Fallout (21 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ he said evenly. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

Neither of them spoke. There was only discomfort and the painful spoiling of delight.

‘You didn’t upset me,’ she said. ‘I think . . . I’m not used to—’ She stopped, because she wasn’t sure what it was she wasn’t used to; Luke, the danger he presented, or the honesty.

He took a breath. Sat up straight.

‘Right. Let’s do it like this then: my name’s Luke Kanowski. My father was a Polish fighter pilot and my mother is from France. I grew up in Lincolnshire. I went to grammar school and then worked for a while before starting to work in theatre. I’ve just sold my first play, which is why I came and kissed you yesterday, because I was – happy – and you didn’t run away.’

She said, ‘I didn’t know you were a writer.’

‘Well, I work for the council part time,’ he told her, not wanting to misrepresent himself. ‘And I live with my friend Paul and his girlfriend. I want to just write but I’m not sure how it will all turn out.’

He let out a short laugh at this easy understatement of his shrouded future, but Nina didn’t see the joke.

‘What do you do for the council?’ she asked politely.

‘I’m a dustman.’

At that, Nina yelped with laughter. There was a brief pause and she began to giggle.

‘Are you really?’ she said.

He nodded, smiling at her. All he could think was how sweet she was when she giggled.

‘Your turn,’ he said.

‘Leigh isn’t your girlfriend, then?’

‘Leigh? No. Why? I’ve told you.’

Nina didn’t say anything else.

‘Go on,’ said Luke. ‘Who are you?’

‘Oh. Yes. My name is Nina Jacobs. I went to LAMDA and until I was married I lived with my mother – who’s French, too. My first professional job was Worthing Rep. I got my Equity Card in TIE in Cardiff during my second summer at drama school.’

‘That’s it?’

‘I’m sorry, I’m dull.’

‘No. You’re not dull.’

And then, just then, in that second, for no reason at all – except perhaps his honest reassurance – the mood shifted. They looked at one another and didn’t notice anything else. It felt as if they had moved closer but neither was aware of having done so. They spoke more quietly, taking in one another’s features closely, intent with unspoken need.

‘What’s your play about?’ she murmured.

‘Which one?’

‘The one you’ve just sold.’

‘It’s about people being stupid to each other and telling lies.’

‘Adultery lies?’

‘Among others.’

‘Are you a liar, then?’ she asked, lightly.

Luke thought about it.

‘Only to myself,’ he answered.

Nina hadn’t had any expectation he would answer truthfully.

‘Don’t you lie to yourself?’ asked Luke, not noticing her shock. ‘How else are you married to that man if you don’t love him?’

Nina didn’t move. They were very close, held in stillness.

‘Or
do
you love him?’

She couldn’t answer, broken into by his directness. She wanted him to kiss her. Wanted him to kiss her and make love to her, and he knew. He put his hand lightly to the back of her head and, very carefully – did.

They kissed as if they were alone – softly – and then harder. Small, close breath and secret, just-open mouths – the intimate, quick heat of need. She leaned back into the corner, Luke’s body shielded her from the humorous glances of the men at the bar and she forgot about them. Hidden, she put her hands inside his coat and felt his blood-warmth. They kept on kissing. She wanted him so badly she couldn’t keep herself still and so she pushed him away.

‘Stop it.’

They both tried to breathe steadily. He smiled at her and at what they would be. She wanted him too much to smile, and looked away from him. He took her hand and there was no other thought in either of their heads.

‘We have to get out of here,’ he said. ‘Come to—’ He thought of Paul and Leigh. ‘Where can we go?’

‘I have to go home,’ she whispered, not meaning it.

‘A hotel. Let’s go to a hotel.’

‘We can’t.’

‘I want you.’

Hearing it made her hurt. Jolts that went through her so she couldn’t think.

‘God, please don’t,’ she said.

He hooked his finger underneath the thin gold chain around her neck. The minute touching of the chain against her skin, the feeling of his hand so close to her –

‘When?’ he said.

‘Tomorrow. Think of something. Phone me.’

And then the taxi back, the scribbled numbers on torn scraps in biro, her body pressed against him in the dark. He didn’t dare do what he would have with another girl in another taxi. He wanted to make her come and to know how she felt to him when she did, but he couldn’t. With other girls he could feel the rush of their release and then let them go free and forget. He couldn’t bear to do that to Nina and then leave her weak and alone and not be able to take her home with him.

Tony was in his study when the phone rang the next day at nine o’clock. When he picked it up there was silence and then whoever had called put the phone down. He listened to the dialling tone for a second and then there was another click, the extension going down in the bedroom. He had a hangover, and was drinking black coffee and cleaning his nails with an orange stick, an Alka-Seltzer fizzing in a glass beside the telephone. Half an hour later the phone rang again and when he picked it up the same thing happened. The next time it rang, at ten, it was Marianne and although Nina had answered it, he listened to their
hellos
before replacing the receiver. An hour later, Nina left.

She put her head around the door and said, ‘Just popping out.’

She hadn’t bathed.

Nina went to the pay phone at the river end of the street and dialled Luke’s number. Her hands were shaking. A woman answered. Nina recognised Leigh’s voice.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘May I speak to Luke, please?’

There was a pause.

‘Hold on,’ said Leigh. Nina couldn’t tell if she had recognised her or not. She swallowed, nervous, dry mouthed. She heard, ‘Luke . . .’ and footsteps, and then Luke, his voice familiar, close, inside her head as if they hadn’t slept apart.

‘Is that you?’

‘Yes. Tony picked up the phone before. I’m in a phone box.’

‘Sorry. Can we meet?’

‘I – my mother is out. She’ll be out today from – I don’t know – twelve. She won’t come back until later. I’ll meet you at her flat at one.’

The pips went and she shoved in another 2p.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Yes. Where is it?’

She gave the address. Marianne, on Nina and Tony’s money, had moved to a serviced one-bedroom flat off Bayswater, which she insisted on calling
the wrong side of the park
.

‘I’ll be there.
One?
’

‘One. But wait until you see me. Don’t ring the bell.’

‘I won’t. I’ll wait for you.’

Neither of them could say goodbye. Silence. The hiss of the phone line.

‘I’ll see you later then,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ He put down the phone.

Nina went and bought some cigarettes and walked back to the house. As she went up the stairs she looked at the closed door of Tony’s study, clutching the solid packet of fresh cigarettes, preparing her alibi, but he didn’t come out.

She bathed and dressed. Tony was still in his study. She went to the door and knocked.

‘Darling?’ she said. ‘I’m just off shopping with Chrissie.’ She knew she shouldn’t elaborate but she couldn’t help it. ‘She needs honeymoon things – they’re off to the Bahamas on Boxing Day.’

Silence.

‘I know,’ he said, unseen. Nothing else.

She went to Peter Jones and bought a sheet and towel from the solid middle-aged ladies on the ground floor, then she took a taxi to her mother’s. She had a key. She passed the porter on the door clutching the Peter Jones bag, feeling sure he would know what was inside and why she was there. She took the caged lift to the third floor.

‘Mummy?’ She knocked. Silence.

Marianne had said she was lunching with friends in Knightsbridge and then she had a doctor’s appointment. They were safe, but Nina felt far from it, desperate with anxiety. She knocked again and then let herself into the flat. The sitting room was at the front with the kitchen and bathroom between it and the bedroom, down a short corridor at the back. The thick carpets were pale green, freshly hoovered, and there were flowers in a vase on the window ledge that boxed in the radiator along the curved 1930s window that ran the length of the room. Nina slipped off her shoes and quickly went to look out. She could see Luke standing on the street corner in his coat, nervous even from a distance. She ripped the sheet from its tissue paper, threw the towel into the bathroom, and ran back into the bedroom. She hauled the bedclothes from the bed and scrambled over the mattress on all fours, tucking in the sheet, hair messing over her face, sweating with haste. She stood up. Looked around. Shoved the tissue paper back into the bag and pushed it under the dressing table with her foot. The telephone rang – so loud it shocked her into breathlessness. She almost answered it, let it ring, and as she did so, realised with a quietness that crept over her in smooth delight, that the telephone was ringing in an empty flat. She wasn’t really there. Nobody knew she was there.

She walked over to the window, opened it and leaned out into the wintry day. Luke looked up immediately and she waved. He crossed the road to her, dodging the traffic.

They didn’t speak. He came in, and after glancing around for a moment, moving close almost without looking at her, he kissed her. Then there was no restraint, no uncertainty, just pushing past clothes, crushing, hurting and gentle. He was inside her before they were properly undressed; blind force, helpless.

Then they undressed. They stayed in bed all afternoon until they were sore and dizzy from each other, slick with sex and sweat. The room became darker. They didn’t put on the light, or stop. He couldn’t stay out of her, she couldn’t hold him close enough.

‘What will we do?’ he asked, when she was quiet in his arms.

She hid her face. ‘I don’t know.’

‘It can’t stay like this.’

‘I’m married.’

‘Not for long.’

She laughed. ‘You’re so—’ She stopped.

‘I’m so what?’

‘Sure. Are you really?’

‘Aren’t you?’ he asked her.

She looked up at him, their faces inches away.

‘I don’t know why you like me,’ she said. ‘And I’m – I’m just . . .’ She summoned her courage. ‘I’m just so frightened.’

He didn’t answer that, but kissed her temple and her forehead, and held her more tightly. He thought of what he had been like with other girls and that of course she couldn’t know she could be sure of him.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, kissing her. ‘I’ll wait for you.’

They stayed there, as long as they could, for as long as they felt safe and apart from the world, and then they took turns to wash and put everything back as it was, and laughed over her going to Peter Jones to buy an adultery sheet, and her fear.

They caught a taxi to the theatre and Nina dropped the crumpled worn-out sheet into a rubbish bin in the street.

They kissed goodbye in the shadow of the alleyway where they had kissed the first time.

‘I can’t stand it,’ she said, and he shook his head and crushed his cheek against hers and his mouth into her neck, holding her tightly, because he couldn’t either and thought he would cry. Then she went inside.

For three weeks Marianne had no other lunches to go to, no reliably lengthy shopping outings to send her from her house. Tony didn’t leave London and wasn’t planning to. No shows in the provinces, just home all day. Nina and Luke met for snatched, discomfiting moments – a frustrating hour near the theatre, coffee shops and pubs, and Archery began casting
Paper Pieces
.

They were auditioning the actors in the American Church on Tottenham Court Road. John Wisdom had hired a director called Richard Scott-Mathieson, of daunting reputation. It was already the end of November and the play was set to go into rehearsal at the beginning of January. Tense, hasty meetings with the designer, the producers, rewrites, readings. Luke was grateful to be given any place in the making of this brave new world. He had lived his life with need and hunger driving him to unknown consummation – the seeking of his heart’s home – but nothing touched this. He fixed the play as well as he could and watched its first tentative realisation, scared of everything until Nina’s voice made him forget everything but her. They spoke on the phone. She in the phone box at the end of her road, Luke sitting against the door in his room because the wire would only stretch that far. They made plans and she had to break them and he railed against what felt to him the false constriction of her marriage. He was halfway mad. It was a delicious disorder.

Leigh was getting ready to leave the theatre after the evening performance when Nina came and found her. It was after eleven. The actors usually left long before the crew; off stage and out of costume in ten minutes flat, and Leigh was often the last to go. Now Nina stood in the doorway to Leigh’s windowless office and smiled with timid conspiracy.

‘You live with Luke, don’t you?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’ Leigh was unwilling to be drawn.

‘Would you give him this?’ Nina held out an envelope, sealed, with no writing on it.

Leigh took it, feeling the weight of the paper inside. She saw the light in Nina’s eyes, heard it in her voice as she said, ‘Thank you, Leigh. I hope you don’t mind?’ She had never looked so beautiful, or perhaps she had never looked beautiful at all until now, and suddenly Leigh felt scared for her, trusting all her fragility to Luke’s thoughtless appetite. She shook her head and could not answer.

‘Goodnight,’ Nina said, gave her a smile like Christmas morning, and left her.

When she got home the flat was dark. She took off her coat and Nina’s envelope from its pocket and went to Luke’s door. She bent, slid it underneath and stood to go – but he opened the door, dressed, holding it.

‘Don’t you ever sleep?’ she said.

‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘What’s this?’

‘Nina gave it to me for you,’ said Leigh, trying not to watch his reaction as he took it. He smiled at her. She wished it didn’t hurt her – Paul was sleeping in their bedroom, just there, next door.

‘Night,’ she said.

‘Is it all right?’ asked Luke, generous in his happiness.

‘What?’

He gestured the letter. ‘If we do this.’

‘Of course. If you like.’

He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to her temple.

‘Night.’ He closed the door.

It had been so unexpected.

Leigh undressed quietly in the dark bedroom, hoping not to wake Paul as she slipped under the covers and lay down next to him, but he reached out for her.

‘Hi,’ he said, sleepy and pleased.

He pulled her into his arms.

‘I’m so tired,’ she said, and waited for him to go back to sleep, unwanted tears slowly sliding from beneath her closed lids.

The next morning there was an envelope from Luke on top of her bag, waiting. She took it to Nina’s dressing room just after they called the half, and knocked.

‘Yes!’

Nina was at the mirror, which was stuck all over with telegrams and postcards, some flowers dying in a vase on the cracked ledge underneath it and her costume hanging nearby on a metal rail. Leigh held out the envelope. Nina took it, delight coming off her like heat.

Leigh indicated the dead flowers. ‘I’ll take these for you, shall I?’

‘Thanks.’ Nina was bent over the envelope.

Leigh picked up the vase and turned to go.

‘Oh, Leigh . . .’

Leigh turned.

‘I’ve asked – Luke –’ she faltered over the name, ‘if he’ll come to my house on Sunday.’

Leigh was speechless. Nina had invited Luke to go to her house where, presumably, her husband would be. She couldn’t decide if she was desperate or corrupt; she had shown no signs of being either before she had met him.

‘I would ask you and . . . ?’

‘Paul.’

‘Sorry, Paul. But Tony only wants people who are more—’ She stopped, corrected herself. ‘It might look strange, if you all come.’

‘Just Luke, then?’ said Leigh, coolly.

‘Well, Tony likes – I mean, Luke is a writer, isn’t he?’ asked Nina.

It wasn’t a rhetorical question, she didn’t seem sure if he was or not. Leigh wondered whether they had talked at all or if Luke just fucked her, or if she had bothered to ask Luke anything about himself, or just fucked him.

‘Yes, Luke is a writer,’ she said, ‘and we had a company that did quite well. And Paul – my boyfriend – is working with Archery producing Luke’s first play, now, actually. In Oxford.’

Nina looked as if Leigh had slapped her.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly, ‘he told me.’

‘Right,’ said Leigh brightly, ‘but he does also work as a dustman for money. Did he mention that?’

‘Yes,’ said Nina again, shrinking, so that Leigh took no pleasure in making her uncomfortable.

‘I hope you’re not offended,’ she almost whispered. ‘It’s just if I don’t see him on Sunday I won’t see him until after Christmas.’

It was as if this catastrophe explained everything, excused anything. Leigh wondered if Nina had any idea how to manage herself, if she had forgotten completely what was normal behaviour because of Luke. Because of him.

‘But I’m sorry not to ask you,’ Nina said again. ‘And you won’t say anything to anybody about us?’

‘Why would I?’

‘Promise?’

‘Of course.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nina. And she smiled like the sun coming out. ‘Thank you.’

Leigh left the dressing room holding the vase of dead flowers. She wasn’t sure just what had happened, but she knew she had been beaten.

When she got home she scrawled a message on a piece of paper torn from her notebook and pushed it under Luke’s door –
No More Letters Please.

They were hemmed in by impossibility.

Sunday, 22 December. Then Monday’s show. Then two days of Christmas and back to work. Luke was leaving London for Oxford to start rehearsals before New Year.

This desperate act of inviting him to her house – Nina sat at her dressing table on Sunday night, trying to keep calm.

He would be there and they wouldn’t be able to touch. But she would see him.

She opened the drawer, took a Valium from the packet and swallowed it without a drink. She spat into the block of mascara in the narrow tin and rubbed the brush into it. Layering on the black, she wondered where he was. If he’d left his house yet. How long it would be until he arrived. Voices down in the street. Tony’s feet on the stair . . .

‘Darling? Come down.’

‘I’m on my way.’

The evening was rowdier than usual. Tony played Christmas carols on the piano, fitting dirty words into them. Only their closer friends were there: Eleanor Scott, Willy Lansbury – people Tony called the widows and orphans who were free every Sunday and seldom away. It wasn’t anyone important.