The Pleasure Seekers (34 page)

And then, finally,
it
happened. After months and months of walking past the glass-windowed office, willing the raven-haired Spanish architect to make eye contact with her, they were introduced at a party in Kensington on a rooftop with flamingos. Bean was wearing a turquoise dress that showed off the bones in her shoulders and the bronze in her skin, and he was in dark blue jeans, a long sleeved shirt and a corduroy blazer. Bean was so thrilled to learn his name. Javier. HA-VEE-YAY. Nothing Allegra or she had guessed at.

Javier and Bean sat side by side without eating. Wry, compact Javier, who whispered in Bean’s ear after seven vodka and tonics. ‘I want to make love to you. Where can we go so I can make love to you?’

Javier, who held her, who rubbed and touched, but wouldn’t kiss, wouldn’t fuck, not yet. ‘What soft skin you have. Almost too soft, as though you aren’t really here. And what a nice bum!’ Tops off. Chest against chest. Skin on skin. ‘I want to fuck you, and I don’t.’ Javier and Bean, saying each other’s names to each other again and again in Bean’s bed that very first night. ‘You’re unbelievable, do you know? Where did you come from, to land in my life like this?’ Bean, leaning on her elbows, glowing.

Their first weekend away in Barcelona, Javier’s home town, they barely left the hotel room. Bean waited for him, perched on the edge of the bed with her skirt up to her thighs.
Don’t you know what that does to me?
Javier, touching her, putting his hand in the space between her legs, moving her in a way she’d never been moved before.

When Bean and Javier made love they kept their eyes wide open. Javier on top of Bean, the weight of his sturdy body falling like a wave upon her. Bean straddling him on the edge of the couch, rocking her hip bones into his, her small breasts dancing up and down like fruit. Afterwards, they lay spent, their thighs interlinked, staying in the moment for as long as they could. They ordered up expensive bottles of wine and plates of calamari, took long baths together, soaped each other’s backs and downtheres as though they’d been lovers for centuries. They sat on the balcony in fluffy white robes watching the sunset, discussing how and when they were going to take the next step.

‘Can’t we go and see Gaudi’s skulls and bones building? Won’t you show it to me? Or Miró’s museum. I can’t leave without seeing anything.’

‘There’s so much time for that, mi alma. There’s the rest of our lives.’

Mi alma.
My soul
.

When it was time to fly back to London, Javier cried. He laid his head down in Bean’s lap and cried like a baby. There was so much in his heart, so much he wanted to change. ‘I love you,’ he said, ‘It’s simple. I can’t imagine not having you in my life.’

‘So don’t,’ Bean whispered. ‘It
is
simple. You have me. I’m here.’

Sometimes the desire for him was so strong, Bean had to stop looking through the glass windows from her office desk. It was a desire that stopped her in her tracks, made her sit down in a chair, throbbed between her legs. It took the breath from her. Bean couldn’t understand it. It was nothing to do with his body because she had seen bodies more beautiful than his. It wasn’t his intellect or sense of humour or any one specific thing. It was the way he allowed her to drown in him, demanded that she stand at the centre of his life, and she in his. It was the constant text messaging and phone calls, the
I can’t get through the day without you
. The incredible need.

Javier put rings on her fingers and laid himself bare. ‘I want to tell you everything about my life. I wish I had met you when I was younger. I never expected this in my lifetime, this kind of love.’ He was ten years older than Bean. ‘When I’m not with you my blood feels like it’s flowing the other way.’

Javier wanted to know all about her old loves, so Bean summoned them up. Michael Mendoza led them with his painted jeans and Metallica rings. The lovers were holding out pieces they’d claimed and carried, pieces that had prevented others from walking through: a pierced navel, a lower lip, a hip bone, a tear-shaped birthmark, a night spent weeping in the bay window of a room. Bean was collecting all those missing pieces because she had to be whole if she was going to give. And she wanted to give to this one. She wanted to reassemble herself to be as she was at sixteen: so pure and un-inundated that this man would want to walk with her for ever.

‘One day we’ll go to Madras,’ Javier said, rolling his ‘r’ like a bird’s trill. ‘Do you think your family will like me? Who do you look like, your mother or your father?’

Bean opened her albums and showed him pictures of Babo and Siân when they were young, driving around India in their Flying Fiat. She told him the story of their love affair, which began in London nearly thirty years ago. How they found each other in a canteen, and how they’d been chasing each other ever since. She showed him pictures of Ba in Anjar, and Chotu. ‘Isn’t it scary, how one minute we’re there, the next minute gone? And this is Mayuri, don’t we look like sisters?’

‘Was it a magical time for you, your childhood?’ Javier asked. ‘It must have been.’

‘I’d like my children to be born in India,’ Bean said, looking seriously at him. ‘To grow up there.’ Bean had never thought of having children before, never mind where they were going to be born and raised. But Javier had already imagined them. A boy and a girl with olive-brown skin and shiny white teeth.

From the beginning Bean kept Mayuri updated.
I can’t explain it. I’ve never felt anything like this before. It’s chemical, immediate. And, May, I willed it, months before we actually met, I willed this to happen. He’s everything I could want in a man. Strong and kind and gentle. And he loves me. He loves me so much. He
knows
me. Even though we come from two completely different cultures, we are both home here in London. All of a sudden, nothing seems strange or difficult any more. He wants to marry me. He said this right at the beginning, the first weekend we went away together. He went out and bought me a diamond ring, and said, I wish I could marry you
.

It isn’t going to happen any time soon, though. He says there’s still so much he needs to work out. But I’m so happy, I’m willing to wait as long as I need for this to happen. When a love like this comes into your life, you have to believe in destiny after all.

What Bean doesn’t tell Mayuri is what she hardly tells herself: she cannot marry Javier. Not yet. Not while his petite blonde wife in loafers and the three children with matching muddy green eyes are still in the picture.

The nights Javier can’t get away Bean imagines him tucking his children in bed, making love to his wife. She imagines him occupying all those things that belong to him, solidly,
his
house,
his
children,
his
wife. All the things he had to call his own. And what did Bean have? Bean had Allegra, who said, ‘Be careful, Bean, it’s a delicate situation. Take it slow.’

But it was too late for slowness. Because Javier was close, so close. This was Ekam. Bean was sure of it.

27  All Men Shall be Sailors then Until the Sea Shall Free Them

In the summer of 2000, two years into their love affair, Bean and Javier spent a weekend in the Lake District to decide on things once and for all. Like most of their weekends away, it was fraught with emotion: intense sessions of lovemaking alternated with crying. Javier told Bean it was tearing into him now, the guilt. Sharp as knives, twisting in his stomach. ‘I don’t know what to do about it,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I wish she’d just accuse me, then I could admit to it.’

‘Why don’t you just tell her?’

‘I can’t do that. I’m the first love of her life. The only man she’s ever known. We have three beautiful children together. And her father is dying. How can I do this to her now?’

Javier and Bean walked around Lake Windermere, holding hands in the rain. ‘I miss home,’ Bean said, taking in the landscape, which reminded her somehow of Anjar. The terraced green hills, the long blue horizon.

‘You know, I’m so fed up of all this. It isn’t simple at all. I want to be able to share my life with you, entirely. I can’t live like this any more – stopping and starting. My whole life on pause. I keep waiting for something to change, but it never does.’

They made their way back to the city separately. Bean took the train, and Javier the motorway. That evening, there was no customary text message from Javier, no phone call to make sure she had reached home safe. Nothing.
Let’s see how long it lasts
, Bean thought, going to sleep, fully confident that there would be a text from him in the middle of the night, or first thing the next morning, saying,
Mi Alma, I can’t live without you, you know this. Let’s work it out.

But in the morning there was still nothing. At work, when Bean looked through the glass, she saw only George, manning the phones, pacing up and down like a caged animal. All day Bean waited for something, a sign, a peep. ‘Something’s happened,’ she told Allegra. ‘I can feel it. It’s his wife. She knows.’

Bean imagined all sorts of things. Javier coming home and realizing the futility of his double life; his wife discovering one of Bean’s many love letters and confronting him; Javier breaking down in a moment of weakness, confessing everything. In every scenario that Bean invented, Javier eventually came back to her, because they had already decided it, hadn’t they? A love like theirs wasn’t easy to come by. No matter how difficult it got, they were going to do this.

But that night, when there was still no word from him, Bean began to worry. For the entire duration of their relationship, it was the first time that twenty-four hours had passed without any kind of contact. It was surreal, as if she had just dreamed up the last two years of her life with a man who had suddenly vanished. In bed, unable to sleep or cry, Bean dialled his mobile number. His wife picked up. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Hello, who is this?’

The next morning, still nothing from Javier. Bean stared at the glass, willing Javier to suddenly materialize. Every time the phone rang Bean pounced on it, expecting it to be him with some kind of explanation. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said to Allegra. ‘Why hasn’t he just called to say what’s going on?’

Bean moved through the day feeling like a robot. Tears threatening to fall any minute to spoil the illusion of calm. She walked home, talking to herself the whole time.
Like a crazy woman
, she thought.
I’ve become one of those crazy women
. Finally, at midnight, when she had resigned herself to sleep, her mobile rang, vibrating heavily on the side table. ‘Where are you?’ she cried, ‘What’s happened?’ Breath returned to her body. To hear his voice meant everything was going to be OK. Things would return to being as they were.

‘There was an accident,’ Javier said, sounding different; muffled and far away. ‘It’s OK, I’m all right. Nothing happened to me. A miracle really.’

Javier, driving home from the Lakes, had found himself on the side of the M6, sideswiped by an Asda delivery truck, his golden Vauxhall smashed like a Pringle’s potato crisp, his body intact and untouched.

‘I didn’t see my life flashing before me,’ he told Bean. ‘Nothing like that. I only thought if I died, my wife has no other husband, my children have no other father.’

‘What are you telling me?’

‘I told Renatta everything when I got home. I showed her your pictures and letters. I told her how much I loved you. She threw me out of the house and screamed, and oh my God, the children. Rosie, she’s old enough to understand these things. She said, “Daddy I don’t want you to move into another house.” It was awful. It’s been two days of torture. I begged Renatta to listen, to understand. And we talked. We talked like we haven’t talked in fifteen years.

‘Mi alma?

‘She wants to give me another chance. I have to give my family another chance. Have I let you down? Tell me, have I let you down?’

Bean pictured Javier crying and pleading, saying he didn’t know what had come over him. It was something to do with the middle of his life, something to do with the way Bean appeared before him on a roof with flamingos. It was such an easy thing to fall into. There had been so much beauty. He was terrified by having it, and not having it. Javier, weeping all the sadness out. Bean knew how his head bent when he wept, how the sadness curved out of him and settled in your fingers. Because Javier knew how to let go of things. Bean didn’t.

‘You have to do what you think is right,’ Bean said. Of course, it was betrayal, but Bean wasn’t going to say it. She wasn’t going to say,
This is what happens when you give yourself away, when you had no business giving. Do you know how I feel right now? Like I’ve been abandoned, left to stand by myself in the darkest corner of the room
.

‘She knows I’m talking to you now. I have to tell her everything, otherwise it will never work with us again. I don’t know what to do. I’m so confused. I feel like every action I make, every time I open my mouth, I’m hurting someone. She said I could call to explain everything, but we leave for Spain tomorrow for a few weeks, maybe more. To try and work things out. I think about you every day.’

Bean wondered at it all. How a man, who couldn’t get through the day without her, had suddenly set himself free. How a woman, who knew her husband had loved and touched another woman could even dream of taking him back.
Isn’t it a tainted thing?
She wanted to ask.
How can you possibly build on something so shattered?