‘Nothing,’ he murmured, still looking at the photos.
‘No…’ she mused, leaning over him, tickling it. ‘I suppose not. With me it all happens there…’
‘Mm…’
‘It’s funny to think that nothing happens there with you.’
‘No…’
‘With you I suppose it happens
here
…’
He left early the next morning—Hugo was in Mecklenburgh Street—with a perfunctory halitosis-laced kiss in the steady headache of first light. Still, so much for not seeing him for a while. The question was—what now?
On Friday he sent her a hopeful text—
See you this weekend?
There was silence until Saturday morning, when this popped out of the ether—
No honey sorry doing things this weekend x
He wondered what she was doing. It occurred to him, of course, that she might be with Fraser. In a strange way, he hoped she was. Fraser was somehow part of the furniture. He had probably been sharing her with Fraser, without knowing it, for weeks. He was used to that idea. It was the idea that she might be with someone else, someone
other
than Fraser—or even on her own—that was the heavier thought. And it did weigh on him, as that Saturday wasted away unused. Partly it was just a matter of knowledge. He was very keen to
know
what she was doing. To know whether she was with Fraser, or with someone else, or on her own. Not knowing was what was hard.
1
F
riday morning the wind was screaming and yelling, screaming and yelling at him to shake a leg. He pressed out his Silk Cut and flung off the duvet. Today was the day. Today was the day he had been waiting for for more than a year. In the white nook of the kitchen, where the wind was fighting the unsnug window, he took the Tropicana from the fridgelet. The fact was, they were destined to be together, in spite of everything that had happened. It was pretty simple. He loved her, she loved him, and it had been like that from the very first moment. The moment when she looked up from the front desk, her manner as intimidatingly poised and together as always, and saw him there…
Pow!
A
coup de foudre.
(Or Cupid’s twang.) Love at first sight. That never happened to some people. Some people never had that. Then last year he had nearly fucked it up—no, he
had
fucked it up—and now fate was offering him a second chance.
So do not fuck it up again, Fraser,
he instructed himself, pissing noisily in the wind-hammered suntrap of the bathroom.
He took a shower.
They were just so wonderfully easy, those long talks they had on the phone practically every night now. It was as if nothing had happened. Everything forgiven and forgotten.
Amor vincit omnia.
They still laughed at the same things. The same things made them happy. The same things made them sad. They understood each other. Soulmates. That was so obvious there was no fighting it. There was just no fighting it.
‘Let’s try again, Katie,’ he had said last week, when they had just laughed at something together.
And then, ‘Hello? You still there?’
‘Yes, I’m still here.’ Her lovely English voice.
‘So,’ he said, ‘are we gonna try again?’
And she said. ‘What exactly would that entail?’
‘What would it entail?’… He said, ‘Why don’t we go away somewhere. Why don’t we go away for a weekend somewhere. No pressure. Just see where things stand.’
He did not expect her to say yes straight away, and she didn’t.
First she just laughed as if the whole thing was a joke.
Then she made him wait a few days.
She was stronger than he was. He knew that. Smarter and stronger. (Some men would find that hard to take—a smarter, stronger woman.) Strong as she was, though, she was suffering too. And she was doing all sorts of things to try and numb that suffering. That was her way. She wouldn’t just suffer passively, like he sometimes did. She would never do that.
Towelling his furred solidity, his thoughts touched with a new twinge of shame on the incident that had provoked all this suffering. It was an incident that had preoccupied him much since last fall—sleepless nights and such—and specially the last few months. It was tough for a man like him to be married and do that sort of work. You know the sort of work. The model taking off one set of underwear and putting on another on the other side of the screen, talking merrily. Only the two of them in the windowless studio with the stainless-steel sink in the corner. And then she steps out from behind the screen and he tells her to lie down on the furskin and look sexy, or strike a Christine Keeler pose and look sexy, or use some prop and look sexy… Part of the trouble was he found women like that—women like Felicity, for instance—very easy to engage with. They
liked
him. They liked his energy; they liked his playfulness. It’s fair to say there were typically a lot of warm feelings in that studio. And a lot of flirting—which was part of the job. The job was to make them look sexy, and to make them look sexy he had to make them
feel
sexy, so he had his professional patter. The thing is, when you say stuff like that, even if you don’t mean it, even if you’re just
saying
it, it has its effect. There is no such thing as a purely professional situation. That was something he had learned. He knew that all too well.
So they were alone in the warm studio, him and Felicity, a man and a woman, and it was late at night. And it was
her
idea to do the artistic shots. She was the one who said, as she stepped out of one set of transparent panties and into another, ‘When we’ve finished these, I want to do a few arty ones for my portfolio. Is that okay?’ And what was he gonna say? No, it’s
not
okay? I don’t think that’s a very sensible idea? Listen, this was his
job.
He and Felicity were
working
together. A household name on the
UK
high street was paying him for those shots. Those shots were paying the mortgage. (Though they were just test shots. Felicity and the other models were just on try-out. Only one of them would feature in the pictures which would be on the side of every bus in the country next year. And it’s possible that some of them, Felicity included, mistakenly thought that Fraser would have some say in deciding which of them it would be.)
They had just started the artistic shots—i.e. the nudes—i.e. he was in an isolated studio late at night with a naked underwear model—and she was making various pouts and swoony faces at the lens, and he was sort of squatting there over her, almost sitting on her legs, near enough to feel the warmth of her peachy skin, and telling her how sexy she looked, and how hot she was making him feel… No, there is no such thing as a purely professional situation.
When she started to undo his trousers he said, ‘Oh no,’ as if something terrible had happened. ‘No,’ he said, frowning tragically as she lowered the zip. ‘No…’ He was pleading with her, and she ignored him.
An hour later he drove her home.
And she invited him in.
And he sat at the wheel with a look of terrible pain on his face. Why did it have to happen when she was out of town? Why did this have to happen when she was in Madrid, for Chrissakes?
Well, he went in. And he has suffered for it ever since. Even when he was living with Felicity last summer, he was suffering. (And she threw him out as soon as she realised he wouldn’t be useful to her professionally, that was the sort of person
she
was.) Yes, he has suffered for it, and he
needed
to suffer. That’s the way he sees it now. To make himself worthy of her again, he needed to suffer. He needed to spend a year in purgatory. And now he had.
The VW Golf parked in the street out front was extremely old. It had the fully depreciated feel of its two hundred thousand miles, a semi-organic hothouse smell. Some sort of shy plant life seamed the window-seals. The top of the steering wheel and the head of the stick-shift looked like they had mange. He snapped his seatbelt on and started the engine—he had had some work done on it and it fired first time.
*
Fraser was late. From the living-room window, she saw him park a scrofulous Volkswagen Golf, silver, liver-spotted with rust, in front of the house. Instead of trying the doorbell, he took out his phone.
‘Hello?’ she said neutrally.
‘Hi, it’s me. I’m outside.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
She was still watching him as he produced his pack of Silk Cut and lit one. And he still didn’t look like a proper smoker; the cigarette still looked silly in his ursine hand. It had been his idea to spend a weekend together, somewhere out of London. ‘Why don’t we, uh… Why don’t we see how things stand?’ he had said. (Whatever that meant.) There was a long silence. Then she said she would think about it. She said it flippantly, without meaning it. It took her two days to see what some part of her had known all along—she
would
do it. It was the thing in the whole world that she most wanted to do. There was something hopeless about that. And also, she thought, staring sleeplessly out at the lobby the next morning, something uniquely hopeful.
She seemed tetchy as she slammed the front door and descended the four asphalted steps to the street with the handle of a shabby sports holdall in her fists. Smiling, he stepped forward and took it. ‘New car?’ she said.
‘Newish.’ He stowed the holdall. ‘I’ve had it six months or so. I mean, it’s not
new
new, of course.’
‘You’re smoking again.’
‘ ’Fraid so. Want one?’
She shook her head.
He took off his leather jacket and settled in at the wheel with enthusiasm. He seemed very pleased with himself as he turned the key.
The Golf was indeed not
new
new. He was talking about some work he had had done to the engine. (He knew about these things. She liked that about him. In Senegal, at Zebra Bar, he had been the unofficial onsite mechanic, spending most mornings hidden under the latest jalopy to limp into the stockade, helping hapless travellers,
homme de la situation
…)
The traffic was fairly light, and she did not say much as they negotiated their way out of London—Swiss Cottage, Finchley, signs for ‘the North’. She just sat strapped into the tattered passenger seat, flicking looks his way every now and then. Sometimes she would ask a simple question, and he would answer at length. For instance, ‘What sort of work are you doing at the moment?’ (A question that had its own particular intensity.)
‘Oh, this and that…’ It was mostly parties these days, he said. He would show up in his old leather jacket and jeans and spend several underdressed hours wandering around with a Nikon D70 shelved on his paunch, looking faintly seedy as he snuck canapés into his mouth and asked trios and quartets of party-goers to smile…
She was experiencing his presence as something pungently strange. It was true that they had spoken several times on the phone. Long meandering talks, mostly late at night. He would phone at eleven, midnight—she liked that. She liked the intimacy of it. She liked lying in bed, listening to his voice.
‘I miss you, Katie,’ he had said one night.
To that, she said nothing for a long time. She stared at the wicker fan.
So they had spoken a lot on the phone. To be sitting there next to him as they zoomed north, however, was a very different proposition. (He was pushing the Golf hard up the M1, squinting out intently at the motorway.) His eyes, his long jutting jaw, his hands holding the mangy wheel, his substantial forearms, his jeans—it was a very different proposition from the telephonic spirit she had been tentatively engaging with for the past week. For one thing, the telephonic spirit had no smell. His smell. His own smell, and the smell of the Davidoff scent he always used.
She had spent the night with James on Tuesday, and she had worried that that might interfere with how she felt, that it might interfere with her
perception
of how she felt. (An interesting idea, when she thought about it—
her perception of how she felt.
What was the difference between her perception of how she felt, and how she
did
feel? In what sense did her feelings exist when she wasn’t perceiving them—when she wasn’t
feeling
them?) It was not something she had planned, that last night with James. Toby had invited them for a drink, and somehow they had ended up sleeping together, and she had worried that she would find it harder to know what she felt about Fraser—and that was why she was there, on the M1 near Luton, torpedoing through a heavy squall, to work out what she felt about Fraser—so soon after spending the night with someone else.
She need not have worried. James was not in her mind at all as they tore north, water scrambling to the edges of the windscreen and peeling from the windows in long, nervous trails. What was in her mind was something else. The trouble was, this entire escapade was predicated on the idea that she had
forgiven
Fraser for that. The nocturnal talks might have misled her here. Somehow they seemed to have taken place in a parallel world, a world in which it had simply not happened. A world in which she had never phoned him from Madrid.
‘Where are you?’ she says, as soon as he answers.
‘I’m at home,’ he says.
‘Why haven’t you been answering the phone?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been phoning you all morning. You haven’t been answering the phone.’
‘I didn’t hear it.’
‘I’ve been phoning you
all morning
…’
‘I was out.’
‘Where?’
‘The shops. Shopping…’
‘When? What time?’
‘Uh… I’m not sure. Why? What is it?’
‘Listen. You’re at home, yeah?’
‘Yeah…’
‘I’m going to call you on the landline. Okay?’ Silence. ‘Okay?’
‘I’m not at home.’
She is in Madrid—a ‘training week’—staying at her employer’s Madrid hotel. It is supposed to be a sort of prize as well as training, and there is all sorts of free pampering on offer. Now she feels light-headed and shuts her eyes. ‘You’re not at home?’ she says, without emotion.