Come a Little Closer

by Karen Perry

  At that moment the front door opens above, and a man emerges. He bangs the door shut behind him, and stands there for a moment, as if catching his breath.

  Anton, she thinks, her heart clenching in her chest. But when she hurries up the steps, she sees that it is not Anton but a younger man, still tall with a youthful head of hair, zipping up his jacket and staring out over the park with a narrowed gaze.

  She knows who he is. His face is bruised and swollen, but she still recognizes him. The boy she wanted to take in. The boy she wanted to raise as her own. A grown man now, and so like his father that it disarms her.

  ‘Mark,’ she says, her voice fluttering with nerves. ‘You probably don’t remember me …’

  ‘I remember you.’

  There’s harshness in his tone. The look he gives her is cold and assessing, layers of meaning within it. Her insides curdle beneath the weight of his stare.

  ‘I didn’t know you were here. It’s been so many years since –’

  But he is already moving past her, hurrying away, as if he can’t escape the place fast enough. Her eyes go back to the house and she sees that the front door remains open. Quickly now, without giving it thought, she runs up the steps and inside, closing the door behind her.

  It takes a moment for her to reorient herself to the gloom after the bright sunlight of the street. She leans against the door, breathing heavily. This is the house where her life had changed. The house where Charlotte died. The house where Anton killed her.

  Blood rushes through her veins – she can hear the thrum of it in her head. Beyond the workings of her heart, she listens for noises in the house. The creak of woodwork expanding in the heat of a summer’s day. The call of birdsong through an open window at the back of the house. But apart from that, it is silent. The house feels empty.

  Hilary takes a step forward into the hall, calls hesitantly: ‘Hello?’

  Another step towards the staircase.

  ‘Anton?’

  His name echoes around the hall. She puts a hand to the banister and looks up, feeling uncertain, trying to locate within her some courage. A noise overhead points to his presence, making her bold. She moves up the stairs quickly, her resolve recovered by the time she reaches the return. On the last step, the bedroom door opens, and there he is, a tray in his hands. He sees her and his mouth opens, but no words come out, his face registering astonishment, and something else – a flash of confusion, perhaps.

  Her heart, which had been fluttering wildly, now grows still.

  ‘I couldn’t wait any longer,’ she tells him. ‘Why didn’t you reach out to me? Why didn’t you come?’

  26

  Anton

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, as the frown on her face softens, her eyes lighting with a new intensity.

  ‘I couldn’t wait any longer,’ she tells him. She reaches out and touches his arm. He looks down and sees her hand clasped around his wrist. ‘Anton, I had to come.’

  Briefly, he wonders how she got in. His thoughts are frustrated and confused. They keep bending towards Leah, and the way she wouldn’t look at him as she was leaving – the way her eyes refused to be drawn to his, as if she was embarrassed or ashamed.

  ‘Anton,’ Hilary says, drawing his attention back to her face, two spots of high colour in her cheeks. She’s staring at him intently, but her eyes are darting about, as if they cannot find a feature to settle on. Her grip around his wrist is clammy and hot.

  ‘What is it? What do you want?’ he asks, sounding irritable but really it is confusion that is blurring his thoughts, obscuring clarity.

  Perhaps it was not shame or embarrassment he had glimpsed in Leah, but fear.

  ‘What do I want?’ Hilary asks, and the smile on her face falters. He is surprised to see shyness coming over her, as she says, almost coquettishly, ‘Why, you, of course. What else did you think?’

  He pulls his hand free of her grasp and, still clutching Leah’s tray, he hurries down the stairs. She follows him, hot on his heels.

  ‘I’ve waited and waited,’ she tells him. ‘Why didn’t you send for me? Why didn’t you give me the sign?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he declares, panic starting to spread through him. There is an intensity about her that he wants to draw back from. It’s like standing too close to a fire.

  ‘We agreed that we would wait until you were free. Until the time was right. And it is right.’

  He wants her out of his house, but balks at the idea of manhandling her out of the door. This woman was once his lover, yet the thought of touching her now makes him feel queasy and unclean.

  She follows him into the sitting room, babbling about letters and promises, about recompense for deeds done, sacrifices made. He puts the tray down on the coffee-table while his mind races. He feels fenced in, cornered, and even though the room is large, the ceilings lofty, somehow the space shrinks with her in it, such is the force of her presence. The way she keeps coming at him with her words, her smile, those eyes hungry for something from him, but it’s hard to decipher just what she wants.

  ‘Hilary, please. I think you should leave.’

  ‘No,’ she tells him firmly. ‘We’ve waited nineteen years for each other. We cannot wait any longer.’

  Despite the purpose in her voice, he hears the undercurrent of nerves. He looks at her now, properly, for the first time since his release, taking her in fully. Her hair, which he remembered as brown and gleaming, is shorter now – a shingled bob, like a 1920s flapper’s – and coloured orange. She is still small, her figure beneath the silk wrap dress has remained trim, although there is something stoutish about her now, as if the softness of her flesh has hardened over the years, grown tough and sinewy. Her bare arms are wild with freckles, a sort of joined-up mass of them making her look tanned, her legs too, cerise-pink toenails peeping out through silver sandals. In this brownish room, she is a blaze of colour – her red dress, her copper hair – but there is something artificial about it, like a flower too vividly bright to be real or lasting. Just as the expression in her eyes seems falsely bright.

  ‘We promised we’d wait for each other,’ she’s telling him now. ‘Don’t you remember? “Good things come to those who wait.” That’s what you said to me. “Be patient,” you said, and I have been. All these years, your words have sustained me. The memory of them, of what we had, of all we shared. The love between us made it worth every day spent apart, every month, every year.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he asks, bewildered.

  ‘Our last night together, your parting words to me. You told me you would find a way for us to be together. You said there was no obstacle that could not be moved. You told me that, no matter what happened, I was to hold firm and be patient. I have kept faith with that, Anton, throughout that night, and everything that happened since.’

  Her loud and vivid presence makes it impossible for him to think straight. With her words, she’s dragging him back into the past, back to a night he does not want to return to.

  ‘I cannot …’ he begins, but she steps forward suddenly and presses her mouth to his.

  For that instant, he feels the firm mass of her body against his, the sticky sweetness of her lips on his mouth, her nose pressed into his cheek. This sudden onslaught of sensation overwhelms him, as if she’s pushing through his skin, her breath invading his lungs.

  A wave of revulsion comes up through him and he shoves her away, disturbed by the violence roused in him. She stumbles backwards, her eyes widening with shock.

  ‘No!’ he shouts at her. ‘Christ, what are you thinking?’

  Her hair has fallen forward, a flap of it partially covering one eye, but the other is on him, filling with tears. He sees her chin tremble, but it doesn’t arouse any compassion within him. And when she tells him now that she loves him, that she’s never loved anyone else, he turns away from her, and moves to the armchair by the fireplace, sinks into it, exhausted.

&
nbsp; ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,’ he says, leaning forward so that his elbows rest on his knees, his face dropping into his cupped hands. It seems amazing to him that hardly more than an hour ago he was sitting in the park amid the busy Sunday-market commerce, eating olives, full of hope. All that energy and enthusiasm has drained away. His son has marched off in despair, and Leah has retreated from him, like a nervous rabbit. He is left alone with this woman and her unfathomable hopes, her reckless fantasies.

  She comes to him now and, to his horror, she kneels in front of him, placing her hands on his knees. Her face is watery, her certainty having wavered under the blow of his rejection, but there is still a stubborn persistence: he sees it in her flushed cheeks, her dilated pupils.

  ‘I know the sacrifice you made,’ she tells him, her voice shaky and barely controlled. ‘And I have kept faith with it all these years. I never breathed a word. I have kept your secret, my darling, and I have waited.’ Her face breaks into a wavering smile. She appears unhinged, and then she adds with a hopeful raise of her eyebrows: ‘Haven’t I proven beyond all doubt that I am your Penelope?’

  Her hands are still on his knees, and he grabs hold of them now.

  ‘I don’t know what it is you thought would happen between us,’ he tells her, forcefully, ‘but this love affair you’ve conjured up is just a fantasy.’

  She twitches her head, still wearing her hopeful smile that seems maddeningly complacent to him and makes him tighten his grip on her hands, shaking them.

  ‘I never asked you to wait for me, or – or lie for me or keep secrets! I don’t love you – I never did! It was just supposed to be a bit of fun, that’s all. The odd shag here and there. It was nineteen years ago, for Christ’s sake! You’re the one who constructed this ridiculous notion of romance around it.’

  Her smile falters, the gleam in her eye dims. When she speaks, her voice has weakened with doubt. ‘My letters. All those years I wrote to you. You knew what I –’

  ‘Dear God, Hilary! I told you to stop sending them! In the same way I wouldn’t have you visit me. Those letters were nonsense, like some lovesick teenager’s!’

  He remembers reading them with a sort of ghastly amazement. The flowery prose, the sickly sentiments expressed. For the most part, he felt embarrassed for her when those missives arrived. And it was true that they sometimes amused him, provided a spark of distraction from the dreary accumulation of his days. He’d even gone so far as to keep some for sentimental reasons: a reminder of what it had been like for him, some sort of touchstone to his old life. And it heartened him, sometimes, when his son neglected to write and his daughter set her mind against him, to think that there was someone out there who retained a spark of feeling for him, even if she was a crazed love-starved lunatic who needed these fantasies to punctuate the boredom of staid middle-class life.

  ‘You told me they kept you going,’ she says, wounded but still doggedly following her course.

  ‘I never … When did I –’

  ‘When I visited you in prison. During the third year, when you were at such a low ebb. You told me my letters were the only thing keeping you alive in there. That without them you didn’t know how you’d manage.’

  He scrambles back through memory, shuffling to find an occasion when he might have uttered such a thing, but those early years are blurred and faded, like old sepia prints, mildewed and creased.

  ‘I remember the evening we met,’ she tells him now, her face and voice softening with recollection. ‘When Greg and I went upstairs to your house and Charlotte made that awful pass at Greg. We were so shocked, poor Greg not knowing what to do, how to disentangle himself without causing offence. I couldn’t believe she would do something so brazen, so cruel, right there in front of you. And I remember how still and quiet you were, and I knew – I just knew – that, despite your stoicism, she had cut you to the quick. There was something so pained within you, my love, something crying out to be healed. I wanted so much to comfort you – oh, yes, I wanted that. Even though I hardly knew you, I still felt this connection, like something ancient between us, waiting to be unearthed. So when you came to me that day, when you kissed me – you attempting to be a salve to my pain – I knew that really it was every bit as much about me healing your wound, my love easing your pain. You needed to be loved, and I wanted so much to love you. That hasn’t changed, Anton. It’s only got stronger.’

  He’s mesmerized by her in one way, even though there’s a sickness in his stomach. There’s a kind of purity to her dogged belief, this trail of gibberish coming out of her with such fervour. It inspires pity and remorse.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry if you’ve been waiting for … well, for some kind of grand reunion but, honestly, that’s never entered my head. I liked you back then,’ he says tenderly, ‘but I loved Charlotte.’

  ‘How could you say that?’ she asks, and he’s surprised by the disgust that creeps into her tone.

  ‘Because it’s true. I mean, yes, I was unfaithful. God knows I tested her sorely on that point. I like women,’ he admits. ‘I always have.’

  ‘No,’ she tells him firmly. ‘No, that’s not how it was. You’re mistaken. What we had was special. It was unique.’

  The colour in her cheeks has flared and spread. Her face is blotchy and flushed. Beneath the calm, controlled exterior, her passions are running close to the surface – he can see that clearly. ‘Hilary –’

  ‘We came together because we recognized something missing in each other that only we could fill. I am your missing piece and you are mine,’ she insists.

  ‘It was a casual fuck!’ he shouts, exasperated. ‘That’s all! Enough of this madness about missing pieces and being special. There was nothing special about it! You want to know what I saw in you back then? Convenience. You were right there beneath my doorstep. It was easy. No inventions, no elaborate excuses for where I’d been. A bit of fun – a distraction to break up the boredom. I didn’t love you, Hilary – if anything, I felt sorry for you. When you told me you couldn’t have children, and then Charlotte insisting the dog be put down and afterwards, realizing that the dog was like your child or something … It was sympathy, but it wasn’t love.’ His voice changes, growing hard once more. ‘I pitied you, Hilary. Your sad, pathetic yearning, your ridiculous romantic sensibility. Anyone could see that your husband – that dull, unimaginative drip – would never be enough to satisfy you. Easy pickings, that’s what you were. That’s all you were.’

  Exasperation has made him cruel, pushed him beyond the point to which he had wanted to go. And now, looking up, he sees that his words have tipped the balance. The light of conviction has died in her eyes. They are dull and dry, her mouth a thin line. She is still kneeling on the floor looking up at him, and it is only now, in the awkward silence that descends, that it seems to hit her – the wildly inappropriate nature of this exchange, how she has demeaned herself with her admissions, her actions. It is almost unbearable, the way she draws herself in, getting to her feet awkwardly, one foot and then the other, tucks the wing of hair back behind her ear. He can hardly bring himself to look at her, but when he does, he sees that same flat stillness in her face. The high colour is gone from her cheeks. Instead she seems jaundiced, unwell.

  ‘I just want you to know,’ she says quietly, ‘that despite what you’ve said, I still trust in what we had.’

  She is exhausting.

  ‘Please. Just go,’ he tells her.

  Relief sweeps over him when he hears the front door bang shut.

  In the silence that follows, he leans back into the armchair, feels the weight of his limbs, the heaviness in his chest. The house whispers around him, the air unsettled in the wake of Hilary’s manic presence. She has stirred something to life, and he closes his eyes, thinks back.

  His affair with Janice was coming to an end when Charlotte found tenants for the flat.

  ‘A short lease,’ she’d told him, over the children’s heads at dinner, ‘three or four mon
ths. Just until the work on their house is complete.’

  A young couple who’d bought the house across the street, teachers, she told him, with an air of forbearance. He’d spied them in the garden, the day they came to view the flat, Charlotte turning on the charm as she showed them around: the husband with his pudgy features and serious expression looked every bit the geography teacher; the wife was small and animated, a mousy little thing, who tittered at Charlotte’s jokes, eager to please. He watched for a minute, then turned away, instantly forgetting them. He was, at that time, consumed by other things – he’d hit a road-bump with one of his bigger investments, and Janice had become tearful and needy, the whole thing tiresome as they played out its bitter ending.

  He gave no further thought to the young couple who were taking the flat, until one Thursday evening, he came through the front door from work, dread lodged in his chest, and heard voices in the living room.

  ‘Ah, here he is!’ Charlotte said, as he came into the room. ‘The man of the house.’

  Her tone was falsely bright, as was the mobile smile on her face.

  ‘Come and meet Greg and Hilary,’ she cried gaily, putting a gin-and-tonic into his hand without meeting his eye.

  In the early hours of that morning, Janice had telephoned their house. Drunk and tearful, she had spoken to Charlotte. The scene that erupted was awful. So while Anton observed his wife perform the role of charming and animated hostess, he knew it was just that: a performance, in front of an unwitting audience. There was a dangerous edge to her laughter and he watched her carefully.

  When she put her hand on that poor fool’s thigh, Anton didn’t react. Even when he read the young man’s discomfort, his little wife squirming with unvoiced outrage on the opposite armchair, still Anton remained calm and quiet, not rising to the challenge. Charlotte wanted a scene but he would not give it to her.