He would have denied this, but the Cigarette Girl was waiting in the restaurant at that very moment, the number of his mobile phone tucked into her garter. Later he would wonder if there was something else he might have said to save the situation, a
joke perhaps. But nothing occurred to him and Emma let go of his hand.
‘Well off you go,’ she said. ‘Go to your party. You’re rid of me now. You’re free.’
With failing bravado, Dexter tried to laugh. ‘You sound like you’re dumping me!’
She smiled sadly. ‘I suppose I am in a way. You’re not who you used to be, Dex. I really, really liked the old one. I’d like him back, but in the meantime, I’m sorry, but I don’t think you should phone me anymore.’ She turned and, a little unsteadily, began to walk off down the side alley in the direction of Leicester Square.
For a moment, Dexter had a fleeting but perfectly clear memory of himself at his mother’s funeral, curled up on the bathroom floor while Emma held onto him and stroked his hair. Yet somehow he had managed to treat this as nothing, to throw it all away for dross. He followed a little way behind her. ‘Come on, Em, we’re still friends, aren’t we? I know I’ve been a little weird, it’s just …’ She stopped for a moment, but didn’t turn round, and he knew that she was crying. ‘Emma?’
Then very quickly she turned, walked up to him and pulled his face to hers, her cheek warm and wet against his, speaking quickly and quietly in his ear, and for one bright moment he thought he was to be forgiven.
‘Dexter, I love you so much. So,
so
much, and I probably always will.’ Her lips touched his cheek. ‘I just don’t like you anymore. I’m sorry.’
And then she was gone, and he found himself on the street, standing alone in this back alley trying to imagine what he would possibly do next.
Ian returns at just before midnight to find Emma curled up on the sofa, watching some old movie. ‘You’re back early. How was Golden Boy?’
‘Awful,’ she murmurs.
If Ian feels any glee at this, he doesn’t let it into his voice. ‘Why, what happened?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it. Not tonight.’
‘Why not? Emma, tell me! What did he say? Did you argue? …’
‘Ian, please? Not tonight. Just come here, will you?’
She shuffles up so that he can join her on the sofa, and he notices the dress that she is wearing, the kind of thing she never wears for him. ‘Is that what you wore?’
She holds the hem of the dress between finger and thumb. ‘It was a mistake.’
‘I think you look beautiful.’
She curls up against him, her head on his shoulder. ‘How was the gig?’
‘Not great.’
‘Did you do the cats and dogs stuff?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Was there heckling?’
‘Little bit of heckling.’
‘Maybe it’s not your best material.’
‘Bit of booing.’
‘That’s part of it, though, isn’t it? Everyone gets heckled sometimes.’
‘I suppose so. I suppose sometimes I just worry …’
‘What?’
‘That I might just be … not very funny.’ She speaks into his chest. ‘Ian?’
‘What?
‘You are a very, very funny man.’
‘Thanks, Em.’
He rests his head against her and thinks about the small crimson box lined with crumpled silk that contains the engagement ring. For the last two weeks it has been tucked inside a balled-up pair of walking socks, waiting for its moment. Not right now though. In three weeks’ time they’ll be on the beach in Corfu. He imagines a restaurant overlooking the sea, a full
moon, Emma in her summer dress, freshly tanned and smiling, perhaps a bowl of calamari between them. He imagines presenting the ring to her in an amusing way. For some weeks he has been devising different romantic-comedy scenarios in his head – perhaps dropping it into her wine glass while she’s in the loo, or finding it in the mouth of his grilled fish, and complaining to the waiter. Getting it muddled up with the calamari rings, that might work. He might even just give it to her. He tries out the words in his head.
Marry Me, Emma Morley. Marry Me
.
‘Love you lots, Em,’ he says.
‘Love you too,’ says Emma. ‘Love you too.’
The Cigarette Girl sits at the bar on her twenty-minute break, her costume on beneath her jacket, sipping whisky and listening to this man as he talks on and on about his friend, that poor pretty girl who fell down the staircase. They’ve had some kind of row apparently. The Cigarette Girl tunes in and out of the man’s monologue, nodding every now and then and glancing surreptitiously at her watch. It is five minutes to midnight, and she should really get back to work. The hour between twelve and one is the best for tips, the high-water mark of lust and stupidity on the part of the male customers. Five more minutes and she’ll go. Poor guy can barely stand up anyway.
She recognises him from that stupid TV programme – and doesn’t he go out with Suki Meadows? – but can’t recall his name. Does anyone watch that show anyway? The man’s suit is stained, the pockets bulging with packets of unsmoked cigarettes, there’s a sheen of oil on his nose, his breath is bad. What’s more, he still hasn’t even bothered to ask her real name.
The Cigarette Girl is called Cheryl Thomson. She works most days as a nurse, which is exhausting, but does an occasional shift here too because she went to school with the manager and the tips are incredible if you’re prepared to flirt a little. At home in her flat in Kilburn her fiancé is waiting
for her. Milo, Italian, 6′ 2″, once a footballer, now also a nurse. Very good-looking, they’re getting married in September.
She would tell all this to the man if he asked, but he doesn’t, so at two minutes to midnight on St Swithin’s Day, she excuses herself – got to get back to work, no I can’t go to the party, yes I’ve got your number, hope you and your friend work things out – and leaves the man alone at the bar, ordering another drink.
‘Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it’s the same with people.’
James Salter,
Burning the Days
Leytonstone and Walthamstow
Emma Morley lies on her back on the floor of the headmaster’s office, with her dress rucked up around her waist and exhales slowly through her mouth.
‘Oh, and by the way. Year Nine need new copies of
Cider With Rosie
.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ says the headmaster, buttoning up his shirt.
‘So while you’ve got me here on your carpet, is there anything else you’d like to discuss? Budget issues, Ofsted inspection? Anything you want to go over again?’
‘I’d like to go over
you
again,’ he says, laying down again and nuzzling her neck. It’s the kind of meaningless innuendo that Mr Godalming – Phil – specialises in.
‘What does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything.’ She tuts and shrugs him away and wonders why sex, even when enjoyable, leaves her so ill-tempered. They lie still for a moment. It’s six-thirty in the evening at the end of term and Cromwell Road Comprehensive has the eerie quiet of a school after hours. The cleaners have been round, the office door is closed and locked from the inside, but still she feels uneasy and anxious. Isn’t there meant to be some sort of afterglow, some sense of communion or well-being? For the last nine months she has been making love on institutional carpet, plastic chairs and laminated tables. Ever considerate of his staff, Phil has taken the foam cushion
from the office armchair and it now rests beneath her hips, but even so she would one day like to have sex on furniture that doesn’t stack.
‘You know what?’ says the headmaster.
‘What?’
‘I think you’re sensational,’ and he squeezes her breast for emphasis. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you for six weeks.’
‘At least it’ll give your carpet burn a chance to heal.’
‘Six whole weeks without you.’ His beard is scratching at her neck. ‘I’ll go crazy with desire—’
‘Well you’ve always got Mrs Godalming to fall back on,’ she says, hearing her own voice, sour and mean. She sits and pulls her dress down over her knees. ‘And anyway, I thought the long holidays were one of the perks of teaching. That’s what you told me. When I first applied …’
Hurt, he looks up at her from the carpet. ‘Don’t be like this, Em.’
‘What?’
‘The woman-scorned act.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I don’t like it anymore than you do.’
‘Except I think you do.’
‘No I don’t. Let’s not spoil it, eh?’ He places one hand on her back, as if consoling her. ‘This is our last time ’til September.’
‘Alright, I said sorry, okay?’ To mark a change in subject, she twists at the waist and kisses him, and is about to pull away when he places one hand on the nape of her neck and kisses her again with a gentle scouring action.
‘Christ, I’m going to miss you.’
‘You know what I think you should do?’ she says, her mouth on his. ‘It’s quite radical.’
He looks at her anxiously. ‘Go on …’
‘This summer, soon as term’s over …’
‘Tell me.’
She places one finger on his chin. ‘I think you should shave this off.’
He goes to sit. ‘No way!’
‘All this time and I don’t know what you actually look like!’
‘This IS what I look like!’
‘But your
face
, your actual face. You might even be quite handsome.’ She puts her hand on his forearm, and pulls him back down. ‘Who’s behind the mask? Let me in, Phil. Let me know the real you.’
They laugh for a while, comfortable again. ‘You’d be disappointed,’ he says, rubbing it like a favoured pet. ‘Anyway, it’s either this or shave three times a day. I used to shave in the morning but I looked like a burglar by lunch time. So I thought I’d let it grow, let it be my trademark.’
‘Oh, a
trademark.’
‘It’s informal. The kids like it. Makes me look anti-authority.’
Emma laughs again. ‘It’s not 1973, Phil. A beard means something different these days.’
He shrugs defensively. ‘Fiona likes it. Says I have a weak chin otherwise.’ A silence follows, as it always does when his wife is mentioned. To lighten things he says, self-deprecatingly: ‘Of course you know the kids all call me The Beard.’
‘I wasn’t aware of that, no.’ Phil laughs and Emma smiles. ‘And anyway it’s not The Beard, it’s just Beard. No definite article, Monkey Boy.’
He sits suddenly, frowning sternly.
‘Monkey Boy?’
‘That’s what they call you.’
‘Who?’
‘The kids.’
‘Monkey Boy?’
‘Didn’t you know?’
‘No!’
‘Oops. Sorry.’
He flops back down on the floor, sulky and hurt. ‘Can’t believe they call me Monkey Boy!’
‘Only in fun,’ she says, soothingly. ‘It’s affectionate.’
‘Doesn’t sound very affectionate.’ He rubs his chin, as if comforting a pet. ‘It’s because I’ve got too much testosterone, that’s all.’ The use of the word ‘testosterone’ is enough to perk him up, and he pulls Emma back towards the floor and kisses her once more. He tastes of staffroom coffee and the bottle of white wine he keeps in his filing cabinet.
‘I’ll get a rash,’ she says.
‘So?’
‘So people’ll know.’
‘Everyone’s gone home.’ His hand is on her thigh when the phone rings on the desk and he recoils as if bitten. He staggers to his feet.
‘Leave it!’ groans Emma.
‘I can’t leave it!’ He’s dragging on his trousers, as if talking to Fiona whilst naked from the waist down would be a betrayal too far, as if he’s terrified of sounding in some way bare-legged.
‘Hi, there! Hello, love! Yes, I know! Just walking out the door …’ Domestic issues are debated – pasta or stir-fry, TV or a DVD – and Emma distracts herself from her lover’s home life by retrieving her rolled-up underwear from beneath the desk where it lies with the paper-clips and pen tops. Dressing, she crosses to the window. There’s dust on the blades of the venetian blinds, outside a pink light hits the science block, and suddenly Emma wishes that she were in a park or on a beach or a European city square somewhere, just anywhere but here in this airless institutional room with a married man. How does it happen that you wake up one day, find yourself in your thirties and someone’s mistress? The word is repulsive, servile and she would rather not have it present in her mind, but can come up with no other. She is the boss’s mistress and the best that can be said of the circumstances is that at least there are no children involved.
The affair – another awful word – began the previous September, after the disastrous holiday in Corfu, the engagement ring in
the calamari. ‘I think we want different things’ was the best that she could come up with, and the rest of the long, long fortnight passed in a haze of sunburn and sulking, self-pity and anxiety about whether the jewellers would take the ring back. Nothing in the world could be more melancholy than that unwanted engagement ring. It sat in the suitcase in their hotel room, emanating sadness like radiation.
She returned from the holiday looking brown and unhappy. Her mother, who knew about the proposal, who had practically bought her own dress for the wedding, raged and moaned at Emma for weeks until she began to question her rejection of the offer. But saying yes would feel like caving in, and Emma knew from novels that you should never cave in to marriage.
The affair had settled it. During a routine meeting she had burst into tears in Phil’s office, and he had crossed from behind the desk, put his arm round her, and pressed his mouth to the top of her head, almost as if to say ‘at last’. After work, he took her to this place he’d heard of, a gastropub, where you could get a pint but the food was great too. They had rib-eye steaks and goat’s cheese salad, and as their knees made contact beneath the big wooden table she had let it all flood out. After the second bottle of wine, it was all just a formality; the hug that became a kiss in the taxi home, the brown internal envelope in her pigeon hole
(about last night, can’t stop thinking about you, felt this way for years, we need to talk, when can we talk?)
.