Infidelity (9 page)

‘Was the music good?'

‘Always good. Wonderful. Always . . . therapeutic.'

She moved closer to me on the sofa and tucked her hand into my arm.

‘Oh, before I forget,' she said, ‘Jelly wants you to call him tomorrow. Here's his card. I told him you already have one, but he's a compulsive card-giver.'

‘Jelly? Did he say why?'

‘He has some part-time work that might interest you. One of the pies he has a finger in.'

‘But that's terrific.'

‘This is Jelly, remember. It might be terrific for him but it mightn't be terrific for you. Do call him, though.'

‘Of course. First thing.'

‘Also, Fox and E want to have lunch with you one weekend when I'm away. You made quite an impression. Fox obviously fancies you, but she does have a husband
and
E . . . and a foetus, of course, so I think I can relax about that.'

‘With E rather than her husband? The lunch, I mean?'

‘Of course. Oh yes, I see what you mean. Well, it's complicated. We all thought E and Fox would end up together. They've always had a strange kind of on-again, off-again relationship, ever since university. Typical E. Even when they've been with other partners. I don't enquire. They've somehow managed to stay good friends – more than friends, I guess. Well, I don't guess – I know. Turbulent is the word, I think, for their relationship. So, yes, they'll no doubt pick a weekend when Mr Fox is away. Which is most weekends, by the way. He basically lives in Basel.'

We lapsed into a long silence. Sarah swung her legs up onto the sofa and dropped her head into my lap. I stroked her hair and she purred sounds of deep contentment. I bent over her face and we gave ourselves up to kissing.

Eventually she said: ‘I have to pay for my sins with an early start tomorrow. And I have Mother for lunch, of course.'

‘Shall I join you?'

‘Perhaps not tomorrow. Mother is far too astute. I think we'll need to practise the art of public detachment before we meet her together again.'

A cloud of reality-consciousness descended on us, dissipated only by the heat of a ferocious kiss. ‘And that's precisely the kind of thing we must never say in bed,' she said.

At midnight, we roused ourselves from the sofa, stretching like cats.

‘Tom, I very much want you to sleep with me tonight. But I also want you to know you haven't forfeited your right to the guest room.'

‘Tough choice,' I said.

11

‘M
r Yelland will see you now.'

I was led by a casually dressed young man down the corridor of a tiny office building in a lane off Oxford Street. The entrance had been hard to find, tucked away among high-security jewellers, tailors and silverware shops. I'd walked the length of the lane a couple of times before spotting
Kenneth Yelland
on a brass plate so discreet as to seem almost apologetic.

Jelly's office was small, dark and chaotic – not what I had expected from Sarah's description of his wealth. His welcome, though, was warm and expansive.

We shook hands and he offered me tea.

‘Rod will make our tea. Good boy, Rodney.' After Rodney had withdrawn, Jelly added: ‘Wouldn't get a woman to do it these days. Not in the fucking job description, of course, making the tea. World has changed. Remember tea ladies? Wonderful institution, what? Gone the way of Pitman shorthand.'

For a man of roughly my own and Sarah's age, Jelly seemed to have adopted the persona of someone much older. Perhaps he believed it gave him gravitas. Perhaps it was just a joke he was playing on the world.

‘Good of you to see me, Jelly. I'm grateful. A bit surprised, too, in fact. I'd wondered if I might have been a bit crass the night we met. A bit abrasive. Might have pushed the colonial line a bit hard? Sorry if that was the case.'

Jelly appeared genuinely amazed by this. ‘Abrasive? Good fucking grief, Tom. Fun, wasn't it? Fun's the name of the game.'

‘I'm pleased to hear it. Now, Sarah mentioned there could be a prospect of some part-time work.'

‘Good old Sar. Your advocate, Tom. Did you know that? You can't be half as wonderful as Sar says you are. No one could be. But she thinks you're some kind of fucking paragon, so don't do anything to disabuse her of that too soon, there's a good chap.'

I smiled and shrugged, not wanting to disabuse Jelly himself of any rosy illusions about me either.

‘All above board, what I have in mind,' he said, as though this might be an exception to his normal approach. ‘You've got an EU passport, Sar tells me. Work's not a problem for you?'

Did he mean work per se
was not a problem for me, or working in the UK? Either way, the answer was ‘no'.

‘You're a trained psychologist?'

‘Trained but not currently registered. That's a long –'

‘Sar told me the gist of it. You know the ropes, clinically speaking, but you can't practise officially.'

‘Can't call myself a psychologist. That's the main restriction. I could still operate as a kind of generic counsellor, I suppose . . .'

‘No, no. Counselling's not on the agenda. This is about psych testing, Tom. My game, as you might recall, is recruitment. One of our firms is into the psych-testing caper up to its eyeballs. They make too much of it, if you ask me, but what would I know, a mere bean counter? Goes down a treat in the marketplace, they tell me. A trained monkey can administer the tests, but you need a minimum bit of psych to do the stats part of it and write it up in some convincing fucking prose. Nothing too poetic, what? Nothing very sophisticated at all, to be frank. Still, they tell me there's an art to it. Like every other fucking thing. The right lingo.'

A knock at the door. Rodney with the tea.

‘Would you get that, Tom? No room to swing a proverbial in here.'

The tea ceremony consisted of Rodney placing a pot of tea and a jug of milk on the edge of Jelly's desk and taking two mugs from the top of a bookcase.

‘Milk, Mr Harper?'

‘Thank you, Rodney, and please call me Tom,' I said, and he poured some milk into both mugs,
Keep calm and carry on
emblazoned on the side of mine.

‘Sugar?'

‘I take chemicals with mine,' Jelly said, producing a pack of artificial sweeteners from his top drawer. ‘You want one?'

I declined both offers and Rodney withdrew.

‘Good boy, Rodney. Two pies for my lunch – no sauce,' Jelly called after him.

‘I assume the work would involve some face-to-face contact with job applicants,' I said, feeling the need to get to the point while pouring the tea for both of us. ‘Some interviewing?'

‘Could do, could do. Down the track. First up, though, they tell me this will be purely a back-room type of position.'

‘I just imagined it would make sense for the person scoring the tests and writing up the results to have some contact with the –'

‘Quite possibly true, Tom, quite possibly. But nothing to do with me. Not my bag, the professional side of it. You'll need to sort that kind of thing out once you've got yourself established. I don't know how they rationalise any of this stuff. They have highly trained interviewers – suave as buggery, they tell me. They trawl around the client base, touting for business, too. Take the briefs. That type of carry-on. I wouldn't know. I just watch the bottom line, what?'

‘Well, it's certainly something I could do – though I haven't actually done much testing since I finished my training.'

‘Look, I wouldn't want to glamorise this, Tom. Neither the job, nor the prospects. To be totally frank, it's not much of a fucking job and it pays fucking peanuts. Two or three days a week maximum. But work is work, right? You're looking for a bit of pocket money and you're only here for the short term, is what Sar tells me. Though if you're half the man she thinks you are, I can't see her letting you leave the country. But that's another issue entirely. So, what do you say?'

Jelly reached for one of three rather old-fashioned phones on his desk. ‘Shall I make you an appointment?'

‘Thank you,' I said, with some reluctance. Menial, part-time work hardly sounded like a good career move, though it occurred to me that any job might be a welcome distraction from days mainly filled with anticipation of soaring, roaring nights. And if my stay were to be prolonged, I would need to earn some money.

Jelly set up an appointment for later in the day with the head of one of his recruitment firms, Blair International.

‘Who's Blair?' I asked as Jelly scribbled the address on the back of his business card.

‘There is no Blair. And no International, either. Not yet, anyway. Memorable, though, wouldn't you say? Perhaps we'll go offshore one day.'

As we stood and shook hands, Jelly said, as if it was an afterthought, ‘I want you to take this on as something of a watching brief, Tom. Things are a little softer at Blair than I'd like. I wouldn't mind a pair of reasonably mature eyes giving the place the once-over from the inside, what?'

‘Will your CEO know that's why I'm there?'

‘Oh, that's not why you're there. You're there to do the hack work I described to you – as reflected in the miserable pittance you'll receive. No, Jennifer won't know. Absolutely no reason I can think of why she should know. Give it a month or two, and we might have another little chat, what? Leave it to me to get in touch.'

The reception area of Blair International, in contrast with the burrow occupied by its owner, was a monument to chrome-and-glass minimalism, though the facade of the old three-storey building, just off Charing Cross Road, gave no hint of the interior style. The glass reception desk appeared to float above the floor and the receptionist, perched on a stool, complete with discreet earpiece, would have been right at home on Sky TV.

I waited for my appointment in a low-slung structure, rather like a chrome and leather deckchair. Studying the black-and-white decor, I saw that the receptionist's desk was indeed floating, suspended from the ceiling by four almost invisible cables.

A woman approached with outstretched hand and I struggled to my feet. ‘Jennifer Rey. How do you do? Mr Yelland has given me your background, so it's just a matter of getting someone to show you the ropes and work out when you might like to start.' (When I might like to start? This was clearly a foregone conclusion, engineered for me by the proprietor, for his own benefit as well as mine.)

The polar opposite of Jelly, Jennifer Rey was tall, slim and beautifully dressed, even by the high standards to which I had recently become accustomed. She took me up in the lift to an area that looked more like a call centre than an office.

‘I'm afraid this is cubicle city, Mr Harper. I'm sure Mr Yelland explained. We're hard pressed for space at present. The business has expanded very rapidly – we're having to use every available nook and cranny. But Ros will show you where you'll be sitting – the general area, I mean. It's all hot-desking, these days.'

Jennifer Rey was the very picture of a calm and composed CEO, an MBA doubtless heading her CV. By contrast, Ros, with an armful of overstuffed manila folders – so much for the paperless office – looked harassed and distracted. From behind thick glasses, she clearly viewed me as an interruption to an already impossible schedule, looking me up and down as if I were an unlikely proposition, rather than a friend of the owner of this business. (Or perhaps this rather disdainful look was precisely tailored for a friend of the owner.)

Ros said: ‘There's no need to show you a spot. You'll be a floating unit, like everyone else. It's very fluid, which means I can never find anyone when I need them. But that's the modern way, they tell me. When have they said you're starting, by the way?'

‘Well, I thought perhaps that was up to –'

‘Sooner the better, Mr Harper.'

‘Tom, please.'

‘Your first day, I'll get young Darren to run you through the system. Second day, in at the deep end. All right with you?'

‘Certainly.'

‘And I'll introduce you to Human Resources, of course. I assume you'll be expecting to be paid. Is that part of the arrangement?' The ghost of a smile.

‘I understand so, yes.'

‘Let's say Monday, shall we? Mondays and Tuesdays, let's make it, with Wednesdays optional, depending on the work, et cetera, et cetera. All right with you?'

‘Fine with me.'

I appeared to have a job.

12

O
n our first Friday morning after we had begun sleeping together, Sarah told me to be sure to leave no trace of my presence in her bedroom.

My previous three Fridays in the apartment, chastely installed in the guest room, had taught me the Friday morning routine.

‘Mrs Hepworth comes up to London on the train every Friday,' Sarah had explained. ‘She arrives here about ten, cleans the place, sees her sister for lunch, and is always back in Littleton well before dark. Been doing it for years.'

On each of those previous Fridays, we had left early enough to walk together to King's and have breakfast on the way. I had sensed Sarah's reluctance for me to meet the housekeeper from Littleton. Now the reason to conceal me had become more sharply defined.

‘You don't want Mrs Hepworth to know . . .?'

‘Tom, do I have to spell it out? She works for Perry, too, remember. It's better not to burden her with any knowledge she'd rather not have.'

I didn't get it. The story of Perry was a cold-hearted farce about an out-and-out philanderer and the story of his marriage to Sarah was a tragedy of emotional vandalism amounting to abuse. Now, when she and I had finally found a sense of freedom with each other, she wanted to hide me away.

‘Is Mrs Hepworth Perry's spy?' I asked.

‘Mrs Hepworth is a dear, dear friend who is almost as old as my mother. For years, Perry's behaviour disgusted her. Now, she's rather puzzled by the whole scene. I try to be a bit discreet, that's all. I don't want to thrust you – us – in poor Mrs Hepworth's face.'

‘My fingerprints are all over the guest room. I've been sleeping there for three weeks.'

‘Oh, she's used to the guest room being occupied,' Sarah said, as if I hadn't been joking. ‘Evidence of human habitation – the particular human unspecified – is no surprise. She never enquires who's been staying with me. I told you, E was here for several months last year.'

‘So you're saying I have to pick up any stray socks from your bedroom floor,
and
make myself scarce.'

‘I'm afraid so, yes. Do you mind terribly? Mrs Hepworth doesn't know you, and she doesn't need to know you. Not yet. Don't you understand the need for a little decorum? She'll adore you, of course, when the time comes.'

I confess I struggled with this appeal for decorum. This was only our second morning of waking up in the same bed and I was furiously offended by the idea that I must be hidden from the gaze of Mrs Hepworth, lest . . . lest what? Lest she tell Perry that Sarah had someone in the wings, waiting for his demise, ready to take his place in Littleton? Lest she spread tales in the village about Sarah's lurid love-life in the big city? Lest she tell her sister in London and her sister turned out to be passing secrets to a contact at the
Sun
?

‘Is this about the money? I assume that's what this is about. You can't afford to upset Perry.' It was out of my mouth, the words like flotsam carried on a swelling tide, before I knew I would say it; before I knew I was thinking it.

Sarah looked at me with an expression I'd never seen before. Was she angry? Disappointed in me? Or did she feel exposed? Affronted?

‘Tom, I hope we're not going to have our first serious argument. But if we are, I won't flinch from it. So don't develop that thought unless you're determined to see it through to the bitter end.'

We stood looking grimly at each other.

‘It doesn't matter,' I said, wanting to mean it. How could it matter? For all I knew, the apartment was owned by Perry or, like Whitman House, had been bought for Sarah by Perry. She had never said anything about the ownership of the apartment. Perhaps she leased it, using the ceaseless flow of Whitman money. Yet there was I, as hypocritical as can be, trying to sound as if there were some principle at stake. What principle? Even in that moment, I knew my anger was mainly directed at myself: who did I think I was, savouring the fruits of Perry's generosity while bedding his wife (even if wife in name only)?

‘That's right,' Sarah said, still not smiling at me. ‘It doesn't matter. Come back to bed.'

We lay there in each other's arms, both breathing hard, sensing – hoping – a dangerous corner had been safely negotiated that might easily have brought us undone.

‘Tom, I know you think you love me, but you still have reservations. I know that. You feel complicit in something a little bit grubby, perhaps?'

‘I love you –
you
– unconditionally. Of course I do,' I replied. ‘But, yes, there are these shadows and I suppose I haven't quite come to terms with them.'

‘I tried to make sure you knew precisely what you would be getting yourself into.'

‘You did.'

‘And I repeat what I said once before – if you think this is a moral minefield, please understand it's my own personal minefield. But at least I am exactly who I say I am, and my situation is exactly as I say it is. As long as you accept that, there's no deception between us and nothing to be afraid of. We're grown-ups. We both know what we're doing. You've brought some still-tender bruises of your own into this bed, by the way. I can sense them.'

(Did she really not understand that we were walking together, hand in hand, through that minefield?)

We held on to each other and I felt her give a shuddery sigh. Of relief, I assumed, tinged with the ineffable sadness of our whole situation – ‘our whole situation' meaning Perry, of course, a figure who was beginning to take on the shape of a wounded monster in my mind.

Sitting up, Sarah announced briskly: ‘Time to strip the bed. Same routine as usual. We'll strip the guest bed, too.'

With no time left for our Friday walk, we ate a hurried breakfast and Sarah said, as we went outside to wait for her cab: ‘I have a tutorial finishing at two, and I'll come straight back. Will I find you here?'

At two-thirty she did find me there. Not just in her apartment, but in her bed. I was hoping this would be interpreted as a sign of contrition as well as eagerness. I needed to cover her with my kisses and fill her with my seed. I wanted her to be in no doubt of that need, before she left me, yet again, for the weekend.

‘Goodness,' was all she said when she found me. But she smiled, quickly undressed and slid in beside me.

For several minutes we lay silently, side by side on our backs, holding hands like tentative teenagers.

Eventually Sarah spoke. ‘Tom, I've thought about what you said. In fact, I've thought about nothing else.'

‘Sarah, I –'

‘No, Tom. Let me say this. I put on a terrible performance for those poor students. I simply wasn't in the mood for “Humpty Dumpty”, even though some of them had done some terribly original thinking about it. They all Google like mad, of course, so the fall of the Roman Empire features in every single essay, almost word for word. But this one boy had turned the whole thing into a rather sweet little fertility fable, wrapped in a love story. The egg, of course. The wall – the barrier between two lovers. The falling. The broken heart that couldn't be repaired.'

‘That sounds quite clever. I like it.'

‘I know. It was rubbish, historically speaking. But it was such endearing rubbish. And there's always Alice in Wonderland's Humpty to be contended with: “When I use a word, it means precisely what I want it to mean” – the rallying cry of the postmodernists. Anyway, enough of that. The fact is, I didn't engage as I should have.'

‘I don't want to have that effect on you.'

‘Nor I on you. But we do have to deal with these things. We have to talk things through.'

I thought, but (knowing the rule) didn't say, that my ex-wife Clare had the opposite view. She used to say the more we talked, the less we liked each other and the more we grew apart. She thought too many of the words we spoke were like bricks in a wall between us. She said she loved me most when she knew me least. She accused me of converting everything into words and wanting her to do the same. I interpreted her silences as impenetrable barriers; she interpreted my need to talk as an intrusion into the privacy of her own thoughts.

Talking matters to me; one of things that drew me to Sarah most strongly was the talking. The torrent of talk made
our
silences poignant rather than threatening. When she said ‘we have to talk things through', I was almost giddy with pleasure.

‘The thing is,' she said, carefully placing her hand on my chest, ‘you were right, up to a point. It
is
partly about the money. Not in the rather crass and obvious way you might think. I don't have to put my hand out each week and wait to see if Perry will judge me worthy of my allowance. And remember, I do draw a salary from the university, so I'd never be on the breadline.'

‘You don't have to say any more, you know. I feel embarrassed about having raised this at all. I was just feeling resentful about the need to hide.'

‘Quite. I understand that absolutely. Absolutely. If I were in your place, I'd feel exactly the same, or worse. And I'm terribly sorry it has to be this way. Don't you realise that what I want, more than anything, is to go out and dance in the streets and sing to the sky? I'm mad about you, Tom. And I should say I was half hoping you'd be in bed when I got back.'

For a moment, we let the seriousness go out of us and it felt as if we might abandon this conversation in favour of making love. But Sarah said: ‘I need to finish what I was saying.'

And I said: ‘Aren't we breaking our bed rule?'

At that, Sarah sprang out of bed. ‘You're right, Tom. I'm deadly serious about that rule. I really don't want ghosts of partners past, or any other ogres, or work, or politics or scandals to infest our bed. Except our own scandals, of course. The more the better. Come and have a cup of tea and let's be scandalous until it's time for Blackfriars and Waterloo.'

Dread word, ‘Waterloo'. But I knew the rules – in and out of bed.

We made tea and found some biscuits, and we sat at the dining table as if we'd convened a meeting, Sarah dishevelled and peachy in her silk dressing-gown, me in my unbuttoned shirt and underpants.

‘All right, Tom. I'll say this as clearly and honestly as I can. For a start, Perry has always been remarkably generous. Sometimes it made me feel like a call girl, I can tell you, in spite of being married to him. But he gave me the house and he set up the trust fund I told you about, and I've been living very comfortably off its earnings for the past sixteen years. I don't rely on regular handouts from him – that's not how it works. I simply find my bank account freshly swollen at the end of each month. In the beginning, I managed to think of this arrangement quite charitably – like some never-ending version of a traditional dowry. Over the past ten years, though, I've mostly felt soiled by it, as if it were securing my services for life.'

‘What's the difference? Isn't that precisely what a dowry is? Part of the institutional, contractual approach to marriage, I mean. Isn't it supposed to provide some protection, some security, for a wife, especially if things turn out badly, like the premature death of a husband? It can be horribly abused, of course. Still, in your case –'

‘In my case, the symbolism wasn't exactly subtle, was it? The less we examine it the better, thank you. I entered into that arrangement when I was dizzy with lust and full of dreamy optimism. The money was just another manifestation of the whirlwind that had picked me up and swept me into a new way of thinking – or not thinking – about my life. Even when the scales fell from my eyes, I continued to take it.'

‘And later?'

‘Oh, later, I used to think of it as appropriate compensation for the deeply undignified situation I'd allowed myself to be put in. In any case, I've taken the money, I've used it, and it's become part of who I am. I've told you before – it's changed me in ways I'm not proud of. The financial wizards at the Whitman Corporation manage it, but the earnings flow directly to me, absolutely unfettered. I'm sure Perry hasn't the faintest idea how much I receive each month and couldn't care less. Nothing to do with him – literally. There are times when I have to pinch myself to believe it still keeps happening so long after he lost interest in me.'

‘You mean, as if you no longer deserve it?'

‘Something like that. I suppose I must be filed under W for “wife” in some perpetual system that conflates the roles of wife and corporate entertainer and would, in any case, barely register on the Whitman corporate radar. But maybe it does exactly what Perry always expected it to do – create a terrible sense of obligation in me, more powerful than any marriage vows in this day and age. I entered into the arrangement quite light-heartedly. But over the years, I realised I was a prisoner of it – like someone marrying into a royal family. That money bound me to Perry absolutely. It's one of the reasons – perhaps the only reason – why I persevered through those early years of such bitter disillusionment. I was utterly beholden to him for the way of life I'd adopted so enthusiastically. Do you think that's pathetic? I think it's pathetic.'