‘No.’
‘Where are you?’ Another simple, unemotional question.
‘I’m at Nick’s place.’
‘Why are you at Nick’s place?’
‘We were out late,’ he says. ‘So I just slept on the sofa.’
‘Why did you lie to me then?’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know. I’m sorry. It was stupid.’
‘Does Nick have a landline number?’ she says.
‘I guess.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know it.’
‘Well… will you ask him?’
He hesitates. ‘Are you serious?’ When she says nothing, he sighs. ‘Okay.’
He is off the line for a minute, then he tells her the number, and she writes it down, hangs up on him, and dials it.
He picks up immediately. ‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Is that you?’
‘It’s me.’
‘Okay? Satisfied now?’
‘Why did you lie to me?’ she says, suddenly distraught. ‘Why did you
do
that? Don’t you understand that I
want
to trust you? Don’t you see that if you lie to me that’s just not going to be possible?’
‘I’m sorry. It was stupid. I’m sorry.’
‘
Don’t
lie to me! Just
don’t!
’
‘It was stupid. I’m sorry.’
‘Where are you?’
There is a momentary silence. ‘I’m at Nick’s.’
She thinks of asking to speak to Nick. Then she says, ‘I’ll be home tomorrow night.’
She had not asked for the number in order to prove, by phoning him on it from Madrid, that he was at Nick’s. It proved no such thing, though he seemed to think she thought it did. He was quite stupid sometimes. (She had always worried—it was one of the things she worried about—that he just wasn’t intelligent enough for her.) Perhaps he wasn’t so stupid, though. Perhaps, in his instinctive way, he understood that she did not want to know the truth. That she probably wouldn’t phone the number because she did not
want
to know that it was not Nick’s number. Which she didn’t. And since she didn’t, why do it? Why phone it?
‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice. ‘Hello?’ the woman says again. ‘Who is this?’
‘Is Nick there? Please.’
‘Nick?’ It is obvious from the way she says it that there is no Nick there, ever. And then she says, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong number.’
She wrote it all down. In writing, Fraser was obviously a shit. And she, poor little thing, still loved him. What was so terrible was that she still loved him. She did not want to throw him out. It was something she had to force herself to do, in the knowledge that she should, like putting her fingers down her throat. And when she did, it was he who shed most of the tears.
What was so terrible was that she still loved him. She did not want to. She wanted to love someone else, and within a few weeks she tried. She was just about to tell him, this prospective lover, that she didn’t fancy him at all, that she had no interest in him whatsoever, when he was kissing her. She slept with him that very night. He was sweet, intelligent, had a
BMW
. Within two weeks it was a sad failure—and then there was someone else fighting his little trickle of tears, his wobbly mouth, and only just losing. There was someone else earnestly wanting to know what everyone always wants to know.
Why?
*
They stopped to fill up and have something to eat at a service station somewhere near the heart of England. The sky was mild. The sky was neutral. Neutral like the system of slip roads and parking spaces, like the sharp white arrows stencilled on the tarmac, like the lines of stationary
HGV
s, the surrounding flat land, the inveterate soughing of the motorway. A place of horizontals. A non-place. Fraser was paying for the petrol.
While they ate—toasted paninis that looked like they had been flattened by a truck tyre—he talked about various people she half-knew, friends of his. Filling her in on what they were up to. There was something fairly lugubrious about this. Probably it was the thorough, systematic way he was working through them. He was talking about Ed O’Keefe, the veteran pap who was also well known in the soft-focus world of ‘erotica’, and some tax difficulties he was having with the Inland Revenue—or was it the VAT man?—when she interrupted him with what immediately seemed like obvious hostility. ‘Should I drive for a while?’ she said.
He stopped speaking. He looked hurt.
‘Do you want me to drive for a while?’ she said.
‘If you want.’
They walked across the tarmac in silence and took their seats in the old Golf’s muffling interior, and she drove them through Yorkshire, as neutral Midlands afternoon sloped into northern evening. Until they stopped, Fraser had done most of the talking, and now that he had shut up they travelled predominantly in silence. It was to be expected, she thought—noticeably more philosophical now that she was occupied with wheel and pedals—that it would be like this. It would have been naïve to expect anything else. Except that she did seem to have expected something else—she looked quickly over her shoulder as she moved out to overtake—which presumably made her naïve… What had she expected? Just something… Something less painful. It was painful, that was the thing. Though the pain was low-level, it had been there since the morning, and she just wasn’t used to it any more. Since the end of last year, she seemed to have had the manage of it. She had filled up her time. She had left none of it vacant for pain to squat in, and in the process, she seemed to have forgotten the most obvious thing about pain—it was painful.
He was asleep now, in the passenger seat, with his head fallen and his hands in his lap. He had nodded off somewhere near Sheffield. He didn’t say anything for ten minutes, then there was a single short snore. Though her first instinct was to wake him, she did not. With him asleep, she was able to imagine, staring out at the motorway’s soothingly neutral space, that she was on her own, which had the effect of lessening the pain. When she did pick him up in her peripheral vision, though, it was stranger in a way to be there with him asleep than it was with him awake—with him just
sleeping
there, it was spookily as if the whole year of separation simply hadn’t happened.
She flicked on the headlights.
The traffic streamed north in slate-blue twilight. On the other side, the traffic streamed south. That would be them, she thought, in forty-eight hours…
Since this morning, he had been trying very hard to be light. Unfortunately he wasn’t light. He was heavy. It had been more and more obvious as the hours wore on. He just didn’t have the energy to keep up the jolly-jolly act. When she thought about it, it was not surprising that he seemed depressed. The facts
were
quite depressing. He was forty-eight and lived on his own in a studio flat, scraping a living from menial photographic work. He saw his daughters once a fortnight or less. Physically, he seemed to be losing it swiftly now—his hair, his shape, his
je ne sais quoi
… He still smoked. He had no savings. No prospects. She took her eyes off the surging motorway for a second and, suddenly feeling sorry for him—the feeling pierced her shockingly, made tears spring into her eyes—she placed her hand for a moment on his sleeping thigh.
A little while later he woke up.
‘Where are we?’ he said.
‘Nearly at Newcastle.’
‘Do you want me to drive?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s okay.’ The driving was therapeutic, analgesic.
He moved in his seat. Yawned. Lit a Silk Cut. ‘Maybe we should have picked somewhere nearer London,’ he said, snapping open the ashtray.
‘Yeah, or taken a plane.’
He yawned again.
‘Anyway…’ she said. ‘It was your idea.’
*
The hotel was one of the most famous and expensive in Edinburgh. At about eight thirty—the last stretch, from Tyneside, had been surprisingly long—they strayed scruffily into the lobby with their sports holdalls. The lobby. A huge open fire. Stags’ heads.
‘I, uh… I got a reservation,’ Fraser said.
‘Okay, sir,’ said the man in the tartan tie. ‘What’s the nim?’
‘It’s uh… King.’
‘How much are you
paying
for this?’ she whispered frantically, while the tartan tie fussed with formalities.
Fraser shushed her with a hand on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about it. To tell you the truth, I got a special deal. So don’t worry.’
A second tartan tie had been summoned and to this man—a Lithuanian—they handed their pitiful luggage.
‘Should we eat first,’ Fraser said, ‘or do you want to have a shower first?’
She said she wanted to eat first, and they went upstairs for a few minutes to freshen up. The Lithuanian, having shown them how to turn on the
TV
, waited for twenty seconds then withdrew untipped. She was feeling strange—she stood there in the air of plush expectancy (Fraser was in the wetroom) wishing she was at home. Or at least that home was nearby, escapable to at any time. She felt trapped there, standing next to the troubling question of the tartan-festooned four-poster. This, she thought, was the inevitable bed. This was what the weekend was all about. It was what they had been speeding up the M1 towards—he had had his foot to the floor the whole way, while he was driving—and what troubled her as she stood there was a sense that she might not want to sleep with him in it. She did not know whether she wanted to. Where once it was the most important, the most essential thing in her life, she felt, standing there, that she would need to think about it. She was just not sure what it would mean. What would it mean?
In a polo neck now, and extravagantly scented, Fraser emerged smiling from the wetroom. Something about her posture prevented him from putting his arms around her and taking it from there, as he had intended. ‘So, should we eat?’ he said. They took the lift downstairs—the hallways of the hotel were woollen in their windowless hush, with pools of halogen light on the floor—and were warmly welcomed into the dining room, where there was another spectacular open fire, another expanse of sombre tartan. They were shown to a table. She was suddenly feeling very depressed. She put down the menu and said, ‘I think this whole thing might have been a mistake, Fraser.’
He looked up from his own menu with a notch of worry in his forehead.
‘What are we
doing
here?’ she said. ‘This is just weird.’
‘What are we doing here?’ He put his hand over hers. ‘I’ll tell you what we’re doing here…’
She pulled her hand away.
He had started to say something else—something about falling in love again—when she interrupted him. ‘Should we order? I’m starving.’
He sighed. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sure, let’s order.’
They sat in silence until the waiter had taken their order. Then they sat in silence some more. Fraser was looking at her. She was looking everywhere except at Fraser. The
Monarch of the Glen
-style paintings on the walls. The waiting staff in their long white aprons, their standard-issue tartan ties. The man in the tailcoat—presumably the whisky sommelier—squeaking from table to table with his wheeled tantalus of single malts. The whole tree flaming in the fireplace…
‘You’re very angry with me,’ Fraser said finally.
She looked at him.
Sitting opposite her, he looked somehow implausible in his auteur’s polo neck. His shoulders were still powerful. His head—the dimpled imperial jaw—was still fairly splendid. So what was it? It was his eyes. His squinting eyes, with whose joyously sexual merriment she had once fallen thuddingly in love, were polluted with sadness. They were polluted with sadness and fear.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’
‘Of course,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I understand. This will take time. It won’t be easy…’
‘
What
will take time?’ she said in a louder voice. ‘What do you think is going on here?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me. What is going on here?’
‘Fraser…’ she said, sighing exasperatedly. ‘Alright.’ She seemed to marshal her thoughts. She seemed to focus herself. ‘You made my life absolute fucking hell,’ she said. Then, in a very much less matter-of-fact tone, ‘Do you understand that? I sometimes wonder if you even
understand
that.’
‘I do…’
‘
Do
you? I’m not sure that you do…’
‘Of course I do…’
‘You made my life absolute fucking hell, and now you seem to think you can just take me to a posh hotel and everything will be fine. That we can just sit here and have a lovely time…’
‘No,’ he protested.
‘There’s something
insulting
about this. There’s something insulting about the way I’m supposed to be swept off my feet by all this…’
‘You’re not—’
‘It’s a fucking luxury hotel! Wonderful! I spend all my time in a luxury hotel. Didn’t it occur to you that I might not want to spend the weekend in a luxury hotel?’
‘Katie…’
‘No, of course it didn’t…’
‘Katie…’
‘What is the point of this? What are we
doing
here? What do you think this is? A nice romantic weekend? Is that your understanding of emotions? Is that how you think emotions are?’
‘I said it will take time…’
‘Your understanding of emotions is just so fucking limited, Fraser. You trample on other people and then all you feel is self-pity. You’re just so fucking selfish. I seriously sometimes wonder whether you’ve got some sort of problem. Otherwise how can you not see what you’re doing? How can you not see how you’re
hurting
people… ?’
She put her hand over her eyes to hide all the water that was suddenly there as the waiter solemnly put the starters on the table. Fraser looked on helplessly as he did. As soon as he had moved away, still hiding her face with her hand, she stood up and hurried out.
A few minutes later she sat down again.
‘Okay. I’m fine now,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
And she seemed fine in her new face. She started to eat.
‘Katie,’ Fraser said. ‘I understand what I put you through…’
‘Let’s not talk about it,’ she said. ‘Not now.’
Looking shattered, he said, ‘We
need
to talk about it.’