East Fortune (12 page)

Douglas opened the door and waited as Julia looked round, assessing the size and the space, avoiding the bed. Douglas had booked the largest available double room. He waited until Julia turned and smiled and then he let the door close. He took a step towards her and they started kissing, eyes half closing, her body falling into him.

Douglas felt the heat and force of the kiss. He tried not to think of his wife and resented the fact that he had ordered champagne. They would have to wait until the concierge brought it up.

Douglas wished he didn't have to think about these things, that he could lose all sense of himself; kissing Julia so hard he could forget about everything else. He kissed her forehead, her closed
eyes, her cheeks, her neck and her lips. He tried to tell himself that he had neither anticipated nor planned what he was doing; that this was a conclusion, both natural and inevitable, and he could do nothing to avoid it.

Julia took a step back.

‘Careful, my jewellery, my earrings.'

‘Never mind about that.'

‘I do mind.'

There was a knock on the door. The waiter looked unsurprised. He opened the bottle of champagne and poured out the glasses. As he did so, Julia took off her shoes. Douglas was surprised by her drop in height; how much smaller she became. He handed her a glass. Julia took a sip and watched the waiter leave. As soon as he had closed the door she looked back at Douglas.

‘I want you,' she said.

‘What about…'

‘You don't need to worry about that…'

They moved over to the bed, kissing all the time. They started to take off their clothes, helping each other until they were naked and desperate.

‘Come into me now,' she said.

It was all Douglas wanted: this moment, with this woman in this life. He wished he was younger and stronger and that he could make it last for the rest of his life; that he could go on like this, that he could die like this, that nothing mattered except what he was doing now, with her, in this room.

After they had finished they looked up at the ceiling and listened to each other breathing. Douglas fell asleep.

He awoke when the bedside light was switched on. Julia was sitting next to him. For a moment he did not know where he was.

What time is it ? It's after seven. Why are you dressed ? I'm sorry, I have to go, I have to get back to my hotel. Why? My husband will worry where I am … He's in Paris? No, of course not, but I have to call him and I can't do that when I'm with you. Stay. I can't. You mean you don't want to? Don't make it hard. When will I see you? Soon, sooner than you think, I promise. I love you. Don't say such things too soon. I mean it. Don't you love me? Of course I do, just don't make me say it out loud, I
have to go. Don't go. I have to go, if I don't go now I'll never go, I'll be lost. Then don't go.

In the doorway Julia tilted her head to one side to whisper that she was sorry.

Douglas finished the champagne and ordered room service. Then he sat up on the bed and watched French television. He wanted to see how long it would be until there was no longer any sense of Julia in the room; her footprints in the talc on the carpet, the smell of perfume and lipstick and newly washed hair, the champagne left in the glass, her weight on the bed and the fallen sheets as she had thrown them off. The next morning the chambermaid would come and erase it all.

He knew that he should go out, think of something else, and be active in the world, anything other than this lassitude.

He lay down and took in the remains of Julia's scent as if she was still there. He didn't normally sleep on the left side and he spread himself across the bed. As he did so he thought, involuntarily, of home, and of Emma.

He tried to shut out the memories of his wife; of the holidays they had shared, the hotel rooms they had slept in, her delight to be away from Scotland in places where she could feel the warmth on her face.

He wished he could stop thinking about her but he could not.

His head began to hurt with the speed of his guilt. Was it for desire alone that he had lost all sense of his life? Could lust, or whatever it was that had overcome him, so unravel every sense that he had of himself that he no longer knew who he was?

The next morning he visited the Musée d'Orsay. Outside there was a queue of tourists, penned into lines. He remembered that Julia had an Art World pass that allowed her to walk straight into almost any gallery in the world. She would enter as if she ran the building already, moving with an assurance Douglas knew he could never possess.

He had to queue for half an hour. He took the escalators up to the impressionist galleries on the top floor, past the determination of Caillebotte's woodstrippers, the exhaustion of
Les Repasseuses,
the unhappiness of
L ‘Absinthe.
A group of children sat on the floor with their lunch boxes as their teacher told them to close their eyes and imagine what it would be like if the whole of their lives were a dream.

He stopped at the Monet series of Rouen Cathedral and at Renoir's path through the high grasses: a daughter leading the way through the sunlit fields, her left arm outstretched, reaching for a butterfly. The mother's parasol matched the red of the poppies in the light of summer. It reminded him of his childhood: of home.

He thought back to the time when he had wanted to be an art historian rather than a television producer, studying early Italian Renaissance painting in Glasgow, happy in galleries and libraries, drinking tea, yes, tea, for God's sake, sitting in cafés in the afternoons with his friends.

He turned into a darkened room of pastels by Toulouse-Lautrec. He remembered how Emma had given him a card on one of his birthdays. It was of two people lying in bed under the sheets, and turned towards each other.
Le Lit.
The woman on the left had hair that had sprung up in a tuft; the figure on the right had the same lips as Douglas's.

‘Don't you see?' she had said. ‘It's us – except they're lying on different sides. They're the wrong way round.'

He could sense the warmth and yield of the marital bed and the give of the pillows. He had once bought a new mattress for them both on Valentine's Day. It was pocket-sprung so that they could turn in the night without disturbing each other. ‘It's got so much more give to it,' Emma had told him. ‘We'll be in heaven.'

In the art gallery he shuddered at the familiar ease of the two figures in the painting. It was a portrait of them both: he could see that now.

He wanted to sit down but there were no seats. He didn't know whether he was going to cry or be sick. He thought of Emma and what he had done.

Her optimism. His bleakness.

Her affirmation. His drift.

He took a taxi to the Gare du Nord and crossed the river past La
Samaritaine. They had once shared a meal together in the rooftop restaurant. It had been an anniversary weekend just after they had given up on having children. They had discussed how they were going to tell their parents.

It was raining when the taxi arrived at the Gare du Nord and Douglas had neither a raincoat nor an umbrella. He had not thought about the weather. Everyday life seemed to have nothing to do with him any more: people, escalators, walkways, security, passport control.

He boarded the train and edged his way towards his compartment. A man flirting on his mobile blocked the gangway: ‘Smooth like the groove, baby!'

Douglas found his seat opposite an alert elderly woman who looked up from her crossword with a nervous smile. He hoped that she wasn't expecting a conversation.

As he sat down, Douglas imagined what it might be like to tell her his whole story, this stranger on a train, a woman that he knew he would never see again. She would be as good a choice as any, he thought, and perhaps he was lucky to have found her. Her face, even in repose, was a mixture of curiosity and joy. Already he envied her ease with the world. Was it faith, family, the love of one person on whom she could rely, or had she been born with such confidence?

The woman took out her knitting from a polythene bag. She was making baby clothes for a grandchild, a girl.

Douglas decided to order drinks and look out of the window. A bottle of red wine. He knew it looked bad but he didn't care. He overheard a man talking about his mother-in-law: ‘The only reason she isn't dead is because she's more toxic than her cancer.'

He opened the bottle and the old joke came to him:
Is life worth living? It depends on the liver.
He thought of the colleague who had failed to eat and who had deliberately drunk himself to death on two bottles of vodka a day (it had only taken a year). There was his Uncle Gordon, living in a house divided into two flats, his wife below, visited every Wednesday by a financial adviser who was also her lover. And he thought of Ansei, the Japanese poet he'd once met in Tokyo, a man who married a
woman he hated because he thought the suffering might make him write better poetry:

Now that you are going to a far-off land,
Only your scent remains,
Lavishly infused with late-autumn rain.

On arrival in London he could still pass himself off as being in control. He did not need to resort to mints or aftershave to disguise his drinking. He would take the tube and then catch one of the last trains back to Glasgow.

Two girls opposite were talking about the previous night's party. One of them had been standing in a conservatory full of plants and a woman asked her if they were inside or outside. It was so hard to tell, she said, and the girl had said that she had often felt like that when she was blind drunk and the woman had replied, ‘I'm not drunk. But I am blind.'

Douglas knew that he had often been that drunk.

He looked out of the window to see the flooding in the fields, a dull reflection of the bleak skies above, church steeples against low dark clouds. There were people throwing fireworks from bridges on to passing trains and traffic. They came as a series of sharp white explosions and distant smoke against brick and timber yards.

This was a countryside of car parks and abandonment, disused pumping stations and recycling centres, of land being cleared for out-of-town superstores, of desolate rugby posts that reminded him of his brother Angus, the sky darkening above them all.

Back in Glasgow an open-air concert was ending in George Square. Douglas watched people leaving, couples free from anxiety, the young and the newly in love, heading on for pubs and clubs all over the city, dancing at Corinthians, or Cottiers, or the Garage, anywhere, it didn't matter, getting wasted, slaughtered, trashed, bombed and wankered.

Douglas could not ever remember being as young as them.

He took a taxi to Hyndland. Most of the lamps in the tenement were out but an overhead light shone over the entrance. He
unlocked the door to his flat and heard Emma call, ‘Is that you, darling?'

He saw her walking towards him, barefoot, wearing his favourite pale-blue blouse over her jeans. She was young and alive and her whole face was smiling.

‘I've missed you,' she said. ‘Have you had a good time?'

‘If you're going to go far out you should wear a bright hat,' Jack said, ‘so that passing boats notice and steer clear.'

‘Oh, I think they will notice me,' Krystyna replied. ‘Don't you think?'

It was a Saturday and she had come out of town for a day. Jack had met her at the bus stop and she was already wearing a black halter-neck swimsuit under her cotton dress. She could not risk a bikini and knew that she had only a few weeks left before her pregnancy would start to show.

Jack watched Krystyna swim out to sea with the Bass Rock ahead of her. Her head was low against the surface, closer than he had expected, her body streamlined in the glide. She turned on to her back, circling her arms, churning the water with her feet.

Jack had been coming to the beach at Seacliff all his life; with his parents and his brothers when he was a boy, and then, in the early days of his marriage, with Maggie and the girls. He remembered the picnics and the ice cream and the shivery bites after all their swims. Every time he had come he had returned to his childhood. Now here he was again, beginning another chapter, resitting the exam of his life once more.

Guillemots and kittiwakes swept over the rocky outcrop by the smallest of harbours. Jack remembered calling his daughters in from the water and their inevitable disappointment, cold and impatient for immediate supplies of towels and chocolate biscuits.

Krystyna turned and swam butterfly back towards the shore. It was a continual, rhythmic movement and she appeared to be
unaware of her surroundings, losing herself in the water. For a moment, Jack thought he was watching a different Krystyna, a Krystyna that was confident and unafraid. Perhaps this was who she really was, before Sandy, before she had come to Scotland, before anything terrible had happened.

Once she was back in her depth she stooped to regain her balance and climb out. Jack handed her a towel and she began to dry herself.

‘I will change at the house. It is easier.' She turned her towel into an improvised skirt and threw her dress over her shoulder. ‘I hope you are proud of me, swimming in the North Sea. You should have come too.'

‘It's too cold. My days of swimming in the sea are over.'

‘I do not believe you. Next time I will insist.'

They walked back over the dunes to the bus stop, passing a row of holiday cottages. There were young pheasant in the roads, cabbage white butterflies quick and low over the fields, and then a burst of midges, flickering briskly in the air.

Krystyna smiled.

‘Better with a car.'

‘You know I'm not ready to drive.'

‘I do not mind.'

‘I can hardly remember what it's like.'

A man was shadow-boxing underneath a sprinkler in his garden, attacking the water as it fell through his fingers. A ten-year-old boy walked past accompanied by a mother wearing a T-shirt that read,
I am still a virgin.