Lie With Me (6 page)

‘But haven’t the police looked?’

‘Yes, but . . . Too late, you know?’

I didn’t really know, and I didn’t really care. I was bored of the subject. The dead girl – because of course she was dead – wasn’t bringing out the best in Alice. I wanted more of the sexily efficient businesswoman from dinner with her deportations and hearings. Or the grubby domestic goddess from Andrew’s house. I remembered the laugh I had wrung out of her in the garden – a girlish tinkle with a filthy undertow; the way she had licked the cappuccino foam from her finger. I knew as well as anyone how life gives us certain roles to play. But I had had enough of her goodness, of feeling in the wrong, of this misery memoir. The Merlot was a good one – fruity and soft, warm blood in the mouth. I’d have another glass and, unless things changed, be on my way.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Let’s lighten the mood. You haven’t come all this way to talk about that.’ She gave a lopsided grin.

I stayed all evening.

Alice found another bottle of wine and, moving with speed around the kitchen, opening cupboard doors and hurling ingredients, produced a bowl of pasta with homemade pesto, and a salad of tomato and cucumber and feta: a Greek salad, in fact, ‘though nowhere near as delicious as the ones you actually get in Greece’.

She made a staggering amount of mess – cucumber peelings left flopping over the dirty Magimix; a glug of olive oil spilt on the top of the Aga, the white plastic packet that the feta came in dropped on the floor and forgotten. Oblivious to the chaos she was creating, she talked in a stream about leaving Pyros. The kids had loved it there when they were younger, but now they had social lives in London that needed to be constantly stoked, they were less interested in coming. Perhaps it was good this summer would be their last. ‘Everything comes to an end,’ she said. She was chopping tomatoes and she stopped in mid-cut. She gazed out of the window, which was still half open, on to the wet garden. ‘No matter how hard you try to stop it.’

She picked up the knife again, and said, as an afterthought, ‘If you haven’t got any plans this summer, you should come.’

Once it was cooked, she suggested we took our plates upstairs and ate in front of the fire. The sitting room was soft and cosy, with mismatched sofas and mohair throws, thick velvet curtains, and threadbare Turkish rugs. Bookcases lined the alcoves. A corduroy beanbag was positioned in front of the television; headphones and PlayStation handsets were scattered on the floor. The fire was real and, once she had revived the embers with another log, comfortingly warm. The tabby cat was curled against a tapestry cushion and was happy now to be stroked. Alice drew the curtains and I saw her face, for a second, reflected in the glass, a ripple of fractured lights, and I remembered the passage in
To the Lighthouse
when Mrs Ramsay, serving stew, feels a sense of coherence, of stability. In my case, of course, it may have been the hope of sex.

Alice sat on the floor, with her plate on the coffee table, and I sat on the sofa, elbows awkward, leaning down. When I finished my food and had mopped up the last gritty green juices with a piece of bread, I stood and wandered over to study the bookshelves more closely. Alice was telling me about a Muslim woman from Bexleyheath who, after years of abuse, had stabbed her husband to death with the kitchen scissors. To be honest, the subject was making me feel a bit jangly.

The lower rows contained bestsellers, thrillers, an extensive run of Hornblowers. But on the top shelf was a clutch of old green and orange Penguin editions (Simenon and Ngaio Marsh; George Orwell;
The Great Gatsby
), and some hardbacks in colourful dust jackets. My eye snagged on a distinctive black spine with a slash of yellow, and I reached up to pull the book out:
The Rachel Papers
by Martin Amis. I flicked it open. 1973. A first edition.

‘God!’ I yelped.

Alice had been watching me closely. ‘Harry loved Martin Amis,’ she said, her eyes on mine. ‘Public schoolboys often do, I’ve noticed. Sex and money and a rich dollop of self-loathing.’

‘I’ll ignore that,’ I said, bringing the book back to the sofa and sitting down. The cat slunk off the cushion and joined me, nudging to get on to my knee. I held the book above its body and turned the pages with reverence.

‘Gussie,’ Alice said. ‘The cat, I mean.’

I felt I could hardly breathe, in case I damaged the pages. ‘It’s signed,’ I said.

Alice sighed. ‘He probably bid for it off eBay. He was susceptible to extravagant impulses, was Harry.’

A note in her voice made me put the book down, carefully to one side of me, and look at her. Her eyes had a glassy aspect. ‘Have it,’ she said. ‘Go on. It’s yours.’

I pretended not to hear. ‘Do you miss him?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I’ve forgotten what it felt like to be held . . .’

A stutter in the atmosphere between us, a faltering. The room darkened. A noise against the window, a splatter of rain, as if someone had thrown a handful of small stones at the glass.

Alice shook her head and laughed. ‘I’m not a nun. By
him
, I mean. I’ve forgotten what it felt like to be held by
him
.’

She kept her eyes on the carpet. After a few minutes, I tipped the cat gently off my knee, and made the worst mistake of my life: I unzipped the silver-grey running top to her navel, pushed aside the rather nasty nylon material to expose her surprisingly bra-less breasts, and pulled her towards me.

Chapter Five

The following week I moved back in with my mother. I can’t help thinking things might have been different if I hadn’t.

The railway cottage in East Sheen, where I had grown up, had changed very little over the years – the same threadbare carpet, the same lingering smell of cabbage, the same trains rattling out the back. My father had gone, of course – a heart attack delivering pastoral care at Wandsworth Prison, where he was chaplain – and my mother had made certain improvements to my tiny single room: a pine shelf, with puny brackets, ‘for your books’, a new lamp from BHS (‘Ta-da’) and above the single bed, a framed copy of the review that appeared in the
Times Literary Supplement
of
Annotations
, the paper yellowing with age behind the glass. It had always been stifling at home – the weight of my parents’ expectations, their oppressive pleasure in my success, my own gaping sense of failure. But now the atmosphere was heightened – my mother warily cheerful in the face of my encroaching sense of suffocation. As she warmed us ‘a couple of nice lamb chops’ while maintaining a constant stream of chatter – she had taken the faulty kettle back to Dickins & Jones and had been served by a lovely girl (‘black but couldn’t have been nicer’); nice Jenny, from church, had offered to host next month’s WI, ‘which is a relief because of my knee’ – it was immediately apparent desperate measures were called for.

‘All those bags of stuff you’ve got in the attic,’ she fussed over dessert, a Tesco apple crumble with Bird’s custard. ‘I thought I might bring them down.’

‘Leave them there. It’s fine.’

‘Or maybe, as you’re so busy, I might sort through them.’

‘No,’ I said abruptly. ‘Don’t touch anything of mine.’

That night, as I sat with her in the front room, watching a ghastly soap opera she described as ‘one of my programmes’ – I ran through my list of contacts. In the past, I’d always found something to save me – a colleague or cohort needing a house-sit, a girlfriend wanting more of me, the generosity of other peoples’ parents I had carefully charmed. In extremis, Michael had bailed me out, but now the twins had taken occupancy of his spare room. For the first time in fifteen years, I felt trapped, forced to face my own demons.

Until this moment I had given no further thought to Alice. One night had been enough to satisfy whatever had drawn me to her in the first place. But as the soap opera finished and my mother changed the channel for a detective show set in the 1950s, I began to think about her. The sex had been enjoyable enough. The house was warm and comfortable. I’d got a free book. (I had sold it to one of the posher dealers in the Charing Cross Road for £500. It would have been more but there was a mug ring on the back cover.) And there was always the daughter’s imminently empty bedroom to consider.

In the ad break I slipped out to the kitchen on the pretence of making tea. She answered, sounding pleased, and we arranged to meet the following week – supper at a fashionable bistro in Clapham.

That first proper date was not cheap (she insisted on the “taster menu”), but I treated it as an investment. I courted her. I courted her hard. I figured out what formula would work best and applied it, decided what buttons to push and pushed them. The way she had confronted me with my bad-boy image at Andrew Edmunds had been as sexually charged as foreplay – she was clearly aroused, like many women, by a bastard. But she had made it obvious, too, that she liked an underdog, and put her faith in the goodness of the human spirit. Over that first dinner, I eked out a sob story about a woman who had broken my heart at college (‘No, not Florrie’), and my subsequent fear of being hurt, my issues (of course) with commitment. We said goodbye chastely in the street afterwards, but the next morning, I sent flowers, with a carefully composed message (‘Thank you for being different’), followed up by texts, increasingly flirtatious in tone. (It was so lovely to spend time with you . . . Can’t stop thinking about you . . . Mrs Mackenzie: do you realise the effect you have had on me? . . . Come to bed with me, please.)

It took me two weeks and two more dates to win her over properly, to bring that final plea to fruition. Over that period I convinced her that she had affected me creatively as well as emotionally. I confessed my writing had been blocked until meeting her and that for the first time in years I felt in touch with real emotions. I was working hard in the London Library every day, finishing the manuscript for which breath in publishing circles was now bated. I pumped out the clichés, and watched as she absorbed them all, marking how she took responsibility for this reincarnation of my abilities and energy.

A certain amount of ducking and diving was needed to maintain my credibility. She had no idea I had left Lamb’s Conduit Street. Or that a small creditor problem – certain bar bills it had become urgent to avoid – kept me out of Soho. I had lost my free pass to the London Library, too, now Alex had returned and requisitioned it. Instead, I spent my days browsing the books sections of south London’s charity shops, or drinking tea in Bun in the Oven, a cheap cafe at the end of Sheen Lane. To cover my tracks, I made sure Alice and I met exclusively in Clapham – a tactic I presented as thoughtfulness. It gave her time to nip home to freshen up, or check on ‘GCSE coursework’ (I even had the lingo down pat). I let her know ‘kitchen suppers’ were fine by me too. ‘You are understanding,’ she said, throwing together pasta puttanesca or chicken cacciatore (she was a wonderful cook). ‘I don’t like to leave the kids too many nights in a row.’ In reality, although I soon palled of teenage sulkiness across the table, I was delighted to avoid spending money. Dating a woman of her standing was not cheap. There was one tricky moment, for example, when I realised she was assuming I would accompany her to the Finding Jasmine benefit: at £90 a head! I found myself inventing a godchild’s birthday to get out of it.

My target may initially have been that spare room – by September I planned to be close enough to Alice (maybe as a sort of friend with benefits) to take it over organically, for it to be the natural next step. But as the early weeks of our relationship went by, the idea of something more permanent began to take form. I imagined myself perhaps not her husband but master of the house – of her feather-down king-sized duvet, her claw-foot bath, her stocked fridge, her cat. I mused idly on the subject of Harry’s life insurance. Her kids were a pain – a sweaty, hulking fug of grunts and hormones. But the thought was not unpleasant. I wasn’t in love with her. I looked at her objectively, and noticed her age: the tight lines across her brows, the cross-hatching to the side of her eyes. It was a complicated desire, maybe a mental captivation rather than a physical one, to do with her energy, her confidence, her ability to sort the most complicated of plans or problems. When she took a call from a colleague at her law firm, or from one of her many pressure groups (Women Against This, Lawyers For That), I would feel aroused just listening to her. The sheer competence of the woman took my breath away.

And there was something else, too, enflaming me, something more sensitive, to do with a certain unattainability, a nagging sense even during intercourse that she was holding back. She seemed keen enough – she asked earnestly after my ‘oeuvre’ and laughed at my jokes, took off her clothes at my request, revealing a pale, limpid body, with stretch marks prettily etched across her stomach and a full crop of pubic hair. What she didn’t do, despite all my efforts, was reach orgasm – a penetrating blow to my
amour propre
. Once I had returned to bed, having disposed of the condom, she made satisfied noises and nuzzled her face into my neck, sighing as if she were replete. One night I decided to confront it head-on (so to speak). I propped myself on my elbows and gazed down into her half-closed crescent eyes. ‘Your turn,’ I said, about to go down. ‘No excuses.’

But she wriggled out from under me, swivelling sideways, tugging at the duvet, until she was sitting, hunched, on the side of the bed. She pulled a worn towelling dressing gown over her shoulders. ‘I don’t any more,’ she said flatly. ‘It’s not that I don’t enjoy it – I do, I love it all – but I don’t come.’

‘Perhaps it would be . . . easier . . . more satisfying for you if you were on the pill?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s guilt, I think.’

‘Harry,’ I said. I closed my eyes. ‘Of course. Poor Alice.’

I peppered her neck with kisses until she squirmed away, laughing. Her bedroom – a sluttish room, scattered with discarded clothes and jewellery, fairy lights and dusty candles – had an ensuite bathroom, which she wandered into. I could hear her peeing. I threw myself back into the pillows, arms crossed above my head, chest expanding, and made light of it. ‘All the more for me,’ I think I said. But I thought about Harry: a big, solid, dead man in the well of her bed. And I felt a hard, gritty resolution form, a vow that one day soon not only would I have her, I’d have her completely.