Little Bee (21 page)

I
remember looking down at the carpet tiles in Lawrence’s office. I can still see
them now, with hyperreal clarity, every minute gray acrylic fiber of them,
gleaming in the fluorescent light, coarse and glossy and tightly curled,
lascivious, obscene, the gray pubic fuzz of an aging administrative body. I
stared at them as if I had never seen carpet tiles before. I didn’t want to
meet Lawrence’s eyes.

“Please,”
I said. “Stop it.”

Lawrence
blinked and inclined his head, innocently. “Stop what?” he said.

And,
just like that, for the moment, it was gone.

I
breathed again. Above us, one of the fluorescent tubes was buzzing loudly.

“Why
did the home secretary have to resign?” I said.

Lawrence
raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you don’t know. I thought you were a
journalist.”

“Not
a serious one.
Nixie
does current affairs the way
The Economist
does shoes.
On a
need-to-know basis.”

“The
home secretary had to resign because he fast-tracked a visa for his lover’s
nanny.”

“You
believe that?”

“I
don’t really care one way or the other. But he never seemed that stupid to me. Oh,
listen to them.”

From
outside Lawrence’s door there was laughing and shouting. I heard the sound of
paper being scrunched into a ball. Feet scuffed on the carpet. A paper ball
clanged into a metal waste-paper basket.

“They’re
playing corridor football,” said Lawrence. “They’re actually celebrating.”

“You
think they set him up?”

He
sighed. “I’ll never know what they did to him, Sarah. I didn’t go to the right
schools for that. My job is just to write a good-bye letter to the man. What
would you put?”

“It’s
hard if you didn’t really know him. I suppose you’ll just have to stick to
generalities.”

Lawrence
groaned.

“But
I’m terrible at this,” he said. “I’m the sort of person who needs to know what
I’m talking about. I can’t just write some spiel.”

I
looked around his office.

“I’m
in the same position,” I said. “And like it or not, you seem to have become my
interview.”

“So?”

“So,
you’re not making it easy for me.”

“In what way?”

“Well,
you haven’t exactly personalized this place, have you? No golf trophies, no
family photos, nothing that gives me the slightest clue who you are.”

Lawrence
looked up at me. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to stick to generalities,” he
said.

I
smiled. “Nice,” I said.

“Thank
you.”

I
felt the ache of adrenaline again.

“You
really don’t fit in here, do you?”

“Listen,
I very much doubt I’ll still be working here tomorrow if I can’t think of
something suitably noncommittal to write to the old boss in the next twenty
minutes.”

“So
write something.”

“But
seriously, I can’t think of anything.”

I
sighed.
“Shame.
You seemed too nice to be such a
loser.”

Lawrence
grinned. “Well,” he said. “You seemed quite beautiful enough to be so
mistaken.”

I
realized I was smiling back at him. “A little blond of me, you think?”

“Hmm.
I think your roots are showing.”

“Well
I don’t think you’re a loser, if you must know. I think you’re just unhappy.”

“Oh,
do you?
With your gimlet eye for emotional cues?”

“Yes,
I do.”

Lawrence
blinked and looked down at his keyboard. I realized he was blushing.

“Oh,
sorry,
” I said. “God, I shouldn’t have said that. I
got carried away, I don’t even know you, I’m so sorry. You look really hurt.”

“Maybe
I’m just doing vulnerable.”

Lawrence
drew in his elbows—drew in all of
himself
in fact, so
that he appeared to withdraw into his body on the royal-blue upholstery of his
swivel chair. He paused, and tapped out a line on his computer. The keyboard
was a cheap one, the kind where the keys have a high travel and they squeak on
the downstroke. He sat there so long without moving that I went behind his desk
and looked over his shoulder to see what he had written.

You tried your utmost and it has still to be
seen_

That
was the unfinished sentence that stood, without resolution or caveat, on his
computer screen. The cursor blinked at the end of the line. From outside in the
street, police sirens screamed in and out of phase. He turned to me. The
bearings squealed in his chair.

“So
tell me something,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Is
it your husband who makes you unhappy?”

“What?
You don’t know anything about my husband.”

“It
was one of the first things you said to me.
About your
husband and his opinions.
Why would you mention him to me at all?”

“The
subject came up.”

“The subject of your husband?
You brought it up.”

I
stopped, with my mouth open, trying to remember why he was wrong. Lawrence
smiled, bitterly but without malice.

“I
think it’s because you’re not very happy either,” he said.

I
moved quickly out from behind his desk—my turn to blush now—and I went over to
the window. I rolled my head on the cool glass and looked down at the ordinary
life in the street. Lawrence came to stand beside me.

“So,”
he said. “Now it’s me who’s sorry. I suppose you’ll tell me I should leave the
close observation to you journalists.”

I
smiled, despite myself. “What was that line you were in the middle of writing?”
I said.

“
You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen
…I don’t
know
,
I’m going to say,
still to
be seen what great fruits your work will bear,
or
still
to be seen what the successes of your hard work will be.
Something open-ended like that.”

“Or
you could just leave it how it is,” I said.

“It
isn’t finished,” said Lawrence.

“But
it’s rather good,” I said. “It’s got us this far, hasn’t it?”

The
cursor blinked and my lips parted and we kissed and kissed and kissed. I clung
to him and whispered in his ear. Afterward I retrieved my knickers from the
gray carpet tiles, and pulled them on under my skirt. I smoothed down my
blouse, and Lawrence sat back at his desk.

I
looked through the window at a different world from the one I had left out
there.

“I’ve
never done that before,” I said.

“No,
you haven’t,” said Lawrence. “I’d have remembered.”

He
stared at the screen for a full minute with the unfinished line on it and then,
with my lipstick still on his lips, smashed down a full stop.
You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen.
Twenty
minutes later, the letter was transcribed to Braille and put in the post. Lawrence’s
colleagues hadn’t cared enough to proofread it.

Andrew
called. My mobile went in Lawrence’s office and I will never forget the first
thing Andrew said:
This is fuckin fantastic, Sarah. This
story is going to be full-on for weeks. They’ve commissioned me to write an
extended feature on the home secretary’s downfall. This is pay dirt, Sarah.
They’ve given me a team of researchers. But I’m going to be in the office all
hours on this one. You’ll be all right looking after Charlie, won’t you?

I
switched off the phone, very gently. It was simpler than announcing to Andrew
the change in our way of life. It was easier than explaining to him: our
marriage has just been mortally wounded, quite by accident, by a gang of
bullies picking on a blind man.

I
put down the phone and I looked at Lawrence. “I’d really like to see you
again,” I said.

Ours
was an office-hours affair.
A long-lunches-in-short-skirts
affair.
A sneaked-afternoons-in-nice-hotels affair.
Even the occasional evening.
Andrew was pulling
all-nighters in the newspaper’s offices, and so long as I could find a
babysitter, Lawrence and I could do what we liked. Occasionally in a lunch hour
that had extended almost to teatime, with white wine in my hand and Lawrence
naked beside me, I thought about all the journalists who were not receiving
guided tours, all the meet-the-media breakfasts that were not getting planned,
and all the press releases that were waiting on Lawrence’s computer with the
cursor blinking at the end of the last unfinished sentence.
This new target represents another significant advance in the
government’s ongoing program of_

Handing out in-flight meals in a plane crash.
That’s what our affair was meant to
be. Lawrence and I escaped from our own tragedies and into each other, and for
six months Britain slowed incrementally during normal office hours. I wish I
could say that’s all it was.
Nothing serious.
Nothing sentimental.
Just a merciful
interruption.
A brief, blinking cursor before our old stories resumed.

But
it was gorgeous. I gave myself completely to Lawrence in a way that I never had
with Andrew. It happened easily, without any effort on my part. I cried when we
made love. It just happened; it wasn’t an act. I held him till my arms ached
and I felt agonies of tenderness. I never let him know. I never let him know,
either, that I scrolled through his BlackBerry, read his e-mails, read his mind
while he slept. When I started the affair, I think it could have been with
anyone. It was the affair that was inevitable, not the specific man. But
slowly, I started to adore Lawrence. To have an affair, I began to realize, was
a relatively minor transgression. But to really escape from Andrew, to really
become myself, I had to go the whole way and fall in love. And again, I didn’t
have to make an effort to fall in love with Lawrence. All I had to do was to
permit myself to topple.
This is quite safe,
I told
myself: the psyche is made to absorb the shock of such falls.

I
still cried when we made love, but now I also cried when we couldn’t.

It
became a source of worry, hiding the affair. The actual assignations were
simply concealed from Andrew, of course, and I made a point of never mentioning
Andrew or his work when I was with Lawrence, in case he himself got too
curious. I put up a high fence around the affair. In my mind I declared it to
be another country and I policed its border ruthlessly.

Harder
to disguise was the incontrovertible change in me. I felt
wonderful.
I had never felt less sensible, less serious, less
Surrey.
My skin started to glow. It was so blatant that I tried to conceal it with
foundation, but it was no use: I simply radiated joie de vivre. I started
partying again, as I hadn’t since my early twenties. Lawrence got me in to all
the Home Office events. The new home secretary loved to meet the media, to tell
them over canapés how tough he was going to be. There were endless soirees, and
always an after-party. I met a new crowd.
Actors, painters,
businesspeople.
I felt a thrill I hadn’t felt since before I met
Andrew—the thrill of realizing I was attractive, of knowing myself
irresistible, of being half drunk on champagne and looking around at the
bright, smiling faces and giggling when I realized that suddenly anything could
happen.

So
I should hardly have been surprised when it did. Inevitably, at one of those
parties, I finally bumped into my husband, crumpled and red-eyed from the
office. Andrew hated parties—I suppose he was only there on some fact-finding
mission. Lawrence even introduced us.
A packed room.
Music—flagship British music—some band that had made it big on the internet. Lawrence,
beaming, flushed with champagne, his hand resting riskily on the small of my
back.

“Oh, hi!
Hi! Andrew O’Rourke, this is Sarah Summers. Sarah
is the editor of
Nixie.
Andrew’s a columnist for
The Times,
terrific writer, strong opinions. I’m sure you
two are going to get on.”

“So
was the priest,” said Andrew.

“I’m
sorry?”

“He
was sure we were going to get on.
When he married us.”

Andrew, lighthearted, almost smiling.
Lawrence—poor
Lawrence—quickly removing his hand from my back.
Andrew,
noticing.
Andrew, suddenly unsmiling.

“I
didn’t know you’d be here, Sarah.”

“Yes.
Well. I. Oh. It was a last-minute thing. The magazine…you know.”

My body betraying me, blushing from my ankles
to the crown of my head.
My childhood, my inner Surrey, reawakened and vengeful
, redrawing
its county boundaries to annex my new life. I
looked down at my shoes. I looked up. Andrew still there, standing very still,
very quiet—all the opinion, for once, drained out of him.