—
Well, Peter’s in Nairobi,
she said, explaining what had already been explained once before.
—
The pesticide scheme,
Thomas said, as if he’d just remembered.
The man had slightly thicker jowls than as photographed and was narrow-shouldered in the way that Englishmen often are. Still, he was undeniably handsome, and his gestures
—
brushing back a forelock, his hands draped casually half in and half out of his pockets
—
suggested he might be charming as well. But then Thomas saw the puzzlement on Peter’s face, as though the man had just perceived an odd, even alarming, sound. He’d be working out where he’d heard the voice before, Thomas thought, and he wondered how long it would be before Peter guessed. As if in anticipation of that discovery, Peter put his arm around Linda, cupping her bare shoulder.
The tide abruptly went out again, beaching Thomas like a stranded seal.
—
And how is it you’re in Nairobi?
Peter asked.
—
My wife has a grant with UNICEF,
Thomas said. And thought, hopelessly, And is pregnant.
He wanted to glance at Linda and yet was afraid to. It became a kind of adolescent struggle.
—
There’s champagne and food,
he said, releasing husband and wife. He gestured to the door. Even as he was foundering inside. Flopping on a beach.
She went
—
slight reluctance in her turn
—
with Peter, her Englishman. Thomas followed them in, not wanting to lose sight of her, so recently found. Peter seemed to know people. Thomas watched Linda take a glass of champagne from a tray (holding the shawl closed with one hand) and sip from it immediately, as if she were thirsty. Thomas observed Peter in conversation and hated the man for his charm, for the way he bent his head, face turned slightly away as he listened to a man who had just hailed him. Thomas followed at a barely decent distance, as close as he dared, yet altogether too far from her. She had wonderful posture, he realized, the back of her dress as low as he remembered (complicated bra, he recalled), and thought, She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.
Roland, who seemed to thread through the crowd like a python (no, that was unfair; Roland wasn’t that bad), was making his way, Thomas realized, toward him. He cast around for a plausible exit, saw none, and knew he ought to be pleasant to Regina’s boss, however much he found the man distasteful.
—
Who’s your friend?
Roland asked, stupefying Thomas.
—
What friend?
Thomas asked, pretending to be oblivious.
—
The woman you spoke to on the steps? The one you’ve been following and staring at.
Thomas said nothing.
—
Pretty,
said Roland, looking at Linda. She stood sideways to Thomas, and, shattering pretense altogether, glanced over at him and smiled. As one might smile at a friend. Nothing in it under normal circumstances; everything in it now.
Roland, old sage, nodded to himself.
So,
he said, wanting a story.
—
She’s just someone I went to school with,
Thomas said.
We just ran into each other one day.
(The repetition of the word
just
giving him away, he thought.)
—
Indeed,
Roland said, making it clear he didn’t believe a word of it.
So you say.
—
Jane here?
Thomas asked, needled, and wanting, foolishly, to needle back.
Canny Roland smiled even as he narrowed his eyes.
—
Elaine?
Thomas asked.
—
Of course,
Roland said smoothly.
Where’s Regina, by the way?
Thomas saw his wife, a tall woman in heels, making her way toward Thomas from across the room.
She’s just coming,
Thomas said.
—
No Kennedy then?
Roland asked.
—
Afraid not.
—
Not a bodge on your part, I hope.
—
Amazingly not,
Thomas said, snagging another glass of champagne.
—
Ah, the beautiful Regina,
Roland said. And what ought to have been pure compliment sounded oily on his tongue.
Regina kissed Roland just off the mouth, as people who are something more than acquaintances will do. She looked at Thomas and beamed
—
shared secret, it would appear, still intact.
—
It’s a shame about Kennedy,
Regina said sympathetically to Thomas. Her flush had lowered itself to a place just above her bosom, hard not to stare at. Indeed, Thomas saw, Roland was staring.
—
Did you get something to eat?
Regina, normally not solicitous, asked solicitously. She could well afford it now.
—
I’m fine,
Thomas said. Outrageous lie. He was frantic. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that, by some principle of crowd physics unknown to him, the throng between himself and Linda was thinning and that she and Peter were being inevitably nudged in Thomas’s direction. Linda, he saw, was now drinking a scotch. Neat, no ice. A half dozen reasons why Linda’s meeting Regina and Roland would be disastrous hurtled through his mind.
—
Let’s find Elaine,
Thomas suggested, Regina and Roland looking at him oddly, as, indeed, the suggestion warranted. But it was already too late. Linda, detached from Peter, stood beside him.
—
Hello,
Regina said, surprised.
You’re Linda, right?
—
Yes. Hello.
Linda’s bare arm not an inch from Thomas’s elbow.
—
Linda, this is Roland Bowles. Regina’s supervisor.
Linda put out her hand.
How do you do?
—
Thomas and Linda went to high school together,
Regina said.
Roland giving Linda the once-over and not bothering to hide it, either. Jesus, the man was insufferable.
—
In fact,
Regina said,
Thomas and Linda were once in a car accident together. Isn’t that right, Thomas?
The mention of the accident stopping, for a moment, Thomas’s heart. He was certain it had done the same to Linda.
—
It’s how he got the scar,
Regina said in a necessarily loud voice, shouting as everyone had to do.
—
I’d wondered about that,
Roland said.
—
It must have been terrible,
Regina added, examining first Thomas, and then Linda, her eyes darting from one to the other as they stood side by side. But then, remembering her good news, her slight scowl vanished. Her face lit with recollection
—
so much so that Thomas was sure she would say something.
—
I hardly remember it now,
Linda said. The scotch nearly gone.
And as if a kind of critical mass had been reached in the room, raising the temperature six or seven degrees, Thomas suddenly felt uncomfortable and began to sweat beneath his white shirt and gray suit. Linda, too, he could see, had sweat beads on her upper lip, a delicate moustache he wanted to lick off. And with the perceived rise in temperature, so also did his emotional temperature rise
—
seemingly making
more
of everything. So that, looking at Regina, he felt a sense of claustrophobia so profound he began to think he couldn’t breathe. And he wondered, as he had never wondered before, if he didn’t actually hate Regina, and if he didn’t hate smug Roland as well. Roland, who made pronouncements and who was now saying something about Kingsley Amis and did Thomas know him, he was a neighbor of a cousin, and so on. And Thomas wondered as well if he didn’t hate boyishly handsome Peter, too, for sleeping with the woman he loved, the woman he was meant to be with. And so foul was the air from this sudden temperature rise that he almost felt as though he hated Linda for having walked into his life too late, stirring up old emotions better left dormant. (Though, strictly speaking, he supposed he had walked into her life.)
He spun away from the group and threaded a path through backless dresses and thickened necks, faintly aware of his name being called, ignoring the summons, walking past an Asian woman wrapped in silken saris and a slender Frenchman (he could only be French with that mouth), hearing as he walked
—
or did he only imagine it?
—
a voice raised in argument, a snarl from somewhere deep inside the crowd. It was the weather, he knew
—
parched and gritty and oppressive
—
that chafed skin and tightened jaws and loosed snarls where before snarls had been unthinkable. He reached a table and stood against it, not knowing where else to go, and smoked a cigarette, his back to the crowd, not wanting to see them.
He heard his name and turned.
—
Keep moving,
Linda said, putting a hand out to touch him.
He walked, not blindly, for he was aware of searching for an empty corner, of moving at the edges of the party, of not being able to find the exit and so wandering into a hallway, into an anteroom and through a door into a darkened office. She was behind him, in full sight, he supposed, of anyone wishing to notice, but he was so glad she was there he thought his lungs would burst.
She slid inside the door and turned the lock.
He understood that she was drunk, but he couldn’t help himself. This might be the last time
—
would
be the last time
—
they’d ever be together. The moment doubly stolen, like borrowing from an overdraft, the original capital depleted. And far from thinking it dishonest, he considered it a mercy she herself didn’t know. His own grief enough for both of them.
In the darkness, he found her mouth and her hair, kissed the one, held the other, then kissed them both. He could barely see her face, the only light a streetlamp outside the window. She was wiry against him, more passionate than he had known her before
—
more
expert
—
and it was her lust as much as his own that made them impatient to be undressed. They strained at fabric, stepped on it, had no time for buttons. She took her shoes off and suddenly was smaller, more fluid against him, and for a time they were up against a wall, then leaning on a leather chair. They slid or knelt to the carpet between the chair and a table, a corner of the table catching him in a kidney, and he thought there must be some anger of her own fueling her, for she was unlike herself
—
more abandoned in the way that anger can produce abandon, as, indeed, it had just done in him when he’d spun away from the grouping. He didn’t stop to ask himself longer than a second what Regina and Peter and Roland might be thinking, because they were not important now. Not right now. This would be all that mattered if it had to last a lifetime. And, fuck it, it
would
have to last a lifetime. And he said, or she said,
I love you,
as lovers will, though he knew the words
—
devalued (had he not said them to Regina? she to Peter?)
—
didn’t explain what it was they had, for which he knew only one word, a word both blank and precise, now repeating itself endlessly in his head:
This,
he thought.
This.
And then again,
This.
______
They lay in the squalid dark of the office. He was aware of bunched clothing at his head, the heel of a shoe poking into his thigh. Their naked hips wedged between a table leg and a chair. Maybe they would not be able to get out, would have to stay until they were found. She felt for his hand and laced her fingers through his, and there was something in that gesture, in the slow lacing of fingers and in the way she lowered their clasped hands to the floor, that told him that she knew. Knew it would be the last time. Nothing needed to be said, the gesture seemed to imply. Or perhaps it was just that he was too exhausted to summon words.
She stood and gathered her clothes. He watched her put on her complicated bra, zip her much-wrinkled linen dress, step into heels
—
the reverse of love, the reverse of expectation. And, in a moment he would remember for the rest of his life, she knelt and bent over his face, her hair hanging in sheets that gave them ultimate privacy and whispered into his mouth the unforgivable thing she had just done.
It might have been Confession.
______
Roland had his arm around Regina. In a corner, a baffled Peter was speaking to the back of Linda’s head. Guests were leaving
—
casually, normally, unaware of catastrophe
—
or if they were aware, giving it a sidelong glance, a quizzical stare. It would entertain, this story, become part of the pantheon of stories of illicit love in Kenya, a footnote to the Happy Valley days. Or not even that. Forgotten before the nightcap, the principal players not prominent enough to warrant sustained attention.