The Facts of Life (31 page)

‘Well that’s just Myra.’ He made to hand it back. ‘Myra in a chair.’

‘Yes,’ she pursued, ‘but where?’

He had known straight away. It had been his chair, his photograph, his London bachelor pad on a long, boozy Sunday afternoon. He remembered the brisk excursion to the nearest corner shop – trousers and coat tugged on to cover his nudity – to buy her cigarettes, and the return to the womby fug of his gas-fired rooms with their smell of body and tobacco. He looked up into Venetia Peake’s unflinching gaze.

‘I don’t know.’

‘How about this one then?’

She sounded almost like a policewoman. It was another picture of Myra, this time sprawled on a car rug amid the remains of a picnic, laughing as she added extra leaves to her already mussed-up hair.

‘No idea,’ Edward said, although he knew that the shadow cast in the inexpert snapshot was his own.

Venetia Peake watched him for a moment then opened another file.

‘The thing is, Edward,’ she said, her abrupt familiarity startling as an unwelcome proposal, ‘That I seem to know more than you do. I’ve got some letters and things here. Rather a lot, so I won’t bore you with the details, but they’re all to her and they’re all from you. To “Darling M from Hopeless E”, to “My Darling”, to “Sweetness”, to
“Liebchen”
, to “Cupcake” …’

‘She
showed
you these?’

Venetia Peake merely shrugged.

‘Let’s just say they’re all here. You can see them if you want. I have photocopies in my office in New York.’ She held out the file full of old, crumpled scraps, scraps of a cherished and utterly private devotion, but he brushed it aside, blood racing, as he lurched to his feet and made for the bookcase.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Since you’re evidently going to tell the story at least make sure you tell it with
both
sides fully documented.’ He climbed on a ladder, scanned a high shelf and tugged out a thick pink tome called
Fond Remembered Loves
, bought in a second-hand shop with the sole purpose of providing an ironic hiding-place. ‘Here,’ he said, opening it and passing sheet by faded, crumpled sheet to Ms Peake who had come eagerly to the ladder’s side. ‘Letters from her. To “Dearest E”. To “My Darling”. To “Bunny”. To “Mr Hotinsack”.’

‘Oh. Well. Thank you,’ she stammered, turning greedily from one to the next. ‘She said she never wrote any letters.’

‘She forgot.’

‘Of course, I already have her side of the story.’

He followed her back to the sofa.

‘Let me guess,’ he said bitterly. ‘I besieged her with flowers and letters and she finally succumbed out of pity?’

‘Well … Er … God, I never thought this could be so embarrassing.’ She struggled back to composure. ‘Yes. Something like that,’ she said at last.

‘There were no letters. No flowers. Not at first,’ he said after thinking for a while. ‘It started when she was drunk. She used to drink. Everyone did then but she drank more than everyone. I found her in the studio car park. She could hardly stand up and she was about to climb into her racer, the one St Teath gave her as a wedding present. Luckily for her she’d dropped the keys and couldn’t find them or she’d have killed herself.’

‘So what happened?’ she asked, adjusting the volume on the tape recorder.

‘Nothing much. It was raining. She was wet through, crying, hair everywhere. A real mess. I drove her back to London, to my place in Albert Hall Mansions. Ran her a bath. Lent her some pyjamas while her clothes dried. I put her to bed while I slept on the sofa.’

‘And then?’

‘And then she woke up in the middle of the night having a panic attack, screaming the place down. I went to calm her, explained where she was, what had happened then she … well … she had a rather winning way of saying thank you and ended up spending the weekend.’ Edward found he was smiling despite himself.

‘Then what?’

So Edward told her the whole sad, sweet, humiliating story of their affair. It was not the only liaison of his long widowerhood but the first and the last in which he had allowed himself to become involved to the point of pain. The telling of it, the long-forgotten sight of her childish handwriting and of the intensely evocative snapshots so mysteriously acquired, softened his rage. Venetia Peake’s questions, her relentless interest, broke up the heartless flibbertigibbet image of Myra he had carefully constructed in his wrath, and expensively endorsed in prolonged psychotherapy.

His inquisitor made no allusion to his and Myra’s having had anything but a professional relationship in the brief years of his marriage to Sally. Either she was being cunningly manipulative, or she was genuinely ignorant. In his initial outburst of rage and panic, he had assumed that Myra had not only handed over private letters for this young woman’s cold perusal but had told her of their one adulterous encounter. Now that his vengefulness seemed cheap beside her delicacy, he wanted to unsay what he had said or at least take back some of the letters which showed her at her most sluttish and illiterate. Then he reflected that this was, after all, to be an authorized biography and that Myra would surely therefore have power of veto.

He softened slightly towards Venetia Peake too – but to say that he warmed to her would have been an exaggeration. He offered her a drink once the dictation machine and letters had been clicked away into her capacious bag and was touched to observe, from her evident relief, that she had been as apprehensive about the interview as he. She knew nothing whatever about music – although it seemed she came from a musical family – so they talked about America, where she had taken out citizenship after a brief, convenient marriage, and about his grandchildren.

‘Are these them?’ she asked, picking a photograph off the piano.

Edward nodded.

‘Alison and Jamie. It’s a bit out of date apparently but that seems to be the way I remember them.’

‘He’s so handsome,’ she enthused politely. ‘What does he do?’

‘In the City,’ he said and had to touch his brow to rub away a frown he felt forming there. ‘She’s in publishing.’

‘Oh but I think I know her. That is, we’ve met once. She wouldn’t remember. She’s at Mallard and Rose isn’t she?’

‘Pharos, actually.’

‘That’s the one,’ she bluffed. ‘I get confused. You must be very proud of them both.’

Her tone was rather patronising, but he found himself nodding and feeling a small warmth of pride, if only in being a grandfather. Regretting his initial hostility, he showed her the hall and gallery of The Roundel. She presumed to peck him on the cheek before climbing into her car. Then, slightly drunk from a whisky on an empty stomach, he found himself waving her off as fondly as if she were a favourite niece.

Back in the studio, having abandoned all hope of useful work for the afternoon, he telephoned Miriam to warn her the journalist might track her down. However he learned from a halting conversation with her cleaning lady that, incongruous but true, Miriam was out at the hairdressers. He telephoned Pharos to ask Alison if she intended to come down at the weekend, but she was in a meeting and he had to trust a message to her arrogant male secretary. It was actually Jamie he most wanted to speak to, but he knew the boy found it awkward to receive personal calls at the office. He rang his flat instead and left a pointless and slightly garbled message on his machine beginning, ‘Don’t worry. It’s only me –’

‘No! No, I’m not ready.’

‘Yes,’ Jamie commanded and thrust home so hard that the man gasped as if he were being stabbed. ‘Yes you are.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’ Another thrust. ‘Come.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. Go on. you’re coming.’ Another thrust. Harder this time. ‘I can tell. Come
now
!’

‘No. Yes. No! Oh God!’ The man arched his back and wrapped his thighs tight around Jamie’s waist, pulling him towards him. As he came, with a series of dry sobs, the muscles in his arse seized and released Jamie’s numb, bruised dick, seized and released it. For a moment, watching the man thrash and wince on the rug before him, Jamie wondered whether he could be bothered to come as well. But even as he made up his mind to pretend to, he felt the obscure mechanism in his loins thumping into motion of its own accord.

They had kissed already – against the side of a lorry, inside the porch, on the stairs – kisses between perfect strangers, conveying only hunger and curiosity. Now, as he spurted his juice into the man’s insides, desire sated, he felt an old familiar yearning to kiss in tenderness, to be held, to be made to feel, however fraudulently, safe. He fought the feeling, roughly pressing a hand across the man’s face, forcing his thumb between his teeth and on to the hot vulnerability of his tongue. The man sucked obediently, expressing Jamie’s need on his behalf. Jamie watched him for a moment, until the beating in his chest subsided, then he pulled back his hand and let his dick slide out with a wet, suggestive plop. In the half light from the lamps along the riverside, he could see that the condom had slipped off. With a practised gesture, disguised as a further caress, he slipped two fingers inside and tweaked the thing out.

He began to stand but the man, eyes still closed, took him by the wrists. Jamie waited, making no reciprocation, until he was released again, then walked slowly to pull on some tracksuit bottoms. Taking a small, black towel from the neatly folded stash kept in the bathroom for just this purpose, he came back to clean his visitor. Wiping sweat and sperm from limbs that were lent a deathly pallor by the thin light, an effect heightened by the man’s heavily corpseish stillness. He wiped the body longer than was strictly necessary, enjoying the slow ritual courtesy and the almost paternal feeling it invariably stirred in him.

At last he roused himself with a little, comical snort.

‘What did you say your name was?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t,’ Jamie said. ‘But it’s Tony.’

‘Well, thanks. Tony.’

He rose, lit a cigarette and began to wander around the eerily lit room, peering closely at things in the gloom. Walking near the windows his body was lit by the diffused glow of lights from outside, revealing a suggestion of belly.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, picking up the idol that perched on Jamie’s only bookcase.

‘I inherited her from my grandmother. She’s from an East Anglian burial barrow. A fertility goddess.’ In three short sentences, Jamie realised, he had destroyed his carefully assembled image of tight-lipped machismo. The man chuckled.

‘Whatever she is, I wouldn’t want to meet her up a dark alley,’ he said.

Jamie watched him replace the treasure and said, ‘I … er … I’m afraid I’ve got to get to work early.’

With mumbled apologies, the man dressed and left. He behaved perfectly. He made no awkward overtures about leaving addresses or telephone numbers and he gave no name. He only spoiled the encounter’s smooth completion by having to ring on the doorbell when he realised he had left his watch and wedding ring in an ashtray by the sofa.

Ever since he had started attending a gym after a summer with a leg in plaster caused him to put on weight, Jamie had checked himself religiously on the bathroom scales at night, charting his progress from slack-thighed wimp to urban olympian. This evening, stepping off the scales, he sensed it was a habit he would have to break if he was to retain his sanity. These things became obsessive, tedious even. For the fourth night in a row, instead of luxuriating in the pleasures of an unshared, unrumpled bed, he found himself fretting wakefully over complex mental indices of indulgence and retribution, teasing, circular lists of profit and loss, the nightmarish equations whereby risk might be calculated.

The twenty-five years of Jamie’s life had been shaped by an impulse towards transgression in one form or another. Miriam, as his mother had always insisted her children call her, had brought him and his sister into the world in a haphazard commune, made up of fellow art school graduates she gathered about herself. Uncertain as to which of the group’s floating male population was their father, she had proudly given them her surname. She had fed them on home-made bread and home-made cheese and encouraged them to run naked as savages and decorate their bodies with natural pigments. Seven-year-old Jamie had transgressed against this self-conscious paganism by winning a place at a Rexbridge college choir school, where he sang like an angel, wore a collar and tie and learned slabs of the Bible by rote. When Miriam finally put communal life behind her and married her accountant, she tried hard to become the kind of mother who liked having a privately educated choirboy for a son. Like her father, she became keen for Jamie to pursue his musical training and shed a little culture on her by association. Reliably disobedient, he changed direction again, taking Economics, Politics and Maths A-levels, giving up singing and skipping university to take a job with a Lloyd’s syndicate. Now his contemporaries seemed to be falling over themselves in the rush to settle down and have babies and/or cats, so he remained petless and resolutely – even callously – single. His regular encounters with men he picked up in the street or the gym were lent an added spice by the knowledge that his settled colleagues, and even his stepfather, enviously pictured him playing the field with a fragrant address book of single women.

Appalled by Miriam’s transformation following her marriage, equally wilful, though not, he suspected, quite as committed to the single state as he was, his older sister Alison was his only confidante. They lived on opposite sides of London but spoke every day and made a point of meeting once a week, if only for a sandwich and coffee. The morning after this latest adventure, they had time for complicated salads and a bottle of Chablis.