My Lover's Lover

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Don’t,’ he says quietly. He moves a plate from the draining-board into the sink and picks up a glass. Behind him, he hears her suck again on her cigarette. Wait. Exhale. He turns, glass in hand. She isn’t looking at him but out through the doors into the black garden. It’s only two steps to the table, where he sits. Places the glass on it. Rests his elbows on the table top. Pushes his hands through his hair. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ he says.

  She balances her cigarette on the bevelled lip of the ashtray and slides her hand into one of his.

  ‘I never meant for this to happen,’ he says. ‘I really didn’t. I never even saw it coming.’

  ‘You rarely do, though, do you? It’s not as if anyone can ever plan these things.’

  ‘Yeah, but there are slightly better situations.’

  ‘Are there?’

  He looks up, exasperated. ‘How many women are there in London?’

  ‘I dunno. Six million?’

  ‘OK, let’s say six million. Out of all of them, I had to fall for her.’

  Jodie smirks. ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns—–’

  ‘Shut up,’ he says, but starts to laugh. ‘OK. Out of all the women in all the gin joints in all the city, I had to walk into the girlfriend of my best friend. Which is—–’

  ‘Ex-girlfriend,’ she interrupts. ‘Ex-best friend.’

  ‘Whatever. Which isn’t, of course, the only problem.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Jodie,’ he says impatiently, ‘you didn’t notice anything slightly amiss tonight? Anything at all? Floods of tears? Extreme misery? No?’

  ‘All right, all right,’ she says, ‘so she’s in possession of a broken heart, which—–’

  ‘Which is a rather major stumbling block.’

  ‘Hmm. But that’s the only stumbling block,’ she tells him sternly. ‘Who cares about that fuckwit? You mustn’t even think about letting him stand in your way.’

  ‘Jodie—–’ he tries to interject, but, insistent, leaning forward, stabbing the air with the burning tip of her cigarette, she talks over him: ‘Aide, you don’t owe him anything. Ever since you were both children, you have always looked out for him, always helped him, always picked up his pieces, always sorted out his various cock-ups. You’re his bloody stunt man. Yes, he’s basically an all right guy but he’s messed up too badly this time to get away with it. He treated her like something he’d scraped off the bottom of his shoe and you just have to take one look at her to realise what a fool he is. He’s a feckless emotional retard. You owe him nothing. Nada. Niente. And neither does she. I’ll be livid with you if you don’t follow your heart because of any kind of vestigial loyalty you might have to him.’ Jodie flicks her ash viciously into the ashtray.

  ‘You like her, then?’ he says eventually.

  She rolls her eyes in exasperation. ‘Aide, she’s wonderful. She’s clever and funny. And gorgeous. In fact,’ she says, ‘I hate her.’ She grips his hand in hers, hard. ‘You have to tell her.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You have to. She has a right to know, apart from anything else.’

  ‘Look, you saw her. The woman’s in no fit state for anything. How could I tell her? How do you think it would go down? I’d just come across as some opportunistic bastard, and she’d never want to see me ever again. The last thing she needs right now is more emotional shit dumped on her.’

  Jodie sighs, fiddles with the lid of her Zippo. ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘But you will tell her, won’t you? At some point? You’re not just going to let this lie?’

  Aidan grunts and attempts to press a ball of cold, rigid wax into a perfect cuboid shape with the blood-heat of his hands. Jodie comes to stand behind him, hugging him. Aidan feels the thud of his sister’s heart along his back.

  ‘Poor Aide,’ she murmurs.

  ‘Hardly,’ he says, flinging the wax aside. ‘Poor Sinead I’d say.’

  ‘I could kill that fuckface Marcus Emerson.’

  ‘No, I could.’

  ‘No. I could.’

  ‘No, no, no. I think you’ll find that—–’

  ‘We both could,’ she concedes.

  ‘OK. When?’

  Lily and Sarah sit on a row of three tilting metal chairs, holding a newspaper between them. Sarah is reading the job adverts and Lily is half pretending to do the same, but her mind feels swollen, overblown: things sink into it, as if into wet concrete, never to be seen again.

  One of her feet swings over the cold floor of the tube station. The sole of her shoe squeaks ever so slightly on the floor at the nadir of each swing. Back, scuff, forth, scuff. It’s reached that point now where the movement has created its own momentum, the pendular sweep powered by its own self-perpetuating physics.

  Sarah met her from work and they’ve been to a café with red leather seats and steamed-up windows, where they ate ribbons of pasta from oval plates and eavesdropped on the first-date conversation going on behind them. They were going to go to a film but they’ve had one of those London nights where nothing comes together, when the city seems to conspire against you: the film they wanted to see was sold out, and by the time they’d found that out they’d missed the other screening of it across town; the bar they liked was full, the rather smug bouncer on the door told them; walking to another it had started to rain, and then hail, sharp pellets of ice bouncing off the pavement, into their hair and down their collars. They’d given up, beaten a retreat to the tube.

  Lily glances up at the box suspended from the arched ceiling, where destinations and times of tube trains are displayed in ever-changing combinations of tiny orange lightbulbs. This movement of her head, which pulls on the muscles and tendons down her back, spine, ribcage and pelvis, combined with the distracting, unbalancing effect of a man in a wide, insulation-stuffed coat walking too closely by them, makes the movement of her leg falter, stutter and lose rhythm. Lily stills her foot, crosses her legs, and glances up at the board again. Still blank. ‘1,’ it announces proudly, ‘High Barnet,’ but next to it, where the number of minutes in which the train is due should be, is a dense black blank.

  ‘What about a sushi chef?’ Sarah says. ‘I could do that.’

  Lily leans over to look at the advert. ‘Must speak Japanese,’ she reads.

  Sarah peers more closely. ‘Damn,’ she exclaims. ‘That’s discrimination, that is. Just because I can’t speak Japanese doesn’t mean I can’t make sushi.’

  ‘But would you really want to spend hours rolling bits of raw fish into balls?’

  Sarah sighs. ‘I don’t know. It’d be better than cleaning toilets or chambermaiding or flipping burgers.’ She crushes the paper shut. ‘I have to get a job,’ she moans. ‘Woman cannot live on art alone.’ She opens the pages again. ‘OK,’ she says, smoothing the adverts flat on her lap. ‘What can you do in the evenings that’s not too strenous or depressing that earns you loads of cash?’

  ‘Be a hooker?’

  ‘Very funny,’ she mutters. ‘And you shouldn’t joke. It may still come to that.’

  Lily smiles, leans her head back on the wall and closes her eyes. And as soon as she does, her mind is swarmed with the thoughts Sarah’s presence has been holding at bay. Indecision is not something she’s ever really experienced before. It’s a strange feeling: cloying, unaccountable, gluing everything together. It frustrates and angers her. All day, no matter what she is doing, an internal debate is running in her head, questions and doubts wrestling and fighting each other. She can’t switch it off, even when she wants to sleep. Sometimes she wonders if she’s spoken it aloud. She’s thought about telling Sarah everything, the whole story, and has been on the brink of doing so several times tonight. But somehow she needs to sort it out in her own head first.

  She opens her eyes again. Sarah is talking about the pros and cons of dot.com businesses. A man with the polished, slick box of a briefcase in one hand and a red tartan scarf in the other keeps twisting round to glare at the still-blank
board. When he turns away, he lets a short sigh snap his tongue against the back of his teeth. It makes Lily think of the momentary suspended click of an alarm clock reaching its assigned hour before its mechanics connect up to the bleep. A woman in the kind of stack-heeled, thin-soled boots that would make the jigsaw bones of her feet ache and strain is marching up and down the yellow-lined edge of the platform. Six paces – the heels of her boots hitting a cloc-cloc sound off the porcelain tunnel walls – stop, a swizzling turn that makes her skirt swirl around her, then six paces back.

  In the days since Sinead told her, nothing she does or thinks or feels is separate any more, but connected to and dragged down by another reason or effect and then another and then another, until everything in her head and everything around her seems to sink into an obscure haze of doubt and uncertainty. She’s not used to this, doesn’t know how to deal with it, can’t organise her thoughts. She’s always just known how she felt or what she thought, just as she knew her own name. But now, at whatever point she starts, her thoughts go round and round like beads on a rosary.

  If she loves Marcus – does she love Marcus? – then she should tell him what she knows. She should be honest. But then he might be angry. Why? Because he did something wrong. But if she thinks it was wrong then why does she love him – does she love him? – why is she still with him? And if she still loves him knowing what he did, is that wrong of her?

  The woman’s shoes cloc-cloc one way and, when she turns, her hair swoops around her head. A man she’d met once in a theatre bar told Lily that human hair clogs the walls of these tunnels, that cleaners clear tonnes of it away from the tracks every year. The idea fascinates her – those great clots of soot-brushed, matted hair.

  How does she know she’s telling the truth? But why would she lie? To get Marcus back. How could he do that to someone he loved? She can’t imagine him doing anything like that. It doesn’t seem like him, but then maybe he didn’t, maybe she’s lying.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Sarah says loudly, looking up at the board, ‘you’d think they’d give us an announcement to tell us how long we’re going to be sitting here.’

  She should just ask him. Just come out and say it, say, Marcus, is this what happened, and what made you do it. There must be some explanation. There has to be. She’s only heard one side of the story, after all. But if he’d wanted her to know he would have told her. So he doesn’t, and maybe it’s none of her business anyway.

  If she told him she knew he’d want to know how she knew, how she found her, how she recognised her. She’d have to tell him. Couldn’t tell him that. Couldn’t ever tell him that. Couldn’t tell him she sees her still in his flat, behind him, next to him, in front of him. Does he still love her, does she still love him, does he love her, should she leave?

  There is something about him that binds her to him, and Lily can’t quite see clearly what it is. It’s as if many narrow strands of wire, twisted together, link her to him; individually, they’re inexplicable and frail, but together they are indissoluable, cannot be hacked through. She doesn’t understand it, this strength of feeling. It follows her around like a dog on a lead. If she looked at this objectively, she wouldn’t love him, maybe even like him. But somehow this transmutes into a sensation of inseparability, of longing, of need. His unhappiness causes a collapse in her chest, as if it has somehow spread to her like a virus. How could she leave him? But disquiet silts up her veins.

  ‘What about a swimming-pool attendant?’ Sarah is saying. ‘I could do that.’

  Carpe diem, she tells herself, as a disturbance in the atmosphere – minuscule at first, but unmistakable – heralds a far-off train rattling along mercury-smooth rails. Seize the carp, she thinks, a screeching of brakes and wheels filling the tunnel, and almost laughs.

  The lights are on, and his coat is slung over a chair.

  ‘Marcus?’ Lily calls, hesitating on the threshold. No reply. ‘Marcus!’ Nothing, and then, a plink-plink-plink sound and a kind of swishing. She extracts her keys from the lock and walks into the flat. Again, that plink-plink sound. ‘Marcus?’ she says again. ‘Are you there?’

  On the floor, in a trail through the kitchen, are items of his clothes, as if he undressed on the move, as if in a hurry to get stripped. Shirt, shoes, trousers, socks, underpants, scrumpled and collapsed on the boards. Lily walks by them, examining them like a visitor in an art gallery. She cocks her head, listening out for the sound of running water – the shower or the bath. But nothing. Then she hears a noise like a sigh or a gasp.

  Coming round the bathroom door, she sees him: the bath is full, water tipping over the sides. He is face-down, naked, his shoulders and buttocks breaking through the surface. The rest of his body shimmers pale under water. His hair trails from his head like seaweed, his feet rest up against the rim of the bath. There is a black tube jutting up through the water, through which comes the sound of his breath.

  ‘Marcus,’ Lily says. She reaches out and touches his shoulder. He rears up out of the water, his face encased in a black mask, his feet slipping, and for a moment he flails, limbs thrashing. A tidal wave flops out over Lily’s shoes. He laughs, water streaming from his face and hair.

  She looks at him, her head on one side. ‘What are you doing?’

  He takes the snorkel out of his mouth before answering: ‘Testing my new gear.’ He replaces it and puts his face back in the water, his hands braced on the sides of the bath. ‘I think it’s watertight.’ His words come out of the snorkel tube distorted, consonants fusing into long vowel stretches. ‘The man in the shop said to check it straight away and if it leaked I could take it back.’

  ‘Oh.’ She lowers the toilet seat and sits down, arms folded. The bathroom is cold, the windows opaque with condensation, whirls of steam rising from the water. ‘Are you going snorkelling, then?’

  ‘No,’ and then he says a word that comes out as ‘die-wing’.

  ‘What?’

  He says the word again.

  ‘Die-wing?’ she repeats, mystified.

  He resurfaces, removing the tube from his mouth. ‘Diving. Scuba diving.’ He pulls off the mask and starts fiddling with the strap. There is a red weal in a perfect oval around his face. ‘It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And this guy I work with was booking himself a holiday today. Two weeks in Thailand. So I decided to go with him. The diving course takes a week, so I’ll have another week to travel about.’

  ‘It’s just the two of you?’

  ‘Well, I asked Aidan if he wanted to come, but…’ He trails off, frowning at his mask strap.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘He said no,’ he says quickly. ‘So, yeah, it’s just the two of us.’ He looks at her, ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Mind? No, not at all. It sounds great.’

  ‘I know. I can’t wait.’ He snaps the mask back into place on his face and dives under the water again.

  Beyond the door, something flickers at the periphery of her vision. Her pulse stutters and she tells herself, it’s nothing, it isn’t real, she wasn’t there, she isn’t dead. But when she brings herself to look, just to be sure, she’s there, standing by the window, her hand resting on the kitchen counter, looking straight in their direction. How can she still be here?

  Lily looks back at the bath. Marcus has submerged the end of the snorkel tube. Saucer-shaped bubbles rise to the surface in a steady stream. Then he moves and the tube rises again like a submarine periscope and she hears him drawing in air. Some water has got trapped in the tube, which rattles when he exhales. She resists the urge to block up the end of the tube with her hand.

  Lily stands and walks away, through the door, past the kitchen, giving Sinead a little wave, and into the bedroom. She lets the door slam closed behind her. It’s only as she’s removing the clothes she’s been wearing all day, heavy with smoke from the café and damp from the hailstorm, that the idea comes to her. At first, it’s slight, a notion, almost nothing, but as she lifts her shirt o
ver her head, it solidifies, calming her mind with resolve. Quick as a flash, she hurls her clothes to the floor, opens the wardrobe, and starts leafing through the hangers. Where is it, must be here somewhere, where did she put it?

  Her fingers close on its material before she sees it. There is a sighing sound almost like music as it falls over her skin. She swings the mirror round until she is caught in its frame. The material seems dark and measureless, sucking all light into its depths. It hangs from her shoulders, coating her hips, thighs, pooling around her legs. It was expensive, she can see in the way the seams meet, in the caress of the fabric, in its effortless, fluid drape. It would have been shorter on Sinead.

  Lily opens the door and steps out. The dress moves around her like liquid tar, warmed now by her flesh. Marcus is standing by the table, reading a postcard, wearing just a towel, his hair dark with water, standing up in spikes. She glances around. No sign of Sinead. She must have decided to leave them to it.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ he says, without looking up. ‘Do you want to go out for something?’

  ‘No. I ate with Sarah.’

  ‘Oh. Maybe I’ll phone for a takeaway, then.’ He moves towards the pinboard, riffling through the menus stuck to it. ‘Don’t know what I fancy.’ And turning round, says, ‘Are you sure you don’t want anything?’ He blinks slowly. His eyes travel down her body to her feet and up again.

  She holds his gaze. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Sure?’ he says again, turning back to the menus in his hand. ‘Maybe I should have Thai. To get myself in the mood.’ He sits down at the table and pulls the telephone towards him. ‘You know, I can’t believe I’m finally going diving. Apparently, you have to sit an exam. Can you imagine? Going on holiday to do an exam. I never thought…’