Straight on Till Morning

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  He leaned his head back against the headrest and stared into the distance. Then his mouth twitched.

  ‘Up there is OK, Sally.’

  ‘Not for me it isn’t. That’s the whole point. I’ve been feeling like this a good bit longer than you realise, you know.’

  His head turned.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Too long.’

  ‘Since Wales? ‘

  ‘Of course since Wales! Did you not notice? How could you not have noticed, Nick?’

  He grinned. His first grin of this tortuous encounter. It soothed me. Like a plaster on a cut.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I noticed. But then I decided I noticed wrong.’ He grinned again. ‘No. That’s not right. I knew I noticed right but I told myself I’d noticed wrong. A substantive difference.’

  ‘To tell the truth, something strange happened to me the first time I clapped eyes on you. Almost like it was serendipity. Except I don’t believe in all that nonsense. I just thought it must be my hormones.’ He laughed at this, but then his expression became serious.

  ‘I lied,’ he said at last.

  ‘Lied? What about?’

  ‘When I said I didn’t believe in all that stuff. I do.’

  Just like Ruth. Fate. The Drug U Like takeover. Nick Brown flying in. My meeting him…my… ‘Well,’ I said crossly, ‘that’s all fine and very romantic and everything. But it leaves us where, exactly? Do we sit here and wait for more divine guidance to beam down and tell us what to do next?’

  He considered me for a moment then dropped his eyes and pulled the keys from the ignition.

  ‘Tell you what. Let’s go for a walk.’

  *

  Walking. Not talking. Walking. That was the thing. Walking would be good. Space all around and fresh air in the lungs and sunshine and green leaves and views and perspective and the small matter of quite how I was going to deal with every single day after this one shunted away like a petal on the wind. We got out of the car and headed uphill, following a ribbon of well trodden pathway that wound away from the back of the picnic area. He stuck out a hand and I slipped my own into it as if it were the most natural thing in the world for me to do. Because it was the most natural thing in the world to do. To touch, to hold, to connect. I had not held hands with Jonathan since – since when? Since ever? No. Not quite ever. Since Kate was born and one of us always seemed to be pushing the buggy. How did we slip out of the habit so easily? I pondered, as we walked, about how it would be if I were to slip my hand into Jonathan’s now. He would be embarrassed. I could almost taste his embarrassment. But worse – far worse – I couldn’t even see myself doing it. I clutched Nick’s hand more tightly and drew closer as we walked. My heart was so full of him I wanted to cry.

  ‘Better?’ he asked, as we crested the hill and paused to draw breath. The airport sprawled flatly in the distance, sun winking off metal as the toy planes taxied around. Beyond it, lay the cream bulk of Amberley Park. And beyond that, my home. The place where I lived with my family. All tiny. Unreal. All that felt real at this moment was the steady warmth of his hand in mine. It blotted out everything else.

  I released it and took two steps backwards away from him. ‘Marginally,’ I said. ‘No. Substantially. Better enough, all things considered. Enough to know that if I stand over here and you stand over there then everything will be just fine.’

  He blinked at me. Knitted his brows in silent enquiry.

  ‘There. You see?’ I said, smiling wanly at him. ‘Simple. Nothing to it. Proximity, that’s the secret. Because if you take two steps towards me now, everything will go wrong again and I will fall in your arms and want you to sweep me up and tell me everything will be all right. But it won’t, Nick.’ I shook my head. ‘Everything will be all wrong…’ my eyes were smarting. My throat felt sore. ‘Nick I’m married. I can’t see you. I can’t –’He frowned and took two steps towards me. Crushed me against his chest.

  ‘You see?’ I sobbed into his shirt. ‘Not better. Not better at all.’

  ‘Oh, God. Don’t cry, Sally. Please.’

  ‘I can’t help but cry!’ I railed. ‘I don’t want to feel like this! I have a husband and children and responsibilities and…and…and I can’t be doing with feeling like this about you. I just want to be able to go back to all that and be…and be…’ I gulped at the enormity of what I was realising. ‘…and be quietly unhappy again.’

  He held me against him tighter still. A plane roared overhead. A light breeze made the slender boughs above us creak.

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ he said suddenly, his voice rumbling against my face. ‘I’ve been quietly unhappy for most of my life. I don’t want to be that any more.’

  I pulled my face away from his chest.

  ‘But you have to,’ I said. ‘It’s what people have to do. It’s what I have to do. Except I can’t, Nick. That’s just it.’ I wiped my eyes furiously with the back of my hand, but the tears just kept coming. ‘I didn’t even realise I was unhappy. I mean, ours is no different to anyone else’s marriage, is it? I mean, Jonathan and me –’I sniffed. Took a step back again, for safety. ‘We’re OK, you know. We just – well – been getting on with it. Like you do. You know?’

  He grimaced and pushed his hands into the pockets of his trousers then turned to look out across the fields. We were feet apart now. Two statues on the top of the hill.

  ‘Of course I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent most of my marriage doing just that, believe me. Getting on with it.’ He fell silent.

  Two lonely statues. ‘So what’s changed?’

  ‘My wife. ’It was the first time I’d heard him utter those two words. ‘My wife is what changed. She didn’t want to get on with it any longer. She didn’t want to live any longer with someone who didn’t love her.’ I could hear the heavy sigh that accompanied his shrug. ‘Which is fair enough. Because it’s true. I don’t love her. I’d just been getting on with it.’ He swivelled around and looked at me as if the words were physically hurting him. ‘I have a son, you see. Who I love very much.’ I stayed where I was. I just couldn’t stop crying.

  ‘So she left you?’ I sniffed.

  He shook his head.

  ‘No. I left her. Practically speaking, at any rate. She asked me to leave. She didn’t want me there any more.’

  ‘So you came here.’

  He nodded. ‘I came here. I had always been coming here. We had always been coming here. But she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to leave her friends, and her family, and disrupt Will’s education – and – and, Christ, why would she? For a guy who doesn’t love her?’ He took his hands from his pockets and spread them towards me. ‘Would you?’

  I shook my head. So he had come on his own. And here he was, standing not five feet away from me, lonely and sad and thousands of miles from the son he loved. And plopped down into my life, like the sugar lumps they used to give you to stop you getting polio. So sweet on your tongue as you crunched them. But with all that nasty tasting medicine along for the ride.

  ‘And then I met you,’ he said, moving towards me once again. His arms were back around me and I didn’t resist this time. ‘I guess I could have met any number of women. But I didn’t. I met you. You and your mad dog and that feisty way you have about you and your happy smile and your doggedness and your warmth and your….He trailed off, touching his fingers to my face and frowning again. ‘And I don’t know what to say, except if you want to stop this right now, you only have to say. Because you’re right. I can’t make it better. I can only make it worse.’

  I was gulping back sobs now. I felt so weary, all of a sudden. Hot and tired and wrung out like a dishrag. All I wanted was to curl up into a little ball on top of this hill with him and wait for the storm to pass. His hands were drawing circles across my shoulders now. Gentle, rhythmic, calming strokes. I stroked him back, pressing my small tired body against his enveloping strong one. I was safe here, my face cradled i
n his hands, his lips warm against my wet cheek.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. And then he was kissing me again. Kissing my forehead, my temples, my lips. Kissing my tears away. I could taste them on his tongue. Melting everything away as if nothing else mattered. Just him and me and here and now and the ferocious heat burning inside me again. It was as if a tsunami had suddenly taken hold of me and I could do nothing but hang on and ride it. Everything else was kicked back into touch.

  ‘I’m not,’ I mouthed, knowing, even as I said it, that storm clouds were gathering ahead.

  Chapter 17

  I would be sorry. As sure as I knew the sun shone I knew I would be sorry eventually. But I wasn’t feeling sorry right now.

  Chapter thirteen. Sexual Arousal.

  My book says that women are like formula one racing cars. That the more work you put into the tuning, the better they go. I feel sure I’ve heard that somewhere before, but as it says it in a very learned looking font and includes all sorts of references, which are asterisked and annotated at the back, I presume it must have been said by someone who knew a thing or two, and not just some wag of a bloke down the pub.

  My book also says that female sexual arousal is one of the cornerstones a couple must lay if they are to successfully relight the marital fire. Without sexual arousal (it says) sex is very boring for women, and it is no surprise that they find themselves remembering their Auntie Maud’s birthday, mid-thrust.

  I remember everyone’s birthdays. Always.

  Though I certainly wouldn’t have today.

  Nick had dropped me back at my car a little before seven, in some anguish, certainly, but rather more pressingly, in such a state of extreme and distracting sexual arousal that it felt as if my whole lower torso was being pneumatically drilled. We had kissed each other so much by this time that my lips were bruised. But that had been all. We had only kissed. We had talked a little more, but mainly we had simply held each other and kissed, and in a way that, by rights, shouldn’t have been busying itself with anything that went on further south than my heart.

  I got into my car, pulse still pounding away as I watched him stride the short distance to the automatic doors of the Meridien hotel. He turned as he went in. Waved. Blew a kiss.

  And now here I was, driving into a giant red orb of sun, and in a state of arousal of such animal intensity that even the fetid fumes eddying around me were insufficient to loosen its grip. There was no way on earth that I could present either myself or my cake at the tennis club pavilion until serious steps had been taken to dampen it down.

  I drove home slowly, judging things carefully. I needed to arrive after Jonathan had already left. I could not face him, feeling as I did. I had not felt like this for almost half of my life. If at all. Had I ever felt like this before?

  Thankfully, the house, bar Merlin, was empty. Kate, obviously long since over her hangover, had left what for her was a fairly effusive missive, timed at 6.20, thanking me for my ministrations the night before, assuring me of her sobriety, and letting me know – she’d had tried my mobile – that she was being picked up by Carl and his mother and step dad and going with them to the multiplex cinema to watch Artificial Intelligence and have a pizza somewhere.

  I freed my grateful feet from their long incarceration and padded upstairs. I could, at this point, have simply lain on the bed in the spare room, – not our room – closed my eyes and bade the image of his beautiful face to appear before me. It would have been enough. I was teetering on a cliff edge. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to. I wanted to hang on to this feeling. Savour it a while. Enjoy it as I walked around the bedroom, undressing languidly, hug its throbbing heat to myself as I turned on the shower. Let it race through my veins as the cold water hit me, and tuck itself away into every corner of my being. I wanted, in short, to save it for him.

  That thought having been thought, I stood under the shower for ten minutes and soberly contemplated the rest of my life.

  I was just about to leave the house when the telephone rang. My mother.

  ‘Listen!’ She started to read something to me. Some snippet she’d found in whatever magazine she’d been flicking through, about some screen idol or other who had fallen from grace with some other screen idol, causing much consternation in the film world and several thousand eager column inches. ’Can’t help it? Tosh!’ she snorted, as soon as she’d finished. ‘Uncontrollable passion my eye! You wouldn’t credit it, would you? These people have no shame. Why on earth do they get married in the first place? Five poor little kiddies between them and all they can think of is carrying on with other people on the side –’

  I really didn’t want to hear this right now. ‘Mum, I can’t stop. I’m just –’

  ‘Oh, I won’t keep you,’ she said. ‘I just thought I’d ring and let you know I’ve got things sorted.’

  ‘Got what sorted?’

  ‘For delivering my petition, of course! I spoke to someone at Charing Cross Police station earlier – such a helpful young lady – and they say I can have a slot on Tuesday. Is Tuesday going to be all right? I know you normally take your day off on Wednesday, but we’ve got the mobile hairdressers coming then.’

  ‘What, this Tuesday? This one coming?’

  ‘If that’s going to be OK with you. I thought we could go up on the train. We’ll need to get there in good time. You get given a fifteen minute slot, you see, and you can’t miss it because of all the security procedures. You get taken in by a policeman.’

  ‘What, you mean right to the door of number Ten?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said breezily, as if hanging out with Premiers was a regular happenstance for her. ‘They were very nice. You get to give it to the commissionaire there, and he’ll pose for a picture, apparently. Isn’t that nice? That’ll be something for that man at the Argus, won’t it?’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘I never realised it was that simple.’

  ‘Well, your father would turn in his grave to hear me say it, but I’m beginning to think I’ll vote Labour next time round. Anyway, I plumped for half past twelve – emergencies permitting, of course – if something important happens they have to re-schedule you, of course – is that going to be OK with you?’

  ‘Mum, it’s a bit short notice to change my day off, to be honest. Does it have to be next week? Couldn’t it wait till the week after?’

  ‘I’m coming up to you the week after, aren’t I? To help you out with Kate’s show.’

  I’d forgotten. I was forgetting everything right now. ‘Oh, yes. Look, I really don’t know, Mum. I promised Morgan I’d spend a day up in London with her soon, and I was thinking next week would be good. Jonathan’s going to be away and –’

  ‘So she could come too! And we could kill two birds with one stone, couldn’t we? Have a wander round John Lewis and look at frocks after lunch, maybe. Look, will you try? Please? I’m sure if you tell your nice boss what it’s for, he won’t mind. How could he?’

  How could he indeed. ‘I’ll try, Mum. OK?.’

  ‘Oh, one thing,’ she added. ‘No banners, no placards, and no fancy dress.’

  I put down the phone. Surreal.

  *

  It was still light when I arrived at the tennis club, the low sun emphasising the rich terracotta of the new clay courts they’d recently had laid. Jonathan, thankfully, was busy playing in a doubles match. I didn’t want to have to talk to him. I didn’t think I would be able to talk to him. I was outwardly calm, and showered, and functional, but inside it felt as if my whole body was quivering. Every time I thought of Nick, which was almost every second, the same heat would diffuse through my stomach as if a little ball of energy that couldn’t work out what to do with itself.

  I made my way around the back of the courts and into the pavilion. A trestle had been set up along the far wall and was already groaning under the weight of the cakes. I placed my shop bought offering at the far end. Away from all the puffed up and se
lf important sponges, the lovingly cut sandwiches and glistening buttered scones. The products of loving wives, happier marriages. Stark evidence that mine was so lacking all round.

  Then I scuttled off home and scrubbed the car once again, willing the sky to grow sufficiently dark that I could search out some constellation to tell Nick about.

  Jonathan and Kate arrived home almost simultaneously.

  ‘And,’ I could hear Jonathan saying as they clattered in through the utility room together. ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you, young lady.’

  I had not even paused to collect my thoughts about Kate. So much had happened in the intervening hours, that her misdemeanours of the previous evening almost seemed as if they’d happened to someone else. I had certainly not given any thought to it in relation to Jonathan, let alone what line of approach to adopt. Say nothing, was my first thought now. Let the thing be forgotten. After all, she’d had her own head to remind her.

  Too late, was the second. I stopped loading the dishwasher and turned to greet them both. Kate caught my eye. I remembered her note. He must have read it. But just how incriminating had it been ? I mentally backtracked. ‘Sorreeeee about last night. Am fine now, if delicate. Chastened but happy! Off out with Carl ….’

  ‘What about?’ she asked him lightly, sloughing off her jacket and heading towards the fridge.

  Jonathan put his racquets down with a clatter on the kitchen table. His forehead was pink and shiny still from the tennis. He frowned at her.

  ‘About exactly what it was you got up to last night.’

  Kate looked at me again while Jonathan stooped to pull his kit from his bag. I raised my brows to indicate I hadn’t spoken to him. News, however, had obviously travelled fast.

  ‘What?’ said Kate again. ‘What about last night?’

  Jonathan assumed a severe expression and glared at her from the other side of the table.