A Certain Chemistry (23 page)

Sara continued to grin at me.

Trying impossibly hard to imbue my voice with no kind of inflection whatsoever, I looked at her and said, “What?”

“Your
girlfriend,
” laughed Sara. I’d clearly been sucked into some surreal, David Lynch dream sequence. Something—possibly my head—was sure to burst into flames in slow motion any moment now.

I pressed on.

“What?”

“Your girlfriend’s been at it in the back of a taxi with some bloke—and on the way to her hotel together, apparently. I wonder what Darren Boyle will say when he finds out.”

“Yes,” I replied. Then, “Um, how did
you
find out?”

“It’s in the paper.” She nodded across at something beyond my field of view.

Walking a bit like the Tin Man still waiting for the oil to fully work, I moved forward into the kitchen. The local paper was there, and on the front page—though not the main headline (which was just about the economy collapsing or something)—was “Nye-t on the Town!” Which, I like to think, I’d have found offensively appalling on a professional level even if I’d been a disinterested reader. Whether the cab driver had gone directly to the paper or whether the story had traveled a little through his fellow drivers first, it was clear that he was the ultimate source. (I bet George had already seen this before the book signing—no wonder she was so anxious to remain formal.) The story contained everything we’ve come, depressingly, to accept as news. It was just the headline and a couple of sentences on the front page before a
“continued on page 7.”
And even there it continued for only another fifty or so words because it was, of course, a fundamentally trivial event. Nevertheless, they managed to cram every piece of journalistic tiresomeness into the small space available. We had a good selection of those words that are kept from becoming outright archaisms thanks solely to their incessant use by the press:
canoodling,
for example, and
beau.
In addition to being her
beau,
I had extra aesthetic misfortune heaped upon me by also being a “mystery man.”

I read through the piece. Several times, in fact—each time expecting to discover a tiny, throwaway detail that revealed my identity. The kind of thing everyone overlooks until Poirot says, “But,
of course
. . .” just before the dénouement.

“Do you know who he was?” asked Sara.

“It wasn’t me,” I replied, instantly. Like a twat, instantly.

Sara huffed with laughter and glanced up from where she was slicing tomatoes, grapes, and onions and dropping the pieces into a bowl of strawberry-flavored Angel Delight. “You don’t say? Georgina Nye whisking you off to her hotel room? Yeah—
you wish
.” She popped half a grape into her mouth. “I just thought you might have seen who she left with.”

“No. I didn’t notice. I stayed there at the party—as you know—and George left. I was so far away from her when she left I didn’t even see her leave, let alone see who was with her. It wasn’t until hours afterwards when someone said, ‘Where’s George?’ and someone else replied, ‘She’s gone’ that I knew she wasn’t there anymore, in fact. I imagine she left with someone very famous, though.”

“Why?”

“Well . . . because George is famous. Celebrities always have sex with other celebrities, don’t they?”

“Special celebrity sex, I bet.” Sara laughed. “This really well-choreographed, nonsquelchy sex that’s lots better and sexier and loads more photogenic than the sex we have.”

That sent a shudder through me. “Better than the sex we have.” The sex had been pyrotechnically fabulous with George, but it wasn’t better than the sex Sara and I had. Or was it? And it didn’t matter anyway—this wasn’t simply about sex. But—even looked at purely in sex terms—then the sex I had with Sara was great. Really lovely. It was a different kind of sex, perhaps, but still quality sex, no doubt about it. I’d be terribly hurt if I thought that Sara thought that I was having better sex with George than I had with her. Hmm . . . what I really needed here was to
Stop Thinking
.

“Why don’t you pick out the carpet you want?” I said. “We can afford to buy it now.”

Sara waggled her head and then looked at me. “Whoa—from sex to carpets. What worries me is that I
can
see your train of thought there.”

“I was just thinking that I’m getting the book money, and you wanted the carpet, and I love you, and, well—”

“No, no, I wasn’t criticizing. Christ—you express your love for me in carpet form just
any time you fancy
.” She leaned towards me and gave me a quick kiss on the lips. “Phew—you smell of smoke.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s this jacket. It needs airing after last night. It
reeks
.” I fingered it and grimaced.

God, I could do with a cigarette.

I spent the whole of the rest of the day repeatedly checking that my phone was working. George had said she’d call, and I was so hyper with expectation, longing, and frustration waiting for her to ring that you’d have thought I was trying to get my own syndrome. I couldn’t sit down, or watch television, or read, or concentrate on anything. I drifted off halfway through whatever Sara was saying, and every single thing in the world—presumably owing to the simple fact of it not being George calling me—was unbearably irritating. Only yesterday I’d started smoking again; right now I really could have done with hitting the town and scoring some Ritalin. Except that was probably being optimistic. Attention deficit disorder
and
obsessive compulsion? I was bringing together two disparate dementias. Yeah, check me out—very experimental, very crossover.

Sara couldn’t fail to notice that I was agitated and prickly. I told her it was just because I was overtired, and I kept apologizing. When we went to bed, it was obvious I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, so I had sex with Sara in the hope that it might help. That sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? Cold-bloodedly having sex with your girlfriend, just so you can siphon off some of the tension that’s there because you’re thinking about another woman. Well, it wasn’t as black-and-white as that. I got some pleasure from the sex with Sara as well. Hmm . . . that sounds even more dreadful, doesn’t it?

Okay, listen, I’ll tell you something: even though I might have started it just to help me sleep, and even though I was getting enjoyment from Sara while deceiving her, I tried the best I could to give her simply excellent sex. Really. I thought I owed it to her. I was having this extra sex, so I owed it to her to make sure the sex she had was perfect. No thought of myself. My only purpose was to serve her. If need be, I was going to be there for her until my jaw locked. Making sure she had great sex was my duty, a penance I gladly performed. Ahhh . . . now
that
sounds like just about the most dreadful perspective of all.

I should have stuck to talking about giving myself a wank—that way I’d have retained your respect.

What you have to remember is that
I
was the victim here. I don’t think you could say I was having an “affair”—it was just the one incident. That’s not an “affair,” is it? That’s what you call a “slip.” Okay, I’ll admit, I was, um, less than resolute that it would end with that single night, but that’s all there’d been so far. You can’t go all hysterical and over the top and start giving labels to things simply on the basis of what they
might become,
can you? That’s unfair. But anyway, even if we call it an “affair,” purely for rhetorical purposes, it wasn’t an affair like other people have. For one thing, I’d simply been caught up in events—and unlikely events at that. If George’s agent hadn’t decided it would be good to do a book, if they’d gone with another publisher where Hugh wasn’t in place to suggest me, if I’d missed our meeting that first day (as I very nearly did), et cetera, et cetera—forwards and backwards. An almost incalculable number of ifs
all
needed to have been linked in a chain to allow this to happen: for a nobody from Kent to end up with a woman from East Ayrshire who was now probably the biggest celebrity in the U.K. This wasn’t: bloke, married, has affair with his secretary. This was almost as if Fate had forced me into the situation against my will, because it was
destined
to happen. And I felt completely different from how I’m sure other people feel when they have affairs.
I
was suffering horribly. Suffering while everyone else was fine too. George certainly had nothing to feel miffed about. She’d made the first move, and if I’d seemed to encourage her at all, it was unintentional. I hadn’t lied either before or after the fact. She knew I was with Sara—I’d talked about her a lot. In fact, if anything, George had been keen to hear about Sara and me, and our relationship. And I hadn’t said I was going to leave Sara, or that I was unhappy or any of that stuff. What’s more,
she
didn’t have to worry about being discovered as I did. She didn’t have a relationship to lose, nor did she have to keep herself alert and be constantly wary of slipups. No, George had been dealt a good hand. As for Sara, well, yes, I was being unfaithful to her. But
she
didn’t know that.
I
was the one who had to endure life under the weight of that knowledge;
I
was the one who felt guilty. If anything, things were better for Sara because I was trying hard to make sure they were. So, you tell me: who was getting the worst deal out of all this? And yet I was keeping it all to myself, living with the turmoil inside, unable even to share my burden. My philanthropy was going completely unrecognized. Good God—people had been sainted for less. I was practically a modern-day Sydney Carton. Here I am suffering silently to maintain the happiness of others, and all you can do is despise me for ensuring that my girlfriend has wave after face-crushing wave of orgasms; you ought to be bloody ashamed of yourself.

Anyway, as I was saying, George didn’t call. Nor did she call on Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon snailed by—and you know how Sunday afternoon drags even under normal circumstances—and my phone stayed silent. Except for the half-dozen times I called myself from our land line, just to make sure there wasn’t a technical fault. Sara accidentally made the whole experience all the more harrowing by watching the omnibus edition of
The Firth
on TV. It was having George rubbed into my face in entirely the wrong sense. I sat beside Sara on the sofa while the landfill of Sunday-afternoon TV gently gave way to Sunday-evening TV’s stumbling confusion; I was dead and letting it bury me. One of the evening’s succession of atrabilious detectives adapted for television from a series of novels was moaning about something or other to his subordinates when, at last, my mobile trilled for attention. I whipped it up to my ear with fumbling speed. (This might have looked suspicious had someone else done it, but Sara was used to me doing that all the time anyway, of course.)

“Hello? Tom?” It was George. She sounded naked.

“Oh—hi,” I replied, casually. I rose and walked towards the door. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said. She was marking time; I could tell she didn’t want to say anything that wasn’t completely bland until I gave her some sort of clue that it was okay to talk.

“Good.”

“You?”

“Oh, you know . . .” I was out in the hallway now but still didn’t feel completely safe. “Fine. Just watching a bit of telly.” I mounted the stairs and went into the bathroom. “Some detective show is on.”

“Right. If you’re watching it—”

“No, no, no. I’m not watching.” I sat down on the toilet. “It’s just on . . .” My voice became whispery. “I’ve missed you.”

“Have you?”

“
Christ,
yes.” I realized my sitting there might look odd if Sara came up. “Hold on, let me take my trousers down . . .”

“That’s okay—you’ve missed me, I believe you.”

“Ha. No—I’m hiding in the bathroom. I just want to make it look convincing.” Trousers now vouchingly round my ankles, I sat down on the lavatory.

“It’s a romantic picture you’re painting.”

“Sorry. I . . . oh, bugger.” (If anyone’s devised a workable solution to the problem of sitting on the toilet with an erection, I wonder if they’d be good enough to send me a schematic.)

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I just noticed we’re out of conditioner.”

“Have you seen the papers?”

“Yeah. Tossers.”

“Scared me to death. Can you imagine what the press would do to me, what with the book just out and my banging a feminist drum? They’d make it a whole ‘betraying a sister’ issue. Not to mention that they’d have a good time talking about you and how much of the book was really my work.”

“And there’s Sara too.”

“Hmm? Oh, yes—exactly. It’d be awful for both of us.”

“So . . .” I picked at the toilet roll. “Are you saying you want to stop?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Is it what
you
want?”

“If it’s what
you
want.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to stop. I just asked if you did.”

“So, what do you want?”

“I want what you want.”

“Well,” said George, “I don’t want to stop, but if you want to—”

“Jesus, no!
I
don’t want to stop.”

“Really?”

“I couldn’t bear it.” I was sweating. I didn’t tell George this. It might convey how intense my feelings were, but it was a less than ravishing concept. Let her just keep the image of me sitting, unsweaty, on the toilet. “I want to see you again as soon as possible. Sooner than possible. I want to see you impossibly soon.”

She giggled.
Giggled
. How can you hear even the fading echoes of your reason over a noise like that?

“I’ve got to go to Glasgow tomorrow,” she said.

“I’ll sneak over.”

“No, I’ll be tied up all day.”

“Even better,” I purred. (Christ—I can
purr;
where’d that come from?)

“Oh,
don’t
. No, really, I have to do a couple of things at the studio. They’d arranged it so I had time off from filming to promote the book, but I need to go back and do a few loops. Then I’ve got another signing, two radio slots, and a pile of interviews. I don’t have a second free. But on Tuesday we’re getting together at the publisher’s for a meeting. Kind of a launch postmortem.”