The Still Point (28 page)

Julia would never betray her husband. The very thought of betrayal is anathema to everything she believes in, the whole fragmenting edifice she has staked her identity on. But, unknown to her, infidelity has been hovering at the edges of this day, disturbing sleep and lending the morning its oddly affectionate cast. It is a possibility only, an opportunity, somewhere in London, about to be offered.

Julia will never be unfaithful to her husband. She is not the nearly guilty party.

 

The afternoon has dragged past inevitably, but painfully slowly, for Simon. He has been laying foundations on paper while Julia’s have crumbled; while Julia’s world has splintered and split, Simon has been making new structures solid. But he himself, he knows, cannot stand so firm. Seven o’clock has at last bonged out across Westminster, and he has been forced to forgo the refuge of work and face consequences. Now he is pushing his way through the everpresent horde outside Parliament. The Gothic immensity of it is so familiar that he doesn’t even glance up at the towers and spindles, golden in the evening sun, which have mesmerized the gaping tourists that crowd the pavement, striking them dumb. In every sense of the word, Simon grumbles to himself, as he narrowly escapes the back-stepping trainer of a photographer moving out for a wider angle without thinking to look behind her. Simon is rushing for an
appointment he has serious misgivings about attending at all. He checked his phone before setting out, hoping that he might somehow have missed a call or message to cancel, knowing he hadn’t. 19.06. If he hurried, he could have a drink before she got there.

 

Simon reaches the pub and orders the only single malt he can spot. He has arrived ten minutes early. This is not like him. He is, as you might expect, a punctual man. This means that he likes to arrive at any destination precisely on time, so that no time is wasted in the place before the minute of the assignation. Yet here he is, ordering himself a whisky at the bar, having deliberately allowed himself this time alone. Could it be that a spot of Dutch courage is called for? It would seem so. He doesn’t want to seem on edge. No, he doesn’t want to seem anything, suave or indifferent or boyish or… A clean break, just as he has already decided. Several times over. He fidgets with the glass, in the measured way that passes for a fidget in Simon’s fingers, rotating it round and around. Staring into its amber depths, thinking of his wife’s eyes, thinking of her sleepy, surprising smile — the first notes of the concerto creep into his mind, and he recalls that she didn’t get to hear them, that the alarm barged in right at the end of the piece, without regard for the careful layering of intensity, the suggestion building to insistence that precedes the final culmination; he has remembered too late what he forgot at the bathroom mirror, and resolves to find the CD for her when he gets home — and he will be home soon, just as soon as…

Here she is. He has stationed himself cleverly so that he is far from the door and partly hidden by the pillars of the long bar, but with a clear view of anyone entering. She is early, too. The old man further along the bar turns to
look lasciviously — or so Simon imagines the look to be, with a prick of indignation that he quells before he can acknowledge it. He picks up the whisky and swallows it down, while she scopes the gloom, sunglasses incongruous on the top of her head. Simon had thought this place neutral, and wonders now if it is possibly bordering on the insulting, a grubby run-of-the-mill pub among a wealth of more pleasant options. Or if otherwise, to a certain turn of mind, there might be some sort of romance about the place. Some sort of run-down post-war glamour. He isn’t sure which would be preferable. He wishes he had another whisky (his father’s drink. He is not a big drinker. He is not like him. Certainly he’d never known his father to be nervous). Too late, she has seen him and he hurriedly puts the empty glass away from him and stands to greet her with a decorous kiss on the cheek, which she repeats on the other unexpectedly, awkwardly, and he shrivels inside. He orders an ale that he really doesn’t want and a white wine for her — ‘Oh, anything, medium dry,’ she says, and he feels an automatic inward sneer that he is, at least, ashamed of. He motions her to a table in the middle of the room so that they are quite exposed, avoiding the cosy booths around the edges, although he can see her speculating. Imagining the accidental brush of an ankle. Craven, he knows he is craven.

‘Oh, it’s just too hot for shopping today!’ she says, dropping carrier bags, fanning herself and sitting in the chair emphatically. She pouts her underlip to blow away a hair; it remains stuck to her forehead. Her cleavage is beaded with sweat and the red lipstick she wears is blurring her mouth at the edges. In the airless gloom, the grimy windows filtering the sun and casting a sickly light upon all within, she looks a little older than he’d remembered.

‘Buy anything nice?’ asks Simon politely.

He is relentlessly polite throughout the half-hour conversation that
follows, politely evading any attempt at flirtation. She tries harder. She puts her hand on the table close to his and, without meaning to, he pulls away sharply. He notices her nails are now immaculate, newly manicured. For his benefit. He puts his hand on hers. His last chance: he might, then, have given into the crackle now coursing up his arm from his palm; offered a compliment; he might have smiled bashfully and suggested that they walk along the river, perhaps. But his hand is on hers out of kindness, his hand on hers has forced the moment to its crisis, so that there is nothing left to do but say:

‘I think I should apologize for my behaviour. It was inexcusable.’

Watching his lips make the words, Sandra’s own quiver just a little before she clamps them firm, a tightness at the corners the only hint of instability. She withdraws her hand delicately to lift her wine. She nods, understanding. A brief, murmured conversation follows; the words are the same as ever. My wife deserves better and so do you; in different circumstances, he implies, in another life, he lies…

 

But other lives are not our business. It is over, before it began. It might have gone differently, had it not been for the pheasant, for that shiver and the tenderness that followed; the unexpected smile and Rachmaninov and the eggs for breakfast, the accident on the road, the awful client and his squalid stories about his mistress. If the steak had been a better excuse for good wine, which might have induced him to drink more, and made the afternoon irrational. If the day hadn’t been so hot; in short, had it not been today. There are any number of factors, some of which we have surely missed or cannot know, that compel Simon to stand now and leave her with another peck on the cheek (this time she makes no attempt at symmetry). She holds her smile until he’s out of the door,
and she’s left with a large glass of white wine that has no savour. It is an unpleasant yellow that makes her think of a man’s piss. She drinks it anyway, quietly despising everything, including herself, staring at the table between acrid sips and not letting go of the stem. Then she dumps her over-stuffed handbag on the table and roots around for her lipstick.

She is almost relieved. She never meant to be a home-wrecker. She has been lonely since she left her husband. She’d like to make friends. She’d like a lover. She’s not sure which she wants more. She wants to wear scruffy summer dresses and still look beautiful, like her neighbour. She wants to stand in the dawn sun naked and not be ashamed. She doesn’t think a vicious kiss in the conservatory to be much of a triumph, in the face of that unassailable easy loveliness. A kiss like that has no hope in it. Thoughtful, she takes out her compact and carefully reapplies lipstick and powder although she’s quite aware that her make-up will soon be ruined anyway, the moment she gets in the door if she can keep herself together for the whole of the train journey home, because she cries all the bloody time, these days, and it’s making her eyes puffy.

 

Simon, meanwhile, is making purposeful strides for the Tube. He feels his mobile vibrate in his pocket and remembers thinking he felt it before, on his way to the pub; this time, he draws it out and sees that it’s Julia. When she calls him, her face fills the screen, her lips pouting for a kiss. This is her doing; she likes to surprise him with such things. When he first saw it, he shook his head and smiled. Now he quickly slips it back into his pocket, hiding her wide, trusting eyes. He feels sick. He drank the pint far too quickly, on top of the whisky too, so desperate was he to abandon Sandra with her near-full glass of wine; his stomach turns and turns again. The vibrating stops, and starts again
almost immediately. He told her he’d be back late, he thinks, with a surge of irritation, was she listening to him? He is doing his best to get home to her now, he’s rushing for the Tube, he can’t answer or he’ll miss the train, what more does she want of him? She’ll just have to wait until he gets back.

This spell of self-vindication lasts for precisely fifteen seconds, which is how long it takes for his voicemail to kick in, at which point he knows she will ring off — she hates leaving messages. As he feels it stop, he imagines her cutting him off in mid-sentence, ‘You’ve reached Si — ’, lying on the rug with the phone on her belly and the handset still to her ear, listening to the dial tone, letting it fill her head with its lonely sound, because she hasn’t reached him at all, she has reached out to him and he hasn’t answered and he knows how sad such things make her, sad out of all proportion, and he wills her to dial again but she doesn’t, she’s given up on him. He is, he thinks, disgusting. But he has reached the entrance to the Tube and will soon be out of range; as he descends into the foetid depths of the tail end of rush hour, he thinks at least he will be home when he said he would be, and hopes she was listening when he told her he’d be late. He will be home by nine, at the latest. He thinks of her pulling that silly big-eyed bug-face, her impression of a butterfly puckering up; he thinks of the other woman’s full fleshy mouth leaving lipstick on his neck; the beer and the whisky and the coffee and the foolishness of what he’s almost done slosh about in his stomach as he jogs to the platform, and to a chorus of tuts he presses himself into the crowded carriage, into the stink of perfume and sweat and after-work booze and thinks he’s no better than the rest of them and his stomach turns as they set off with a lurch into the tunnel.

Julia lies on the rug listening to the dial tone, deciding whether or not to try once more. He either hasn’t heard his phone or is ignoring her. Why would he ignore her? If he’d just left the office as Joanne said, he would have been heading for the Tube the first time she tried (so he wasn’t working late, after all); she gave him half an hour, waiting impatiently, scrunching the fur with her fingers and bare feet and feeling it heat up under her back; remembering lying there with him and trying now to regain that tenderness, trying to feel anything other than this awful disappointment, this want, this lack. When half an hour at last had elapsed, she tried calling again; he should be on the train home by now. She let it ring on, hung up when she heard his business voice telling her she’d reached him when she hadn’t. She tried again, cut him off again. Now she is listening to the dial tone. She holds the handset to her ear until the sound cuts out to a constant monotone which seems such an empty hopeless sound that it makes her want to cry. Is he ignoring her? She tries one more time. This time it doesn’t ring; his voice answers immediately, straight to voicemail. Underground? Strange, she thinks, sighs, and replaces the handset. She lies there for a while longer. She tries to take comfort:

 

 

but she cannot find it. The dream which has been so vivid all day to her has
vanished; the lights no longer flash unbidden across the sky, the expanse of snow no longer rolls out beyond her. She looks up at the dark red ceiling, at the swirls of the glass lampshade; she knows every whorl. She wonders when he’ll be home, makes plans without consciously hearing herself do it —

 

 

She lies there longer still, unable to exert the will to raise herself although her back is now uncomfortably hot against the rug. At last she lifts the phone off her stomach and sits up, leaving a sweltered patch of flattened fur behind her; she sits cross-legged with the phone in front of her and taps her top lip with her fingertips. Then she reaches again for the handset and dials another number.

 

Miranda is in the locker room at work; she just has time for a cup of tea before starting her shift. She opens her locker and is about to throw her handbag in when she hears her phone ringing, digs it out just in time. Her sister.

‘Hi, Julia, what’s up?’

‘Hello. Nothing really, I just thought I’d call. Well, it’s just that…’ Miranda’s colleague clatters the door of his locker, greeting her loudly as he does so before turning and silencing himself with that mouth-pursed handflat gesture which means ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t see you’re on the phone.’ Julia picks up the noise in the background.

‘Are you at work? Sorry, I didn’t think.’

‘Start in ten minutes, it’s fine. Was it important?’

‘No, not really. It doesn’t matter. I can call you tomorrow or…’

Miranda by now has heard the slight quiver in her sister’s voice which means that it does matter, it is important. She tries not to audibly sigh.

‘Come on, something’s up. What’s happened?’

‘It’s… Jonathan came to see me today.’

‘Who?’

‘Our cousin, Jonathan Mackley.’

‘Really? The little ginger boy? And?’