‘That’s not fair.’ The arch of his right foot stroked my left shin. ‘Anyway, since then we’ve both kept our side of the bargain.’
‘Oh, come on, Arthur.’ The disingenuousness of his position could be ignored no longer. ‘She may have, but in case it’s escaped your notice, you’ve started again. And I’m not sure I like being compared to a pint of lager.’
‘Oh, but this is different,’ he protested. ‘Completely, fundamentally different.’
‘Why? It’s an affair like the others.’
‘It’s not an affair. It’s the real thing, the coup de foudre. It’s what makes me see how unnecessary the others were.’
I had not heard the phrase ‘coup de foudre’ before, but I had not had a relationship with a married man before, an exceptionally overcommitted married man at that, and it had taken me by surprise how intense and fast-moving it was, an expedited version of an ordinary one. We were propelled by the imperative to make every meeting count, as if we were foreign secretaries gathering at a moment’s notice to tackle the outbreak of civil war in a neighbouring territory. Critical decisions were reached in pillow talk, key announcements made as zips were refastened and belts buckled. Avowals, pronouncements, promises: they did not have to be fished for or extracted (or, in the case of Matt, forsaken), but came of their own accord and in thrilling flurries.
‘I’m falling in love with you,’ he told me, after only a handful of liaisons, and not even when we were in bed but afterwards, with minutes to spare, as we dressed and gathered up keys and wallets, ready to return to our respectable real lives.
‘Are you?’ I had halted midway back into my skirt, but quickly resumed wriggling it over my hips, telling myself he was teasing.
‘Yes,’ he said, very firmly, ‘I am,’ and when I looked across at him I saw that he was perfectly serious.
‘Do you think that’s wise?’ In the short time of our affair I had developed a composure that represented either a persona especially for him or a sudden steep development in my actual personality. Whichever it was, Arthur embraced it whole-heartedly, telling me he had been attracted in the first place by the ‘exceptional mismatch’ of me, that I was someone whose humility did not tally with her appearance and he wanted to help me realise how beautiful I was.
He smiled at me, tender and indulgent. ‘“Wise” isn’t the word I’d use, no. Nothing about this is wise, is it? Being here isn’t wise.’
Except for the first weekend, when Matt and Sylvie had been out of town, we had not been able to use the flat for our assignations and so we met in the only decent hotel in the neighbourhood, the Inn on the Hill. It was a boutique place on the high street near the station, a couple of bus stops from Earth, Paint & Fire and walking distance from Arthur’s hospital department. By accident or design we were always given the same room, ‘Marrakech’, which had a riad theme: terracotta walls, patterned kilims, a big wooden bed with carved posts; in the bathroom there were cobalt-blue mosaic tiles and a polished copper basin, high-end toiletries that we never used and I longed to pocket but was too ashamed to in front of Arthur. I wondered if it was the room they always gave to couples having illicit assignations: a simulated honeymoon in Morocco. I wondered if the hotel had sprung into existence expressly to service the affairs of the hospital consultants down the road.
‘I get the feeling you don’t feel the same way,’ Arthur said, and his face betrayed no disappointment, nor even bemusement. His was a character built to beat adversity; he did not acknowledge rejection.
‘Of course I feel the same way,’ I said, scooping up my shoes from under the bed without breaking eye contact. ‘But I think I can still stop it happening. Rein it back before it’s too late.’
His eyes widened a fraction – with interest, I thought, rather than doubt. There was never any reason with him to worry about being too honest. ‘Why on earth would you want to rein it back?’ he asked.
Because of the long human history of love triangles, I thought: all the triumphant wives, all the mistresses brought low. There was a good reason it was not the other way around. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Because I don’t want to be one of those women who hangs around for years waiting for her married man to leave his wife and then he doesn’t, of course, and why should he? He already knows he can have her as an extra – that’s why they call it a “bit on the side”, isn’t it? But by the time she realises that, it’s too late for her to start something with someone else, too late to have children, too late for anything. She’s totally wasted her best years.’ The use of the third person did not provide the safety net I’d intended and for all my bravado I experienced a direct hit of despair – a visceral recognition of how it would feel to be the woman I described, waking up at the age of forty or forty-five and seeing that only the beginning had been sensational: the rest had been no more than the aftermath of a mistake.
Evidently feeling no such neurosis himself, Arthur leaned across the bed and seized my hand to draw me to him, steadying me as I lost balance. Our faces were now close enough to kiss and I could feel my breath coming harder. ‘That’s what you think is going to happen? That I’ll string you along, just use up your best years and then spit you out? Because that’s what I do?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘But you think it, don’t you?’ He was growing amused. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of a positive mental attitude, Miss Marr?’
‘I’ve heard of falling in love with the wrong man, a man who openly admits he’s a serial adulterer and who has no hope of changing his ways as long as he lives.’
I expected him to protest the insult, but instead he crowed, ‘So you do admit that’s what you’re doing? Falling in love?’
This was so far removed from any discussion I’d had with a boyfriend before, it was a brand-new language. ‘Yes, I admit it,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how it helps me, though.’
‘Look,’ he said, and I sensed the building of deliberation that came whenever he was about to say something crucial. It wasn’t in any correction to the eyes or even the tone; it was to the breathing, which became concentrated, undetectable. ‘The scenario you’ve just described is from the Dark Ages. Divorce is as common as staying together now, especially when the kids are growing up, like mine are.’
I felt uneasy at the reference to his children. Having focused to date on the chemical rush of our sexual attraction, the sensation of flying above ordinary mortals, I had not considered his two sons at all. To me they were among the ordinary mortals, the ones we’d left on the ground. I knew their names, of course, Alexander and Hugo, I knew they were eighteen and almost seventeen, just one school year apart, the elder taking A-levels the coming summer and beginning a gap year soon after, the younger to repeat the sequence twelve months later. Though Arthur admitted he hadn’t spent a great deal of time with them when they were young, not compared with the current hands-on breed of father, there could be no doubt that he adored them, in the primal, unconquerable way of all good parents. He never spoke negatively of them, only of his own deficiencies. And they had had Sylvie for their everyday needs, I thought: she had not had to earn a living as the new generation of mothers invariably did. In retrospect, it sounds callous, I know, no more than a convenient excuse, but the truth was that to me it was natural to need only one parent, to have no choice in the matter.
‘You didn’t want to leave last time,’ I said, finally, ‘when she gave you the warning.’
‘Forget last time. Last time wasn’t you. How I feel now only makes me realise how miserable Sylvie and I have been for a long time. But this is it. I’m clear about that.’
I could hardly believe what he was implying, that he intended to leave her to be with me, and I certainly could not allow myself to trust it. Last time wasn’t you: I would be a fool not to consider the possibility that he’d made such intoxicating declarations to previous lovers. That the possibility existed that, however pretty my face, however individual my personal style, I was still the
same as every other woman who’d fallen for him: fallible, flawed, and never more so than when in love. Because I was in love, of course I was.
‘Please, Arthur, don’t try to trick me, don’t tease me. I’m not stupid: I know you have far too much to lose if you split up with her, you’d be mad to do it. I’m the one who’ll lose, I know that and I accept it. But please don’t pretend it’s going to be any other way.’
His expression did not alter. As far as I could see, he was no longer even blinking. ‘I’m not pretending anything,’ he said in that grave undertone of his. ‘You don’t know me well enough yet to know that I don’t say things I don’t mean. And what I’m saying is I will be with you. You don’t need to “accept” anything less.’
‘You might mean it now,’ I said, moved by both his words and the loving press of his fingers, ‘when you’re here with me. But you’ll mean it a lot less when you’re back home this evening with your family around you.’
‘Or maybe I’ll mean it more, because the reality is the boys are never at home and Sylvie doesn’t really want to be alone in a room with me, not any more.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Like I say, children fly the nest, couples move on. There might be two or three spouses in someone’s life. I have a colleague who’s on his fourth.’
‘How many do you plan on having?’ I giggled, if only to relieve the tension, but he remained quite solemn.
‘Don’t make a joke of it, Emily. To answer your question: one more. You. When I leave Sylvie, it will be the first and last time I leave anyone.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. It will happen. It’s purely a question of timing. Tell me you believe me.’
We stared at each other with rapt devotion. ‘I believe you,’ I said.
And he released my hands at the exact moment my body weakened with delight, causing me to fall to the side, laughing. In that moment history was forgotten and with it any woe I’d ever experienced or anticipated, the whole lot extinguished by the radiation of joy. It was the happiest I had ever felt, I was sure of it. I had reached the summit of human elation.
‘But what about the boys, Arthur?’ I had yet to use their names, conscious of my lack of right, strangely superstitious of the effect of such an utterance.
‘I’m only leaving her,’ he said, ‘not them. I’ll need to make sure I can see them as much as I do now. Alex will be off soon, it won’t affect him so much. And Hugo, I honestly think he’ll handle it fine. Sometimes I think he’s more of an adult than I am. I’ll talk to him properly about it, make sure every question is answered, every possible doubt cleared.’
‘As you say, they’re older now,’ I said. ‘They might have been more upset if they were younger.’
‘I couldn’t do it if they were younger,’ he said, ‘not even for you,’ which put me in my place all right. But it was still a place I was very happy to be put.
By then, Matt had agreed to move out. I’d insisted on our parting even before this declaration of intent by Arthur, though the truth was overlooked later in preference of the theory that I had wilfully traded up, discarding the old only when I was sure I had the new in the bag.
In keeping with the tone of our whole relationship, we were not explicit in our break-up discussions. We made no interrogations of one another and traded no recriminations. If not able to be warm, we could not bring ourselves to be cold.
‘One of us has to move out and if you don’t want to, it will have to be me.’ I stated this with little sense of the urgent necessity I felt, for it was important to avoid the inference that this was anything but a mutual decision. Still, this was my initiative and I had to be prepared to bear the greater inconvenience of it.
‘You move then,’ was his first response, and I agreed without argument. I then spent a fraught night considering my options, ready the following morning to begin looking for a short-term rental within easy distance of work. Away from the Grove, it would be safer for Arthur to visit, too.
But the next evening Matt announced that he had changed his mind. ‘I’m not paying this rent on my own, not even for a couple of months. I’ll go, all right?’
‘All right.’
I gathered from this that he’d mentioned his dilemma to a friend and had had an offer of a sofa or spare room. Either that or he too was seeing someone new and she, being presumably unmarried, was happy to take him in.
During this period he asked only one question that caused me proper difficulty, partly because it could be answered in so many different ways. ‘What’s going on with you, Emily?’ And there was confusion in his face, as if he no longer knew me, which gave rise to opposing pangs of pride and remorse in me. I knew I’d altered since becoming involved with Arthur, but I did not want to be unrecognisable to Matt. We’d been friends a long time.
‘What d’you mean? Nothing’s going on.’
‘Is it that posh bird at work?’
‘Charlotte? She’s not a bird, Matt. She’s a Homo sapiens.’
But his meaning was clear enough: I thought I was too good for a down-to-earth man like him; I’d developed aspirations, wanted the kind of privileges Charlotte – and most of her customers – had. I did not tell him that relations with my boss had taken a downward turn lately, ever since I’d developed a need to take time off at short notice with debilitating migraines.
‘I’m exactly the same as I’ve always been,’ I said firmly.
Matt capitulated. ‘Well, you look the same. Better than ever, actually.’
‘You’re not so bad yourself.’
There was a silence then that neither of us knew how to fill, but I was glad of it, of the evidence of reflection before the separation. ‘I won’t be able to give you your half of the deposit until I’ve moved out myself,’ I told him at last. ‘I hope that’s OK?’
‘Whatever. I’ll let you know the address to send it to.’ And that really was that with Matt. I haven’t deliberately cut his lines or diminished his significance. He simply was not a man to chase someone who did not wish to be chased. The damage he could have done had he chosen to stick around and stir trouble, or even avenge, was untold.
When I told Arthur I’d be officially free by the end of the month he was overjoyed, proclaiming our cause ‘halfway there’. ‘He must be insane not to fight for you,’ he said, adding, only half jokingly, ‘but he’d never have beaten me anyway, so it’s probably easier this way.’
I suspected the same could not be said for Sylvie. A devoted wife of twenty years was a different proposition from an inattentive boyfriend of five. She would not concede so easily.
We had been involved for three months when we had our first skirmish with the real world. It was an opportunistic Saturday-afternoon tryst following a cancelled appointment at his private clinic and requiring my feigning nausea to leave work at lunchtime. (‘I think it’s a side effect of the headaches,’ I told Charlotte, but she’d grown tired of my mystery symptoms, demanding with disdain, ‘Are you sure you’re not pregnant?’ As if her livelihood did not depend on just such reproductive inconveniences.) Late afternoon, I exited the main door of the Inn on the Hill and walked directly into the path of Sarah and Marcus Laing, out shopping, judging by their armfuls of bags from the chic-er neighbourhood stores. In using a local hotel, especially at the weekend, there had always been a risk that we’d see someone – or be seen – which was why we never left together, always allowing at least ten minutes between our departures. If second and not dashing back to work, I would have a coffee in the café, extending the time to twenty minutes or longer. Today I was first.
‘Hello, Emily,’ Marcus said, sounding genuinely pleased to see me. ‘I haven’t seen you about much recently. How are you doing?’
‘Really well, thank you. And you?’
As her husband chatted, Sarah eyed me with mild hostility and since I was not being the slightest bit flirtatious with him there could be no other reason than how I looked. I had not checked my reflection before leaving and hoped I didn’t look too
obviously like someone who had had all her make-up kissed off. If there was one thing I knew about women it was that we did not like to feel more resistible than others of our sex, especially younger others.
‘Where are the kids?’ I asked her, casually jovial, though I would never have assumed such a familiar air if I were not bent on concealing my own activities – and terrified of Arthur materialising too soon behind me. But the subject of children acted as both neutraliser and guaranteed digression and, sure enough, Sarah could not help supplying details.
‘They’re at a birthday party. Rather a nice one, actually. Horse-riding in Richmond Park and then a private viewing of that new vampire movie.’
‘Wow, a bit different from parties when I was young. Aren’t they lucky? I see them in the morning sometimes,’ I added. ‘They look so smart in their uniforms. Where do they go to school?’
I had not heard of the school she named but the pride in her voice told me it was an élite one and that I’d earned myself the credits I’d fished for. Even so, I was not home free yet. After seeing her three successive glances towards the hotel entrance – we stood practically on its doorstep – I could no longer avoid explaining my business here, though I knew very well that the offering of unnecessary details was a sure sign of a guilty conscience. I didn’t want to say I’d been in the café, in case Arthur appeared and said the same. I needed a story he couldn’t possibly echo. ‘I’ve just been asking about a job,’ I said, off the top of my head. ‘I thought this might be an interesting place to work.’
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 12