‘How was your day?’ she asked me, over her shoulder. I told her about the football player who’d walked into the showroom and within half an hour had bought the best part of twenty thousand pounds’ worth of furniture, most of it red. He’d had his girlfriend with him, who’d carried on as if the CCTV cameras were the lenses of the paparazzi, and kept shielding her face from them while doing little twirls that made her skirt fly up. Alan had felt obliged to make out that he knew who she was, but he didn’t have a clue; he wouldn’t have known who the footballer was if a courier hadn’t told him. The footballer had seemed like a nice enough lad, I told her, then I realised I was talking too much. The pedal bin needed emptying, so I busied myself with that. ‘And how was Eleanor?’ I asked.
She gave me a clenched-teeth smile and rolled her eyes. For two hours they had trawled Oxford Street and Regent Street, looking for a dress that was stylish and expensive-looking without actually being expensive; having tried on more than twenty, and become increasingly dismayed by what the changing-room mirrors were showing her, she’d opted for a dress she’d picked out right at the start of the expedition. ‘Not sure my presence was necessary,’ said Aileen. But Cerys had met them for a coffee, and she was on great form, she told me with a smile, a particular smile that her niece often brings out in her. Cerys was in a semi-professional production of Anything Goes, and rehearsals were going well: the director, it appeared, was quite taken with her. She had a new boyfriend as well: Simon, a trainee vet, who also had a part in the show. ‘It’s always good to see her,’ said Aileen. A pause followed, in which Sam – having been held at bay for a while – sprang forcefully back into my mind. I took the bin-bag outside.
Over the meal we talked about my conversation with Kirsten, and what I was going to say on the programme, and various trivialities, then we watched TV for a while. Aileen went to bed early, halfway through a film. ‘Sorry,’ she said, giving my hand a squeeze as she rose from the sofa. ‘Oxford Street has caught up with me.’ I stayed downstairs for another hour, perhaps wanting to be sure that Aileen would be asleep when I went up.
I kept the TV on, but I wasn’t really watching it. I wasn’t really thinking, either – it was as though I had mild concussion. I looked around the room. The things that it contained – the furniture, the pictures, the souvenirs – were evidence not just of the years that Aileen and I had spent together: they signified a deep accord, an enduring like-mindedness, and in the act of looking at them I seemed to be reminding myself of the contentment of that like-mindedness. I found my attention returning to the objects that were ranged on a shelf behind the television, and I took some of them down, as if I needed to touch them to get the full meaning out of them. I picked up a glass paperweight; I had no idea where it had come from. Ditto a small brass urn with a lid that didn’t open. A figurine of a morose clog-wearing boy sitting on a tree stump, however, I knew to be a gift to Aileen from Eleanor, but why or where it had been bought, I couldn’t recall. But next to the boy stood something – a little basalt cow – that instantly raised a full-bodied memory: Aileen had bought it about fifteen years earlier, in a village in the Massif Central, near the place where a lunatic called Raël claimed to have been taken to a planet where he’d met Muhammad, Buddha, Moses and Jesus; there was picture of crazy Raël in the shop, which was run by a huge woman with violet hair and beads the size and colour of satsumas round her neck; the day was so hot that the soles of our shoes stuck to the road and Aileen burned her hand on the car door. A portable sundial, made in 1900 by the Ansonia Clock Company of Brooklyn, likewise brought back the occasion of its acquisition: we’d found it amid a pile of junk at a market in Canterbury, soon after we’d moved into the flat in Chatham Road. And at this point, finally, inevitably, Sarah re-entered my thoughts, as though she’d been waiting for the right moment to come in.
It was while Aileen and I were living in Chatham Road that I’d become involved with Sarah. The circumstances in which it had begun were fairly clear: she had been a customer; she’d bought a small table from me, and later a bowl, a cherrywood bowl; she came to the shop quite frequently, perhaps as often as a dozen times in the space of half a year, but, as I remembered it, I never realised how keenly she was interested in me until the day of the photographs. She’d recently come back from a holiday in Morocco, and her tan was accentuated by the white shirt – a man’s white shirt – that she was wearing, under a scuffed leather jacket, blouson style, soft, sandy in colour. Remembering that afternoon, I saw this quite distinctly. In the pocket of the jacket she had some holiday snaps, which she showed me. It was the usual stuff: beaches, mountains, gangs of smiling children, a huge lizard on a wall, dazzling fabrics. Then there was Sarah on a motorbike, Sarah haggling at a market stall, Sarah in hiking boots, and lastly Sarah lying belly-down in shallow water, topless. I was holding the picture, and she made no attempt to hurry me along; she laughed, but there was no embarrassment in the laugh; she gave me a look. Remembering this moment, I couldn’t recall precisely what this look had been. Perhaps it was like the look she’d directed at the camera? I didn’t know. But I remembered that there was a look, and that it surprised me as much as the photo itself. And I surprised myself by feeling a momentary envy of the man – obviously it had been a man – who had taken the shot. The shirt that she was wearing was his, I decided. It’s possible, even, that I actually said that I envied him.
I sat in front of the TV, staring at the wall, trying to picture the scene, to hear what I’d said to her, to reconstruct what had followed. We’d met late one afternoon, near the castle; the light was extraordinary – the walls were apricot in the sun, but the sky above them was dark purple; this, I was almost certain, had been our first rendezvous. But when I tried to dredge from my mind some remnants of the first time I’d gone to her flat, I found that those hours were wholly lost to me. Instead what came to the surface were moments from one of our last arguments: Sarah screaming at me, wanting me to believe that she was heartbroken by my decision to move to London, that she hated me for it, when in fact we’d both known for a while that we were at the end. Now I came to think of it, I was sure that I’d told her that I was going to London only after (some time after) a row in which she’d ridiculed the very idea that she might have loved me, as if the notion of her having any serious attachment to me were nothing but a product of my vanity. I could picture her sitting on the windowsill of her bedroom, arms crossed, glaring; I saw the dismissive quick uplift of her chin, the disdainful slow lowering of her eyelids, and I could hear her telling me that I was running away. That was why I was going to London – to get away from her. This wasn’t true, I said.
There might, however, have been some justice to the accusation. Aileen and I had been talking about moving to London before I met Sarah, but it was not unlikely that Sarah had been a factor in the timing of it. An opportunity had arisen for Aileen, and I had an offer of work as well, but would I have hesitated more than I did, had the circumstances been different? ‘Why is this the first I’ve heard of it?’ Sarah had demanded. I couldn’t recall what I’d answered, and I didn’t have an answer now. Had I embarked on the affair knowing that it would necessarily be ended soon, when Aileen and I left for London? Or had I thought, at some point, that the relationship with Sarah might turn into something more than an affair? Was that why I hadn’t said anything to her – because I’d not been entirely certain that I would be leaving? I found it hard to believe that this might have been what had been going through my mind. Then again, it was hard to believe that the affair had happened at all.
I couldn’t answer my own questions, and from the meagre material of my memories I couldn’t make a story that I knew to be true. I had always told myself that I had learned truly to love Aileen after the affair with Sarah, that I had appreciated her properly only after it was over, that having indulged in that meaningless excitement I had made a new and genuine commitment to the woman I now knew I would stay with for the rest of my life. But perhaps, rather than
seeing Aileen more clearly, I had been motivated by remorse more than anything else? Had I married Aileen to atone for my betrayal of her? And perhaps, though Sarah had told me ‘I don’t want to know where you’re going’, as if my treachery had merited perfect oblivion, she had in fact been as distraught by my departure as she had sometimes said she was. And maybe she simply hadn’t been able to find me again, after I’d left? No – this idea was implausible. If she’d been expecting a child, I convinced myself, she would have found me.
It was long past midnight when I went up to bed. I tried not to wake Aileen, but as I lay down she smiled without opening her eyes. ‘I was dreaming of the biggest department store in the universe,’ she said, with her eyes still shut. ‘I was on the escalators with Eleanor. You couldn’t see where they ended. They went on forever.’ A minute later she was asleep again.
I lay beside her, thinking of Sarah, trying to see her clearly, and failing. When I pictured her sitting on the sill in her bedroom, telling me what a creep I was, I saw a figure that I knew to be Sarah: this figure spoke some words that I knew she had spoken, and the figure had attributes that had been hers – she was slim, her hair was auburn and piled up messily, the tone of the voice was Sarah’s. She gestured as Sarah used to gesture. But this imagined figure wasn’t fully in focus – it was as though I were seeing her with my peripheral vision. When I tried to make her face appear, I only glimpsed her as she sped out of sight too quickly for me to fix the image in my mind. Were she still alive, I told myself, I could have walked past her in the street without recognising her.
A week after my first encounter with Sam, I rang him to suggest that we meet the following week. ‘I appreciate it,’ he kept saying, as if deferring to a magistrate who had shown him leniency. We arranged to meet in Russell Square Gardens, at midday.
3
A hazy drizzle had begun a few minutes before I reached the gardens, yet Sam was slouched on a bench, with his head lolling against the upper slat and his eyes closed, as though enjoying a dose of sunshine instead of getting a faceful of light rain. A cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth. A hand came up to the cigarette, removed it for a second while he exhaled, replaced it and went up to tug at the edge of his black woollen cap, and all the time his eyes remained closed, even though he must have heard my footsteps coming closer. From a distance it had appeared that he was wearing gloves, but it was a piece of sky-blue cloth that was wrapped around his hand. Several brown stains blotched it.
When I stopped, a couple of yards from the bench, he finally opened his eyes and removed the cigarette with his bandaged hand, slowly and delicately, spilling no ash. ‘Good day to you, sir,’ he said, flexing his legs. He grimaced at the sky, before swiping the dots of rainwater off the sleeves of his sweatshirt, the same black sweatshirt as before. ‘I’ve got an hour,’ he said. ‘How about you?’ The way he said it, it was as if we had a job to get done. I told him I could manage thirty minutes, at the most. ‘Right then,’ he said, slapping his legs as he stood up, ‘where do you want to go? There’s the Crown, that’s nearest. Five minutes from here.’ He gave me a look, the sort of look a shop assistant might give you when you’ve put on a jacket that doesn’t quite suit you. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not a pub. OK. You don’t want to go to your office, do you? Not a good idea, I can see that. Right. OK. I’m out of ideas. Does the rain bother you?’ I had my umbrella; it wasn’t cold; I was happy to stroll, I told him. We set off, walking on opposite sides of the path.
‘So how are you?’ he asked, lighting another cigarette.
‘I’m well,’ I answered.
‘Good,’ he said.
‘And how are you?’
‘Good. I’m good,’ he said, nodding. ‘I’m good. Really good. Never better.’ The nodding became more vigorous as he spoke, as if he were coming to agree with himself that he had indeed never been better. ‘Business doing well?’ he asked.
‘Thank you,’ I replied.
‘That’s good. Opened a place up in Leeds, haven’t you?’ he asked.
Clearly he expected me to ask him how he knew this. Instead I merely answered ‘Yes.’
‘Saw a thing about it in a magazine,’ he said.
I cut the subject short with a question of my own. ‘What have you done to your hand?’ I asked.
‘Take a look if you like,’ he said, unwinding the cloth. He extended his fist towards me, at eye-level. The knuckles were swollen and pink and wet, with clots of near-black blood and grime all over them; on the outside of the little finger a piece of flesh had been snipped off, leaving a cut that looked like the open beak of a small bird. My grimace amused him. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Give it a couple of days and it’ll mend.’
‘You should clean it,’ I told him.
He turned his hand this way and that, inspecting the damage. ‘You’re right,’ he said, then he rewrapped the hand. The inside of the strip of cloth was as filthy as the wounds were. ‘I will. As soon as I get back I’ll give it a dip.’
‘What happened?’ I asked him.
‘Some twat dropped a joist on it,’ he said. ‘Then he went and stood on the fucking joist. He won’t be doing that again in a hurry, I can tell you.’ He threw a couple of punches at the air; the punches were fast and purposeful.
‘So,’ I said, ‘you’re a builder?’
He snorted and did a slack-jawed face. ‘Well, yeah,’ he said, holding up his hands to make the point that only an idiot could look at these and not see immediately that their owner was a builder.
‘That wasn’t necessary,’ I told him, and at this he shut his eyes tightly and pressed his mouth shut, silently cursing himself.
‘Fuck. Yes,’ he said. ‘I know. Sorry. Fuck.’
‘And that’s not necessary either.’
‘Yes, but I can’t help it,’ he said.
‘Well, try,’ I requested.
‘OK. I’ll do my best.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Not at all,’ he said, smiling as though to say: ‘You see how well we’re getting along already?’
I asked him where he was working. It was a good job, he told me. He spent a lot of his time doing stupid little jobs – a bit of plastering, a bit of painting, a bit of repointing. But this was a big one: the ‘mother of all sheds’, an architect-designed music room for a banker up in Highgate. They were building it in his garden, and the thing was going to be the size of a bungalow, he said. ‘Triple-glazing, foundations you could bury a tank in, oak doors, oak panelling. Sound-proofing that’s going to cost an absolute fucking fortune. Stuff they use in recording studios. A two-hundred-pound bomb could go off outside and you wouldn’t hear anything. Fittings coming in from Finland or somewhere. The door handles – they’re like a hundred quid each. Straight up – a hundred quid for a fucking doorknob. This bloke’s got money coming out of his arsehole. Sorry. But it does your head in. His wife’s piano is going in there, and it’s not just any old piano – it’s this fucking great thing from Italy that costs the same as a Ferrari. It’s in the living room at the moment. Fills the whole fucking room. A beautiful thing. Really beautiful. Took a year to make it, or something like that. All these different kinds of wood. Even I can tell it’s special, and I don’t know anything. And the wife can really play. We can hear her sometimes. Sounds fantastic. Like she’s got fifty fingers. She’s a total fucking nightmare, though. Can’t get it into her head that noise is part of the deal with building work. Like we make a racket just for the fun of it. And no chance of the workers actually being allowed inside. You want a cup of tea – you bring a flask, mate. But the piano is something else. And the sound system – you wouldn’t believe it. Speakers the size of wardrobes and amps as heavy as sacks of cement. He’s a nice bloke, though, considering he’s a banker-wanker. No side to him. You know what I mean? You could talk to him and not know he’s a rich bastard. Nikos, his name is. From Cyprus. Gorgeous daughter. Hair like silk. Wicked tits and all. Sorry. But no, she’s really gorgeous. Right bitch, t
hough. Takes after her mum, I’d say. Looks at you like you’ve just dropped out of the trees. Spends all day at the shops, far as I can see. Scoots around in this little fucking Mazda—’
‘Please,’ I interrupted. If I hadn’t stopped him he’d have gone on for an hour.
‘What?’
‘Is it impossible for you to get through a sentence without swearing? Just “little Mazda”. That’s all we need.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘No, it’s not. You said: “little effing Mazda”.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes, you did. Please stop it.’
He apologised with an embarrassed smirk, as a son might. ‘It’s the way we talk, me and my mates,’ he said. I told him that it wasn’t the way I talked, and I was about to say that it wasn’t the way Sarah had talked either, when he laughed and said: ‘It’s my upbringing that’s to blame. Boys need their fathers.’ Within a second his smile was erased, replaced with the expression of a man who thinks he’s just made a bad misjudgement. ‘No. Sorry. Just a joke. No. I didn’t mean it. Really. It was a stupid thing to say. Sorry I said it. Really,’ he gabbled. ‘I’m not blaming you at all. I’m not blaming anyone.’
I assured him that I didn’t regard myself as being blamed. How could I? Until a week ago I hadn’t known of his existence. And this, I confessed, was something of a mystery to me. Why had Sarah never told me he’d been born? Why suddenly had he appeared?
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