Claustrophobia (19 page)

She slid back under the covers, nestled against Kathleen's smooth shoulders, and slept again instantly.

13

‘Can I come round this evening?' Pen spoke softly.

Kathleen was silent a moment on the other end of the line. Then she said, ‘Yes, do. I've got some marking, but that doesn't matter. If you don't mind. I'd rather see you than not.'

It was like sleepwalking. Each time she'd been with Kathleen lately, Pen had told herself, ‘I won't do this anymore. I won't do it this time.'

Then she would see the fine white bloom at the side of a silken cheek, or the slight pulse visible above the collarbone, and she knew the logic would have her again.

It was as if, because she knew it was coming to an end –
had
to come to an end – her hunger for Kathleen had grown enormous. Not only could she not say no, she was even seeking her out.

This was diametrically opposed to her actual intention, which was to break things off. As soon as work was finished, as soon as the last goodbyes on her last day there, she meant to cut the tie. Without a trace.

Derrick was wry and rueful, the nights she was home.

‘I thought pregnant women were supposed to be … you know.'

‘What?' Pen was munching on halva, avoiding a sink full of dinner dishes. She didn't care if people said cravings were mythical. For once she was listening to her body. And as Derrick pointed out, halva was made of sesame, and sesame was full of calcium. Never mind the sugar overload … You could justify anything if you looked at it from certain angles.

‘Well, you know. Raving with lust for their husbands and all that.'

He was trying to soften it by making a joke, the way he said it. But she could hear the hurt behind the hyperbole.

‘Oh well,' she said, trying to match his affected lightness. ‘You'll soon have me all to yourself again.'

It was frighteningly true. Soon there would be nothing to fill her days except the waiting, and getting the house ready. They'd put in a concertina room divider, like the ones used between classrooms. They needed the extra bedroom back again.

The room where Pen had found the letter.

‘All to myself!' Derrick laughed. ‘I think not. I think I'll be the one sleeping in the spare room. You'll have your hands full with a third party, don't forget.'

A third party
. Redolent with irony. Pen thought yet again of Diana:
There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a
bit crowded
. Why did this always come back to her? Acid wit designed to win public sympathy – a skilled speechwriter, no doubt. The other woman present from the very beginning. You had to fight her with whatever came to hand. Nobody else would do it for you.

Pen had no public to bear witness, no ally to vindicate her cause. She would have to look out for herself, just as she always had.
Take your own part against the world
, Leon had said.

But which was her own part? When she thought of giving up Kathleen, her body ached. Kathleen was her own private victory, her stash, her hoard, her trophy. No longer Derrick's other woman, but her own.

For the first time, Pen felt panicked.

‘Maybe we should think about moving,' she said to Derrick. ‘Rather than all this work. It might be simpler. And a fresh start.'

Derrick contemplated it. ‘That's probably just as much work. Even if we really wanted to leave here. You've never wanted to leave here, Pen.'

‘It's just an idea.'

‘Okay, but think about it. We'd still have to get the house ready to sell – nobody's going to look at a place halfway renovated. And then there's the whole process of finding another one – subject to sale, all that stuff. We've not even been following the market. It takes ages. No, I think now is not the time.'

Pen fretted at her fingers, the cuticles, the knuckles. Derrick tutted. He was always policing her little habits. And she his. The way he rubbed at his beard, or scratched his scalp
in his sleep. Only years together could create such patterns, a kind of interlock.

If she'd lived with Kathleen, she would have known all her habits too. But she could not live with Kathleen. Not now. And probably never. She must face facts, with a child on the way.

‘Could we go away somewhere, then?' she said. ‘I don't want Mum breathing down my neck once the baby's born.'

That much was true.

Derrick laughed mildly. ‘Don't worry, darling. I'll protect you. You know what: it's just the changes in your body making you jittery.'

He put his arms around her and placed his rough cheek beside hers.

‘And I thought they called them
happy hormones
… Why don't you come to bed now and I'll cheer you up.'

‘The dishes,' Pen protested. The greasy load of them still in the sink, a kind of resistance to the real.

‘Leave 'em. I'll do them in the morning.' Derrick often said that, but then he usually forgot.

Pen stood up shakily and allowed herself to be led.

In her last week at the library, Pen took the precaution of changing her mobile phone number, and clearing out all the little details you might usually leave lying behind you.

She did not tell Kathleen she was leaving her job. Instead, she made a time to meet for coffee.

‘I don't have to see her,' Pen said to herself, pulse racing, as she waited in the café. ‘I could just disappear, tell her nothing.'

But she'd decided against that for at least two reasons.

One: if she disappeared, Kathleen would look for her. Complete silence would beg inevitable questions, even pursuit. Doubtlessly pushing her library colleagues for information, trying to find out whatever she could, and understandably so. Better to make things clear.

Two: she cared for Kathleen. She owed her at least the honesty of a decisive split, if not the whole story. The whole story was not an option.

There was a sweet excruciation in the process of breaking something that felt so whole. Pen knew it at once as Kathleen stepped into the café, her eyes seeking Pen with their same ordinary trust.

Pen could have slapped her then, as if to say,
This is what you get for such an open face. This is what you get for love.
She tuned out the silky black shirt, the Indian cotton skirt that lifted slightly with a breeze through the door. It wouldn't do to linger about this.

Instead she nodded and stayed seated. In command. She'd chosen a spot on the terrace, empty of other customers.

Kathleen scanned the bare table-top. ‘What can I get you?'

Pen reached into her pocket for a fiver. ‘Just a decaf.'

‘Don't be daft,' Kathleen pushed back the money and whipped out her purse. ‘You can pay next time. And since when did you go decaf?'

Pen shrugged. She watched Kathleen stroll up to the counter; watched too her deftness in balancing the tray all the way back. So far, so good. Pen breathed deep. If she could manage not to touch or be touched, she could do it.

‘We really need to talk.'

Kathleen straightened her cup. ‘That sounds ominous.'

Pen bit her lower lip.
Steady
.

‘Is it about Paris? It's past crunch time, you know. The ticket will be astronomical. If there's even a seat left. Are you getting cold feet?'

‘Cold feet, maybe, though I wouldn't have put it that way. But it's not the trip, Kathleen.'

Kathleen was silent and regarded her with a flatness Pen had not expected, as if stiffening some inner part of her. Then she said, ‘Go on.'

As if she knew. As if she was primed for moments like this, whether from instinct or from past experience. As if she could not be derailed, ever, by any surprise. Perhaps that was what it meant to be older.

‘I …' What a silly word. ‘I want to stop … I don't want us to go on seeing each other anymore.'

To her own surprise, Pen found she could not look Kathleen in the eye. It was unbearable, what she might see there.

‘May I ask why?'

The words were no clue. Still Pen kept her eyes averted. That was less than ideal, but it was all she could manage.

‘I don't feel comfortable. It just doesn't feel right. It's not what I want.'

‘I see.'

Pen looked up now, but the eyes by this time were no clue either.

‘I'm sorry,' she added. It was lame. She must gird herself better for what would follow. Suddenly the sing-song words
of some hymn she'd heard from street preachers in the mall:
No turning back no turning back
.

But Kathleen merely laughed, a dry, humourless laugh that came from no depth.

‘I knew it,' she said. ‘When I saw the Vixen this morning, after all this time, I knew it was a bad omen! I always know these things.'

‘What? What do you mean, the vixen?'

Kathleen looked at her with a crazed detachment. ‘Never you mind, it's an old joke. An oldie but not a goodie. And the joke's on me, it appears.'

She stood up suddenly, her coffee untouched. The head on it gone cold, grimy as river scum. ‘That's it, then?' she said.

Pen was taken aback. She had steeled herself for some sort of struggle, and it was as if the floor had fallen away just where she sat. It no longer felt like a seat of command. She could not speak.

‘I knew it was a bad omen,' Kathleen said, and pulling her handbag gracelessly off the back of her chair, she strode out of the café.

For a day or two Pen felt a weight had been taken off her, as if sandbags that had held her down were cast aside, and she floated somewhere in the upper atmosphere.

She did not even want to think about what she had done. She wanted to go on floating, swelling balloonlike over the coming months, gliding into a certain future.

In the morning she slept in. By afternoon, she drifted down the hill to Gatelands shopping centre – semiconsciously
sticking to her own side of the city, as if it had some kind of force field to shield her from running into Kathleen. And in a way it did, because people from Kathleen's part of town almost never set foot in places like this.

Hills people did, rich or poor, because it was their nearest option. But however many new stores were brightly announced, or fast food venues sprang up, it still had the feel of grimy, dejected boredom cheaply assuaged.

Vaguely she browsed for skirts and pants with elastic waists. Her belly was not even swollen yet, but she was paranoid about putting pressure on it with her normal clothes. And then there were baby items to price and compare, ideas to take home to Derrick.

Pen had never really been a shopper. Partly because she'd never had the time; partly because goods were not what she desired. Unlike her dad, who'd had almost a fetish for beautiful things.

‘You see this suit,' he'd say to her as a small, awe-struck child, adjusting his tie and cufflinks in front of a mirror. ‘This suit is Yves St Laurent.'

He said it
Wives
St Laurent, and for years, before Pen learned French, she'd thought that was the way you said it. He said you had to have the right trappings if you wanted to mix with the right people; he said Jack was as good as his master.

‘A cat may look at a king,' he'd say, ruffling her hair, and head off somewhere elegant, someplace where you had to impress people to get by, to move on up. Pen never knew who Jack was, or why the cat should look at the king.
I've been to London to visit the Queen
…

He collected bits and pieces of bric-à-brac, old polished wooden furniture
bought for a song
. She'd imagined him singing to the sellers in his wavering, croony tenor, charming the items off people.
Little Tommy Tucker sings for his supper
… He was convinced they were undiscovered antiques that would bring him a fortune.

When he left, these bits and pieces were all Pen and her mother had of him. Worthless.

She'd never thought goods were the way to
move on up
. It was so much more complex than that. You could lose them in one stroke – fire, flood, one false move in your finances and then bankruptcy …

No, what she'd worked for all this time could not be found in the plasma television screen or the limestone water feature or the backyard lap pool. Such things turned her stomach, like the smell of skewered meat coming from the shopping centre's food hall, mixed with the reek of steaming curries and the unreal sweetness of those flavoured whipped coffees all the truanting teenagers and middle-aged ladies were sucking on.

She felt faint, and pulled up a chair at the edge of the food court, resting her head on her arms. The tabletop was slightly sticky, and her stomach heaved again.

‘Pen! Pen Barber!'

Despite the muzak and the crowd noise, she could hear her own name with perfect clarity.

It was Jean Sargent, from Derrick's school. But today she was laid-back, not in her teacher's gear. Bermuda shorts and a tennis shirt; just a smudge of pale lipstick as if to smarten up her casuals.

‘Haven't seen you for ages! Are you okay, Pen? You don't look so good. I'd say morning sickness, but it's afternoon.' She laughed at her own joke.

So obviously Derrick had talked at work. Everyone always knew everything at that school. ‘Except when a boy was suicidal,' Pen considered grimly.

‘I'm fine, just a bit tired.'

‘A spot of baby shopping?'

Pen nodded. ‘You're not teaching this term?'

‘Oh, I am, I am. I've just got the day off. Actually it's my leave, but I've opted to use it up as two days off per week. That way I keep my hand in – and keep an eye on my spot, as it were. You've no idea what backstabbers that lot can be.'

She licked her lips and sat down opposite Pen, uninvited.

‘But perhaps you do. Derrick's had a pretty swift rise, hasn't he?'

Pen pondered that. ‘How do you mean?'

‘Hasn't he told you? About the deputy-headship?'