Another Country (9 page)

When she was on her way home, Richard called. She listened to the message as she walked from the tube to her house, through the shadows of trees and other houses on the back street.

Richard's voice was warm, slightly hesitant. ‘Hi sweetie, it's me. I'm sorry we parted on a bad note. Give me a ring if you get this soon. Otherwise, talk to you tomorrow. And Dad's out for a bit in the afternoon so we could meet up if you want. Anyway, hope you had a good day, and speak to you soon.'

Leela looked at the screen of her phone. It was almost an hour since his call. The message sat in her heart like ballast, something to be held against the vast flow of indifference, time, transience. He had called. In the moment of freedom from her usual sense of lack, she felt she could do anything: tell him it was over, be alone. She wouldn't call now, she'd call back tomorrow. She remembered, too, as she let herself into the darkened hall of her house – a place she now considered home but which she'd pass through just as she'd passed through other rented accommodation, other rooms, and made conversation with other flatmates – the time Richard had called her over when his father had last been in town. Richard had moved to the spare room, which had a single bed. They had repaired there, and begun to kiss: he had coaxed Leela into bed. It had struck her that he'd invited her over for an hour so they could have sex and that this was – was it? – an insulting way to treat her. She'd submitted, completely callously, closed her eyes, and thought without guilt of anonymous bodies, large-breasted women, images from pornography: dark, hot openings. She'd come silently and with satisfaction. Afterwards, Richard had said, ‘You felt slightly absent during sex.'

‘What makes you say that?' she'd asked.

‘You weren't completely engaged. I don't think that's fair. I don't think you'd like it if I did that.'

But he did make love with his eyes closed, and she was reasonably sure he thought not of her but of other people, and other images as he moved. Did she care? Occasionally she realised she was more detached from the experience than she admitted. Didn't she, too, think of other things, other pictures, animated by the desire of other, unseen but multiple people?

She closed the door, leaving behind her the shifting panel of light from the street that came through the stained glass. She went towards her bedroom to get a towel. She'd shower, wash her hair, dry it, put some gunk in it, so she wouldn't make herself even later in the morning. On her way to work she would, she thought, call Richard, and apologise for the things she'd said.

Chapter 12

Installed at her desk at ten past nine, relieved that she wasn't later, then depressed to be there at all, Leela went into a reverie.

It was bizarre to think it had only been a year ago, in May, that she'd been considering whether to stay in Paris a second year. There was a simple application process by which teachers had to submit a letter asking to renew their contracts. Nina was going to stay, but Kate wasn't. Leela had debated the question with herself. She made lists, on foolscap copies, under two columns: Pros and Cons. The lists ran overleaf. She wore a frown. One day, towards the end of the month, in blithe sunshine, she went for a walk towards the Left Bank.

The lists danced in her head. Paris seemed unreal, or was it she who was without substance? A man bumped into her, and apologised furtively. On the boulevard, the trees were new in leaf. Near Les Halles, stalls bristled with sunglasses in coloured frames. The sun hit the top of the Tour Saint Jacques and shattered everywhere.

She crossed bridge after bridge, then took a long stroll home as the sun went in. She walked through the new Louvre, whose neoclassical courts frightened her. She would apply to renew her post, she decided. Paris was Paris: she had not yet had enough of it. There would be other encounters, adventures perhaps. She sat on a bench near the river and wondered where Patrick was these days: maybe in his flat, maybe returned to England. They had reached a mutual truce and agreed, silently, to forget each other's existence, after the episode in January when Leela had gone to see him and, intending to mention dryly and in passing the results (none) of her liaison with Simon, had instead laid out, in rage, all the misdemeanours Patrick's friend had made and the ways in which his treatment of her, Leela, had been tawdry and unsatisfactory (unreturned messages, a general disappearance, but once, when she'd run into him on the street, an annoyingly bluff chat terminating in a kiss and a suggestion they ‘go for a drink sometime'). Patrick had listened, become more and more politely detached, smoked in silence, then got up, paced about a bit, and suggested it had been Leela's fault. What had she expected?

‘Why didn't you tell me what he was like?' she burst out. His eyebrows had shot up; she'd gone too far.

Now they lived in the same city, or didn't, and she worked ten minutes from his apartment, and went out in the same area, but in other streets, other bars, and they didn't see each other.

She went home and wrote the letter asking to have her contract renewed.

The next day, when she went to the school office to drop it off, Mme Sarraute shrugged and said applications had officially closed, and, anyway, there had been several excellent candidates from outside the school. It was hardly worth Leela's putting in her letter.

She could have insisted, or spoken to the director of teaching. Instead, she took the letter home, cried a single tear, and crumpled it.

That Sunday, the first of June, she went for another walk along the bridges of Paris, fictional in their loveliness, heedless in their eternity, and the sunshine in which she walked seemed to erase her as she passed through it.

Nine forty. There were three, perhaps more, hours till lunch, when she would tramp through the next-door shopping mall, which was furnished with further fluorescent light and clothes in mixes of man-made fibres, plastic jewellery, make-up, hair products.

Gemma, a blonde girl with a triangular smile, was one of the senior administrators in the office where Leela was filling in as Junior Administrative Secretary to Mike Pringle, a man with a beard who took Leela's job alarmingly seriously. Gemma liked the place where they worked. There was a corporate discount at the Canary Wharf branch of Fitness First, she told Leela, in Leela's first week.

‘Great.'

‘It's a really good gym.' She fixed Leela in the eye. ‘They have elliptical trainers, treadmills, an aerobics studio.
Yoga
, if that's what you're into.'

‘Great.'

Yesterday Gemma had come back from lunch carrying a plastic bag, and plopped it on Leela's desk. ‘Look, I got a whole ton of Redken shampoos.'

‘Really?' Leela had no idea what these were, and was in the middle of filling in her time sheet to claim she had been away from her desk for half an hour when it had in fact been an hour and ten minutes.

‘Yeah.' Gemma bristled with pleasure. ‘I thought I'd treat myself for working so hard.'

Leela smiled. ‘Sounds like a good idea.'

She had been in the fluorescent light of the office, then the mall, for too long.

On the tube, she brooded. Everything in the office conspired against her; even the physical environment. The dull grey low-pile carpet, with its near-imperceptible pattern of blue squares arranged in diagonals; the grey and black desk chairs; the counterfeit wooden tables. The pens were useless yellow ballpoints, the pencils had smudgy erasers. Even the files she was supposed to keep in order – sometimes she did, at other times she shoved ‘Claims Ranked by Order [Mortality]' into a totally different section, like ‘Mortality [Isle of Wight]' – came in different colours: red, blue, yellow, green, but depressing tones of those colours. Yellow was a dirty mustard, red a faded maroon, blue a slatey mess, green resembled ageing Astroturf.

By summer she was getting up early to go to the gym before work. Richard was just waking when she left the flat to walk to the tube, under trees in yellow-green leaf. When she got there, she clutched her card, feeling a mix of assurance – she did the same workout every day – and slight nerves. The presence of other people gave the gym an odd sense of theatre.

The lights were bright, fluorescent. She felt the nervous energy of morning coffee give way to sweat, and the body took over from the mind, endlessly iterating the same action.

A dance song played, a pumping beat; the legs worked harder. Next to her, a very thin, tanned blonde woman stepped much faster than Leela. She was using one of the older, more resistant stair machines. She arrived every day before the eight o'clock rush and stayed, with silent determination, on the machine for twenty minutes. She wore sports leggings and a crop top between which her midriff was nearly flat, a yellowish colour. Leela had watched her on many days. She seemed to work by the calorie counter on the machine, and burnt off at least a thousand calories as she moved between the stepper, the treadmill, and the elliptical trainer. When she arrived, she had a slight exoform curve to her belly; by the time she was well into her workout and an exhausted Leela was heading to the changing room, any sign of fullness was gone. She probably aimed to burn off every calorie she had consumed the previous day. In this way her balance with the world remained at nil: she might just as well have not been there.

After lunch Leela fished out her notebook. Near the end, she had written the numbers from one to a hundred, each above a small box. In some of the boxes she'd drawn a symbol denoting a smiling face; in others, the box had been coloured black. It was rare for there to be a line of smiles longer than four or five; there was one stretch of eleven but, she thought, the black squares that followed it probably ought to have swallowed half the page.

Today's square was still blank. Nothing had happened; she had risen early, given Richard a kiss, smiled at him as he made sleepily for the bathroom while she was on her way out, and she had gone to the gym. The tension that always seemed to buzz between her neck and shoulders, and which resulted either in tears or bitten-out words of anger, had been allowed to dissipate somewhere between the stair climber and the scent of the gym's shower gel, a generic green smell that might have been called Alpine Fresh, or Forest Morning.

The secret, strange ways her day passed, her frustrations when the photocopier kept jamming, and she had to produce reduced-size, double-sided copies of annotated documents for Mike to take away with him on a business trip, and it was after five thirty and everyone else had left, and she fretted about how long the tube journey back would take, were things she tried to tell Richard about. He sympathised, but she knew he didn't understand.

She stared at today's blank square.

‘If we could just have a while without arguing,' he had said, head in hands. ‘I hate it when we argue.'

Leela's jaw had begun to ache. They had been sitting on his sofa on a Sunday night, the sky outside black. The weekend had passed in the usual way: late-night arguing, matinal apologies, interminable resentment.

She said nothing for a bit. ‘You want us not to disagree?'

‘Not that, but not have these horrible arguments.'

She considered it coldly. There had been other things that had frightened her, but which she had dealt with: final exams, or moving to a new city. This too could be done.

‘Are you angry?' he enquired apprehensively. It was their pattern: when she became self-sufficient, he would break her down with affection or argument till the usual imbalance was restored.

‘Not at all,' she said. Later, when he was on the phone, she drew the set of squares, crazy in their alignment, each row tilting hopefully upwards.

After that, her zeal for achieving, in a new but similar way to the meaningless achievements of the gym, made her manage to be pleasant and, at worst, a little withdrawn for ten days. They had a spat one Saturday at a party when Richard allowed a dull and not very attractive woman to flirt with him, while a silent, increasingly enraged Leela looked on; he then tried to talk to Leela's friend's very attractive girlfriend before she drunkenly disappeared to the bathroom. ‘You always get paranoid when I talk to anyone more beautiful than you,' he observed. They had a teary row on the road towards her house; he grabbed her satchel and slung it over a wall into the garden of a block of council flats.