Slowly, unwillingly, I opened my eyes and wiped my fingers on the rough accusing velour of the seat. I’d come so hard, I’d scratched myself, and my breath had gone all gaspy like a goldfish. I should at least have felt sated or relieved or even quits with Leo, but all I felt was squalid and depressed. The slut had won once more, the angel fallen. All I’d done was delude myself (again) that frigging was the fastest route to God.
Stupid tears were pricking behind my eyelids, trying to shame me further. I was wet both ends and I didn’t have a Kleenex. I wiped my crotch with my shirt-tail and my eyes on my sleeve and sat there, hating myself, for the remainder of the journey. It was raining when I arrived at Twickenham, a stinging, ill-tempered rain which was almost sleet. It seemed strange that I had lived there five whole years, worked in the travel agency, belonged to the public library, swum in the municipal baths, shopped at Tesco’s. I was divorced from the town as well as from Adrian. The Decree applies to streets, shops, cinemas, not just to the man.
I walked down from the station through the dingy main street and turned off by the river. Adrian had kept the marital home, as the judge kept calling it. It was a damp, cramped semi, with a small garden overlooking a dye-works. I’d been a couple there — Adrian and Thea. (His name always came first, like Leo’s would if we ever became a couple, which we won’t.) I stood in front of the prim French Blue door. Janet and Adrian had repainted it. (Her name came first, now.) It’s a strange sensation, knocking at your own front door. Janet had planted snowdrops by the dustbins.
Adrian came to the door with a pencil in his mouth. I knew his pencils — 4Bs — very soft. He sharpened them with an old scout knife and left little coils and whorls of pencil sharpenings on his desk. They were soft, too. You could have made a pillow of them. He looked thinner. Janet rationed him. All his meals were gaunt and insubstantial now, but disguised with fancy French names and what Janet called ‘garnishes’, which meant half a slice of gherkin or a sprig of watercress.
“Bonjour,” I said. It was the only French I knew.
“Thea!” Adrian sort of shrank back into himself as if I were a traffic warden come to book his car. “Look, I told you not to …”
“I know, but it’s important. How’s your cold?”
“Better, but …”
“Can I come in? It’s freezing on the step.”
“Well, I suppose so, but you really …”
I had already stepped into the hall. The house smelt different now. When I’d lived there, I don’t remember it smelling at all, but perhaps you’re unaware of your own smell. Now it reeked of television commercials — Daz, Harpic, Clean-O-Pine — a self-righteous, Janet sort of odour.
Adrian was looking like a dog who had messed the carpet, guilty and abject both at once. He still had the door held open. “Look, Thea, I don’t want to be unfriendly, but …”
He paused. Even now, he hated to hurt me. I finished the sentence for him. “Janet doesn’t like it.”
“Well, of course she doesn’t, Thea. I mean, it’s only understandable. I tried to explain to you last time.”
I was halfway down the hall. A small Christmas tree was glowering at me from a table, one of those green deodorised plastic ones which can’t make a mess or drop their needles. Adrian was still agonising between me and the door. The draught was killing both of us. I kissed him on the neck.
“Janet needn’t know,” I whispered.
“No, but …”
The Christmas cards had been pinned to a piece of tape and then strung across the walls in strictly graded rows, small ones at the top. They were mainly small. Mingy things with under-nourished robins on them, or spindly stage coaches with Gothic script and glitter.
‘Merry Christmas to Jan and Adrian.’
‘Greetings to Adrian and Janet from …’
I turned my back. Adrian and Thea had scattered their cards over every available surface in the house and used them as a reason not to dust for the whole six weeks of Christmas. Leo and Thea didn’t go in for cards. (Xmas was a four-letter word as far as Leo was concerned. We’d spent most of Christmas day in bed and then got up and opened a tin of Epicure smoked oysters. Leo claimed he’d never eaten fowl in his life and didn’t intend to start.)
Adrian had finally shut the door. The cards were blowing in the draught and I suppose he was afraid he’d disarrange them. Janet probably had her graded penalties. Loss of a roast potato for messing up her cards; no meal at all for letting in an ex-wife. I walked straight into the back room, which Adrian was still using as his study. It looked much the same, only tidy. His papers had been sorted into neat piles, the books banished to a bookcase, and five black biros stood to attention in a green plastic desk-tidy which Janet had probably purchased in the same shop as the tree. Clamped to the wall was a large black pencil sharpener, the old-fashioned type with a handle. The scout knife had been confiscated.
“Coffee?” Adrian asked.
I nodded. It would be instant Sainsbury’s with 10p off and a money-saving voucher to go towards your next purchase, in a cup with roses on to make it taste superior. I followed him into the kitchen which looked scrubbed and white like a morgue.
“Well, how are you, Thea?” He really meant “What do you want and when are you going to leave?”, but Adrian has always been polite.
“So-so.”
You can live with someone five whole years and suddenly find great silences springing up like traps. He tapped his pencil against the coffee jar.
“Found a job yet?”
“Sort of.”
He was wearing old corduroys without a belt. I stared at the bit between the legs. There were no bumps or curves. He could have been castrated, for all I knew. I inched my hand along the table and dropped it on his lap.
“Thea! Stop that immediately.”
Teachers always treat you like a naughty child. If you live with them, they turn into headmaster and you into the Upper Second. I noticed, though, he didn’t remove the hand. There was a slight twitching through the corduroy. Sex is like masturbation. It makes you sacred — at least for half an hour. It also unites you to another human being. I always feel less alone and frightened when a bit of a man is corkscrewed right inside me, as if we’re Siamese twins cemented at the loins, instead of just halves of people pining on our own. Even the nuns had allowed that sex was more or less permissible, so long as it was the married sort and without any contraception. That’s why I still lusted after Adrian. Only with him had screwing been safe and sinless and smiled-upon, as if we had a sort of British Standards Kite mark stamped on our cock and cunt by God Himself.
I moved my hand a little further down. “How’s your book?” I asked. That always worked. Once Adrian got going on the Causes of the Black Death or the Decline of Feudalism, I could have raped him and he wouldn’t really have noticed. “You told me on the phone you were having a bit of trouble with John of Gaunt.”
He looked grateful, like a horse reaching out for a sugar lump. He loved me to remember names. If I’d thrown in a date as well, I think he’d have put ‘good work, A +’ on my report.
“Oh, he’s fine now. In fact, I’ve almost finished. I’ve had an advance from Longmans, actually. They sent me a contract on the strength of the first five chapters and the general plan. Apparently, they’re quite impressed.”
“Congratulations.” It was easier without a belt. He still had the stomach, but my hand had slipped past it, across the rough, curly hair, and down.
“Look, Thea, I don’t really think …”
“I’m doing an evening class in History,” I said. I wasn’t, but I knew it was the sort of bait he’d jump for, especially with a capital H. Meanwhile, I eased his underpants aside. It was the only way I could get close to him. He and Janet had barred every other route. I had to aim directly, knock him off his guard, dismantle his defences. I yearned to believe we were bound and tied again, that Janet was back in Devon, Leo still sitting quietly in his wine bar.
“Goo
d for you! What period are you studying?”
“Er … Tudors and Stuarts.” They were probably safest. Television was always wooing them, and even I knew the juicier bits of Henry VIII.
“You should have started earlier.” He sounded disappointed, almost disapproving. “You can’t pick up history like a magazine and turn to the spicy bits without any chronological introduction. It’s actually more or less impossible to understand Tudor government unless you’ve been strongly grounded in the Middle Ages.” He was stiff now, but trying to disown everything below his head. “In fact, there’s a new book on the Tudors which traces some of their achievements back to the reforms of Edward I. That’s always happening. When there’s a flowering, we have to examine the rootstock.”
I nodded. I had his own root cupped between my hands and was rubbing it between them. I knew what would happen next. He’d deny it later, deodorise it with historical facts, gloss it over with Latin land charters or thirteenth-century parish rolls, but at least I’d have had him for half an hour, defied the barristers, negated the divorce.
We went upstairs. I’d have preferred the kitchen or under his study desk, but sex meant bed for Adrian. It wasn’t pale pink candlewick, it was primrose frills. Janet must have changed it. Her photograph was standing on the dressing-table in a fake-wood frame. She had plump arms and short blond hair, badly permed. I turned her round. I derived a strange sort of pleasure from the fact that she had made the bed that morning, between Adrian’s breakfast and rushing off to work, and he and I were messing it up again. He turned the sheet back very carefully, as if it made the crime less heinous. They were slimy yellow nylon sheets, the sort that don’t need ironing, but tangle round your limbs and make you sweat. Adrian had stopped talking now and looked embarrassed and furtive as if he was about to be examined by a bum doctor. A man with an erection is always comic, somehow, especially standing up. (Well, Leo isn’t, but Leo exists only to be the exception to every rule.) Adrian touched my left breast very politely, as if he had been introduced to it at a formal dinner party. We both had all our clothes off. Undressing is always the trickiest bit. His zip could have stuck, or Janet phoned to remind him to switch the tumble-drier off, or war been announced on the radio. I wanted it so much, I think I’d have gone straight on, even with bombs and poison gas. It worries me, my greed. I read somewhere that the average woman in her twenties has it twice a week. I wrote to Evelyn Home, once, and asked her what was wrong with me, but she never answered. Actually, I may only have wanted Adrian, and not the sex at all. I can never really tell where men stop and their pricks begin. All I know is that if you want devotion, you have to get undressed.
Adrian’s thing is short, but very fat. It’s diameter which matters more than length. He filled me up like one of those tampons they show you in advertisements which puff up when you drop them into water. He let me lie on top. I rocked backwards and forwards against him and tugged at the hair on his chest and bit his neck. I was screaming out some nonsense or other (‘R.B. for me, R. B. for me!’) and the whole force and rhythm of the Southern Region was rocketing through the room.
“Hush, darling,” he kept murmuring. “Not so loud.” He always called me darling when we did it. Otherwise, he saved the term for Janet. You lose your darlings after a divorce, like your housekeeping allowance or your joint insurance.
I knew he was worried about the party wall. I tried to quieten down, but he was slamming against me from underneath and we sort of collided with each other, out of time, in a delicious and reverberating shock. Fifty shocks a minute, a hundred, two hundred — he was hotting up the pace. The bed was creaking now. He was split between terror and excitement. All his ‘Hush’s’ kept turning into gasps. “Quiet, darling. Not so loud … Aaaahhh …” He was coming now. I hadn’t had enough, but I pretended to come with him, whipping him with my heels and screaming. There didn’t seem to be a lot of sperm. Maybe he’d used it all up last night — shot it into Janet. I could feel her looking at us from a hundred little touches round the room — the frilled mats underneath her toiletries, the vapour rub and the vitamin B her side of the bed, her satin nightdress case with ‘J’ embroidered on it, the smell of mingled distaste and Devon Violets.
“Look, Thea, I think we ought … I mean, I don’t really …”
The disownment now, the stuttering, the quick return to the Henrys and the Edwards. I climbed off his stomach and stood up. His thing was dripping and shrinking like an invalid. He was remaking the bed, before he had even dressed. I think he suspected Janet could see us from her office in the City fifteen miles away. He pulled the covers very tight and smooth, brushing off my pubic hairs and inspecting the sheets for stains. I refused to help. It was Janet who would climb in there tonight. Neither of us bathed. He dabbed at himself with a Kleenex and changed into clean grey trousers and another sweater, as if to prove he was a different, stricter person who didn’t screw ex-wives.
That’s all I was, an ex. We’d been joined for eleven minutes and then divorced again. I hadn’t undone the past, hadn’t pole-vaulted from his prick into his heart. The Siamese twins had been sliced apart in a law court and wouldn’t fuse again. The sex thing hadn’t worked. (It seldom does.) Sometimes I long to be a nun or a Vestal virgin or a prudish panda like Ling-Ling who doesn’t even do it when you fly her mate all the way to Washington and bribe them with bamboo shoots. At least pandas have a keeper and a proper home.
We trailed downstairs to the kitchen. Janet had left cheese and Ryvita for him under a clean white tea towel, doled out two small slices and a mean-sized piece of Gouda. If I’d been her wife or sister, she’d have rationed me as well. I’m not exactly fat, only what my mother calls big-boned. I was sent to a child-minder once who always used to say, ‘Eat your food up, love. You never know where your next meal’s coming from.’ I took that seriously. Every meal thereafter was a relief and deliverance, something which had saved me from starvation, but which well might be my last. I took to secreting food in handkerchiefs, sneaking things down sweaters, hoarding them for those rumbling years ahead. It was much the same with sex. I rarely refused a man, in case no one ever fancied me again.
Even now, I was gobbling Adrian’s lunch. He had eked out the Ryvita with a bag of apples and a packet of bacon-flavour crisps. I suspect he bought the crisps himself, to supplement his diet. Janet wouldn’t approve of Golden Wonder. He was droning on about a new interpretation of Magna Carta.
“Adrian, I want to talk to you.”
“We are talking, darling.”
That was a post-coital darling and probably a mistake. He flushed. Darlings slip out unawares after five solid years of them. He looked wary, haunted almost. He wanted to get rid of me. He didn’t like the past, except in textbooks.
“Well?”
I leaned against the dresser and grabbed an apple from the bag. It was hard and very shiny, as if Janet had applied an aerosol polish to it. I was surprised, really, that she hadn’t engraved a ‘J’ on all the fruit. Everything else seemed to be stamped with her.
“I want to come back to you, Adrian.” I didn’t, not really, but I needed an excuse to stay there a little longer. It was too dark at Notting Hill. Nothing there was mine. It was Leo’s house, his furniture, his friends, his meals, his music. We’d never be an us. Leo wouldn’t compromise. I suppose it suited me, in some ways. I hadn’t any home of my own, or friends, or even food, so I might as well use his. Anyway, I worshipped him. But not when he blockaded me with his Bechstein or made Bermondsey antique shops more important than my body. I was better off with Adrian, then.
“Thea, that’s impossible …” Adrian’s skin had gone white in patches, underneath the red. His eyes were trying to walk away from me, turn their backs on mine. “I mean, there’s Janet and …”
“Janet isn’t right for you.”
There was a tiny silence. A Ryvita crumb dropped from his mouth on to the floor. He pounced on it, as if it were a used Durex. The floor was so clean, he could have writte
n his textbook on it. I wondered if he missed me. Even with my sluttishness, my refusal to scrub floors or change sheets, all our rambling, well-mannered rows over God and money and history and my non-existent jobs, there’d still been a mutual ease and greed between us. We’d never bought Ryvita — just hacked great chunks off new white loaves and larded them with butter.
“Look here, Thea, I have no desire to hear your views on Janet.”
I was the Upper Second again. ‘Put that stink-bomb down, Hargreaves. No, Hunter, the study of History does not include the making of paper darts …”
“Leo doesn’t sleep with me,” I said, sort of carelessly. That was a lie, an outrageous scarlet screaming lie, but I was losing Adrian’s attention. He’d be back to his book if I didn’t stir him up.
It worked. He choked on his cheese, dropped a flurry of crisps, and looked agog and embarrassed at the same time. “But you always said … I mean, I thought …”
“It’s different now. Oh, Adrian …” I wanted his soft, flabby arms around me, his thick sandy hair falling in my eyes, his British Home Stores sweater chafing against my breasts. I still wore his ring, the nine-carat gold one he’d bought me in a sale. It made me less an alien. It shouted to the world that I was married, normal, dignified. That someone still desired me. I hated the thought of Janet taking over, barging into my house, my bed, my husband, gate-crashing our life. She even had a better ring than mine — eighteen carat at least, and twice the width. Adrian wore her ring now, smirking on his finger, padlocking his hands. I shut my eyes so I didn’t have to look at it, leant against his shoulder, squeezed my arms round what should have been his waist. He tried to squirm away.
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