Spring (8 page)

‘Well…’ he said. ‘I hope…’

‘Can I kiss you?’

It was so sudden that he just said, ‘M-­hm,’ and she stood on tip-­toe and kissed him wetly on the mouth.

A few moments later the Saturday-­night hubbub of station and street swam back. ‘I’ll see you next week,’ she said.

‘Okay…’

She went into the lightbox of the station, and he watched her through the snapping ticket barriers.

The next morning he was up early to take the train to Huntingdon.

The mare had not run since that murky January day. There was a scare when the meeting at which her final prep run was supposed to have taken place, at Fakenham, was abandoned due to waterlogging. That was while he was in Marrakech. Miller had said he would enter her for something else.

‘Fontwell, Wednesday,’ Freddy says.

‘Fontwell?’

‘It’s in Sussex.’

‘I know. What race?’

Freddy shrugs. ‘He did tell me,’ he says. ‘Some novices’ hurdle. Do you want to get something to eat? A kebab?’ There is a kebab place on Earls Court Road that Freddy particularly likes. He is on first-­name terms with Mehmet and the others there.

‘No, I can’t,’ James says, looking at his watch.

‘Why not?’

‘I have to meet someone.’

5

H
e has been waiting for this moment, the moment when he sees her, for nearly a week now. She is already there, sitting at a small table with a vodka and tonic. And something is up—­when he tries to kiss her she moves her head to the side, though not enough to prevent their lips from smudgily touching. She seems unnaturally still, except for her eyes, which are nervously mobile. When he touches her she hardly seems to notice. There is, however, something strangely playful about all this. There is something strangely playful about the impish S-­shaped smile which sits in her small lips while he talks. That is probably why he is not worrying, not even about her visitor of yesterday night, whoever he was. Why he is even enjoying it. Why it is even exciting him. There is even something playful about the way that she will not let him kiss her on the mouth. Whenever he tries—­and leaning towards her, he tries often—­she smiles and turns her face away. They stay in the pub for two drinks—­she has another V & T—­and then she says she wants to get something to eat and they walk to a noodle place she knows on Upper Street.

There, things are less playful. She seems sadder. She drinks water. They share a platter of fried pastry parcels. They each have a deep bowl of soupy noodles. They still only talk about insignificant things—­for some reason, he is explaining to her how the stock market works. Though she lets him take her hands in his, she looks down at her empty soup bowl when he does. He notices her rosy, tattered cuticles—­they are even worse than usual. Her hands are usually a fiery pink, weathered by soap and water, wrinkled on the knuckles, the nails snipped very short. So different from her feet, which he has told her more than once are the prettiest he has ever seen—­small and smooth, with soft pretty toes, and the same even ivory hue all over.

When he tries to kiss her, she turns her head away again. There is nothing playful about the way she does it now, and for the first time he looks pained and says, ‘What is it?’

Instead of answering, she asks him whether he wants to see the photos she took in Morocco.

‘Of course,’ he says.

Outside he puts up the umbrella. They have to squeeze together to fit under it. They have not been in such proximity all evening and he smells the faded scent of the perfume—­so familiar a smell, lingering in woollens—­that she put on in the morning when she went to work. It is only a short walk to her flat. They have made this ingress together many times. They know what to do. He shakes out the umbrella and takes off his shoes. She turns on some lights and starts to make mint tea. When he puts his arms around her, however, she looks at him quizzically, as if it is something he has never done until that moment. ‘Why won’t you kiss me?’ he says.

‘I just won’t.’

‘What do you mean you just won’t?’

She leaves the kitchen with the mugs.

‘What do you mean you just won’t?’ he says, sitting down next to her on the sofa. When he tries to, she sucks in her lips and shakes her head. She laughs, and lets herself flop over to the side, so that she is half-­lying there. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says, leaning over her. ‘What is it?’

Looking up at him, her eyes move like insects on the surface of a pond, with quick little movements, this way, that way, unable to stay still. ‘Why don’t you ask me some questions?’ she suggests.

‘What sort of questions?’

She shrugs with mock secretiveness and for a moment makes her eyes very wide.

‘What sort of questions?’ he says again.

She sighs, and lets her head loll on the velvet of the sofa. He is looking at her face from a strange perspective, more or less up her nostrils. She is looking up into the tasselled pink lampshade on the table next to the sofa. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Just…’

‘What?’ he says quietly. ‘What is it? Tell me.’

She does not tell him. She pushes him off her and says, ‘I’m going to get ready for bed.’

‘Okay,’ he says, propped on an elbow. ‘I’ll watch you.’

‘If you want.’

‘I do.’

He follows her upstairs. There, however, she takes her pyjamas from under her pillow and leaves him on his own. Eventually he lies down and stares at the ceiling. That this has something to do with the man who was here last night is obvious—­it was obviously a significant visit, and if it was significant, he is pretty sure he knows who it was. In her pyjamas now, she takes a hairbrush from where her things are laid out—­her perfumes and make-­up, her lacquered pots of junk jewellery—­and starts to sweep her hair. She holds it out to the side and sweeps it vigorously. ‘Are you going to stay?’ she says, lifting the duvet on her side.

‘I’ll stay for a while. Hugo’s at home. Otherwise I’d stay the night.’

‘M-­hm.’

They lie there for a few minutes in the lamplight—­her under the duvet, him fully dressed on top of it. Then he jumps up, takes everything off and joins her underneath. His eagerness, maybe, makes her laugh kindly. ‘You like being naked, don’t you,’ she says. ‘I saw Fraser yesterday.’

To hear her say it is surprisingly painful.

‘I know.’

‘You know?’ she says, sitting up.

‘I heard him. When we were talking on the phone.’

‘You heard him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you hear?’

He tells her.

‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘I didn’t know it was him. I didn’t know who it was.’

He tells her that he noticed the way she lost the thread of what they were saying on the phone, that he heard the tension in her voice. She laughs when he tells her these things. And the way he tells them is
meant
to be funny—­it is meant to turn the whole thing into a harmless farce—­and he laughs too. She says, ‘I’m so sorry, James. It was so unlucky he walked in just when I was talking to you. I heard the doorbell and I had this whoosh of adrenalin, and then when I heard him talking to Summer, I wanted to hear what they were saying. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry if I sounded tense. I’m sorry it was so obvious.’

‘That’s okay,’ he says, still quite lightly.

Then, ‘Why was he here? What happened?’

She sighs and flops onto the pillow.

Overhead there is an old-­fashioned ceiling fan with wicker blades—­like something from a tropical hotel, pre-­air conditioning. It was there when she moved into the flat. She never uses it, does not even know if it still works. ‘He phoned me in Morocco. The day we were supposed to go to the mountains. That morning.’ She says they hadn’t spoken for a year, that she was surprised and upset. ‘I mean it was upsetting,’ she says. ‘He said he was just phoning to say hi. I said I was in Morocco. He wanted to know what I was doing there. I said I was with someone and told him to leave me alone. That was it. I
was
upset, though. I’m sorry if I seemed… upset. Or out of sorts or something.’

Lying on his back with his left arm under his head, he puts his other hand pensively inside her pyjama trousers and strokes her pubic hair. ‘That’s okay,’ he says.

He is trying to remember that day. Exactly a week ago. The hour at the poolside, the warm wind stirring the line of palm trees, the shadow of the hotel on the water…

‘I thought you went to the mountains,’ he says.

Surprisingly, she laughs. ‘No, of course not.’

And that night, the terrace on top of the hotel in the Nouvelle Ville, over the thick smog of the town. The hotel turned out to be a sort of whorehouse. They saw one of the men who worked in their own hotel making for the lift and its full ashtray with two fat whores… Yes, she had been upset. He thought she was upset with him for making them miss the minibus to the mountains, and then taking her to a whorehouse. In fact, it had been something else entirely. Nothing to do with him.

She says, ‘A few days ago he phoned me again. He said he wanted to see me. I told him I didn’t want to see him. He insisted. He said he had something to say. So yesterday we went for a drink.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said… he wants to try again.’

They lie there in silence.

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said… I said… I said I’d think about it.’

She turns her head on the pillow. He is just lying there, staring straight up. ‘Are you crying?’ she says softly.

He shakes his head.

‘I said I’d tell him within a week,’ she says.

He is seeing the ceiling fan with a strange intensity. It is as if the whole world has shrunk to that old fan—­its off-­white wicker blades, its thick stalk, the plastic housing of its motor, and the weighted string of tiny stainless-­steel spheres that hangs from the housing.

‘I don’t need a week, though. I know what I’m going to tell him.’

‘What are you going to tell him?’ And then, feeling a need to justify himself, such is his sense that Fraser King has some sort of primacy over him in this situation, ‘I think you should tell me if…’

‘Of course.’

Still, she does not speak for a few seconds.

From the start he has frequently had the sense that she is measuring him against Fraser King—­measuring him in every way, from the most obviously physical to the most ineffably emotional—­measuring him, and finding him wanting. There have been times when seeing her lost in thought—­for instance on the Eurostar as it left Lille Europe—­he experienced the precise, painful feeling that she would prefer to be there with Fraser King than with him. That she would prefer to be
anywhere
with Fraser King than with him. And yet now she is telling him, in effect, that this is not true. Hearing her say it, he feels a hint of euphoria. Fraser King is no longer a factor. Everything is now okay.

It is a feeling that lasts only a few seconds, until she says, ‘I don’t think we should see each other for a while.’

And when that elicits a prolonged silence, ‘I’m sorry.’

He turns to her and sighs and they smile wistfully at each other.

She lets him slip his arm under her neck and snuggles up to him. The way she does this makes him improve his prognosis. When she says she does not think they should see each other ‘for a while’, what he now takes her to mean is maybe a week or two—­until she has told Fraser that she intends to turn him down. Poor Fraser.

‘I’m sorry, James,’ she says.

‘I understand.’

‘Thanks for being so magnanimous.’

‘That’s okay,’ he says. (She laughs.) Easy to be magnanimous when he is the one in her bed. He says, ‘When you say a while…’

‘Mm.’

‘What do you mean?’

She shakes her head—­he feels it move in the hollow of his neck. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I just… I don’t know. Sorry.’ And as if it were part of the apology, she strokes his leg with her foot.

Still studying the ceiling fan, he twists a lock of her hair around his finger. Then he turns onto his side, and studies her face. She submits to this study with a small smile. For the first time that night she does not try to move away when he kisses her on the mouth. Indeed, she even opens her mouth, and there is an immediate surge to heart-­hammering intensity. She does not let this last long, however. He encircles her with his arms and squeezes her. She squeezes him too, and for a long time they lie there like that.

‘Should I turn off the light?’ she whispers.

‘If you want.’

With a sudden twisting movement she turns and sits, takes a sip of water—­with water in her mouth she offers him the glass, he shakes his head—­and switches off the light.

*

It is still dark when he leaves the bed and feels for his things, which are mixed up with hers on the floor. He has a terrible feeling that he is neglecting poor Hugo—­who, having spent the night unexpectedly on his own in Mecklenburgh Street, must urgently need a walk. That is why he is standing there in the dark, even though to all intents and purposes it is still night outside and he has not slept much on the thin pillows, frequently waking to look at the time, in spite of the fact that the alarm was set. Then it went off—­loud and shrill—­and he sat up while she struggled, still essentially asleep, to make it stop.

He is feeling for his things on the floor when she turns on the light. She puts a hand over her eyes. ‘No, it’s okay,’ he says quietly, doing the same. ‘I don’t need the light. Thanks.’ His mouth is thick and faecal-­tasting. He is sweating. It is too hot for him here, where the storage heater seems impossible to switch off and leaks nasty heat all night.

When he is dressed he sits on the edge of the bed, wondering whether she has fallen asleep again. She has not—­as soon as she feels his weight on the mattress, she sits up, and seems to prop herself on an elbow.

‘Okay, I’m going,’ he whispers.

‘Okay.’

He kisses her, lightly touching her lips with his own. Her lips are sleepily warm. Her whole face, which he can hardly see, is sleepily soft and warm. He kisses her again, and is just standing up to leave when she says, ‘James.’

‘Yes.’