Lie With Me

by Sabine Durrant

  ‘I’ll ignore that,’ I said, bringing the book back to the sofa and sitting down. The cat slunk off the cushion and joined me, nudging to get on to my knee. I held the book above its body and turned the pages with reverence.

  ‘Gussie,’ Alice said. ‘The cat, I mean.’

  I felt I could hardly breathe, in case I damaged the pages. ‘It’s signed,’ I said.

  Alice sighed. ‘He probably bid for it off eBay. He was susceptible to extravagant impulses, was Harry.’

  A note in her voice made me put the book down, carefully to one side of me, and look at her. Her eyes had a glassy aspect. ‘Have it,’ she said. ‘Go on. It’s yours.’

  I pretended not to hear. ‘Do you miss him?’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘I’ve forgotten what it felt like to be held . . .’

  A stutter in the atmosphere between us, a faltering. The room darkened. A noise against the window, a splatter of rain, as if someone had thrown a handful of small stones at the glass.

  Alice shook her head and laughed. ‘I’m not a nun. By him, I mean. I’ve forgotten what it felt like to be held by him.’

  She kept her eyes on the carpet. After a few minutes, I tipped the cat gently off my knee, and made the worst mistake of my life: I unzipped the silver-grey running top to her navel, pushed aside the rather nasty nylon material to expose her surprisingly bra-less breasts, and pulled her towards me.

  Chapter Five

  The following week I moved back in with my mother. I can’t help thinking things might have been different if I hadn’t.

  The railway cottage in East Sheen, where I had grown up, had changed very little over the years – the same threadbare carpet, the same lingering smell of cabbage, the same trains rattling out the back. My father had gone, of course – a heart attack delivering pastoral care at Wandsworth Prison, where he was chaplain – and my mother had made certain improvements to my tiny single room: a pine shelf, with puny brackets, ‘for your books’, a new lamp from BHS (‘Ta-da’) and above the single bed, a framed copy of the review that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of Annotations, the paper yellowing with age behind the glass. It had always been stifling at home – the weight of my parents’ expectations, their oppressive pleasure in my success, my own gaping sense of failure. But now the atmosphere was heightened – my mother warily cheerful in the face of my encroaching sense of suffocation. As she warmed us ‘a couple of nice lamb chops’ while maintaining a constant stream of chatter – she had taken the faulty kettle back to Dickins & Jones and had been served by a lovely girl (‘black but couldn’t have been nicer’); nice Jenny, from church, had offered to host next month’s WI, ‘which is a relief because of my knee’ – it was immediately apparent desperate measures were called for.

  ‘All those bags of stuff you’ve got in the attic,’ she fussed over dessert, a Tesco apple crumble with Bird’s custard. ‘I thought I might bring them down.’

  ‘Leave them there. It’s fine.’

  ‘Or maybe, as you’re so busy, I might sort through them.’

  ‘No,’ I said abruptly. ‘Don’t touch anything of mine.’

  That night, as I sat with her in the front room, watching a ghastly soap opera she described as ‘one of my programmes’ – I ran through my list of contacts. In the past, I’d always found something to save me – a colleague or cohort needing a house-sit, a girlfriend wanting more of me, the generosity of other peoples’ parents I had carefully charmed. In extremis, Michael had bailed me out, but now the twins had taken occupancy of his spare room. For the first time in fifteen years, I felt trapped, forced to face my own demons.

  Until this moment I had given no further thought to Alice. One night had been enough to satisfy whatever had drawn me to her in the first place. But as the soap opera finished and my mother changed the channel for a detective show set in the 1950s, I began to think about her. The sex had been enjoyable enough. The house was warm and comfortable. I’d got a free book. (I had sold it to one of the posher dealers in the Charing Cross Road for £500. It would have been more but there was a mug ring on the back cover.) And there was always the daughter’s imminently empty bedroom to consider.

  In the ad break I slipped out to the kitchen on the pretence of making tea. She answered, sounding pleased, and we arranged to meet the following week – supper at a fashionable bistro in Clapham.

  That first proper date was not cheap (she insisted on the “taster menu”), but I treated it as an investment. I courted her. I courted her hard. I figured out what formula would work best and applied it, decided what buttons to push and pushed them. The way she had confronted me with my bad-boy image at Andrew Edmunds had been as sexually charged as foreplay – she was clearly aroused, like many women, by a bastard. But she had made it obvious, too, that she liked an underdog, and put her faith in the goodness of the human spirit. Over that first dinner, I eked out a sob story about a woman who had broken my heart at college (‘No, not Florrie’), and my subsequent fear of being hurt, my issues (of course) with commitment. We said goodbye chastely in the street afterwards, but the next morning, I sent flowers, with a carefully composed message (‘Thank you for being different’), followed up by texts, increasingly flirtatious in tone. (It was so lovely to spend time with you . . . Can’t stop thinking about you . . . Mrs Mackenzie: do you realise the effect you have had on me? . . . Come to bed with me, please.)

  It took me two weeks and two more dates to win her over properly, to bring that final plea to fruition. Over that period I convinced her that she had affected me creatively as well as emotionally. I confessed my writing had been blocked until meeting her and that for the first time in years I felt in touch with real emotions. I was working hard in the London Library every day, finishing the manuscript for which breath in publishing circles was now bated. I pumped out the clichés, and watched as she absorbed them all, marking how she took responsibility for this reincarnation of my abilities and energy.

  A certain amount of ducking and diving was needed to maintain my credibility. She had no idea I had left Lamb’s Conduit Street. Or that a small creditor problem – certain bar bills it had become urgent to avoid – kept me out of Soho. I had lost my free pass to the London Library, too, now Alex had returned and requisitioned it. Instead, I spent my days browsing the books sections of south London’s charity shops, or drinking tea in Bun in the Oven, a cheap cafe at the end of Sheen Lane. To cover my tracks, I made sure Alice and I met exclusively in Clapham – a tactic I presented as thoughtfulness. It gave her time to nip home to freshen up, or check on ‘GCSE coursework’ (I even had the lingo down pat). I let her know ‘kitchen suppers’ were fine by me too. ‘You are understanding,’ she said, throwing together pasta puttanesca or chicken cacciatore (she was a wonderful cook). ‘I don’t like to leave the kids too many nights in a row.’ In reality, although I soon palled of teenage sulkiness across the table, I was delighted to avoid spending money. Dating a woman of her standing was not cheap. There was one tricky moment, for example, when I realised she was assuming I would accompany her to the Finding Jasmine benefit: at £90 a head! I found myself inventing a godchild’s birthday to get out of it.

  My target may initially have been that spare room – by September I planned to be close enough to Alice (maybe as a sort of friend with benefits) to take it over organically, for it to be the natural next step. But as the early weeks of our relationship went by, the idea of something more permanent began to take form. I imagined myself perhaps not her husband but master of the house – of her feather-down king-sized duvet, her claw-foot bath, her stocked fridge, her cat. I mused idly on the subject of Harry’s life insurance. Her kids were a pain – a sweaty, hulking fug of grunts and hormones. But the thought was not unpleasant. I wasn’t in love with her. I looked at her objectively, and noticed her age: the tight lines across her brows, the cross-hatching to the side of her eyes. It was a complicated desire, maybe a mental captivation rather than a physical one, to do with her energy, her co
nfidence, her ability to sort the most complicated of plans or problems. When she took a call from a colleague at her law firm, or from one of her many pressure groups (Women Against This, Lawyers For That), I would feel aroused just listening to her. The sheer competence of the woman took my breath away.

  And there was something else, too, enflaming me, something more sensitive, to do with a certain unattainability, a nagging sense even during intercourse that she was holding back. She seemed keen enough – she asked earnestly after my ‘oeuvre’ and laughed at my jokes, took off her clothes at my request, revealing a pale, limpid body, with stretch marks prettily etched across her stomach and a full crop of pubic hair. What she didn’t do, despite all my efforts, was reach orgasm – a penetrating blow to my amour propre. Once I had returned to bed, having disposed of the condom, she made satisfied noises and nuzzled her face into my neck, sighing as if she were replete. One night I decided to confront it head-on (so to speak). I propped myself on my elbows and gazed down into her half-closed crescent eyes. ‘Your turn,’ I said, about to go down. ‘No excuses.’

  But she wriggled out from under me, swivelling sideways, tugging at the duvet, until she was sitting, hunched, on the side of the bed. She pulled a worn towelling dressing gown over her shoulders. ‘I don’t any more,’ she said flatly. ‘It’s not that I don’t enjoy it – I do, I love it all – but I don’t come.’

  ‘Perhaps it would be . . . easier . . . more satisfying for you if you were on the pill?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s guilt, I think.’

  ‘Harry,’ I said. I closed my eyes. ‘Of course. Poor Alice.’

  I peppered her neck with kisses until she squirmed away, laughing. Her bedroom – a sluttish room, scattered with discarded clothes and jewellery, fairy lights and dusty candles – had an ensuite bathroom, which she wandered into. I could hear her peeing. I threw myself back into the pillows, arms crossed above my head, chest expanding, and made light of it. ‘All the more for me,’ I think I said. But I thought about Harry: a big, solid, dead man in the well of her bed. And I felt a hard, gritty resolution form, a vow that one day soon not only would I have her, I’d have her completely.

  The house in Pyros hadn’t been mentioned since the night we first slept together, but I hadn’t forgotten her vague invitation. It was a slow thought at the back of my mind that I would spend the summer with her there and that, on our return to Clapham, she would ask me to move in. Greece was a major part of my campaign.

  It was an encounter with Andrew that first made me falter.

  Alice, I was always aware, saw a lot of Andrew. They met up both professionally and socially. (It was Andrew who had gone with her in the end to the Finding Jasmine benefit.) I didn’t encounter him again for a while, but I was unpleasantly aware of his presence nevertheless. One Saturday, I found a silk-lined scarf on the back of a chair, which Alice said belonged to him. On another occasion, he had left an envelope on the kitchen table with forms for her to sign. I wondered a couple of times if I smelt his aftershave – Trumper’s West Indian Limes.

  I didn’t like it. He was a threat, one I would, sooner or later, have to do something about.

  It was early April when I saw him again. Alice and I had spent the afternoon in bed, with a bottle of wine and the Guardian crossword. Maskarade, a relatively new setter, had set the puzzle around Under Milk Wood, in celebration of the play’s anniversary. Alice, in playful mood, professed herself enchanted by my knowledge of the text and characters: Lily Smalls, Captain Cat, Nogood Boyo, etc. I began to show off – ‘Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs,’ I quoted, but she wasn’t taking me as seriously as I thought. ‘You’re my nogood boyo,’ she kept saying. ‘Aren’t you?’ She was tipsy enough to find it hysterical. ‘My nogood boyo.’

  I took it in good part at first. I kissed her. But as she went on, the joke (‘my nonononogood boyo’) seemed to be at my expense and I began to feel hot and scratchy. I got out of bed, with a huffy shuffle of the duvet, and pulled on my boxers before remembering I had nowhere much else to go. Doubly nettled, I rummaged for my cigarettes in the pocket of my discarded jeans and walked to the window. I hoiked open the sash.

  ‘Come back and shipwreck in my thighs,’ Alice cooed. She knew I was cross, but was making a play of not noticing.

  I sat on the ledge and lit up, using the curtain to protect my semi-nudity from the street below. I stared down. Fat wodges of white blossom clustered on the cherry tree. A thin sun reflected on the houses opposite, yellowing the brickwork, glancing off the glass. The shopping trolley had gone from the next-door garden. I remember wondering if the council had collected it, or whether it was still there, buried and disintegrated. I imagined triangular heaps of rust under the brambles, ants crawling. I wondered whether anything could ever be said completely to disappear. I took a few deep puffs, and watched the ash at the end of my Silk Cut lengthen into a precarious tube, before flicking it out.

  The silver-white dust floated on the air in tiny fragile lozenges. I noticed voices from below, the gate opening and people accumulating in the front garden. I jumped off the sill and peered down. They were hidden by the porch. Deep in the house, the doorbell rang.

  ‘Visitors,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Alice replied, pulling on the green sweater dress she had been wearing before I took it off. She thrust her bare feet into a pair of suede ankle books, and briskly threw her head forward and then back: a quick way she had of sorting out her hair. ‘Andrew, Tina and the gang – they’ve come for an early supper. Thought we’d have an Indian takeaway’

  She stood at the door and smiled at me, her head tipped to one side. She seemed sober now. ‘You coming?’

  When I didn’t answer, she left the room. I stayed where I was for a moment, feeling disconcerted, outwitted. I hadn’t met any of her other friends. We’d spent all our time alone. Why hadn’t she told me they were due?

  I could hear her voice, mingling with Andrew’s. Tina’s laugh, the sitting- room door opening and closing, footsteps descending to the kitchen.

  I got up and pulled on my trousers. My shirt was crumpled under the bed. The door to her wardrobe was open. Some of Harry’s clothes still hung there. I’d been through them before, and pocketed a couple of ties I liked the look of. Now I ran through the hangers until I found a shirt I liked: pale pink with a subtle textured pattern. The label read Charles Tyrwhitt. It was a little wide in the collar, but would do. I buttoned it up slowly.

  Tina saw me first. She was leaning against the Aga facing the door and I saw her eyes widen with surprise and also pleasure – I think about that moment quite a lot these days. She looked at Andrew and her expression tightened into something more cautious. ‘Paul!’ she said.

  Andrew was sitting at the table with his back to me. His head whipped round. In that split second I saw him take in the shirt and my bare feet. I saw him acknowledge that I had been in Alice’s bed, that there was something I could do with her (not a finance meeting, not a quick lunch) that he couldn’t.

  He made to stand up and tangled his feet in the feet of the chair. He swore and, rubbing his calf, hopped towards me, a small piece of theatre that gave him a moment to collect himself. ‘Old man!’ he said with exaggerated bonhomie. ‘Where’ve you come from?’

  ‘I was upstairs.’

  ‘Nice to see you.’

  I shook his hand, smiling into his face. ‘It’s been a while,’ I said.

  ‘Gosh, yes. But then here you are! Alice. You dark horse. How life moves on.’

  Alice was getting a six-pack of Coke out of the fridge. ‘Oh grow up, Andrew,’ she said, shutting the door with her elbow. She sounded annoyed. ‘We’re all adults here.’

  She noticed the shirt. ‘Oh,’ she said, flushing.

  ‘Do you mind? Mine was crumpled.’

  She shook her head, and turned away.

  In the garden, a tall, thin teenage boy with a stick in his hand was trying to whip the head off a tulip. A girl of a
bout seventeen, with very short hair, boyishly cut, in baggy jeans and sneakers, was sitting on a swing, a rotten old thing that dangled from the arm of an apple tree, scuffing the grass with her shoes to spin herself round.

  Tina, who was wearing a rather peculiar outfit, a big black linen dress like a depressed artist’s smock, saw me looking. ‘Our kids,’ she said, adjusting her hair, which was pulled back in a tortoiseshell clip. ‘Daisy and Archie.’

  Alice said to me: ‘Paul – you couldn’t go and round up my lot, could you?’

  I liked that – being given something to do. It showed Andrew I belonged.

  I ran upstairs, shouted at the boys to get out of their bedrooms and then took the last flight of steps up to Phoebe’s attic room. The door was ajar, and I was about to push it open when I saw her through a crack in the frame, and I paused, angling my head to see in. She was lying on the bed on her stomach looking at her laptop, bare feet in the air, her arse tight and round, her T-shirt twisted to reveal a strip of white skin across her lower back.

  I thought I had been quiet, but after a moment she said, ‘Coming,’ to let me know she knew I’d been spying, that she wasn’t to be underestimated.

  I’d have to watch her.

  Back in the kitchen, Alice had found a menu in a drawer and Andrew was writing down what people wanted. Dennis was nosing around and Andrew pushed his head away a couple of times, with an expression of distaste: not a dog-lover, then. (I made a fuss of him to show I was.) Alice seemed tense. She kept laughing and moving things: a pepper-pot, a newspaper. At one point she grabbed a child – Frank – and held on to him, one arm across his chest, almost for protection. Intriguing. I wondered if I was unnerving her, the adjustment of integrating her new flame with her old friends. Yes, possibly I was right. She kept giving me jobs to do: collecting cutlery, finding bottles of Beck’s, rummaging in the fridge for lime pickle and mango chutney and Hot Pepper Jelly (the woman had it all). I felt Andrew’s eyes on me the whole time.