by David Szalay
When he appears in the doorway, frowsy and thunder-faced, Heather says, ‘Oh there you are. I was just about to wake you up. We’re going.’ She sounds drunk.
‘Well, I’m up,’ he says. ‘All right, Martin?’
Martin just nods. He is looking through some photos.
Joan brings Paul a coffee, and he sits down. Martin is looking through the photos – which are of Mike and Joan’s narrow-boat holiday – as if they were the most interesting things he has ever seen, examining each one for ten or twenty seconds. Paul enjoys his obvious unease and embarrassment. He should not have showed up there. It turns out, however, that Heather more or less invited him in. She phoned to say that they were leaving soon, and since he was sitting in his car two streets away, she suggested – with voluble encouragement from her parents – that he join them.
It is nightfall when they leave. Heather, Paul notes, is totally drunk. When they finally slip onto the M25 near Staines, it is night. Not long after this, however, they have to pull over onto the hard shoulder. Heather falls out. In silence, Oliver and Marie watch her stagger towards the undergrowth, while Paul and Martin sit in their seat belts, staring straight ahead. She has not made much of an effort to hide herself, and waves of headlights wash her squatting form. ‘Sorry about this,’ Paul mutters. Martin – keeping an impudent eye on her in the mirror – says nothing. This offish silence, and the way in which he is openly staring at her, make Paul furious. In a quiet voice he says, ‘What did you get up to this afternoon then?’ Still staring at Heather as she wobbles towards the car, Martin just shakes his head.
Thereafter, an icy silence sets in until he parks the Saab in Stoneham Road. Heather is asleep, and when Paul tries to wake her, she shrugs him off. As soon as Oliver and Marie were out, she slid into a horizontal position, and now seems intent on staying there. They wait on the pavement looking nervous while Paul, in an increasingly savage whisper, tries to persuade her to disembark. Standing next to them, Martin wears a look of extreme, sober seriousness, like a politician on TV in the midst of a natural disaster. Squashing herself into the leather of the seat, Heather shoves Paul with a stockinged foot – her shoes have fallen off – and he hisses, ‘For fuck’s sake, get out.’ He takes her arm and tries to pull her into a sitting position, but she wrestles it free and slithers further in. He sighs and stands up, with a sort of shrug. For a moment, humiliated and at a loss, he just stands there. Then he fumbles the house keys from his pocket and hands them to Oliver. ‘Mum’s not well,’ he says. ‘We’ll be along in a minute. Go inside.’ Without a word, Oliver takes the keys, and he and Marie walk away – Marie looking over her shoulder.
In the few seconds that this has taken, Martin has insinuated himself into the situation – perched on the ledge of the seat, leaning into the car, he seems to be whispering something to Heather. Paul wonders what to do. It does not seem to be Martin’s place to try and wheedle her out – except that it is his vehicle and he, Paul, has already tried and failed – and the impulse to seize his suede shoulder and say, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ quickly evaporates in the face of these observations, and of Paul’s weariness and wish to end this situation as quickly as possible. He looks along the quiet, terraced street.
Something seems to be happening, some sort of movement, and for a nightmarish moment he thinks that Martin is kissing her. Then he withdraws slowly from the interior and sighs. ‘She’s been sick,’ he says.
They stand there.
‘Look, I’m sorry, Martin,’ Paul says. Martin, touching his palms tenderly together, seems to be pondering something. Paul assumes – wrongly – that it is something to do with the vomit in his spotless Saab. ‘I really am,’ he says. ‘We’ll pay for it to be valet-cleaned. You know …’ Seemingly lost in thought, Martin shakes his head. Paul wonders whether he is dismissing the offer. Martin sighs again – a great heaved sigh; he is shaking his head with a sort of weighty sorrow. Suddenly wanting a cigarette, Paul takes one out of his pocket, and is about to light it, when it occurs to him that Martin’s pensive, sorrowful immobility may just be a matter of waiting for him to deal with the situation, so he shoves the cigarette into his pocket and hurriedly inserts his head into the now sourly unpleasant-smelling interior of the Saab. ‘Come on, Heather,’ he says. ‘Let’s go. You’ve puked up in Martin’s car.’
Very pale, she sits up. For a moment she does not move. Her face is expressionless and at the same time utterly miserable. Slowly, in silence, she manoeuvres her way to the open door and steps out, moving past Paul as though he were not there. ‘Your shoes …’ he says.
She is already walking away, tiptoeing with drunken single-mindedness in a wavy line up Lennox Road. It is Paul’s turn to sigh now, fiercely. He stoops into the car and takes her shoes. One of them has vomit in it. While he is doing this, Martin is watching Heather walk away. And he is about to speak, to say something, when standing up, holding her soiled shoes, Paul speaks first. He says, ‘I’m sorry, Martin. I really am. We’ll be in touch, all right?’
Martin just nods, and Paul starts to walk away.
‘Paul.’
He turns. ‘What?’
Martin is not even looking at him. He is staring at a spot on the pavement, with a strange little smile on his face.
‘Look, we’ll be in touch,’ Paul says, and walks on, only stopping momentarily when he is some way off to turn and shout, ‘Thanks for the lift.’
He waits for Heather in the kitchen from first light. In fact, he is in the garden when she emerges. Through the window, he sees her enter the kitchen with her tawny hair trailing over her face. Her face is lifeless and ugly. With a final leaf through the notes in his head – fizzing with indignation, he has spent the night preparing this talk – he opens the door and steps inside.
‘I’m frightened of him, Paul,’ she says.
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m frightened of him.’
‘Who?’ She says nothing. ‘Martin?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you mean you’re frightened of him?’
‘He won’t leave me alone,’ she says, her eyes shining. This is not what he expected. ‘He won’t stop pestering me! I don’t know what to do. I told him he shouldn’t take us to London. He wouldn’t listen. He’s mad.’
Paul steals a look at the text of his speech; it seems to have been overtaken by events.
‘He just won’t leave me alone. He won’t stop phoning me.’
‘You shouldn’t encourage him.’
‘I know. I know.’ She starts to sob.
‘You encourage him.’
‘I know. I don’t know what to do.’
‘What do you mean he won’t stop phoning you?’
‘He phones me ten times a day. I have to switch my phone off. He wants to see me all the time …’
‘He wants to see you?’
‘Yes!’ She is tearful. ‘Why do you think he took us to London? He just wanted to see me. I said I couldn’t. So he said he’d drive us to London. He insisted.’
‘Why didn’t you tell him you didn’t want him to?’
‘I did. He wouldn’t listen. He’s mad. He’s mad …’
‘What about Friday night?’ Paul says.
‘Friday night?’ She doesn’t seem to follow.
‘He drove you home from the Metropole.’
‘Yes?’
‘You said he was there with someone else …’
‘No, that’s not true! He wasn’t there. He phoned me. He wanted to see me. I told him he couldn’t. He asked me where I was – he said he’d come and get me when I wanted to leave. I told him not to. But he came anyway. I’m frightened of him, Paul.’
‘What do you mean you’re frightened? Why are you frightened? What’s he done?’
‘It’s not what he’s done …’
‘Why are you frightened?’
‘He’s … He’s …’ She is shaking her head.
‘Has he threatened you?’
‘No.
No.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘Maybe I’m just being silly.’
‘You should just ignore him,’ Paul says.
‘I know.’
‘Stop encouraging him. Tell him you don’t want to see him.’
She nods.
‘And if he still won’t leave you alone …’ She is staring at the floor. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘we might have to …’ Hearing one of the doors open upstairs, he stops. ‘You know.’ She looks up haggardly for a moment. Then, wiping her eyes on the rose towelling of her sleeve, starts to take things out of the fridge and transfer them to the table.
‘You should just ignore him,’ Paul says.
She ignores him.
‘Do you want me to have a word with him?’
She says nothing.
Smoking in the garden once more, he feels shamed and furious with himself for ignoring his instinct, throughout Sunday, to punch Martin in the mouth. Yes, he should have punched him in the mouth, and sod the consequences. Should have done something. Next time, he promises himself, he will.
18
‘HELLO, PAUL?’
The voice is very familiar, but he does not immediately recognise it. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Martin here.’
‘Martin …’ Paul is unable to hide his surprise. For a moment he is perplexed, and Martin says nothing. There was something strange about his voice – an urgent, suppressed intensity. Still he is silent. Paul suspects that this is about the vomit. Tiresome. He says, ‘Um …’
Simultaneously, though, Martin starts to speak. ‘I really hope you’re strong enough to take this, Paul,’ he says.
I’m going to be sacked, Paul thinks.
So when Martin says, ‘I’ve just been with Heather,’ it seems a puzzling non sequitur.
What? Paul wonders. Heather? Why?
He quickly surmises that something must have happened to her. Even – his mind makes the sickening leap – that she is dead. I really hope you’re strong enough to take this, Paul. And how will he tell the children that their mother is dead? ‘What is it?’ he says quietly.
‘Paul, we’re having an affair. We’re in love.’ A pause. ‘Yes.’
Paul says nothing.
‘Yes,’ Martin says again, in a more sadly sympathetic tone, though still unable entirely to suppress the note of satisfaction. ‘For a few months now. Since, um –’ said as though looking it up in a diary – ‘since January.’
Expecting Paul to have something to say at this point, he waits for a moment, and then – when Paul still does not speak – his voice tilts unsurely, and he evinces for the first time a hint of embarrassment. ‘So, um.’
Standing in the lounge in his uniform, Paul is tempted to hang up and pretend that nothing has happened. Make his supper, watch television …
Martin is impatient. ‘She told me things haven’t been going too well between you,’ he says. ‘That’s what she told me. Is that true?’
‘I don’t think that’s any of your business, Martin,’ Paul says. It seems like a long time since he has spoken, and he is surprised to hear his voice – its stony, perfectly level tone.
‘No, I know.’ Martin seems to take the point – until a moment later, when he says, ‘It’s just that she told me –’
Paul interrupts him. ‘I don’t think it’s any of your business.’
‘No,’ Martin says. ‘No.’ And he sighs, obviously peeved.
‘Why are you calling me?’
‘Why am I calling you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I wanted to tell you,’ he says, as though it were obvious. ‘I thought you’d want to know. This is … It’s a fucked-up situation,’ he says. ‘I don’t like it. I’m sure you don’t. I want to see if there’s any way we can sort it out. It’s a fucked-up situation.’ Swearing is not like him – he is using the expression to show how serious he is. He is silent for a moment. He does not seem satisfied with the way things are going; and as if deciding to tear up what they have said so far and start again, he says – not without petulance – ‘Look, if I could just ask. What’s going on with you and Heather? I mean, what exactly is going on? Because she told me –’
‘Look, it’s none of your business, Martin. Thank you very much for your call. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you.’
He puts the phone down.
He is trembling. Trembling quite violently. In a form of trance – with an absent-minded expression on his face – he steps into the hall and quietly shuts the front door. (In his hurry to pick up the phone, he had left it open.) The situation, of course, does not feel particularly real. It was important for him to hang up on Martin, to be the one to end their talk, on his terms, ensuring that he had the last word, but now he is dissatisfied. Perhaps he should have asked Martin some questions – his head is loud with them now. Distractedly, in the middle of this mob of questions, he undertakes a first skimming survey of the previous few months, and finds them solid with evidence. The only strange thing is his surprise. Or perhaps not. It is, he thinks, strange that it should be Martin. Martin, of all people. Still trembling, he finds himself wandering through the house. He steps into the garden. He stands in the lounge.
It seems like some awful joke. Of course, Martin has long taken an obvious interest in Heather – making an obliging handyman of himself at the slightest murmur of need; lugging in the unwieldy apparatus for unblocking the drain; regrouting the shower while Paul watched snooker downstairs; passing hours in futile tinkering under the bonnet of her car. And Paul had quite liked having Martin as his handyman. He had always understood his motivation, of course – even Heather had stopped pretending that she did not see that – and to be so openly and extravagantly helpful to her sometimes seemed to verge on insolence, to be a direct expression of desire at which Paul might be expected to do something. If he did not, it was because he never saw Martin as any sort of threat. He was a joke. They all laughed at him – even the kids, even to his face sometimes – and Heather laughed most of all. In fact, laughing at Martin seemed to have become one of the mainstays of their own life together, one of the subjects to which they were able to turn for affirmation of what they shared – a way of asserting that they were akin, homogenous, members of a tiny tribe; because what they mocked in him were the many ways in which he seemed to differ from them – his obsession with high-tech novelty, his fondness for soft rock, his ineffably holier-than-thou aversion to alcohol, his love of whitewater rafting … And they had laughed – how they had laughed – at his smitten willingness to perform services for her. Paul even found his efforts to please quite touching. They seemed maladroit, naive, innocent, harmless – and because of this, incidents which would otherwise have made him suspicious met with no more than an indulgent laugh. Martin’s tie turning up in the sofa, for example. Paul did not know at first that it was his – he simply found a mysterious tie in the sofa. When Heather said, without hesitation, that it was Martin’s, everything seemed fine. If it had been someone else’s – Nigel the solicitor’s, say, for whom she worked at Gumley Rhodes – Paul would have spun all sorts of suspicious scenarios from its silk and polyester mix. As it was, he just laughed. Over tea, Martin had taken off his tie, and forgotten it. Paul handed it back to him himself while they waited for Heather on Easter Day. The sudden jump in the number of her evenings out might also have raised questions in his mind (and indeed he had questioned this sudden surge in her social life), but he did not suspect, ever, that the explanation might lie in her having an affair with Martin. Not even when he saw her, last Friday night, getting out of his car. How was it possible that he had not seen what was happening? And Easter Day … A ‘fucked-up’ situation indeed – one that was in front of his face, and that he had still somehow failed to see. Is he really such a fool? When he thinks about that day now – and he goes through it with the minute care of a chimp going through another chimp’s hair for nits – he understands that Martin, in his own mind, would already have taken possession of Heather, and that from his point
of view it would thus have been Paul, paunchy and half asleep in the seat next to him, who was the interloper, not himself. And Paul had had an unpleasant premonition of the truth, shambling downstairs that afternoon, to find Martin in the Willisons’ lounge; he had seen them together – Heather, her parents, the children, and Martin – and had felt for a moment, with a frisson of exclusion that he, and not Martin, was the outsider there.
He tries Heather’s phone.
It is switched off.
Then, feeling a terrible need to leave the house, he walks out into the trembling streets. He does not see where he is going. Later, finding himself leg-weary, he waits for a bus on the Old Shoreham Road. He has walked as far as Mile Oak.
He is intensely impatient to hear what Heather will have to say for herself. What will she have to say for herself? In the lounge, still trembling a little, he punches her number into the phone.
She picks up immediately. ‘Hello?’ she says. She sounds frightened.
‘It’s me.’
‘Hello.’
‘I’ve spoken to Martin.’
Silence.
‘He told me everything.’
When she still says nothing, he says, matter-of-factly, ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m in town. I’ll come home. Paul …’
‘Okay, I’ll see you at home.’
And for the second time that day he indulges in the satisfying violence of putting the phone down on someone as they speak. For a long time, he does not move. He looks lost in thought. In fact, his mind is empty. The Claymore seems futile somehow, but he takes it out – with its underdesigned, over-Scottish label, thistles and fluttering tartan – and pours himself some anyway. It tastes of watery alcohol with sharp overtones of sour vomit and a desultory smokiness, its lukewarmth somehow slightly sickening in itself.