Straight on Till Morning

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  I rattled on down the A23, dreaming up scenarios in which we would meet, fall into each other’s arms and declare our undying love for one another, all the while in another bloody poppy strewn field. And having decided my resolve had been found wanting in so many departments that it was all but moribund, I abandoned any immediate plans to take it to task. Until it felt a little stronger, at least. Instead I resolved I would return his text message instead. Just as soon as I fetched up at work.

  ‘OK,’ I typed feverishly as I sat in my car in the bowels of the car park. ‘But missing U already. Where U? How U? LOL, S xxx

  I sent it off and smiled a little smile as I put on my lipstick in the rear view mirror. It was the beelzebub smile of a fallen woman. I smiled it again. Felt the bubbles fizzing up. Felt the delicious heat of expectation suffusing through me again. Imagined Nick – where was he, I wondered, right now? On his way into work? Tucking into yet another hotel breakfast? Already in a meeting? Most likely, I thought. With his mobile tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket. The little message icon waiting for him. Me in his pocket. I kissed the phone before I slipped it back in my bag.

  As I got out of the car I spotted Dennis sauntering towards me, raincoat folded over his arm, briefcase swinging from one hand.

  ‘You’re looking very chirpy,’ he observed. ‘Cat got the cream, eh?’

  And whump! I was back down at the other end of the seesaw. Oh, God. This was no way to live.

  Chapter 19

  But live I did. Live I must. Mrs Sally Matthews back in her kitchen. Normal service resumed.

  And it was surprisingly easy. Despite everything inside me being in a state of near-chaos, outside life went on as normal.

  On Saturday morning I got a letter from the Drug U Like UK Head Office, to let me know that following my recent meeting with Nicholas Brown, Human Resources etcetera etcetera, they were now inviting me to attend an interview for the post of Optometry Manager, Amberley Park, the following Friday week at eleven fifteen. It was to take place at their southern area head office (map enclosed) and I was to take along with me an up to date CV and report to a Mr Monroe.

  Both Kate and Jonathan expressed about as much interest as they had when I’d become senior optom, i.e. sufficient to but not excessive. Kate expressed mild surprise, Jonathan mild disinterest. My job was my job. He did teeth, I did eyes. And apart from (what for him seemed, at any rate) a modest increase in my salary, nothing much in his sphere of interest had changed. Had he been effusive and excited and all the things it now occurred to me he might reasonably have been expected to be – even if it was little more than a polite display – I think I would have found things a little harder to deal with. As it was, every small moment of minor neglect had become a counter-weight to balance my burden of guilt. Enough, I well knew, and the scales would surely tip. It was only a matter of time. A shameful admission and a scary one. Even so, that was how it was.

  I had been sensible up to a point. I had not told Nick about Jonathan and Kate leaving the country on Sunday evening. Even manic as I was (and I was) the one thing I knew I must not do was to tell Nick I was going to be alone for four days. That way lay danger and hob goblins and triffids, not a few of them sprouting from the rich peaty compost of my own wicked thoughts.

  I had no misconceptions about myself on that score. And I knew as surely as night follows day that bad things followed bad people around. It was karma. Whether I believed in it or not.

  But sensible only up to a point. Bad, to a greater degree. My reasoning on the non-contact equals safety score was decidedly woolly, for we had been sending each other flurries of text messages all week. I was like a child with a new toy to play with. And this was a deliciously enjoyable game.

  How I managed to go about the ordinary business of being a sensible forty year old person while conducting this juvenile text correspondence I didn’t quite know. But there were two things I did know. One was that had I come across such toe-curling bilge on Kate’s mobile I would most certainly have been sick in a bucket, and the other – the more pressing and pertinent of them – was that I should be getting ready for some seriously bad karma, because I’d become a very bad girl.

  ‘Sally –’he’d sent. 3.45 am Saturday. ‘Am back home tomorrow. Amberley Monday. Monday Night? Maybe? When/where? Yes/no?’

  ‘Jesus, Kate!’ Jonathan barked now, scowling theatrically. ‘What have you got in here? Bricks?’

  It was just after five on Sunday afternoon, and we were toiling along the concourse in the South terminal at Gatwick, Kate plugged into her Discman, a portion of the din that must have been crashing against her eardrums following her around like a swarm of angry bees. Jonathan was pulling both cases.

  ‘Books’ she yelled back (as one does when in headphones). ‘I thought I’d better have something to do.’

  ‘Kate,’ I chided. ‘You’ll have a lovely time. Really you will.’

  She turned round and gave me her best withering look. ‘Yeah, right, mum. So why don’t you go instead?’

  But teenagers, for all their sneery superiority are actually very easily impressed. There was an almost palpable lifting in Kate’s spirits once she realised she was cruising past the Economy crocodile, and heading for the Business Class check in instead.

  ‘Cool,’ she observed. ‘Mum, get this bit of carpet!’

  I waved them off confident she’d have a fine time in Malta. And then there was one. And I really shouldn’t go there.

  I got home from the airport a little after six. The sun was still up and my heart was still pounding. I would take Merlin for a nice long walk to calm down.

  I drove out to the Ashdown forest, to lose myself in the gorse and bracken. There was a little low cloud bubbling up on the horizon and the beginnings of a chilly breeze in the air. I let Merlin off the lead and began the long haul up to the top of the far hill, hoping the heavens wouldn’t open in the meantime.

  I had just reached the summit when my phone peeped in my pocket.

  ‘Hello,’ I read. ‘Just arrived home. Where are you?’

  I stopped on the footpath. Merlin was rootling in a tussock up ahead. My freedom felt like a great burden all of a sudden. Especially as the tang of foliage and uncompromising terrain put me so much in mind of our exploits in Wales. How tempting it was to just tell him. Right now. How lovely to have him come here and find me. But I mustn’t. I knew that if I told Nick I was out here on my own there was a very real danger of him doing just that. I could not have that. I could NOT have that.

  ‘Out walking the dog,’ I replied, resolute and decided. ‘Legs aching. Puffed out. And so on. How was Brighton?’

  His message came back immediately.

  ‘Very dull. Wish I had a Merlin to walk. Where are you walking?’

  I paused here and waited while another wave of treacherous desire washed over me.

  ‘Here and there,’ I typed back. ‘Over hill and down dale.’

  ‘Be nice to join you. Here and where?’ came the response.

  It was a rhetorical question. It had to be. For all Nick Brown knew I was yomping across the downs with my entire extended family, half a dozen neighbours and the man from the Happy Shopper in Lingfield, but it did serve to crystallise the situation I was in now. That of being a woman at large with a dangerous passion. And having thought this I realised I was quite, quite wrong and that it was not in the least rhetorical. What was I thinking? He wasn’t stupid. Were I really out walking with Jonathan or Kate, I’d hardly be sending him text messages, would I? I would, I resolved (oh, so much resolving!) have to try a little harder, stand a little firmer. And, above all take very great care not to let slip I was alone. I switched the mobile off and slipped it into my pocket. This wasn’t a game. Not at all.

  *

  But my resolve being what it was (pathetic, intermittent, flimsy, ethereal – pants, basically) I felt entirely unequal to the task of having to keep shoring it up all the t
ime, and as soon as I clapped eyes on him on Monday morning I could almost hear it shattering into a million pieces around me. Who was I kidding? I was completely in thrall to him. It was greatly fortunate therefore that the seeing was done in company. Namely the short meeting he held at the Amberley offices first thing on Monday and which related to the up coming in-store festivities that would accompany the ‘big push’ on August tenth. Funny how corporate bodies so often seemed to want to glorify their commercial endeavours with doughty references to war. But then, Drug U Like were an American firm. Perhaps they thought it would bring in a few World War Two veterans and thus shift a shedload more specs.

  Nick Brown could sell me a time share in Thetford. I watched him work, watched him talk, watched him move, watched him breathe, all with the same breathless compulsion.

  ‘How you?’ he mouthed as we shared floor space around the coffee machine afterwards.

  ‘Terrible,’ I whispered, smiling coyly up at him. I couldn’t help it. He just made me act that way.

  ‘Later? Something?’ He mouthed, shrugging minutely as he reached across me to get a plastic cup.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Um…’

  And then Russell was there, flapping his in the air.

  ‘Come on. Shift up, Matthews. Stop hogging the Cona. And I bet you’ve already pinched all the custard creams, haven’t you?’ He turned to Nick. ‘You have to watch her like a hawk around biscuits.’

  Nick smiled and walked away. I took the bourbon as well.

  And then he was gone, and presumably into several lengthy meetings or a space pod to Jupiter, because I didn’t see or hear from him again that day. But that was fine. That was OK. This was space. Which was what I really needed. Space and time to think everything through.

  Even so, when by six thirty and I was ensconced in the familiar yet suddenly changed surroundings of the pub with Russell and Ruth, I couldn’t help feeling a stab of anguish that he’d not sent me a message since our brief conversation in the morning. Was he worried I was avoiding him? Keeping his distance? Waiting for me to make some sort of move now? What? This was like being Kate’s age again.

  ‘Here,’ announced Russell, sliding his buttocks on to a squat bar stool and slurping the top off his pint. ’You know what I heard this morning, don’t you?’ We shook our heads. ‘Kevin from pharmacy is apparently shagging that Susan whatshername from the canteen.’

  ‘No!’ said Ruth, pausing with her own pint halfway to her lips. ‘Susan Taylor?’ Russell nodded. ‘But she only got married last February, didn’t she?’

  Russell nodded. ‘Incredible, isn’t it? If it hadn’t been Michael that told me, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. ’

  ‘God,’ said Ruth, taking a sip now. ‘How depressing.’

  ‘Russell shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I doubt Kevin sees it like that.’

  ‘But she’s married! How could he?’

  Russell grinned again. ‘Listen to Mrs Prim! Never seemed to stop you.’

  I felt myself cringing on Ruth’s behalf. I wished they would change the subject, and fast.

  ‘D’you want a punch in the face?’ she asked him.

  ‘Rumours,’ I remarked, adding a yawn for emphasis. ‘Just people who’ve got nothing better to do. So, Ruth. Any more sales since last week?’

  ‘As it happens, yes,’ she said. ‘A twist ender for Coffee Time. Three hundred squids. So far so good.’

  ‘You’ve got a moustache,’ observed Russell, reaching to wipe it from her lip.

  She slapped his hand away. ‘Oh, piss off,’ she said.

  So far so good.

  I was getting frighteningly adept at going-though-the-motions. I’d always imagined people who had affairs lived in a state of constant hyperventilation and anxiety, but it was obviously not so. On the contrary, I found myself strangely enervated by the time I got home, almost as if energy had been seeping out of me all day, leached away by the steady drip-drip of my guilt.

  I dumped the training manuals I’d brought home to gen up on, poured myself the remainder of Jonathan’s Claret and gave Merlin the cold half-pizza I’d earmarked for reheating but which I could no more face eating than I could face eating the plate. Eating, I decided, was becoming a chore. Still, I thought, I had shared a packet of peanuts in the pub with Ruth earlier, and as I’d recently read a book in which the heroine managed to exist for 300 pages on little more than pork scratchings and red wine, I figured it would do. Then I showered and went to bed. I was so tired. All this resolving and vacillating and worrying had worn me out. And if I went to bed early, I reasoned, then I would at least get a few hours in before I was woken by the infidelity fairy and obliged to spend an hour thrashing about with my conscience before taking my mind off down avenues of sexual speculation and up softly lit cul de sacs of carnal excess. Yes. I would sleep now. So far so good.

  The peep-peep of my mobile woke me with a start. I turned my head to find the phone still illuminated greenly on the bedside table beside me. I picked it up and pressed the button.

  A message from Nick. ‘Hello.’

  Just that. I wriggled up to a sitting position and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. It was not much after midnight. I had been asleep less than two hours.

  ‘Am azzzzzleep,’ I typed, wide awake now. ‘What time do you call this?’

  The answer came back almost instantly.

  ‘Asleep in bed?’

  ‘In bed.’

  ‘And on the phone?’

  ‘On the phone.’

  ‘On the phone in bed?’

  ‘On the phone in bed.’

  Then a two word response. ‘And alone?????’

  I stared at this message for ages. Ages. In reality only a few moments, most probably, but if so, it felt like the longest few moments of my entire life. This was it. This was a going-through-the-motions situation no longer. This was real, and scary, and now in my hands. I didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. He must know. I swallowed. Everything in my hands. Everything dependent on the decision I made now. I threw myself back against the pillows and glared at the phone in my hand, willing it to ring. Willing it to take things out of my hands. But even then, I could elect not to answer it, couldn’t I? There was no decision to be made here. There was only one thing to do. I deleted the message and turned off the phone. Lay back against the pillows and closed my eyes. But inside my head they were still busy seeing him. I opened them again. Wisps of pale cloud scudded across a charcoal and ink backwash. The phone, temporarily extinguished beside me, was no more than a small chunk of plastic and metal, but it was almost as if it had become my executioner. I battered my pillow a bit and lay my head on it once again. Closed my eyes once again. That was the thing. Close my eyes and try to sleep. Ridiculous. How on earth could I sleep? I rolled over, smelt the familiar scent of Jonathan’s aftershave on his pillow. Now I really could not sleep. Get up then. That was the thing. Get up. Go downstairs. Talk to the dog. Look at the stars. But there were no stars out. Just the granite sky and a dispiriting drizzle. Coming down in bright speckles against the white glare of the outside light. Go downstairs. That was the thing. Make some tea. Go back to bed. Go through the motions. Get on with things.

  I sat up and pushed the duvet irritably from over me. Scooped my hair from my face and sighed loudly. This was no good. It wasn’t going to work. The other me was having none of it. The other me was having him.

  I snatched up the phone again. Switched it back on. Half an hour had passed but he’d sent nothing more. I scrolled down the menu. Send message? It prompted.

  Yes. Send message. A. Stop. L. Stop. O. Stop. N. Stop. E. Stop. Full stop. YES.

  The front doorbell rang thirty two minutes later.

  The rain had all but stopped by now and a sharp rise in temperature was pulling the moisture from the earth, lending a misty soft focus to the dripping shrubs in the front garden. It was now one seventeen in the morning. This couldn’t be happening and yet
it was. His hair was damp. His expression was serious. His crystal eyes bored into mine.

  Then dropped. Became veiled by those impossibly thick lashes. I felt too overwhelmed by him to speak. ‘It’s OK,’ he said, pocketing his car keys and glancing at me sheepishly now. ‘I parked at the end of the lane and walked.’

  I peered up and down.

  ‘Right,’ I said, beckoning. I felt like a gangster. ‘Come in.’

  He came in. We stood in the hallway looking at each other. I had taken off my night time T-shirt and replaced it, frantically, with a pair of jeans and another, smaller T-shirt. And then prowled around the house like the caged beast I’d become. I was naked beneath it. My feet were bare. I gripped the carpet with my toes to stop myself from swaying. He seemed to fill the whole hall.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here,’ he said. ‘I just –’

  ‘How did you know?’ I interrupted him.

  ‘Ruth,’ he said, following me as I turned and walked into the kitchen. ‘Just in passing. We were talking about the weather. She happened to mention you’d drawn the short straw. Malta, was it? Your daughter and…well, it doesn’t matter. I did.’

  It didn’t matter. He was right. And he was here. I licked my dry lips.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you,’ I said. ‘Self preservation. Resolve. All that. because I knew if I told you –’

  ‘But then you did anyway.’

  In any other circumstance I would have found myself blushing. But not this one. I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘I did.’

  There was nothing much of use either of us could say at this juncture. I knew this because I had rehearsed it many, many times since Jonathan had announced his Malta idea. Countless times. And there was nothing to say. The only thing that could reasonably be said was that as both of us were fully aware of the gravity, the seriousness, the very wrong nature of the circumstance in which we had now placed ourselves, we really should not be here at all. We knew that. Yet we were. Looking at each other across a kitchen and failing to articulate these thoughts to one another, lest they swell up and smother us in guilt. Lest they force us to do the right thing. So we continued to stand there and gaze into each other’s eyes as if, by the intensity of our need for one another, our guilt could be dissolved away.