A Certain Chemistry (35 page)

“I’ll say it again: you’re sleeping with Georgina Nye, aren’t you?”

My head dropped. “Yes,” I said. Hardly louder than a whisper, and choking on the word.

“You . . . fucking . . .
cunt
.”

I somehow managed to raise my eyes to look at her.

“You . . .
fucking
. . .
cunt
!” she repeated. “So—that’s how much respect you have for me, is it? I’m not even worth fucking
lying
for? No, no: just come straight out with it—spit it right into my face.”

“You said—”

“You disgusting, arrogant bastard. Being dragged around by your dick I can understand, but I never knew you thought so little of me as to be prepared to calmly kick me in the teeth like
that
.”

“But you . . . I’m sorry, but—”

“
Jesus
. Well, I hope you’ll treat Georgina fucking Nye better than this now you’re with her.”

“
With her?
I’m not ‘with her.’ I mean, I
am,
but I’m not, and I’m with
you
at least as much, if not more. It’s . . . oh, I don’t know what it is. I’m confused.”

“If you think you’re going to be ‘with me’
and
‘with Georgina Nye,’ then
confused
is not
nearly
the fucking word for what you are.”

“I didn’t mean . . . I just don’t know what to think or what to do.”

“Really? Poor you and your inner turmoil. I’m not nearly so deep, apparently, because
I
know what to think: I think you’re a cunt.
And
I know what to do too.” She moved over, opened the front door, and held it wide. “Fuck off,” she said.

“Come on, Sara . . . can’t we talk about this?”

“Ha! Mr. Talk About Our Feelings all of a sudden? Good-bye, Mr. Sit on the Fucking Sofa, Not Say a Word, and Sigh Wearily If I Try to Get a Conversation Going—Can’t It Wait Until After
Newsnight
: I’m Listening to This Report?, and hello, Mr. Talk About Our Feelings. What a sudden and remarkable change—what
can
have brought it on! You
cunt
!”

“Sara—”

“If you want to talk, go and talk to your slag of an actress.”

“She’s not a slag.” I felt I couldn’t let George continually be called that. I wanted to be fair, and it was, well, dishonorable not to defend her against such things. “I thought you liked her.”

“
What?
You . . . oh, I
see
. . . you mean, ‘like her as an actress’? Rather than ‘like her as some rich slut who’s been fucking my boyfriend behind my back’?”

“Come on, Sara, be reasonable. I understand you’re upset, but let’s try to behave like adults. This doesn’t change who she is, and you liked her. She
is
a lovely person.”

“Doesn’t change who she is? Of course it changes it. She’s now the kind of person who can have it all—all the money and the fame and the success—but not be able to resist taking what
I
have, when I’ve got so little.”

“It’s not like that. In fact, you’re quite similar people.”

“We are not—in
any
fucking way—similar.”

“That’s not true. Look, for a start, you’re a supervisor at your work, and she’s one in that factory in
The Firth
.”

“She
plays
a supervisor, you shithead!”

“But she knows how it feels—she spent two weeks in a real factory shadowing a supervisor to prepare for that part.”

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t knife you
right
fucking now.”

“I didn’t say it was
identical
—”

“Good for you, Tom. Because she’s a wee, spoilt, rich tart who just takes whatever she fancies on a whim, and I’m a nobody. A nobody with three pairs of shoes to my name, in a dead-end job, in a dead-end life, and she can just drop by and take my boyfriend because . . . because
she can
. Because she’s the big star who’s in the newspapers and on TV, and I’m nothing but the boring girlfriend who sells bleeding Walls Viennettas and fucking microwave fucking Calorie Counter fucking
Cannelloni alla Besciamella,
and I’ll be doing exactly the same thing until the day I fucking die. Jesus—she must be laughing at the very thought that I could possibly compete with her.”

“It’s not a competition, for Christ’s sake—and I don’t care that she’s a famous actress. That’s just stupid.”

“Right. Of course. It had no effect on you at all.”

“It
didn’t
.”

“Sure. You never once thought, ‘Wa-hey! I’m fucking
Georgina Nye
here!’ Never even crossed your mind.”

“No. Never. If that’d been the case, I’d have been attracted to her even before we met—but I wasn’t. The whole thing just happened gradually, without my even being aware of it.”

“I can imagine. It must have been a terrible bleeding shock to look down one day and notice you’re shagging her brains out—’Christ! I’m fucking an actress!’ ”

“It . . . look, it simply wasn’t like that. It was just . . .” I wanted to say “destiny,” but that seemed ludicrous at this point, for some reason. “I can’t explain it, but I love you both and—”

“Och, you
love
her, do you?”

“I love you
both
.”

Sara grabbed me and physically hurled me out the door.

“I’m charmed by your huge capacity for love, Tom. Well fucking done. . . . Now fuck off.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t care. Just leave. You can come back during the day, while I’m out, and collect your stuff. You can do that all next week. After that I’m changing the locks, and anything of yours that’s still here I’ll burn.”

I leaned towards her. “I love you, Sara. I know you’re hurt, but I do still love you . . . more than I can say.”

“I’m closing this door now. I’ll be back in two minutes to see if you’re still here, and when I come back to check on that, I’ll be carrying a hammer.”

She slammed the door in my face.

I decided she needed some time to cool down.

“Sorry,” I said, for about the twentieth time. “I didn’t know where else to go . . . well, to tell the truth, there was nowhere else I
wanted
to go.”

“It’s okay,” said George. “I was still awake anyway.” She lit a cigarette and tossed the packet over to me. I took one greedily. There ought to be special cigarettes for times like this—rapid, superstrength ones, in the same way as you can get those isotonic, glucose-rich sports drinks. They ought to make crisis cigarettes that you simply have to tap on a table to ignite and that race down from tip to filter in a single drag.

After the unfortunate scene with Sara, I’d phoned George’s mobile and then taken a taxi to her hotel. The night staff there had obviously assumed I was one of the other guests and had let me walk right up to her room without anything beyond a “Good evening, sir” from the reception desk.

“Anyway,” I said, “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Yes,” replied George, and served up just the most basic components of a smile.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Tom. If it’s anyone’s fault, then, well”—she took a long draw on her cigarette—“it’s Fiona’s.”

“Bitch. I’m sure she only meant to torment me. But she’d had a bit of wine and she misjudged the level—and misjudged Sara too, for that matter. Still . . . bitch.”

“I’ll call Paul first thing in the morning. He’ll take care of her.”

In my head, I heard Paul hissing the words “I’ll take care of her.” And then, perhaps, tapping the side of his nose.

“He’s not going to kill her, is he?” I asked, a little anxiously.

“Kill her?”

“Well—get someone from the London gangland to do it.”

“Er, no, I don’t expect so. I was thinking more that he’d phone and tell her that if she said another word, then she’d be flushing her publicity career away—that he’d put the word out that anyone who employed her certainly wouldn’t be working with me or anyone else Paul has any influence with. Why on earth did you think he’d
kill
her?”

“Well . . . you know . . . his accent.” Put like that it sounded stupid.

“Ah.”

“Don’t tell him I said that.”

“Of course not. . . . You’d be a dead man.”

We treated ourselves to a couple of proper, if puny, smiles.

“So,” I said, “what are we going to do?”

“What’s Sara going to do?”

“I don’t know. She’s taken this much worse than I imagined.”

“You imagined her finding out?”

I had, in fact. Often. She’d discover some telltale clue, and it’d all come out. She’d be in floods of tears. Upset almost to the point of collapse—distressed by the discovery and also terrified that she’d lost me. It’d be awful and very, very emotional. I’d hold her as she sobbed, hold her tightly and tell her how it was a dreadful, cruel thing that Fate had visited upon all of us. How most people are lucky enough never to face a situation where they meet the two people they were meant for, and meet them at the same time. I’d cry a little too, and say how I loved her just as much as I’d always done. That I couldn’t bear the thought that finding love with George would mean I’d lose my love with her. We’d cling to each other, desperately, into the night. Then, the next morning—Sara a little red-eyed from the tears but confident now of my continued love for her—we’d try to find some way for the three of us to move forward; a way of making this three-cornered relationship work.

I didn’t imagine her just getting very, very angry indeed and throwing me out of the house. I seemed to remember she implied she might attack me with a hammer too, at one point—I’d definitely never imagined that bit at all.

“No,” I said, shaking my head animatedly, “I don’t mean I imagined her finding out. I meant she reacted much worse than I would have imagined, she would react, to it, if she had, done. Which she did.”

“I see.”

“Well, whatever. I don’t know what she’s going to do. I’ll give her the night to calm down and call her tomorrow. She did have quite a few glasses of wine at the party, so maybe it was just the alcohol talking.” (Yes—that was probably it, actually.)

“Hmm . . .” George bit her lip. “Do you think she’ll keep talking when the alcohol wears off?”

“I’m sure she’ll talk more reasonably.”

“No—I meant, do you think she’ll
talk
?” she asked.

I looked at her, squinting to convey that I didn’t quite know what she meant.

“To the press,” she said. “Do you think she’ll talk to the press?”

“God—
no
—of course not.” No, she wouldn’t. Would she? No, it was unthinkable. For one thing, Sara had more class than that. And, for another, she’d surely realize how damaging such a thing would be. Giving her story to the press, doing something so spiteful and ill-considered, would be dreadful—it’d create a wound in our relationship that it’d be terribly difficult to heal. I couldn’t believe she’d do something like that. “No, Sara would never do that.”

“How many books have you ghostwritten for women whose husbands have thought they’d never do such a thing?”

Jesus.

“Sara’s different.”

George’s face humored me with an “Okay, if you say so” expression. “Practical things, then—where are you planning to stay?”

“Well, I thought I could stay here tonight.”

“Yes.” George squeezed my hand, briefly. “
Of course
you can. But what about after that?”

“Well . . . hopefully Sara will get a little less volcanic and let me back into the house. The spare bedroom or something. But I suppose, just in case, I’ll get a hotel room in the meantime.”

“Not in this hotel, though.”

“Christ no—I could never afford to stay in— Oh, right. I see what you mean. No, I’ll get a room in a different hotel. A long way from here.”

“You’re very sweet, Tom.” She touched my face, briefly. “Especially with all you’re going through.”

We talked for another half an hour or so, chain-smoking and running over hundreds of what abouts and what ifs. Then, quietly, we went to bed. We just slept together; we didn’t have sex. Which was absolutely fine with me, obviously. We were both exhausted—emotionally as much as physically—and, in any case, having sex in these circumstances, with what had happened still very much raw in our minds, well, that would have been completely inappropriate.
Coarse,
even. Actually, I was glad it never seemed to be an option. Phew.

The following morning I went to book a room in a hotel—a reasonably nice one, in fact. Well, I wasn’t remotely poverty-stricken, not with the money I was going to get from
Growing,
so I was sure I could easily afford a night or two in a fairly decent place. After that, I went and had a quite astonishingly ugly ten minutes with Sara.

I’d never have thought she could be so nasty, quite frankly. I called round the house with the perfectly acceptable excuse that I needed to pick up just a few things that couldn’t wait until next week when she was out—my shaver, some clothes, the charger for my mobile, and so on. I even rang the doorbell, rather than using my key to let myself in. She did allow me into the house to collect the stuff, but she was rigid-faced, cold, and monosyllabic—it was like trying to talk to the Terminator. However, it wasn’t until I suggested that this was a silly situation—shouldn’t I stay so we could try to work things through?—that she really turned savage. She said that if I ever turned up again while she was there, she’d destroy everything of mine without even giving me the week’s grace and, what was more, if I didn’t leave in the next fifteen seconds she’d call the police. (I may have lived there for several years—and, if I’d been looking at it from the position of preparing for a vile and grueling legal battle, also partly paid for the upkeep—but it was solely her house on paper.)

I left carrying a suitcase of my things and a completely new, sober perspective on the situation. Clearly, it could be several days—perhaps even a whole week—before Sara calmed down again.

Once I’d set myself up with a room, I gave George a call. We talked for a few minutes, but she was just about to set off to meet Paul (she had to tour around the country doing more publicity work for the next few days). So, I stayed in my hotel for the rest of the day, and all the next day too. Even more so than usual, I kept my mobile to hand—to the extent of leaving it switched on all night while I charged it. I didn’t want to miss it if Sara rang to begin patching things up. I could understand it’d be quite a struggle, internally, for her to make that first call, and I wanted to make sure I was there for her when she did.