Ideas floated into my mind and drifted away again. I couldn’t concentrate on one thought long enough for it to take shape. Alice was in my head perpetually – a beautiful boulder that nothing could pass.
I needed to get her out.
But I didn’t want to. I liked having her there.
Alice was good for me, I thought. Her youth meant she could help with my work. There was a freshness and a freedom to her that had gone from me. I was bogged down in the everyday, the domestic, the drudge; Alice could show me the world through young eyes again, and I thought, if I could somehow combine the vitality of youth and the wisdom of experience into my work, then I might be on to something.
Alice also reminded me of what it was like to be young. Her emails could take me soaring to a peak of giddy, reckless laughter that made me feel, just briefly, twenty-five again. It was gold. It was addictive. I wanted more of it.
This, I felt sure, was the reason she was taking up all the space in my head. Nostalgia for youth, a yearning for the freedom to eat take-away chips every night and not worry that they’d have killed me by morning. The freedom to stay up late and then lie in bed for half the day without other lives crashing around you.
That was all. The longing for youth was powerful. Like pining. Pining for the person you used to be. But that didn’t change the fact that I’d spent most of yesterday sitting at my computer, unable to stop emailing her, unable to stop talking about love…
I swallowed a large gulp of coffee, then sat at the kitchen table to apply my make-up, which I kept in a bag on top of the fridge. I didn’t wear much, just mascara and lipstick most days, enough to keep me from becoming washed-out and invisible to the world. I remembered something Alice had said last week, about people’s personalities being reflected in their faces. I peered at my own face in the mirror and wondered what the world could see there.
Christian once had said I had an ‘aura’. He said I carried the air of a beautiful, creative woman being crushed by an oppressive man. I’d liked that idea, and besides, it was hardly untrue.
I put the mirror and the make-up away and set to work. Today, I was not going to be seduced by the computer and all the chat it contained. I would not let my desire to hear from Alice drag me away from work. I was just going to write. Write and write and write. Anything at all. I would do what I told beginners to do: ‘Don’t worry about what you’re trying to create. Just learn to love the act of writing. See what happens.’
So I set to work, the ideas barely formed, but the paragraphs emerging anyway. I scarcely looked up. Time opened its mouth and took the morning, the way it used to do.
I locked the door so I wouldn’t be disturbed.
I described a woman, lying on her side in bed – the white curve of her breasts, the arc of her stomach, the strip of hair between her legs alluring beneath the translucence of the thin, white slip that covered her.
The image of her – beautiful, remote, untouchable – made me catch my breath. I knew that this was Alice. I went on writing – another woman appeared in the scene, her lips touching Alice’s, her hands against her skin…
I had to stop there. This was something I’d never known before, but I wanted Alice here. I wanted her near me, beside me, beneath me. I wanted her unclothed. Beautiful Alice. Beautiful, beautiful Alice.
The house was empty and the study locked. I lay down on the floor and let thoughts of Alice flood me. This was passion, I thought. Ecstasy. I pictured Alice, lying in bed, naked as she was in the image I had created, and it made my breath come faster, until I slipped my hand beneath my clothes, caressing my own skin lightly, then harder, until my fingers slipped slowly under and into me, and I imagined I had Alice beside me, touching me, moving with me, kissing me, and I sighed and whimpered and wished it could be real.
So now I couldn’t ignore it. Alice was in my head because I fancied her. Loved her. Was in love with her. Wanted to make love to her.
But it was ridiculous. I was married. Alice was fifteen years younger than I was. It made no sense. I laughed at that. I’d read enough of love to know it couldn’t be held to reason. But this? Really?
In the evening, after I’d put the girls to bed and made myself a quick pasta supper – Gus and I hardly ate together these days – I checked my emails. There were two from Alice, one sent that morning and another an hour or so ago. The first was light-hearted and chatty. She said she’d been writing and had plans to move out of her flat and find somewhere better. The second was brief. ‘I haven’t heard from you today. Are you alright? Drop me a line, as it seems I cannot make it through the day without hearing from you. xxx’
How should I reply? ‘I haven’t been in touch because I’ve been lying on my studio floor, running my hands over my own wet flesh, imagining you naked and sweating beside me, and the image of it was so glorious I now want you to come here and make it real.’
Instead I wrote: ‘Hi Alice. Sorry not to be in touch today. I woke up this morning and decided I needed to give myself a rest from the computer. In fact, I was awake most of the night and I thought, “I must ask Alice to stop emailing me for a while, as I need my head to myself for a few days.” Would that be OK? I just need to get on with some work. I’ve been so distracted recently and I hardly know why…’
I hit send. The reply came back almost immediately: ‘My darling Bo. You don’t need to apologise. I understand completely. Loving you in silence, in absence, and always.’
I thought, I am not the only one.
Another email. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to sign off like some kind of bloody Barrett Browning there. Yes, get back to work. Speak in a few days. A.’
Oh, God, I thought. I was in love with Alice and as far as I could see, Alice was in love with me.
It was like being given permission to fly.
But it was impossible. Eternally impossible. Eternal, impossible love. But there was romance in that, I thought, and my heart ached and ached.
This was it. This was it. Not waving, but loving.
6
I muscled on with my work. There would be nothing in my inbox from Alice so there was no point checking. My story was taking shape. At the heart of it now was a couple, separated after environmental disaster made refugees of them; long years in Europe passed by, the husband presumed dead, the wife slowly liberated…
I wrote on and sighed. Everything hurt with hopeless promise. Impossible love. Alice herself was impossible. She was so uncontainable, so open and so fragile, I knew she would never last. Not in this form. She would mature, learn cunning, shroud herself in smoke and mirrors. She couldn’t stay this artless for long.
I’d never met anyone like her. Alice’s range of emotions was astonishing. Even in her emails, she could drag me with her through the hot, loveless hell of her early years. Then the next day, she could make me cry with laughter.
‘You are gorgeous,’ I would say. ‘Just absolutely gorgeous.’ And I meant it.
I had no idea how her mother could have let this young woman go; not realise the treasure she’d possessed, right there in front of her nose. It made me angry. But there was no point being angry. Her mother was dead and all I could do now was pick up what she’d left behind.
I came away from the computer and took myself to the kitchen for a drink.
Gus looked up from his usual place in the rocking chair. ‘How’s your young friend today?’ he asked, lightly scornful, as he always was these days, of my friends – the ones I had that were separate from him, that were tied up in my work.
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘How many emails has she sent this morning? Fifty?’
Clearly, he’d been at my computer. Jealous snooping, as always.
‘Three,’ I said.
‘Remember this was how it started with Christian.’
‘Christian was a one-off,’ I said. ‘He was troubled. He was dangerous. And now he’s dead.’
It was the first time I’d said it out loud since it happened, and it surp
rised me how matter-of-fact I sounded. But the letters from his mother were still coming, still hurting.
Gus returned to his paper in silence.
I looked at him with contempt. I’d have liked to reach out my hand and strike him across the face, just to see if he’d respond; just to see if he had it in him to get out of that bloody chair and move.
I didn’t mean to, but I imagined Alice there in his place. But then, Alice would never spend her days in a rocking chair, not even when she was old (and Gus wasn’t even old yet; he was barely into his sixties). When she was old, Alice would still wear full make-up and sensational clothes, still go out on the lash, still be sexy and outrageous. She would fill her life with things more exciting than reading news about Cumbrian sheep.
It was nearly noon. Five hours before I could click on my emails and hear from Alice. Five hours. It was the agreement we’d come to. One message a day, in the evening. Otherwise, neither of us would get anything done. It was meant to be a sensible move, meant to bring us both back down to earth. This thing between us – whatever it was – had never been spoken of directly, but we both agreed that we were each other’s terrible distraction and it was too easy to let hours slip by, just talking on messenger.
It was like being starved of her, I thought now. Hours and hours each day had to roll on without her, but she was still here, still in my head, and my body still ached to have her here, in my home, in my bed.
I’d given up trying to fight it. It had taken me over.
Sod it, I thought, and went back to the study and turned on the laptop. Just in case Alice had written this morning. Just in case.
Nothing.
I went back to the kicthen, where Gus was making his lunch. I wished he’d just bugger off sometimes instead of being here, cluttering up my space.
‘What are you doing with the afternoon?’ I asked.
He dug his knife in the butter. ‘I need to book some train tickets. Dave phoned from Manchester. He’s got some work he wants overseeing. He’s asked me to help. I said I would. He’ll pay me.’
‘You’re going there?’
Gus nodded, ‘It’s easier to do it in person. It’s three days’ work.’
‘When?’
‘Next Tuesday.’
Immediately, I went back to the study.
From: [email protected]
Sent: 11 July 2015, 12:17
To: [email protected]
Subject: Next week
Gus is going away next Tuesday for three nights.
Come and stay.
Please. Love you, adore you.
Bxxx
7
After all those years, I felt her as a gift, a dropped jewel.
She lay beside me on the rug and gazed at me in bewilderment
and murmured, ‘There cannot be anyone on earth like you, no other
mind more perfectly sculpted to mine.’
‘We are twin souls,’ I said. ‘Identical.’
‘No. Not identical. Opposite. Like life and death, light and dark
– one cannot be known without the other.’
We lay together in silence for hours.
I held her against me; the warmth of her breath on my neck; the
warmth of her body; her face staring down at me, holding my gaze
until her eyes were a mirror and I saw my own in them.
‘My beloved,’ she whispered. ‘My beloved.’
The dark moved slowly over us. We hid inside it, bright stars, our
light collapsing.
I rested my head on her shoulder and she read me to sleep. Later, I
woke in silence and drew her into my gaze. No words passed between
us. We had learnt not to speak of love, just let it be.
8
Through the night, I woke repeatedly and wondered what I was doing. Here I was, in bed with Alice, in love with Alice, everything happening so quickly I hardly knew how I’d got here.
But then I looked at the woman lying beside me and felt happy. Deeply, deliriously happy, in a way I’d not known before. Somewhere, in some distant part of my mind, was a warning, reminding me that I was married, I had two girls who needed their father, and none of this was ordinary after all I’d ever fought for. All my life, all I’d wanted was to be ordinary and I was putting everything at risk.
But it didn’t matter. For now, tonight, it didn’t matter. This was irresistible.
In the morning, the sun woke us early. Alice opened her eyes and smiled at me: a rich, beautiful smile, tender with love.
I looked at her, and felt appalled.
9
In the morning, she took herself to the guest bedroom to get dressed while I went downstairs to see to the girls. They sat together at the kitchen table, their hair unbrushed, spooning Cheerios into their mouths while I busied myself putting bread into the toaster and finding the jar of peanut butter that could have been in any cupboard. There was no system in this house, just the whims of the tidiers.
Maggie paused for a moment between mouthfuls, looked up and said, ‘When will Daddy be home?’
‘In a couple of days,’ I said breezily, and all of a sudden, I felt sick.
She returned to her cereal. I began to spread their toast with butter and saw my hands were shaking. Not once, in all the time I’d been planning for Alice to come here and share my bed, had it crossed my mind how I’d feel in the morning when I faced my children. All that trust they’d put in me their whole short lives to keep them safe within our family, and I’d betrayed them.
Alice stepped into the kitchen, dressed in blue jeans and a strappy pink top. My heart lurched at the sight of her. Beautiful. She was beautiful and I wanted only to keep her here.
I could barely look at her.
Together, we dropped the girls off at school, then walked on through the woods to Loughrigg Tarn. She took my hand in hers. Happiness radiated from her, like sunlight. I felt like I could walk through it. I’ve done this to you, I thought, I’ve made you this happy. The responsibility was huge.
We walked in silence. I could see her from the corner of my eye, casting anxious glances my way.
She said, ‘Are you alright?’
I couldn’t speak.
I needed to force myself to talk to her. In the evening, after I’d put the girls to bed, I made dinner and said, ‘I can’t keep pretending Gus isn’t coming back.’
She said, ‘Where do we go from here?’
I spoke the truth. ‘I can’t make any promises.’
‘Do you regret this?’
I said nothing.
She said she would sleep in the guest room. I could see she wanted me to say no, that it wasn’t necessary, she must stay with me. But I didn’t. I thought we could both do with the space.
All night I missed her. I missed her and missed her and missed her.
It was dreadful, to love like this. I’d thought a love like this was beyond me.
The next day, I gave in. The night was long and perfect, and I was wrecked.
10
What I needed was to cool everything down. This was intense – emotion so strong it took my breath away. Love had weakened me. If I kept it up, unchecked, then I would die from it.
On the last day, I told her to go for a walk while I worked. If we’d spent it together, we’d have fallen into that whirlpool of emotion and drowned in it. The imminent parting, the love, desire, the tears, the anguish. We couldn’t do it. We had to stay calm.
She was hurt. But someone needed to take control.
While she was gone, I dug around old files on my computer and found those earliest stories – the ones I’d written at the beginning of my career, when nothing but the past would come out. I wanted to give them to her. I wanted her to know who I was. I wanted her to know the heartwood at my core, and to understand.
It was our only hope.
Later, we said goodbye, and for days afterwards I felt wretched, as though my heart were a gaping wound. I
couldn’t heal it.
It was more than I could bear.
11
From: [email protected]
Sent: 18 July 2015, 10:32
To: [email protected]
Subject: Hello, Beautiful
Dear Beautiful, Darling Bo,
I won’t open this email by telling you how much I miss you because you already know that. Instead, I will simply say that I have moved into my new flat and it is bright and lovely and I ought to be happy, but instead, everything is crap because you are not here.
That’s enough of that.
Let me tell you about my new flat. I am sitting in the sitting room, which is mostly wood. I fret now and then about the glorious trees that had to be slain for this luxury, but until someone comes up with an alternative, I must pillage the earth for my comfort, just like everyone else.
Anyway, that is the sitting room. Wooden floors, an ancient sofa and a bookcase filled with books, of which your own are on most prominent display. I look at them sometimes and remember … Well, never mind about that.
There is a small kitchen off the sitting room. It’s tiny. Two units on one side and a fridge on the other. You couldn’t really call it a kitchen. ‘Kitchen’ is not the right word, or even ‘kitchenette’. There needs to be a whole new language, I’ve decided, for these days of tiny-property-related bullshit. In reality, this kitchen was probably once a cupboard. A more accurate term for it, instead of kitchen, would be ‘cupboard space with fridge’, though admittedly, that’s not terribly catchy.
I might write to the Oxford English Dictionary and ask them to give me a job, inventing this new language of estate-agent crap.
Exquisite Page 15