She sat up and started to rearrange her dishevelled clothing, fastening her bra behind her back with practised hands, while her tights still hung from one foot like a half-shed skin. Funny how much shyer we were about putting our clothes back on than taking them off.
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘By the way.’
‘You don’t have to say that,’ she replied, smoothing down her camisole and fastening her shirt buttons.
‘It’s true though. Shall I tell you when I realised?’
‘When?’
I pulled her back down beside me. ‘That evening at the Powys Society. You came in late and sat next to me. You were wearing a yellow dress. When you came back to my room for coffee your heels made a lovely clicking sound on the stairs. That was when.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘You can’t fall in love with the sound of someone’s shoes.’
‘No, you’re right. It must have been earlier. In the kitchen, that first night we met, when you humiliated me. I think it was then.’
‘But we’d only just met. We’d hardly spoken!’
‘Ah but there was a connection. The lemon meringue pie conspiracy. You felt it too. Admit it.’
‘I admit it brought you to my attention,’ she conceded. ‘But it was only much later, when I’d got to know you . . .’ She laughed at herself. ‘All lovers must have had this conversation at some point: When did you first know you loved me . . .’
‘I suppose so. Carry on, it’s nice.’ Somehow the thought that there was nothing original in our situation, that we were part of the great fellowship of lovers past and present, was oddly reassuring.
‘There was one time when you said I was beautiful. You sounded as though you meant it.’
‘I did! You are.’
‘I thought, perhaps I’m just flattered, bored, all the conventional things. But then the other night when you said you’d had lunch with Leila, I just felt sick. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. That’s when I knew for sure: when I started feeling ill.’
‘But I told you we just had lunch.’
‘I know, I know. There’s nothing rational about it. I never felt jealous of Zoe, even though she was your girlfriend. Even once I’d met her and seen that she was young and pretty.’
‘It was never a big romance, me and Zoe. We were just mates, with a bit of sex thrown in. Anyway, she knew how I felt about you; that’s partly why she left.’
‘Did she?’
‘She said it was obvious.’
‘It wasn’t obvious to me.’
‘If I hadn’t come today would you have called on me?’
‘No. Never.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’d have assumed you didn’t want to see me, and I could never push myself on someone who didn’t want me.’
‘Diana, I will always want you.’
‘We’ll see.’
We had been lovers for less than half an hour, and she was already looking ahead to our separation.
I walked the four miles home in a trance and toppled onto my bed like a felled tree. I lay there for hours, re-experiencing Diana in every detail, and wondering how I would function until I saw her again. We had made no arrangements, and no promises, beyond the fact of our love, which was perfect and absolute, and at the same time entirely unreal. Neither of us had made the faintest allusion to those mountainous obstacles to any sort of continuation: Owen. The Children. I had given no thought to the practicalities of ‘afterwards’. I hadn’t seen making love to Diana as a stage in a process. It was simply something that urgently had to be done at that moment. Something to be chased into the past. This much was clear:
We were madly in love.
Her marriage was sacred.
I couldn’t do without her.
She would never leave her children.
I loved Owen like a brother – better than my brother.
I had to have sex with her again.
These incompatibles floated around my consciousness, unresolved, until I was roused by a knock at the door. Diana. I leapt up, but it was only the teenage son of the West Indians downstairs. I’d never actually seen him face to face, though I’d heard his music.
‘Phone,’ he said curtly.
I took the stairs in flying strides; he had left the receiver swinging on its leash like a hanged man. Somehow in fumbling it to my ear I managed to clout myself on the forehead. It was surprisingly painful.
‘Hello?’
‘Christopher? It’s Owen.’
My heart plunged. This was it. She’d told him. I was instantly drenched in icy sweat. I could feel it creeping up through my scalp. ‘Owen.’
‘It’s brilliant.’
‘What?’
‘I finished the book this afternoon. It’s brilliant. Such a great ending. I didn’t think you’d pull it off but you have.’
‘Oh . . .’ In my state of brainsickness I’d forgotten ever having written a book.
‘Hello? Are you there?’
‘Yes . . . yes . . . sorry.’ He didn’t know.
‘I just love what you’ve done with Gareth. I laughed and laughed over that bit in the police station.’ He continued to flay me with compliments, citing particular episodes and phrases that had impressed him, but I didn’t take any of them in over the noise of blood roaring in my ears. It seemed inconceivable that he couldn’t hear the crashing of my heart from the other end of the phone. ‘. . . so I thought I’d show it to Isobel, if that’s OK with you,’ he finished.
‘Who’s Isobel?’ I managed.
‘The sales director. I think you met her.’
My memory was shot to pieces. ‘Maybe. You do whatever you think.’
‘I know she’ll love it. And it’s always best to present a united front to Herman. Not that I’m expecting any resistance. It’s absolutely his sort of thing.’
‘Thank you for reading it so quickly. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you so soon.’
‘It was a pleasure to read. I’m really excited about it.’ His relentless goodness was unendurable. I had to get off the phone.
‘Look, Owen,’ I burbled. ‘I’ve got to go. There’s someone waiting to make a call.’
‘Of course. Sorry. I’ll get back to you as soon as there’s any news.’
‘Thanks, Owen. Don’t go to any trouble,’ I finished feebly.
‘It’s no trouble,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’ll talk again soon.’
At the click of disconnection I sank down onto the stairs and clutched my sweaty head in my arms. What should have been a moment of triumph had turned to ashes. My conscience had woken from its slumbers too late: everything was in ruins. I had betrayed Owen in the worst way possible, and in his innocence he continued to heap me with praise and favours. For a moment I contemplated my own vileness with a detachment that was almost serene, and then my heart gave a great kick of panic. Perhaps even now she was confessing. Owen, I did a silly thing, today. Please don’t be cross with me. Or maybe she was in the kitchen in her frilly apron, cooking his favourite supper as if nothing had happened, a bottle of wine breathing easily on the side, the twins sleeping peacefully upstairs, just like any other evening. This seemed equally impossible.
Not wanting to spoil our moment of discovery with sordid conspiracies of concealment, we had arranged nothing, agreed nothing.
I spent a wretched evening, anxious, tense, waiting for the axe to fall. I contemplated biking over to Aysgarth Terrace and spying on the house to reassure myself that there were no signs of domestic unrest, but I was too much of a coward. In any case, in my present mood it was hard to imagine any scene that would have sent me away comforted.
At one point, quite late, the phone rang and I felt the by now familiar adrenalin rush. I stood by the door, holding my breath, in anticipation of the footsteps on the stairs, the summoning knock, but none came. I felt hunted, even in my own room. I snatched up my keys and coat and headed out into the safety and anonymity of the dark street. I walked
without any sense of direction, but briskly and purposefully to deter muggers. The comforting familiarity of my neighbourhood, which even at this hour was still busy and sleepless, prompted a wave of nostalgia, bordering on grief, for yesterday when my life was simple.
I had discovered too late a great truth: that to be happy it requires nothing more than a clear conscience, and that there can be no happiness without one. I didn’t know it then, but in the matter of guilt I was a mere amateur. I had only scaled the foothills, while the vast ranges were all still ahead of me.
As I strode onwards towards the city, chin down, collar up, what I would have to do became clear. The only conceivable thing was to tell Diana, who was herself probably experiencing similar regrets, and had after all far more to lose, that there could be no repetition. We must never meet, except in Owen’s company, and never mention or acknowledge the incident again. Owen must never find out. This was the best that could be salvaged from our reckless behaviour. There was no alternative. I was absolutely determined.
21
‘KEEP STILL OR I’ll stab you.’
‘Ow. Why don’t I just take it off?’
‘It would be OK if you stopped fidgeting.’
I was lying on my bed while Diana, kneeling on the floor, tried to sew a button back onto the shirt that I was still wearing. She had noticed it hanging by a strand when I was getting dressed, and produced from her handbag a tiny repair kit containing needles, pins, folding scissors, and four coloured threads wound around a strip of card. Her bag was full of precautionary supplies – tissues, plasters, paracetamol, nail file, change for parking, pen, mirror, comb, lipstick, torch – the paraphernalia of someone thorough, sensible, and a shade pessimistic.
It was a week later, and I had seen her every day apart from Saturday and Sunday, when she was unavailable. To fill in the yawning weekend hours I had gone up to the West End and bought her some presents: an ankle bracelet (which she thought was hilariously tarty); a black basque (likewise); a pair of turquoise leather gloves (jackpot!) and half a dozen CDs by my favourite bands.
On Sunday I took my sheets to the launderette and read all the tabloids that had been left behind, while I was waiting for a free dryer, then I remade the bed ready for Monday when I would see her again. She always came to my place for the sake of discretion. All the time my visits to Aysgarth Terrace had been innocent, it had amused her no end to think of the neighbours jumping to salacious conclusions. Now that there were real grounds for gossip, of course, it was no longer funny.
The great edifice of good intentions I’d built during that long night trudging the streets of South London had collapsed like a house of cards when confronted by the reality of Diana herself. Something I had failed to take account of, during all my rehearsals, is that love, in its early stages, is an imperative that sweeps all other loyalties aside.
My resolve was already weakening as I walked down the path to the house and rang the bell. I might have rallied if I’d met anything like equal determination, but the door opened, Diana’s smile lit up the street and any hope was lost.
‘I had to see you,’ I blurted out – the very opposite of what I had planned and intended to say, which was, ‘I can’t see you again.’
‘Thank God you came,’ she said, pulling me into the house. We were kissing before we’d even got the door shut. Her urgent, scrabbling fingers were tugging at my belt, and she went down on me right there in the hallway, my back up against the rocking horse, one of its stirrups digging into my spine. The moment for moral fortitude was well and truly past.
Later, I tried to reassure myself with the thought that if Diana was prepared to betray her husband, the father of her children, then it was not up to me to recoil from the lesser offence of betraying a friend. This is the twisted reasoning that passes for logic in a mind curdled by desire.
Our one conversation about our ‘predicament’ left us both so miserable, and caused Diana such anguish, while resolving nothing, that I never dared to raise the subject again.
‘Diana, what are we going to do?’ I said, that same morning, as we were lying together on the spare bed, in a warm, post-sex torpor. ‘I mean, what are we actually going to do?’
The skin of her arms rose into gooseflesh as though my words had let in an icy draught, and she looked at me with something like panic. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t plan this.’
‘Neither did I. I just wondered what you think is going to happen. In the future.’
‘I don’t think. I’m trying not to think. Thinking any further ahead than tomorrow makes me feel ill.’ She covered her face with crossed arms.
‘But supposing Owen finds out, or suspects? What are you going to do? Admit it? Deny it?’
She sat bolt upright. ‘He mustn’t find out. He’d never, ever forgive me.’
‘You mean he’d throw you out?’
‘No. He’d never leave me; but he wouldn’t forgive me either. You’re not married, you don’t understand. I would have to spend the rest of my life atoning, and it still wouldn’t be enough.’ The colour drained from her cheeks as a thought occurred to her, and she looked like a ghost of herself. ‘You haven’t told anyone, have you?’
‘No, of course I haven’t. Who am I going to tell? I’m not exactly feeling great about it myself.’
‘You don’t have as much to lose as me.’ To my dismay she started to blink very fast. Tears would surely follow. This melancholy truth struck me: I had it in my power to make the woman I loved miserable, nothing more.
‘Sorry,’ I quailed, clutching her against me. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I’d do anything for you. Anything.’
‘Then don’t make me face things that I can’t face. Don’t make me choose. If you make me, I’ll have to choose Owen.’
‘You don’t have to. I’m yours whatever.’
She kissed me with relief, dry-eyed now. ‘I can’t bear the thought of doing without you. That’s all.’
‘That’s fine by me.’
So we made our pact-without-words to collude in whatever moral blindness was required to sustain us. We wouldn’t plot or scheme or even think.
‘Who knows what might happen in the future? Anything might happen. I might be run over by a bus tomorrow.’ She said this almost wistfully, as though this solution had some virtues.
‘I said I could be happy in this room when I first saw it. And I was right.’ Diana had finished sewing on the button and was sitting on my window ledge eating pistachio nuts from a tin while I tried to coax a signal from my elderly radio.
Owen’s sister, an occasional actress, had a part in the afternoon play – an adaptation of Ethan Frome – and Diana had promised to listen and offer feedback. It was safe to mention Owen in this sort of neutral context: only in relation to our ‘predicament’ was he off limits.
At last I managed to locate some dialogue amongst the storm of buzzing and whistling.
‘Aha, that’s Bronnie,’ said Diana. ‘Not a bad American accent. Considering she’s from Neath.’
‘Bronnie? What sort of name’s that?’ I retorted, then shut up smartly, remembering that her own children had been saddled with equally daft names.
I left her listening happily, snapping pistachios, while I went out onto the landing for a cigarette: I never smoked in her presence as she didn’t want to go home with the smell in her hair. I’d offered to give up altogether, but she said, no, don’t go making changes for my sake.
I came back into the room five minutes later, just in time to see Diana spring away from the window, sending a lapful of nutshells skimming across the floor.
‘It’s Leila,’ she said.
We gaped at each other. ‘What?’
‘Out there. Walking down the street.’
Instinctively I took a step forward, but Diana put her arm out to stop me. ‘Don’t let her see you. Just pretend you’re out.’
‘Are you sure it was her?’
‘Of course I’m sure. There’s no o
ne else who looks like that!’
‘Did she see you?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ For some reason we were whispering.
‘What would Leila be doing here?’
‘That’s what I was going to ask you,’ said Diana, with a slight edge to her voice. ‘I thought you weren’t in touch.’
‘We’re not. I never even gave her my address.’ I tried to think back to that lunch in St Martin’s Lane. I was pretty sure I hadn’t even mentioned where I lived.
We waited, tensed, for the doorbell, but it didn’t come.
‘We’ll just sit tight and not answer,’ said Diana. ‘I assume she hasn’t got a key.’
‘Don’t be insane!’
‘I was joking.’
Later, lying awake, alone, I would brood on the unfairness of having to justify a non-existent relationship with an ugly lesbian, while Diana spent every night in another man’s bed.
‘Look, she’s clearly not coming here or she’d have rung by now,’ I said, still not entirely convinced that it wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. ‘Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Perhaps she’s visiting someone else in this street.’
Diana looked sceptical.
‘Her drug-dealer for instance,’ I suggested.
‘I can’t very well ask her what she was doing here,’ Diana pointed out.
‘Anyway, would it be such a disaster if she found you here? She knows I often call on you.’
‘But me coming here is a very different thing.’
We had both advanced towards the window now, drawn by an irresistible urge to know the worst. I tweaked the edge of the curtain and peered down through the chink onto an empty street.
‘Oh shit. My car,’ Diana said, joining me.
‘What about it?’
‘Even if she didn’t see me, she’ll have seen the car.’
‘Women don’t notice things like cars,’ I said.
‘Of course we do. She’ll have recognised the number plate.’
‘But even if she suspects something, she won’t make trouble for you. She’s your friend. It’ll be all right.’ It was nearly time for her to leave and I couldn’t bear us to part on a note of crisis.
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