My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  The corridors remind her of her primary school – the high, white-timbered windows, the wide grey worn concrete floors, the scent of paper and paint and chemical-heavy cleaning fluids. When she reaches Sarah’s studio, she peers through the marbled glass of the door, and spots her, bending over a pot on the floor, stirring energetically. The rest of the room is empty.

  ‘Hi,’ she says as she unlatches the door.

  Sarah turns. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Laurence has a cold,’ Lily says, ‘and his mother’s convinced it’s pneumonia, which means…I get the day off.’ She holds up a carrier-bag. ‘I brought some food. Have you had lunch?’

  ‘You,’ Sarah says, ‘are a psychic marvel. I’m starving. But I’ve got to do this first. The plaster’ll dry out otherwise.’

  Sarah is making a body cast. She’s been talking about it for weeks. Next to her, Lily now sees as she moves towards the window, is the framework, dangling on a string – a female form in frail, twisted wire, its hands resting on its hips. With the light directly in her eyes, it had been invisible. Lily places the conkers in a row on the window-sill, watching as Sarah soaks gauze strips in the wet plaster and wraps them, carefully, concentratedly, around the curves and planes of the framework. She works quickly, chewing the inside of her cheek, her fingers moving over her creation, deft and capable.

  Lily unpacks some of the food, and feeds Sarah torn strips of bread. Some other students pass through, pausing briefly to watch, then moving on down the long, thin room. Sarah is older than most of the other people on her course, a mature student, although she prefers to refer to everyone else as ‘immature students’. Lily drinks from a water bottle, rubs a conker into the dip of her hand and watches as the woman emerges, feet first, like a lone parachutist, waiting for the earth to come up and meet her.

  ‘Gypsophila,’ Sarah says at one point. ‘Great word.’ Lily pokes at the wet, creamy tub of plaster with a fingernail. It is the consistency of cake mix or mud. Sarah tells Lily about a lecture she went to that morning about male nudes, and about two people on her course who are going out together and insist on holding hands throughout the tutorials.

  ‘How’s Laurence’s French coming along?’ she asks.

  Lily grins. ‘Très bon, naturellement.’ She shakes her head, thinking of Laurence’s mother, a tall, anxious woman with prematurely whitening hair and not enough to do. ‘That woman is mad, really mad. How is it you need a licence for a dog but anyone can have a baby? It shouldn’t be allowed.’

  ‘And how’s the new flat?’

  Lily concentrates on peeling the tight, pungent skin of a clementine in one long, coiling strip. ‘It’s fine.’

  She feels Sarah looking at her. The possibility of telling her about Sinead opens somewhere, like a window in another room. But something is blocking her. Some kind of loyalty to Marcus, maybe, or a reluctance to reduce it to small-talk, or to make real these nebulous fears she’s been having. It seems too new, too undigested in her own mind, to speak of it easily.

  She swallows a clementine segment, neat and contained as a goldfish. ‘It’s fine,’ she says again.

  ‘And have you bedded the landlord yet?’

  She removes the white web of pith from her clementine, frowning. ‘There’s been a bit of a new development on that front.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  This all seems wrong. Sarah’s using the flippant voice with which they do all their chit-chat. How can she sit here, munching her way through a clementine, discussing the death of a woman as if it means nothing at all?

  ‘Um,’ Lily begins, wondering how to go on. Then it comes out in a jumbled rush. ‘You know the girlfriend I told you he had? The one whose room I’ve got? Well, she died.’

  There is a short, shocked silence. When she looks up, she sees Sarah on a chair, standing beside a perfect white replica, her hands dyed the same colour. ‘Are you serious?’ Sarah steps down with a thud. ‘My God. How come? I mean, how did she die?’

  ‘I don’t know. He couldn’t really…talk about it’

  ‘When did he tell you?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘My God,’ she says again. ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘Not sure. I think pretty recent.’

  ‘Jesus, the poor guy.’ Sarah picks a dot of dried plaster from her shirt and crumbles it between her fingers. ‘You’ve got to be careful, Lily.’

  Lily doesn’t say anything.

  ‘I mean, that’s a big situation you’ve got there.’ Sarah holds her arms wide, as if measuring it. ‘You need to think carefully about whether you want to…take it all on.’

  She comes in to find him watching a film on TV. They don’t say much to each other and she sits down next to him, pressing her shoulders against the sofa, and discovers that there is no way of sitting so that their bodies aren’t touching. The film is an old black and white one. An orchestral score surges as a woman is creeping along a corridor towards a big ornate door, the tempo of the music becoming more and more frantic.

  Lily tips back her head and looks around the huge room. Rusted steel girders transect the ceiling, and by the window hangs an old, ropeless pulley. It seems peculiar to her suddenly that they should be living in this space: a hundred years ago it would have been a garment factory, where immigrants from eastern Europe stitched fabric into human shapes and practised getting their tongues around the muted diphthongs of English. This is what Lily loves about London, that every building, street, common and square has had different uses, that everything was once something else, that the present is only the past amended.

  She swallows a yawn. Marcus’s thighs are encased in jeans. She imagines that if she were to let her hand drop on to them, they would feel taut and warm, the muscles close under the material. It would be so easy: all she’d have to do would be to let her arm relax, and it would fall naturally, her hand coming to nestle close to his groin. She then realises that Marcus is looking at her, saying something. ‘Sorry?’ she says.

  ‘He had more money for this one.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘He had more money. He went to the States.’

  Lily has no idea what he’s talking about. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, and turns back to the screen. ‘It was his first Hollywood-backed film. Have you seen it before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I won’t spoil it for you then.’

  A few minutes pass. The young woman is descending a staircase in a frothy white dress and a big hat. An aristocratic man in a tuxedo stands at the bottom with his back to her.

  ‘How was your day?’ Lily asks after a while.

  He glances at her. ‘Good, actually.’ He nods. ‘I’ve got moved on to a new job. Project Architect.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s means being in charge of everything,’ he explains, his eyes fixed on the screen.

  ‘Right. That’s great.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What do you mean, you suppose so? It is great. Really great.’ She touches his arm, wanting to press her point home.

  ‘Mmm.’ He shifts around so that he is facing her, and sighs. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Is it not a good project?’ she asks, confused by his lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘No, no, it’s a great project. Really interesting – a bus terminus. It’ll be…it’ll be…’ he rubs his forehead ‘…great.’

  She looks at him, puzzled. They are sitting close together in this huge room, knees touching.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, and gives a funny little laugh. Lily sees that he is trembling, his jaw muscles clenched. ‘Life’s just hanging on me a bit heavily at the moment. I don’t know…I don’t know what I can do to make myself feel better.’

  ‘Do you…would it help at all to talk about it?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’ He gets up and walks away quickly, closing his studio door behind him. Lily sits where she is, her hands tucked between her knees.

>   The film still plays in the corner. An evil-looking woman seems to be trying to persuade the girl to jump out of a window. Lily wonders if she should switch it off.

  It’s Sunday afternoon. Lily is having a hibernation day. She has to do this about once a month. It’s the only way, she tells herself, that anyone can remain sane in this city – lock the doors, put on the answerphone, don’t leave the house, don’t even think about going on public transport, just surround yourself with silence and do nothing.

  At this precise moment, she is lying on her bed the wrong way round, her head tipped over its end, her legs crooked at the knees. She teases knots out of her hair with her fingers; she peels away loose jags from around her nails; she presses her eyes, then shuts them to see technicolour sparks behind her lids.

  She sits up. Her head swims with the quick movement. She has no idea what time it is. Hunger tears like paper in her stomach. She should probably return the message Sarah left her earlier but can’t quite make the move to do so. The day is ebbing away, the sky that blank, whitish, shut colour.

  Lily stands, wanders to the window to look down into the street, and reaches up her hand to unfasten the latch. She encounters not cold metal but a dry crackle. She stands up on tiptoe to see a folded piece of lined paper, jammed into the join. Lily tugs it out and opens it. It’s a list of things: hairgrips is first. Then:

  notebook

  stamps

  hair serum

  In a different column, with slightly neater, more thought-out handwriting, as if the person had shifted position or moved to a table or readjusted the pen:

  pick up photos

  call I

  shoes?

  Shoes. Question mark. Was she going to buy shoes or not? Had she seen a pair she liked but wasn’t sure about, and maybe needed to try on? Or did she need some and was just reminding herself to have a look? The writing is spiked, sloping. The bottom of the g a deft, straight line. No loops, the dot of the i pulled into a dash in her haste, her es missing a space in their top half, the taller letters dwarfing the smaller. Who is ‘I’? ‘Call I’ seems strange, as if it had been a reminder to place a telephone call to herself. What kind of hair needed grips and serum?

  The paper feels crisp and brittle. Lily holds it to her face and sniffs. The floor beneath her shakes, as if a washing-machine is on somewhere else in the building. There is a rumbling sound in the next-door room like a radiator digesting heat.

  She wrenches open the window and, without thinking about it, lets the paper fall from her fingers. It floats down in a straight line, and she thinks suddenly of the paper fish her father used to make her by looping a strip of paper into itself. He would stand her on a chair and hand her the delicate curl of paper: Lily would hold her arm up above her head and release it; there was always a moment when you could see it twist and spore like a sycamore helicopter into a fish shape before it hit the ground and became just a loop of paper again.

  She leans out of the window, wanting to catch that moment when it meets the ground but as she does so, the window-ledge seems suddenly lower; her body swings far further forward than she intended, her feet sliding on the boards. Her heart convulses, blood cooling her chest, and she has to grab for the window-frame to steady herself, her nails scraping against the woodwork, her fingers scrabbling for a hold. The courtyard, street, cars, Tarmac, cobblestones wheel and tip beneath her, looking at once far away and sickeningly close. Her mind seems to split away from her body and she seems to see herself or maybe someone else fall, limbs flailing, hair arching behind her, hitting the ground with a crunching thud. She imagines that final, immovable, hard kiss of stone as she is moving back into the room, into safety, into balance. Then she grips the window-frame with both hands, standing up very straight. She doesn’t shut the window, but keeps the breath of the street moving around her. She is aware of the swell of the room at her back and the rush of the drop in front of her, and she stands there for a while, thinking.

  That evening, Lily sits at the table, her dinner in front of her, half reading a book. Her eyes keep straying from the tight blocks of printed text, floating upwards to rest on Marcus. Across the room, he is murmuring into the telephone, his face turned to the wall. Another black and white film plays out, unwatched, on the TV.

  Lily turns a page. Marcus dials a number, hangs up, dials again, hangs up, redials, speaks inaudibly into the receiver before dragging the phone on its extension lead into his room. The white cord rattles after him like a snake.

  With one hand, she winds strings of tepid spaghetti around a fork. Marcus’s film, freeze-framed to a moment where a man in too-short trousers is vaulting over a low wall, continues to flicker in the corner. She puts the fork back on the plate and starts clearing the table of her dinner things, stacking the plates on each other, balancing her mug on top of them. As she walks around the table towards the sink, she sees, she is sure she sees, out of the corner of her eye, something in the bathroom – a movement, a flicker, the greenish glass bricks refracting and splintering it.

  And then suddenly it is gone and the space behind the glass is empty and clear. She’d blinked or looked straight at it and it had vanished. Lily slides the stack of plates on to the counter and moves towards the bathroom. The light is on and the window wide open. Rain flecks the curtain and the sill. There is the faint, sickly scent of jasmine in the air. The hinge is stiff as she tries to shut the window; she pulls hard on the catch and the curtain billows and reaches for her, the dampness clutching at her. It must have been what she saw, moving in the wind.

  But she inspects the shower. It is dry, pristine, unused for hours and hours.

  The next day, Marcus is out of the flat before she even wakes. As she’s leaving her room, her bag on her shoulder, struggling with one arm in and one arm out of her coat, hooking her foot into her shoe, she sees on a chair outside Marcus’s room the patterned shirt he was wearing when she first met him. It is draped, its material creased and rucked, the geometry of its pattern interrupted, one arm flung across the chair back, the other dangling to the floor. The top three buttons are undone, as if he pulled it over his head in a haste to be undressed.

  Lily stands a few feet from it. She takes a step forward, but a movement at the corner of her eye makes her stop almost guiltily and flick her head towards the rest of the flat. It’s empty. Of course. Who does she think might be there?

  She covers the last two steps in a rush and seizes the shirt in both hands, as if someone is about to snatch it from her. As she does so, there is a sense of something being spilt inside her. She presses the shirt to her nose and mouth, trying to adjust. It is an unaccountable feeling, like the sting of sunburn you weren’t aware of happening. She’s in love with him. This is not good. She doesn’t want this.

  Lily thrusts the shirt from her, looks away, out of the window, and sees for the first time that the green cones of shoots are pushing up out of the black soil in the window-boxes. She frowns. It’s far too early, or perhaps even too late, for them. How come they’re growing now, just as winter is beginning? Lily steps to the window, staring down at their green tips – waxy, speared and determined. Beneath them, she knows, are the paper-dry cortexes of bulbs, and inside them, the germ of flowers, folded and folded into themselves. Sinead planted these bulbs, she thinks. There’s no way Marcus or Aidan would have. Sinead packed in their parchment bundles with powdery peat, watering them, placing the boxes here where no one has touched them since. How long can she have been dead? Two months? Three? How long ago did she plant these bulbs and would it have crossed her mind that she wouldn’t see them flower?

  She turns away. The flat seems sticky with Sinead’s fingerprints. She doesn’t know what to do.

  She arrives at work late. Natasha, the lingerie supervisor, who Lily knows for a fact wears padded bras, gives her a narrow-eyed glare as Lily tries to skulk into the back room, unnoticed.

  Sarah bursts in as she is stripping off her jeans.

  ‘Shit,’ Sarah says
, flinging off her coat and struggling out of her sweater. ‘I overslept. Through two alarm clocks. Can you believe it?’

  ‘Natasha’s on the rampage.’ Lily yanks her shirt over her head. ‘Did she see you?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  As they struggle into the green nylon skirts of their uniform, bumping into each other in the hot proximity of the tiny windowless room, Lily says, ‘I have a question.’ She stops, unsure of how Sarah might take this, then decides just to launch in. ‘If you wanted to find out how somebody died, how would you go about it?’

  ‘What?’ Sarah straightens up from lacing her shoe. ‘Who on earth—–?’ Her face clears. ‘You mean the girlfriend. Whatshername. Lily, you can’t be serious.’

  ‘I just want to know.’ She shrugs. ‘That’s all. Satisfy my curiosity.’

  ‘But you can’t go poking around behind his back! Lily, that’s – that’s devious and dishonest. It’s stalker territory. If you want to know, you have to ask him.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Just ask him. It’s not an unreasonable demand. He tells you, he cries on your shoulder, you fall into each other’s arms, you live happily ever after. Simple.’

  Lily drags a brush through her hair. ‘I don’t feel I can. He’s so…wrapped up in his grief. Most of the time he seems fine, and normal, but when she’s mentioned, he just clams up. Won’t say another word – about anything. And it’s not exactly hard to imagine why, is it? I’d feel like some horrible ambulance chaser if I forced the issue. It’s much easier this way – on everybody.’

  ‘Can’t you ask the other guy? The flatmate film man?’

  Lily snorts. ‘Yeah, he talks to me a lot.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘Don’t know. Go to the Public Records Office? I’ve no idea how you go about these things.’ She meets Sarah’s exasperated gaze. ‘Look, this is something I have to do. Once I know I’ll be able to—–’

  ‘What?’ Sarah demands. ‘Sleep easy at night? Know what you’re dealing with? What?’

  Lily doesn’t answer.