‘But—’
‘They mean nothing to me, nothing at all, they’re all because I can’t have you.’
‘I’m not sure if I believe you—’
‘Oh, it’s true. More true than you’ll ever understand. Please. Please. I want you to come and be with me.’
‘I must get back.’
‘And anyway …’ Tamara shifted Beth’s arm in the crook of hers in a warm shuffling. ‘It’s not nearly as bad as you think. I really don’t do much of anything with anyone. Sometimes I think I’m virtually a nun. I love you.’
‘I love you,’ said Beth.
‘Come away with me. Let’s – you know –’ Tamara dropped her head ‘– let’s really be together.’
‘We can’t,’ said Beth into her hair.
‘I know, I know the practicalities. Don’t, don’t say anything now,’ said Tamara so quietly that Beth could barely hear her. ‘It will break me. Don’t spoil the dream. It’s what I keep thinking about and hoping for, trying to work out.’
‘No,’ murmured Beth, stroking her, kissing her. ‘I love you,’ she said again, and bit her own bottom lip hard.
‘Just think about it. When you’re at home, on your own. Please. Just hold me.’
NINETEEN
July heat was settling in; the river throttle of tourism and dirt rose. Tamara’s arm gestured like a snake as she talked about her marriage. ‘Angus’s been in the spare room for a while,’ she said. ‘But the girls … what would I do with Francesca? Only Angus can deal with her. The thing is,’ she said, her mouth suddenly close to Beth’s ear. ‘If I don’t do something about me and Angus, I may as well be a dead woman.’
Time was formed of a race of images through Beth’s nights, the subject of summer in the States increasingly intruding. ‘I’m basically done with this conversation,’ Sol had said when Beth was uncertain of dates again, and he booked flights for him and Fern, Beth to follow.
‘One hundred per cent stay away,’ shouted Fern, and Beth cried on Tamara’s shoulder.
‘But just think of all the fun we could have,’ Tamara said, her hand moving over Beth, ‘without them.’
‘Fly out after your series is finished,’ said Sol, unsmiling, and a date was agreed upon.
‘I’m waiting for you,’ was all Tamara said, and there was nothing Beth could reply.
The night before Sol and Fern were due to fly to Rhode Island, Beth received a phone call from her gallerist about the almost-completed river series. Kevin O’Hanlon reminded her of the quieter men from Liverpool: wise men of Irish origin who had taken the vow of abstinence, or lived their religion, or those who were simply wed to family with a steady integrity, like her own dear father, his manner refreshing in the chaos of mental drama in which she seemed to exist.
‘City Lies has problems,’ he said, and together they agreed and dismissed thousands of hours of work. ‘River Walk,’ he said, and he paused. Beth held her nail against her finger until it hurt. ‘I’d consider this your breakthrough,’ he said. Beth’s mouth opened. A grin was pressing her cheek against the phone. She wanted to clutch his arm down the line.
Yes! They’re bloody brilliant, they are my babies, they’re the best thing I’ve ever done, it was Tamara Bywater, it was me, it was her, she wanted to say. ‘Thank you.’
‘I like them. Congratulations.’
Fern came into the room after she had finished the call, and Beth gave her a radiant smile. Seeing her mother, Fern walked straight out again.
I long for you, Tamara texted.
***
That night, Beth lay awake, excitement roaring inside her. She pretended to sleep as Sol scrolled down his iPad beside her and pottered about, adding items then putting his case and equipment by the bedroom door; and at one in the morning, he woke Fern, and Beth heard the sounds of drinks being made and his gentle murmurings.
Beth got out of bed and she and Sol hugged. ‘Take care, Bet,’ was all he said.
She moved towards Fern. ‘No,’ said Fern, her voice harder than Beth had ever heard. ‘You don’t need to. Don’t worry. Go away.’ The voice cracked.
‘Of course I need to! You’re my daughter,’ said Beth, and she grabbed Fern and pulled her towards her.
‘Go away,’ said Fern. ‘Fuck off,’ she seemed to mumble, but it was swallowed as she pushed through the front door.
‘Treat her with respect,’ Sol snapped at her. ‘She’s your mother.’
‘We have to sort this out. I love you,’ Beth called to Fern’s retreating back, but she didn’t turn, and Sol turned once, with no smile. ‘I love you,’ called Beth again.
***
‘Look after her’ was the last thing she had said to Sol, but he had her absolute trust.
She got up, pressed a flannel against her eyes, sent a prayer for Fern and grabbed her phone as a text arrived. A small row of jubilation emojis. Tamara B.
Her excitement knew no end. Words stormed. I’m waiting for you … This is your breakthrough … All the fun we could have. I love you, Kevin O’Hanlon, she thought, in exultation. I love you, Sol. I love you—
Tamara. Shrinks were out of bounds, the most common fantasy largely because they were untouchable. But hers touched her. Because a part of her was brilliant. Because a good gallery wanted her again. Because she could have the world.
She spread her legs out in the bed. Tamara Bywater somehow intimated dangerous delights without a single explicit word. How could she keep away from her? She called. Tamara’s voicemail switched straight on, and she listened again and she came and she came, and her river paintings appeared, one by one, on a gallery wall, and she loved them all.
She couldn’t possibly sleep. She texted Tamara, didn’t send it, couldn’t put anything into words.
She fell into a daze. Guilt started twining through the excitement. Her heart beat a sinister tattoo. She was a shit underneath, some Scouser with aspirations, some Mummy’s girl without a mother. She simply didn’t deserve this. She wanted Tamara Bywater. She wanted Tamara to tell her it was all right. She needed to fuck her. She needed her. Tamara would cure her. Tamara would go to bed with her and complete what they had started. Her heart raced. Was she so brilliant? No.
It was past two in the morning. Guilt daggers stormed at her. She couldn’t have a show. Kevin O’Hanlon didn’t understand. She was useless. And even if she did exhibit, the idea of critics coming and poring over her work made her want to throw up. Her mother was alone in this life. Her own cup overflowed. She turned to her pillow.
She got up. Tamara had laid her cards on the table. Beth was keeping herself from what every primitive impulse in her most needed, while the family she was with didn’t want her. She wiped her armpits with a flannel, threw on a dress, took a jacket, tossed some clothes, toothbrush, phone charger and iPad in a small bag almost randomly, with handbag and some cash, and she went out into the street, the coolness on her brow a relief. She walked, turning at every sound of diesel, a night bus throttling past, two cabs full, a third lit halfway down Camden High Street. She hailed it.
‘Calder Street, please. SE11,’ she said.
***
Where would they go together? Practicalities were impossible to calibrate; nothing logistical could be approached that night. As the taxi sped across the river, she and Tamara sank on to her hall floor together, clawing at each other, kissing frantically in relief that she had finally arrived, the husband emerging useless from the spare room while they admitted what had become unstoppable.
Beth got the taxi to drop her off on the square, her mind slowing from its racing to a chill of slight fear. Angus Bywater appeared as a more solid obstacle. She could barely think. I’m waiting for you.
It was almost twenty to three in the morning. She made herself breathe slowly, there in the summer air damp with plant growth over petrol. Sol. Fern. Her heart pounded. Tamara’s lights were on. A glare through the bars of the basement illuminated her area, and there seemed to be a blue glow emanating from the
front door’s fanlight. Beth hesitated. She dialled Tamara’s number, but her phone rang and then switched on to voicemail.
She knocked lightly on the door and nudged her bag behind her as she became aware of music and voices. She waited. Eventually, she heard Tamara’s laugh. She rang the bell.
Angus the husband loomed in the doorway, his fringe awry over an expression of residual amusement. He took a moment to register Beth, his attention still caught by the scene in the room behind him.
He looked blank, and then somewhat irritated. ‘Come in,’ he said after a beat. Cigarette, weed and candle smoke blurred the air, clusters of conversation above music. Beth hesitated.
After a few moments, Tamara tottered into the hall on high heels in a dress of skin-tight satin. Her eyelids were coloured a kingfisher teal with false lashes, so when she blinked it was as though they carried weights.
‘You decided to attend!’ she said, flinging her arms round Beth. She laughed. She gave Beth a showy kiss straight on the lips in front of her husband, who faintly stiffened. Her pupils were dilated, a chemical edge flitting over every expression.
‘Attend …?’ Beth said, nodding into the hall, but Tamara didn’t reply. ‘What?’
‘Our little party!’
Beth looked blank.
‘It’s mostly over now.’
‘You didn’t invite me.’
‘Of course I did. Didn’t I? I did. Well, maybe I thought you wouldn’t come. But you have!’ The husband shambled back into the blue-glowing gloom. Tamara wobbled against Beth. ‘My sweetheart. There is no one I could ever want more.’
Beth sank into the depths of Tamara’s smell, and she could breathe again. Tamara held Beth’s head back. ‘So wonderful to see you, like an apparition,’ she said, and kissed Beth, unsteadily but briefly on the mouth.
‘What are you on, Tamara?’
She laughed. ‘Don’t ask. Am I so obvious? Too many things, I think.’ She grabbed Beth’s hand.
‘I’ve come for you. I came to you,’ Beth whispered beside the door but her movements were suddenly awkward. ‘I couldn’t keep away any more.’
‘Wonderful you!’ said Tamara, and pulled Beth into the back sitting room with no time for her to protest. Five men and two women lay draped over sofas and on the floor. One of the men reached out from where he lay on a rug and stroked Tamara’s calf as she walked into the room; a second pushed his arm around her waist as she sat down, and she snuggled against him, her hair lying across his shoulder, her eyes blank pools. She stretched her hand over to the lap of the very young woman next to her, and the woman held it. Tamara seemed to sleep, momentarily, then woke. ‘Can you get Beth a drink, darling?’ she said to Angus, who rose, brought Beth what appeared to be a cocktail in a clearly freshly-rinsed used glass and removed bowls while Tamara smiled blearily at Beth, and mouthed something she couldn’t catch.
Beth gazed at the portrait of Tamara. It was a well-painted oil; it distorted and missed, yet it caught something of her, some essence Beth had barely seen. Again, there seemed to be no signs of children anywhere in the house. Humiliation that Beth was reluctant to examine threaded through her as her grand gesture collided with daily life. But then she caught Tamara’s gaze across the room, and nothing mattered; Tamara was projecting sex at Beth through her pupils, the deepest intimacy. There was no choice left.
‘Fern,’ she murmured to herself, and her eyeballs ached. Fern didn’t want her. Laurie?
Sol. She would work it all out later. Later.
Beth stood clumsily, went to the hall, and after a few minutes Tamara appeared. She smiled. Very lightly, she leaned against Beth.
‘I can hear the dawn beginning,’ Beth said, and put her arms round Tamara, her waist bird-small.
‘Is it so late?’ murmured Tamara.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ said Beth blindly.
‘Darling, darling, I will crash before I even get to bed.’
Beth hesitated.
‘We’ll find each other in the morning,’ said Tamara, wrapping her arms round her. ‘Won’t we?’
‘Find each other?’
‘There’s the couch in my consulting room. Sleep there tonight. Or is it this morning? I don’t know, my one love. I have no idea.’
‘I love you!’ said Beth spontaneously.
‘This is all I wanted.’ Tamara gazed into her eyes. ‘If I can have you, my life will be all right.’
The husband came out carrying a stack of glasses, his hair flopping over his face as he balanced the glasses with an ashtray, and Beth and Tamara pulled away.
‘Angus,’ said Tamara, now husky. ‘It’s too late for Beth to go back. She lives in—’ She cleared her throat, unsuccessfully, and her words emerged as a whisper. ‘North London somewhere. She can have my couch. Could you be a—’
He paused. ‘Of course. You go to bed. I’ll bring you up your—’
‘Can you get rid of the others?’ she murmured.
‘Go to bed, Mar.’
She smiled at him wearily, blew him a kiss from the stairs. She climbed two steps. As though she had only just remembered Beth, she turned.
‘Love,’ Tamara mouthed, and Beth glanced towards Angus Bywater, who was waiting out of sight, and when she looked back, Tamara was climbing the last stairs, head bowed, spine bent.
‘It’s a little on the cold side over there in the winter, autumn,’ said Angus in his regionally uncertain monotone. He caught Beth’s eye. He had softened. ‘Usable now, I think.’ He was careful in his movements for all his largeness, with his enormous weekend T-shirt loose over a broad chest and the first sprouting of a pot belly, a stoop to his head in that house of low ceilings. He had a tic, blinking too emphatically. He led Beth through the little turns at the back of the house to Tamara’s consulting room.
In a leap of memory, Beth reimmersed herself there, but it was different from the location of her recollections: smaller and so tidy that, unlike the rest of the house, it felt bare. The couch, latterly one of the props in her varying sex scenarios, lay in shadows. Angus showed Beth to her narrow bed, a temporary solution until she could climb into his wife’s. He then re-emerged with his old-mannish movements behind a pile of pillows, sheets, quilt, and even towels, like the well-trained consort that he was, resistant yet polite.
Beth lay on Dr Tamara Bywater’s therapy couch as the birds began to wake. She could only exist in the moment, on this needle end of exultation and catastrophe.
TWENTY
Beth woke with a jump on Tamara’s couch at just before ten o’clock to sun glaring through the cracks in the blinds. Sol and Fern would almost have arrived in Rhode Island. She pressed her palm for their safety. Pain crashed into her forehead with a delay as she turned. Yet the simple fact that she was here, in Tamara Bywater’s consulting room, was like some kind of miracle of possession. It was eerily silent, the birds thinned out, traffic a skein of sound, and the Bywater family on a Saturday apparently asleep. She listened for them through the house, hearing creaks that were real or imagined.
A moment of disbelief hammered into her. When would Sol know? He would WhatsApp, email, FaceTime. Even before he saw the background room or the inexplicable street or garden, he would know. There was nothing on her phone from the airport.
She padded barefoot to the toilet at the back of the kitchen where she washed at the tiny sink, put on some foundation, cleared her throat and called for Tamara. There was no reply. The lower ground floor was empty, the kitchen a mess of breakfast, ashtrays and wine glasses. She ventured to the upper ground floor like an intruder, detritus of the party with its smoke still evident in the sitting room, the portrait of Tamara now a shock of flesh. There was silence from the top floor. She made herself some coffee, searched for painkillers, then methodically and quite loudly cleared up the kitchen. It took some time to empty the dishwasher, fill it, wash scrambled egg and scoop away crumbs.
She stopped still at the thought of Sol and Fern. She texted a good-morning message and sent l
ove. Words went through her mind: I ran away to be with Tamara Bywater. Her mind spun back on itself. The very idea of leaving Fern brought an instant prickling to her eyes, making her breathless. But practicalities had to be postponed. She sent a text to Fern: My darling girl, I will miss you. I hope you enjoy the space that you want away from me. I hope very much that one day you can explain it all. I love you very very dearly, whatever you do. Always. There was nothing from Sol. She crept up the stairs, observing every detail and calling softly, but doors were closed except one girl’s bedroom.
Just as Beth was emptying the second dishwasher load, the front door opened upstairs. Her hand froze. ‘Hi!’ she called in a squeak.
There was a hesitation. ‘Yes,’ came a man’s voice, and a creaking of floorboards. Down the stairs inched the unfavoured neighbour who fixed Tamara’s lights, equipped with secateurs and a recycling bag. He gave a grunt, barely catching Beth’s eye.
‘Hello,’ she said. They both stood there, seemingly locked in a competition not to speak.
‘Pruning Tamara’s jasmine,’ he said eventually.
‘I’m not sure she’s in.’
‘She said late Saturday a.m. was the best time. I have my key.’
‘You can get in at the side gate to access the jasmine,’ said Beth.
‘I have my key,’ he repeated while hugging his secateurs, and Beth suppressed amusement.
The post snaked its way through the door upstairs and she left him to his gardening tasks then went to look. A postcard lay on the mat.
Dear Dr Bywater. Thank you for your advice. I have kept the card to remind me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Jade.
She chucked it back on top of the other post, and wandered into the yard, images of disappearing without leaving a note interleaved with a scene of Tamara waking and calling a conference in her bedroom for a joint confession to the husband. Beth paced round the Bywaters’ yard while the jasmine wobbled to chopping sounds, Tamara’s servant hidden from view. There was a broken mosaic on one wall, improvements to its design scrawling through Beth’s mind as she paced, and she fetched her sketch pad so that she was working.
The Seduction Page 19