Infidelity (8 page)

9

From
: Tom

To
: Maddy

Sent
: Saturday 28 February 9:32 PM

Subject
: Living arrangements

C/- Vincent Square

Westminster SW1

London

(Just showing off . . .
this is a very temporary address – please keep forwarding any snail mail to Fi's flat. She'll call me when there's anything to collect.)

Hi Maddy,

Did you notice the date – tomorrow is the 29th – leap year.

The promised follow-up from a gloriously grey and chilly London. I could grow accustomed to this. My father used to say (rather too often): ‘Grey matter works better under grey skies.' I can see why – I'd love a project to get my teeth into.

As you might have already heard from Fiona, I moved out as soon as she returned from her trip – first into a rather sleazy bedsit, now installed in the guest room of the woman I mentioned last time – Sarah Delacour, the one with the Australian mother. She has a large and comfortable apartment in Vincent Square and often has friends to stay. Courtesy of her mother's nationality, I have been appointed an honorary friend.

Don't get the wrong impression about Sarah. Moving into her guest room two weeks after meeting her is a sign of her generosity, nothing more (except, of course, her uncanny perspicacity re character). She is as remarkable as I first thought – perhaps more so. A wonderfully engaging, articulate academic (English literature, specialising in nursery rhymes, believe it or not!) who also sings in a small a cappella group. I had dinner with them one night. Early forties, married, her husband (much older) has a terminal illness (motor neurone disease) and is holed up in their rather grand-sounding house in the country, outside Guildford. (I keep forgetting – you and Harley know these places from your time living over here. Did you ever visit the village of Littleton in Surrey? You might even have seen their house. Strange thought.) She spends every weekend down there. He has full-time nurses, etc.

I'd like to talk to you about Sarah, but I already know what you'd say, so imagining you saying it is almost like hearing you say it. I do miss our chats – when morning tea-time rolls around, I often wish you were here. I should phone you . . . I'm glad to know the clients are sticking with the locum – sorry she doesn't appeal to you. It's far too soon to know what I might do when I get back. I want to make the most of my time over here, and we're already in the last week of February.

Any news?

Cheers,

Tom

From
: Maddy

To
: Tom

Sent
: Sunday 29 February 10:15 AM

Subject
: Re: Living arrangements

Hi Tom,

Very posh, by the sound of it. I know Vincent Square – Harley and I did a ‘square crawl' when we were there. We were driving a rented Corolla – most of the parked cars seemed to be Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

So you know what I'd say about Sarah, do you? If you're assuming I'd counsel caution, you'd be right. I've seen you hurt too often – and forgive me for saying it, but it's often been a case of self-inflicted wounds. I wish I could meet Sarah – it's just possible I might be better than you at picking up the danger signs. Anyway, she's a married woman and I know you wouldn't be mad enough to get involved. Admiring from afar is good, Tom. Window-shopping is good.

I hope she's not another narcissist. We've been around the block with enough narcissists. They don't seem to know or care whether they're married or not – just so long as they're being adored. You're not the adoring one, are you, Tom? If you are, for God's sake don't let her know.

I wish I'd known your mother.

I'm at work – better dash.

M x

PS You didn't perhaps catch sight of Fiona's latest boyfriend, did you? Harley thinks he smells a rat.

PPS Why the reference to the leap year? I can't ask you to marry me – I'm too old for you, to say nothing of the fact that I'm already taken. (And so is Sarah, Tom. SO IS SARAH!)

From
: Tom

To
: Maddy

Sent
: Sunday 29 February 11:48 AM

Subject
: Do you call this work?

Hi Maddy,

I think we might leave the subject of Sarah for another day.

You'll love this, though. I've just been listening to myself on the radio. Do I have your attention?

Just after I moved into Sarah's apartment, I did an interview (so-called) for Radio Four on the psychology of car buying. (Do I hear you snorting with disgust?) I had read about this BBC radio unit planning a series about technology, including a feature on cars, so I sent them some
Vroom
clippings. (No, I didn't tell you at the time. I wonder why?) To summarise: I do not foresee a career for myself in broadcasting. (Nor in motoring print journalism – my other feelers have produced zilch.) The interviewer was an ageing relic who just wanted ‘texture'. I lost patience with him after about ten takes, all focusing on the same tedious question. I made the mistake of listening to the broadcast this morning – towards the end, thirteen of my words (I counted them) were included in a hodge-podge of grabs from assorted academics, politicians, advertising types, racing drivers, et al, about the irrationality of our love affair with the car (you can hear it online if you really want to, but I'd rather you didn't, and I suspect you'd rather you didn't, too).

Soon I shall have to decide whether to make this a low-rent holiday, or take some serious steps to find gainful employment. (My EU passport is both a blessing and a burden. If I knew I simply couldn't work, I'd be able to relax more. But I also wouldn't be able to afford to stay much longer.) Sarah seems in no hurry to eject me from her spare room, so that removes one source of pressure, at least for the time being.

From the little I've seen of her, I'd say Fi is well – and happy with her new man. No, I've never met him or seen them together. He's in retail, I gather.

Still bracing myself for the obligatory visit to Aberdeen to see the Harper side of the family. Did I say that last time? I'll do it one weekend when Sarah is in Guildford.

Cheers,

Tom

From
: Maddy

To
: Tom

Sent
: Sunday 29 February 10:12 PM

Subject
: Re: Do you call this work?

All right, I'll bite. What were the thirteen words?

Then I'm going to bed. (We're ten hours ahead of you, remember – daylight saving.)

M x

From
: Tom

To
: Maddy

Sent
: Sunday 29 February 12:23 PM

Subject
: Re: Do you call this work?

‘Pure lust. Falling for the body, the curves, the hips, the rear end.'

T

From
: Maddy

To
: Tom

Sent
: Sunday 29 February 10:35 PM

Subject
: Re: Do you call this work?

No – I don't call it work. I wish I could just call it fun, but it feels like a very talented man squandering his talent. I'm glad you didn't enjoy it.

Goodnight

M x

From
: Tom

To
: Maddy

Sent
: Sunday 29 February 5:47 PM

Subject
: Forbidden fruit

Ah, Maddy. I'm not a total idiot.

You're safely tucked up in bed with Harley as I write this – I am imagining you reading it over morning tea at the office – not with Jane looking over your shoulder, though, the way I used to do. (Sorry about that. If we ever work together again, I'll be a better-behaved person. Promise.)

Sarah. What can I say? She's a wonderfully interesting, intelligent, funny person (not, I think, a narcissist – whatever gave you that idea?). It feels as if I have found a new friend – utterly platonic, I assure you. We spend hours of every week in each other's company. I do some cooking for us both (better at that than I used to be), and we have been to several galleries and movies together these past two weeks. I've also had lunch with her and her mother at the Royal Academy. Great fun – her mother is a feisty old bird who loves hearing about Sydney. Sarah and I often go for brisk walks together in the mornings – though it's still very cold – sometimes to her work at King's College, forty minutes away. It's very companionable, for her, I think, as well as for me. She has a few days off, starting tomorrow, so she's going to show me ‘her' London. She says she enjoys seeing things through the eyes of a visitor. The main thing, though, is our conversations, which often go late into the night. There's never a shortage of topics and plenty of robust differences of opinion. You'd love her!

Cheers,

Tom

10

1–3 March.

Those three days.

A rinsing blue sky, promising more than it could deliver on this first morning of March. Red double-deckers glinting in pools of unaccustomed sunshine. Rowing with Sarah on the Serpentine. Never done this before, she said. Really? I said, doubting, but wanting to believe. Her straw hat, defiantly beribboned in the colours of spring, blew off when she took the oars. ‘Will it float or sink?' she asked. It floated and we cheered like children. The anthology of poetry she drew from the pocket of her long skirt. She read Larkin as I rowed, and Auden, even Hopkins, perhaps forgiving him his faith. She read William Barnes's ‘Linden Lea', poignant in its unsung original. She read Robert Bridges:
I praise the tender flower/That on a mournful day/Bloomed in my garden bower/And made the winter gay.

I silently praised the not-so-tender flower that had made my winter gay, and wondered: were those verses deliberately chosen, or had they come randomly from her languid turning of the pages? Scudding clouds and soft showers. Soaked to the skin in St James's Park.
Hardly worth sheltering, she said. The end of a perfect day, she said. The end of a perfect picnic, I said, thinking not only of the two cloths, layered green and white, set on the grass like a table, with green goblets, the colour of her eyes.

Hot showers at home. A Pinter revival at the Lyric Hammersmith, the theatre's faithful re-creation within a dour commercial building a symbol of love and loyalty, she said. And I wondered all night about love and loyalty.

The next morning's early ferry to Hampton Court, wrapped up against the wind, the rats on the docks indifferent to weather. The opulence of luxury cruisers that I knew, even as Sarah mocked them, reminded her of Perry and all his works. We're only here for the maze and the Mantegna pictures, she said. The grandeur, the gilt, the velvet ropes to keep us in our place. A place beyond the dreams even of Puss, she said. The pub lunch, huddled like lovers under a rug on the verandah. The interminable wait for a train home, singing all the rounds we knew under our breath on the platform bench.

A cocktail hour of jazz at Guildhall. Abandon yourself to it, she said. And I wondered about abandonment. A sudden shower. In and out of cabs. The intimacy of enclosure. Leaning on the railing of Hungerford Bridge at dusk, Charing Cross Station looming like a temple. The magical discovery that each of us preferred night to day – watching the fading light a blessing, a release, rather than an ending. Finding we both hated ‘closure' as a word. Perhaps even as a concept. Always more, always more, we said, and briefly slid our arms around each other's waists. (When did we eat? Where?) Walking through the night, as lovers might. Chastely retiring to our separate beds.

The auction room at Christie's, a short stroll from Vincent Square, but time to start three conversations we never finished. Make a low bid, she said, just to be part of it, and I secured an ugly jug. Be careful what you wish for, she said. Dappled light on pavements. Green shoots appearing on bare branches above us. Crocuses peeping gamely from grassy swards. The parks alive. Nothing relaxes me like walking in the spring when others are working, she said. The almost-spring, I said, winding my scarf more tightly around my neck. Lunch in the old vegetable markets at Covent Garden. A swaying African choir at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

‘Afternoon tea at the Ritz would be a cliché,' she said. ‘Take me home.'

Sitting in the cab, Sarah holding my hand, I marvelled at how different these three days had been from that first long walk we took together, when Perry had seemed like an insuperable barrier – both physical and moral – to any possibility of happiness with Sarah. I asked myself what had changed, and I had no answer.

Though barred from entry into her moral labyrinth, I wondered how far Sarah herself had explored it, or whether she even wished to. I suspected she might only ever acknowledge it without feeling the need to penetrate it – those were matters she never raised as issues with me (nor I with her, of course). She wanted me to be in full possession of the facts, and that seemed to be enough to quell any moral queasiness she might feel, if she felt any at all: ‘As long as you know what you're getting yourself into . . .'

I knew proper foundations had not been laid for this glorious edifice we were creating, yet Sarah herself showed no sign of hesitation.

Inside the front door of her apartment, we embraced and kissed, as we had never previously kissed, with tenderness and yearning. With her lips held softly against mine, Sarah said: ‘I have two hours before I need to shower and change.'

I drew back. ‘Our three days are over?'

‘Far from it. But this is a first Wednesday. E's turn tonight. We meet in his shoebox in St John's Wood. I should have reminded you. I'll be gone for no more than three hours.'

Again she placed her lips lightly against mine and murmured: ‘Did you not hear me? I have two hours before I need to shower and change.'

I took her hand and led her towards her end of the apartment.

‘Carry me,' she said. ‘I want to be swept away.'

I put one arm around her back, the other behind her knees and began to lift her.

‘Not fully dressed, surely,' she said.

Where were you, I've heard older people ask, when you heard President Kennedy had been shot? I knew that where I stood, in Sarah's living room, hearing her say that, was one place I would never forget.

Wordlessly, I put her back on her feet and peeled off the outer layers of her clothing, throwing everything over the sofa. She stood there, smiling, in silk camisole and panties, and I picked her up again.

Thus I entered her bedroom for the very first time, and thus we made love for the very first time, as if it had been the first time either of us had loved. Everything – the lightest touch, the faintest word – felt surprising, almost shocking in its intensity, its rawness, its newness. I heard Sarah cry out for the very first time. I watched her shed unfathomable tears for the very first time, and I comforted her and stroked her, naked against me, for the very first time.

She settled into the pillow and seemed to sleep. I rolled onto my back and breathed lightly so as not to disturb her. But she opened her eyes, widening them as she looked deeply into mine. She smiled and reached for me again.

Later, I said: ‘The curtains were drawn when we came into the room. The bed was made but the bedspread had been turned down.'

‘What are you, a private detective? Of course the room was ready for us. Did you think you were an unexpected visitor?'

‘Well, I –'

‘Tom! We've been heading for bed since Thursday the somethingth of January. Haven't we?'

‘The twenty-second.'

‘Ah. There you are.'

Faint afternoon light was just discernible through a gap between the curtains. Wordlessly, we turned to face each other, to wrap our arms around each other again.

‘Tom, I've been wanting you, more and more, for a month. I fancied you the moment I saw you, of course – you'll be used to women saying that. But it was settled for me on that first walk from Blackfriars to Waterloo. I knew these three days together, non-stop, would settle it one way or the other for you.'

‘Settle it for me? I've been in love with you since . . . well, I don't believe in love at first sight, so we'll say since first I heard your voice. How's that?'

‘You continue to surprise me. You amaze me, on every level. I operate on the well-established principle that men are basically hopeless and yet here you are – not hopeless at all.'

‘Hopeless in very many ways, I assure you, my sweet Sarah.'

‘Sweet? I'm sure I'm not that.'

‘All right – my darling Sarah. First time I've ever wanted to use that particular term of endearment, by the way. My wife – ex-wife – was far from the kind of woman one would dare call “darling”.'

‘Tom! Our one and only rule! No third parties in the bed – not them or their issues, or our problems with them, or their problems with us. This is our very own place, ours and only ours.'

We lay together for . . . who knows how long? Drifting, dozing, stroking, nuzzling. I was drowning in the discovery that my love for this woman could be made real, Perry notwithstanding.

A thought came, unbidden and tiresomely rational.

‘Sarah, I have to ask you . . .'

‘Mmm? Ask me anything at all.' Her face was buried in my shoulder.

‘I just wondered if you're, you know, on the . . .'

She sat bolt upright. ‘
What?
I can't believe this! Tom – are you shy? Lying naked in my bed and you're
shy
?'

‘Well, here we are, two grown-ups. Aren't there supposed to be things we ask each other before we rush into bed together?'

‘Rush?
Rush?
You've had weeks and weeks to ask me these pressing questions. I don't recall hearing a peep out of you.' She was grinning broadly, enjoying my absurd awkwardness. ‘Do you think we should each have filled out a questionnaire? Sexually transmitted diseases. Tick. Contraception. Tick. Family history of Alzheimer's. Tick. Ever been convicted of an –'

‘Okay. I get the message.'

‘Tom, I'd certainly expect you to have warned me if you had any nasties to report. And I'd have told you, long before now, if I believed I was any kind of risk to you. Including the risk of paternity.'

‘Of course you would. Sorry. Old pattern.'

‘Well! That was a romantic little postlude, I must say. Any more surprises?'

‘None like that.'

Suddenly she was out of bed, rummaging in a drawer and heading for the bathroom.

‘E's by seven. I nearly forgot!'

I stayed right where I was. After the shortest shower on record, she came back into the room with a towel wrapped around her head. She began to dress in a way she must have known would give me exquisite pleasure – facing me, bending, turning away, pulling things on, zipping and buttoning . . . a striptease in reverse, and quite as erotic.

Back to the bathroom. The roar of the hair dryer. Back to the bedroom. Shoes. Scarf. A flying leap, fully clothed, onto the bed for a horizontal parting hug.

‘Three hours,' she said. I heard her heels click on the vestibule tiles, and the front door shut behind her. I felt like her man. She felt like my woman.

I straightened the bed, picked up my clothes and headed for the guest room. Sarah's clothes were still scattered across the sofa. I dropped mine on the floor, picked hers up and carried them into her bedroom. I paused in the doorway, taking in the room, the curtains, the lamps, a small sofa in the bay window, the bed; sensing, smelling, her very essence in this bedroom air.

I showered, dressed and found the refrigerator devoid of anything that could constitute a meal. I went out, walked two blocks, decided I wasn't hungry after all, and returned to the apartment. Back in the guest room, I lay on the bed. I was not ruminating. I was not introspecting. Perhaps I was convincing myself that the value of introspection had its limits; that endless analysis and the search for too much meaning could be self-defeating; that over-interpretation was foolish. Let's see what happens, I said again to myself, as if I were tapping into ancient wisdom.

At ten-thirty, I heard the sounds I had been longing to hear – her key in the lock and her heels crossing the vestibule. I got up quickly and went to meet her, afraid that she might not be as she had been when she went out.

But she was.

We held each other tightly. We kissed with total abandon. She wept more tears. I wiped them silently.

‘I don't know where they're coming from,' she said into my shoulder. ‘From some deep well. That's how it feels. This is like a proper homecoming. And I don't mean coming home tonight, though that's lovely too. Better than lovely, Tom.'

I poured us each a glass of wine and we sat side by side on the sofa.