The Kindness (11 page)

He returned from his lecture hoping he’d retained something, though he’d been too distracted to make many notes. There was stuff about various sects in Milton’s time, like the Ranters, Calvinists who believed that they were destined for heaven
whatever
they did. SIN IS THE PRODUCT ONLY OF THE IMAGINATION he’d written before his mind wandered to the more pressing issue of where he and Julia would live.

As he cycled back from the lecture there was drizzle. He collected the local rag and tucked it into his Crombie to keep it dry. The road was mulchy with leaves and the chain chose that moment to slip off his bike and his hands became filthy with oil. Finally he got back and was turning the pages of the soggy newspaper to the Rooms to Rent section as he climbed the stairs. The antique shop didn’t open on Mondays: Julia was just the other side of the door. His heart leapt as he put his key in the lock.

She was standing at the window. An intense slant of sunlight had conspired with a break in the clouds to fall across her to the floor so that the sight of her in a blue shirt, the long brown backs of her legs and her hair loose and shining, was instantly stowed in the Dutch Master department of his brain. She remained looking out at the street, perhaps she hadn’t noticed him arrive. The light hit the curve of her cheek when she turned. She leant into the sill, the shirt barely skimmed the tops of her thighs, her tan from the summer not fading now, or ever. He flew across the room and she raised her fingers to his lips, pressing them flat, so for a moment he didn’t know if he wanted to bite or kiss.

The pale-blue shirt was his, a fact that gave him pleasure. It still smelt of the hot iron she’d used before putting it on. She hadn’t bothered with underwear and his hands found her warm back. She leant her head on his shoulder, her hair smelt of his shampoo. He slid his hands from the back of her ribcage to the front and she gasped and squirmed as he reached her breasts. ‘They’ve become so hot and tender,’ she said and he wasn’t such a boy that he didn’t know what this might mean.

What had he felt when she told him? Elation, yes. Fear? Maybe. However hard he tries, he can’t remember exactly what went through his mind. He sees himself only from the outside, as though through the glass of a diorama or on a screen with the sound turned off. He’s skinny, almost gaunt, dressed in a black V-neck that’s a bit long and ragged in the hem, baggy suit trousers, yellow socks with a hole just starting at one big toe. Rakish, he likes to think, with his dark hair curling at his collar, and, unless he pushes it back, across his eyes. Scholarly, surrounded by books and untidy piles of notes, Gustave Doré’s etchings Blu-tacked to his walls. Candles stuck in wine bottles, his few plates and bowls stacked by the window, a duvet with a pattern of autumn leaves on the bed. Not much more than a boy, he can see that now. Free for the first time in his life but weak against the charm of beauty’s powerful glance.

There he is throwing down the newspaper, enclosing her, kissing her, unbuttoning the blue shirt, parting the cloth and kissing her belly and minutes later rising above her on the single bed, entering her cautiously and with such an exclamation of wonder and awe about the facts of life – the sudden facts of
their
life – that he made her laugh and then cry, her arms thrown back, palms to the ceiling and fingers spreading, begging him not to stop, her hair across the pillow like something unravelling.

He had not a flicker of doubt, this new blood-borne certainty snuffed out all other thought. The next day he went to Professor Mulligan’s room to tell him he was dropping out.

Paul Mulligan tried to dissuade him with words that just days before would have charmed Julian’s ear. ‘Your work on Milton leaves me in no doubt you’ve got a contribution to make, well beyond degree,’ Mulligan said with twinkling eye. But the rich music of books and study and far-off PhDs had overnight become only incidental. He was moving to London, he said, as Mulligan fiddled with his glasses. There would be work tutoring rich kids through A-levels.

A couple of years ago Mulligan had written to him, c/o Abraham and Leitch, on home, not college paper. He said his young nephews very much enjoyed a film about a space-age dog, Mulligan himself liked the scene where Laika appeared as a ghost on the moon. He had, he wrote in his neat script, been astonished but pleased to see Julian’s name in the credits. He signed off saying: ‘People say that when life gets busy, the time for study and reflection fades. I very much hope this is not true in your case.’

Julian replaces the Milton, belches. He counts the empty beer bottles, which confirm that he is quite drunk. He takes what’s left in the last bottle to swallow his sleeping pill.

Though the storm has cleared, the air remains stuffy in his bedroom. It’s that or the stink of the jasmine if he opens the windows. The little owls screech from the roof of the granary. He strips off and falls into bed, fishing around in his mess of bedclothes until he finds what he wants. Julia’s jumper is thin and lavender-coloured, floppy from wear and thin at the elbows, long enough to just about cover her bum, and pulled on in the mornings when she went down for coffee.

A far-off vixen pierces the valley with anguished screams. The cashmere is old and soft, the ribbing a little frayed. He is furious with himself, throwing it away across the bed. He should go downstairs now and put it in the box with the rest of her junk.

His pill fails to tame his unresting thoughts – round and round they fly – and he finds himself with her jumper to his face. The smell of Julia is fading, it’s hardly there now, but he clutches it to quell a pain that has started in his groin, squeezes his eyes shut. He curses the beginnings of a hard-on, and also the part of his brain that conspires continually and lasciviously to light the way to a bed containing Julia. ‘In loving thou dost well, in passion not . . .’ Who says that? Ah yes, Raphael to Adam,
Paradise Lost
, Book VIII. Already the taper is lit to a hotel in Paris, spicy candles burning all along the bar. It’s a place he can’t stop himself returning to, time and again. Julia’s long swaying walk along the aisle of candles, high heels of black satin, and lips painted a shade of red called Rampant, a fact he knew because they’d got the giggles in the pharmacy in Rue Jacob choosing it. There’s low-level trance music, buttoned banquettes the colour of kidneys, murmured conversations and a man in a brown corduroy suit sitting at the bar drinking alone.

Julian spotted the man moments before Julia made her entrance. He was clearly resident in the hotel, as he kept fiddling with his room key which he’d placed beside his glass. He was fiftyish, Julian guessed, with a head of cropped steel-grey curls and a large nose. He was drinking red wine and glancing around the bar from time to time, nodding almost imperceptibly along with the beat. Julian saw the man stop with his glass halfway to his lips, suddenly transfixed, and followed his eyes to the door. There she was: Julia, pushing a pin into her hair, stalling.

The white silk of her blouse shimmered as she entered. God, she was good. Venus stepping from her shell. Va-va-voom. Every head turned to watch her.

She was dressed exactly as he had asked and despite her earlier protestations was managing perfectly well in the heels and tight skirt. She paused again just inside the bar, momentarily gathering her courage, before sashaying closer. He was holding his breath. They’d had vodkas from the mini-bar upstairs before he left her to get ready, so she must’ve been already quite drunk. Through the sheen of her blouse her breasts bounced as she passed so close he could feel the breath of her movement but not so much as a wink of complicity. Total strangers. She settled at a table in the corner, within his sightline. Her hair was half pinned up and half tumbling. She crossed her legs and uncrossed them, ignoring his stare as she studied the cocktail list, and he found he had to keep gulping from his glass, his heart pounding then as his fist was now.

Julia. Quite the actress. Oh, yes. He hates himself and her raggedy jumper and, retrospectively, for how he felt when the man in the brown corduroy suit slid from his bar stool to Julia’s table. He watched as the man reached out and took the menu from her hand. She leant forward to hear what he was saying and Julian watched the unrestrained trajectory of the man’s eyes as her blouse fell away from the pointed cones of her breasts.

He was supposed to hold back until after the first cocktail and endured Julia running her fingers up and down the stem of the glass as the man spoke. He found himself wondering if that was part of her act. The man was leaning closer, almost handsome for someone of that age with his three-day stubble and evenly cropped curls. Finally she finished her drink and he was free to move in and offer them both another. Might he join them?

‘Of course,’ Julia smiling, welcoming him, gesturing to the banquette, the man, disgruntled, shuggling himself beside her. The man had taken off his brown corduroy jacket, loosened his tie, iron-grey question-marks peeked at the base of his neck. He turned his shoulder, did his best to block the young English interloper, twice laying his hand lingeringly on her thigh.

Julia and Julian maintained their act – that was all there was to it really, his grubby birthday wish. He would’ve stuck to the script but after a third margarita an impious spirit rose up inside him. He was almost laughing out loud as he leant back in his chair, calling for his bill, preparing to leave, Julia’s lipsticked mouth falling open: ‘
Merci
,’ he said, putting down a few notes and standing with a little wave. ‘
Amusez-vous bien . . .
’

She was soon back upstairs where he lay naked beneath the hotel sheets, pretending to snore. She pulled them back and slapped him on the bum. ‘You were supposed to rescue me.’ She was hopping to rid herself of the heels. ‘What happened to the sudden proposal of a fuck and leading me off? I thought that was the point of your little fantasy?’

He pulled her on to the bed before she got a chance to remove anything else. ‘Admit it. You wanted to fuck him,’ he said, pushing up her skirt. ‘Go on, admit it . . .’

Her legs around his neck, heels battering his shoulders. The beating of wings in his ears. ‘You wanted to fuck him . . .’

He was thrashing hot with shame and fury at her jumper. ‘Admit it, Admit it . . .’ She wandered around in the mornings with nothing on underneath it. It had become stretched over the years where she’d pulled it to her thighs but was not long enough to cover her at all when she bent over to pick her pants up from the floor in that straight-legged way she had, hips so flexible she could lay her hands flat when she touched her toes.

‘Admit it,’ he shouts into the empty room, kicking the sheets to his feet, headboard drumming, louder, faster, one sleeve of her jumper furiously flapping. Blood pounding. ‘I did. I did. I did.’

Ten

It was bound to happen sooner or later. He couldn’t hide from Katie for ever. Another day of brutal sunshine. His milk growing warm on the step. She follows him into the kitchen, rattling her keys like an estate agent and clanking together the two pint bottles her arrival has made him forget. ‘I keep meaning to leave a note for the milkman,’ he says. Not easy to do. The second pint was Mira’s.

She plunks the milk into the fridge, pulling a face at the chaos inside. He starts apologising.

‘OK, OK. Now let’s get a look at
you
,’ she says, flinging wide the kitchen curtains, making him wince. She’s wearing a brightly patterned dress of blown roses and her skin is flushed, her arms bare. The dress is cinched at her waist by a wide red patent-leather belt that catches the light as she moves.

She turns from the window, advancing on him like a bush in full flower. ‘Oh Jude,’ she says, reaching for him as the dog comes skittering from the garden, bouncing on his haunches and trying to lick her.

‘At least someone’s pleased to see me,’ she says, crouching to ruffle his ears. ‘Good boy, Zephon.’

‘I’m afraid he’s been rolling in something dead,’ Julian flees to fill the kettle. ‘He stinks.’ Katie gets up sniffing her fingers, pulls a face. ‘To be honest, that makes two of you.’

He lifts his armpit to his nose. Agrees.

‘And when did you last shave?’

He turns off the tap, scrapes his hand along his jaw, which sets it itching. She comes and takes the kettle from him, runs some water over her hands and looks around for something to dry them.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘I can’t begin to imagine what you’re going through.’

He passes her a tea towel, ashamed of its grubbiness, of the mess of empty bottles and bowls pasted with half-eaten meals, of his own stink.

‘Go on,’ she says, drying her hands and giving him a little push to the stairs. ‘Have a bath and a shave and I’ll clear up a bit down here. Mum’s got the boys so I can make you some breakfast and I won’t make you talk if you don’t want to . . .’

Water thumps into the tub conspiring with his conscience to summon a song, the beat of the claves and a female singer with a breathy voice: ‘Easy, easy, easy. Loving you is easy.’ He’d gone straight to the Marylebone hotel from Great Ormond Street. The song was playing in the bar; a rhythmic cow bell, watery percussion, the singer was Swedish and pronounced ‘easy’ as ‘ici’ which had made him and Katie smile.

Katie in that too-tight blue dress, her cloying sadness and hyacinth scent. Bar snacks of posh burgers. She was telling him about the humiliating end of her marriage. She might as well have been talking about the humiliating end of her blow-dry for all he was taking in. Instead of listening he was sketching on a paper napkin, the kitchen at Firdaws: lines and arrows indicating where the cupboards should be, the layout of the tiles, the places for pots and pans. On a second napkin he drew a floor plan for Mira’s bedroom; her bed was to be toes to the window, shelves right the way along the wall from the door.