Barefoot in the Dark (18 page)

‘Jack? Jack, what are you doing in there?’ The doorknob squeaked. Shit. He hadn’t thought to lock it.

Allegra appeared behind him, ruddy in the gloom. He pressed himself up against the basin. Cold porcelain. Absolutely the worst thing. She was right behind him now. He could feel various soft protuberances making warm contact with his flesh. No. Hang on.This actually felt better. This felt
hopeful
. She snaked an arm around his torso and traced circles across his chest with her fingernail. He could see his own face growing more cheerful. This
was
better. The bed had been a vast and forbidding gladiatorial arena. This was better. This was warm, cosy, arousing. This was – or he could at least think of it as – spontaneous sex in an unusual setting. Yes! The sort of sex Lydia would never have with him. Ever. Yes. This was progress. There was even a mirror! He smiled at it. Smiled at Allegra. Who smiled right on back. Who started inching her fingers back down over his stomach, and – yes! Progress! There might even just be something for her to take in hand when it got there! And then – suddenly – there was a buzzing noise in there with them. And Allegra was purring. He tried to place it. An odd noise. An electric-toothbrush kind of noise.

‘What’s that?’ he said, concentrating to keep the momentum. Her other hand appeared from behind his back in the mirror.

‘Why, this!’ came the silky reply.

It was supposed to be windy in March, but someone somewhere had tinkered with the settings.

Jack locked the car and ran through the now teeming rain with a copy of the
Western Mail
over his head. Leonard’s flat was still in darkness – it was just before midnight, so probably a lock-in at the pub – but the lamplight burned yellow through the net curtains in his own window, lighting the front path just enough for him to see.

He clicked the latch on the gate and walked dejectedly up it, his burning sense of shame now replaced by regret. He should never have done it. He should never have gone there. However much he tried to convince himself otherwise, the simple fact was that he didn’t fancy Allegra, and this knowledge – so cruelly and irrefutably now proven – had depressed him far more than he could possibly imagine. She was beautiful by any yardstick, so what was his problem? What kind of man was he that when a desirable woman started taking all her clothes off his principal response was terror?

It had been such an ignominious retreat. She’d been fine. She’d been solicitous and sweet, even. Nice. But there’d really been nothing more to say. He had needed to get home and be alone.

Approaching the front door, he rootled in his jacket pocket for his door key. Bed. Oblivion. That was what he needed. And perhaps a large glass of that brandy that he’d been given at Christmas by the girls in the office. He was just thinking how thinking about Christmas was depressing him further, when he became aware of a noise coming from the porch. The house, being old, and presumably grand in a former life, boasted a brick porch with an arched frontage and red flagstone tiles. There were recesses on either side of the front door, one of which contained the downstairs loo window, and one which contained a small wall-mounted carriage lamp that didn’t (and, knowing Leonard, wouldn’t ever) contain a bulb.

Hence the blackness. He stopped on the path and listened harder. The pathetic puddle of light in the front garden only made the porch blacker. The noise had stopped. Was he about to be ambushed now? Mugged for his mobile at his own front door?

He took another step forward. This was silly. It was probably just a cat.

‘Er… anyone there?’ he said.

The noise started again, its components becoming louder and in doing so identifying themselves more readily. The squeak of footwear on flagstone, the rustle of clothing, the grunt of a male voicebox, the exhalation of breath. A tramp? A dopehead?

‘Who’s that?’ Jack said, more sharply. There was no response. ‘Leonard?’ Of course it wasn’t Leonard. He
knew
it wasn’t Leonard. Leonard wouldn’t lurk in his own porch.

All of a sudden a form emerged. Jack tensed, his fists clenching as the figure approached.

‘Thank fuck. About time!’ Danny drawled.

Chapter 19

Had Danny been in any way physically compromised – a limb hanging off, say, or a severed artery spurting blood all over Leonard’s mahonia, Jack might have felt more sympathetic. But Danny looked every inch fully functional and was, though soaking wet, also grinning rather sheepishly, so Jack’s response, now his fear had abated, was to be simply nonplussed. And peeved. He had wanted to get in and brood.

‘Are you drunk?’ he asked, needlessly. Had Jack spent another moment hovering on his front path it would have been the fumes rather than the movement that would have alerted him to Danny’s presence.

‘Of course I’m drunk,’ he said, now back in the recess of the porch and picking up a large holdall. ‘You’d be drunk, believe me.’

Realising that there was a chance that Leonard might fetch up from the pub at this point, Jack hurried to get the front door open and Danny inside. He pushed the door open and waited for Danny to stumble through.

‘Though not that drunk,’ he was saying, as he stamped the rain from his shoes. ‘I was drunker. Some things have remarkable sobering properties.’

Yes, thought Jack bitterly, they do. Not that he was drunk. Perhaps if he had been drunk – a little merry, at any rate – the evening would have turned out differently. No, being drunk was the thing he needed to address. He needed to GET drunk right now.

He followed Danny up the stairs to the flat, and reached past him to turn the key in the lock.

Danny dumped the bag in the hallway and Jack had to step over it to get past.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

Danny smiled mirthlessly. ‘Julie’s chucked me out.’

Jack digested this statement with a sense of resignation. Every day, it seemed, had an endless capacity for getting worse than it already was.

‘Why, exactly?’ he said.

‘Well… ’ Danny scratched his head. ‘Look, you got a beer or something?’ He strode off in the direction of the kitchen. Jack followed.

‘An “or something”,’ he said. ‘Unless you want a warm one.’ He peered into the food cupboard (a loose-ish description) and reached inside for a bottle of red. He’d run into Sainsbury’s earlier that evening – for the flowers – but hadn’t yet unpacked the rest of his few purchases. He hadn’t, he thought, wretchedly, been anticipating being home quite so early, or, indeed, so in need of a beer.

Danny was ferreting in the carriers on the worktop. ‘I’ll shove these in now then, shall I?’ indicating the two four packs he now held in his hand. Jack began opening the red.

‘Well?’

Danny opened the fridge door, which made his normal pallor look even more ghoulish. Like he was something that had been yanked up from the ocean floor by David Attenborough. He put the beers in.

‘I have been rumbled,’ he said, in tones of great gravity.

‘Rumbled?’ God – had Danny been unfaithful to Julie? ‘
Rumbled?
’ he said again.

Danny nodded. ‘She has, rather unfortunately, found my little stash.’

Jack eased the cork from the wine bottle.

‘Stash? What stash?’

‘Well, I say stash, but I’m not being strictly accurate. Given that it’s all on the hard drive.’

The penny dropped. ‘Porn, then.’

‘Yes, porn. Come on, get that wine poured, will you?’

It had, apparently, only ever been a matter of time, and, boy, was he was kicking himself about it. Since Julie had become secretary of the Cefn Melin Little Sprouts mother and toddler group, she’d developed a taste for home publishing. She produced a monthly newsletter, created posters for events and generally fiddled about in that way women did. It had been while in the process of trying to access the photos from the Easter Hunt ’n Cookout (which she had taken with Danny’s digital camera and now wanted to cut and paste into her ‘Sprout and About’ wall display) that she had inadvertently stumbled upon a number of other photographic files – ones that didn’t include nappies or potties or bottles, although plenty of bottoms and breasts. It being Friday, and Danny at work, she’d had several uninterrupted hours in which to explore a great deal of the canon – her horror growing more acute with every click of the mouse. The first Danny had known of her discovery was when he’d arrived home from work to be welcomed with the greeting ‘I hate you, you disgusting pig’.

She’d said nothing more then. But the minute their eldest was tucked up in bed, she’d let rip.

Danny glugged down the last of his wine and held the glass out for a refill.

‘And then some. But I mean, for Christ’s sake! It’s only bloody pictures!’

Jack pulled out the stool and sat on it.

‘Yeah, but what sort of pictures?’

Danny looked affronted. ‘God, mate, what do you take me for? Nothing illegal or anything. Just women. Nothing heavy. Nothing grim. But the way she went on, you’d think I’d been out and shagged every woman in Cardiff!’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I wish!’

‘Oh dear,’ said Jack, not really knowing what else he could say. His own forays up to the top shelf had been few. He’d read his fair share of
Playboy
and
Razzle
as a teenager, but marriage and a pathological terror of actually making such purchases had all but expunged such urges from his life. There’d been one video –
Mandy goes to Hollywood
, that was it – that some guy on his MA course had lent him. He’d taken it home for Lydia and him to watch together, but there’d been so much eye-popping debauchery in it (the scene with the garden hose remained wincingly vivid) that Lydia had pronounced herself queasy and retired to bed with a headache and an improving book.

He had no particular problems with it. Not really. He’d even been to a lap-dancing club with some of the boys at work. Though the proximity of so much female flesh on display made him so anxious about getting an unstoppable hard-on that he had a Pavlovian droop for the best part of a week, he had quite enjoyed it. But it had always seemed to him (perhaps not always, but certainly since the breakdown of his own marriage, and most definitely in its aftermath) that there was something terribly sad about the idea of a grown man sitting hunched over a computer screen looking at other people having sex. Grim or not, it felt grim. Like the worst kind of substitute for real life. For real lovemaking. So however non-existent his own sex life had become, he’d never felt comfortable about doing it himself. Perhaps that was his problem. Perhaps he was too idealistic. Perhaps he
was
out of step with the rest of the world.

Danny stomped off into the living room and plonked himself on the sofa. Jack followed.

‘Oh dear,’ he said again.

Danny stared moodily into his half-empty glass. ‘ It’s my own stupid fault,’ he said. ‘Downloading stuff.’

‘Yes, why d’you
do
that? Why couldn’t you just, well, look at it and be done with it?’

Danny shrugged. ‘What planet is she on, eh? I mean, what does she think I do? What does she think blokes do, period? I’m lucky if she lets me near her most of the time. What does she expect me to do, for God’s sake? I’m not a bloody monk! I mean, what would she rather?’ He jabbed a finger in the air. ‘That’s what I told her. What
exactly
would she rather? Would she rather I went down Caroline Street and picked up a prostitute? Or went off and had an affair?’

‘You said that to her? I bet that didn’t go down too well.’

‘Too bloody right it didn’t.’ He nodded towards the open doorway, where his holdall still sat, bulging ominously, on the floor. ‘That’s what she’s told me to go and do.’ He stood up again. ‘Shall I go and check on those beers? I can’t drink any more of this stuff.’

‘If you like,’ said Jack. ‘They won’t be cold yet, though.’ He didn’t feel like a beer now. Didn’t feel like drinking any more. Perhaps he’d make himself a coffee. He followed Danny into the kitchen.

‘She’ll calm down,’ he said. ‘Once she’s thought it through.’

Danny turned around to face him. ‘That’s just it,’ he said. ‘She has thought it through. She’s had all day to think it through and she’s decided I’m a disgusting pig. It’s –’ He sighed, heavily. ‘It’s just, you know, so bloody depressing. It’s like we live in totally different places in our heads. I always thought Jules was – look, I’m not stupid. I know she’s never been particularly adventurous about sex and I know it’s never been such a big deal for her. But I can’t help thinking there must be something fundamentally wrong about a relationship where we can’t talk sensibly about such a basic life function. Can’t talk about it at all, in fact. We don’t, you know. Not ever. When we were younger, and I’d look at a girl, or make a comment about her legs or something – as you do – I always thought it was rather nice when Jules got all huffy about it. It made me feel good. It made me feel wanted. It was what it was all about. Being with someone. So I learned to keep my mouth shut, so I wouldn’t upset her. But, I don’t know, the more I think about it, the more I can’t help feeling it’s all wrong. I feel as if she doesn’t accept me as a person. That there’s a whole part of me she finds distasteful but just puts up with. I tried to explain it to her, you know? Tried to make her understand that just because I can look at an attractive woman and fantasise about what it would be like to have sex with her, it doesn’t mean I love
her
any less. It doesn’t mean I actually want to. Doesn’t mean I would. It’s just normal. Isn’t it?’ Jack nodded. ‘But she can’t see it.’ He shook his head. ‘She really can’t see it. It isn’t about feeling possessive. I used to think it was about feeling possessive. But it’s not. She really does believe it’s all a bit unsavoury. That thinking about sex is a bit unsavoury. That
I’m
a bit unsavoury. That I’m bad.’

‘A disgusting pig.’

‘A disgusting pig.’ He pulled out the can again and tested it against his cheek. ‘I mean, how would you feel if someone described
you
like that?’

Jack thought that half the population had been describing the other half of the population pretty much like that since time began. Slugs and snails. That was it. Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails. Danny was right. It was depressing.

‘I’m sure she doesn’t mean it. I mean, I’m sure she did at the time, but it’s just words. That’s all. Said in the heat of the moment. And, well, she’s not long had a baby, has she? Women go off sex when they have babies. It’s their hormones. They can’t help it.’ So Lydia had told him, at any rate. Some pretty potent hormones, in her case. They’d lasted the best part of a year.

He wished he knew Julie better. They’d never socialised much as couples. Since it became clear there were to be no further little Valentines, Lydia didn’t like being around women with more babies than she had. All he really knew of Julie was that she seemed a quiet, fairly unremarkable woman, who got on, rather stoically, with the business of bringing up her family. But you never did know with most people.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do?’

Danny opened the can and foam surged over the top. ‘Kip here. If that’s all right. Till she’s calmed down a bit.’

Jack thought of something. ‘Hang on. What about next Saturday?’ Their youngest, Fergus, was about to be baptised. And Jack was to be godfather. Which scared him a little, moved though he was to have been asked.

‘What about next Saturday?’

‘Isn’t it the christening next Saturday?’

Danny scowled. ‘Next Saturday week. In theory.’ He slurped noisily at the overspill and stared at the carpet.

‘It
will
be OK, mate,’ Jack told him. ‘You’ll see. These things blow over. You’ll sort it.’

The words were empty platitudes. He didn’t know any such thing to be true. But he hoped it, hoped it more sincerely than Danny knew. He gave him a reassuring squeeze on his forearm.

‘You’ll sort it,’ he said again. ‘And in the meantime you can have Ollie’s bed. She knows where you are, and –’

‘No she doesn’t.’

‘Haven’t you rung her?’

‘No, I fucking haven’t.’

‘Shouldn’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you think –’

‘
No
. She can ring me on my mobile if she wants me.’ He upended the can to his lips and walked back into the living room, shoulders drooped. ‘Where were you, anyway? I’ve been trying to get you all evening.’

Jack followed him. ‘I was out having dinner.’

‘Really? With who?’

Jack hesitated a second. ‘Allegra.’

Danny turned around, looking suddenly animated. ‘What – Staunton?’ Jack nodded. Danny rolled his eyes. ‘Tsk! You lucky bugger. Now there’s someone I wouldn’t kick out of bed. There’s someone –’ he waggled the can towards Jack, ‘who definitely wouldn’t call a man a disgusting pig. Why can’t all women be like that? Any joy?’

Jack, all the while that Danny had been talking, had been readying himself for this question. He could, of course, not have mentioned Allegra at all. He hadn’t at work. He could easily have made something up. But what was the point? Half the BBC had been at the bloody restaurant. It would be all over the office by Monday.

‘Joy?’ he asked, to give himself a moment.

Danny gave him what his mother would have described as an old-fashioned look. Though it might have been a leer. ‘Matey-boy, you don’t take Allegra Staunton out to dinner without having at least a small hope of there being a shag on the menu somewhere.’

‘I guess not.’ He felt very tired, all of a sudden. It was all too much stress. Too much stress and manoeuvring.

Danny raised his eyebrows. ‘So?’

‘So, no,’ he replied. ‘No joy.’

It had mainly – no, wholly – been the fault of Allegra’s vibrator. The anxiety had already been present, to be sure, but up until she’d bought that wretched thing out, he’d thought, or at least hoped, he could ride it. But not then. After that it had become almost blackly comic. She’d do whatever he fancied with it, she’d told him. Whatever he liked. And then she’d started twerbling on about prostates or something, and how nice he might find it if she… He’d had to go then. Had to dress and just go.

Funny he should be sitting here talking to Danny about sex and pornography. He’d always thought he’d rather enjoy watching a woman doing things to herself. But did he? As for her other idea… God. There was so much sexual stuff that he’d taken for granted while it was all safely hypothetical – that he’d be up for a threesome, that if Liz Hurley walked into the studio and offered him her body he’d have her up against a wall in a flash, that wife-swapping between interested parties was something he wouldn’t
absolutely
rule out – but now it all seemed risible. Ridiculous and stupid and risible. He didn’t really want any of those things – it was just years of conditioning and blokey banter and pub lore. All he actually wanted right now was someone to love him and cherish him. Someone to help him make dinner, choose a new rug with him, stroll in the woods with him. Someone to love. Which meant his penis – that most cruelly treacherous part of his anatomy – was not actually capable of directing him anywhere he really wanted to go.