Exposure

by Talitha Stevenson

  He did not look into the mirror. He touched nothing. Suddenly he was afraid to leave his fingerprints anywhere, afraid the hotel would leave signs, marks, would subtly adhere to the surface of his skin. After a moment or two of absolute stillness, he walked towards the toilet and flushed it. Then he heard Karen calling, 'What's ... Kewsa ... koyza ... something-dilla?'

  He ran the tap for a second over the empty basin, watching the water run down the drain, aware of infinitely refracted versions of himself in the mirrors on each side of him. His hand moved and ten thousand hands moved. His shameful legs were ten thousand shameful legs walking towards the door. He was his own strange god.

  When he came out she was cross-legged under the bedside lamp, smiling up at him. 'I think it's Mexican food,' he said. 'Quesadilla.'

  'Oh, is it? I'll have that, then. And a Bacardi and Coke, please.'

  He called Room Service and ordered. When he replaced the receiver, she put her hand on his arm and he jumped. 'Hey,' she said. 'What on earth's the matter?'

  He turned round and took the fingers—and, with infinite gentleness, he let them go. 'Jumpy,' he told her. 'I'm sorry.'

  She looked down at her hand, knowing it contained their momentary intimacy—a souvenir as small as a ticket stub. 'Why are you sorry? No harm done.' She rubbed his arm with the other hand, 'You know, maybe you should have ordered two dinners. I'm starving.'

  He said goodbye, he said, 'Thank you very much,' to her in the bathroom, where she was arranging the complimentary shampoo and soap bottles along the side of the bath, singing along to the TV. The hot water crashed in. She kissed him on the mouth with her hands on either side of his face and wrinkled her nose up at him, saying, 'Go easy on the guilt.'

  'The guilt?'

  'Look, I know I'm young and I know fuck-all, really, but everyone deserves a bit of pleasure, you know? Life's not long, is it?'

  'No.'

  'The way I think about it is, it doesn't matter if nobody sees. Didn't happen. Haven't you ever started wondering if something you just remembered really happened or if you dreamt it?'

  He nodded vaguely, afraid to commit himself to agreement.

  'Well, then,' she said, 'that's what things are like if nobody sees. If there's just you to say what they are, then they could be a dream, or you could call them a dream and nobody's going to know better.'

  She was smiling at him and stroking his face and he did not know how to reply. He watched the water pounding into the white bath, whipping up a thick foam of bubbles.

  'Anyway,' she went on, 'I had a lovely time. I think your wife's really lucky.'

  He kissed her goodbye and left.

  It was just after a quarter to nine when he got home. It was dark now and the air was damp and smelt of recently fallen rain, of wet paving-stones and brick. Drips came off the railings and the leaves along the avenue where he lived. The dripping was part of the darkness: it seemed to be the sound of the darkness. For a moment it was almost unbearably beautiful and again he put his hand on his excited heart.

  He got out of the cab outside his house and glanced up at the drawing-room window. The curtains were drawn. Friends must be behind them already, having drinks, wondering where he was. A halo of light escaped round the edges of the window. It would have been sensible to call Rosalind from the taxi, but he had not felt able to.

  He walked up the steps and patted his pockets for his keys, but they were not there. He remembered he had left them in his study at chambers. Had he gone back there, as he had intended to after court, he would have seen them on the desk and slipped them into his pocket. Not once in almost forty years of marriage had he forgotten his keys. He rang the bell. Rosalind came to the door and opened it to a flood of home: the dappled hall light, the warmth from the kitchen, her face ...

  'Oh. Alistair? I assumed you were Peter and Isabel,' the face of his wife said. And around it poured the hall wallpaper, the vase of lilies under the mirror, her perfume, the umbrellas in the rack.

  He smiled at her from underneath this tidal wave of sensory information. 'Alas, it's only your husband,' he said.

  'Alas?' She laughed. 'What d'you mean, darling? I'm actually rather relieved to see you're all right. Where on earth have you been?'

  'I left my keys behind,' he said, pointing at the door by way of an explanation. She looked at the door and then at him.

  'Yes, I see that. Are you all right, Alistair? What kept you so long?'

  'Working,' he said.' Working. Working. May I come in?'

  Rosalind leant over to kiss his cheek. 'Darling, I'm sorry. Come and have a drink. Goodness—another drink,' she said, smelling the alcohol on his breath. And then, as she went towards the drawing-room door,' "Alas"? What a funny word.'

  He couldn't help agreeing with her. Guilt appeared to have poor taste in language. With distorted emphasis, he heard the dark rain dripping off the trees as he followed her inside.

  It was very, very bright in the drawing room.

  'There you are!' Anne Nicholson said, setting down her glass. 'We were all beginning to suspect you didn't want to see us.'

  'Poor man's just been working late,' David Nicholson said. 'Honestly, Anne.'

  Alistair received the hugs. As Anne pulled away from him, she said, 'Goodness, was that your stomach?'

  'Yes, how very embarrassing. I'm so sorry. I—I'm evidently rather hungry.'

  Peter and Isabel arrived shortly after Alistair. It was strange for them all to see Peter without Erica, to whom he had been married for twenty-eight years, and as Rosalind took coats in the hallway and was politely amazed by a rustling bunch of flowers, they each prepared themselves for a good show of civility.

  Peter looked tired but very much in love with his new young pregnant wife. He brought her in protectively, with his arm round her. She was a rather fat, not particularly pretty girl, but Peter couldn't take his eyes off her. Alistair, whose face was still hot from sex, who still had the flavour of another woman on his tongue, was appalled by this flagrant lust. The world was plainly drowning in it. As they went into the dining room, Peter took hold of his arm. 'Isn't she fantastic?' he said.

  Alistair nodded, wanting his friend's incriminating hand off him quickly.

  Rosalind had made an opera of a meal. To start with there was fried pink bream in a fish and vegetable broth. Just before serving it, she sprinkled finely sliced raw vegetables over the fish—orange peppers, mushrooms, fresh coriander and spring onions. Alistair watched her quick fingers as he waited to carry the tray through. The broth was clear and spicy and slightly sweet, and with it they drank a good Riesling. The main course was a fillet of beef in filo pastry. Hidden in the crisp, golden pastry, over the beef, was a stuffing of wild mushrooms, garlic, chilli and parsley. The meat was pink and velvety and complemented perfectly by the earthy spiciness of the stuffing. For pudding there were caramelized apples and pears with hot butterscotch sauce and cold, tart Greek yoghurt. This she served in their wedding-present champagne glasses. And then there was cheese, Explorateur, St Marcellin, Epoisses, St Félicien, with biscuits, crisp sweet grapes, and fig chutney. Alistair ate ravenously, indulging his body in spite of his mind, which reprimanded him with deeply distasteful biblical images of dry bread and water.

  Around him, the gentle talk went on: was Tuscany overrun these days? Parts of Spain were just as lovely but then there was the far less interesting food. France, of course, would be utterly fantastic, if only it weren't for the French.

  'Where are you two going on holiday this summer, Al?' said David.

  Alistair forked spinach on to his salad plate. 'We thought we might stay with Chris and Lara in Malta,' he said. Then he looked at his friend and thought:You have absolutely no idea who you're talking to. If you knew, you'd leave. He said, 'How about you? Andalusia again?'

  'Absolutely. If it ain't broke—that's what I always say. Can't bloody wait. A chair and the sun,' David sighed, capturing the idea between his raised hands, like a photographer, implying this was
all he had ever wanted out of life.

  By the time Alistair was helping Rosalind bring through the cheese, he was telling himself that he must regain control of his thoughts. He would contain the aberration in the hotel room within himself and he would most certainly resist the childish desire to confess.

  He looked around the table, then he let his eyes fall on his wife's smiling face. Rosalind had always been beautiful. What a lucky man he was to have spent his life with one so beautiful. When was the last time they had made love—or even kissed each other? He felt intense love for her and a desire to be physically close. He wanted to make love to his wife and to have her familiar body wipe away the other woman's fingerprints. He longed to apologize to Rosalind physically.

  I have been unfaithful to my wife, he thought. I am an unfaithful husband. There were tears in his eyes.

  Then he listened to the conversation, to Isabel talking with what seemed to him to be a feigned respect about schools with the older women.

  'Well, Luke hated Eton,' Rosalind was saying. 'It really only suits some characters. He's so sensitive, that was the thing. We had to move him. Alistair was disappointed, of course, but obviously he never let Luke see that.'

  So, family life was beginning all over again for Peter. Alistair found it so exhausting to contemplate he had to stifle a yawn. Erica was a lovely woman and he thought his friend had been an idiot to throw her away. There was Peter, grinning murderously.

  'We thought maybe weekly boarding, actually,' Isabel said. 'I mean, Westminster's very good academically.' Her fingers reached over to Peter's.

  Oh, why bother sending it to school? Alistair thought. What did any of it matter? Another identikit education, another job in the City, another mortgage, another marriage at twenty-eight in a rented manor house, another first child at thirty-two. He looked at the self-satisfied young mother face and told her silently, 'It's an illusion, that sense of identity your swollen belly gives you. We unmake ourselves in a matter of seconds.'

  She looked up at him with a slightly anxious expression. She had plainly noticed him staring. He forced a smile. 'Not long now,' he said.

  'Two months. We're so excited,' she replied, the uncertain hand scrabbling across the table for her husband's again, 'aren't we, darling?'

  Dinner was over. Very calmly, Alistair decided that it was quite late now and he really ought to be going. This peculiar thought made him laugh out loud and he managed narrowly to suggest it was in response to a story David was telling. He felt safe until he saw that the pregnant girl was looking at him again. She turned away, embarrassed.

  A little while after they had moved back to the drawing room, Rosalind said, 'You did put the coffee on, didn't you?'

  'Coffee?'

  'Oh, Al. I did ask you.'

  'Darling, I'm so sorry, I forgot. Forgive me, Rosalind.'

  'Of course I'll forgive you.' She laughed. 'Darling, what's the matter this evening? Are you all right?'

  Why did she keep asking him that? Yes! Yes, he was all right! 'Forgive me' was just a figure of speech, for God's sake.

  'I'm fine,' he said, 'just tired out. That was an incredible meal.'

  'It wasn't bad, was it? Even if I do say so myself,' she said, smiling shyly.

  He squeezed her arm. 'You're very talented, darling.'

  'Thank you.' She appeared touched—flattered, even moved by his approval. It struck him that these moments of bland encouragement were all that she lived on.

  'I'll do the coffee now, shall I?'

  'Lovely, darling.'

  The guests wanted two black coffees, one decaffeinated coffee with cream, a mint tea and a camomile tea ...

  He crept out of the room, smiling amiably. Although, of course, nobody knew what he had done that evening, he felt utterly humiliated. When he remembered his weird laughter at the dinner table, he was afraid that he might start talking to himself. He was, essentially, talking to himself then. And the tone of the conversation seemed at best ironic and at worst horrified.

  He did not want to talk any more, because he had said quite enough already. Least said, soonest mended, his mother always used to say.

  Why was he thinking about his mother so much all of a sudden? It was just plain odd that he had talked about his past with Karen. And now, just for having mentioned it, he felt his concealed history sticky on his fingers and arms and hair. He sniffed his fingers and smelt sex.

  His childhood had no place in his real life. It was just a crackly black-and-white film sodden with shame and sentiment. A far greater proportion of his life had been spent in these surroundings, in Holland Park, in corduroy trousers and a cashmere V-neck, than in Dover. If the number of years counted for anything, he was unquestionably Alistair Langford, QC—the man in the photograph at the House of Lords, rightfully there because of his own achievements. He must simply put out of his mind this terrible evening and the pervasive sense of his own fraudulence. It had all been a rather devastating species of Freudian slip—and now he would continue with what he had meant to say. 'A Freudian slip is what happens if you say one thing when you mean your mother,' a friend had once joked.

  He flicked the switch on the kettle and heard it start up. This was the way life functioned, he told himself. You put lots of things out of your mind—starvation, torture, wars, famine. Terrible things, which, if attended to, would make ordinary routine impossible. This was the purpose of good manners—he glanced through to the dining room—this was the purpose of nineteenth-century tables with silver knives and forks lined up, each one to be attended to carefully. Etiquette slowed the painfully racing heart: it distracted you from the things that did not bear thinking about.

  He heard Karen's soft voice—'You've got a beautiful cock, haven't you?'—and flinched. The different age-group with its risky liberation. But it was not his problem. It was his son's problem, his darling daughter's problem. And yet those words he had used in the hotel bar when she suggested they get a room: 'Want to,' he had stuttered.' Want to'. The shard of desire in his eye.

  He took out the cups and saucers and spoons and put them neatly on the tray. As the kettle boiled, it made him shudder to think how terribly cold it must have been, in late December, for one unconscious in the doorway of Tesco, one so drunk he had forgotten his own name.

  The phone call about his mother's death came two weeks later. Rosalind received it and wrote down the details on the phone pad. She stared at them for a long time after she had put down the receiver. She decided to wait until Alistair got home before telling him—it was inappropriate to do so during the working day. She had great respect for what he did, and in all their years of marriage, she had interrupted him only once at court, when she had gone into labour with Luke.

  At around eight, she heard him shut the front door and drop his keys into the bowl on the hall table. She walked out into the hallway. 'Darling, there's been some news,' she said.

  'Really?'

  'Yes.'

  He was loosening his tie. 'What have our children done now?'

  'No, it's not them. It's about your mother.'

  'My ...?'

  'Alistair, she died last week.'

  'Really?' he said again. He put down his briefcase very softly. He had told Rosalind his mother had died just before they got engaged.

  'I don't really know what to say about it,' she said. 'As you know, it's a shock to me, too.'

  'Yes. Yes, I see that.'

  'So, I'm just going to tell you the facts, Alistair.'

  'OK.'

  She had received a call, she said, from an Ivy Gilbert. His mother had died of a heart-attack. It would not have been a drawn-out thing, Rosalind told him. Apparently the doctor had been quite certain about that. It was sad, though, that she had lain undiscovered at the bottom of the stairs for a few days. It had been Ivy who alerted the authorities, concerned that she hadn't heard anything from her friend for a while. Ivy had said she felt that Alistair ought to be told, as he was his mother's son, no matter how l
ong it was that they hadn't seen each other. Because of the circumstances in which she had been discovered—so long after her death—she had already been cremated.

  As Rosalind spoke, they went into the drawing room and stood a little way apart from each other in front of the fireplace. When she had finished, she looked right at him. His eyes ran over the room, skipping from the chandelier to the carpet, along the shelves of books to the orchid in the pot by the door. She was reminded of the way his eyes had done this when they first met—and how she had thought at the time that it was as if they were seeking refuge, a place to rest.

  'Well,' he said, 'I'm quite shocked.' He looked hunched—stiff.

  'Yes. Let me get you a drink.'

  'Thank you,' he said. And, as he had been on so many occasions, he was intensely reassured by her presence—and by her good manners. She must be angry and confused, he thought, but she would never lose her temper, not Rosalind.

  She poured him a glass of whisky, put a litde water into it and brought it to him on the sofa. He took the glass and she looked at him until he averted his eyes. She said, 'Alistair, I have lived countless years thinking your mother died before we were married.'

  'Yes,' he said.

  'You've lied to me. We've lied to the children.'

  'Yes. Well - not you. You haven't lied to anyone, darling.'

  'Look, I'm not going to make you talk about it now—I'm not even sure I can face it myself—but ...'

  'But I owe you an explanation.'

  'I think you do,' she said. 'My God, Alistair, you do. I know you didn't get on with her, but this is really ... I can't even think of the right word.'

  'No,' he said. 'I'm not surprised.'

  She sighed very deeply and then she held his hand. But it was he who squeezed her fingers.

  'I expect you're in shock, aren't you?' she said, as if she was offering him an excuse for not explaining himself just yet.

  'I think I am, darling,' he said.

  'Oh, God, Alistair, I've just remembered that I'm meant to be going to our table supplier in Sussex with Jocelyn tomorrow. This is hopeless. We won't get back till very late—you'll be on your own all evening. I'm going to call her and cancel.'