My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Lily crosses and recrosses her ankles underneath the bench, pushing each hand up the opposite sleeve. Around and in front of her, rows and rows of heads are bent over notes, arms jerk with quick note-taking; one or two people are whispering something in their neighbour’s ear. Lily is amazed by the rapt concentration in the room, how everyone is listening to the words that flow from Sinead’s mouth, how this one woman is the vortex of everyone’s attention, the reason they’re all here. People are concentrating and transcribing her every word in a notebook, or trapping the rises, falls and modulations of her voice on a tape-recorder. This is not how she remembers university.

  ‘What we have to realise,’ Sinead reaches up to pull down one half of the blackboard, and the sweater lifts to reveal the bottom rung of her ribcage, ‘is that Gawain is caught in the workings of a social machine that is beyond his ken. And doesn’t even know it. What he ignores, or doesn’t have the nous to take notice of is in fact the clue, the key to the whole plot in which he is ensnared. What appears to be the periphery is in fact the centre.’

  Lily leans, her hands flat on the glass, against the big bookshop window. Daylight is sinking into violet. The sky is lighter than the buildings. The clocks will be going back soon: in a few days’ time, this hour of the day will be gloomy, orange-lit and cold. She sinks down and rests on her heels, making sure she is still tucked into a doorway, just in case. A group of men with briefcases, tight shoes and well-cut hair pass her. The hem of one of their raincoats brushes against her knee. ‘Hello, darling,’ one says and they laugh, but Lily doesn’t react. Her eyes are fixed on the building opposite.

  There is something about this woman that strains and tugs at some vital part of her, as if her heart, connected to Marcus’s, is connected to Sinead. And at her very core is an unease of things not quite fitting into each other. Questions, small and insistent, whisper to her from corners of her mind. How does Sinead know about her? Can it be possible that Marcus really doesn’t know why she left? What is she – or the thing that looks like her – trying to tell her? What can be so bad to make a live woman haunt another?

  She’s going to stop her, that’s what she’s going to do. She’s going to just stop her in the street and ask her straight out. No messing about. Why did you leave? That’s all. Simple. Tell me why you left. And Sinead will tell her. And then she’ll know.

  Students she recognises from the lecture leave, bunching outside the door to pore over maps or to chat or to look up at the sky. Two men in caretaker uniforms wander out and down the street, a few lone academic-types. But not the person Lily is looking for. Lights are switched off in an upper floor. An elderly man stands by the now-locked doors, gazing at passers-by – a woman with a double-seated pushchair, a couple in matching fleeces, a man trailing an empty dog-lead. Then, just as Lily’s legs are becoming numb with cold and inactivity, Sinead appears.

  Lily leaps upright. Something in the hinge of her knee catches and twangs, but she ignores it and moves swiftly over the pavement, never taking her eyes off the figure on the other side of the road. Sinead is carrying a bright red and purple woven plastic bag in the crook of her elbow. She walks fast, and Lily’s knee sends arrows of pain up her thigh. Sinead crosses Gower Street at the lights, but Lily misses them and has to wait in agony, watching Sinead’s back recede into the distance. As soon as the lights glow amber she is running over the tarmac and along the road in a kind of stumbling jog, her breath steaming out in front of her, careful not to get too close. By the time they reach Tottenham Court Road, Lily is ten yards behind her.

  To her horror, Sinead suddenly breaks into a run, dodging cars, across the road. Has she seen her? Lily staggers after her, blood surging through her head. Sinead swings herself up into the back of a bus. Lily pushes herself into a sprint. Sinead is climbing the stairs to the top floor. Lily hears the ding of the bell and she stretches out her arm, making a lunge for the rail. Grasps it, thumb meeting fingers. Feels the bus powering away from her. Her feet scrabble for the platform. Her left foot makes contact and she hauls herself up.

  ‘Good exercise, eh?’ the conductor says, and winks.

  She manages a smile, then, steadying herself like a sailor against the swell and roll of the bus, cautiously climbs the winding stairs.

  It’s quite busy, people sat singly on most of the seats. Sinead is next to a man in a baseball hat on the front seat, the one Lily doesn’t like sitting in, the road eddying and rushing underneath her, and that teeth-smashing bar across the window against which she could be thrown at any moment.

  She sits near the back, in an empty double seat. Leaning towards the window, she can spy Sinead’s profile through all the other heads. She is reading something, her bag propped on her knee. Lily is suddenly aware of the loud labouring of her breathing. A few rows ahead, a teenager chirps into a mobile phone and a red-haired man opposite is muttering to his girlfriend, who is staring fixedly out of the window. Otherwise, silence.

  Lily swipes a sleeve through the condensation and a fan-shaped segment of the street appears – computer shops, a big stationer’s, a window full of futons. Her breathing is returning to normal when the bus judders to a halt. Feet thud on the boards. People clomp down the stairs. The baseball-cap man stands. Sinead moves her knees aside to let him pass. Lily folds her body in half, her face almost buried in her lap, her finger plucking at the heel of her shoe.

  The bus jolts forward and swings left into Euston Road. Lily peers up over the top of the seat. Sinead has moved next to the window and is looking out. There are four other people. The bus has picked up speed and is rushing along Marylebone Road. For the first time, Lily wonders where they are going.

  She could speak to her now. It would be so easy. Too easy. All she’d have to do is stand, walk a few paces and slide into the seat behind her and say – say what? Remember me? Hi, how are you doing? Great lecture, by the way.

  Lily turns her head away and gazes out of the window. Huge corporate buildings skim past. Thin darts of horizontal rain fleck the glass. Her own reflection – large-eyed, wild-haired, staring straight at her – makes her start.

  At Bayswater, Sinead shunts herself along the seat and stands. Lily bends, fiddles with her shoe, her tights, her buttons until she hears her descend the stairs. Then she gets up.

  They stand on the landing board together. Sinead leans right out, one hand holding the pole, hair and drizzle whipping across her face. Lily could push her. She could peel those fingers away from the pole and release her into the blasting flow of traffic. The thought, which appeared unbidden in her head, shocks Lily so much that she almost forgets to jump off after her.

  Sinead strides up a side-street, tugging her coat around her, shifting her bag on to the other arm. Then she turns into a doorway. Lily hesitates outside. There are double glass and dark wood swing doors, with a kind of wooden kiosk beyond, where Sinead is paying and being handed something large and white. Above the doors, in twisted, unilluminated neon, are the words ‘The Spa’.

  Lily pushes at one side of the door and steps in. She hands over the money to a large, florid-cheeked woman, who slides two towels across the counter towards her. Holding them to her, she goes through the second doors.

  Everything is very still and very cool. She is in a huge, high-vaulted room. People lie on rows of reclining chairs, draped in towels. No one speaks. The walls are gilt and stained-wood panelled, with lamps throwing circles of dusky yellow upwards. Reflections of water oscillate on the ceiling. The centre of the room is missing and people stand at the crater’s edge, looking down into the floor below. As she walks through the room, people turn their eyes to her then look away.

  Sinead is standing in a corner, stepping out of her skirt. Her hair is loose to her shoulders and her spine stands out from her back like beads on a thread. She folds her clothes into a narrow metal locker, wraps herself in a towel and descends the stairs. On the other side of the room, Lily does the same, the building opening out to her as she drops below street
level.

  There are women everywhere, naked. Milling from hot-room to showers to loungers to a steel drinking fountain to a small kidney-shaped blue pool, they step on crinkled, bare soles over the damp tiles, hair twisted to necks. Everyone is graceful and slow. Sinead slides between the vertical, heavy plastic slats of a doorway and is swallowed by steam. Lily follows.

  The air is whited-out and heavy with the medicinal tang of eucalyptus. The hot, wet smell stings the edges of her lips. Through the mist she can make out figures, lying or sitting, and wooden benches running around the walls. Lily moves through the steam and lowers herself down. She peers around. Sinead, barely visible and recognisable only by the mass of her hair, is sitting at right-angles to her, her feet on the floor, hands on knees, her head tilted back on the china tiles. Lily is mermaid-wet, the towel soaked. Hot drips fall on to her face and hair from the ceiling. Every muscle seems to flex and droop, her limbs socketless, her head weighted on her neck. The pain in her knee fades. The steam machine hisses and sighs somewhere near the floor. Two people in the corner murmur to one another; the woman next to Lily rubs her hand over her skin in long, methodical strokes. Sinead hitches one heel on to the bench and leans her arms on her knee, her hair falling over her face.

  Suddenly the heat is too much – sealed in around Lily’s nose and mouth. Every breath seems to take in only more heat, and when she moves her eyes they scald her lids. She stands and pads over the floor, through the plastic slats, and gulps at the cold, still air in the shower room.

  She walks around: echoing, empty hot-rooms linked to a further, hotter twin; another steam room; showers with three jets; the small, seething box of a sauna; a belching, spitting jacuzzi; an icy plunge pool with a glassy surface. She finds it strange that just above this warren of heat and cleanliness is a road where cars and lorries and taxis power to and from Westway, the city’s arched concrete spine. When she returns to the first steam room, she almost walks straight into Sinead.

  She is coming out between the slats, her cheeks pinked by blood, her body gleaming with sweat and moisture. She walks up some steps and around a corner. Lily raises her eyes over the small, surrounding wall just in time to see her lower herself into the freezing plunge pool. Feet first, her body disappears into the turquoise water like a woman swallowed by quicksand – calves, legs, buttocks, waist, back, torso, neck, head. For a moment, all that remains on the surface are the ends of her hair; then they, too, are pulled down. Lily waits. And waits. Counts to five, anxiety brimming. Counts past seven, then eight, then nine.

  Sinead explodes up through the surface, an emphatic column of flesh, gasping and shivering. She reaches for a towel and rubs roughly at her stippled skin. Lily looks at her, a delicate white all over; she looks at the small, tilted breasts, the dark arrowhead of hair, the thin, muscular arms, the twelve, evenly spaced ribs. She pictures Marcus’s hands and how they might fit in the dip of the waist, or curve over the buttocks, or how his fingers might slot between each of the ribs. There is a scar pleating the flesh of her upper arm. Lily imagines it would feel like braille under your lips.

  Upstairs, she watches in a mirror as, across the room, Sinead, dry and in a robe now, settles herself back on a lounger, picks up a book, opens it, places the bookmark inside the back cover. And she watches as she tries to read it, tries to go over the same paragraph, again and again. She watches as something keeps tugging at her attention and as she lets the book fall closed. When the tears come, they don’t surprise her. They don’t fall like Lily always thought tears did – out of the corners of the eyes and one by one. Sinead’s all seem to come at once and from every pore, flowing down her cheeks and nose and chin as if her whole body is crying, as if they will never stop.

  It is dark. Her wrists are pinned to the bed. Something is travelling over her, something cold and inquisitive, sucking and sniffing at her so vigorously she feels as though she’s being vacuumed.

  ‘What do you smell of?’ Marcus is demanding, pressing his nose to her arms, shoulders, the cleft between her breasts, her stomach.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, trying to turn away from him.

  He places his hands on her shoulders, buries his nose in her neck, inhaling. ‘What is it?’ His hands are strong and insistent on her limbs. She wriggles, turning this way and that, trying to get away from him, but he holds her fast.

  ‘Marcus,’ she says, cross now, ‘get off. You’re hurting me.’

  Suddenly he stops, his hands disappear from her skin. She opens her eyes, uncurls her neck. He is above her, staring at her, his brows drawn together. ‘It’s eucalyptus,’ he whispers, his voice low and barely audible. ‘Why do you smell of eucalyptus?’

  Lily thinks of an avenue of eucalyptus trees she once drove through in Portugal, the wind turning their leaves silver. ‘I don’t know.’ She turns her back to him, pretending to be asleep.

  But for the rest of the night she lies on her side watching the dark soak into grey, while Marcus, next to her, thrashes around as if he can’t find a way to get comfortable.

  ‘What you have to recognise,’ Sinead says, one hand raised to waist-height and turned upwards, ‘is that they are two halves of the same personality.’ She pauses and walks to the other end of the platform as if to allow time for the furious scribbling around her. ‘She represents all that Jane has been forced to suppress.’ Her eyes travel the room, veer close to Lily, pass over her, and – is it Lily’s imagination? – return, linger, then move on. Sinead turns on her spike heel, walks the other way, and moves the tip of her tongue across her lips. ‘And as for him…’ she continues.

  Sinead has stopped on a corner, looked up and down the street and checked her watch. Is she waiting for someone? Lily leans against the wall of the doorway she is concealed in. She’s going to approach her tonight, definitely. No more messing around. She just has to wait for the right moment, that’s all.

  Sinead folds her arms, as if she’s cold, takes out her phone and starts pressing at the buttons. At the sound of someone approaching, she looks up quickly but when she sees a woman in a red mac looks back down at the phone. Soho seems empty tonight, the café doors closed against the cold and the windows steamed over. People don’t loiter at this time of year, but hurry along the usually thronged pavements, coats hunched up around their ears. Lily feels her feet begin to numb and she tries to curl her toes inside her shoes. Sinead is also cold, Lily sees. She stamps her feet against the concrete, pulls her scarf more tightly around her face.

  Suddenly her head snaps round and her whole body flexes expectantly. She smiles. ‘What time do you call this, then?’ she shouts. A man in a leather jacket, tall, big, with dark hair, is running towards her down the middle of the road.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ he is saying over and over again. ‘The tube stopped in a tunnel for about three years.’

  Sinead steps off the pavement and they meet near the kerb, Sinead saying something Lily can’t hear and the man bends over to kiss her cheek. Sinead brings her hand up to curl round his shoulder and he presses his hand to her back like a tango dancer. It’s only when he pulls away that Lily recognises him. The shock is like the shock of infidelity. She has to put out her hand to steady herself against the wall.

  Aidan. It’s Aidan. Running towards her, late. Kissing her on the cheek. How come Aidan is meeting up with her? Does this happen a lot? And does Marcus know?

  They are moving off now. He is pulling something from his pocket and showing it to her, and their heads are bent over it together as they walk. Lily hurries after them, watches them stroll along pavements, skirt puddles and parking meters, cross roads, exchange sentences, brush against each other, hand a magazine back and forth between them. Outrage floods through Lily, and she isn’t quite sure why. They stop at a cinema and wait in line to buy a ticket, standing close together as they talk. There is nothing serious in their demeanour. Sinead is talking, animated, in a long spurt, Aidan listening intently. The noise in the foyer means she has to lean
on his shoulder and speak into his ear. He bends down to hear her, his hair falling into his eyes, and then he throws back his head and laughs, clutching at the arm she’d laid on him.

  They reach the counter, buy a ticket then disappear down the stairs. Lily is left standing on the street outside, still unable to believe it. Seeing them together seems incongruous, ridiculous. She wants to go up to them and demand an explanation.

  After saying goodbye to Aidan at the cinema doors, Sinead walks quickly through the city. Lily keeps about fifteen paces behind her, the city moving beneath them. The high, narrow streets of Soho give way to shops and boutiques, and by the time they reach Leicester Square, Lily is wondering how long they’ll be walking. But there’s no stopping. They pass the crowds outside the Hippodrome, the people streaming out of the theatres, the National Portrait Gallery, and take a left towards Charing Cross Station. Sinead turns in her direction once before she crosses the road and once more when she stops at a shop window and glances up the street. Both times, a cold fear closes around Lily’s heart and she looks down, hiding her face in her scarf.

  Sinead walks on past the station and down the side road towards Embankment. Lily can smell the river now, over the chalkiness of a building site and the doughy odour of a streetside pizza place – that fetid, dank heaviness of air. They pass through the tube station, and on the other side, Sinead inexplicably speeds up, the rucksack bouncing off her back as she weaves through the crowds. She must be late for something. People tut and sigh as Lily shoves her way past them, desperate not to lose sight of the tall figure ahead.

  Sinead starts up the metal steps to Hungerford Bridge. By the time Lily reaches them, a large group of people is coming down, five abreast. She darts from one side of the staircase to the other but, drunk and unhurried, they don’t let her through.