A Certain Chemistry (25 page)

George jerked her legs away, crossing them at the same time; she did this so violently and abruptly that her chair made a scraping noise across the floor. As her legs crossed and shifted, my hand very nearly got snared between them and I came close to being dragged off after it like a man whose arm has got caught in machinery. I looked at George, but she was determinedly staring away from me, apparently completely fascinated by something her agent was saying about cross-marketing. I had no idea what I’d done, what line I’d overstepped (a bikini line of some sort, I imagined). It wasn’t until I pulled my eyes away from George that I saw the cause of her sudden explosion of chastity. Fiona was bent over towards the table. It was no consolation whatsoever that I could see down her top, because she wasn’t bent down, heading
down:
she was bent down, heading
up
. I’d no idea why—my attention was elsewhere—but Fiona was obviously sitting upright again after reaching under the table for something. What it was that had made her descend—to retrieve a dropped pen or a piece of paper, to attend to an itch, to dip a loosening finger into a shoe, or maybe just to sneak a crafty look at Paul’s groin—I didn’t know, but whatever it was, her head had been subtable. It was, of course, possible she hadn’t seen anything. Her eyes may simply not have glanced in the direction of George’s legs, or George could have spotted her ducking in time and made evasive maneuvers before she was sufficiently submerged to be able to see anything. Both of those things were possible, but neither of them was true. A fraction of a second with Fiona’s face dismissed those possibilities instantly. As she moved back into an upright position, her eyes remained zeroed in on me in the same way you see a lion maintaining its lock on a gazelle while moving through tall grass. If that wasn’t enough—and it was more than enough, I can assure you—she was smiling at me. A wholly humorless smile. If it contained any emotion at all—other than a soulless, icy maleficence—then it was simply a whiff of something like, but not quite, triumph.

I tried to meet her look with a countercountenance of blankness. Not guilty, nor embarrassed, nor angry, nor anything at all except resistant. My eyes fell first, though. You can’t bluff when your opponent has seen your cards. I avoided eye contact with her and feigned interest in what Paul was saying. The final ten minutes of the meeting seemed to last about twenty-eight years and take place in a room that was a dozen degrees hotter than before. Hugh had barely got a third of the way through a speculative sentence tentatively suggesting that we might think about drawing to a close before I was up out of my seat and heading towards the door at a brisk trot. Fiona—poisonously casual—called out to me, “Tom?” as I shot out of the room, but I pretended not to hear her and raced off towards the water cooler like a man with a thirst born of the desert.

I poured myself a cup of water and used it as a thing to look over at the rest of them leaving the office. Hugh stood in the doorway like a host bidding farewell to his guests. Fiona, Paul, and George paused just outside the office, chatting cheerfully about something, but Amy broke away from them and made her way over to me.

“So,” she said, “that went pretty well.”

“Hm,” I replied.

Amy looked back at the group. “I must say I’m glad you’ve got over your Fiona thing.”

I arranged a couple of bemused eyebrows and a surprised mouth for her. “Eh? What Fiona thing?”

She was digging around in her handbag. “None of my business, I know . . .” She pulled out her cigarettes and put one in her mouth. “But I don’t miss much. I couldn’t help noticing, really.”

“Noticing what?”

“Oh, the gormless expressions, how you lost brain cells as she approached, the way you stared at her tits . . .”

“I stare at everyone’s tits. I stare at
your
tits—all the time.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She had her lighter in her hand and was absently flicking it on and then letting it go out. “But only because they’re tits and they’re within view. You look at my tits like some people would watch a football match between two teams they don’t support: you’d bought a season ticket and a club shirt for Fiona’s tits.”

“You reckon, do you?” I said dismissively.

“Whatever. Like I say, it’s none of my business, but I’m glad that you’ve recovered. You couldn’t even bear to look at her by the end of that meeting. I don’t miss much, you see.”

“Apparently not.”

“You’re far better off with Sara, you know. How long have you two been together now?”

“About five or six years.”

“There you go. You’ve got yourself a nice-looking woman—a nice-looking
Scots
woman, too, which is a prize no Englishman really deserves—and you’re happy together. You’re far better off than most people.” Fiona, Paul, and George left Hugh to seal himself in his office and mope about his book and his mortality, and began walking over to where Amy and I were standing. “If you’re going to risk what you’ve got, then at least do it for someone who’s worth it. At the very least, you ought to consider someone whose arse isn’t visible from space—oh, hi, Fiona!”

Fiona ignored Amy, but now she did so with a superior, invulnerable air. She didn’t say anything to anyone; she just stared at me, smiling.

“You ready, love?” Paul said to Amy.

“Sure,” she replied.

I looked at her, pleased to have a reason not to look at Fiona.

“Paul and I are having lunch, Tom. I’ve booked at that Bosnian place. We’ll never get extra seats there at this time of day; sorry—I didn’t think you’d be here. We could go somewhere else, though. That’s okay, isn’t it, Paul?”

“Erm, yeah, sure—I’m easy.”

“No,” I insisted, “it’s fine.”

“Why don’t you and George go somewhere together?” said Amy.

Fiona coughed. I didn’t look at her. More surprising, neither did I beat her to the ground with a fire extinguisher.

“Leave us to talk business,” continued Amy, “and you two have a nice ‘job well done’ meal. You both deserve it.”

“Yeah—good thinking,” said Paul.

“And I’m sure Paul will pick up the tab as a thank-you,” added Amy.

Paul seemed to experience a sudden sharp constriction around his heart, but he managed to reply, “Yeah” weakly and shoot George a glance that read, “Please God, George,
please God
guide Tom in the direction of sitting on a park bench with a saveloy and a can of Fanta.”

“Sure.” George nodded. “How does that sound to you, Tom?” I think she’d decided that the way she was going to play it with Fiona was to carry on as if nothing had happened. Show no sign of concern whatsoever.

“Well . . . yes. Why not?” I said.

“I’ll leave you all to eat, then,” Fiona said. “I’ve got things I need to get on with here.”

“Don’t you—” began Paul, but Amy stomped over him immediately.

“You’re a real trouper, Fi. You almost make me feel guilty. Right—let’s the rest of us go and stuff our faces.”

Fiona stood and watched me all the way out.

It was really so that we could have some privacy, but I’m sure it was also a great relief to Paul that George and I rejected all of the restaurants in town in favor of some Marks & Spencer’s sandwiches on the scrubby grass of Arthur’s Seat. George suggested it, saying she’d heard the view of Edinburgh was wonderful from up there (she really did seem to have a thing about views). I wasn’t bothered one way or the other about the view, but I suspected that, if you want to get a sense of perspective about things, then it always helps to be sitting on the side of a volcano. So, we took a taxi out to the bottom, hiked up to the top, and with no one passing within a hundred yards of us—and George in her Nyeness-concealing hat and glasses anyway—we were hidden on the most exposed place in Edinburgh. Nearly bleeding
killed
me walking up the damn thing, of course, but, once I was there, my wheezing had subsided enough to allow me to talk after only about ten or fifteen minutes.

“No,” I said, “you did exactly the right thing.”

“You’re sure?”

“Definitely.
You
can stare Fiona down. She wouldn’t
dare
do anything to offend you—you’re Georgina fucking Nye, for God’s sake.”

“What level of celebrity do you have to be to merit the ‘fucking,’ then?” She laughed.

“Hu-fucking-
mongous,
” I replied. “Nothing can touch your tmesis-grade celebrity.”

“Your
what
-grade celebrity?”

“Tmesis—when you split a compound word with another word.”

“Tmesis?”

“Tmesis.”

“Did you use that just so you’d sound clever?”

“Did it work?”

“Yeah.”

“Phew. Because I’m not sure it is
tmesis,
technically, when you say ‘Georgina fucking Nye.’ I was a bit scared you’d pull me up about it.”

“With good cause. . . .” She teased a slice of cucumber out of her sandwich, popped it into her mouth, and became serious again. “She could tell people, though. Even if she’s scared of me—and my fearsome tmesis—she could start rumors that’d wind up with some reporter.”

“No. Not Fiona. She defines herself too much by her job—it’s how she measures herself against others and the universe. It would be unprofessional of her to let the info out, so even the
faintest possibility
that any leak would lead back to her—and people would therefore think she was flawed as a head of publicity—even that would be more than she could bear.”

“So she’s got to pretend she didn’t see anything, then?”

“Oh, no. I bet she’ll use it to torment me, as a stick to poke me with. She’ll always make sure
I
know that
she
knows something I wish she didn’t, but she won’t mention a thing to anyone else.”

“Right . . . Thank God. We need to be careful.”

“You said that before, and the next thing I know you’re feeling me up under the table at a sales meeting.”

She did her grin. “I know, I know. I couldn’t stop myself. You know how it is sometimes—the very fact that something is so
obviously
dangerous and a bad idea just makes it all the more irresistible.”

I started to consider this notion, but quickly switched to taking a bite of my sandwich. I wonder who first decided to cut sandwiches diagonally. I bet that at the time, when they first displayed their triangular slices to a stunned world, they were thought of as subversive, shocking, and antiestablishment. There were probably furious editorials in all the papers and, when the initial scandalous platters were carried in, men led their fainting wives from the room amid chaos and uproar. Now, of course, it’s a mark of the most twee kind of refinement—they’ve gone completely mainstream. Just like trousers arriving in respectable society—as an outrageous fashion that referenced the legwear of the French Revolutionary peasants—to appalled howls, and now being the norm. I bet diagonally cut sandwiches have an outlaw past.

Right. I think all that’s distracted me sufficiently from what George said.

“Are you free for the rest of the day, then?” I asked.

“Day . . .” she replied, “and night.”

“The whole night?”

“Yes. Can you get away?”

“Away where?”

“I don’t know where, I just meant . . .”

“Oh, right. Away
from
. . .” I didn’t say “Sara,” but even the tacit acknowledgment of her existence blew a kind of sadness over us. Not that I wished that she didn’t exist, that she
wasn’t
—absolutely not. I loved her. It was simply . . . oh, the
pain
.

How cruel were the sightless stumblings of Fate; how unpitying the heart of Chance to torment us thus! We were sensitive people. I ached with guilt and sorrow not as other men, but deeper and more profoundly. My conscience was in anguish. My soul wept. George and I, alone, our feelings a fire whose flames at once warmed and scorched us—the most wonderful of emotions intertwined inextricably with the worst.

My throat swollen with a dizzying melancholy, I leaned across and kissed George’s lips. She responded without hesitation and, mouths accepting, we wrapped our arms about each other and lay back on the harsh ground. High above, the sky looked down on our joyous, tragic embrace and sought in pity to hide us for a moment from the spiteful gods.

“It’s a pisser,” I said to Sara, pressing my phone harder to one ear and sticking a finger into the other to hear over the noise of the traffic. “I can’t complain, I suppose—Amy has never overlooked any details before. But she missed this one, and now I’ve simply
got
to get my initials on the amended contracts while we’ve got Georgina’s agent off balance.”

“Aye, of course,” she replied. “You get it sorted out. You’ve
promised
me that carpet, remember.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s no big deal; you’re only away for a night.”

“Yeah, but I hate that I couldn’t warn you. We only realized at the meeting today.”

“Och, relax, Tom. You’re off to London for a night—I’ll cope. Hell, I’ll probably hunt out that old electric toothbrush I had, rent a couple of John Cusack videos, and have a scorcher of an evening.”

“Sure—you do that.”

“I was kidding.”

“I know . . . but I’m just saying it’d be fine if you wanted to do that. What with me having to be away for the night like this.”

“Tom?”

“Yes?”

“Get a grip. . . . Did you have a few lagers with lunch, at all? You know how they make you all . . . odd.” She laughed.

Christ, what a complete bastard I was.

“Okay, okay. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Love you.”

“Well,
obviously
.”

I hung up. I made something of a long-winded performance of doing this very simple thing because I was aware that when I’d said “Love you,” I had—conscious that George was walking next to me and could hear—blushed extensively. It wasn’t because I was ashamed of her hearing me say that to my girlfriend as part of setting up the means of being unfaithful to her. (It would have been perfectly understandable if this
had
been the reason—being observed performing that kind of calculated treachery is shameful even if the person watching is in league with you.) Oddly, the reason I’d flushed awkwardly was that it felt mean to tell Sara I loved her within earshot of George. I was concerned and embarrassed about the hurt it might cause
George
to hear me say it to
Sara
. This was complicated. Some people might think that complications like this proved they were an interesting person with an interesting life and relish it. But not me. No, I only wished things could be simple, that I didn’t have to carry around the curse of being interesting and exciting. Look at all these people walking past me—
they
were the fortunate ones. If only they knew the anguish of being interesting, they’d thank their lucky stars they were dull people with mundane lives. But they didn’t know, of course. They had no idea who walked among them.