The Square (29 page)

“So, how’s things?” Tracey had asked Jane. Before she knew it, Jane had launched into a carelessly desperate confession about how things were with Patrick.

“And we just never do it, you see,” Tracey remembers Jane saying. “So I started doing it with someone else. Almost had to.”

Tracey remembers wanting to ask, and not wanting to know at the same moment.

Yet Jane, never acute about the nuances of adult curiosity, continued, carelessly.

“So I occasionally… get it together with, guess who?”

Tracey didn’t want to guess. She really didn’t. She had an ache in her stomach when she thought of Jane, lonely in her sexless marital bed.

“Oh, don’t worry, Jane,” she had told her, looking desirously at the door.

“No, guess,” insisted her neighbour. “You know him quite well. Lives in the Square, actually.”

Tracey looks helplessly at Jane. “I have no idea.”

“Fat wife.”

After a pause, Tracey hazards a guess.

“Not Jay?”

Tracey remembers Jane laughing slightly, and wiggling her feet as if amid a schoolgirl crush, and then nodding her head slowly with the satisfaction of a conquering queen. The ache in Tracey’s stomach deepened.

“Yup. When we got together, I think he needed it almost as much as I did! Anyway, what we have is lovely. Really is. It’s all about the sex. That’s it. It’s not as if I want a substitute for Patrick, nothing like that. Why would I want that? Oh, God, Tracey, I am sorry. For telling this to you. Please keep it to yourself. You will, won’t you?”

Tracey agreed, and she had kept her word. She hadn’t told anyone. For a few months after this, Jane would give her a knowing smile, or even a conspiratorial wink when Jay was in the room, but Tracey had steadily refused to acknowledge them. After a while, the nodding and winking stopped.

Tracey was so consistently discreet about the episode that Jane had begun to wonder whether she had actually invented the whole scenario thanks to nerves over George’s exam. By the time she had the dinner party at which all were present, Jane had convinced herself that she had dreamt the confession.

She hadn’t, of course. Tracey knew. At Jane and Patrick’s dinner party, she had noted the moment when both had left the dining table. She had observed Jay’s adrenalin-mottled cheeks. She had noted Jane’s arch-coquettishness, when the pair returned from upstairs, ten minutes later. She remembers feeling almost jealous of Jane, the hostess. With sex, on tap.

Tracey remembers all this. She looks at Larry, smiles at him fondly. At least their bed is not a barren desert. And the thing with Alan… well, that can be finished now. In her head, she has parcelled it up with the television documentary. After the screening next week, she would have no need to see Alan Makin ever again. Ever. It was a neat, civilised ending. Not messy. Tracey hated mess.

“So.”

“Got to forgive Patrick everything then, don’t we?” he snorts. “I’m certainly not going to fire Anya NOW. Not that I was ever tempted, but you know.”

Again, she strokes his forearm. It is warm and familiar.

“I think we all just carry on, don’t we? Try to forget about it.”

“Don’t you want to ask them both over for the screening party, anyway? When is that, actually?”

She is startled to have the screening mentioned by her husband. With a low visceral thrill, Tracey rethinks her resolution. She recalls how it feels to be screwed on Alan Makin’s sofa. Maybe, she worries, she is just like Jane. Maybe she too needed that spice. And now Alan will be here, at their house, for the screening.

She has no worries about how he will be. She knows he will be discreet. It’s how she will be that concerns her.

Larry is still laughing about the party.

“Who shall we invite, both of the dissembling couples? Anya and Patrick? Jay and Jane? Or some other combination? Hey, why don’t we turn it into a Seventies wife-swapping night, since that is what our neighbourhood is beginning to resemble.”

“Larry, stop it. Jane is clearly devastated.”

That’s what she likes about Larry, though, thinks Tracey.

Never takes anything too seriously. If nobody died, it’s okay. That is her husband’s motto.

She doesn’t really know what goes on inside his head, even after years of marriage. He doesn’t care to show her. “I can’t stand people who ‘let it all hang out’,” she remembers him telling her when they were first married. Larry has surfed through life on jokes and backslaps, so far. It has been a strategy which has served him well. After all, he won the Lottery, didn’t he? He sees no reason to stop it now.

All of which is good, thinks Tracey. She won’t tell him about Alan. She won’t tell anyone about Alan. She doesn’t need a modern day confessional to a best friend. She envisages the remonstrations going on at Jane’s house and puts the excitement of being undressed by Alan to the back of her mind. She vows that a similar event will never threaten her family life, on this side of the Square. She thinks she will arrange a neat ending.

Chapter Thirty Jane

“I mean, if you look at it logically darling, you haven’t got a leg to stand on,” points out Jay. “Turn over.” She obliges, kneeling. He parts her ass and starts fucking her from behind.

Oh God, I am lost, thinks Jane.

“Yes but I deserve being screwed by you, you see. Whereas Patrick… ” She abandons her sentence, gives out a little sob. Her face is buried in the pillow. It is impossible to discuss the semantics of her husband snogging the au pair while her lover is entering her. Jay knows this.

Afterwards, he picks up the subject again playfully.

“… So you see, what is your objection? That it was done at all, or that it was done publicly?”

She turns over, smiles at him ruefully. She’s irritated by her better mood. The sex has made her much more cheerful.

“I suppose if Patrick snogged the au pair and I never knew about it, then it doesn’t really matter. Look at us. Nobody knows, so no harm done. No, it was the public thing of it. So bloody embarrassing. Oh my God. What an evening. I still keep having flashbacks, like it was an experience in the Gulf War. Maybe I am suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disease.”

“Stress Disorder.”

“Whatever. Did you enjoy ANY of it?”

“Are you kidding?” says Jay, standing up and stretching. “I enjoyed ALL of it. It was hilarious. From start to finish. Brilliantly planned throughout. By you. I mean, you won’t like knowing this but I felt bad for Harriet. However, she says she hardly noticed the invasion of the Sans-Culottes.”

“Jay, please!”

“Well, it was an Off With Their Heads moment, wasn’t it? Like something out of
Blackadder.
”

“Hmm. I don’t want to remember that bit. I don’t want to remember any of it.”

“Darling. It was a success. Did you raise a lot of money, though?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you care about that?”

“What, getting new fences for the park? Nope.”

“Do you think Tracey is screwing Alan Makin?”

Jane laughs at this.

“Oh for God’s sake Jay. Of course she’s not. She’s much too prim for that. I mean, she wears tarty things, occasionally, but I think she’s very buttoned up.”

“You are the only real sexual adventurer on the Square, aren’t you? Or at least, you hope you are.”

It was true. She likes to think of herself as such. The only brave one. The one to go out and get what she deserved. The one in the vanguard, forging ahead. No, Tracey would never have the guts to shag Alan Makin. She hopes she won’t, anyway. Jane wants to be the only naughty one in the Square.

She remembers, or thinks she remembers, that she had told Tracey about her affair, but it was so long ago. She’s probably forgotten about it, thinks Jane. Especially now. How could Tracey believe that she, Jane, was capable of infidelity when everyone saw how upset she had been about the bloody au pair? Every time she thinks about that event she feels panic, rising in her body, choking her. A wave of rivalry consumes her with hot fire.

“Well, I hope he’s feeling really shitty about things,” says Jane.

“Who, Alan Makin?”

“No, of course not, you berk. My fucking husband. Oh Jay. Will you do something for me, now?”

“The usual?” says Jay, smiling. “My pleasure.” He passes his tongue across his lips, and kneels down.

As it happens, Patrick is not feeling particularly bad about Jane, or his behaviour, or whether the Talent Show was or was not a disaster. All he cares about is what is going to happen between him and Anya in the next twenty minutes.

Anya has dared to come round to Patrick’s house. In order to collect her music, which she had left in the seat of the Blüthner’s music stool. She’d never play the grand again, of course. And she has taken precautions beforehand. With her phone.
Patrick, is Jane in?
she had texted him.
So sorry, but I need to collect my music.

Coast clear. Führer out. Boy out. Come over, if you dare. Be my guest.

She gets the message, taps the phone on her hand, thinking.

“Tracey, I am just popping out for an hour or so, thank you, is that alright?” she shouts up the stairs.

Why does he use Hitler’s nickname for his wife, thinks Anya as she walks around the Square. English people still think Hitler is a living presence, she ponders. And while not a benign one, certainly one you can make regular jokes about.

She had been watching repeats of
Dad’s Army.
She was amazed by it. At home in Lodz, the war, which had essentially flattened most of the old city centre, had been so thoroughly traumatic that, even now, having a TV comedy show about it, and repeating it unchanged for several decades, would be unthinkable. A bit like having a slapstick show in Auschwitz. She shudders and rings the door bell.

“Ah, Anya!” says Patrick, surprised, as if they had not just had an exchange of messages indicating he would be seeing her in about two minutes hence.

She raises an eyebrow and steps over the threshold. The door closes behind her. There is an exciting tension about the moment. She has no time to do anything other than fleetingly note it, because immediately the latch snaps shut, and Patrick is kissing her wildly in the hall.

God, these English men, thinks Anya. Have they no sense of place, time, formality?

“Come to collect your music, have you? Think I believe that?”

He rubs his hands up and down her dress, pawing at her. She breaks away, gasping for air.

“Patrick, are you sure? I mean, this is your house.”

“Quite sure,” he says diving at her neck, running his hand through her hair.

He will take her, that is no question. But where will he take her? She wonders about this as he grabs her bra strap. In her experience, British men are very happy to bring a lover home, but they have a horror of defiling the marital bedroom with the au pair. In this, Patrick is nothing if not typical.

“Kitchen,” he murmurs, propelling her towards the stairs.

And so, in full view of the offensive jar of instant coffee, Patrick screws Anya on the kitchen table. He does so with a sort of exerted desperation, wiping beads of sweat away from his face from time to time. He just about manages to get his trousers off but his socks are still on.

Afterwards, rearranging her skirt, she looks at him fondly.

“You can think about this at breakfast tomorrow. When you are sitting at this table eating your bacon and eggs.”

“Oh, Christ!” says Patrick, smiling sheepishly. “Christ, Anya. That was wild.”

He sits down on a chair. She swings her legs off the table, jumps down, pulling up her underwear.

“Come and sit on my knee.”

She obliges, looking around the room as if she has never seen it before, never spent a dreary evening doing the washing up while the English laugh and chatter over a ludicrously detailed meal.

It’s much better this way, she thinks. Seeing it as a woman, not a drudge. But then it always is. Anya has quite an experienced line in sleeping with, if not her actual employer, then her employer’s friends.

“Where is George?”

“Gardening with Roberta.”

“How funny.”

“I know… she asked him to help her on her allotment. Know what an allotment is?”

“Of course. Everyone has one at home in Lodz. Where is… Jane?”

“Out. Look, Anya… ”

This was the other thing that Englishmen did. Got in a terrible twist about explaining why they couldn’t marry the au pair. They’d love to, of course, dying to see her again, but you know. School fees. Mortgage. Life.

“I know. It’s fine. I know. I’m going to be gone soon anyway.”

“Are you?” he says, feigning disappointment.

“Don’t pretend to be sad. I’m going back to Poland in a fortnight.”

“Will you ever come back?”

“Maybe. Depends on my academic course.”

“I’ll miss you.”

She laughs at this, jumps off his knee, kisses his forehead affectionately.

“No you won’t. But it was nice, yes? And I have so loved playing on the grand piano. You are a good person, Patrick. I’ll go and collect my music. I’ll text you in a few days. Maybe come and play the lovely piano one last time.”

“Do, do,” says Patrick uncertainly. “When… the Führer is out.”

She looks at him and laughs.

“Jolly good,” says Patrick, to her departing back. “You are a lovely girl, Anya, do you know that? Skills and beauty. What a combination.”

Totally wasted on the Square, he says to himself, as he washes his hands at the kitchen sink.

Back at the Travelodge, Jane has managed to get the window open, and is now leaning dramatically out of it. The sex has made her feel good, but she still feels hot, inside, when she thinks about her husband being turned on by another woman.

“You know what I really feel like having is a bloody fag. Or taking drugs.”

“Oh, come on Jane. Do buck up,” says Jay, bustling around, snapping his jeans against his bare legs, and then putting them on.

“No need to start wanting to poison yourself just because your husband snogged the au pair. All husbands snog the au pair at one point in their married life.”

There is a pause.