Fallout (22 page)

Nina sat on the sofa pretending languor, but imagining Luke walking in hit her like sickening stage-fright. And she must pretend not to know him. She shocked herself. It was mad. She couldn’t imagine it, not really, only a dream-version, of him coming into the house and telling everything, striding up the stairs and confronting Tony with the bare-brave truth of it, and taking her hand. Taking her away.

But he didn’t come.

It was after nine and he still hadn’t. The gas-log fire made the room stifling, burning all the air away. He wasn’t coming. He didn’t love her. She got up and went to the window, forgetting what she looked like, not caring. She held her hands up to the sides of her face, trying to see down into the street. She couldn’t see much – just the reflected room, the vague houses opposite and the tops of bare trees against an orange sky. There was a shout of laughter behind her at something Tony had said. She turned back, heat prickling beneath her dress.

Eleanor was curled in the wicker chair like an elf. She was a dancer and now, recently, a mother, and missing Broadway. She would never go back, everyone knew but her.

‘Nina,’ she said, smiling up at her, ‘I expect you’re dying for us to leave.’

‘Don’t be silly, you and John have to stay. It’s Christmas,’ said Nina and left the room.

They mustn’t go; Luke hadn’t come yet. She went across the landing to the window. She felt tears, painful – he wasn’t going to come. She was making a fool of herself. He had loved her in a clever play and now it was fading. She wasn’t good enough to keep him. She should have known. She would call him. She could call from the kitchen—

‘Nina?’

Tony was on the landing, the people behind him oblivious to the two of them. He walked to her, pale and bright-eyed with chemical sharpness. Nina had the feeling he knew everything – that even before she knew it, he knew it. She kept her face blank.

‘Enjoying yourself?’ he asked, looking into her eyes.

‘It’s so hot,’ said Nina. ‘I was going to get ice.’

‘Let’s open the window,’ said Tony. He unlatched the sash and lifted it. The cold wind blew in. He touched her shoulders and turned her to it. ‘Better?’

Outside was the free night. She pretended he wasn’t observing her. The hard air went straight through her clothes to her skin. She shivered. Tony took her wrist with the thumb and forefinger of one hand and ran the fingertips of the other down her chest then lightly across her nipples.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said. She stepped back quickly and slipped her wrist from his grasp. She closed the window.

‘It wasn’t that bad,’ she said. ‘I’m freezing now.’

She left him and went back into the sitting room, holding her arms up across her breasts. She went straight over to the drinks cabinet and, with her back to her guests, sloshed vodka into a glass and knocked it back as though it would clean her out.

Luke, waiting on the pavement, kept well out of the glow of the street light. They had arranged that he would just ring the bell but she had said not to mention her name – just pretend an apparent taking-up of the open-house Tony was known for. But the phoniness grated. He had been standing in the cold for an hour and a half, arguing with himself.

He walked up and down, leaned a foot against the wall, shook his head, fought the rushing of his blood at the thought of her nearby, trying to drag reason from the dangerous state of himself. Normally you’d at least go along with a friend. It would look as if he was after a job. He might be a burglar; hitting the whisky and slipping ashtrays into his pockets. There was no professional reason Tony Moore would be interested in anything about him. He might even turn him out. To be taken down in front of Nina would be humiliating. He wasn’t proud but – that.
Paper Pieces
hadn’t even opened yet. It could fall through. Plays folded all the time without ever seeing a first night.

He watched the lighted windows of the house, locked out like a stray cat. Sniffing round her. Unentitled. Undesirable. Poor. He didn’t care about that – he didn’t care about Tony Moore or his acolytes or backers or whoever it was that hung out there, but he couldn’t walk in and stare at Nina all night and pretend he wasn’t, hold out a begging bowl to that great luminary of West End theatre the producer of
Wot, Not Married
?! – he ignored the fact he was also responsible for
In Custody
.

There she was.

Luke watched as she stood in the first-floor window, looking out. Looking for him. She was almost silhouetted, impossibly slight. She turned her back to him.

He would not walk into her house and lie to her husband in a room full of strangers. And not be able to touch her. It wasn’t right.

Three o’clock in the morning. Nina lay wide awake next to Tony. She couldn’t tell if he was sleeping. She slipped out of bed, not daring to breathe, and tiptoed from the room. The telephone rang in the flat like a fire alarm in the silence. Luke sprang up to answer and reached it just as Paul opened his door – shut it again.

She was whispering. She sounded as if she had been, or was, crying.

‘Where were you?’ she said.

‘I couldn’t do it.’

‘I’m in the kitchen. He’s in bed . . .’ He heard her breath shudder.

‘I’m sorry. I just couldn’t.’

‘Never mind.’

‘Never mind?’ he said. She didn’t answer. ‘Nina, it was all wrong. Are you all right?’

There was a silence, then, ‘I can’t stand it here,’ she whispered. ‘I hate it here.’

‘Well, leave. Whenever you want. Tomorrow. Now.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Why is it silly?’

She didn’t answer.

‘You don’t know me,’ he said. ‘I can – care for you. You’ll see.’

He heard himself make promises he had never thought of before, commitment coming to him fully formed, a sureness he had never felt.

‘Nina?’

‘It’s not that,’ she said.

‘What, then?’

‘He—’ She stopped. He wasn’t sure if she’d said something.

‘What? What did you say?’

‘Nothing. I can’t talk. I have to go,’ she said.

‘No. Don’t go—’ There. Now he was desperate.

‘But when shall I see you?’ she said, and it felt like a reward.

He felt weak. He sat down on the floor, getting his breath.

‘Luke,’ she said, urgently, ‘come to the theatre at six thirty. Come back – I’ll be there.’

And Luke lay down on the floor in the dark with the phone pressed to his ear and loved her.

‘Are you mad?’ he said quietly. ‘What could we do in half an hour?’

Nina put down the phone. Upstairs in their bedroom Tony drowsily heard the
ting
at his bedside as the extension went down and he opened his eyes.

The next evening Nina went in to the theatre early, passed Leigh in the corridor with a smile and went to her dressing room. She waited, standing, facing the door.

The moments passed. Her heart beat fast. His knock, and quietly, ‘Nina?’

‘Yes.’

He opened the door, came in. ‘Nice,’ he said at this new place for them to be in.

She was disorientated by the sight of him, couldn’t move.

He took off his coat and laid it down on the floor, took the cloth that covered her broken armchair, a shawl, a dressing gown. They lay down on the hard floor just covered, without a word, and he made love to her. He pushed up her skirt, pulled her underwear to the side and went hard into her, no waiting. She wrapped her arms around him tightly, his cheek pressed against hers, her lips next to his ear. She pushed up to meet him as he went deeper. They stayed like that, holding the deepest, longest moment still, as if they could stop time passing, breathing softly. Then when he moved in her again she whispered to him and her voice was in his ear as he came. He went down on her almost before he’d finished. The taste of her pleasure, holding her hands.

They lay quietly together and trembling, knowing time was taking them away from one other. Unwillingness. The increasing sensation of loss. She kissed his neck delicately; closer, close, privileged and soft.

‘Why does it feel so perfect?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why it does.’

Then the strange clumsiness of cleaning up with tissues, getting dressed in the hazy disoriented fall from height; slipping reluctantly into the chill of separation.

By the still-closed door she hid inside his arms and he said, ‘Be careful. Be clever. Don’t feel sad about anything. I won’t really be gone. I’ll write to you.’

‘Do you write poems?’

‘I can try it if you want. But you’re prose. And I won’t be able to match you.’

‘Just send me postcards then.’

And at that Luke felt the collision of his worlds, like the unstoppable glide of the planets’ rule.

‘Just one line, so I know you’re there,’ she said. It was as if she knew his past and secrets, knew them all. ‘Every day, one line. What would it be?’

‘I love you,’ he said, automatically.

Good evening, ladies and gents, this is your half-hour call
, said the speaker above their heads.
Thirty minutes to curtain up. Thank you.

They tried to smile. He should leave.

‘What will your Christmas be like?’ he asked, not letting her go.

‘We’ll visit my aunt. Just drinks – deadly.’

‘Does . . .’ he couldn’t say Tony’s name ‘he have family?’

She shrugged. ‘He’s a closed book. We’ll have lunch out – widows and orphans.’

‘You won’t let him touch you?’

‘I’ll try not to.’

‘Please.’

‘I don’t know what will happen. There’s nothing I can do.’

Luke was amazed at his flat-out sickened jealousy. And how much it hurt.

‘You?’ she said, not seeing what she did to him.

‘Me what?’

‘Your Christmas.’

‘I go home,’ said Luke flatly.

‘That’s nice.’

Nice
. He didn’t answer.

Footsteps outside. Voices. He had to go. He held her face. He kissed her forehead. He tried to take in all of her but each second made it worse and he couldn’t.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

Luke took the two trains to Seston on Christmas Eve morning. He took food with him because there would be nothing open, feeling like a strange, unimaginative Father Christmas with a holdall full of raw meat and vegetables. He brought light bulbs with him too this year, because his father let them go out one by one, and when Luke had been there last Christmas the house was all but unlit. He hauled the bag onto the train at King’s Cross and off again at Lincoln. By the time he was on the small train to Seston his life in London had drawn back into shadow.

Entering the familiar, alien house he paused, gauging the atmosphere. The year before, his father had forgotten what day it was and they had cleaned the kitchen together; mould on the plates, stacks of chip paper, empty bottles, squalor that had disturbed even Luke who thought he had long since stopped being shocked by his father’s incapacity. But this year there was no need for the light bulbs, the lights worked, and Tomasz had put tinsel along the mantelpiece in the kitchen, even though the fireplace contained only the boiler. Luke smiled at the pathos, holding his father in a firm embrace, as if he could transfer his strength to him, and the fat red tinsel shone, looped against the neglected wall. Tomasz, in his sixties, was still a big man, but Luke was taller and each year stronger in comparison as his father’s body shrunk onto his bones.

Luke fried pork chops for their tea, flashing fat flames from the pan, and kept a galloping monologue going, wanting to talk about Nina but fearing what this place would do to her name if she was spoken of here; his father at the table with his bottle and the dented bins in the yard by the outside toilet. Nina. Her fragile name would diminish and fade, or he would find the house even more stupidly disastrous than it was already.

‘How’s my mother? Have you seen her?’ he asked, knowing his father had not.

He always asked because it was important Tomasz knew that it would be the right thing to do to see her.

‘We’ll walk there in the morning, Dad. We should leave at eleven,’ he said.

There wasn’t a bus to the hospital on Christmas Day; it was a four-mile annual pilgrimage they made on foot.

He managed to ignore his father even while talking to him, just as he had done in childhood, and when he went to bed he stood in his room, alone at last, and thought doggedly,
Tonight, tomorrow night, and away again.

Each year it was the same, but this one made both better and worse, because of Nina and
Paper Pieces
. He said his rosary, thanked Leigh for it as he always did – without even noticing – Leigh and the God he didn’t believe in at all, and then he worked on
Diversion
until he fell asleep; small notes, comforting himself with minutiae. The bed had been too small for him as long as he could remember. He went onto his side to fit into it, curved around an imaginary Nina to keep her safe, and closed his eyes.

Leigh’s mother had come from New York for Christmas and was staying in a friend’s flat in Knightsbridge. On Christmas Eve she and Leigh wandered around Harrods – the cashmere, the scent, the book department.

Erica was a long-legged woman with glossy black hair and a matt, highly coloured complexion, Leigh’s bone structure but rail-thin. She was a privileged New Yorker who had met Leigh’s father at the Sorbonne. He was a post-graduate European historian, who would teach and planned to publish; he would not leave London again. Erica was absorbed into the exotica of North London’s liberal elite until two children later, endangered to the soul by her husband’s various blinkered infidelities, she left him.
Your father was a progressive socialist who wanted his wife barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen,
she would say. Leigh saw him only rarely. As a little girl she had craved his attention but her overriding memories were of his closed study door, awareness of the force of his intellect, its dominance in the house. She was fourteen and her brother seventeen when her parents separated and they moved into a flat on Prince of Wales Drive, the furthest point in Erica’s London from Hampstead. It was Leigh – her brother having fled to university – who listened to her mother crying in the next bedroom, or playing records at two o’clock in the morning; who lived with her burning supper or forgetting to buy any at all, slamming the front door as she went out into her erratic newborn life; the loneliness and fresh experimentation of her solitude. Leigh went to Sheffield to university and her mother, liberated further, moved to Manhattan – and into therapy. She acquired a degree in Psychology and a zealot’s passion for women’s liberation. Leigh registered Erica’s triumphs proudly and chose not to see her departure as another infidelity in the succession that had made up her life. She had never visited her mother in New York, Erica preferring to spend her money coming to see her daughter and catch up with old friends.