The Company of Strangers (36 page)

Greig leaned back in his chair. Andrea stretched herself out on the bed, propped her head up with a hand, sucked on her cigarette and tried to remember whether this was how seduction worked…if she ever knew.

‘You’re a dark horse,’ he said.

‘I’m dark,’ she said, flatly.

He laughed, uneasily, suddenly finding blood converging on parts of his body – neck, groin – finding swallowing and crossing his legs suddenly a problem.

Her mother had been wrong. Sex
had
been revolutionized over the last twenty years or maybe Rawly had been much more of an interesting partner than Luís. After their first kiss she’d reached to stub out her cigarette and Greig had told her to carry on smoking. He put his hands up her skirt and she felt his hands shake as he found her suspenders
and the bare skin above her stocking tops. He stripped down her knickers, roughly. He knelt before her, bent his head down between her thighs, cupped her buttocks with his rough hands and drew her to him.

He made love to her expertly. He was unembarrassed at making his demands and, continuing the tutor/pupil relationship, taught her things about men, like a tennis coach demonstrating grip. He asked her not to close her eyes in mock ecstasy but to keep them open, looking at him at all times, especially when she was kneeling in front of him. She ricocheted between embarrassment, lust and disgust. She was doing things within a matter of hours that Luís had probably never heard of and the discovery of this deep carnality in herself was disturbing, but oddly gratifying, too.

She fell asleep in the early morning and woke up alone, the morning so dark that she thought it was dawn when in fact it was close to eleven o’clock. She fingered her lips, which were sensitive, bruised. Her legs were as stiff as if she’d been out riding. In her gut she was both desolate and rampant. In her head she was ashamed and excited.

She had a bath and found herself rooting around for her best lingerie. She made herself up as she’d never done to go to the maths department and dressed in her new autumn clothes. He wasn’t in the department. Her postgrad colleagues stared at her from beneath their crackling nylon shirts, their drip-dry, ever-creased Crimplene trousers. She moved on to Trinity and bumped into him coming out of the porter’s lodge. He had his face turned back and he was holding his hand out.

‘Come
on
, Martha,’ he said. ‘For heaven’s sake.’

A woman, dazzlingly kempt, with styled blonde and lustrous hair, and a floor-length brown coat with a French silk scarf around her neck, took Greig’s hand. Andrea stepped back, preparing to run. Greig turned, saw her.

‘Anne,’ he said.

‘Andrea,’ she replied.

‘You’re so awful with names,’ said Martha, whose American accent grabbed the adjective and made of it innards on a butcher’s floor.

Greig introduced his wife, asked Andrea to drop by his rooms at tea time. He pressed the automatic release on his umbrella, which burst open like a giant bat, and they headed out into the rain.

It had happened as quick as murder and the change was no less devastating. Andrea watched his broad back heading into town, Martha’s narrow shoulders leaning into him. Desolation, bleak as the rain-slivered wind off the Fens, sliced into her.

She went home and thumped into the bed in her damp coat. The earlier emptiness had now been replaced by a full roll of barbed wire jealousy. Why anybody thought it was green, she couldn’t fathom. Jealousy was a multiedged blade and whichever way it turned it cut you.

By tea time she was exhausted and the walk back to Trinity in the rain was the trudge of a soldier making his way back to the front but, and she couldn’t fail to notice this, she was going back. It was that inevitable. Choice was not in it.

Greig took the coat from her antagonistic shoulders, hung it up and showed her the leather sofa.

‘I could see you were surprised by Martha,’ he said softly. ‘I thought João would have told you that much, but then it’s not a natural way for his mind to think. Must have been a terrible shock. I’m sorry.’

She had nothing to say. All the savagely planned words suddenly seemed amateur, naïve.

‘I hope you don’t think that last night meant nothing,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t just a one-off.’

Hope surged to absurd heights. What was she? Twenty
again? Not one inch of emotional progress since girlhood.

‘You’re a beautiful woman. Extraordinarily gifted. Mysterious…’

‘And your
wife
?’ she asked, the word hacking through the air, serrated edge.

‘Yes,’ he said, simply – no excuses, no apologies, no denials.

She had questions stacked up inside her like punch cards for a computer programme but they were all binary banal and some of them, if asked, might have answers she didn’t want to hear. What am I to you? A comfortable lay. A convenient screw. A charitable poke. That last one hurt because she knew how needy she was.

Greig sat next to her on the sofa, took her hand as if she was a patient. Where
did
he get those rough hands from? Nobody got hands like that from chalking equations on a board. His words leaked into her head like myrrh – exotic, nearly meaningless, except her insides quivered at them.

‘The first time I met you I knew you were going to be important to me. I didn’t intend to stay last night with you, but I just thought we’d suddenly connected and I couldn’t resist that connection. The chance of knowing you, of getting closer to you. The way you smoked that cigarette, stretched across the bed…I was yours.’

As he spoke his hand came to rest on her knee. She knew, she saw what he was doing and did nothing about it, because she wanted this to happen. The coarse skin of his hand snagged on the nylon stocking as he pushed it up between her legs, over the stocking top, the soft skin on the inside of her thigh, until he brushed a hard finger over the outline of her sex beneath her best silk. The carnal jolt rushed up her spine, but something older, atavistic, recoiled. She stood and lashed her hand across his face.
The slap fizzed on her palm. His face reddened. She slammed the door as she left.

Hours later she was back looking for him in the quad. No lights on in his room. She found his address from the porter’s lodge and stood outside his house on the other side of the street, still wearing the same clothes, her make-up repaired. At 11.30 p.m. a light came on upstairs and Martha appeared in a bay window to close the curtains. Another light came on in the hall. The front door opened and Louis came out with a short-haired dachshund on a lead. She crossed the street, came at him between two parked cars and startled him as surely as if she’d had a knife.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, partly for startling him, partly for the slap.

‘I probably deserved it,’ he replied, and continued on his way.

‘You were taking advantage of me,’ she said, catching up with him.

‘I was,’ he said. ‘I admit it, but I couldn’t help it.’

The dog trotted between them, doggedly disinterested in human drama.

‘Do you have any idea what this is like for me?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been married for twenty-four years. You’re only the second man I’ve known.’

The lie so smooth she even believed it herself. It stopped him in his tracks. The dog continued, yanked the lead tight, walked back huffily, looked at their feet.

‘How am I supposed to know these things?’ he asked. ‘You don’t tell me anything about yourself. And from my side, well, I sensed something. I was attracted to you. I did what any man would do. I went for you. It has nothing to do with my past, my marriage, your past or your previous marriage. It was just the moment.’

‘And this afternoon?’

‘I couldn’t help myself. I find you irresistibly sexy.’

‘Your wife,’ she said, the word cutting her at the back of the throat, ‘she looks…she seems very…’

‘If I want strength, pragmatism, and efficiency, she’s my girl. You have to understand, Andrea, Martha runs our lives, hers and mine, as a controlled experiment. My career, my work – what’s that geared to? To achieving pinnacles of logic, zeniths of rationale. That’s a mathematician’s lot. Somewhere along the road I need passion, mystery, humour, for God’s sake.’

They carried on walking. The dog leading, jaunty now that they were on the move again. They came on to an open expanse, a football pitch, and he let the dog off the lead.

‘I thought you were walking into this with your eyes open,’ he said.

‘I was, but not with full information.’

The wind buffeted them. His mac flapped open. Her hair streaked across her mouth and nose as if she were under the veil. He peeled her hair back, pushed his hand round the back of her neck and pulled her to his face. They kissed as they had done the night before. She pushed her hand into his jacket and up his shirted back. The dog reappeared, circled, snorted and tore off again.

The ground rules laid out, they started their affair. In that first term, the longest they ever spent together was after Sunday dinner when Martha, who was bored by the Senior Common Room, had an early night and Louis, instead of passing round the port, cycled to Andrea’s flat and stayed there until 2.00 a.m. He also had a brass bed in his rooms in Trinity and they would occasionally take a tutorial in there. On spring afternoons they would go to his allotment, he was a gardener (those rough hands were from digging and planting), and she would read her paper to him while he worked and afterwards they’d lie down on the rough
wooden floor of the shed amongst the forks and spades. Some evenings, if she became desperate, she would wait for him to walk the dog and join him on black, blustery nights. The dog would run off and they’d manage as best they could on a park bench, Louis looking around wildly as car headlights skirted the common.

The next term, when it was too cold to sustain anything in the frost-hardened air, they would slip into the back of his car, which he took to parking down the street from his house. They would trap the dog lead in the door and she’d end up with her face pressed against the quarterlight of a window, her breath fogging the glass, the dog outside looking up at her, questioning.

She couldn’t believe what was happening, what she was doing. He would ask her to do things. Things like role-playing, which at first thought seemed absurd and, in practice, faintly disgusting but then she found herself doing them and as she did them more they would become less repellent, until they didn’t seem revolting but were stimulating and then almost normal.

When he left her, as he did all summer to go to the States to idle on the beach with Martha and her family in Cape Cod, she stayed in Cambridge, researching to forget him. She lay awake at night, at first trying to work out what it was all about without ever being able to define her nebulous need for him and then realizing that she knew all along. With her mother, son and husband gone she felt unmoored, empty. Louis, her mentor and teacher, tethered her, filled her up. But the realization made no difference to her state and she saw that although this was what she expected of Louis, it never quite happened and yet it could…it could.

She had thought, at first, that Martha was the only barrier to her future happiness until it had occurred to her that Martha’s presence was a part of the intensity. She and
Louis were both hooked on the subterfuge – the secret meetings, the late-night assignations, the sense of the forbidden.

Memories of another age, another secret love leaked into her head to confuse the present.

During the next academic year Louis sensed a change in her, a change he did not like. She appeared confident. Louis responded by becoming slapdash about his other liaisons. Andrea would arrive just as another girl left, reapplying her lipstick. She found an earring in his room, a tiny pair of knickers, a used condom. Andrea never mentioned any of these finds. He had already become hostile and she didn’t want to antagonize him further. That next summer he left for Cape Cod without saying goodbye.

She became prone to spontaneous bursts of crying which stopped as abruptly as they started. When the library shut for that summer she couldn’t bear to go off on her own for a lonely holiday near families and lovers. Even when Jim Wallis invited her down to his cottage in the south of France, she couldn’t face being with him and his not-so-new wife.

She stayed in Cambridge and counted the days to the beginning of term like a child with an advent calendar. As her loneliness crowded around her in her first-floor flat and the usual haunts of the undergrads fell silent, she sought out other pubs with life and noise, pubs whose regulars were labourers and builders, people who actually ordered pickled eggs from the jars behind the bar and ate them. She woke up in the mornings feeling as if she’d drunk everything including the wringings from the beer mats. She shuddered and squeezed the pillow to her face in a pathetic attempt to block out the creature she’d become.

Louis turned up late, three weeks into term. She was
happy even when he trashed her summer’s work, even when she could smell another woman on him.

As the Christmas break of 1970 approached she didn’t know what to do with herself. She saw no way out. She was disgusted by her own weakness – announcing to herself every morning that this was the last time, that she was going to abandon the project, go back to London. Then she would methodically get dressed in her best clothes and go and visit the man who had made her into this.

Waking at four in the morning she would force herself to think of the good things from her life. She couldn’t touch on Julião because her failure there was still too painful, but she went back to those last days with her mother and found things to sustain her. Her father’s nobility. Her mother’s honesty. Her own feelings of love for the woman she’d despised so much. She replayed conversations, thought about Rawly and his wine. His wife. And Audrey telling her that she only deserved the three-quarters man that Rawly was. Had the same happened to her? Was Louis all that she deserved, all that she wanted?

At the end of November she went to his rooms in Trinity, as usual, like the programmed toy she’d become. He barked at her from the door to go straight to the bedroom. He’d begun to enjoy command. She’d just undressed with Louis standing in the doorway, when they both heard Martha’s voice at the bottom of the stairs. Martha never came to his rooms. It was an unspoken agreement. He shut Andrea in the bedroom. Martha came into his rooms without knocking. Her New England voice cracked like a whip. They were continuing a row they’d had the night before about going to New England for Christmas, rather than up to Louis’s father in Scotland. Andrea, paralysed, sat naked on the bed and stared at the door. She thought she was praying for it not to open, but realized that this was just some superficial horror of social embarrassment, that in
fact she
wanted
Martha to open the door. It would do something. It would move her situation one way or another.