by David Szalay
Some time during the night, when she went to the loo, she opened the fridge in the tiny kitchen. It was entirely empty—not even milk. It had the pristine white look of a display fridge in a department store. It was then that she noticed there were no covers on the duvet or the pillows. In the morning, while he showered, she started to wonder about these things. The flat had a totally unlived-in feel. It seemed to be very new. In the living room there was nothing but the sofa, still in its plastic wrapping, and a TV—its packaging too was still there. The kitchen was equipped with two mugs, one plate, one knife and one spoon. The oven had never been used—it still had pieces of polystyrene and an instruction manual in it. The expanse of built-in storage space in the bedroom was empty. She was looking into this surprising void when he put his arms around her waist and picking her up, spun her once, twice—she squealed, her legs kicked and flailed—and fell with her onto the bed.
‘Why isn’t there anything here?’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean those cupboards are empty. There’s nothing there. Don’t you have any clothes?’
‘Clothes? What do I need clothes for?’
‘And there’s nothing in the kitchen. Not even a kettle.’
‘I’ve just moved in,’ he said, more seriously. ‘That’s obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Where are all your clothes then?’
‘They’re somewhere else. I’m moving my stuff here next week. What’s the matter?’
She did not press him.
Instead, she went and had a shower. There was only one towel and it was already quite wet. While she was using it, and looking at herself in the steamy mirror, he shouted through the door, ‘Do you want to go out for breakfast, or do you want me to go get some stuff?’
‘Go out!’ she shouted back. She brushed her teeth with his toothbrush, and daubed some of his deodorant under her arms.
He was smoking a Silk Cut in the kitchen with the little window open, using the sink as an ashtray. ‘Okay?’ he said, smiling.
As they went down in the tiny lift—the flat was quite high up, had a view over the huge normality of south London—she surprised herself again. She said, ‘I’m in love with you.’
* * *
The past. As if someone had forgotten to lock its cage and it had slipped out, looking for her. It is on the loose now. It is at large in the lobby. It is there with the multilingual louche flâneurs who populate it at this hour of the day. Half past four, p.m. She stands there next to an enormous vase of flowers, staring out at the public luxury.
For a while, months, they met in the flat in Battersea. It soon emerged that he was not in fact separated from his wife—not physically, though he insisted they were ‘emotionally separated’, that when he had told her he lived on his own, it was in a metaphorical sense true. He said he hated his wife. (And she was shocked by his use of that word—she had never hated anyone.) In a strictly literal sense, however, they did still live together, with their two daughters—and for their two daughters—in the house in Sevenoaks. The flat in London was a pied-a-terre, that was all. He was often on jobs—‘stake-outs’—that made it impractical for him to trek all the way to Kent every night. The ‘Jane Green’ job had been such a ‘stake-out’. Mostly they were neither so interesting nor so profitable. Typically they involved loitering outside a fashionable nightclub in Mayfair, hoping to snap a Premier League footballer or someone from TV, or if you were very lucky one of the junior Windsors. Or spending days at Heathrow like a stranded traveller, eating junk food and eyeing up incoming flights from JFK and LAX. That was the sort of thing he mostly did. He said he hated that too. He hated his life, he said—how it had turned out. ‘How did it happen like this? I didn’t want it.’ He meant the marriage, the job. (On the plus side, he did make a lot of money. For the ‘Jane Green’ pictures alone, he eventually told her, he was paid £50,000.) He said, as they lay naked on the mattress in the still unfurnished flat, that he wanted to change everything. He just needed some more time. Then he would leave his wife in Sevenoaks and live with her in London; he would stop papping and start Ansel-Adamsing. Then they would travel together to the wild, pure places he told her about. Then everything would start anew.
She lived for the two nights a week she spent in the flat in Battersea, and the occasional minibreak—there were minibreaks, there were weekends away. When they met in London she would wait in the flat. She had her own key. She would wait in the kitchen smoking, or in the living room with the TV on. He was usually late. It might be midnight, one o’clock. Then he showed up smelling of the kebab he had eaten, sometimes flushed with success. He opened a bottle of wine and she listened while he told her about his evening’s adventures. Then they had sex. The next day, at lunchtime, he took the train to Sevenoaks. It wasn’t always exactly like that. Sometimes he didn’t have a job to do and they would spend the whole evening together.
Finally, on New Year’s Day, she told him she would never see him again unless he left his wife. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said. He was in a windowless hotel bathroom in Florida (a family holiday), whispering into his phone while the extractor fan and the shower made noise. ‘You know that’s what I want. You know that’s what I want to do. It’s just a matter of time. You know that…’
He thought he had talked her down, but in London a few days later—they were walking in Battersea Park—she said the same thing. She said he had until the first of February to make up his mind, and until then she wouldn’t see him. He pleaded. He phoned, he turned up in Caledonian Road, he tried to make her see things from his point of view, the kids, the kids… Though she wouldn’t listen, she did not know what she would do if he said he wouldn’t leave his wife.
He did leave her—in March, a month late—and she must have found Katherine’s number in his phone. She phoned her and swore at her in impeccable RP—she sounded surprisingly posh—for twenty solid minutes.
In April she left her flatshare over the shop on Caledonian Road and moved in with him in Battersea. He was still papping, though he had started to spend a lot of time poring over atlases, trying to work out where to take his first shots of Nature. There would be no more papping for him then. In the end—the fact that they would be travelling in winter effectively excluded the northern latitudes—he settled on Mauritania. She took two months’ unpaid leave and they left London on 2 January in an old unheated Land Rover and headed south through France and Spain. They lingered a few days in Marrakech. Then pressed on through the Atlas Mountains, where they spent two memorably idyllic nights in a stone hotel within earshot of a waterfall—and then south, south, towards the Sahara. There were a few weeks in the Mauritanian desert, a picture-book desert of peach dunes neighbouring the dark blue Atlantic. Fraser took his photos, and then they went further south, over the frontier into Senegal. (Where he almost lost his equipment and plates to some venal khaki officials.) For a while they hung out at a place called Zebra Bar near the city of St Louis—some huts in a national park on a marine lagoon, and a fridge full of beer. A population of intriguing transients. Fraser was popular there. He loved it and for a few weeks he was king of the place and she was his freckled queen.
Then they went on to Dakar and stayed out late in salsa clubs.
And then on.
And on.
They left the Land Rover in Burkina Faso and flew back to London in April.
He had opened a different sort of world to her—it wasn’t anything he did so much as something in what he was—a world of immediate feelings; and with them the sometimes troubling sense that they were the only thing that was of any value, that finally they were what life was.
Later that year they were married. If there was to be a wedding he wanted it low-key, which it was. A London registry office on a Saturday afternoon. His mother, over from Saskatchewan. Her parents. A Swedish aunt. A few friends.
His photos were not a huge succ
ess. He had exhibited them over the summer, and sold a few prints, but it was obvious that he was not going to be able to make a living from them, and he had to look for other sorts of photographic work. (As for her, she was still working in the hotel—she had been working there for more than two and a half years, and was now a shift manager.) Fraser was depressed that his attempt to be Ansel Adams had failed. He said he was too worn out for papping. That was a ‘young man’s job’. They didn’t have much money. He sold the place in Battersea and they took out a joint mortgage for a flat on Packington Street in Islington.
She had always imagined a house in some nice white-stuccoed nook of north London. Trees in the street. Family Christmases. What she had was not quite what she had imagined, but Packington Street passed for a white-stuccoed nook, just about. Fraser said it was the worst possible time. They were just scraping along as it was. They needed her income. And there was no hurry—she was only twenty-nine. Every second weekend his daughters stayed with them. He picked them up from school on Friday, and his wife picked them up from Packington Street on Sunday afternoon. She stayed outside, usually sitting in the car—except for that once on the phone, she and Katherine had never spoken.
He started finding more work. He seemed to have found a source of more lucrative product work, high-street fashion stuff. He had shots of posh parties in Tatler—Lord Something So-and-so’s twenty-first, the bar mitzvah of a north-London billionaire’s son. He was often out late on these jobs, and was sometimes away overnight.
She was very strict with herself. He himself had once told her, while he was still living in Sevenoaks, that even if he did leave his wife, she would never trust him. Not the way things had started. She knew from her own experience what he was like. She often thought of those words. Her memory of him saying them, of the self-satisfied melancholy smile on his tremendous face was precise. They had made a powerful impression on her. However, she insisted on trusting him. She had to trust him. What was the point otherwise? To freely enter into this situation and then spend a lot of time not trusting him—that would be insane. She had known what she was doing, and in doing it she had taken a decision to trust him. So she did. She trusted him.
*
When she leaves the hotel at the end of her shift it is nearly dark outside, the western sky over the park still just streaked with wet blue light—she sees it through the trees—as it was on the afternoon that she first spoke to Fraser, over four years ago. She walks quickly to the tube station. When she saw him on Sunday he did not look well. He looked surprisingly old and paunchy. He looked out of shape. Having exchanged a few words with Summer, he stood there waiting, staring at the floor, while she finished her phone call—she was trying to hide the fact that her heart was palpitating from him and also from James on the other end of the line. When she had finished with James she snapped her phone shut and said, ‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ he said.
She stood up. ‘Do you want to get a drink then?’
‘Okay.’ He shrugged, seemed unenthusiastic.
‘That’s what you said you wanted,’ she said. ‘You said you wanted to have a drink.’ That was what he had said. He smiled—the smile wasn’t quite there. ‘Sure. Let’s do that.’
Watching her put on her coat, he said, ‘You look nice.’
She ignored that—though her heart seemed to hit a pothole—and they left (she shouted up to Summer that she wouldn’t be long) and walked in silence to the Old Queen’s Head, where they often used to go for quiet drinks on Sunday nights…
She stands on a fully freighted escalator at King’s Cross, one of thousands of people in motion, tens of thousands. The formiche di Londra, Carlo calls them. And one of the formiche, lost in her thoughts, she transfers from the Piccadilly line to the Northern for the single stop to Angel.
The flat is empty and unlit. Summer is out. She will probably not be home tonight.
She has a long bath, and opens a pack of supermarket tortellini, and phones her mother and tells her that she has seen Fraser and wishes she hadn’t. Then, in her turquoise kimono, with her hair in a towel, she watches television for an hour.
Lying in bed, she opens the poetry anthology that lives on the night-table and, as she sometimes does last thing at night, takes the first poem she sees. She is pleased that tonight it is a short one.
Ah! Sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;
Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire;
Where my sunflower wishes to go.
She switches off the light. When she is half-asleep, however, she hears her phone, muffled somewhere in the flat. She does not move. Sleepily she wonders whether it is James, or Fraser, or someone else.
2
Simon Miller wakes at four. Though it will not be light for more than two hours, he has things to see to. Leaving Mrs Miller to sleep in—she were a lazy so-and-so—he pulls on his jeans and prowls downstairs. In the kitchen he switches on the overhead light and, still squinting painfully, sets matchflame to Marlboro Red. Then he starts to make his tea. He has five runners entered at Fontwell Park this afternoon, a large number for a small stable like his—he has had to hire an extra horse transport—and there are preparations to see to. He opens the yard door and standing shirtless under the lintel puts on the floodlight. Floodlight were right. The fockin yard is under water. With filthy weather like this down in Sussex, it’s a short odds-on shot, he thinks, that Fontwell will be off. He’ll still have to pay for the horse transport. He’ll still have to see to all the paperwork that sending five horses to the track involves. There’s an inspection scheduled for later, until then he just has to assume the fockin thing is on.
When the light struggles up the rain has stopped and the old farmhouse looks sullen in its hollow. The stand of nettles shivers in the wind. In the tackroom the neon lights are on. The lads and lasses are up and taking out the string.
‘What you reckon, Piers?’ Simon says, sunk up to his ankles in the ooze of the yard mud, so that his thick legs seem to thrust from it like young trees. ‘Will it be on? What do you think?’
And patient, pale Piers does think—he thinks as if he is trying to work it out, as if it was possible to work it out logically. From his vantage point in the high saddle—he is on Mr President, smoking a cigarette while he waits for the others—he looks up at the laden sky. He looks at the flat ploughed fields. ‘Don’t know,’ he says finally.
‘Yeah.’ Simon nods. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘There’s talk,’ Piers says, still with his eyes focused somewhere near the horizon, ‘about a heavy-ground Festival.’
‘I heard that. I heard that.’
‘What with all this rain.’
‘That’s right.’
The others are filing out into the twilit yard. Among the workriders are several of Simon’s offspring, and Piers’s son is on Absent Oelemberg, her profile looking like a shadow or silhouette in the frigid half-light. Warren Andrews, the stable jockey, is next, slouched over the withers of his mount. Handsome despite the slaloming nose, Indestructible Warren is the veteran of very many nasty falls. Snapped legs, smashed arms, pierced spleen, punctured lung—he knew what it meant to be mashed into hospital fodder by a storm of pummelling hooves. He is a famished, saturnine figure first thing in the morning. He struggles increasingly with his weight, and needing to do ten stone ten at Fontwell today, he spent most of yesterday in the makeshift sauna he has (an oil-drum filled with stones in his shed), eating nothing except a few Ryvita.
Simon smiles at one of the lasses, a plump teenager in jodhpurs on Mistress Of Arts—Kelly, the daughter of the local farmer from whom he rents this land. In spite of being the fattest workrider, she
is the only one who wears jodhpurs. Them, and posh boots, and a purple velvet helmet. Proper little madam, Simon thought, when she first walked into the yard. ‘Alright, Piers,’ he says, and the head lad moves his mount into a walk and leads the slopping string down the lane. When they have left, Simon heaves himself into the old Land Rover, into its comfortless smells of cold oil and suffering canvas, and follows them to the new all-weather gallop—you need them nowadays—on the other side of the swollen stream.
*
It is eight when he steps into the hot kitchen. Mrs Miller has made his fry-up—the plate is waiting in the Aga—and the Racing Post has arrived. When he has eaten, he takes the paper and two Marlboros to the lavatory.
He is still in there twenty-five minutes later when James phones. ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ he says, when James asks after Absent Oelemberg. ‘Fit as a flea, she is.’
‘She is fit this time?’
‘She is.’
‘So…’ James says. ‘If she’s fit… How will you stop her winning?’
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Miller says, smearing out the second Marlboro in an ashtray stuck on the toilet-roll holder.
‘She’s not going to win then?’
A short silence. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’
When James presses him on how he plans to ensure this, however, Miller just says, ‘Look—you let me worry about that.’
‘Okay,’ James says. ‘I’ll let you worry about it. I’ll see you at the track then. About two o’clock.’
James tries Freddy—who does not answer—and walks Hugo.
When he tries Freddy again an hour later on the way to the tube station, and he still does not answer, he starts to suspect that he will have to travel down to Sussex on his own.
Which is indeed what happens.