The Venus Trap (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-Four
Day 4

D
id I hear you
laughing
in there earlier?’ Claudio has an
expression
on his sallow face that’s half curiosity, half disgust. He’s brought me in a sandwich for dinner but I can’t eat.

‘Something funny on the radio,’ I say sullenly. There’s no way I’m going to admit to it being the diary that made me laugh, in case he makes me read it out loud to him.

‘Are you all right?’

Perhaps my plan is working, even with the curveball of his lack of sense of smell. Perhaps he’s going off me. He’s concerned that I’m losing the plot. Good.

I shrug. ‘No.’

‘You look like you’ve been crying again.’

‘So?’

‘Don’t be like that, Jo. I just want you to be happy.’

‘Well
that’s
a joke.’ I blow some feathers off the mattress in a huff of irritation.

‘I don’t like it when you’re in this sort of a mood.’

It’s then I notice that he’s also brought in the small chair from Megan’s room, a flimsy little ladderback thing with a wicker seat. He plonks his big arse on it next to the bed like I’m a patient he’s visiting in hospital. Presumably having decided the mattress is too skanky to sit on.

‘I don’t like being locked in my bedroom forced to talk to you all day. Does that make us quits?’

‘Is this what you’re really like?’

A chink of hope splinters through me. ‘Yeah actually, a lot of the time. I’m unbelievably moody, more so when I’m tired or stressed or pre-menstrual. Richard divorced me because he couldn’t take my moods any more. He stopped fancying me, and then we split up when our sex life petered out completely.’ I take a breath and add, pointedly, ‘He’d built me up to be something I’m not, by fancying me for so long before we got together. It just took its toll, in the end.’

Claudio straightens up and examines me as though I’m something he found in his net on a nature trail. ‘Really? I thought you split up because you were banging your personal trainer.’

‘I wasn’t
banging
him, as you so delightfully put it. Not before Richard and I separated, anyway.’

‘But you wanted to.’

I pause. ‘Hadn’t really crossed my mind at that point.’

This is a complete lie. Of course it had, and not just
crossed
my mind but bulldozed a twelve-lane highway through it. It was all I could think about, until I was convinced that the reality could never be as good as it was in my imagination.

Yet when it finally happened, it was even better. It was the best sex I’ve ever had in my whole life, and it was here, in this bed, in this flat. It led to a Saturday morning ritual that began shortly after I moved into this flat, which Sean and I christened Tea in Pants.

On the weekends that Megan stayed at Richard’s and Sean stayed over here, he would slide out of bed first thing, dress, and jog down to the twenty-four-hour Tesco for fresh croissants. He would let himself back into the flat, warm up the croissants, and make two cups of tea. From down the hall I’d hear faint sounds of clothing being removed and then, as I propped myself up on one elbow, eagerly waiting for the bedroom door to be pushed open with a shoulder, Sean would eventually appear. Two steaming cups of tea in one hand and a plate of croissants in the other, a big smile on his face and naked except for his pants.

‘I can hear you rolling over to watch me coming in,’ he’d say, laughing at the lust on my face.

‘I can hear you taking your clothes off down the hallway. It’s such a turn-on.’

The memory of his body coming into my bedroom like that was as strong as perfume: the broadness of his shoulders, his flat muscled stomach, his buttocks like two grapefruit . . . He would carefully place the tea and croissants down on the floor, and then roll on top of me in an effusive morning hug that s
ent Lester
leaping off the bed in disgust. The tea almost always went cold before it was drunk and I was forever sweeping croissant crumbs out of the sheets, but I wouldn’t have changed the ritual for anything.

Those mornings were what we were all about. The way Sean looked into my eyes as he made love to me, slowly and tenderly, with such passion, never breaking my gaze, a complete and almost spiritual connection. I’ve never known anything as powerful and it made me forgive everything else he did that irritated me—
saying
‘up London’, liking Harvesters, stuffing his food, not knowing who Carole King was—none of it mattered when Sean was deep inside me, feeling like a part of me so new and wonderful that I became new and wonderful too. After all, you could talk about music and eat in posh restaurants with anybody, couldn’t you? But there was only one person you could make love with, have that
connection with.

As we lay there afterwards, kissing and giggling and feeding croissants to each other, I’d congratulate myself on having done the right thing. I’d had the courage to release Richard, so he could be with someone who made him feel the way Sean made me feel, and I’d freed myself to be able to make love with Sean for the rest of my life. I really couldn’t imagine ever wanting to sleep with anybody else again. Actually, I still can’t. I wish I could.

I’m going to try not to let Claudio’s presence sully that memory, but I think it’s too late.

‘So, were you and Richard in touch after you left school?’

Claudio forces my thoughts back to Richard, and I feel disloyal and grubby—mentally as well as physically—for misrepresenting the facts of the collapse of our marriage. Richard deserved so much better, in all ways, than what he got from me. All he’d done for his entire adult life was love me wholeheartedly, and that was how I repaid him?

Claudio would probably argue that this was all he’d done, too. I suppose there’s a fine line between stalking and wooing. Richard definitely wooed me, though.

I nod, smiling faintly at the memory. ‘We became friends. I had a summer job in Boots during the uni holidays—’

‘I remember,’ Claudio interrupts, and I have a bizarre
mental
image of the pair of them hanging round outside Boots’ sliding doors, waiting for me to come out and pick one. I wonder if
Richard
was aware that he had a competitor—not that I’d ever, in a million years, have picked Claudio over Richard anyway.

‘He used to come in a lot. The first time he didn’t realise I was working there. He’d just had his wisdom teeth out, the first summer after A levels, and he was really embarrassed to see me. Then it turned out my stepdad-to-be was his driving instructor as well as mine, so that was something else we had in common.’

I suppress a smile. Richard used to talk me to sleep when I woke up in the night, and I remember him telling me about driving lessons with Brian. He had a knack of recounting stories that just very slightly took the piss out of the person concerned, but never in a mean way.

I loved those stories. They were another layer of how he let me know how much he’d loved me and for how long, a deeper layer than the compilation tapes and quirky little cards that he plied me with during the months before our friendship turned into a romance.

Ignoring Claudio, I close my eyes and try to transport myself back to a long-ago night in another bedroom, a clean, freshly laundered room smelling of The White Company room scent,
moonlight
filtering in through the curtains, Richard’s voice murmuring in my ear, his minty breath cool on my face, my big toe touching the soft hairs on his shin . . . .

‘The day I failed my test,’ Richard said, ‘was a lovely spring day—I was leaving tyre tracks through pink cherry blossom, it was scattered like confetti over the sodding corner, the one I was supposed to reverse around but went up on the pavement instead. But honestly, all I thought when the examiner said I hadn’t passed was “Great, I’ll book another lesson for next week, and ask Brian if we can go and practise hill starts at the end of Jo’s road.” ’

Claudio refuses to be ignored, though, so my reverie doesn’t last long.

Perhaps he clocked the fond expression on my face when I was thinking about Richard, but he’s picking at me like a scab. ‘So he had driving lessons with your mum’s bloke just to get closer to you? That’s pretty tragic. Bet he failed on purpose.’

Not as tragic as locking me up and giving me seven days to love you,
I think but wisely don’t say. I don’t rise to the bait.

‘He did fail, but I don’t think it was on purpose. He said he was gutted not to have passed the first time, but that part of
him was
glad too because Brian was his best link to me—this was before we became friends. Even though Brian’s a bit of an old bore. Lovely guy, but obsessed with the Sixties. Richard said he used to have to keep changing the subject off Sandie Shaw and Lulu and all these other Sixties icons who had allegedly wanted to have his babies.’

‘Changing the subject back to you?’

I nod. ‘Apparently. Richard confessed that he found out all sorts of stuff about me and Mum by talking to Brian.’

‘Like what?’ Claudio looks almost as though he wishes he’d thought of that as a strategy. What is with these blokes, I wonder? I genuinely don’t understand what they saw in me. It’s not like I was some Kate Moss babe. I was plump and my boobs were massive and I had crooked teeth like Dracula. It must be because I only had eyes for John. It seems that playing hard to get really does work. Even when you don’t want to be got.

‘Oh I don’t know. Stuff like, we did our grocery shopping on a Thursday. That Mum worked part-time at the Trade Union office as a secretary. That I wanted to learn the sax but Mum couldn’t afford to buy me one.’

‘Were you still at school then?’

‘Yeah. Upper Sixth.’

‘So you were with John. Why didn’t Brian tell him you had a boyfriend? He must have known he was just fishing for information about you.’

I make a sound through my nose, half laugh, half huff. ‘He did, in the end. After Richard failed his test. I remember Richard telling me about it. He’d been wondering, in the car, if I’d be at the joint area school disco that Friday night, and that was when Brian told him about John.’

‘I’m surprised that he didn’t already know you had a boyfriend if he spent so much energy following you around.’

‘He didn’t follow me around.’

Although he had. He’d followed me home the night of
the attack.

‘He just wanted to go out with me. Apparently Brian told him there were “plenty more fish in the sea” and Richard wanted to punch him.’

‘Well, I suppose we have that much in common, then.’ Claudio leans back in the little chair to stretch, and it creaks and cracks but doesn’t give way.

I remember the night Richard confided in me about pumping Brian for information. We were married by then, and of course I knew he’d liked me for a really long time; he’d already told me that. He’d proved it too, by not giving up when I gave him the cold shoulder all those months after he told me he’d saved me in the alley. But there was something so raw about the way he spoke about the chat with Brian, how devastated he’d been to find out I was in love with someone else, how ridiculous the notion was of other fish in the sea. I knew how it felt, of course I did, because hadn’t I felt exactly the same about John? I cuddled Richard close that night, wrapping him in my arms with gratitude and awe that someone could love me that much, for that long.

Not so different from how Claudio feels about me, I suppose, in his mind, at least. Not mine.

‘Think I’ll have an early night tonight,’ he says eventually. ‘This day feels like a bit of a write-off.’

I nod. It does. It feels like stalemate. I’m no nearer to being able to convince him I love him and I can’t imagine that tomorrow will be any different.

But tomorrow, if my calculations are correct, is Day Five. Do I really only have two days left? I am thinking so hard about this as Claudio locks me in that it takes me a few moments to realise the momentous thing that has just happened and suddenly everything changes in me in a flash, as though I’ve been shot through with a massive charge of electricity. I lie frozen and still, heart pounding, waiting to see if he realises his mistake, but he doesn’t come back. After ten minutes, when I hear the toilet flush and the door to the spare bedroom close, I bite my lip with excitement.