by Fiona Neill
He starts walking towards the lift. I can’t believe that Robert Bass has booked the room for so long. Won’t his wife be suspicious if he goes out until four in the morning? It is strange but it doesn’t occur to me to ask the same question about Tom.
I try to calculate how many times we might have sex in three hours and then feel shaky. The man who was queuing behind me at reception looks bemused as I obediently follow Diego into the lift.
‘You have no luggage I see,’ he says, shutting the lift doors behind us and pressing a button to take us to the fifth floor.
‘I’m not here for very long,’ I say. He is looking at my wedding ring. I put my hands behind my back and look up at the ceiling.
The lift shudders to a halt on the fifth floor. We walk down a long corridor and he opens the door of room 507 with pride.
‘This is one of our best rooms,’ he says. He goes towards the bed, lifts the covers and pulls back the top quarter of the sheets so that they lie on the bedspread in a perfect sandwich-shaped triangle. I imagine Robert Bass and myself lying in this bed and put out a hand to steady myself.
Diego wants to show me the bathroom.
‘The bath is enormous. Big enough for two. Or three,’ he says. ‘Not big enough for a manatee though.’ No matter what he says, his voice is still sorrowful.
He goes back into the bedroom and asks whether I want room service to send anything up.
‘We have Tension Tamer tea for the anxiety delegates,’ he says kindly.
‘That would be great,’ I reply.
Anticipation does not necessarily heighten desire. For the professionally unfaithful, those who habitually wait for their lovers in functional hotel rooms in Bloomsbury, it might allow time to get into the mood, to make the switch between work and play, to have a shower and consider the pleasures that lie ahead. Perhaps they lie back on the carefully made bed with its cover that matches the curtains and watch the Playboy channel or read a book and order a bottle of cheap wine.
I, on the other hand, sit gingerly on the edge of the bed and wonder about how clean the mattress is, given its workload. My mood of languid desire has passed and I am starting to become all too aware of my surroundings. When I look at the door key lying on the bed beside me, I start to invest the numbers with ridiculous emotional significance. Five hundred and seven. If you subtract seven from fifty, it is forty-three, Tom’s age. We were married on 5 July. The London underground was bombed on 7 July. I wonder what time in the morning the anxiety conference is programmed to start. I conclude that it will be an early kick-off, because it wouldn’t be good to allow a group of tense people to wait for too long for redemption.
There is a television but I prefer the quiet. If the silence is overwhelming I can always put on the radio and listen to the World Service. I wonder if Robert Bass listens to the World Service and whether I could suggest to him as a preliminary exercise that we just lie beside each other in companionable silence and listen to the radio for fifteen minutes and then go home. And then I wonder what he watches on television, what books he reads, whether he leaves a decent tip for waiters, whether his cup is half-full or half-empty, what was the last film he saw. It strikes me that I know very little about him apart from the kind of routine information that parents share. I know his children had single measles jabs, that there is no television allowed during the school week, and that they each play two musical instruments.
Would he be able to light a fire during a damp camping trip? Does he patrol the fridge for inexplicable changes in the way food is organised? Would he notice, for example, if the yogurts were on the same shelf as the chicken, if the lettuce had formed a close relationship with a half-eaten jelly or if the milk was not stored according to its sell-by date? Does he talk in his sleep? Does he have a mother complex? Are his parents alive? Does he have siblings?
Of course, I might discover that we concur on everything. More likely, I would determine that his imperfections are different from Tom’s but not necessarily any the less irritating in the long term. The first time someone sleeps diagonally across the bed, their legs straying over to the other side, the desire for communion through the lonely hours of the night seems a sweet gesture. Within a week it becomes mildly irritating and painful. Ahead lies a future of single beds.
Then I consider the fact that all too often when Robert Bass has spoken, I have found what he says irritating. This is something that I have tried to suppress over the previous months, but now all his most annoying comments and habits crowd up behind each other, jostling for consideration.
The vanity of removing his cycling helmet and combing his hair before he goes into school seems ridiculous; the way he expounds his parenting techniques – no television during the week; the importance of playing with children without directing play; of never using processed food not even a can of baked beans – becomes thoroughly irritating. Even the way he walks, like a cowboy, suddenly seems ridiculous. Everything is so mannered. The scars on his face, far from being manly, are a hangover from adolescent acne.
It reminds me of something that had happened during a summer holiday when, out of the blue, Simon Miller had called at my parents’ house and asked whether he could come and see me. It had been at least two years since we last met up and I was studying at Manchester. My parents were on holiday and I was fully prepared that he might stay the night and we might relive the passion of our teenage years. When he arrived I noticed that he was wearing a pair of white towelling socks, and for some inexplicable reason, this detonated a series of negative feelings towards him, culminating in him spending the night in the spare bedroom with me counting the hours before he left. When I met Tom, and he committed far worse sartorial hara-kiri, I was relieved to find that it had no effect. Even the shag-pile dressing gown was endearing. Thinking of Tom makes me feel nostalgic.
There is a soft knock at the door. I’m unsure what to do. I decide that it looks a little forward to be lying on the bed but then, opening the door might prove even more awkward, because it isn’t obvious where we would both sit down. There is a small table with one chair beside the window. All routes lead to the bed. I could swear that there is a worn path between the door and the bed, like a track cut with a lawnmower through a field of long grass, trampled by people for whom time is of the essence.
‘Come in,’ I shout. Diego comes in with a pot of tea and a reassuring orange mug. When I realise that I am relieved to see Diego, rather than Robert Bass, I know that the moment is lost. That is the thing with desire, it is all so amorphous. If we had come here together, there is no doubt that by now I would be involved in an adulterous relationship with a father from the school run. The moment would not have passed.
‘Shall I pour?’ he asks solicitously.
‘I’ll do it,’ I say.
‘Still no sign of Mr Bass,’ he says. ‘Just phone reception if you need anything else.’
It is one-thirty in the morning. How have I got here, I wonder? I look at my mobile phone in case he has sent a text. There is nothing. No missed calls. No messages. The first lesson for the amateur adulterer is therefore to arrive late. The second is to close the curtains and keep the lighting low. I have already made two mistakes because, in a rare show of punctuality, I have arrived early and am now staring out of the window with its plastic panes, wondering which route Robert Bass might adopt. The third lesson is to avoid conversation with the hotel staff but I have already fallen into that trap. I am now thinking about the flora and fauna in Costa Rica and considering its strengths as a family holiday destination when times are less lean.
I go and lie on the bed again but, actually, what I want to do is go home. Despite the air-conditioning the room is still so hot that my calves stick to the polyester bedcover. It is a shiny, green-and-purple mass of interlocking shapes that makes me feel dizzy if I look at it for too long. The carpet is in a different shade of green, slightly deeper, and the bedside lamps are purple. I have heard Emma talk about this hotel so many times wi
th such affection and yet I feel nothing of what she has described.
‘It’s so louche,’ she told us. ‘Like a French film. Everyone has a secret to hide, this heavy lustful air hangs over everything. It’s the ideal backdrop for uninhibited sex.’
But I can relate to none of this. Instead, I think of a conversation that Tom and I had after the party.
‘You know, I think Deep Shallows fancies you,’ said Tom, just after I woke up at five o’clock in the morning. He was lying on his side, leaning on an elbow, one hand resting on my buttocks.
‘You look a bit rough,’ he said, as I groaned. My drinking habits were getting out of control, and after Tom had gone to bed I had sat in the garden and smoked the last two cigarettes. I stuck my leg out of the bed and put one foot firmly on the ground to stop the spinning sensation.
‘Why do you think that?’ I asked, trying to pull myself together.
‘The way he avoided you at that party, the way he looks at you, the way he always puts his arm round his wife when he sees me watching, as though he wants to underline the fact that he is interested in her,’ he said.
‘Well, it’s not true,’ I said a little too defensively. ‘He’s happily married.’
‘Being happily married doesn’t preclude finding other people attractive,’ Tom said not unreasonably. ‘Do you find him attractive?’
‘He’s not unattractive,’ I said.
‘That wasn’t the question,’ said Tom. ‘Do you fancy him?’
‘Do you find other women attractive?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘Mostly when Arsenal win. Stop trying to avoid the question in hand.’
‘So, have you ever been tempted?’ I asked him.
‘The thought has crossed my mind on occasion,’ Tom said. ‘I’m only human. But there’s a big difference between thinking about doing something and actually doing it.’
‘What precisely?’ I ask.
‘The difference between fucking someone and not fucking them, Lucy. Don’t be so guileless,’ he said.
‘Do you think there’s such a thing as emotional adultery?’ I asked him.
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
‘Do you think that if you spend too much time thinking about having sex with someone who isn’t your husband or wife, then you are committing a form of adultery?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘That is absurd. If you spent a lot of time with someone, thinking that you would like to have sex with them, then that is more dangerous territory, because it means that both of you are looking to create a circumstance where something could happen.’
‘So have you ever come close?’ I asked.
‘This was meant to be a conversation about you, not me,’ he said.
‘You didn’t answer the question,’ I said.
‘Well, neither did you,’ he replied.
‘We’re allowed one question each,’ I tell him. ‘Me first. Have you ever been tempted?’
‘There was a situation,’ he said. ‘In Italy. I went out for a drink one night with Kate and when we got back to the hotel she asked me if I wanted to go up to her room.’
‘So did you?’ I asked.
‘You’ve asked your question,’ he said. ‘Now it’s my turn. Do you fancy Deep Shallows?’
‘Sometimes, especially when the weather is hot,’ I said. ‘So what did you say to her?’
‘I told her that it wasn’t a good idea,’ he said. ‘Because it isn’t. And then I went to my room. Alone. To be honest, I’m glad that stage of the library is resolved and temptation is out of the way.’
‘But how do you resist temptation?’ I asked.
‘You think about all the good things about me and ignore the rest: I’m a good father, I don’t play golf every weekend, I don’t make passes at your girlfriends, I’m relatively solvent. You think about how you don’t want to become another middle-aged cliché. Infidelity is a bad habit to get into in your forties. Otherwise you might end up like Deep Shallows.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Serial adulterer. It’s written all over him,’ he said.
There is a knock on the door, a single, sharp knock that makes me jump.
‘Come in,’ I shout a little too loudly. Robert Bass looks around the edge of the door and comes into the room. He closes it behind him and then leans against it, panting, his familiar green cycling helmet in one hand, his hair wild. I imagine he spent at least thirty seconds running his fingers through his hair to achieve this look of tousled abandon. He is eating some sort of muesli health bar.
‘Slow-release carbohydrate,’ he says, wiping his forehead with his sleeve and smiling.
‘Is something chasing you?’ I ask. He smiles weakly.
‘No, I’m exhausted from cycling so fast, I thought you might have left,’ he says. He is sweating profusely. ‘Sorry I’m so late. God, I’m so hot, it must be about thirty degrees out there.’
He comes over to the bed and sits on the corner, on top of the triangle of blankets and sheets that Diego pulled back. His T-shirt is damp with sweat. He leans over to kiss me.
‘Have you done this before?’ I ask, shrinking away from him. He looks a little disconcerted at my line of questioning.
‘No,’ he says, sitting up. ‘Why?’
‘You seem quite professional,’ I say.
‘What do you mean?’ he asks.
‘You knew about this hotel,’ I say.
‘Everyone knows about this hotel,’ he replies. ‘You knew about it. I haven’t come here for an inquisition, not from you anyway, I get enough of those from my wife,’ he says, wiping new pools of sweat from his brow.
‘What about?’ I ask. He looks at me cagily.
‘The usual stuff. And then some more. Mostly about the fact that I don’t earn enough money for her to cut back on work. Look, I’m not really in this for the conversation.’
‘Why don’t you have a bath?’ I suggest, pointing to the small door wedged between two wardrobes. I can’t understand why hotel rooms have such big wardrobes when most people have so little luggage.
‘I might just do that,’ he says, going into the bathroom. His head pops round the door. ‘Do you fancy joining me?’
‘I think I’ll listen to the end of this programme about the life cycle of Amazonian ferns,’ I say. ‘It’s very interesting.’ He looks at me dubiously and goes into the bathroom.
When I am sure that I am alone again I take a deep breath and lean against the wardrobe. It creaks and wobbles precariously. I cannot believe that I am in a hotel room in Bloomsbury with Robert Bass expecting to have sex with me. Although I have imagined this scene many times over the past year, now that it is about to materialise, I am utterly disengaged from the process.
This is not what I want. For the first time in almost a year, I feel absolutely certain about something. I cannot believe that I have come this far. I put it down to a combination of his persuasive powers, the alcohol and something more indefinable: the urge to do something reckless. Sometimes you have to get to the point of no return to know exactly where you are going. I realise that it was the illusion rather than the reality of escape that I wanted.
He leaves the door open, and when I am sure that he is in the bath, I get up to leave. I decide not to tell him, in case he manages to divert me. In any case, I don’t want to see him naked in the bath.
The water stops and Robert Bass hums a Coldplay song. I switch off the radio but outside in the corridor I hear raised voices. I go over to the door and listen. There is the noise of someone running, then a woman starts shouting, a male voice joins in, and a door bangs and then opens again. I poke my head round the door in case someone needs help.
The room opposite is open and the noise is definitely coming from inside. I tiptoe across the ugly, worn carpet and walk into room 508.
There are three people standing there. At first they don’t notice me in the doorway. This gives me time to absorb the fact that I recognise all of them.
They are all talking at once, in raised voices, using clumsy hand gestures to illustrate different points. When they see me standing there, they fall silent, their bodies still, even though their hands are raised in the air in awkward positions that must make their muscles ache. A triptych of ashen faces, their expressions frozen, stare at me.
‘Lucy Sweeney, what the fuck have you done?’ says Guy angrily, without moving from his position on the right side of the double bed. The buttons of his shirt are undone and his trousers hang around his hips, unzipped and crumpled. I hope he was in the process of undressing rather than dressing. His arms are by his side, his fists angrily clenched. The shirtsleeves fall down over his hands. He is looking for somewhere to channel his anger.
‘This has nothing to do with her,’ shout Emma and Isobel simultaneously. But this is the only harmonious moment during the next torturous hour that we spend in this room.
‘Lucy, thank God you’re here,’ says Emma, as though this was something that we planned together. She looks relieved to see me. ‘It’s not going according to plan.’ Obviously Emma thinks that I am here because of her. It wouldn’t occur to her that my presence relates to something going on in my own life.
‘I’ve come to the end of the trail,’ explains Isobel, without removing her gaze from Emma. There is a hint of pride in her voice but she sounds exhausted. I know that she is ruthlessly assessing the woman in front of her, wondering what Emma offers that she can’t deliver. I want to tell her that this is a mistake, that trying to compare a wife of ten years with a mistress of one year is a pointless debate, weighted entirely in favour of the new girlfriend. The fact that Isobel probably has a better body than Emma, who I don’t think has ever been near a gym in her life, is irrelevant. Emma has novelty on her side. Time makes people more critical of each other, they lose their mystique, wives become nags, and husbands become moody.
‘It’s like comparing St Paul’s cathedral with the Gherkin,’ I say. ‘One is old and familiar, the other new and exciting. The question is, which one will endure?’