For a moment he seemed less sure of himself. There was in his smile for the first time a shadow of self-doubt. It was not
what
she had said—that or things like it he had heard many times. It was the essentially unflirtatious way that she said it. She said it as if it was something important. She looked very serious. It was very intense. He smiled—the shadow of self-doubt—and seemed to be about to say something himself, he was not sure what, when she leaned through the elegant light and kissed him.
Without saying a word, she then placed herself entirely in his hands, and he seemed happy to take the initiative. The luxurious mojitos finished, and paid for without her noticing when or how, she found herself in a throbbing taxi, then in a street somewhere south of the river—perhaps Battersea—then in a tiny lift, and then in an equally tiny flat, then on a sofa that seemed still to wear the plastic wrapping in which it was shipped, with his tousled head between her white thighs (his hair was thinning on top), and then naked on an enormous bed, and all the time her heart was pounding. He would not let her lift a finger. She loved the way he would not let her lift a finger, the way he let her lose herself again and again in her own passivity. Her fantasies were mostly fantasies of passivity, for instance of medical examinations, of white-smocked professionals straying from their task and starting to touch her in ways they were not supposed to.
‘You’re too smart to work in a hotel lobby,’ he said. He was propped on his side, peering at her in the imperfect darkness of the London night.
‘I know,’ she said, and then laughed—
Ha!
—at her own immodesty.
‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘So why do you? You went to university?’
She nodded.
‘Which?’
She told him.
It made him laugh. ‘Jesus!’ His smile shone. ‘That’s quite intimidating!’
‘Is it?’
‘So why do you work in a hotel?’ he said.
She said she wanted to set up a small hotel, somewhere near the sea, and she needed some experience of hotel management. That was why.
‘That’s very sensible,’ he said. ‘Most people would just get on a plane somewhere and fuck it up.’
‘I know,’ she said. This time she did not laugh.
‘How long have you been working there, in the hotel?’
‘A few months.’
‘What did you do before?’
‘I worked in publishing…’
She had taken his flopping penis idly in her hand—or it seemed that she took it idly. In fact, she felt quite self-conscious, and she just held it as in slow pulses it started to stiffen. ‘I worked in publishing,’ she said. He seemed to have no further questions. Still feeling quite self-conscious, she moved on the mattress until her flaxen hair spilled onto his furry stomach.
Some time during the night, when she went to the loo, she opened the fridge in the tiny kitchen. It was entirely empty—not even milk. It had the pristine white look of a display fridge in a department store. It was then that she noticed there were no covers on the duvet or the pillows. In the morning, while he showered, she started to wonder about these things. The flat had a totally unlived-in feel. It seemed to be very new. In the living room there was nothing but the sofa, still in its plastic wrapping, and a
TV
—its packaging too was still there. The kitchen was equipped with two mugs, one plate, one knife and one spoon. The oven had never been used—it still had pieces of polystyrene and an instruction manual in it. The expanse of built-in storage space in the bedroom was empty. She was looking into this surprising void when he put his arms around her waist and picking her up, spun her once, twice—she squealed, her legs kicked and flailed—and fell with her onto the bed.
‘Why isn’t there anything here?’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean those cupboards are empty. There’s nothing there. Don’t you have any clothes?’
‘Clothes? What do I need clothes for?’
‘And there’s nothing in the kitchen. Not even a kettle.’
‘I’ve just moved in,’ he said, more seriously. ‘That’s obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Where are all your clothes then?’
‘They’re somewhere else. I’m moving my stuff here next week. What’s the matter?’
She did not press him.
Instead, she went and had a shower. There was only one towel and it was already quite wet. While she was using it, and looking at herself in the steamy mirror, he shouted through the door, ‘Do you want to go out for breakfast, or do you want me to go get some stuff?’
‘Go out!’ she shouted back. She brushed her teeth with his toothbrush, and daubed some of his deodorant under her arms.
He was smoking a Silk Cut in the kitchen with the little window open, using the sink as an ashtray. ‘Okay?’ he said, smiling.
As they went down in the tiny lift—the flat was quite high up, had a view over the huge normality of south London—she surprised herself again. She said, ‘I’m in love with you.’
* * *
The past. As if someone had forgotten to lock its cage and it had slipped out, looking for her. It is on the loose now. It is at large in the lobby. It is there with the multilingual louche
flâneurs
who populate it at this hour of the day. Half past four, p.m. She stands there next to an enormous vase of flowers, staring out at the public luxury.
For a while, months, they met in the flat in Battersea. It soon emerged that he was not in fact separated from his wife—not physically, though he insisted they were ‘emotionally separated’, that when he had told her he lived on his own, it was in a metaphorical sense true. He said he hated his wife. (And she was shocked by his use of that word—she had never hated anyone.) In a strictly literal sense, however, they did still live together, with their two daughters—and
for
their two daughters—in the house in Sevenoaks. The flat in London was a pied-a-terre, that was all. He was often on jobs—‘stake-outs’—that made it impractical for him to trek all the way to Kent every night. The ‘Jane Green’ job had been such a ‘stake-out’. Mostly they were neither so interesting nor so profitable. Typically they involved loitering outside a fashionable nightclub in Mayfair, hoping to snap a Premier League footballer or someone from
TV
, or if you were very lucky one of the junior Windsors. Or spending days at Heathrow like a stranded traveller, eating junk food and eyeing up incoming flights from JFK and LAX. That was the sort of thing he mostly did. He said he hated that too. He hated his life, he said—how it had turned out. ‘How did it happen like this? I didn’t
want
it.’ He meant the marriage, the job. (On the plus side, he did make a lot of money. For the ‘Jane Green’ pictures alone, he eventually told her, he was paid £50,000.) He said, as they lay naked on the mattress in the still unfurnished flat, that he wanted to change everything. He just needed some more time. Then he would leave his wife in Sevenoaks and live with
her
in London; he would stop papping and start Ansel-Adamsing. Then they would travel together to the wild, pure places he told her about. Then everything would start anew.
She lived for the two nights a week she spent in the flat in Battersea, and the occasional minibreak—there were minibreaks, there were weekends away. When they met in London she would wait in the flat. She had her own key. She would wait in the kitchen smoking, or in the living room with the
TV
on. He was usually late. It might be midnight, one o’clock. Then he showed up smelling of the kebab he had eaten, sometimes flushed with success. He opened a bottle of wine and she listened while he told her about his evening’s adventures. Then they had sex. The next day, at lunchtime, he took the train to Sevenoaks. It wasn’t always exactly like that. Sometimes he didn’t have a job to do and they would spend the whole evening together.
Finally, on New Year’s Day, she told him she would never see him again unless he left his wife. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said. He was in a windowless hotel bathroom in Florida (a family holiday), whispering into his phone while the extractor fan and the shower made noise. ‘You
know
that’s what I want. You know that’s what I want to do. It’s just a matter of time. You know that…’
He thought he had talked her down, but in London a few days later—they were walking in Battersea Park—she said the same thing. She said he had until the first of February to make up his mind, and until then she wouldn’t see him. He pleaded. He phoned, he turned up in Caledonian Road, he tried to make her see things from his point of view, the kids, the
kids
… Though she wouldn’t listen, she did not know what she would do if he said he wouldn’t leave his wife.
He did leave her—in March, a month late—and she must have found Katherine’s number in his phone. She phoned her and swore at her in impeccable RP—she sounded surprisingly posh—for twenty solid minutes.
In April she left her flatshare over the shop on Caledonian Road and moved in with him in Battersea. He was still papping, though he had started to spend a lot of time poring over atlases, trying to work out where to take his first shots of Nature. There would be no more papping for him then. In the end—the fact that they would be travelling in winter effectively excluded the northern latitudes—he settled on Mauritania. She took two months’ unpaid leave and they left London on 2 January in an old unheated Land Rover and headed south through France and Spain. They lingered a few days in Marrakech. Then pressed on through the Atlas Mountains, where they spent two memorably idyllic nights in a stone hotel within earshot of a waterfall—and then south, south, towards the Sahara. There were a few weeks in the Mauritanian desert, a picture-book desert of peach dunes neighbouring the dark blue Atlantic. Fraser took his photos, and then they went further south, over the frontier into Senegal. (Where he almost lost his equipment and plates to some venal khaki officials.) For a while they hung out at a place called Zebra Bar near the city of St Louis—some huts in a national park on a marine lagoon, and a fridge full of beer. A population of intriguing transients. Fraser was popular there. He loved it and for a few weeks he was king of the place and she was his freckled queen.
Then they went on to Dakar and stayed out late in salsa clubs.
And then on.
And on.
They left the Land Rover in Burkina Faso and flew back to London in April.
He had opened a different sort of world to her—it wasn’t anything he did so much as something in what he
was
—a world of immediate feelings; and with them the sometimes troubling sense that they were the only thing that was of any value, that finally they were what life was.
Later that year they were married. If there was to be a wedding he wanted it low-key, which it was. A London registry office on a Saturday afternoon. His mother, over from Saskatchewan. Her parents. A Swedish aunt. A few friends.
His photos were not a huge success. He had exhibited them over the summer, and sold a few prints, but it was obvious that he was not going to be able to make a living from them, and he had to look for other sorts of photographic work. (As for her, she was still working in the hotel—she had been working there for more than two and a half years, and was now a shift manager.) Fraser was depressed that his attempt to be Ansel Adams had failed. He said he was too worn out for papping. That was a ‘young man’s job’. They didn’t have much money. He sold the place in Battersea and they took out a joint mortgage for a flat on Packington Street in Islington.
She had always imagined a house in some nice white-stuccoed nook of north London. Trees in the street. Family Christmases. What she had was not quite what she had imagined, but Packington Street passed for a white-stuccoed nook, just about. Fraser said it was the worst possible time. They were just scraping along as it was. They needed her income. And there was no hurry—she was only twenty-nine. Every second weekend his daughters stayed with them. He picked them up from school on Friday, and his wife picked them up from Packington Street on Sunday afternoon. She stayed outside, usually sitting in the car—except for that once on the phone, she and Katherine had never spoken.
He started finding more work. He seemed to have found a source of more lucrative product work, high-street fashion stuff. He had shots of posh parties in
Tatler
—Lord Something So-and-so’s twenty-first, the bar mitzvah of a north-London billionaire’s son. He was often out late on these jobs, and was sometimes away overnight.
She was very strict with herself. He himself had once told her, while he was still living in Sevenoaks, that even if he did leave his wife, she would never trust him. Not the way things had started. She knew from her own experience what he was like. She often thought of those words. Her memory of him saying them, of the self-satisfied melancholy smile on his tremendous face was precise. They had made a powerful impression on her. However, she insisted on trusting him. She
had
to trust him. What was the point otherwise? To freely enter into this situation and then spend a lot of time
not trusting him
—that would be insane. She had known what she was doing, and in doing it she had taken a decision to trust him. So she did. She trusted him.
*
When she leaves the hotel at the end of her shift it is nearly dark outside, the western sky over the park still just streaked with wet blue light—she sees it through the trees—as it was on the afternoon that she first spoke to Fraser, over four years ago. She walks quickly to the tube station. When she saw him on Sunday he did not look well. He looked surprisingly old and paunchy. He looked out of shape. Having exchanged a few words with Summer, he stood there waiting, staring at the floor, while she finished her phone call—she was trying to hide the fact that her heart was palpitating from him and also from James on the other end of the line. When she had finished with James she snapped her phone shut and said, ‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ he said.
She stood up. ‘Do you want to get a drink then?’