The Good Girl (21 page)

‘And if it’s over why are you telling me about it now?’

‘Because it’s important to be honest,’ he said.

‘That’s the most dishonest thing you’ve said so far.’

His eyes were again fixed on the coffee maker.

‘People found out. Colleagues. Her friends. It doesn’t seem fair that you don’t know and they do. Today I was called to see the vice chancellor. Obviously I have to
hand her over to another tutor to supervise. All very awkward.’

This was not what Ailsa was expecting. Now she was afraid. This was no longer simply about the threat to her happiness. Already she knew that although it would be a heavy price to pay, it was a cost she could bear. If this got out he might struggle to get another job. His children would hate him. It could blow apart the life they had built together. Damn him for turning it into a situation where she wasn’t allowed to fall apart. She tried to compose herself.

‘How did they find out?’ She already knew the answer to the question before Harry spoke. ‘She told them?’

Harry nodded slowly as if his head was unbearably heavy. His whole body drooped.

‘I tried to end the relationship. She thought we were moving to Australia. There was a big gulf in expectations. She was devastated.’

‘How could you let yourself get in so deep?’

‘It wasn’t a normal affair.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We didn’t have sex much, at least in the conventional sense.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘We texted each other a lot. It got out of hand.’

He finally looked up at her. His eyes were panicked, like Ben’s after he had woken up from a nightmare.

He started explaining how the modern world held
many temptations. Drugs, alcohol. Risky sexual behaviour. Sugar. He spoke fast. His pupils were dilated.

‘There are so many stimuli in our environment that can activate cravings,’ Harry said in a tone that sounded almost pleading. ‘My self-regulatory capacity has been seriously compromised.’ He started to explain how he had suppressed his pre-frontal cortex. ‘There are two pathways that mediate frontal regulation of emotion and I have moved from a frontal-striatal pathway associated with successful regulation to a frontal-amygdala pathway.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Ailsa.

Harry’s head bowed until it was almost touching his knees. She again noticed his hairline had receded. It made him look so vulnerable.

‘The texts were sexual. Once it started I couldn’t stop.’

Ailsa opened her mouth to speak but the words stuck in her throat. She swallowed. He offered to get her water. She shook her head. She didn’t want to accept anything from him. Their rules of engagement were already being redrawn. She resolved never again to allow herself to be in a position where Harry could cause her pain. It was, to quote Romy’s favourite phrase of the week, an inviolable truth.

‘What did they say?’

‘She’d describe what she wanted to do to me. I’d say what I wanted to do to her. You know, the usual kind of thing.’

‘I
don’t actually.’

‘She sent them to the vice chancellor. There was a disciplinary panel. Five people, including Kath, sat in a row examining the evidence and decided that I hadn’t broken any rules. They couldn’t look me in the eye. They can’t fire me. The vice chancellor said he hoped I would stay, but I could tell he didn’t mean it. Obviously the girl is really sorry, now she’s seen all the trouble she’s caused. She’s begging me not to go. I’m under such pressure, Ailsa, I don’t see how I can keep working at the department. It’s untenable. I don’t know what to do.’

Ailsa knew instantly. She didn’t want to get divorced. Rachel would argue that she had no pride, but it wasn’t that simple when you had children and hadn’t she done an assembly on how pride was a sin in almost every religion from Christianity to Islam? She thought of all the hard work that lay ahead just to get back to where they were forty minutes ago. Her stomach cramped as though her lower intestine was slowly being squeezed tighter and tighter. Sometimes staying in a marriage required more courage than leaving it. Who had said that? Then she remembered: it was her mother.

She must have made a noise because someone was at her side and a hand was on her wrist. It wasn’t the waiter’s because he was fluttering around with a dustpan and brush, sweeping up mozzarella salad and bits of broken plate from the floor. Harry was right: it was always a mistake to look back. Dissecting their relationship had been
like picking up shards of broken glass. Piecing it back together had been even bloodier.

Harry had endured marriage guidance therapy as part of his punishment but loathed its idiom.
How does naming all these feelings help get over them?
Ailsa had sobbed at the end of another searing session. The therapist wanted Ailsa to read the text messages from Harry to the student. ‘You have to know what it is that you are forgiving,’ she advised. Harry had reared from his seat to protest.

‘Don’t you realize that the release of cortisol under stress means that the amygdala imprints memories that have a strong emotional charge?’ The therapist shook her head. Ailsa intervened. She explained that if she read them she might never have sex with him again. And one of the few things they had going for them was the fact that even at the peak of his infatuation they had still managed to find each other attractive. Harry confessed that he had kept this from the student, a fact that Ailsa felt was significant.

The past had to be analysed in order to let it go, the counsellor insisted, otherwise they couldn’t build a new future together. Bollocks, Harry had said. Was she aware of research after 9/11 that showed that retelling a story in a detailed way was like re-experiencing the original trauma over and over again? Ultimately it deepened the distress. After five sessions they decided not to go back. It was the first time they had agreed on anything in ages. They would make it work. They owed it to their children.

Ailsa applied for a job in Norfolk. The timing wasn’t
great but the location quelled any doubts. She suddenly realized that more than anything she wanted to go home. Harry readily agreed. Then just as Ailsa couldn’t imagine going through anything more painful, her mother died.

Ailsa felt the hand stroke the inside of her wrist.
I have spent a lifetime imposing order on chaos and I am tired of it.
She wondered if she had said it out loud.

‘Excuse me, can you hear me?’

Ailsa glanced at the hand, taking in the chipped nail varnish and torn skin around the nails. Someone was searching for her pulse. She noticed her fork on the floor and a slice of tomato stuck on the end. Everything seemed very red.

‘Are you all right?’ a worried voice asked. ‘Because you look very grey. I was worried you might be having a stroke or something. Do you have any loss of sensation? Can you speak?’

Ailsa looked up and knew instinctively it was her. She had imagined this moment many times, but now that she stood before her Ailsa could think of nothing to say. She looked ridiculously young. Prey rather than predator. Her red lipstick and gamine haircut reminded her of when Romy used to dress up in Ailsa’s clothes and make-up. She would have no understanding of the carnage she had left in her wake. Ailsa was reminded of herself at the same age. Hadn’t she been equally irresponsible? And hadn’t she got away with it? Ailsa realized with absolute clarity that she felt no bitterness towards the young woman standing beside her.

‘Migraine,’
said Ailsa, rubbing her temples.

A young man came over and put a protective arm around the shoulder of his girlfriend. He was worried about her getting involved in a drama that had nothing to do with them. He picked up the fork from the floor and put it back on the table.

The woman pulled away from him. Her kohl-rimmed eyes narrowed. ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ she asked Ailsa. ‘Have we met before?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ailsa. ‘A previous life perhaps.’

‘I’m a scientist, I don’t believe in that kind of thing.’ She smiled.

‘What are you studying?’ asked Ailsa.

‘Postgrad in Neuroscience.’ She pointed at the building opposite.

‘Any particular area?’

‘Adolescent brain development.’

‘I have two of those. Adolescents, I mean. Any tips?’

She looked at Ailsa thoughtfully. ‘Actions have consequences,’ she said.

‘I’ll pass that on,’ said Ailsa, getting up to go and pay the bill. The couple sat down again, arms wrapped around each other. Ailsa left the restaurant without looking back. Harry was telling the truth. His relationship with the girl was over.

Love at first sight is pure biology, Harry had told Ailsa the night after their first encounter. It was Glastonbury 1994, and they had met at a Johnny Cash concert the
previous afternoon. Romy always joked that this was the first and last time that her parents had ever been cool. ‘Except it was Johnny Cash when it could have been Pulp,’ Luke always pointed out because Jarvis Cocker was playing at the same time.

Serendipity played its part. They were both alone because none of their friends wanted to see Johnny Cash. And it was daylight, which meant that Harry noticed that Ailsa was one of the few people standing close to him who knew all the words to ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. He could describe to the children exactly what she was wearing: a pair of trousers with a strawberry motif and a white T-shirt knotted around her stomach. Definitely not thinking about how much flesh she was revealing.

When Johnny Cash started playing ‘If I Were a Carpenter’ Harry noticed that Ailsa had intervened in an argument between a couple over who wrote the original version. Tim Hardin, Ailsa said with absolute conviction, adding that he had played it at Woodstock in 1969.

By the time he played ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ they were standing together.
You need to feel really comfortable with someone to be able to sing ‘yippee ay aye’ at the top of your voice
, Ailsa remembered thinking as she shot a glance at the blond curly-haired man standing beside her. His hair was so big that it moved with its own mysterious rhythms to the music. He was such a terrible dancer that it was almost endearing. Anyway, some time in the middle of ‘Ring of Fire’ she had put her hand out to touch his hair.
She grasped a tangle of curls in her hand but they slipped through her fingers. After a few moments Harry had grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards him. They kissed for the first time during ‘Delia’. Harry always teased Ailsa that she had made the first move. Ailsa insisted that it depended on your definition of first move. The couple beside them asked how long they had been seeing each other and Harry said without hesitating, ‘Six months.’ He was so sure of himself.

When the children pressed them for details of their first date Ailsa had to confess they’d never had one. She spent that night in his tent. They both agreed on that version of events. She was meant to be with a couple of university friends and Harry was meant to be sharing his tent with a girlfriend who had called off sick at the last minute, although he didn’t reveal this detail to Ailsa until they met again in London the following week.

‘We make beautiful science together,’ he said to her the next morning after they had sex for the third time. Ailsa giggled because it was such an offbeat comment. They were both euphoric.

‘I would love, love, love,’ Harry said, whispering into her ear, ‘to scan our brains to see what’s going on in our pleasure centres right now.’

‘What are you on?’ Ailsa asked, disappointed that this was going to be one of those drug-fuelled episodes that were quickly forgotten.

He looked confused. ‘Nothing. I’m a scientist.’ He explained that he was doing a postgrad neuroscience
degree at university in London. It turned out his faculty was five minutes’ walk from the Institute of Education.

‘I’m not meant to fall for a scientist,’ Ailsa groaned.

‘So you’ve fallen for me, have you?’ Harry teased as he kissed her.

They were lying naked on top of his sleeping bag. When the sun rose, everything in the tent glowed orange.

He started to tell her about his favourite experiment. A scientist in the 1950s had discovered the brain’s pleasure centres by implanting an electrode into the septal region of the limbic system.

‘When he turned it on, the patients experienced a euphoria so powerful that when he switched it off they begged him not to stop. The same region fires when you have an orgasm. And get this, Ailsa, because this could help you: animals learn more easily when their pleasure centres are activated.’

‘I’m not sure how I’m meant to apply that theory to my pupils,’ Ailsa giggled.

When they met up the following week Harry asked Ailsa why she had gone to see Johnny Cash in concert instead of Jarvis Cocker.

‘I had a Johnny Cash childhood,’ Ailsa explained.

‘Did your fifteen-year-old brother die after his neck got stuck in a circular saw at the mill where he worked?’ Harry asked.

‘Not that part. Although my sister does have a bald patch in her eyebrow because when she was five she fell
on a limpet bed on the marshes where we grew up. I put mud on it to stop it bleeding.’

‘You were alone?’

‘My mum was at home looking after my dad.’

‘What was wrong with your dad?’

‘He drank. Too much. This was the Johnny Cash bit. Mum used to try and calm him down by playing his music. He once put his fist through our piano during “Riders in the Sky”. He even accidentally set fire to the rubbish bin during “Ring of Fire”.’

Rachel used to accuse her of using humour to deflect from the seriousness of their father’s problem. Ailsa tried to explain that it was better to make people laugh than make them feel sorry for you. But she told Harry everything. He didn’t flinch from the details and nor did he patronize her with pity.

Her father had defied the pathways in his brain by giving up alcohol. There was no judgement. Harry told Ailsa that Johnny Cash’s dogs were called Sin and Redemption. He wasn’t fazed by anything. And this was an important quality.

‘By the way. Did you know that limpets go back to the exact spot on the same rock for years?’ asked Ailsa. ‘That’s how I’ll be. I’ll always be trying to head home.’