The Good Girl (19 page)

I started to feel anxious. Did this mean that he fancied me when he first met me but didn’t any more? Mum always says that if you don’t understand something you should ask questions until you do, so I tried a different tactic.

‘Do you find girls attractive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you find me attractive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want to touch me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not making this easy. Can you give me a bit more, please?’

He
turned to face me and put his hands on my shoulders and dropped down until his head was level with mine and our foreheads were touching.

‘I’ve got this problem, Romy.’ His left leg jiggled nervously up and down and he chewed the side of his lower lip so hard that when he stopped it was slightly swollen. ‘I can only get off watching stuff on the Internet.’

‘What kind of stuff?’

‘Porn. Basically. Basically porn.’

This was new territory for me. Of course I knew what porn was and some girls in my year were into watching it, mainly to expand their repertoire, but it held no interest for me. I pulled away from him.

‘I think quite a lot of boys do that,’ I said, remembering a conversation I’d overheard between Dad and Luke last year where Dad warned my brother that watching too much porn could distort his view of sex and Luke suggested he interview his previous girlfriends before drawing the wrong conclusions.

‘You’re not hearing me,’ he said, taking my hand and stroking it tenderly as though he was telling me that someone had just died. ‘That’s the only way I can have sex.’

He held my gaze. I didn’t flinch, but he must have seen the fear in my eyes.

‘I knew I’d freak you out.’

‘It’s just not what I was expecting.’ I stopped speaking because I didn’t know what to say. Then Jay began talking and the words spewed out.

‘It started when we were living in Ibiza. For research
purposes. I’d met a girl and I was looking to improve my range. But the girl disappeared and the porn habit didn’t. After a while I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d go to the beach in Ibiza and I’d see a woman and catch the curve of her arse against her bikini or that cleft between a woman’s breasts and have to go straight back home to have a bash. Which would have been fine if it was once a day but it wasn’t. And isn’t. It’s more like six or seven.’

‘You’re addicted to Internet porn?’ I said the words slowly, trying to get my head round what he was telling me.

‘I guess so,’ he said, ‘although I’ve never thought of it like that.’

‘I’m not sure what to say.’ I must have recoiled from him. He stepped towards me, looking desperate. He put out a hand but I didn’t want him to touch me.

‘I don’t have any really bad kinks,’ he said hastily. ‘No furries, BDSM … There’s a lot of deviant shit out there.’

‘I don’t even know what any of that means,’ I said, feeling totally out of my depth.

‘I get off on different stuff but my main area of interest is oral. I always come back to that. It’s my specialist subject.’ He almost sounded like he was writing his personal statement for university. His voice went really quiet. ‘No girl in real life has ever been as good as watching it on the Internet.’

This was as bad as it gets. Stratospherically beyond my experience. I could see my reactions reflected in his as I fast-forwarded from fear to contempt, panic and
pity and back to fear again. Surely it was good that he had confided in me? For a moment a small part of me even felt flattered. But almost as quickly I understood that it would have been better never to know because this knowledge was corrosive. And I knew from the reactivity series that corrosion is an irreversible reaction.

‘That’s so messed up.’

He didn’t disagree. ‘It’s like junk food. You crave it and a couple of hours later you want the same thing all over again. I’ve never got as far with a real girl as I have with you and believe me, Romy, it is progress that I can think about you in this way. But I’m stuck in something I can’t get out of. It controls me. I can’t control it.’

I couldn’t find the right words and he mistook my silence for disapproval.

‘I told you you’d hate me.’

‘I don’t hate you,’ I said, feeling totally out of my depth. ‘But I’m not sure where to go from here.’ So I went home.

As soon as she sat down in the restaurant opposite Harry’s old office, Ailsa realized it was a bad idea. But midway through the final speaker of the Seizing Success conference at the Institute of Education she found herself ignoring the conclusions on what makes a good head outstanding and began plotting the quickest route to the ramshackle sprawl of Victorian buildings that Harry affectionately used to call the Warren.

Harry always said that life was a competition between impulse and self-control.

And when Ailsa described to Rachel what she did next, her only explanation was that her self-regulatory system had momentarily short-circuited. When she left Norfolk for London she was not intending to go back to the Italian restaurant opposite the Department of Neuroscience where she had occasionally met Harry for lunch before they had children. The idea only occurred to her as the speaker summed up her conclusions on how to get parents more involved in their children’s education. And there was no obvious connection between the two.

Whispering hurried goodbyes to colleagues sitting either side of her, Ailsa explained she had a train to catch
and left the auditorium two stairs at a time. ‘Like a woman possessed,’ she later told Rachel.

As she stared down at the mozzarella salad that the waiter had put down in front of her, it occurred to Ailsa that the last time she had eaten here with Harry she had been heavily pregnant with Luke. She could remember the sensation of her half-undone zip pressing into her stomach and the tiny track marks it left on her skin when she leaned over the table to spoon pasta into her mouth: her fault for refusing to wear those ugly maternity trousers until the last possible moment. She had endured the discomfort like a Christian wearing sackcloth, telling herself the pain was atonement for the lie she had just told Harry, her husband of less than a year.

The restaurant had barely changed since then. The same black and white photos of Palermo hung on the wall. The menu of typical Sicilian dishes was identical. The owner, originally from East Grinstead, now spoke English with an Italian accent.
Just goes to show if you pretend something for long enough, it can become the truth
, thought Ailsa.

‘Is everything all right, madam?’ he said with a discreet bow.

‘Could I have a glass of house white, please?’ Ailsa asked, unconsciously mimicking the upward lilt at the end of his sentence.

She got out a pen and notebook from her bag to review her conference notes. ‘How to emulate the success of the Finnish school system,’ she had written.
‘Ditch competition, standardization, test-based accountability and choice. Focus on collaboration, personalized learning and ending standardized tests. The reverse of current government policy.’ The implications made her feel dizzy. Someone in the Department of Education would see this and another slew of reforms would rain down into her in-box. Change was sexier than consolidation. God, one bad report from the school inspectors and a head teacher could be out on her ear. She was done with change.

‘Long day?’ asked the owner of the restaurant, returning with her drink.

‘It’s not over yet,’ said Ailsa. She took tiny delicate sips of the wine, like a bee sucking nectar.

From her window seat in the restaurant she had an unrestricted view across to the steps that led up to the main door of the Department of Neuroscience. Since Harry’s departure a glass box had been constructed around the ornate Victorian entrance to give the building the illusion of modernity. A group of students tumbled down the steps and waited inside for the rain to stop. Ailsa hadn’t been back to London since the move to Luckmore and she had forgotten how it never really got dark. Everywhere was aglow. There were street lamps, well-lit shops, offices with strip lighting. Visibility was way better than she could have hoped. She glanced from face to face. Was the girl among them? Would she recognize her? Because of course this was why she had come. The Neuroscience students always came here after
evening lectures. She could admit it to herself now. She needed to know if Harry was telling the truth.

Harry had complained bitterly about the introduction of evening sessions for postgrads when the university had floated the idea fourteen months earlier. It was a small tutorial group, he had explained, but nevertheless would take time away from his work. All lecturers were required to do it, even those who were involved in research. He couldn’t let his students down. He had sounded totally beleaguered.

Ailsa had been broadly sympathetic. Harry had always given the best part of himself to his students. His lectures were legendary. He’d even done a TED Talk on adolescent brain development. Or rather lack of development. Because only in the past decade had technology allowed neuroscientists to discover that the rational, decision-making part of the brain didn’t finish developing until your late twenties. After a decade in airless basements scanning the pre-frontal cortices of teenage volunteers Harry was finally making a name for himself. She offered to pick up the slack at weekends so he could claw back time to work on his projects. He had been grateful. He hugged her and she noticed through his thick winter coat that he had lost his paunch.

‘So exploitative the way you now have to teach so many evenings,’ Ailsa had mentioned to Kath Mason, one of Harry’s colleagues, over dinner at her house a couple of weeks later. Harry had wanted to cancel at the
last minute but Ailsa had insisted they should go. ‘Especially with the pay freeze. Harry is exhausted. You’ll all end up in an early grave.’ It was a throwaway comment at the end of a long conversation with Kath about how average life expectancy had increased by fifteen years since Harry and Kath had graduated from medical school.

It was the way that Kath had paused and put down her pudding spoon that caught Ailsa’s attention. Her eyes told a different story from the carefully composed sentence that came out of her mouth. It was a duality Ailsa recognized from dealing with kids who were in trouble at school.

‘We’re all on different schedules,’ Kath had said firmly. Later Ailsa wondered if she meant to tell her something. Or if it had occurred to Kath that Harry was lying at exactly the same moment that it occurred to her. Perhaps for that five-second interval when neither of them spoke they were both weighing up the evidence and coming to the same conclusion. Because how many reasons were there for a husband to lie to his wife about why he wasn’t coming home in the evening?

They had outstayed their welcome that night. Ailsa could tell by the way Kath curled towards her husband on the sofa and rested her head on his shoulder after they finished coffee. She sat as far from Ailsa and Harry as possible, as if marital problems might be contagious. Having wanted to cancel the dinner earlier that day, Harry would not stop talking about the new scanner at
work. Perhaps he knew he was living on borrowed time. He explained to Kath’s husband how it was a powerful giant magnet that measured the hydrogen atoms in blood vessels. ‘Blood flow means busy neurons,’ he kept repeating. ‘The region of the brain where most is going on is the region where there is most blood flow.’ When they left, Kath hugged Ailsa a little too tightly.

Ailsa didn’t confront Harry on the way home. If he came up with a credible excuse it would be too tempting to believe him to avoid the upheaval that surely lay ahead. He was drunkenly affectionate and insisted on holding hands as they weaved along the pavement when the night bus didn’t arrive. When they got home he couldn’t find his keys. Harry never lost anything. As he turned out his pockets Ailsa tried not to reflect on what Kath had said. But when old receipts, coins and business cards fell to the ground she picked them up and found herself looking for clues, resentful of the way that he had so swiftly turned her into a suspicious snooper. In the end they had to wake up Romy to let them in. Romy noticed her mood. Harry didn’t.

Ailsa never managed to pin down the exact chronology of events that followed that evening. The details remained for ever elusive. As far as she could recall, some time the following week she instructed Romy to collect Ben from after-school club so that she could go and see Rachel at her flat in Kensal Rise. She couldn’t remember if this was before or after she had found a
restaurant bill for two from this same Italian restaurant on an evening Harry was meant to be teaching.

She arrived unannounced, worried that Rachel would hear the unease in her voice and elaborate melodramatic scenarios to explain the unscheduled visit or, even worse, phone their mother for clues. She feared Rachel’s overactive imagination and the way she could say things without any thought of their consequences, yet she was the person Ailsa trusted most to help her work out what was going on and what to do. Fearless honesty, their mother had called it. Lack of filter, Harry said.

As Ailsa waited on the pavement for Rachel to throw down the keys to her flat from the first-floor window she had a sudden image of herself as a child sitting on Rachel’s stomach, trying to force her sister’s fingers from her ears so that she had to listen to the argument going on downstairs. They needed to do something, Ailsa insisted, pinning Rachel’s arms by her side. Someone could die. Rachel had responded by flinging her head from side to side, singing ‘Ring of Fire’ as loudly as possible. Ailsa had hugged Rachel until she stopped.

Rachel’s sitting-room floor was covered in pages from the script she was working on. Some had Post-it notes attached with tiny handwritten instructions. Ailsa picked up a couple of pages to open up a trail to her sister. She read a couple of lines of dialogue marked with pink highlighter. ‘I didn’t choose to be born this way. I can’t help who I am. I have to kill the thing I love most.
And that person is you. Then we can be together for eternity.’

‘Ignore the cliché. Does he sound like a zombie with a soul?’ Rachel had asked as she gave Ailsa a hug. She pulled out a pencil that was holding her hair up in a bun.

‘Completely,’ Ailsa said. ‘Although it might be difficult to distinguish him from a vampire.’

‘Traditionally vampires have been more romantic and articulate,’ said Rachel. ‘We’re trying to redefine a genre. Create a more intellectual kind of zombie.’ She turned her back on Ailsa and put the page back on the floor. ‘I know why you’re here by the way. I just wanted to have sex with him one last time. But I couldn’t tell Mum that.’

Ailsa smiled. Not for the first time she was grateful for her sister’s self-absorption. It was a good escape from her own problems. Rachel assumed Ailsa had come because less than a week after promising to end her relationship with Budgie she had taken him to Norfolk to stay with their parents. Budgie had chopped enough wood to see Adam and Georgia through the rest of the winter. He had drained the radiators and mended a broken tile, said Rachel, trying to justify her volte-face.

He had even taken Adam for a ride on his motorbike along the coast road. They had dressed up Adam in Budgie’s leathers. Rachel showed Ailsa the photos on her phone. There was a close-up of Adam wearing a helmet with the visor up. His face was florid. Ailsa was fascinated by the network of tiny broken blood capillaries on
his nose. Was it all the red wine that had turned them so purple? She wondered why there were no pictures of their mother. Georgia was too tired to stay up, Rachel explained.

‘Budgie got on really well with Dad,’ said Rachel almost reproachfully.

‘That’s not a reason to stay with him,’ said Ailsa firmly.

‘Dad needs a playmate,’ Rachel laughed.

‘True,’ said Ailsa.

‘I told him it was over. It was all very civilized. But we agreed we could keep seeing each other casually. Best of both worlds, don’t you think?’

There was a lull in the conversation. Ailsa braced herself. ‘Harry’s been lying to me.’ She hadn’t articulated the thought out loud before. She was sitting on the sofa. The one where Rachel had had sex with Budgie for the first time, Ailsa remembered, abruptly removing her arm from the back. Johnny Cash was playing in the background.
I Walk the Line
. The soundtrack to their childhood. ‘I’m not sure exactly what’s going on.’

‘Spit it out,’ said Rachel, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her. She poured another large glass of wine for each of them. Ailsa tried to stick to the facts, sketchy as they were, and avoid interpretation. Apart from the fact Harry was coming home late more nights than he wasn’t, there had been other changes. He had developed insomnia, which he put down to work stress. He was more impatient with the children, especially Luke, but then with less than a week before his mock
GCSEs Luke had decided to drop Physics and Chemistry, and Harry had taken it personally. He was more sexually adventurous than he had been for a while. In fact in terms of frequency and quality it was better than it had been for years.

Rachel put up a hand. ‘Spare me the details, please.’

Ailsa didn’t point out the hypocrisy of this comment. ‘So what do you think?’ she asked.

‘You need to explore all avenues. From the least obvious to the most obvious.’

‘That’s why I came to you,’ said Ailsa. Rachel ran her finger round and round the wine glass until it made a low hum.