A Certain Chemistry (32 page)

“Hi, Tom,” sighed Hugh. “Hello, Sara. You look nice.”

“Thanks.”

“Mary’s here somewhere . . .” He looked briefly around the room but couldn’t find her. “Well, I’m sure you’ll run into her at some point. She’s off having a good time, I don’t doubt. It’s very entertaining for her, of course, but I swear that the more of these things I come to the more I hate them. There’s no art, no creativity—that’s all over with by the time we get to these parties. All they are, basically, is the media crawling over the dead flesh seeing what it can devour—like twisting worms eating our corpse. . . . There’s a table of finger food over there, by the way, if you fancy anything.”

“Maybe later,” I said. “Is Amy here yet?” I asked, keen to get close to an ally and also knowing that asking for Amy was a less desperate-sounding but equally effective way of saying, “Where’s the booze?”

“Yes,” Sara added (pointlessly, I couldn’t help thinking), “is she?”

Hugh peered around the room again. “I
have
seen her . . . Not sure where she is now, though . . . The wine’s over in the far corner there.”

“Right, I’ll head in that direction, then.”

Sara and I moved off, leaving Hugh staring down into his glass, where he appeared to be able to see the entire cold hopelessness of existence laid out before him.

The room was elegant—dignified, Edwardian, and illuminated by a soft, warm light that was just dim enough to evoke a feeling of intimacy. The columns that fell from the arches in the ceiling broke up the space and added to this impression, so that it seemed to be a cozy affair, despite the room actually being large enough to hold perhaps two hundred people without being remotely overcrowded. Guests were milling around or chatting in huddles of twos, threes, and fours, and I threaded through them with Sara at my shoulder, a pace behind.

“Look,” she said suddenly, though not very enthusiastically.

I turned around to her and then away again in the direction she’d indicated with a quick nod. I couldn’t see Amy or George.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s Paddy Adams.”

I turned back and, now that I knew who I was looking for, saw him. He was chatting to (actually “up,” I guessed) a woman of an age, attractiveness, and casual-dress combination that strongly suggested she was a TV researcher. I could see that he was trying very hard. The fool. The woman was doing things to the stem of her wineglass. She kept pushing stray strands of hair back behind her ears with slow, vastly exaggerated finesse and leaning in closer to him so, fascinated, she could try to hear again a sentence she hadn’t quite caught the first time. When she said something to him, her words were spoken in tandem with her fingers reaching out to emphasize her point by touching the back of his hand. The poor woman must have been in absolute despair about whether she’d actually need to get down on all fours and expose her bottom to him before he got the message. “You’ve done enough—for Christ’s sake, call a cab,” her eyes shouted at him, but he kept on determinedly chatting her up when she was already as far up as she could possibly get.

I turned back to Sara. “Yes,” I said, “it is.”

“Aren’t you going to say hello?”

“Say hello? I don’t know him.”

Sara looked at me without replying. I knew pretty quickly that she was saying something by not saying anything, but I wasn’t quite sure what that thing might be. I had a little think.

Ah, yes, there it was. Fuck.

“I mean, I don’t
know
him. We exchanged a few words at the party after the Benny Barker show” (which, of course, had happened and I’d attended and had stayed at all night and which had occurred precisely as I’ve told you, Sara, and had not remotely been simply a cover for the time I’d spent in George’s hotel room being pornographically and repeatedly unfaithful to you), “but I wouldn’t say I
know
him.”

“Right,” said Sara, nodding: nodding slowly, and keeping my eyes fixed directly in the center of her gaze as she did so.

Oh, crap. Had I remembered right away that I’d said I’d met Paddy Adams, I could have brushed this aside. Casually muttered that we’d best not interrupt him while he was so clearly on the pull or something. Now it looked like I was trying to keep Sara away from him. The mood she was in at the moment, she was probably thinking that I was sleeping with him too.

“Okay, okay,” I blustered. “Let’s go and say hello, then.”

I strode heavily over to where Paddy Adams was standing. Sara followed behind—far too close for her not to pick it up were I to, say, stab Paddy Adams in the neck with a pencil before he had a chance to utter a word. That meant I had to fall back on Plan B. Adams must meet hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in his line of work. The barrage of faces was probably especially acute at the moment, what with his successful show at the festival. Even though he was Irish, I’d have to take the chance that he’d be too English to go anywhere near the awkwardness of revealing that he didn’t have a clue who I was, particularly if I raised the embarrassment stakes by implying that we were great,
great
mates.

“Paddy!” My hand was on his shoulder, a knowing grin on my face. “You old tosser—how are you?”

“Fine,” he replied, while his expression wobbled on a rickety bridge between “Good to see you” and “Christ!”

“You
look
fine, you really do,” I said.

“I am,” he confirmed.

The young woman with him seemed unaccountably irritated by my oafish interruption. “Who . . .” she began, looking at Adams. I leapt in before she could get any farther.

“Hi!” I shook her hand. (We didn’t “shake hands”: I merely took her hand in mine, and shook it.) “I’m Tom.” She inclined her head, and her lips parted to let out what I suspected might be a “Tom who? How do you know Paddy?” or “Paddy, who is this?” or “Let go of my hand, you fuckwit.” She was still drawing in a preparatory breath, so I cut her off. “Oh, Paddy—this is my girlfriend, Sara.”

Sara nodded.

Adams nodded back.

“I think you’re very funny,” Sara said with a smile.

Adams’s face softened into a boyish grin. Clearly he didn’t care who the hell you were so long as you were an attractive young woman and you were saying you thought he was funny. “Thanks,” he said. Sara smiled even more.
That
was quite enough of that, thank you very much. Sara,
my girlfriend,
I said, Adams. You wanker.

He and Sara stood washing each other with smiles. The Probably a TV Researcher woman glared at Sara in a way that suggested that inside her head she was focusing on her and chanting the word “cystitis” over and over again.

“Right!” I roared. “Must be off—maybe we’ll catch you again later, Paddy.”

“Yeah,” he replied, noticeably more to Sara than to me. Sara . . . smiled. Christ, why didn’t the pair of them just go at it here and now? Maybe ask whether I’d be a sport and bring a table for him to bend her over? He’d better hope I
didn’t
catch up with him again during the evening, because if I did, it was a good bet that it’d be to push him off a balcony. But then, as it happened, I guessed he’d probably not be around much longer. As we parted, Probably a TV Researcher woman and I shared a glance and I was pretty sure she’d be redoubling her efforts to get him out of there, with her, as soon as possible.

Sara and I moved off together. I gave her a look.

“What?” she asked.

I wanted to say, “You
know
what. Giving the come-on to Paddy ‘Listen to my musical Irish brogue’ Adams and his twinkling Irish eyes.” I mean, Jesus, here I was half killing myself to keep her from finding out about George—and suffering terrible,
terrible
guilt about the whole thing—and she virtually flings herself at Paddy Adams. Joyfully
. Right in front of my face
. Talk about moral high ground; I’d have been well within my rights to have stormed out, there and then. Somehow, though, I managed to stamp down my feelings. “Nothing,” I replied.

I stared directly ahead (though out of the corner of my eye I could see Sara continuing to look at me) and marched on through the party guests. Eventually we came to a table laid out with glasses of wine. Two waiters stood behind it, filling new glasses as the ones already there were taken. Close by, possibly trying to outpace them, was Amy. She was swaying gently to the tune of alcohol.

“Hiya, Tom,” she said. She kissed me on both cheeks, raised her glass, as if to toast my appearance, and then drained it. “Sara,” she continued, slightly more formally, “you look well.”

“Thank you. You do too.”

“Well, things are going to plan, so I’m happy.” Amy smiled knowingly at me as she said this, to indicate she was thinking of the simply massive pile of extra money we were going to get because
Growing
had sold so well.

“Indeed.” I smiled back, picked up a glass of wine, and took a sip. It was vile. (I really do not like wine—I don’t know why I keep drinking it.)

Amy took a long draw on her cigarette and reached across the table to a boxy
NO SMOKING
sign that she’d overturned and was using as an ashtray. “I’ve been running about all over the place, but it’s been worth it, I reckon.”

“Running about?” asked Sara.

“Hm? Oh, down to London and back quite a bit . . . sorting stuff out for Tom.” She clinked her glass against mine.

“Och, aye—you were down there when I called you the other week, weren’t you?”

“Um . . . no,” replied Amy, using bits of her eyebrows to indicate that she thought this an odd question. “No, I was in Edinburgh then.”

“Ahh . . .” Sara looked over the glasses of wine on the table, taking quite a time to select a particular one, considering they were all identical. “I just thought you might have been there. You never know where people are when you call them on their mobile, do you?”

“I was in Edinburgh.” Amy shrugged.

Sara nodded, “Right,” and took a drink from her glass.

“Has the woman herself turned up yet?” asked Amy.

“You mean George?” I asked, adding a distancing “-ina Nye?” a quarter-second later. “I don’t know.”

“Paul said he’d be driving her over right after they’d finished, erm . . . something or other.”

“A Scottish-TV thing in Glasgow,” I said.

“Is that what it is?”

“Um, yes, well, I think so. I read in the paper that she was on some Scottish TV show tonight. I assumed in Glasgow. It was implied in the text. Perhaps I’m wrong, though. I’m only guessing. It’s just a guess. What the hell do I know, eh? God, isn’t this wine
awful
?”

“Is it?” Amy asked, surprised, and picked up a fresh glass from the table. She drank half of it down. Sara and I looked at her, waiting for a judgment, but she gazed back blankly, appearing never to have considered the possibility of pronouncing upon it.

“So,” asked Sara eventually, “what do you think you and Tom will be doing next?”

“A holiday might be a good idea, eh, Tom?”

“Off to the South Seas together, maybe?” Sara said, oddly, and smiled, oddly.

“Ha! No, you can have him for the holiday, Sara.”

“Thank you.”

“I get enough of him while we’re working.”

“I bet.”

Amy’s attention suddenly shifted. There was a small commotion away across the room that almost certainly meant George had arrived. Amy stood on tiptoes, trying to see above the heads of the other guests. I don’t think she had much success. Affecting complete nonchalance, I didn’t look in that direction at all. When it became apparent that I was the only person in the entire room not looking that way—and that standing there at 180 degrees to the direction everyone else was facing appeared not even remotely casual and inconspicuous—I turned around. Through the shifting people, I caught a brief flash of George. She was smiling and looked confident, relaxed, and quite unimaginably shaggable.

“Is it Paul and Georgina Nye?” Amy asked.

“Yeah . . .” I said. “I’m just going to the toilet.”

I’m not going to be melodramatic here and say that I had a panic attack, but there was an element of panic, and it did sort of attack me. George and Sara, for the first time, were in the same place. More than this, I could
see
them both being in the same place. George, real-life George, was visible, just across the room. I turned my head slightly, and there too was Sara, in the flesh. Experiencing them together, visually, tore at the compartmentalizing walls—and I liked those walls, I liked those walls a lot. I needed a few moments in the toilet to take a few steady breaths and have a stiff word with myself in the mirror.

When, after some extensive therapeutic hand washing, I came back out into the main room, George and her agent were standing with Hugh by the drinks table, not that far from Amy and Sara. George and Sara were still very much separate, however. In fact, it was Amy who was obviously peering across, while Sara faced the other way, not even looking in that direction. I wondered whether this was Sara deliberately “turning her back on George,” but it didn’t seem like it. She appeared to be genuinely and wholly engaged by whatever she and Amy were talking about. Maybe they’d fallen into a nice “the amusing effeteness of Englishmen” groove. I strolled over to George’s group.

“Good evening,” I . . . well, “chirped,” really. Overdid the untroubled brightness a bit there, Tom.

“Hello, Tom,” replied Hugh.

“Wotchaaaaah,” said Paul.

George just smiled politely.

We chatted for a while about how well the book was doing. Paul swung between remarking what a massive, staggering success it had been (playing to Hugh) and (playing to me) worrying aloud how big the market was and whether they’d manage to sell another copy, ever, and whether this might mean George didn’t get the money she’d hoped for. He didn’t seem to be troubled by alternately running in two completely opposite directions, though. Whichever line he was taking at the time he threw himself into fully, without any hint of discomfort or self-consciousness. Meanwhile, George and I did a tremendous job of not looking at each other. In fact, I was so determinedly looking at Paul, so as not to be thought to be looking at George, that I didn’t notice Sara come over to us. Seemingly instantly, she appeared beside me—as if by teleportation—saying, “Hi,” and I very nearly jumped back with a comedy “Agh!” Fortunately, however, I managed to disguise my tense, unnaturally large surprise as a perfectly natural, big, spontaneous nervous twitch.