Breaking and Entering (55 page)

He prowled up and down, the bronze still in his hand, looking out for ‘evidence' – some clue as to her lover's taste; some proof the man had stayed there. He slunk into the kitchen, feeling like a trespasser, gave a swift glance round. Everything seemed much the same: no new foods or acquisitions which might point to a frequent visitor who expected more for breakfast than Juliet's stern morning fare of black coffee and a slice of diet bread. He peered into the fridge: no sausages, no fattening foods, no celebratory champagne. He longed to inspect the bedroom, too, but the door remained firmly shut. He could hear her voice – animated, exuberant, a completely different tone from the one she had used to him just now. She wouldn't talk to her mother like that, and if it was just a casual friend, why couldn't she ring them back, explain she had a visitor?

He snatched up
The Times
, took it with him to his chair and started nicking distractedly through the pages, as he had already done this morning.

‘MORE SEX PLEASE – WE'RE SPARROWS!'

Oh God! Not that again. Every species unfaithful, including cast-off mistresses. He ditched the paper and resorted to his drink, lacing it with self-recrimination. Not only was he overreacting, he was being totally inconsistent and unfair. If you gave up a woman for well-considered reasons, convinced yourself, and her, that there was no future in the relationship, then you could hardly object if she found solace elsewhere.

Except he
did
object – vehemently – and also felt resentful of the fact that she should be prattling on so avidly, as if she had forgotten his existence. He checked his watch again: two minutes to eight. Her escort would be here in fifteen minutes, unless that was him on the phone. Either way, his own presence in the flat could only be a nuisance and embarrassment. Juliet must wish him at the bottom of the ocean, and he felt much the same about her new companion. He was bound to be young and attractive, with no hint of receding hair – some yuppie in the City who bought his suits in Jermyn Street and owned a private plane, or a dashing trendy heart surgeon with a box at the Royal Opera House.

It would be better if they didn't meet, to prevent awkwardness on both sides. Yet he couldn't simply creep away without saying goodbye to Juliet. He paced back to the bedroom door and stood listening just outside, but could hear no sound at all. Was the other person speaking now, or had Juliet rung off at last?

He banged his glass down and began tramping back and forth with deliberately heavy steps, but the noise he made produced no response. Perhaps the call was over and she was lurking in the bedroom to avoid him. Dare he look in, or knock? He remained hovering outside, despising his own vacillation; finally gave a faint tap-tap and opened the door a crack. She lay diagonally across the bed, cradling the receiver; her tight skirt riding up, displaying long black silky legs; her head thrown languorously back, as if she wasn't simply talking on the phone, but making love to it. She hadn't heard his knock, so he pushed the door a little further open. She turned towards him, her radiant flirtatiousness capsizing in an instant, replaced by an indignant frown. She held up her hand like a barrier and shook her head in annoyance; both gestures signalling ‘Keep out!'

He backed away, anger taking over from discomposure as he returned to the lounge and drained his glass in one long resentful gulp. He'd been crazy to come here in the first place. Juliet was bad for him; made him act like a jealous adolescent. He would never set foot in her flat again, but would erect a high brick wall around the whole of Woodleigh Chase.

He seized a pen and paper from the bureau, and, still standing up, started scribbling her a note. ‘I'm off,' he wrote, ‘since you haven't time to talk. And anyway, I hate to interrupt your busy life.'

He underlined the ‘hate' three times, feeling that emotion flaring in his chest: hate for his rival, hate for his ex-mistress, hate for his own crass and puerile self.

Daniel fired maltesers into his mouth like a succession of small brown bullets, then crunched them to a satisfying pulp. He was starving hungry, yet he didn't dare go near a Hampstead restaurant for fear of meeting Juliet and the man he'd already murdered in his mind. He tried to keep his attention on the screen, though the film had started long before he'd wandered in, so he couldn't make much sense of it. It was trendily obscure – shot in black and white, and sub-titled – and apparently set in pre-war Lithuania. The dialogue was scant and interspersed with moody shots of desolate streets, or sudden startling close-ups of old men's faces, pocked with grief and stubble. Long periods of silence alternated with wailing bursts from the depressing and atonal score. Even in normal circumstances, he would have found the thing hard going, but in his present state it was more or less impossible. The meagre plot was inextricably confused with the more dramatic sub-plot of Juliet and her co-star. His mind kept jumping from Lithuania to Chez Antoine, wondering if they were eating there, or already writhing between the sheets.

His eyes strayed back for the umpteenth time to the illuminated clock, though its hands moved just as sluggishly as all his clocks at home. No, wherever they had gone to eat, they couldn't have finished dinner yet; would still be drinking to each other; feet touching under the table, fingers intertwined.

He shook the last Maltesers into his hand, feeling it was insensitive to munch them while the white-haired crone on screen wept for her dead son. (At least he
assumed
the boy was dead. She appeared to have three near-identical sons – dark, gaunt and tragic-looking – so it was all too easy to confuse them.) It would be even more insensitive to nip out to the foyer and buy an ice or a hot dog, yet he found himself on his feet, blundering down the aisle. There wasn't much risk of disturbing his fellow cineastes: he was almost alone in the place, apart from one canoodling couple at the back, and a solitary Indian boy.

Blinking in the bright lights of the foyer, he ordered his hot dog, which was handed to him in a skimpy paper napkin marked ‘Keeping You Satisfied'. The tautly glistening sausage, lying pink and naked in its soft white yielding bed, left him so unnerved that he was unable to bite into it. He returned to his seat in the dark; the warm damp package heavy in his hand. He, too, felt damp in the sweltering heat of the cinema, as if he were sitting in a tropical swamp. No wonder so few people had turned up for the film. There were better things to do on an evening in high summer, and if he had any sense himself he'd be relaxing at home on the patio with an iced drink in his hand and the cool night air restoring him to sanity. He had intended to go home, in fact, even driven as far as the end of the Finchley Road. But then he'd driven back again, unable to drag himself away from Juliet country; his dread of laying eyes on his successor mixed with an overwhelming urge to see the competition. After driving round in circles, cursing Hampstead's twee congested village, he had finally found a parking-space and stalked into a cinema, reverting to his original plan. And he'd been here for the last half-hour – half-century.

He made a renewed effort to follow what was happening on the screen, though the images seemed tediously repetitive – further combinations of weeping, angst and stubble, accompanied by the keening of a cello. He shut his eyes to watch the second film: Juliet disrobing in the bedroom, her wild dark bush surprising him, as it never failed to do. It was so different from her head-hair: not a glossy well-tamed chestnut, but much darker and unruly, with defiant whorls escaping from her ultra-brief silk pants.

Still clutching his hot dog, he crept towards the exit again; managed to get as far as the street this time. When he and Juliet went out to dinner, they had always made a point of returning early; skipping coffee and liqueurs for more intimate delights at home. Juliet and partner might be doing the same this evening. All he really wanted was a brief glimpse of the fellow, then he'd go home satisfied – or at least with his curiosity assuaged.

He drove to Juliet's street once more, parking in a shadowy spot a safe distance from the flat. Woodleigh Chase was mercifully well-lit, Victorian-style lamps throwing obliging swathes of light across every door and pathway. No one seemed to be about, but he settled himself in the driving-seat, with the uncomfortable sensation that he was behaving like a teenager, spying on a couple like this – and fruitlessly, he was beginning to suspect. They might have gone to
his
place, which could be the other side of London – gone anywhere, for God's sake: Surrey, Scotland, Wales.

Wales! He'd actually forgotten its existence; nor had he spared a thought for Penny since that fleeting memory of her earrings in the drawer. Yet it was for
her
sake that he'd finished things with Juliet, so how could he be so devious as to sneak back to his mistress's lair?

Exasperated, he switched on the ignition and was about to pull away when he saw two figures turning the corner and strolling along the pavement towards the elaborate wrought-iron gates of Woodleigh Chase. One of them was instantly familiar, but she was accompanied by another woman – a younger, plumper girl with fairish hair. He stared in disbelief. What a complete and utter fool he was! All that jealous anguish and she'd merely been out with a girlfriend. Well, thank God they hadn't spotted him. The sensible thing now would be to drive straight home, as he had originally intended, and leave Juliet alone.

Except she wasn't alone – not yet, anyhow. He craned his neck to watch, saw both women slip through the front entrance. For one ridiculous moment he wondered if they were going upstairs not for coffee or a nightcap, but for kisses and caresses like Penny and Corinna.

He thumped his fist on his knee. He was getting worse and worse, becoming almost paranoid. Did he intend to stay here all night, checking every creak and whimper of that inscrutable blue door? Admittedly the alternative was little more appealing: to return to an empty house (and bed), and then wake to the prospect of an empty, endless Sunday.

He switched on the radio and caught the last few minutes of a quiz show: how many square yards in an acre; why was Aethelred the Unready so called? He got both answers wrong: he was out by eight hundred as regarded the square yards, and thought Unready meant ‘indecisive', instead of ‘lacking counsel'. Daniel the Indecisive – well, that was right, at any rate. He dithered for a further fifteen minutes, flicking along the wavelength from one station to another, without finding any programme to rival his compulsive interest in Juliet's front door.

Halfway through the Jasper Jones Request Show (which in normal circumstances he would have avoided like the plague) the young plumpish female re-emerged, this time on her own. She slammed the door behind her and stood buttoning up her jacket, then strode purposefully away, down the path and along the shadowy street. Was it just his imagination, or did she look a shade dishevelled, her hair more tousled than it had been earlier?

He snapped off the radio and jumped out of the car, darting through the gates of Woodleigh Chase. If he rang Juliet's bell now, she would assume it was her girlfriend, doubling back to fetch something she'd forgotten. He wouldn't even have to give his name, just sidle in as she released the door.

‘
If
you're lucky,' he told himself, pressing the buzzer with a nervous but determined finger, and praying to the gods he didn't believe in.

One of them must exist. The door opened with no question and no fuss, and he sprinted gratefully upstairs; his panicked heartbeat resounding through the stairwell.

He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray, staring at it with fury and disgust. The crumpled fag-end seemed to be snuggling up to Juliet's red-stained one – the only kind of closeness they had achieved. He'd been so disconcerted to find her already undressed (and absolutely beside herself with fury – accusing him of spying on her, behaving like a lunatic), that he had snatched a cigarette almost in self-defence. He could hardly deny the charges when he'd condemned himself in almost identical terms. None the less, he'd shouted back, and things had spiralled out of control into a vitriolic row, which had left them both shaking – and both smoking.

He closed his eyes for a moment. The strained, resentful silence was almost more disturbing than the slanging match. He felt so ashamed, so tired, he hid his head in his hands, as if to creep into oblivion. He could smell nicotine on his fingers, taste it in his mouth – a harsh repellent taste, which didn't stop him craving a second cigarette. He reached for the packet, but all at once a different smell engulfed him: the reek of Sayers's pipe, as the chaplain's foul and pungent breath whiffled in his face. The effect was instantaneous: tears pricked at his eyelids, started sliding down his cheeks – the traumatic tears of a twelve-year-old. Horrified, he tried to blink them away, but they continued unabated, in full view of Juliet. She had never seen him cry – the very thought was mortifying. She would despise him even more now.

He turned his back on her, but he couldn't stop his shoulders shaking, nor control his violent sobs. He was cracking up, revealing himself as a spineless sissy to a woman he respected. He was aware of her arm creeping round his shoulders, her perfume in his nostrils, displacing the tobacco. She had come to sit beside him, and instead of angry words she was whispering soothing phrases, like a mother calming her hysterical child. He tried to speak and couldn't. It was so extraordinary, so startling, to be close to her again, to feel her arms encircling him. She was wearing nothing but a housecoat, tied loosely at the waist, and her bare feet looked strangely vulnerable without their usual stylish footwear. It was as if by taking off her high-heeled shoes and formal navy skirt she had also removed a barrier between them. Admittedly, she'd been incensed when he'd first caught her dishabille, but she was now speaking to him more tenderly than he had ever imagined possible.