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Caroline, July 2013
EDDIE AND I have a good run on the train, and my mother meets us at the station, waving gaily through the window as she steers into the car park. Eddie spots her instantly, jumping up and down on the spot with frenzied impatience.
‘Nanny! Nanny!’ he squawks, pulling at my sleeve, beaming up at me. As soon as the car glides to a halt in front of us, he runs forward and tugs at the door, squeaking his hello and launching himself into the back seat.
‘Well, bye, then,’ I say, with mock-outrage, leaning in to strap him into the car seat.
My mother laughs, glancing back at Eddie. ‘Sure you won’t come back with us for a bit?’ she asks.
‘No, I’d better get on.’ My mind skates uncomfortably around the lies I have told. Even to me, this disguise feels thin and unthought through. There’s nothing to stop Francis calling my parents’ house and asking to speak to me, and if he does there would be no innocent explanation I could give. All the same, I don’t really think it will happen and, even if it does, I’m not so sure that it would be a bad thing. More and more in recent weeks I’ve felt the threat of an oncoming explosion building inside me, tensing and tightening. Sooner or later, something has to give.
‘Suit yourself,’ my mother says cheerfully, leaning back in her seat and revving up the engine again. ‘Say bye bye, Eddie,’ she calls, as they pull away.
Eddie looks through the glass, smiling faintly at me, his eyes clear and untroubled. ‘Bye …’ I hear him saying faintly, blowing a kiss.
For an instant, I don’t want him to go, and I almost run after the car and flag it down. I could go back with them, spend the weekend with my son and my parents with a clear conscience. It would be simple. Soothing. But while I’m standing there they have turned out of sight, and I’m left clutching an overnight bag that is stuffed with expensive new underwear and pretty bikinis and clothes I’ve modelled in badly lit changing-room mirrors, imagining how Carl will look at me when he sees me in them, how they’ll soon be invisibly imprinted with his hands. And before I know it the weight in my heart drops away and I want to be with him so much that everything else fades into nothing at all.
I take the train up to King’s Cross and hurry out on to the main road, looking for the car he’s told me he’ll be hiring. His friend’s birthday party is in the middle of nowhere, twenty miles from the hotel we’ll be staying in. I scan the street anxiously, not seeing him. I wonder if he’s changed his mind. Going away together, even for such a short time, feels out of step with the way we’ve conducted things so far: snatched evenings in his flat, the odd hour crammed in around the rest of my life. But then I hear the sound of a car pulling up behind me and when I turn around he’s there, smiling through the open window and patting the seat next to him. ‘Hop in,’ he says.
My heart lifts and I scurry round to the passenger seat, sliding in and kissing him. He’s had his hair cut since we were last together and I run my fingertips over the newly shorn nape of his neck, feeling the way it scratches softly against my skin.
‘Like it?’ he asks, swinging the car out into the road.
‘Very much.’
He’s steering one-handed, his left hand straying across into my lap, running lightly up my thigh and smoothing the thin fabric of my skirt. In the rear-view mirror, his gaze slides to meet mine.
‘Good,’ he says mildly, and I feel the muscles of my stomach contract with desire, a quick, visceral shudder. I stretch my hands out in my lap, gripping my knees with my fingernails, grounding myself. When I glance to the side, he’s watching me again, his eyes flicking between me and the road. ‘You’ve taken your rings off,’ he says. ‘Mean business, do you?’
‘I thought we might use the swimming pool,’ I say; it’s a half-truth. I remember sitting on the train, easing the rings round and round my knuckle. The tightness of them, the angry redness of my skin when I finally managed to pull them away. They’re zipped up in my wallet now, safe and out of sight. I’m not sure what prompted me to remove them, when I never have before. But now, when I look at the bareness of my left hand, there’s a sudden, defiant surge of freedom and elation.
‘Right,’ he nods, but there’s a spark in his eyes that tells me he isn’t fooled.
‘Not that I want you to think I don’t mean business,’ I elaborate, ‘because I do …’ My hand snaking across the space between us now, slipping around to the inside of his thigh and feeling the tautness there, creeping slowly higher until he hisses through his teeth and bats me away.
‘Control yourself,’ he says. ‘I want to get there alive.’ He switches the radio on and music floods the car, and we’re both laughing, high on the tension between us. Sun is streaming in and dazzling through the window pane, and in this moment all the sadness and complication burns up and everything is perfect.
We reach the hotel just after two; a small, unobtrusive place with low brick walls and a dark green awning, a badly painted logo and the words Silver Birches stamped in looping script on to the whitewashed entrance doors. I stand next to Carl as he checks in and chats to the receptionist about the opening times of the restaurant and the pool, all the while looking for some kind of suspicion in her eyes which isn’t there. She smiles as she hands over the key, and it hits me that, here, we’re just a normal couple like any other. The thought is intoxicating and, as I hurry after him along the corridors towards our room, it swirls around and around in my head, so fast I can barely form it into words even to myself: the idea of us together, fresh out of the box, and starting on a journey that is anything but a dead end – one that is going to go somewhere, that could make us both happy for a long, long time.
‘Not too bad, is it?’ he says, swinging open the door. Dark red walls, a double bed covered with a duvet in the same colour and pillows edged with white piping. There’s a picture on the wall above the headboard: an abstract field of poppies, their petals splashed across the canvas like blood. The air is warm and the curtains are drawn, a lamplight shining dimly next to the bed. My heart is still thumping with the force of the thoughts rushing through me. I toss my overnight bag on to the floor and move forward into his arms.
‘I like it.’ I press my body up towards his, tilting my hips slightly upwards to press against the hardness of his crotch. His lips graze against mine, once, twice. ‘So,’ I say, ‘shall we go and have a swim?’
‘Sure. If that’s what you want,’ he says. His hands are working their way slowly down my body, sliding underneath the waistband of my skirt and slipping slightly inside the bikini bottoms I already have on beneath my clothes. I’m shivering, but I nod. I don’t want this to happen quickly, not today. I can wait just as long as he can.
He looks into my eyes and, in the darkness of his pupils, I see my own reflection. A long moment, then he smiles and exhales. ‘Good girl,’ he says, and pulls away, affecting disinterest, lazily doing up the buttons of his shirt I hadn’t even realized I had undone.
We go down to the swimming pool – a small white-tiled room flanked with green, waxy-leaved plants that look shinily plastic, the pool a glittering splash of bright blue. It’s cold, and I ease myself in in stages, exclaiming as the water inches over my thighs and soaks into my bikini. Carl is already in, making his way down the length of the pool, sending droplets scattering in his wake. I set my teeth and submerge myself. When I surface, I know I’m grinning stupidly with the weird, giddy pleasure of floating that always hits me when I’m in water. I swim over to him and he pulls me into his arms, my limbs coiling wetly around his. I wipe the hair back from his eyes, slicking it back across his scalp.
‘I love this,’ I say. ‘I always have.’
‘I can see. Funny. I didn’t know that about you.’
His tone is light, but I can’t help thinking that we really know so little, both of us, about each other. I move on to his lap and kiss him, resting my legs gently on his, suspended in the water. And for a moment, I want to tell him everything I can thin
k of about myself, good and bad – pour it all out and have it done with, make him know me as well or better than anyone ever has. But I have no idea where to start and, in the end, I just bite my lip and twist out of his arms, swimming away down the pool.
We stay in the water for almost half an hour, chatting about the week we’ve had and unimportant programmes we’ve seen on TV, then spend a few minutes in the sauna. The wood is so hot it feels as if it’s branding my back, etching ridges of memory into my skin. He’s watching me from above, in the dim, reddish light; the darkness of his stubble shadowing the bones of his jawline, his eyes glittering blackly down at me. Sweat is trickling over me and impatience makes me shift restlessly back and forth – wanting his mouth hot on my skin, his tongue licking the path of my sweat down my body, giving me what I want so much now that it feels almost impossible to deny it any longer. I’m dizzy and defenceless, the walls of the small, hot room lurching uncontrollably around me.
‘Christ,’ I say, scrambling up. This desire is too much; scares me, almost. ‘I need to get out.’
Outside, the sun is shining, but the breeze blowing through the propped-open window is blissfully cool and we go for a walk in the small grounds, wandering across the lawns and finally coming to rest on a bench at the far edge of the rose garden. He puts his arms around me and I lean back against his chest, looking back at the hotel behind us. I have the strange sense of these moments being both fleeting and lasting, the knowledge that, whatever happens, I won’t forget this.
‘I wish you could come with me tomorrow,’ he says suddenly. It’s the first time he’s mentioned anything like this. Despite our deep connection, our lives are fundamentally divided. We’ve never met each other’s family or friends, never been able to announce our relationship publicly – never done any of the things that would make it real in the eyes of the world, or perhaps even to ourselves.
‘I wish I could, too,’ I say. There’s a lump in my throat. I know that if I suggested I could come after all, he’d laugh and dismiss it. As far as he’s concerned, I don’t exist for him anywhere but in the private spaces we’ve carved out for each other. He knows the score, and he’s made his peace with it. For the first time, I wonder what this really is to him, this no-man’s-land he’s created. I imagine him lying awake at night and thinking about what the hell he’s doing, how he’s just wasting time with me. I wonder if he wishes he’d never met me at all.
‘Hey,’ he says, smoothing the hair back behind my ears. ‘Don’t look so sad.’
‘I am sad.’ My voice is so quiet it would be easy to pretend I hadn’t spoken at all, but I force myself to speak louder, looking up straight into his eyes, only inches from my own. ‘I don’t want this to end.’
He sighs and continues stroking my hair, his hand moving rhythmically and tenderly across my skull. ‘Nor do I, Caro,’ he says, ‘but it has to happen soon. I know we’ve been talking about it for ages, but you know I’ve always wanted you, and I haven’t been able to resist this, but it doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t …’ He pauses, tries to sort his thoughts into words. ‘You must see I can’t be in a long-term relationship with someone who’s married.’
I feel the breath draw up through my body, and it’s the closest I’ve ever been to telling him. That I’m really not sure what Francis and I are still doing together – that the way we live now reminds me of two strangers skating around each other on thin black ice, unhappily circling the rink of our marriage. And that now I’m here with him I’m surer than ever that I’m in love with him, that I’m terrified I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life if I let him go. I don’t know why I can’t say it.
Tears are blurring my eyes and I see their echo rising in his own, and by the time he kisses me we’re both crying and I can feel the wetness on his skin.
‘Come on,’ he says after a while, wiping his hand across his eyes. ‘This is stupid. We’re not here for long, and we should enjoy it. Let’s go back in and get an early dinner. OK?’
‘OK.’ I dry my eyes with the back of my sleeve, blinking the last of my tears away. I know he’s right. Whatever the time is for this conversation, it isn’t now. As we stroll back over the lawn together, his hand in mine, I feel the happiness sweeping back, ironing over the last few minutes as if they were never there. I won’t think about them. Not now.
We eat our dinner in the near-deserted restaurant, laughing at the awkward plastic flowers poking out of the tabletop vase, taking our time poring over the laminated menus and in the end choosing almost at random. When the elderly waitress brings a bottle of wine, she smiles indulgently at our clasped hands, radiating bonhomie and approval. I could change her expression, I think, if I told her what was really happening here. As I taste the wine, cool and crisp, the idea of being some sort of scarlet woman suddenly seems funny. It isn’t who I am. It’s not how this feels.
‘It’s all right, this, isn’t it?’ Carl comments halfway through dinner, indicating his food with an air of mild revelation.
‘It’s actually really nice.’ I up the ante, widening my eyes in surprise. The food is pretty bog standard, if I stop to think about it, but in this moment everything feels amplified, ten times better than it really is. ‘Not as good as your cooking, of course.’ My sole experience of his cooking has been hastily cooked pasta one night in his flat when we were both too wired and strung out on sex to want to go out for dinner, but he nods as if accepting his due.
‘Yeah,’ he says, with no attempt at false modesty, ‘I’m pretty good at that. Pretty good at most things,’ he adds, smiling wickedly across the table.
Abruptly, we’re standing up and walking fast across the restaurant, pausing only to give our room number to the waitress and ask her to put the meal on the bill. My heart is beating fast and my legs are weak as I follow him down the corridor. He unlocks the door and I’m barely inside before he’s slammed it behind me and pressed me up against it, forcing my body back against the hard wood. He takes my hands and pins them above my head, keeping them there with his hand gripped around my wrists as he kisses me hard, his tongue in my mouth and his teeth biting at my lip, the smart of blood bursting in my mouth. ‘Tell me you want it,’ he says into my ear, and I hear myself saying things I thought I’d never say, the words tumbling out as I impatiently arch my hips up to his and he pushes down my skirt with his free hand, ripping it away.
He picks me up into his arms and, in another moment, we’re on the bed and I catch sight of us in the long mirror on the far wall, my hands tangled in his hair and his body on mine, the strong, lean muscles of his shoulders rolling as he eases out of his shirt. The curtains are still drawn and the lamplight casts our shadows on to the wall, moving together, and I can hear my breath coming fast and urgently as I wrap my legs around his and he pushes his way inside me. We move slowly at first, his hands unhurried and intense on my body. He says something I can’t catch. Harder, I say. Yes.
‘Ask me nicely,’ he says, his eyes burning intently into mine.
‘Sorry,’ I whisper. ‘Please,’ and I feel his body tense, and after that he does what I want without my having to ask because he knows what to do with me and he always has, even without being told, because this chemistry between us is something that can’t be taught or explained. ‘I can’t get enough of you,’ I find myself whispering, and he smiles that teasing smile that tells me I don’t have to say it out loud because it’s so brutally obvious that a blind man could see it.
We lie in the bed together afterwards, talking, and when the sky outside has darkened and I can hear the first beginnings of rain pattering on to the window, we move into each other’s arms again and I climb on top of him, my hair hanging down and brushing over his chest, his hands reaching up warm and hard on my skin. I tell him that I love doing this with him, and he says it back, and it would take so little to slip over this boundary and say what I really mean, but I still don’t do it – and when, much later, he’s fallen asleep beside me and the rain outside has dee
pened into a hot summer storm, I lie awake half the night staring at the shape of his face in the dark and I say it then instead, knowing he can’t hear me and that I don’t have to wait for him to reply.
When the buzzer sounds, I don’t quite believe it at first. I’ve been sitting in the living room all afternoon, unable to concentrate on anything for more than a minute at a time. I’ve just been here. Waiting. Breathing. These two things suck up as much effort as I’ve got to give. In the back of my mind, I’d accepted that they wouldn’t come. But now, the sound jars through the air again and I’m crossing to the intercom and saying ‘Hello?’ and hearing a voice that I now know sounds like Caroline’s spilling out explanations and justifications, even though I invited them in the first place.
I let them into the building and then I listen to the sound of Eddie’s footsteps pattering eagerly up, his grandmother’s following more slowly behind. There’s no time to prepare myself. They’re here, framed in the doorway, the boy glancing at me briefly and then losing interest almost as quickly, dashing to the hamster’s cage in the corner of the room and unlocking the top.
‘Thanks for letting us pop in,’ Caroline’s mother says. ‘He’s been talking about it all day at school, apparently. We won’t take up much of your time.’ The words are polite but her eyes are darting around all over the place, betraying her uncertainty. On some level, she knows there’s something here she doesn’t trust. And by a process of elimination, she knows it must be me. The silence lasts a fraction too long, long enough for me to understand I should have filled it. ‘I’ll make us a quick cup of tea,’ she says at last. ‘I know where everything is.’
The House Swap Page 20