“How did you get my number?”
“The chap at the Library. I said I fancied you. He was very sympathetic. He said he had seen you over the months and you were always on your own, you never spoke to anyone, you always looked so serious and so lonely. He took pity on you.”
“He shouldn’t have given you my number.”
“No. But he did. Let’s meet. Please.”
“OK.” I couldn’t believe how I felt. For so much of my life Carl asking me to meet up with him would have sent me into every sort of joy. Now I wasn’t so sure. But there was so much history.
“I know this isn’t going to make any sense at all but how about tea at the Savoy?”
“I’d like that. That would be quite special. Is there any particular reason?”
“No. I just thought it would be somewhere we wouldn’t lose control. We will be polite and distant. Probably better than somewhere where we can actually be ourselves.”
I understood exactly what he meant.
I spent a great deal of time getting ready the next day. I bought a suit that I thought might be considered sufficiently smart. It was late February, cold and wet, but I was determined to be sophisticated and professional. I wanted Carl to see what he had been missing. I made sure I had my briefcase with me when I took the train into town. I wanted to make sure Carl saw me as a professional woman. It may have been stupid but it was very important that he didn’t think I was the wreck of a Susie who had lived with him. But I remembered Max’s words ‘… find the man who will make you happy … this is not Carl.’
“Susie, you look wonderful.”
Carl stood up and kissed me on both cheeks. We were both being incredibly civilised.
“Good to see you Carl.”
“Delighted to welcome you Mr Witherby.” Carl was obviously a regular, the waiter seemed to know him well. “Afternoon tea for two?” Carl nodded in agreement and I realised how at home he was in this world.
“Do you come here often?”
“Pretty much. It’s close to Bush House and I’m doing a lot with the World Service now, also for what you get it’s actually a very cheap meal.”
I enjoyed the tea, the pianist played a medley of songs that were all about summer. I liked that, there was a certain light irony bearing in mind the February weather outside. Somehow ‘Summertime and the living is easy’ sounded even better when you knew it was miserable outside.
Sitting in the warm lounge of the hotel drinking tea from perfect pink and white tea cups meant that the real world didn’t exist. After biting into one of the beautifully manicured cucumber sandwiches I nearly choked.
“Are you OK? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Sorry.” I couldn’t tell Carl I was remembering tea served in the room at the Taj Mahal Hotel on the first day of my honeymoon.
“I was just thinking about the title for an article ‘My Life in Cucumber Sandwiches’, it might be quite fun.”
We didn’t really talk much, perhaps we were both shy and a little unsure of ourselves. A man came up and shook Carl’s hand muttering something about needing to keep in touch and appreciating his last series. So people did still know about Carl.
“Allow me to introduce Susannah Donaldson.” Carl said to the man. It hadn’t occurred to Carl that I might not be ‘Donaldson’ any more and it didn’t occur to me to correct his error.
“Delighted.” The man said, taking my proffered hand and brushing it briefly against his lips.
Carl and the man exchanged a few words which I couldn’t really hear, and wasn’t really trying to. And he left.
“What are you up to then?” Carl finally asked a personal question that had to be answered.
“I’m researching a book.” It seemed like a reasonable answer.
Carl’s question was also perfectly reasonable. “What about?”
Should I answer honestly? Should I lie and say something completely innocuous or should I answer truthfully and get Carl on my side perhaps? There wasn’t really any choice. I was never a good liar. I chose the easier option, not mentioning Max. “It’s about my grandfather.”
I was surprised at his immediate response “Can I help?”
“I’m doing very well on my own thank you.” I couldn’t help the bitter defensiveness in my tone.
“I wasn’t saying you weren’t.”
“Sorry, I know. I’m just so used to people thinking I’m a complete idiot.”
“I mean it. I would love to help if I can.”
But I was defensive. “Tell me about your work, what are you up to these days?” The awkward moment passed and we talked comfortably as we drank several pots of tea. The time flew by.
“Time for a cocktail I think. Come on Susie. Let’s go up to the American Bar.”
I followed him up the stairs and along the corridor to the American Bar. Again he seemed well known.
“Can I tell you about the first time I came to this place?” And he told me of my mother’s birthday, how he had treated her to a night of luxury, how he had led her into this very bar and how people had admired the woman who was my mother. “We drank here, we ate in the River Room, we talked and she was very beautiful.”
I remembered something David had said, the night after my mother’s funeral, the first time he had really spoken to us and admitted who he was. He had said he had seen his daughter, at the Savoy, ‘with a beautiful young man’. I felt the goose pimples rising on my arm as I realised that that young man must have been Carl. That was the evening he was talking about and David had been eating here too. I felt inordinately sad that they had not realised who they really were, and had not sealed the circle.
“You slept together didn’t you?” I had asked the question before I knew whether I wanted him to answer or not.
“Yes. I slept with Alicia. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t anything either of us had worked towards. We danced together, she sang and it just happened.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I sipped at the Martini in the triangular glass and tried to imagine Carl here, at this exact spot at the bar, with my mother how many years earlier?
“It was 1967. November 29th 1967.”
“Her birthday.”
“Yes it was her 47th birthday and also her 26th wedding anniversary, or at least it would have been if she and Arnold hadn’t divorced.”
“And you were…”
“21”
“Why…”
“Why did I do it? Simple. She was like you. I wanted to sleep with you, I wanted to be with you, and she was so like you. That and the fact that she asked me to.”
There was nothing I could say so I nodded towards the bartender for another Martini.
“Not that long ago really.”
“A lifetime.”
The tea that had become cocktails became dinner.
“Don’t tell me this was the table you sat at with my mother.” I ventured as we sat looking at the menus.
“No. Not quite. It was that table, in the corner” And he indicated a table three away from ours over his shoulder. I stared at the table imagining Carl, 21 years old, with my mother. She wouldn’t have been that much older than I was now. Ghosts. I could see them at the table and the echoes of it were almost tangible. David was sitting at the table just behind them. These were the tables, this was the setting. I almost felt them sitting in their designated places. I so wanted to tell David to talk to them. I so wanted to tell my mother that her father was sitting just six feet away. They were really there. It was so clear to me, so vivid.
The food was excellent, the wine too. We talked about everything and anything. We both knew what was going to happen, there had been an inevitability about it since his phone call. Without his saying anything I knew he had a room, I knew he had known I would stay. And it didn’t matter. As we drank the coffee looking out over the river and the lights reflecting in the water I knew that I would wake up to look out over that view. I knew that my mother had done just the same years before
. And I knew that I would have absolutely no regrets.
“Can we do this again?” He asked the question tentatively, but not without confidence that he knew my answer would be ‘yes’. Carl was standing by the window, his white towelling robe not completely disguising his nakedness. I was sitting up in the large bed, the lovely linen sheets pulled up around my neck.
“I don’t see why not.” I answered with theatrical nonchalance.
“Susie, seriously, was that a one off or are we going to do this properly?”
“Do what properly?”
“You know. Be lovers, whatever. Have an affair.”
“Why? Are you married?” It hadn’t occurred to me to ask. He didn’t wear a ring but then why would he? Of course he was married. By saying nothing he gave me his answer. “I don’t suppose you thought to tell me?” I made myself sound nonchalant.
Carl had not changed. I had always thought of him as the perfect man, the knight in shining armour who would rescue me from all my pain and loneliness. But I had always known underneath everything he was weak. He had loved me but he had slept with countless women. He had slept with my mother. God knows who else had had the pleasure, and it was a pleasure, of being made love to by Carl. Of course he would be unfaithful to his wife. I was just so happy that I was the ‘other woman’ not the betrayed one, so very happy that tables were turning. Max had been absolutely right.
“Does it make a difference? It would never have worked if we’d got married Susie, really it wouldn’t, but do you want to know anything about her?”
“No and No. I absolutely don’t care.” Perhaps I should have pressed him, asked the name of the woman I was betraying, but I didn’t.
In the first months I never saw him anywhere but at the Savoy. We would meet in the bar and eat in the restaurant overlooking the river. We would share a bath and the bed and then the shower and the bed again with no suggestion of responsibility or guilt. I never worried about leaving him after our nights together because I knew he would be there the next week and strangely it wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t been.
Early in the summer Carl asked me to help with a project he was working on.
“Could you come to my office? We need to talk about you helping with the research. Your expertise would be very welcome on the team.”
I was flattered, and intrigued. I didn’t even mind that the invitation was a few years late.
“OK.”
Our affair lasted all through the spring and the summer. I was working with Carl and his team on my 40th birthday and I thought he had forgotten. When he shepherded us all into the pub at the end of the road where their small office was I realised he hadn’t. I woke up on the office floor the next morning, under a blanket that someone must have draped over me and remembering nothing about the evening before.
“Coffee?” Carl was in the small corner of the office we called the kitchen.
“Was I out of order? Do I have to apologise to everyone?”
“You were sweet, a little maudlin but sweet. They loved you. No you don’t have to apologise to anyone. Except me that is.”
“Why?”
“You were too pissed to make love.”
Carl had introduced me to colleagues as an ‘old and dear friend, almost a sister’. After that night I felt sure the rest of the team must have known that was not quite the case but nothing was ever said.
It was a perfect time. But as with all perfect times it had to come to an end.
Carl asked me to go to lunch with him one day when I was working in the library rather than in the office. He seemed tense and unusually quiet as we walked in silence to a small Italian restaurant I had never been to before. I went to tuck my hand into the crook of his arm, as I frequently did when we were walking together, but he shrugged me away.
“What is it?” As I asked I knew what the answer would be.
“I think we’ve been found out.”
“Your wife?”
“She’s left me. Do you want me to tell you about her?”
“Not particularly but if you need to.”
“I need to.”
And he talked. We hardly touched our bowls of pasta.
He had married Holly.
“I thought you would have married the woman you were fucking all the time we were together.” I couldn’t help the bitterness in my voice but I was determined that he would not know how angry I was that he had married Holly. He loved me but couldn’t live with me, he had never asked me to marry him in the years we were together. But he had asked Holly.
“No. Most women started sleeping with me because they felt sorry for me. I had such a shitty home life, what with all those children that weren’t mine and a clingy woman who just wanted to marry me for security.” He was angry as well but less good at hiding his emotion.
Ignoring the reference to ‘most women’ I pushed home my advantage. “So you married a clingy woman who only wanted to marry you for security.”
“Holly isn’t clingy.”
I simply raised my eyebrow in disbelief. “But she is rich.”
“That’s a cheap point.”
It probably was, but the way he reacted made me think I had hit on his real reason.
“But you still fuck around.” Was I sounding hurt?
“Only with you.” Was he being disingenuous?
“I’m supposed to believe that?”
“It’s true.”
“No it absolutely is not true. You fuck around with anyone and everybody. You’re just like your father. You couldn’t be faithful to any one single person to save your life.” Although I spoke quietly, not wanting the people in the tables around us to hear, there was bitterness in my voice.
“Are we arguing?”
“Probably.”
We were quite for a while, both concentrating, ridiculously, on the plates of pasta in front of us.
“Anyway, Holly has found out about us.”
“Us?”
“Well she knows I’m having an affair.”
“Does she know it’s me?” I couldn’t believe he had told her about me.
He hedged around being honest, as he had so often done in the past. “She knows I’m seeing someone regularly, and spending the night with them.”
“Does she mind?”
“Of course she fucking minds! She’s fucking divorcing me.” Heads turned towards us, there were disapproving stares before people turned back to their meals and their conversations.
“Divorce? That’s a bit dangerous isn’t it? I mean she has loads more money than you. You could take her to the cleaners.” I tried to sound as cynical as possible.
“It’s not like that.”
“I bet it isn’t. No divorce ‘isn’t like that’. She’ll cling on tooth and nail to everything.”
“She’s naming you.”
“Naming me?” I looked at Carl, long and hard. “Naming me? You told her my name? You told her it was me?”
“I had to. She guessed. She asked directly ‘It’s Susannah isn’t it?’ I had to say yes.”
“God you’re weak.”
“Probably. Anyway she’s naming you as correspondent. It’s just that she doesn’t know your address.”
“I don’t believe you! You want this divorce don’t you? You want the excuse, the reason, me? But you don’t know my address! That’s beautiful! That’s absolutely fucking beautiful. How about ‘Care of The Savoy’? No? That won’t do? Oh Carl you are so bloody weak.”
I started laughing. It was so perfect. I looked closely at him across the table and wondered if I was really seeing him for the first time, this man I had loved forever. I realised the truth of what Ted had said ten years earlier, Carl needed me more than I needed him. I don’t know how and in what exact ways but he needed me. Slowly, over the years, the tables had turned and I was now the strong one. I was almost sorry for him. “You’re afraid I won’t tell you.”
“I wondered.”
“You mustn’t tell any
one else. Not Charles nor Linda. None of them. I’ll get back in touch when I need to. Not before.”
“Even if I wanted to I couldn’t. We have nothing to do with them for pretty obvious reasons. I wouldn’t know how to contact them to save my life.”
I reached down into my bag and pulled out my Filofax. Tearing a page out of it I wrote my full name and address handed it to him across the table.
“Susannah Smith?”
“You’re not the only one who got married.” I knew I was completely in control and enjoyed the power of the moment.
“You never said.” He sounded like a little boy, resentful that someone had something he had wanted.
“You never asked.”
I spoke matter-of-factly “Married on my birthday 1983 divorced October 1985. The two years of my marriage netted me the flat in Connaught Square and a six figure sum in the bank. My solicitor was worth every penny of her fees. Apparently Mr Smith, that was my ex, was happy to pay anything so that his parents wouldn’t learn of his homosexuality. I hadn’t known he was that way inclined but it didn’t matter, we hadn’t had sex since almost before we were married. I’ve sold the flat and banked the ridiculous sum it raised. So, you see,” I ended with a hint of triumph “you have a rich wife and a rich mistress, both of whom you are about to lose.”
We ate what we could of the cold pasta in silence.
“I’ll finish this project at home and so there’s no need to meet in the office. Then we’ll have a bit of a gap. Call me when you want another job done, but we can’t work together all the time. It’ll be difficult when the guys find out what’s been going on, we’ll have a bit of a break until they’ve all left and you’re breaking in a new little team.”
“That makes sense.” He seemed pleased that someone was making difficult decisions for him. “What about…” he parked his fork on the plate and wiped his mouth with the napkin. “… the other stuff?”
“I wouldn’t mind one last night.”
“No reason why not.”
“Saturday? It’s the 29th of November.” I wanted to lay that ghost. The opportunity appealed to my sense of history.
We met as usual in the American Bar and ate, as usual, in the River Restaurant, but this time we had the corner table. We both knew why. In every way it was exactly the same as the thirty or so meetings we had had through the past months. But knowing this was the last time we would be together as lovers gave the evening a special edge. From now on we would just be friends.
Runaways Page 29