Strange Loyalties (30 page)

The restaurant was in an alleyway in the West End. Jan's flat was above it and had a metal work balcony which I liked. The flat had an outside door that you reached by means of a stairway. It could also be entered through a back staircase in the restaurant. Why Jan should decide that we had to go in through the restaurant I do not know. There may have been a logic at the time, now lost forever.

Inside the restaurant, all was pleasantly dim. Light came in from the streetlamps outside, as if filtered through gauze. Each empty table, draped simply in pink cloth, floated like a lotus in a pool. I moved with effortless grace among the tables and barked my shin very painfully on metal. I thought I was going to scream. After a brief, soundless dance, I looked down. I saw an object I had always hated.

It was a large metal flowerpot. It contained a lot of money,
mainly coins but with quite a number of notes. It was supposed to be a unique tradition of the restaurant. The idea was that, since everybody who worked here was well enough paid, any tips were put into the flowerpot. Once the amount of money became impressive, it would be given to charity. I didn't mind the thought so much. But I despised the public, patronising style of it. It was enough to make me worry about Jan. I was exhausted trying to connect with her anyway. The flowerpot palpitated, along with my leg, into a symbol. It blocked my way. This route I may go no further. Jan was still talking, oblivious to my pain.

‘But we'll have an alcove. Leading through to where the coffee-room is. It'll be like a room inside a room. Privacy inside privacy. More whispery than the main place.'

‘Hey, Lady of the Manor!' I called.

She turned towards me. Having thrown her coat off, her body was the only sheer presence in the vagueness of the room. She was looking at me quizzically.

‘I've had this,' I said. ‘For God's sake, take your pants off and put them round your mouth.'

I was as shocked as she was. But her shock became assurance more quickly. We looked at each other without the mediation of accidental circumstances or deliberate mannerisms and accepted the challenge. It was as if some kind of smoked glass were no longer between us – say, the window of a Daimler had come soundlessly down. She was face to face with the scuffler in the street. She smiled and waited to speak. When she spoke, it was just the one word. The word was a name. She said the word gloatingly, as if she were a spider that had found a species of fly it particularly enjoyed dismembering.

‘Sexist!' she said softly.

‘All right,' I said. ‘Take your pants off and put them round
my
mouth. Even better. I love the taste of you any way it comes. But let's just meet.'

She stared at me.

‘Well,' she said. ‘If you're that desperate. You know where they are.'

If I hadn't known, I would have found out. She was standing, still as a startled animal, as if she had caught the sudden whiff of our own nature and knew we were its quarry. I came towards her. I did not touch her. I stood close to her and took her scent. That woman smell, may it always fuse every light in my head and teach me to wait again till my senses glow in the dark.

I reached down very gently. My fingers did not touch her. With both hands, I found the hem of her dress at the outside of each leg. I eased her dress up, very slowly. There being no attack, there was no resistance. As the cloth came above her thighs, it struggled and, in that feeling, the sensuality of her hips seized me more potently than if I had looked or touched. When the dress was crumpled round her waist, I released it and it stayed there.

In the half-dark, the whiteness of her thighs shone above the stocking-tops. Her legs were strong and beautiful. To my awed reverence they might as well have been the pillars to some temple. The white brocaded pants concealed her darkness. I knelt down and softly began to lick the insides of her thighs. I became engrossed, as if I had found my life's work. She began to moan faintly. The sound grew, part pleasure, part complaint, like an animal that wanted to leave its lair but was
afraid to. All the words of the evening had translated into this – a licking tongue, inarticulate noises, the sounds of need. Her legs were trembling and they did not so much part as they thawed open.

I reached up with both hands and pulled her pants down. The pants were pretty but they were an ugliness compared with what they were hiding. As I eased them over her ankles and she stepped out, her legs buckled and she closed on me like a trap I wanted to be caught in.

On the floor we stripped each other with an urgency that precluded the need for technique. It happened that we became naked. The rest took place beyond much that we could do about it. Such lust doesn't submit suggestions to a committee to be ratified. It descends like a visiting divinity out of the machine and says, ‘You'll do this and this and this. And then you'll do that.' We did. We ended with Jan sprawled naked across one of the tables, her hands grasping its edges, her buttocks hoisted in the air, and me serving her manically from the back. The idea of making love on the table in La Bona Sospira had, unintentionally, managed to fulfil itself. We had found a way past our pretences to ourselves. Pleased to meet us. The smart detective was a gasping, obedient servant of his phallus. The suave business-woman was an abandonment of beautiful, welcoming flesh. Oh, the lies we tell in the daylight about what we are in the dark. We came finally together with a terrible shuddering I thought I might not survive. The force of the moment shook me like a rat. I felt the strength of her loins would pull me outside in.

I fell across her. We lay. I lipped her back, like someone trying to convince himself he is still alive. ‘Oh, darling, oh,'
Jan said. She didn't move. She lay spread-eagled, as if she had been fused to the table. It was a while before either of us said anything else. We had to wait for the intensity of what had happened to leave. Somehow, it didn't seem right to speak in its presence. It was Jan who spoke again, reintroducing us to practicality.

‘We're beside a window,' she said. ‘I suppose we'd better move.'

I pinned her to the table.

‘No chance,' I said. ‘I'm going to keep you here for good. Make us own up to what we're really like.'

‘Could be awkward at the party.'

‘Don't care. And they can decorate around us. Could make the place's name. How's this for trendy decor?'

‘Some people might object.'

‘More likely to follow suit. Or follow suitless. We could start the revolution right here. Own up. Strip off. Make love.'

‘Or we could just get the jail.'

‘No problem. I'm a policeman.'

‘Oh, I know.'

I had said the wrong thing. It was a cold shower after love, diminishing our intimacy. Our difficulties were gathering again in the room around us. I tried to disperse them.

‘I'm glad you bought strong tables for this place.'

‘I better remember to change the table-cover,' she said, ‘before the hygiene-inspector comes.'

But the levity didn't quite work. We eased ourselves apart and gathered our clothes together. The table reverted to a place where business-deals would be made over lunches and people
would act out their fictions of success and self-sufficiency. At least we had blessed it with a kind of human truth.

We took on our problems with our clothes. As we made our way upstairs naked to the flat, we carried our social identities in our arms, our separate commitments, our mutually exclusive purposes, the continuity of our differences. We couldn't stay naked for each other. We hadn't resolved our dilemma, just rendered it irrelevant for a time. We were content with that for now.

Upstairs we lay in bed and held each other in the darkness. We shared skins. We touched hair. We said soft things we hoped came true. Before I slept, I realised that this was the closest thing to home I had, this fragile tent of feeling I could share with Jan.

The phone ripped through it.

D
awn can be a nuisance. It keeps turning up whether you want to see it or not, making noise, repeating a lot of things you know already, breaking your concentration by demanding your attention. Why can't the world leave lovers alone?

I watched Jan struggle with the phone as if it were a new invention she hadn't yet got used to. When she had finally worked out which end went where, it didn't seem to help much.

She said ‘Sorry?' and ‘What?' and ‘Who?' Her voice was hoarse. It made several false starts, tuning up in preparation for another day. As she listened, her eyes wandered blindly round the room, feeling for a familiar object that would remind her of where she was. They came to rest on the Jim Dine print of different-coloured hearts.

‘Who is this again?' she said and waited. ‘Who?'

She turned round to look at the time on the alarm clock. It was half past eight.

‘Oh, yes,' she said. ‘He's here.'

She turned towards me and gave the phone across like a piece of evidence that incriminated me. Her eyes were passing bitter judgment.

‘Hullo,' I said.

‘Jack? Marty Bleasdale.' The Newcastle accent wore a trace of Scots like a tartan scarf. ‘Sorry about this. Ah don't seem to be exactly a welcome caller.'

I was aware of Jan lying beside me, communing with the ceiling in disbelief.

‘It's all right,' I said neutrally, hoping Jan might think I was talking about my health.

‘The reason Ah'm phonin' so early. Melanie gets her flight today. Early evenin'. She wants to talk to you. Ah thought from your point of view, the earlier the better.'

‘That's right, Marty,' I said.

I had to meet her. It was a chance I couldn't pass up. It was the surest way I had to come closer to Matt Mason. But at the moment it was also a way to move further from Jan. I felt the assessing stillness of her presence.

‘Tell you what,' I said. ‘Can you and Melanie come to the Grosvenor about ten? That'll give me time to get there. Shave and stuff. We can talk.'

Jan turned away from me on the bed. I gave him the room number.

‘We'll be there.'

‘Thanks, Marty. Cheers.'

I put the receiver down but the connection was still there in the room. We had been estranged by the presence of others. I looked at the back of Jan's head. It was rejecting me as she felt I had rejected her. I was aggrieved that she was aggrieved. But as I leaned across her and replaced the phone on the bedside table, I caught the smell of her hair and touched the gentle warmth of her skin. I started to kiss her neck and stroke her.
I was aware of her body relaxing sensuously. But the voice came out cold and precise, a computer in a boudoir.

‘You sure you've got time?'

‘Come on, Jan,' I said, mouthing her arm. ‘I don't take an hour and a half to wash and shave. That was all part of the subtle plan, give us some time.'

‘You don't fit
me
in between appointments.'

‘Jan. Don't say that. I've got to talk to these people. And this is my only chance. I've spent a week trying to crack this. I think today maybe I can do it. Just give me this space. I'll see you tonight.'

‘Which one of you will be coming?'

‘Oh, Jan.'

She didn't speak. I began to feel the outline of her body under the covers. She went soft and then stiffened. She pushed my hand away with her arm. I lay with my emotions all dressed up and nowhere to go. I tried to touch her again.

‘No way,' she said.

I looked at the ceiling.

‘Not even position 42?' I said.

‘Piss off.'

I kissed her hair and got out of bed. As I was putting on my clothes, it started – one of those quarrels that grow out of a triviality, a hairline crack that causes a subsidence.

‘Who was that person?' she said without looking at me.

‘That person?'

‘That person. The one who makes Cheetah sound cultured.'

I stood with one leg in my trousers. It was not the best posture from which to project righteous indignation. But I'm a natural improviser.

‘Hey,' I said. ‘That's Marty Bleasdale. As you would know, if you'd paid the politeness of listening to him. He may not have as many plastic cards as Barry Murdoch. But he would make five of him as a person.'

‘Where did Barry come from?'

‘I didn't know he had left.'

In the pause I managed to get my other leg into my trousers.

‘How did he get this number?'

‘Jan. You know I gave it to him. How the hell else would he get it?'

‘You
gave
it to him?
You
gave it to him? So you knew you were going to spend the night here. I didn't have a choice? I seem to be the last to know. Maybe I should check my engagement diary out with Marty bloody Bleasdale.'

‘It's not like that,' I said. ‘You know it. I just hoped I would be here. It's happened before, you know. In case you've forgotten. I gave him the number in case. He obviously phoned the hotel first. Then tried here.'

‘How many other people have you given my number to?'

‘Nobody else. I don't have to. You're good enough at doing that without my help.'

That was a mistake, one of jealousy's blind swipes that connects with nothing and just leaves you vulnerable to the counter-punch. I tried to duck it by buttoning my shirt and looking for my tie.

‘I've had enough,' she said.

‘Look, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I –'

‘No,' she said. ‘It's not that. It's everything. This isn't a house to you. It's an office with a bed in it. And it always will be. There always will be strangers in it. You bring them with you.
I don't want to know about their lives. I've got my own to live. I think I better learn to live it without you.'

I had found my tie. Making a knot in it became a very slow process, almost ceremonial. I sensed that perhaps I was dressing for a final departure. This conversation was our relationship in miniature, compressed but exactly detailed. The central motif was the conflict between Jan's need to live towards ourselves, what was in here, and mine to live towards what was out there. I didn't see how the conflict could be resolved. The fault was mine. I almost garrotted myself with my tie. The anger was not against Jan. It was against myself and also against something I hadn't yet located. Perhaps today I would. Then she said a strange thing.