for it. She laughed so loudly that the neighboring table stopped to check them out.
As she spoke, somewhere, somehow, something had been decided. “Well, at least you didn’t lie about that,” she said, pulling back her foot gently, then taking pity on him. “I wouldn’t want us to peak too early here.”
He too laughed out loud at that one. He lifted his hand from under the table and held it out across the napkin and the knives and forks, as if greeting a business associate.
“So, Anna—what’s your second name?”
“Revell,” she said, with barely a missed beat. “Anna Revell.”
“So, Anna Revell,” he said. “I’m Samuel Taylor. I’m very pleased to meet you.”
The room had grown dark around the memory. On the bed the phone exploded under her fingers. Home, she thought, grabbing for it. They’ve managed to trace the call.
The restaurant was noisy, Italians doing what they do best. “Hey, I’m about to go hypoglycemic here. Should I call an ambulance or the waiter?”
You could always call your wife, she thought, surprised by the exposed edge of irritation in herself. “Start eating,” she said instead. “I’m almost out of here.”
She pulled herself up from the bed and went looking for something to wear. She dug down into the new bag and pulled out a clean top, realizing too late that it was the one she had wrapped Lily’s present in. The wooden horse tumbled onto the floor, its prancing front leg hitting the tiles at an angle. She heard the crack. Damn. She picked it up gently to survey the damage. The wood around the knee joint had split open on a seam. The horse still stood, but would need veterinary superglue to make it whole again. Her carelessness made her angry, as if it were a symptom of maternal neglect. She rewrapped the animal with exaggerated care and returned it to the bottom of the case.
In the bathroom as she turned on the light a cockroach skittered across the floor and disappeared under the wash unit. Dirt in the cleanest of places.
“What’s your problem?” she said out loud. “Don’t you like it with the lights on?
“And how about you?” she murmured under her breath, staring at her reflection in the mirror. “What do you see?”
The face that looked back at her was pale, the skin almost spongy with faint purple bruising under the eyes from sleeplessness: a woman under the influence of sexual intimacy. She thought again of home: Paul, Stella, and Mike dining in a summer’s garden without her while Lily scampered downstairs to answer the phone. Was that the real risk in all of this? That opening up to a lover would mean somehow closing down on them? She had a job, a daughter, and a home. A life. She didn’t need another one. Or if she did, what did that say about the one she’d already got? She looked at herself again. Was the difference she saw behind or only in front of her eyes? It’s just sex. If I chose, I could walk out of here and never see him again, she thought. True or false? Stupid question. Why should she have to? Was it really so impossible to have both him and them? After all, men did it all the time. The trick was to learn to keep them separate, learn how to compartmentalize.
She had dug into her makeup bag and started dressing her face when the phone rang again.
Home—Sunday A.M.
I WOKE TO the sound of no sound in the middle of the night. No sound, but something wrong. My first thought was that someone was in the house, my second that it was Anna. I got up and pulled on her dressing gown quickly as I moved to the door.
In the gloom of the landing I could just make out her silhouette sitting on the top stair like a goblin, body bent over itself, arms wrapped tight around her knees. If it hadn’t been such a warm night I would have thought it was a gesture against the cold. But I knew that really she was hugging herself.
Scared that I might make her jump, I called her name very softly. I could feel her attention, though she didn’t reply, just shifted her head a little until it lay on her arms. I took it as an invitation and sat myself down next to her.
“Hi,” I said quietly.
“Hi.”
“Couldn’t you sleep?”
A small shake of the head.
“Too much fun during the day, eh?”
“You’re wearing Mummy’s dressing gown,” she said, her head still at an angle but her face obscured by a tangle of fallen hair.
“Yes, I forgot to pack my own. I don’t think she’d mind, do you? Do you want to share it? There’s loads of room.”
Another little shake. We sat for a while. I wanted to put my arm around her, to make her safe inside my warmth, but I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do. If I were Anna, I would know automatically. That’s what being a mother is all about.
“You didn’t hear the phone again, did you?”
She shook her head once again, this time abruptly. I felt a little wave of hostility coming out of her, but whether it was directed against the world in general or just toward me I couldn’t tell. How will we ever cope if Anna doesn’t come back? I thought. How will we ever make it through the night?
“Would you like a drink?”
She shrugged. I waited.
“Do you think you might sleep better in Mum’s bed?”
Still nothing.
Once, the summer before last when they’d been staying with me, and Anna had gone to a midsummer night’s concert in the park, leaving me to baby-sit, Lily had woken with a nightmare, something she had never done with me before, and when I’d tried to comfort her she had grown dreadfully agitated, overflowing with what felt like boundless rage. I had found myself almost frightened of her. She had cried for what seemed like hours (though I know it was only thirty-five minutes because I kept checking my watch). Then, all at once, she had stopped and come and curled herself on my lap and fallen asleep. I was so nervous about moving her that she was still there when Anna got home.
Anna had been sanguine about it. She’d said it happened maybe once or twice a year, and that it was only so upsetting because of Lily’s usually sunny disposition. Looking into the pit, she called it. The drop went so far down you felt giddy and all you could do was stand by and be there for her until eventually, when she was ready, she would come back, knowing you were waiting. We had talked about it for hours afterward: how almost everyone has a darkness somewhere in them, one that is born rather than made, and why should we somehow expect less depth of personality just because there have been fewer years? It had made me think again what a good mother Anna had turned out to be because she wasn’t afraid of that. What a good mother, and what a good friend.
Apparently after my own mother died it became a habit of mine to go into her bedroom in the middle of the night—a kind of sleepwalking grief, I suppose. My father would wake to find me sitting on her side of the bed: no tears, no nothing, just sitting there wide-eyed and blinking, not saying anything or responding to any of his questions. Like Anna he had some aptitude for other people’s pain. If it was a cold night he’d put a blanket around me; otherwise he’d just sit with his arm around me and wait till I was ready. He would ask if I wanted to go back to bed and eventually I would say yes. In the morning I couldn’t remember anything about it. Just like I can’t remember anything now.
It could be that I was trying to work it out for myself, the problem of where she had gone: same house, same room, same bed, one morning she had been there and the next night she hadn’t. Maybe I needed to test the absence for myself. In retrospect I can’t see that I was so damaged by it all. The wisdom of the time, of course, decreed that talking about it should help. I know my father took me to see somebody. I used to think I could remember the face of the woman I talked to—or rather who talked to me—and the pattern of the wallpaper in her room, but now I think I was just embellishing details given to me later. I have no idea if the therapy did any good. As it happened I did my own healing later in ways he wouldn’t really have understood. But at least he tried.
Ever since he’d told me about it—what, it must be ten years ago now—I’ve had this image of children as potted plants: pushy little seedlings that need basic but regular monitoring. Forget to stake them up at the right time, give them too little or too much Baby Bio, and you can affect their emotional growth for years. The tyranny of Freud. I think it’s one of the reasons I never wanted children of my own. Anna, luckily, has always been more phlegmatic. Her line is that potted plants survive the most appalling abuse and that children are more resilient than any of the advice books would have us believe. She would know. Maybe my mother would have known that too. If she’d stayed around longer, perhaps I would have learned it from her.
If only I could rememb
er what her loss had actually felt like, rather than just the flat dull memories of the day-to-day living without her. Presumably it was a way of blanking out the pain. No doubt that’s what I was scared of now. That somehow the loss of Anna would tap into something even bigger in me, something that had hitherto been submerged. Was that why I chose to believe that it had been her on the phone? Because it was just too awful to contemplate anything else?
“You know, when I was little I used to go and sit on my mum and dad’s bed in the middle of the night sometimes,” I said, looking down onto the hall beneath with the phone silent on the hall table.
She liked that one. I sort of knew she would. “Why?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. To make sure they were still there, I suppose.”
“Your mum’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Yes. But she wasn’t then,” I said, working some swift revisionist magic to protect us both.
She didn’t say anything for a while. Maybe I’d scared her. “Was she nice?”
“My mum? Oh yes, I think she was.”
“Do you miss her?”
No point in lying too much. Lily would spot it, anyway. “Well, to be honest I don’t remember her very well anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because it was a long time ago that she died.”
“How old were you?”
“Oh, old—I mean much older than you—nearly ten.”
“Ten. And you don’t remember her? You must have a bad memory, Estella.”
I laughed. “I suppose I have.”
She had shifted herself a little in my direction, so that now I could feel the warmth of her right leg against my own. I slipped an arm around her. She leaned into me. I felt myself go soft inside. We sat staring down into the swirling darkness of the stairwell. I thought about death, and I wanted to guide us both away from it.
“Don’t you find it spooky sitting here on your own in the dark?”
She shook her head. “Mummy says that the dark is only frightening because we’re not cats. She says the world is full of animals that love the dark. And they have to have some time for themselves when they can catch food and play.”