by Adale Geras
‘We’ve got to talk, Lydia.’
‘Do we? Why do we?’
‘Because … I want to ask Maureen for a divorce. I’m serious. I want us to be together.’
‘How can you say that? You’ve been married so long. You must love her, Gray.’
‘In a way I do. You can’t live with someone for so long and not have … Well, you know what I mean. Think of yourself and … and Bob.’ Gray shifted in the bed. He didn’t like saying Lydia’s husband’s name, not even to himself, much less aloud.
‘I can’t leave him,’ she murmured, and as she did, she pulled him to her and began to kiss his neck, just under his ear.
‘Why not? Why can’t you?’
‘He wouldn’t cope without me. He’d go to pieces.’
‘He manages okay when you’re not there. He’s in Egypt now, not giving you a second thought, I bet. Maureen’s having the time of her life in Guildford too, I expect. They’re used to us, Lydia, and that’s it. It’s not like this. Are we happy when we’re together?’
He could feel her nodding, but she said, ‘We made vows, Gray. We promised. That should mean something, surely.’
‘It does mean something, of course it does, but there should be a way of cancelling them when we’re not happy any longer. We deserve to be happy, don’t we?’
‘No one’s completely happy all the time,’ Lydia said. ‘What if other people are hurt? I don’t want to do that, Gray. I’m sorry. Imagine what would happen if no one kept any promises. If nothing were binding. It would be – life would be – impossible.’
‘No one stays hurt for ever. What about Bob and Maureen living with us? We’re unfaithful to them. Have you thought of that? And it’s not just a casual affair, so it’s an even worse betrayal. We’ve betrayed them. But we love one another, so how does that tot up, Lydia? Now, at this very moment. Are we being fair to them when we’re like this?’
Lydia sat up in bed and rested her head on her clasped knees. ‘I explained, Gray. As soon as I saw you, I explained. This … These days are like time outside real life. Time out. We’re not going to see one another alone again. I mean that. This is it. I can’t spoil Zannah’s wedding. Adrian’s wedding, too. It would … Well, nothing would be the same again. You must see that.’
He began to stroke her back and felt her shiver under his hand. ‘I don’t think I can do not seeing you any more, Lydia. What if we’re careful? We can be so … discreet. No one need know.’
She shook her head. ‘I’d be terrified. It’s no good. I feel … It’s impossible. I can’t … I can’t think about it.’
‘Then don’t. Don’t think about it now. Let’s discuss it. Seriously. When we have our session together tomorrow … I mean today … Not in bed, but face to face over a table. We can talk about the future. I want us to be together.’
She lay back and sighed. ‘I want that as well. But it’s difficult. Everything’s so complicated. Let’s just … let’s just have these days and … ’
‘And what? Leave Fairford and forget everything? I can’t. You can’t either. Admit it. No emails. No phone calls. Nothing. Just think about it. What sort of a life is that? Not one I’m willing to live, Lydia.’
‘Later. We’ll talk properly, I promise. But it’s getting late now, Gray. You should go.’
‘In a minute. Come here … ’
‘Oh, Gray, there’s no … ’
He stopped her words with his mouth and she wrapped her arms round him. There was time. He felt her opening, softening under his hands, and closed his eyes.
*
Emily wished she’d taken advantage of her education while it was actually going on. She was out with Cal and Isis on a visit to the zoo, and whenever they were together, because Cal was so well informed, she became aware of how little she knew about almost everything. She’d gone down to London straight after uni to help Zannah after her breakdown and she’d never regretted that. She was eager to start working and had taken up her job in PR quite happily, but now she sometimes found herself thinking in ways most of her friends would consider most peculiar. For instance, she thought, I wish I could have gone with Dad to Egypt and had a good look at some mummies. She knew he was actually sitting in a university classroom, giving oral exams to poor foreign PhD students, but the image of herself accompanying him into the desert, with beige sand dunes all around and romantic-looking tents with lanterns hanging up in them seemed very attractive. I’m going to ask him one day, she thought, if I can go with him. And maybe I could do a doctorate or something. Later on. She shook her head to clear it of an image of herself in fetching khaki shirt and shorts. Cal and Isis had just come back from visiting the snakes. Emily drew the line at snakes (were there snakes in the desert?) and had waited for them on a convenient bench in the rather chilly sunlight.
Cal sat down next to her. Isis had gone off to get an ice-cream at the kiosk they could see from the bench.
‘Makes her feel independent,’ said Cal. ‘She doesn’t realize I don’t take my eyes off her for a second.’
This was true. He was gazing fixedly at Isis’s back and had half turned away from her. Emily fought an urge to put out a hand and stroke his hair. He was talking about the wedding dress, ‘Icey’s been telling me about the wonderful Miss Hayward. She wants a blush-pink dress, apparently. What’s blush pink?’
‘Well, it’s pale and very pretty. You know Zannah. It has to be the exact shade that goes with Zannah’s lace, which is sort of like dead pale milky coffee … It’ll look marvellous, don’t worry.’
‘Worry? Doesn’t matter a scrap to me. I’m sure they’ll both look great, whatever. Hello, Mouse,’ he said to Isis, who had come back from the kiosk to sit next to them. Emily closed her eyes and listened to them chatting. Every time she was with Cal, it became more and more obvious to her that he didn’t think of her as anything other than Zannah’s younger sister. She should give up daydreaming.
Since her early teens, she’d never been short of boyfriends. Now there were three young men who probably regarded themselves as … What could you call them? In her life, was all she was prepared to concede. They weren’t boyfriends, and they had no intention of marrying her, so they weren’t suitors, and Zannah called them ‘your reserve squad’. The reserve squad dated from Emily’s sixth-form days, when she’d had a boyfriend and always a notional list of others she was sort of interested in, even if only in her head. Nowadays, the reserve squad had moved off the bench, as it were, and into play. She went out to meals, movies and parties with all three, though not at the same time, naturally. Grant was an advertising copywriter. He called himself ‘a creative’ which Emily thought was pretentious. She’d met him when he worked on one of her firm’s accounts. He was the one who fancied himself a foodie and took her to fashionable restaurants and bar openings. Rory was the cultural one: theatres, concerts and movies. He was fun and flirtatious and Emily thought, because he’d never once made a real pass at her, that he was probably gay and not quite ready to come out. Matt was the one she went to bed with. He worked in her office, was handsome, uncomplicated, fun and had his own rather lovely flat in Notting Hill Gate. She couldn’t say there was anything wrong with the sex, but that was all it seemed to be, and if Matt was a good lover, he wasn’t in the least romantic and Emily reckoned that he regarded their lovemaking as a pleasant alternative to a workout at the gym. She sighed. Cal combined everything she liked about the three men. Or maybe not quite. She couldn’t imagine him having the patience for some of Grant’s restaurants and he’d faint if he saw some of the bills they ran up. He’d do the movies, if not the concerts, and he’d talk and talk, which was perhaps more important than anything else. He wouldn’t change the subject when emotions or feelings came up in conversation. He wasn’t afraid of relationships, because he’d married Zannah, hadn’t he? As for sex, she tried not to think about the two of them together, because it made her feel too terrible. She already suffered awful pangs of guilt about her fantasies and had vowed
to exclude any thoughts of Cal from her nights with Matt but it was harder than she’d expected.
‘You okay, young Emmy?’ Cal said now. ‘You were miles away. I think we ought to be getting home. Come on.’
He stood up and gave her his hand to pull her to her feet. Perhaps when Zannah was married the penny would drop. Cal would see her in a completely different light and fall madly in love with her. And that aardvark in the enclosure over there would be asked to dance the lead role in Giselle. Grow up, Em, she told herself. Move on.
*
The room she was in reminded Joss of a monk’s cell: plain, whitewashed walls, a pine table, two chairs, a high window. Those who came in here and sat at the table, close enough to touch the person opposite them, adopted a manner of something like reverence, and modulated their voices to fit with the way the room made them feel: serious, scholarly and as though they were about to discover deeply buried truths about themselves. On the Fairford courses, each pupil was given an hour with each tutor, one to one. It was only in those circumstances, poring over single lines, discussing what they truly meant to say, that proper tutoring took place. The communal exercises were fun, but they often led to some course members showing off, and others being almost entirely silenced.
Joss smiled. Gray would be here soon. He’d put himself last on the list, which revealed a sensitivity to her feelings, to what she might want, that few others in her life had ever shown. He knew their talk would disturb her, stir up emotions which she might find hard to cover up if she then had to go on and discuss their work with someone else. He also knew that if any session could overrun a little, it was the last one of the day. There was half an hour before supper. Neither of them was on kitchen duty.
While she was waiting for him, Joss closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair, trying to clear her mind. Other people’s words were floating around in there, other people’s personalities had left a sort of imprint on her, yet the thing she was most aware of was her own body. She couldn’t stop herself. Her head had become a kind of kaleidoscope, and with every turn pictures of their lovemaking appeared and she was unable to prevent them filling her with the drunken dizziness of desire. She was just remembering how he’d left her this morning, how he’d clung to her as she opened the door, how he’d kicked it closed again just for a moment, just for one more kiss, just one … please.
‘Okay to come in, Lydia?’ He was standing in the doorway, clutching his file, like everyone else who came into this room.
‘Hello,’ Joss said, blinking a little, trying to dispel what she’d been thinking a moment ago. ‘Yes … come and sit down.’
Gray took the chair opposite her and put his file on the table in front of him. He smiled, but she could see that he was in a serious mood. ‘I’ve not brought any poems,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you about the future. I want you to leave Bob, Lydia. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’ve been thinking about nothing else for months.’
‘Do we have to talk about this now? It’s so … it makes it so … Oh, God, I’m scared, Gray.’
‘What of?’
‘Everything. If I left Bob, so many people would be hurt. There’d be problems. It’d be like an earthquake. How can we do that to people we love? And we do love them, don’t we, Gray? You can’t say we don’t.’
‘I don’t. I don’t say that. But let me ask you something. What would Bob really do if you left him? If you were to die, let’s say, how would he manage?’
Joss said nothing. For the last five years at least, Bob had been less interested in her than he was in many other things. She tried to reconstruct time they spent together and realized that this was just meals, often eaten quickly, with Bob’s mind on something he was working on upstairs. He worked, they slept in the same bed and met in the kitchen. How many times had he made love to her in the last year? A dozen? She doubted it was as many as that. And if she wasn’t there? If she was in London with Zannah and Isis and Emily, he appeared to manage perfectly well. And yet there was the weight of the years they’d been together. At the beginning, when they were first married, he could make her feel … She could remember being swept away, perhaps not quite as she was being swept away now, but still, she could recall their lovemaking, that it used to be passionate and heartfelt and she’d been happy. She couldn’t deny that shared history now, and it would be wrong to make light of it. Time had happened to them: time and habit. Surely that could happen to her and Gray as well? To any relationship? Was it right to break up two families just for a short period of intense gratification? She might feel exactly the same about Gray in a few years as she felt about Bob now. No, that wasn’t possible. This was different, like no other love she’d ever known. Or had she thought that about Bob long ago? She no longer remembered properly. And there was something else, too. Now that she’d met Maureen, she could imagine only too well the kind of sex she must once have had with Gray … maybe was still having. This thought made her feel faintly nauseous, but it was there, whenever she considered the whole situation rather than just her little corner of it. She answered Gray’s question: ‘He’d cope, I suppose, but I expect he’d miss me.’
‘What would Zannah and Emily think?’
‘They’d be shocked. I think they feel Bob and I are one person. I don’t imagine they spend a lot of time worrying about us. If we’re okay, then they’re busy with their lives. That’s as it should be. But if we parted … well, Zannah would probably be … Well, it might upset her a great deal. She’d be more able to cope with it if she were happily married herself. She went through hell after she left Cal. What he’d confessed to was quite honestly no more than a fling in Moscow, but she was nearly broken by it. She divorced him, in spite of all my persuasion, and Bob’s. If I told her about us now … well, I don’t know how she’d react but I can’t take the risk of her going to pieces again. We can’t, mustn’t wreck the wedding. Zannah’s thought of nothing else for months. And what about Maureen? She’s also very involved with everything to do with the day. More than me, and I feel guilty about that, but she loves all the arrangements so much and is so good at them, and I’m not … ’ Joss’s voice trailed away into silence and she pushed her hair off her forehead with both hands.
‘Maureen,’ Gray said, ‘will be shocked and scream at me, but she’ll survive. What you have to know about Maureen is that she’s supremely selfish and she’ll always see to it that she’s okay. I’d let her keep the house. I’d provide for her – and I can – and I bet she’s married again within two years. Men like her. She likes them. As long as the material circumstances of her life don’t change, she’ll come round.’
‘D’you love her? Does she love you?’ She wanted to ask: What do you do in bed? How is it with her?
Gray closed his eyes. ‘I suppose I do. Just as you love Bob. I don’t want anything bad to happen to her, but … we don’t talk about anything, Lydia. The only thing we discuss is arrangements. When, where, who, how much. It’s not like you and me. You … the way we talk about everything, the way we laugh about the same things … It’s like being young again.’
‘That’s because we don’t live together, Gray. If we did, we’d also fall into a routine. Everyone does. Everyone has to. You can’t … I mean, things have to settle down, don’t they? Perhaps it’s because we’ve seen so little of one another, because we’ve not had time to get sick of one another that we’re feeling … well, as we are. What if we got fed up, irritated with one another? Have you thought of that?’
‘We might, I suppose. Though I don’t think so. But Lydia, we’re in our fifties. We could live for another thirty years. There was that couple in the newspaper … d’you remember? … who’d been married for eighty years. It’s entirely possible we could be together as long as we’ve been with Maureen and Bob.’
Joss smiled.
Gray continued, ‘Tell me honestly. Can you face another thirty years with him? And remember that means without me, because you have this hang-up about not being unfaithful
to him … if you knew he wouldn’t fall to pieces, if you knew your children wouldn’t stop talking to you, if you were sure that you’d be no worse off financially … in other words, if all practical matters were taken care of, how would you feel about spending the rest of your life with me? Marry me. Lydia, I’m asking you to marry me.’
Joss listened to what Gray was saying and suddenly she was in tears. She felt as though her whole life had been upended, tipped upside down.
‘I’m sorry … I can’t … Oh, yes, Gray, yes. Of course I want that too, but how … When? I just don’t know … ’
He took her hands and held them in his own. ‘Listen, Lydia. Don’t think about it now. Not in a practical way. There’ll be plenty of time after the wedding. Once Adrian and Zannah have settled down, once Maureen’s had her glorious party, then we can tell them. Honestly. Quietly. There won’t be any need for scenes.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’ Joss imagined the conversation she and Bob might have. What would he do? Cry? Break down? She had no idea. What about the girls? Emily was more understanding than Zannah, but she was so much her father’s daughter. What would she think of the mother who abandoned him? And Charlotte? Joss longed to confide in her and listen to her advice. Maybe she should. Maybe that would be a good way to help her decide … show her what she really wanted. What nonsense. She knew that already. She took a deep breath.
‘If I say yes, Gray, and if we wait till after the wedding, what does it mean? We can’t meet. It would feel … wrong. Deceitful. Underhand. I hate the very idea of hiding away, fearful of getting caught … but how … ’ How will I survive without you for nine months? How will I get through the days? It struck her suddenly that some people were better at adultery than others, and she was very bad at it. She’d watched many of her friends conduct casual affairs without any apparent guilt on the principle of ‘what they don’t know can’t hurt them’. Was she a coward, fearful of discovery, or did she really inhabit a moral high ground? She suspected that the truth was much simpler. She had the kind of imagination that was always working overtime and she knew, from the way she felt when she had found out Gray was married, that her head was constantly full of pictures she couldn’t erase and which tortured her. If she suddenly learned that Bob had been unfaithful to her over a long period of time, what would hurt would be that the whole of the life they’d lived up to this point would become a lie. Every memory she had of their marriage would be somehow falsified.