Lie With Me (7 page)

The house in Pyros hadn’t been mentioned since the night we first slept together, but I hadn’t forgotten her vague invitation. It was a slow thought at the back of my mind that I would spend the summer with her there and that, on our return to Clapham, she would ask me to move in. Greece was a major part of my campaign.

It was an encounter with Andrew that first made me falter.

Alice, I was always aware, saw a lot of Andrew. They met up both professionally and socially. (It was Andrew who had gone with her in the end to the Finding Jasmine benefit.) I didn’t encounter him again for a while, but I was unpleasantly aware of his presence nevertheless. One Saturday, I found a silk-lined scarf on the back of a chair, which Alice said belonged to him. On another occasion, he had left an envelope on the kitchen table with forms for her to sign. I wondered a couple of times if I smelt his aftershave – Trumper’s West Indian Limes.

I didn’t like it. He was a threat, one I would, sooner or later, have to do something about.

It was early April when I saw him again. Alice and I had spent the afternoon in bed, with a bottle of wine and the
Guardian
crossword. Maskarade, a relatively new setter, had set the puzzle around
Under Milk Wood
, in celebration of the play’s anniversary. Alice, in playful mood, professed herself enchanted by my knowledge of the text and characters: Lily Smalls, Captain Cat, Nogood Boyo, etc. I began to show off – ‘Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs,’ I quoted, but she wasn’t taking me as seriously as I thought. ‘You’re my nogood boyo,’ she kept saying. ‘Aren’t you?’ She was tipsy enough to find it hysterical. ‘My nogood boyo.’

I took it in good part at first. I kissed her. But as she went on, the joke (‘my nonononogood boyo’) seemed to be at my expense and I began to feel hot and scratchy. I got out of bed, with a huffy shuffle of the duvet, and pulled on my boxers before remembering I had nowhere much else to go. Doubly nettled, I rummaged for my cigarettes in the pocket of my discarded jeans and walked to the window. I hoiked open the sash.

‘Come back and shipwreck in my thighs,’ Alice cooed. She knew I was cross, but was making a play of not noticing.

I sat on the ledge and lit up, using the curtain to protect my semi-nudity from the street below. I stared down. Fat wodges of white blossom clustered on the cherry tree. A thin sun reflected on the houses opposite, yellowing the brickwork, glancing off the glass. The shopping trolley had gone from the next-door garden. I remember wondering if the council had collected it, or whether it was still there, buried and disintegrated. I imagined triangular heaps of rust under the brambles, ants crawling. I wondered whether anything could ever be said completely to disappear. I took a few deep puffs, and watched the ash at the end of my Silk Cut lengthen into a precarious tube, before flicking it out.

The silver-white dust floated on the air in tiny fragile lozenges. I noticed voices from below, the gate opening and people accumulating in the front garden. I jumped off the sill and peered down. They were hidden by the porch. Deep in the house, the doorbell rang.

‘Visitors,’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ Alice replied, pulling on the green sweater dress she had been wearing before I took it off. She thrust her bare feet into a pair of suede ankle books, and briskly threw her head forward and then back: a quick way she had of sorting out her hair. ‘Andrew, Tina and the gang – they’ve come for an early supper. Thought we’d have an Indian takeaway’

She stood at the door and smiled at me, her head tipped to one side. She seemed sober now. ‘You coming?’

When I didn’t answer, she left the room. I stayed where I was for a moment, feeling disconcerted, outwitted. I hadn’t met any of her other friends. We’d spent all our time alone. Why hadn’t she told me they were due?

I could hear her voice, mingling with Andrew’s. Tina’s laugh, the sitting- room door opening and closing, footsteps descending to the kitchen.

I got up and pulled on my trousers. My shirt was crumpled under the bed. The door to her wardrobe was open. Some of Harry’s clothes still hung there. I’d been through them before, and pocketed a couple of ties I liked the look of. Now I ran through the hangers until I found a shirt I liked: pale pink with a subtle textured pattern. The label read Charles Tyrwhitt. It was a little wide in the collar, but would do. I buttoned it up slowly.

Tina saw me first. She was leaning against the Aga facing the door and I saw her eyes widen with surprise and also pleasure – I think about that moment quite a lot these days. She looked at Andrew and her expression tightened into something more cautious. ‘Paul!’ she said.

Andrew was sitting at the table with his back to me. His head whipped round. In that split second I saw him take in the shirt and my bare feet. I saw him acknowledge that I had been in Alice’s bed, that there was something I could do with her (not a finance meeting, not a quick lunch) that he couldn’t.

He made to stand up and tangled his feet in the feet of the chair. He swore and, rubbing his calf, hopped towards me, a small piece of theatre that gave him a moment to collect himself. ‘Old man!’ he said with exaggerated bonhomie. ‘Where’ve you come from?’

‘I was upstairs.’

‘Nice to see you.’

I shook his hand, smiling into his face. ‘It’s been a while,’ I said.

‘Gosh, yes. But then here you are! Alice. You dark horse. How life moves on.’

Alice was getting a six-pack of Coke out of the fridge. ‘Oh grow up, Andrew,’ she said, shutting the door with her elbow. She sounded annoyed. ‘We’re all adults here.’

She noticed the shirt. ‘Oh,’ she said, flushing.

‘Do you mind? Mine was crumpled.’

She shook her head, and turned away.

In the garden, a tall, thin teenage boy with a stick in his hand was trying to whip the head off a tulip. A girl of about seventeen, with very short hair, boyishly cut, in baggy jeans and sneakers, was sitting on a swing, a rotten old thing that dangled from the arm of an apple tree, scuffing the grass with her shoes to spin herself round.

Tina, who was wearing a rather peculiar outfit, a big black linen dress like a depressed artist’s smock, saw me looking. ‘Our kids,’ she said, adjusting her hair, which was pulled back in a tortoiseshell clip. ‘Daisy and Archie.’

Alice said to me: ‘Paul – you couldn’t go and round up my lot, could you?’

I liked that – being given something to do. It showed Andrew I belonged.

I ran upstairs, shouted at the boys to get out of their bedrooms and then took the last flight of steps up to Phoebe’s attic room. The door was ajar, and I was about to push it open when I saw her through a crack in the frame, and I paused, angling my head to see in. She was lying on the bed on her stomach looking at her laptop, bare feet in the air, her arse tight and round, her T-shirt twisted to reveal a strip of white skin across her lower back.

I thought I had been quiet, but after a moment she said, ‘Coming,’ to let me know she
knew
I’d been spying, that she wasn’t to be underestimated.

I’d have to watch her.

Back in the kitchen, Alice had found a menu in a drawer and Andrew was writing down what people wanted. Dennis was nosing around and Andrew pushed his head away a couple of times, with an expression of distaste: not a dog-lover, then. (I made a fuss of him to show I was.) Alice seemed tense. She kept laughing and moving things: a pepper-pot, a newspaper. At one point she grabbed a child – Frank – and held on to him, one arm across his chest, almost for protection. Intriguing. I wondered if I was unnerving her, the adjustment of integrating her new flame with her old friends. Yes, possibly I was right. She kept giving me jobs to do: collecting cutlery, finding bottles of Beck’s, rummaging in the fridge for lime pickle and mango chutney and Hot Pepper Jelly (the woman had it all). I felt Andrew’s eyes on me the whole time.

‘How’s the oeuvre?’ he said.

It was the phrase Alice often used.

‘Coming along,’ I said.

‘Don’t be modest.’ Alice broke off from laying the table to wrap her arms around me – rather as she had hugged Frank earlier. I smelt beer on her breath. ‘He’s been writing in the London Library every day and it’s really coming together. His agent has a lot of interest already.’

I smiled. Tina said how clever I was. Alice released me and Andrew started talking about a committee meeting that was imminent – a special fund for ‘review and investigation’.

I looked out of the window. The teenage girls, Phoebe and Daisy, were sitting on garden chairs, just outside the kitchen door. The way Andrew’s daughter was sitting, her legs crossed, her elbow resting on her knee, suggested a French insouciance. She had an edgy, petulant air that reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who. The loose wool jumper she was wearing had fallen off her shoulder, revealing a turquoise bra strap and a pale triangle of skin – a particularly sexy combination.

The food arrived and we sat down at the table. I was next to Louis, who in my opinion was Alice’s least attractive child – a large boy with a face full of acne. He was causing her a lot of trouble. The headmaster from his school had been on the phone a couple of times. Bullying issues. I wasn’t going to waste my time with him so I talked across the table to Tina, asking after the wool shop. ‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘Whole new shipment of alpaca delivered on Friday!’ She glanced at Andrew. ‘Big important stuff!’

It upsets me when women do that – put themselves down. Men like Andrew encourage it. I remembered his patronising laugh when he brought up ‘her little business’ in the bookshop.

‘I’m so impressed by anyone who sets up on their own like that,’ I said. ‘I hope you’re proud of her, Andrew?’

‘Of course,’ he said.

He began to dominate the meal. His father had dementia and had recently been admitted to a residential home. His mother, who had suffered health problems of her own, was not coping. It was terribly unfair. There had been a lot of tragedy in her life. Alice took Andrew’s hand and kept hold of it. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’

‘Horrid,’ I agreed.

Daisy was dipping her finger in the little plastic pot of mint raita, then dabbing the speckled yoghurt on to her tongue.

I realised then who she reminded me of.

‘Gosh, you look like Florrie,’ I said. She could have been Andrew’s sister right there in front of me.

She looked up, still licking her finger again. ‘People say that, yes.’

Everyone else had gone quiet. Had I been indelicate, interrupting Andrew?

‘Sorry,’ I said, and made a gesture for him to continue.

Alice looked at me and then back to him. ‘Perhaps your mother’d like to come out this summer?’ she said. ‘Yvonne and Karl are insisting on staying at the hotel, so we’ve got room. Would that do her good?’

Her tone was cool – it was obviously not a proper offer – but it did its job, from my point of view, by turning the conversation to Greece.

‘Do Yvonne and Karl come every year?’ I asked.

‘No. They came once or twice at the beginning. But this year it’s the tenth anniversary of Jasmine’s disappearance so they’re making a special trip.’

‘As a sort of pilgrimage?’

‘Kind of.’

She was looking at me, and I smiled back expectantly. ‘How nice,’ I said. I’d finished my plate of lamb saag and had polished off a couple of Beck’s. I leant back in my chair. This is my moment, I thought. She will invite me again – publicly. It was the logical conclusion to the evening. Maybe she had even asked the others over this evening for that reason. Whether I accepted, of course, was still up to me. But the offer, and all that it promised, was about to be laid open for my consideration.

‘This year,’ Phoebe said, ‘I’m getting a proper tan.’

‘If it’s our last time ever we must hire kayaks!’ Frank said.

‘Too right!’ Tina laughed.

‘Unless we have another invasion of the jellyfish,’ Phoebe added.

‘Oh gawd,’ Andrew yelped. ‘I’m not peeing on anyone’s sting no matter how much they beg me.’

‘I can’t wait for that delicious baklava they served last year at Giorgio’s,’ Tina said.

‘Nico’s,’ Alice said.

‘Was it?’

‘No, Giorgio’s,’ Andrew said. ‘You were too pissed to notice.’

They all laughed.

‘This year,’ someone said, ‘we must swim out to Serena’s rock.’ Whether this was the rock’s real name, or a reference to a funny story involving a person called Serena, I didn’t know because nobody filled me in. I sat there, like a lemon from the tree in the Pyros house garden, like a ‘saganaki prawn’ (Tina: ‘I can’t wait – washed down with a carafe of that delicious local rosé’).

‘It all sounds wonderful,’ I said, in the next lull.

Andrew looked at me, a smirk on his face. Alice laid her arm along the back of his chair.

‘Coffee?’ she said, after a few minutes.

‘How about you boys go to the park for a kickabout?’ Tina said then.

The boys pushed their chairs back and stood up.

Phoebe said loudly, her tone unreadable: ‘Paul – what about you? You fancy a kickabout?’

I was taken aback. What was she suggesting? That I was on a level with the teenage louts rather than the adults?

Alice said, ‘I’m not sure Paul is a kickabout kind of a man.’

Louis said: ‘He’s more of a layabout kind of a man.’

I noticed Andrew laugh. I had the ingenuity to leap up and lunge at Louis. ‘Ha ha, very funny,’ I said, getting his Neanderthal head in a head-lock, and jabbing at him, as if we were the greatest of friends, as if it were a tease between chums. He pulled away and, as he climbed the stairs, I saw him rub his lower arm. Dickhead.

I waited a few moments until I heard the front door close, and then I went upstairs to use the bathroom.

There was a bottle of wine on the table in the hall, which I felt like smashing, there, on the chequerboard Victorian tiles. Instead, I picked up a small package that sat next to it – a gift wrapped in tissue paper. It felt like a bar of soap. My tweed coat was hanging, among a lot of other coats, on a row of over-laden hooks and I slipped it into the inside pocket. I doubted Alice had even registered its arrival. I’d give it to my mother.