What She Left: Enhanced Edition (17 page)

I’ve really gone and done it this time, Mum. You hear about stuff like this and I prided myself I’d never let it happen to me, but now I have and how could I be so stupid?

 

‘What do you make of our little gathering?’ he’d enquired, as we’d stood around in huddles forcing conversation. ‘We host this soiree on the same day every year; it’s quite a tradition.’

 

‘I’d hate to see you lot when you’re
not
having fun,’ I said, wine recklessness buoying me.

 

‘I knew your mother,’ he said.

 

‘Lucky you,’ I replied. The awareness swam past me. I was on my fourth glass.

 

‘Your mother, how
is
she?’

 

What am I going to do? My memories are shattered … box files, a lamp with frilly tassels, him insisting I called him Jeremy rather than Professor Cooke, classical music. ‘Chin-chin,’ he’d said. ‘Bottoms up.’ I’m not even sure what I’m alleging. They’d assume I had a crush on him, like a few of the other students. He’s famous. Should I confide in another lecturer? Or Megan? I took care of her, he’d probably claim. She rather over-indulged. Another fresher who partook of a surfeit of booze. Silly girl.

 

Why am I even blaming myself? It’s him who shouldn’t have let the situation arise. But if I speak out, where will it end? What if I have to drop out of uni? They’d ask me questions and I won’t have the replies: a stupid slapper who can’t take her alcohol and who never learns. All that remains is his onion breath, his cracked laugh, starchy shirt, dry tanned skin, reptilian.

 

‘Look at me,’ he’d said. ‘Focus.’

 

And I’d hung on to him as the world swam. I’m scared, Mum.

 

I shouldn’t have even
been
there. Keep the old duffer sweet, I’d decided when he’d proposed I join them for drinks, because a
couple of his ex-students had ended up on the nationals and contacts like that are invaluable. He’d paraded me in front of a load of old crusties. ‘Remember this one’s name,’ he’d said. ‘She’ll be famous one day.’

 

I’d prayed the ground would open up and swallow me.

 

‘She’s planning a career in the media.’

 

‘Haven’t definitely made my mind up.’

 

‘A case of –’ and he paused pretentiously – ‘ “not knowing what you’ll be but knowing yourself as you are”. Shakespeare,’ he added smugly.

 

‘I do know!
Hamlet
. And you got it wrong. It’s “we know who we are, but not what we may be”.’

 

‘Touché,’ he said. ‘Chip off the old block, you are.’

 

The waitresses kept topping up my glass, and the cloying sense of apprehension that typically seized me in situations like that evaporated. It was like slipping out of a pair of heels at the end of the night.

 

‘What is it they say?’ I’d heard one of his colleagues snigger. ‘An A for a lay.’

 

Why didn’t I go to the union, Mum? Would have been safe there. I’d have stuck to lager, played pool, hung out with Meg and Holly and Jamie T. We’d have gone back to halls, had coffee, the lads carelessly tossing a rugby ball around, Usher or Kanye West coming from Doncaster Will’s room.

 

His office was a cross between a study and a bedroom. ‘The outside world’s a dangerous place when you’re this drunk,’ he said. ‘But it’s safe in here.’

 

Him, helping me out of my skirt. ‘Your hair’s like your mother’s,’ he’d said.

 

The room was spinning, a sick feeling. ‘Rest now, little one,’ he’d said.

 

A blanket over me, get it off, too hot, can’t breathe, suffocating, get it
off
me … I’m so ashamed, but it’s him who should be: him, him, HIM. ‘Sleep tight,’ he’d said, ‘don’t let the bedbugs bite.’

 

Then waking on a sofa, my hand in his. ‘You were having nightmares,’ he’d said gently. ‘You were shouting in your sleep.’

 

‘Get away from me,’ I said, springing up.

 

Outside, normal sounds – the beep of a delivery lorry reversing, two lads play-fighting, a girl laughing. The previous few hours … shadows, shapes, fitful sleep, him helping me sip water, like you used to with medicine when I was small, informing me that I’d caused quite a stir at the reception but he wouldn’t hold it against me, though I ought to be careful, not everyone was like him, girls in that condition ‘ended up in all manner of unpalatable predicaments’.

 

I didn’t have my top on, my skirt was in a rumpled pile on the floor. I felt sick, pushed him away, pulled my clothes on and ran.

 

You always said I could always confide in you, Mum, but I can’t send this …

Larry,

I can’t get Alice and Liz out of my head. I even dreamed of them last night. Woke up and Fliss asked if I was OK;
I’d been muttering in my sleep. I didn’t tell her I’d been consumed by a vision of Liz’s hair, that long lustrous sweep. ‘It’s like a mane,’ I distinctly recall saying to her one afternoon.

‘Thanks very much,’ she laughed, ‘for comparing me to a horse.’

We were on the bed in a cheap hotel beside the A36. Despite our disrobed state, there was no embarrassment or shame; that habitually came later. Margaret Thatcher’s voice was coming out of a small black-and-white TV in the corner. The Falklands. 1982. Fliss battered into my brain, but I pushed her back out, stroked Liz’s face. ‘You make me feel incredible,’ I said to this woman who wasn’t the one I’d married six years earlier, this latest addition to the teaching staff who I’d first seen waltzing across the quad – she didn’t walk, she waltzed as if she was moving to music – a couple of months before. She smiled; her teeth stained from the not very good red. It occurred to me that this was the me I could have been: the type of man who pays cash for hotel rooms in the afternoons.
I
am
that person
, I thought. ‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ I said.

‘Me neither,’ she replied.

Larry, it’s like a confessional, sharing this with you all over again. I was seeing myself anew: I wasn’t deconstructing someone else’s behaviour or picking over the bones of someone else’s existence, I was living for the moment, in the present, not some era thousands of years ago. I touched her black hair, each strand a package of DNA.
Forget DNA
, I thought stroking it, this is her,
this
is Liz. It felt like everything was changing: politics, rules, society. Maybe this shrill grocer’s daughter was right: anything
was
possible.

‘Aren’t we the odd couple?’ she asked playfully. ‘Well, my darling artefact?’ She never tired of teasing me about how I was nearly eleven years her senior.

I reached out and she made a little noise and it brought to mind a sound Fliss made.

Stop thinking
, I thought,
Stop damn well
thinking.

‘Do you never get scared?’ she asked afterwards – Liz did.

‘I’m rarely anything else,’ I replied. There were lots of obtuse questions and cryptic answers, but that was the second occasion she’d asked me that particular one. It had come up the previous night as well as we’d dressed for dinner.

She lit a cigarette, enquired if I’d like one and it gave me a rush of gloom: that she didn’t know whether I smoked. She could have been being ironic, I suppose. ‘I’m trying to quit,’ she said, exhaling a thin trail of smoke.

You simply have
no idea
that I don’t smoke
, I’d thought.
You have no idea that I don’t smoke, any more than you have no idea that I’d like to establish an orchid greenhouse or can’t abide over-hot climates
– the fortnight Fliss and I had in Leukaspis was purgatory –
or, for that matter, that I was mildly allergic to shellfish
. We lay on the bed and I checked my watch: Fliss and I were attending a faculty function that evening.

‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘Do you never wake up petrified?’

‘Of what?’

‘Of where you might end up?’

Pale sunlight filtered through the drawn curtains. ‘I’ll probably end up in the same office I am now, just arthritic and curmudgeonly.’

Men hit a point, my PhD tutor once told me with what at the time even
I
considered to be near crushing pessimism, when all they can do is try to fuck their way out of it. It won’t work, he informed me, but you’ll try all the same. Is that what I was attempting to do with Liz? I didn’t know if I was going to leave Fliss; if I
could
leave her. Hard to believe now for such a premeditated man that I didn’t have
a plan. All I had was fear: fear that this could be my last chance to get whatever it was that was beyond my imagination. I’d whistled past eighteen and twenty-one and thirty, oblivious to those milestones, preoccupied with my scientific ambitions, but by then I’d have been rapidly approaching thirty-five and the landmark chafed at my consciousness. Halfway to my threescore and ten. Fear of another complexion, too. What if this was just the start, if there’d be more Elizabeths? I’d hoped she’d pick up on my answer, say: Curmudgeonly, don’t you mean
more
curmudgeonly? Because then we’d laugh and that would draw an end to that particular, pernicious conversational thread. But instead she watched the cold flickering and faraway images of dead Argentinians laid out in a line in a hole in the ground and asked: ‘Do you think we’re fated to be together? Destined to keep coming back to each other, whoever we end up with? That happens.’ When I failed to respond, she said: ‘At least I
know
I don’t know my own mind. You’re one of the cleverest men I’ve ever met, but somehow you’re one of the most … hopeless.’

‘I’m not convinced I’m suited to polygamy,’ I replied obtusely.

‘There’s such a thing as polyandry, too.’

This felt like safer ground. ‘Indeed,’ I replied. ‘Masai women, among many others, practise it – a perfectly logical adaptation to high mortality rates among infants and warriors.’

‘You can’t blame the women for keeping their options open,’ she said, the half-smile on her face disappearing, ‘if their men are as rubbish as ours.’

It occurred to me this conversation wasn’t theoretical at all: it was about us.

I wondered if having sex again would help. Earlier, it had
dawned on me it was like the law of diminishing marginal returns: sleeping with someone other than one’s wife wasn’t
as
bad after you’d already done it once.
Even now
, I’d thought, naked with a near stranger in a hotel,
I can’t
not
be me
: dull, pedantic, academic.

A child began crying in another room and we sat. I knew, even then, that in the months and years to come I’d tell myself that we’d both been adults, that no one had forced her to do this, any of it, that it took two to tango. It was a central tenet of one of my first-year lectures: individual accountability. Along the corridor that child’s cry reached a crescendo and then stopped. ‘I wonder if that’s a little boy or a little girl,’ I said, but she wasn’t listening.
I’ve changed you
, I thought. Whatever you might have been when you first waltzed across the quad, now you’re a woman who fucks a married man in a hotel room then puts the same underwear back on and checks out, just as I’d made my wife someone who left me food in the warming oven of the Aga and didn’t probe too closely when I was ‘away with work’ – as she’d been under the impression I had been more frequently this summer.

Liz stretched across me to grab the wine glass on the bedside cabinet, downed the contents, then took up the unburnt inch of her cigarette and sucked on it. A plume of ash fell on my leg. ‘For God’s sake, Elizabeth,’ I snapped. ‘Be careful.’

‘Yes, we’d hate anyone to get hurt here, wouldn’t we?’ She laughed: hurt, hollow, the genesis of hate. ‘Don’t
you
want children one day?’