by Nicci French
Meg bit her lip. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We’d better talk to Trish about this.’
‘Trish may run the office but this is our company. It’s our decision.’
‘We’re like a family here.’
‘Which is why we can’t survive with someone like Deborah.’
Meg’s cheeks had gone pink as they always did at times of strong emotion. ‘How can you do that?’ she asked, in a tone of wonder.
‘What?’
‘Last night you almost get into a fight in a pub. Next thing you’re having a drink with the man who could have killed you. That was the moment we left, as soon as we were sure you weren’t going to get killed. Where did you go after that? I rang your house when I got in. You weren’t there. And now you’re in here virtually at dawn pretending to be Sherlock Holmes. How can you compartmentalize your life like that? Don’t things ever leak into each other?’
‘That’s the point of compartments,’ I said, tidying the photocopies away. ‘That was the problem with the Titanic. The hole wouldn’t have mattered if the water could have been confined by barriers, but it spread everywhere and the ship sank. If the water had been contained in one area of the ship it would have gone on its merry way and reached New York.’
‘The Titanic? What on earth are you going on about?’
I sat in the meeting with a look of professional alertness on my face. I was in control of the facts, I jotted down the suggestions of our clients, assured them that the coming weekend was going to answer all their needs. I leaned towards people with a listening smile. I even managed not to be rude to the smug-faced senior executive from the pharmaceutical company.
‘Team-building,’ he said, and stroked his chin. ‘A sense of common purpose, of intellectual adventure, mutuality and shared interests, all pulling in the same direction. That’s what we need here.’
Or a pay rise, I thought. And a new boss. ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ I said.
‘A colleague of mine recommended you. He said you left them all fizzing with excitement at the end of the two days. That’s what we’d like.’
‘Fizz,’ I said. ‘We’ll do our best.’ I heard one of our work-experience girls give a suppressed cough and I stared at her warningly.
I shook his hand firmly when he left, smiled my friendliest smile.
‘Right,’ said Meg, handing me my coat.
‘Coffee.’ ‘We can have one here. We’ve got so much to–’
‘You don’t get let off that easily. Let’s go to Luigi’s and we can talk properly.’
So we walked into the gusting wind and down the road to the dark little cafe´, whose interior was as warm and snug as a boat’s cabin, with its dim lights and hissing espresso machines.
‘Was I horrible to that guy last night?’ I said. ‘What was his name?’
‘Todd,’ said Meg. ‘I think he got a bit of a fright.’
‘Seemed nice, though.’
‘Quite nice,’ said Meg, neutrally. I raised my eyebrows at her. She blushed violently and looked away. ‘What did you get up to last night?’ she asked, after a pause. ‘That’s what we’re really here for.’
I looked at her soft round face, which always seemed Edwardian to me, with the dimple in her chin, her mop of curly hair. How would she ever understand? ‘Oh, you know. It just went on a bit.’ I sipped at the coffee, burning my upper lip, relishing the pain. ‘Maybe I’d had a bit too much to drink by the end.’
‘By the end?’
‘You’re my friend, not my mother. I was having fun, that’s all.’
‘Did you go somewhere after?’
‘Yes. We went–’ I stopped dead. I didn’t know who the ‘we’ was and I didn’t know where we’d gone. The evening didn’t fit together in my head. It shifted around in queasy fragments. A dark room full of people, a riverbank, splintering glass, a cab, a fever on the bed. Thrashing bodies. I rubbed my temples, trying to ease away the images.
‘Well?’
I drained my coffee and put down the mug with a sharp click. ‘The truth is, Meg, if you really want to know, I can’t remember much about it.’
‘Because you were so drunk?’
‘It became a bit like a dream. You know.’
‘What time did you get home?’
‘This is just like being a teenager,’ I said. ‘A bit before six.’ Just five hours ago, I thought. How could five hours crawl by so slowly?
‘Six? Christ, Holly, how are you still functioning? What did Charlie say?’
‘Not much. He was asleep, and then it was time to go to work.’
‘Doesn’t he mind?’
I thought of Charlie, squatting on the kitchen floor, carefully picking up the mug I’d broken. ‘I think we should get back to the office now.’
‘Was there a man involved?’ She said it so that it sounded more like a statement of fact than a question.
‘What?’
‘Last night.’
‘Kind of,’ I mumbled, then made myself look into Meg’s eyes defiantly.
‘Kind of. You mean, you had sex with someone else?’
‘It didn’t mean anything.’
‘How can it not mean anything?’
‘I was drunk and hyped up. I had sex with a stranger. End of story.’
‘Or beginning of story. Holly, can you hear yourself?’
I could. My voice was coming from a long way off and I was listening to it carefully, trying to make sense of the words, which didn’t seem to have boundaries but ran together like a dirty river so that I had to concentrate hard to make sense of them.
‘What about Charlie?’ She said it very softly, and her voice had an ominous gravity about it.
‘Charlie’s Charlie,’ I replied inanely.
‘Are you going to tell him?’
‘What for? To make him feel terrible too? It happened and it’s over and it won’t happen again.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I – I won’t let it happen again. It was…’ In the fog of my brain, I searched for the word. ‘An aberration.’
Meg looked at me for a long time. My heart was pounding uncomfortably quickly, but I made myself glare back at her. I wasn’t going to drop my eyes or look away. In the end I had to because she looked so sober and thoughtful, as if she was making up her mind about something. She looked, I thought suddenly, as if she pitied me. I couldn’t bear that.
It was Meg who had introduced me to Charlie. She’d met him because he had gone to art college with her cousin Luke, and she invited me to go with the three of them to a film. I remember the film, Lost in Translation. I remember the weather, warm and windy, with leaves swirling around us when we walked up the road together. I remember what I was wearing: jeans ripped at the knee, canvas boots and my oldest leather jacket. I hadn’t thought it was going to be a special day. And I remember what Charlie was wearing. Meg and Luke faded into the background. It was Charlie I was aware of, every gesture he made, every word he spoke, every tiny glance he sent in my direction. I knew, with that delicious, unbeatable feeling of terror, that he was equally aware of me. In the bar our hands brushed, and it sent little jolts of electricity through me. In the cinema, we were separated and I sat next to Meg, who had a bad cold. She kept blowing her reddened nose with a large handkerchief. Her eyes were watering. Did I think, Meg likes Charlie too; you mustn’t? Yes. But I also thought, He’s looking at me now, I can feel the weight of his glance on me like something tangible. I thought, Something’s got to happen.
Afterwards, Luke and Charlie invited us to have a meal with them in the brasserie across the road, but Meg said she needed to get home to bed, and I went with her. We got a taxi, and at first sat in an awkward silence, not looking at each other. Then, as we arrived at her flat, she laid a hand on my knee, and said, ‘It’s all right, you know, Holly. He likes you, not me.’ I muttered something inadequate, and then – this is typical of Meg’s generosity – she said, ‘Even if he didn’t like you, that doesn’t mean he’d like me inst
ead. You’re not taking him away or anything.’ She blew her nose firmly on her handkerchief, kissed my cheek and got out of the taxi.
What would I have done if she hadn’t spoken? I like to think I would have done nothing, but who knows? I waited until she’d opened her front door and disappeared inside, then told the cab driver to turn round and go back the way we’d come. Luke and Charlie were still eating when I got there and I sat with them, drank red wine from their glasses, stole their chips and tried not to think about Meg, lying in bed with her watery eyes. I ate a spoonful of lemon sorbet, put my hand on Charlie’s thigh and he put his leg across mine. We shifted close to each other and pretended to listen to Luke. Later, he took me home.
Meg had said I’d like him and I did. She had said he was shy at first but when you got to know him he was funny – and he was funny. He made me laugh from the moment we met. She had said he was a talented artist. He could do anything, oil-painting, watercolour, sketching in charcoal. At art school he had written a comic strip about an inadequate superhero that had become a local cult. For his degree show he took the contents of a skip and turned them into an installation. I saw the photos. It was amazing. As soon as I met him, I said to myself, You’re the one. I would have married him the day after we met, if the law had permitted it. Instead it took a month.
Since that day in the taxi, Meg has never said anything to me, except nice things, and I’ve never said anything to her, except nice things, and probably we never will talk about it properly, not even when we’re old and the urgent fever of love is all in the past. But it’s no use pretending. I always knew she wanted Charlie, and that she didn’t stop wanting him because he’d fallen for me. She isn’t like that. She has a fuse that takes a long time to light and then it burns slowly, steadily, hard to extinguish. Charlie and I have never talked about it either, but he’s especially nice to her – warm and slightly teasing – and she’s shy with him, self-conscious and a bit abrupt. Now, confessing my infidelity to her, I felt sharply shamed by how I had trampled on so many precious things.
‘The thing is,’ I said slowly, honest at last, ‘the thing is, Meg, I don’t know why I did it. I’m not just dismissing it. I don’t want to tell Charlie because then it would have a meaning, when really it was senseless.’ That wasn’t enough. I was being too easy on myself. ‘Horribly, cruelly senseless.’
There was a long silence. I looked at her face and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She ran a finger round the rim of her coffee cup and frowned. ‘Are things going wrong with you and Charlie?’ she asked at last.
I shook my head. ‘We don’t have a marriage like… well, I was going to say my parents, but they’re not really anyone’s model, are they? Like your parents, then. We often lead separate lives. I’m always charging around with work, and he’s trying to get his going properly. He can shut himself up in his study for hours and when I go in he looks at me as if I’m a stranger. I know it all happened quickly. I mean our marriage. I wasn’t exactly the type to settle down anyway, but I know we were right. Well, I was right. Maybe Charlie wasn’t, maybe I’m a bad bet. But you shouldn’t stop to think too much about things like marriage, you should just do it. Hold on to what you want. Hold on to love.’
I sat back in my seat, exhausted. I didn’t know if I believed what I’d just said, or at least somewhere inside myself believed it, but couldn’t reach that part of me so had to mouth the words, mimic the feelings and wait for them to come true again. That’s the way to do it: pretend to be yourself and maybe you will be again.
‘Do you feel awful?’
‘I could do with an early night. But I’ll be fine. That’s not what you meant, is it?’
She looked at me curiously and put one finger on the side of her mouth, which is something she does when she’s thinking. ‘You should be more careful, my friend,’ she said.
I phoned Charlie at home. ‘Day going all right?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Have you started on the illustration yet?’
‘Not yet. I need time.’
‘I know, but it would be a shame to lose the commission and you know how much we need the–’
‘I’ve said I’ll do it. I’m sorry. We can’t all get ten things done before breakfast.’
I felt a hot jet of rage in my chest, followed immediately by a liquid jolt of shame. Who was I to get angry with anybody, let alone Charlie? ‘You’re right,’ I said. I told him I’d be home by six. I’d buy something to eat or we could get a takeaway.
‘Great,’ he said.
‘Love you,’ I said, but he’d already put the phone down.
I did leave work at the proper time. I had planned to go to the supermarket and behave like a proper wife, loading the trolley with food for the week, planning ahead rather than living from moment to moment. I could cook a real meal, a chicken; even I could cook a chicken, surely. The thought of food made me want to gag, although at the same time I was hungry.
On my way to the Underground I passed a row of shops. One, a little food store, had a smashed window, covered with a plastic sheet flapping in the wind. An Asian woman in a grey nylon work coat was bent down on the pavement. A queasy memory wormed its way into my consciousness. This was where I had been last night. This was my fault. She looked up at me as I stopped beside her. ‘How awful for you,’ I said.
She just shrugged. She looked tired and almost accepting, as if it was a part of life to be dealt with, like the wind and the rain. ‘It’s not the first time.’
I picked up a basket from outside the shop. ‘I need to get some stuff, anyway,’ I said. ‘I can’t think why I’ve never come in here before. It’s on my way home.’
It wouldn’t be chicken now. I bought a packet of ground coffee and some tea-bags, a couple of pints of milk, which, when I got home, I discovered had been mechanically treated in some way so that it didn’t go sour and was impossible to drink. I also chose two shrivelled yellow apples in a Cellophane pack, eight extra-soft pink toilet rolls and some washing-up liquid, four packets of cigarettes, half a bottle of overpriced gin, lime juice, orange-juice concentrate, which I hate and Charlie hates even more. I had to collect a second basket for muesli, sesame-seed bread, a jar of marmalade, a tub of spreadable butter, several packets of chewing-gum, digestive biscuits and beer. When I’d paid, I heaved up the bags, the handles cutting into my fingers, and turned to go.
In the next street I passed a branch of my bank. I stopped at the machine outside and checked my balance. A hundred and forty-two pounds and forty-three pence. I withdrew a hundred and forty in clean, bright, factory-fresh notes. I rummaged in my bag and found an old envelope. I put the money inside and scrawled on it, in what I thought might look like the handwriting of a moronic hooligan, ‘FOR THE WINDOW’. I took a deep breath and walked back to the shop. There was a man behind the counter. I supposed him to be the husband of the woman I’d met outside. I put the envelope on the counter.
‘I found this outside on the pavement,’ I said. ‘It must be for you.’
He looked puzzled and I left. As I got outside it started to rain with the plump drops that soak you instantly. I hoped it was a convincing enough story and he wouldn’t hand over the money to the police. What would God say, if He existed? He would probably say I ought to have confessed. Instead I just stood still in the rain, letting it drench me thoroughly.
I called out as I came in, but there was no reply. I unpacked the supplies and put my head round Charlie’s study door. He wasn’t there, although the radio was on, and the room was in a catastrophic mess. Sheets of paper were scattered over the floor, piles of books had toppled, ashtrays were pushed under the chair and the drawing-board, CDs teetered on every spare surface. On the sketch pad on his desk a faint line of pencil ended in an elaborate doodle. There were also five half-finished mugs of tea, two brown apple cores and the skin of a satsuma. And there, on the window-sill, was the mug I’d dropped that morning. I examined it: you could barely see the hai
rline crack where Charlie had mended it. I closed the door.
If I went to sleep now, I’d never be able to wake up. Instead I pulled on some old jeans and one of Charlie’s paint-spattered T-shirts, and forced myself into action. I turned on all the lights downstairs, fake daytime in the darkening evening, then hauled the step-ladder into the middle of the hall so I could scrape off wallpaper. It was a job I’d started several months ago when we’d moved here but hadn’t got round to finishing. It’s odd how you can get used to living in a house with unlovely shredding walls and bare plaster.
And that was how Charlie found me, three-quarters of an hour later, when he came through the door in his lovely soft suede jacket that I’d bought for him. I stepped off the ladder and kissed his eyelids, and he hugged my dusty, aching, tired, guilty body.
‘What I want to know is, where do you get all your energy from? Can I have some?’
Now, at this moment I could have stepped back, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Yesterday night, Charlie, I don’t know why, I can’t say who, I had sex with a stranger.’ A little thrill ran through me, like a shiver of pure and infinite cold, like a delicious lick of terror.
I smiled back at him, bright as innocence. ‘Big decision. Chinese, Indian or Thai takeaway?’
Later, we had sex, made love, fucked. I don’t know what to call it, because I didn’t want to do anything but close my eyes and sleep and sleep and sleep, but I couldn’t say that. Not after everything. So when he smiled at me in that particular way, I smiled back, although my face felt tight and my eyes raw. And when he put his arms round me, I put mine round him too and pulled him close and murmured into his ear. And he didn’t know, he didn’t begin to guess, that I wasn’t there at all.
5
As I was standing on the Tube, swaying between two large sweaty men, I had a feeling of existential freedom. There was no law of nature, like gravity, forcing me to go to work, to continue on the rails of my old life. I could stay on the train, change at Leicester Square, go to Heathrow, catch any plane and never come back to England for the rest of my life. First, I’d have to go home for my passport. And what about money? Everything was in the house. As an investment that was probably fine, but there was a definite liquidity problem. Abroad was difficult as well. The idea of existential freedom had probably been invented at a time when visas weren’t such a big deal, and you didn’t get grilled in the arrivals hall of airports about how long you wanted to stay and whether you were planning to get a job. There were limits to freedom, limits to whom you could become.