‘What brings you to London?’ he asked. The man dunked down beside him, splashed water on his face.
‘Bit of business. The accountants seem to think I should buy something over here, to diversify a bit. Not so sure myself.’
Jeremy rinsed his goggles and put them back on his head. ‘Where are you looking?’
‘They showed me a place in Hill Street yesterday. Do you know that area?’
Jeremy nodded. Perhaps a longer conversation was in order.
‘A bit poky for seven million,’ the man continued, scratching his blotched forearm. ‘And not even a place to park the car.’
‘It sounds a lot, but that’s probably about right for Mayfair,’ said Jeremy and then, because he was on home ground and he knew how to play these things, ‘although you do need to be careful. I’ve got some pals in the property business. If you’re about in the dressing room after my swim, I’ll give you my card.’
Jeremy slid under the water before the man could reply. All the way down the pool, he tried to ignore the tiny pulse of excitement in his stomach and concentrated instead on lengthening his stroke and breathing correctly. Exhale strongly under the water. Turn your head, don’t lift it. Look for the pocket of air in your own bow wave. Inhale smoothly. At the end of each length, he made sure the man was still swimming in the lane two over, pleased to note he had an extremely crooked left overarm and a jerky leg action.
Later, walking up St James’s Street with Charlie Gibson’s card in his wallet, he felt almost cheerful. Jeremy had a positive feeling about the man and a new rich client would be a good thing. Well. More a splendid thing. No point in relying on the existing clients. No expansion there.
A two-minute Google search and his positive feeling was justified. Even with the downturn in China, Gibson owned vastly profitable mining leases in the Pilbara and, perhaps to insure himself against a slump in iron ore prices or hefty carbon emission taxes, was the majority shareholder in a seven-hundred-hectare algae farm in the Northern Territory. The company prospectus showed a picture of him wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a confident grin. Biofuels, he said, could well be the fossil fuels of the future.
During lunch at the Wolseley two days later, arranged by Jeremy, Gibson appeared awkward and clumsy, the kind of man who could walk down an empty street and find something to bump into. He lacked the patina of money, old or new. He couldn’t decide what to eat and when his first course, a tomato salad, arrived, he considered the cutlery for some time before picking up an implement. He was, thought Jeremy, the perfect potential client: enormously rich but just that bit gormless, needing only to be convinced that Jeremy’s investment fund was a better bet than Mayfair property.
‘How’s the flat hunting going?’ asked Jeremy.
‘There’s this place in South Audley Street,’ said Gibson, prodding his kedgeree. ‘A bit noisy though. You’d have to keep the windows closed. Not that the wife and I would want to spend much time here. We prefer Umbria. Got a place outside Arezzo. But the accountant says something in London would be no bad thing.’
Jeremy saw his opening and launched into a smooth and plausible sales pitch, speaking of possible tax savings, his insider knowledge of integrated commodities and currency swaps versus property investments. He saved the bit about the reduced commission on large investments until last.
‘That may come in handy,’ said Gibson. ‘We’ll have to talk about that later. When I can concentrate. It’s hard to think in London, so much noise and traffic everywhere. Every time I call home, the wife says she can hardly hear what I’m saying over the sirens. I’ll have a think about it on the way back to Perth.’
Jeremy was trying to tempt him with a sure tip on coffee futures when Gibson interrupted him.
‘Where do you live?’ he asked.
‘In Chelsea,’ Jeremy said. ‘On a houseboat, on the river.’
Gibson spent some time dabbing the corners of his mouth with a napkin.
‘Why would you want to live somewhere like that?’
‘Actually,’ said Jeremy, ‘I quite like it.’
‘It must stink at low tide,’ Gibson said, easing his shirt collar. His neck was chafed and raw. His eyes darted around the room and fixed on the upstairs balcony table. ‘Should we be up there?’ he asked Jeremy.
‘I think down here is just as good, if not better,’ Jeremy replied smoothly. ‘We can see everything or everyone who needs to be seen.’ He swallowed his slow-cooked lamb. It was good, but he wasn’t that hungry. He seemed to feel full so quickly these days. Or maybe the meals were getting larger. He noted that his guest had barely touched the kedgeree.
‘Not to your liking?’ Jeremy asked.
Gibson scratched his neck. ‘I thought I’d try something different. Should have stuck to the tried and true. Something you can identify on the plate. No offence, of course.’
‘None taken,’ smiled Jeremy. ‘Let’s keep in touch. I get down south every now and then.’
Two weeks later, when Gibson replied to one of Jeremy’s emails saying he would be in Hong Kong for ten days, Jeremy decided to go courting again. He arranged a meeting and asked his secretary to book flights and hotels.
‘Just for two nights,’ he said. ‘It’s that kind of town.’ He was confident he didn’t need any more time to hook Gibson. On the plane, he swallowed a Valium just after take-off and slept for eight hours. For the remaining time, he stared out the window into nothing. He wanted this to work. He needed his luck to change.
Chapter 29
Penny lay in the bath until her hands and feet were wrinkled like prunes. She would be clean, but nothing more. She would wear her acceptable-in-all-places linen trousers, the ones she’d bought on sale in London, and an old blue top. She would not blow-dry her hair or paint her face for him. Most definitely she would not shave her legs.
She could not let the thought of him go. The fine dusting of hair on his arms, his brown eyes, that sudden sight of him reading his book in the café, jotting something important in his notepad. His interesting mind. His body.
His body. Penny didn’t want to think about his body. The slow swooping, the gasping, the shuddering, the pleasure and the sweet sucking noise when the two bodies separated. She wouldn’t think about it. It was behind her. She had put it behind her. It was worrying, though, how clear the memories were, of the wanting, then the wanting becoming the needing.
His questions. How disconcerting it was to be expected to talk about herself. Conversations with men, as she remembered them, were mostly epic monologues of unremitting boredom. She’d never minded. All that was expected of her was a sympathetic nod, an occasional question and then the drone would start up again. It was peaceful to be left alone, to be able to think of the garden, books still to read, lists of things to do.
It had been different with Sandy, because she had loved him and their early life together. His private self, his essential sweetness, she’d found interesting. His exterior less so. Penny knew Sandy much better than he knew her because Sandy was never interested in her, only in what she thought of him.
Even during their most recent conversation, when Sandy rang on the pretext of asking how she was after the robbery, she knew it was something else he wanted. She had barely finished telling him that after the first fearful night back in the house she was perfectly all right when there was the familiar hesitant cough, the break in his voice. Then, with no preamble, out came everything: how he had trusted Jeremy and how betrayed he felt.
‘I’m sorry, so sorry,’ she said and meant it. As she listened, there was also a sense of detached satisfaction that he had turned to her after everything, that Sandy considered her to be his true friend; a feeling so different from the anger that had engulfed her when she read Jeremy’s email about the failed suicide bid, and the subsequent anger against Jeremy for betraying Sandy.
Penny couldn’t understand the change in herself at first. But that afternoon, digging in the garden in an attempt to calm herself before dinn
er with Robert, a three-word chorus had come into her head and would not leave. If. Only. Might. If only Sandy had been more open, everything might have been different. If only she had been more sensitive, he might have cleaved to her instead of Jeremy and the others.
She had heaved a barrow load of weeds onto the compost heap and returned to her digging. It was time to stop using those words. Penny knew that she couldn’t make everything better for him. Their lives no longer belonged to each other. Prising out weeds with savage precision, she realised, by some mysterious process, that she liked Sandy more now than she had for years, and that the mysterious process had much to do with meeting this man, this Robert who, she had to admit, was very attractive.
Not that anything was going to happen, she told herself as she got out of the bath, satisfyingly stiff from the day’s gardening. Nothing at all. Robert must have been at a loose end when he asked if he could join her at the café, when he asked all those questions, about her life, her house, why she came here, her children, the garden. How she felt when she’d been robbed. On and on.
Penny had always made her signals by sitting still, allowing the man to come closer, curving her mouth in silent acquiescence. That was what good-looking women did. Men talked, she listened. That was the semaphore of seduction.
But Robert would not be deterred by her monosyllabic answers, swiftly followed by her determined enquiries about him. Why had he come here? Did he like the Dordogne? Find it something of a tourist cliché? He didn’t bother to answer, just batted back her questions with more of his own. What did she read? Where did she grow up? What did her parents do? And then, would she have dinner? Not in the café, but in the new place, just outside town. She could feel herself blush, a shy schoolgirl, as she accepted. Not for the next night, but for two nights after that. Some things were hard to change.
She dressed quickly, locked the house and drove down to the town, the last of the day’s sun turning the mountains the colour of ripe plums below a rose sky. In the car, she tried to recall exactly the shades and planes of his face, but couldn’t. All she remembered were hazel eyes, kind and clear, and the pleasing wrinkles at their edges. Her palms were sweating. She wiped them dry on her trousers as she parked the car and walked into the restaurant. He was waiting for her at a table by the window, a bottle of rosé already open, but not yet poured.
‘Sorry to have kept you waiting.’ She was almost stammering. She might have been fifteen again, except then she would have been more confident about what was expected of her.
He smiled. Good, well-tended American teeth. ‘You’re not late. I was early.’
Robert poured water, then some wine. ‘What do you recommend?’ he asked, handing her the menu.
‘It’s gizzards and livers everywhere around here, I’m afraid,’ she replied. ‘Most of the time, I feel like a Roman soothsayer, picking around at entrails.’
‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ he said. ‘Shall I order for us? If we don’t like it, we can always ask for something else.’
She nodded and tucked her hands under her thighs. Why was she so nervous? This wasn’t a date, it was just dinner. And he couldn’t, wouldn’t, be interested in her sexual self. She didn’t have one. Again, she reminded herself. That was behind her.
He chose the perfect meal: mâche and walnut salad, confit de canard, followed by crottin de Chavignol. The process of eating calmed her and the talk between them became less a series of questions and more a conversation. He was on a sabbatical from Columbia, finishing a book on Montaigne.
‘A somewhat crowded field,’ he said. ‘But perhaps there’s still something left to say.’
After dinner, they walked along the river, followed by a family of hopeful ducks. He told her his wife had died two years ago, of liver cancer.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘So am I,’ he replied. ‘It was hard on all of us – her, the children, the grandchildren. But time does help – although not all the time.’
His wife had taught art at NYU. Piet Mondrian was the subject of her doctoral thesis. Penny felt mentally lumpen by comparison, remembering Sandy’s jibe years ago that the only thing she read with any regularity was the bathroom scales.
Robert’s mobile rang. She walked ahead to allow him privacy and also because she couldn’t think of an appropriate and sensitive thing to say. This was difficult. It was so much easier to be alone. She was too old for dinner dates, too clumsy for the subtle gavotte of flirtation. Behind her, she heard his footsteps growing closer.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said.
‘Not at all. I really should be getting back,’ she heard herself saying in a high tight voice. ‘There’s still so much cleaning up to do, after the robbery. But thank you for dinner. It was lovely.’
Robert laughed. ‘You clean at night? In the dark! What do you do? Wear a miner’s lamp strapped to your head?’
She shrugged defensively, caught out in her lie. Her house was spotless, every trace of the robbery exorcised by her frenetic domesticity. Robert stopped and took her arm.
‘I’m American and we’re allowed to be direct. It makes up for our more annoying habits, like talking too loudly or asking too many questions,’ he said. ‘I’m nothing to be scared of. An occasional dinner or lunch can be just that. A chance to get to know someone a bit. That’s all. I’ll call you in a while, see if you’re free for something.’
He walked her back to the car and kissed her cheek. All the way up the hill, her face burned at the memory of his lips against her skin. Could it get any more banal?
Chapter 30
‘Why do I always get the impression that you’re holding something back?’
Sandy kept chewing the ham and reached for another piece of bread. He wiped his mouth with his hand.
‘Sorry about the lack of napkins,’ he said, ignoring her question.
‘The thing is,’ Carolyn persisted, ‘you know so much more about me than I know about you. I’ve told you everything, more than I’ve ever told anyone.’
He’d envied her honesty that night, wanted to take it for his own. Now she was acting as if there was some agreed treaty between them and he hadn’t read the subclauses on the repayment schedule.
There was a peppercorn lodged between his back teeth. He tried to shift it with his tongue without Carolyn noticing, but failed.
‘I miss my kids,’ he said. ‘I wish I’d spent more time with my kids.’
‘You could do that now if you want to,’ Carolyn replied. ‘Make a new start. That’s what I’m trying to do.’
‘Emily is in India, and Matthew is flying out to join her for a while. It will have to wait.’
He didn’t remember Carolyn being so confrontational before, aggressive almost. He shifted about in his chair. How long was she planning to stay?
She brushed the crumbs on the table into a neat heap. Her hands were smooth and unlined. Her fingernails were pink, without ridges and neatly filed.
‘You could buy a ticket too,’ she continued. ‘Flights are cheap. What’s stopping you? Are you frightened?’
He fiddled with the cheese for a while. If only they hadn’t slept together. Being naked and vulnerable always left a trace. You never looked at each other in quite the same way again.
‘I suppose I am. They may not want to see me. I’d probably be interfering in their lives.’
‘Are you frightened of me as well?’ This new confidence of hers was intimidating. ‘Do you think I’m going to jump on you again? Don’t worry. That’s not going to happen, even if I wanted it to.’ She sighed, a big whoosh of air. ‘It’s not so complicated, Sandy. My life was in a bit of a mess and now it’s not. You probably don’t want to admit it, but you were kind to me that night, so kind. You listened, we laughed and it was a turning point for me. Everything started to get better after that. I like you. I’ve always liked you, even when you forgot to pick up the children at school.’
‘That was just once,’ interrupted Sandy.
&nb
sp; ‘I know,’ laughed Carolyn. ‘And I never forgot it, because it was the only time in five years that Penny ever asked you to pick up the children. But now I’d like to know what’s going on in your life. Or, more to the point, what has gone on in your life. You can talk to me, you know.’
He swallowed, hunched his shoulders. There was that familiar dry feeling in his mouth, the tension of shame and self-loathing. He had a violent desire for a drink, and then another. He wanted a cigarette. He needed a Zoloft. Again he wanted her to go. And yet, he heard himself begin to speak. He didn’t want to. But it was like knowing you were going to be sick, that tight feeling at the back of your throat, the rush of sour saliva into your mouth, and realising it didn’t matter how hard you tried to swallow, nothing was going to stop you puking your guts out.
Sandy had the dissociated thought that there were three people in the room. There was his physical self, dressed in grubby khaki trousers and a worn shirt, sitting motionless at the table, his hands tucked under his thighs. There was Carolyn, waiting for him to continue; and there was this voice that somehow suddenly developed a separate existence, then a shape he could see in his mind, tensed and crouched, like an athlete on starting blocks, breathing in and out, ready to launch itself forward. The voice came from him, but it didn’t belong to him anymore. It had its own force and he couldn’t stop opening his mouth and hearing all these words erupt, in sentences already formed, in a story already written.
‘When I was at university, just before I left, I killed someone. In a car accident. I wasn’t driving, but it was my fault.’
After Everything Page 18