The House at Midnight (16 page)
As the week passed and the next one began, I knew for certain that I had made a terrible mistake. I came to see that all that had happened at Stoneborough Manor was the result of the strange heightened atmosphere of the place. I cursed the house for wrecking what I had with Lucas and deluding me into thinking that Greg might ever be interested in me. Back in the real world, everything that had happened at the house evaporated like rainwater from a shallow puddle.
In the empty days after Lucas and I broke up, I was a ghost. I traced the familiar patterns at work and at home but could no longer connect. Physically I was out in the world but all my energy was channelled inwards, for the slow absorption of the guilt and grief and loneliness. It was a strange sort of haunting, where I, the one who had gone, grieved for those who were still living, and they were oblivious to the fact I had ever existed. There was a sheet of plate glass between us, transparent but impassable.
The first weekend was the worst time. On the Saturday I had lain in bed until noon, the day aching open in front of me. There was no need even for me to sneak around. The house was empty: Martha had gone to Stoneborough.
I had heard her on the telephone discussing the arrangements. It was like listening to a lover making a date with someone else. Instead of our usual ride up together on a Friday evening, my car the capsule that transported us between the real world and the private world of the house, she and Michael were taking the train and Lucas was going to pick them up at the station. The fact of it had shocked me. I think that in some way I'd thought that weekends at the house would stop without me. That they continued emphasised just how disposable I had been.
* * *
It wasn't until the following Wednesday that there was a change in the situation. I was at my desk, slowly getting through another afternoon, when a message from Greg arrived in my inbox. The shock of it made my heart thump. I hesitated before opening it, my hand poised over the mouse. Email was the perfect way to keep me at a distance, to apologise but let me know very politely that it had been a mistake. I had been making progress in the past couple of days; that morning had been the first since it all happened that I hadn't had to disguise the fact that I had been crying before getting into work. I was reluctant to have my wounds reopened. I stood up and walked around for a minute or two before finally taking a breath and opening it.
It was one line. 'Can I see you?'
Despite everything, there was a cloudburst of hope behind my ribcage. I quickly suppressed it with the thought of the days that had passed since that evening. If he'd wanted me, I knew, he wouldn't have left it so long. I waited twenty minutes then answered: 'When?'
The response came at once. 'Tonight. I'll meet you from work.'
I felt shaky and went outside for a cigarette. It was just before four o'clock and the traffic was starting to back up at the lights, the stragglers on the school pick-up meeting the first of the afternoon rush. The emails had told me nothing. It was a slippery kind of correspondence, with no detail to mull over or interpret. There was nothing to suggest he actually wanted to see me: it was businesslike. I imagined he and Rachel had sorted things out and he wanted to make sure I wouldn't cause trouble. In the past I would have phoned Martha to ask what she thought.
Well, I could be brave, I decided. I wouldn't cry in front of him. I would give him the impression that it had been a mistake on my part, too, the result of too much to drink. He knew things had been going wrong with Lucas; I would tell him that the whole thing had been a symptom of that, nothing more. The forced courage did battle with a wave of the strongest disappointment I had ever felt.
Back inside, I went down the corridor to the lavatory and looked at myself in the mirror. That I hadn't been sleeping properly was obvious. There were grey circles under my eyes and my skin had no bloom. I wouldn't have time to go home and change, either. There was an editorial meeting at five and they always overran. I would have to do the best patch-up job I could.
For the rest of the afternoon I was tense, unable to listen properly to what anyone was saying in the meeting. The idea that I was about to talk to him was unreal. As the others packed up afterwards, I went back to the mirror, brushed my hair and put on some mascara. I stayed in the office until I was a few minutes late, then went downstairs.
He was waiting for me on the pavement, facing away across the road. I stood inside the door and watched him for a few seconds. He was wearing a dark-navy suit and stood with his hands in his pockets. Even from the rear, he looked ineffably adult. He turned round as I opened the door. My mouth went dry. His tie was off and the collar of his pale checked shirt was unbuttoned. He looked as if he'd been working hard: his eyes were tired and the stubble shadow around his chin was pronounced.
'Hello.' He didn't smile. I waited for him to move forward, perhaps give me a kiss on the cheek, but he didn't. I stood awkwardly, unsure what to do. 'Shall we walk?' he said.
We went down the High Street towards the river. The street was busy with people coming home from work, all seemingly going in the opposite direction to us. I had to weave round them to stay with him. Although I think he was trying to slow down, the extra length of his legs made it hard for me to match his pace. We didn't talk at all until we reached the bottom of the hill and had to wait at the lights for the pedestrian crossing. 'I thought we could go over to Bishop's Park and walk along the river,' he said.
There was a warm breeze coming down the Thames and it played with the loose hairs around my forehead and on the nape of my neck as we crossed the bridge. I thought about standing there ten days earlier, daring the night. I felt only marginally less alone now. I had given up the idea of making conversation over the noise of the buses pulling into the stops or rushing past but the silence between us was not an easy one. I was dangerously close to tears. I realised that despite the days without him calling, part of me had been hoping that afternoon that Greg would pull me into his arms and that we would go from there.
When we reached the park we cut through the garden with its spindly rose bushes and Victorian-style streetlamps and on to the tarmac path that ran inside the railings. On our left flowed the river, strong and unchanging. The light was softening and casting a golden sheen over its breeze-dappled surface. A coxless pair went past, moving as quickly and neatly as a pond insect. 'Did you row at Cambridge?' I asked.
'No,' he said. 'I played rugby. Did you?'
'No,' I said. 'I was useless at it.'
He smiled a little but didn't say anything else. We walked on. After a minute or so I asked him how his day had been. It sounded like the desperate conversational opener it was. My head was down, my eyes watching our feet as they blurred along the tarmac. I thought about how he had held me on the terrace. How had it all disappeared?
At last he offered some conversation and told me about his latest project, a program for a record label based in Hammersmith. He asked what I was working on and I told him about an article on in-fighting at the borough council. It was like being forced to converse with a reticent stranger at a party, every line an effort.
Abruptly, still in the middle of the path, he stopped. He took my hand and pulled me towards him, almost roughly. The suddenness of it took me by surprise. His mouth was on mine in a second but it wasn't a tentative, exploratory kiss like the first time. This one smacked of a claim on me. It was muscular and his hands were round my ears, his fingers laced into my hair. I had a lump in my throat and I felt as lightheaded as if my blood-pressure had just dropped through the floor.
I pushed him off. 'You can't just ... after everything that's
happened.'
He looked at my face and saw my confusion. We were in the middle of the path and a couple on rollerblades had to separate to pass us. He either didn't notice or didn't care. I saw that he was reading me, attempting to interpret what I meant. I knew that my eyes gave away that I wanted him.
He stepped forward again and put his large hands around my face, as if it were something he wanted to keep safe. Then he leant in and slowly kissed me again. After days of self-hatred, the tenderness of it brought tears to my eyes. But it was also sexual. All the energy between us that I had felt out on the terrace was there and it glowed now like the filament in a bulb. I wanted to twine myself around him like a cat.
He pulled away. 'We'll get a taxi,' he said. He held my hand and we ran back across the grass and up the street until we reached the Fulham Palace Road. He flagged down a cab and gave his address in Shepherd's Bush. I didn't care what the driver thought of us. I wasn't thinking about anything apart from the taste of Greg's mouth and his breath in my hair and the way he was whispering into my ear, taking light nips along the edge of it. We stopped too quickly at the lights on the Hammersmith roundabout and I was thrown against him even tighter.
We arrived outside his flat and he paid the driver. I was so distracted I nearly left my bag behind. He slammed the front door shut behind us. We were in a communal hallway; there was a row of pigeon holes and stairs up. 'We're on the top floor,' he said without moving. He looked at me, holding my gaze. I couldn't speak. He pushed me backwards against the wall and kissed me again. This time I felt the echo of it around my whole body. He pulled my shirt out of my skirt and ran his hands up over my torso towards my breasts, pulling down the front of my bra and trapping my nipples between his fingers. 'I want you,' he said in the base of his throat.
I nodded, glad to have the wall behind me. 'Upstairs.'
We got up to his flat. It was almost dark but he didn't turn the lights on. We went straight to his room and he took off my clothes one item at a time, dropping them on the floor, until I was naked in front of him. I heard him swallow. I reached for him and started to undo the buttons on his shirt but he stopped me. 'Not quick enough.' He pulled the shirt over his head, tore his socks off and roughly undid his trousers. Then we were on the bed and he was naked, his hand between my legs.
As we made love, I remembered what he had looked like with Rachel. It was how I had imagined it would be with him: serious. I was a prisoner under his weight: I couldn't have pushed him off if I'd wanted to. It was like a coming of age, as if I had never understood until now what my body was for. I was alive to his touch, as if there was Braille on my skin and he could read it. I surrendered myself but at the same time I gained a whole arsenal of new powers. I discovered that I could make him groan by wriggling under him. At times the expression on his face was feral, as if he were angry at what I had done to him. A strange look passed between us, something old and fierce, a look that might have passed between our ancestors.
You're mine,
Greg's eyes told me and I knew that he was seeing the same thing on my face. I felt brave, strong, as though I were tapping into a resource I'd never known I had.
He folded his arms around me so tightly I could hardly breathe. My face was squashed against his chest. Involuntarily I started to cry and he turned my head up so that he could see my face.
'I think it's shock,' I said.
'Shock? You mean you didn't know it was going to happen?'
How could anyone have known that something like that was going to happen? I wanted to ask. 'I hadn't heard from you,' I said instead. 'I thought you thought you'd made a mistake. And this evening, when we didn't talk ...'
He turned on to his side, dislodging me. His voice was grave. 'I didn't call you because I thought you'd need time. You and Lucas were serious, Jo.'
Oh God, Lucas. How could
I
be doing this to him?
I watched the shape of Greg's mouth as he talked.
'I didn't want to storm in and force you into something if you weren't ready. I didn't know if you thought you'd made a mistake. You might have regretted it all, not wanted to see me. And even if you did, I still worried you'd think it was too soon.'
'Have you got any wine?' I said. 'I could really do with a drink.'
Without putting any clothes on, he left the room. He was entirely unselfconscious and at ease with his body. I heard his footsteps on the floor above my head and the rattle of a drawer as he looked for a corkscrew. I pulled his quilt around me. We hadn't drawn the curtain and an orange glow from the streetlight outside fell across the room and on to the bed. The room had the freedom from clutter that I associated with rooms that belonged to men but there were a good number of books on the shelves by the window. I got out of bed and went to see what he had. There were the inevitable tomes on programming and all things computer but also a wide range of non-fiction. I was impressed to see not only the obvious bestsellers but volumes on economics, international development and travel. There was a strong African flavour both to the non-fiction and also to the small collection of fiction, from Chinua Achebe, Alan Paton and Coetzee. I hopped back across the room as I heard him coming down the stairs agam.
He returned and put a bottle and two glasses on the bedside table. Surreptitiously I looked at his body, the long legs, the strong thighs and buttocks, the dark hair that covered his chest.
'I felt bad,' he said. 'I felt bad about Rachel.'
The guilt came flooding back again. Rachel. I was in bed with her boyfriend. She must have slept with him here. I closed my eyes briefly to shut out the thought.