A Spy By Nature (16 page)

“No. I was snooping. I’m sorry. It was an intrusion.”

“It’s all right,” she replies, moving past me. “I just came to get something to wear. I’m kinda cold.”

I leave immediately, saying nothing, and return to the sitting room. When Katharine comes back—some time later—she is wearing thick Highland socks and a blue Gap sweatshirt beneath her dressing gown, as if to suppress anything that I may earlier have construed as erotic. She sits on the sofa opposite me, her back to the darkening sky, and fills the silence by reaching for the CD player. Her index finger prods through the first few songs on
Innervisions,
and Stevie comes on, the volume set low.

“Oh, that’s right,” she says, as if “Jesus Children of America” had prompted her. “I was going to fix us some coffee.”

“I’m not having any,” I tell her as she leaves the room, and even that sounds rude. She does not reply.

I should deal with this, do it now. I follow her into the kitchen.

“Listen, Kathy, I’m sorry. I had no right to be in your bedroom. If I caught you looking around my things, I’d go crazy.”

“Forget about it. I told you it was okay. I have no secrets.”

She tries to smile now, but there is no hiding her annoyance. She is clearly upset; not, perhaps, by the fact that I was in her room, but because I have discovered something intimate and concealed about her relationship with Fortner that may shame her. I do not think she saw me with the address book. Leaning heavily on the counter, she spoons a single mound of Nescafé into a blue mug and fills it with hot water from the kettle. She has not looked directly at me since it happened.

“I need you to know that it doesn’t matter to me, what I saw.”

“What?”

Katharine stares at me, her head at an angle, tetchy.

“I think every married couple goes through a stage where they don’t share a room.”

“What the hell makes you think you can talk to me about this?” she says, straightening up from the counter with a look of real disappointment in her eyes.

“Forget it. I’m sorry.”

“No, Alec, I can’t forget it. How is that any of your business?”

“It’s not. I just didn’t want to leave without saying something. I don’t want you thinking that I know something about you and Fort and that I’m jumping to conclusions about it.”

“Why would I think that? Jesus, Alec, I can’t believe you’re being like this.”

We have never before raised our voices at each other, never had a cross word.

“I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, you’re right. You shouldn’t have. If I asked you personal stuff about Kate, you wouldn’t like it too much, would you?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Was it? Does it feel that way? No. No it doesn’t. These things are our most private….”

I put my hands in the air defensively, moving them up and down in a gesture of contrition.

“I know, I know.”

“Jesus,” she says, a rasp in her voice. “I don’t wanna argue with you like this.”

“Neither do I. I’m sorry.”

Silence now, and the edge suddenly goes out of our rush of talk. We are left facing each other, quiet and spent.

“Let’s just sit next door, she says, turning to pick up her coffee. “Let’s just forget all about it.”

We go into the sitting room, the breath of the fight still around us. Stevie is singing—ridiculously—“Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing.” Katharine flops down into one of the sofas and clutches her mug in both palms. She has the most beautiful hands. Eventually she says, “I hate fighting with you,” as if we have done it many times before.

“Me too.”

I sit on the sofa opposite hers.

“
Can
we talk about it?”

She emphasizes the word
can
here as if it were a test of character. I do not know how to respond except with the obvious: “About what?”

“About Fortner.”

His name balloons out of her as if he were sick.

“Of course we can. If you want to.”

Her voice is very quiet and steady. It is almost as if she has prepared something to say.

“We—Fortner and I—haven’t shared a bed for more than a year. For longer than you’ve known us.”

My pulse skips.

“I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

I immediately regret saying this.

“We’ll work it out,” she says hopefully. “I just can’t be beside him in a bed right now. It’s not anyone’s fault.”

“No.”

“We’re just kind of going through this thing where we’re not attracted to each other.”

“Or where you’re not attracted to him?”

She looks up at me, acknowledging with a softened expression that this is closer to the truth.

“Have you talked about it? Does he know how you feel?”

“No. He thinks he’s moved into the spare room because I can’t stand his snoring. He has no idea it’s because I don’t want to sleep with him.”

A brief quiet falls on the room, the lull after a sudden revelation. Katharine drinks her coffee and plays with a loose thread on her dressing gown.

“There’s some history to it,” she says softly, still staring into her lap. “When I met Fort, I was very vulnerable. I’d just come out of a long-term relationship with a guy I’d met in college. It ended badly, and Fort offered me the kind of support that I needed.”

“Was he a rebound?”

Katharine doesn’t want to admit this either to herself or to me, but she says, “I guess so. Yes.”

She looks up at me, and I can only hope that my face looks receptive to what she wants to say.

“Before I’d even really thought about it, we were married. Fort had been hitched before—kids, divorce, the usual pattern—and he really wanted to make it work this time. He hasn’t had access to his children for more than ten years. I was still kind of hung up on this guy, and Fortner knew that. He’s always known it.”

She takes a deep, possibly stagey breath.

“I wanted to have kids, to make a family, but he was reluctant to start again. Fort’s daughters are your age, you know, and he doesn’t think it’s fair to children to become a parent when you’re close to fifty. But I didn’t agree with him. I thought he didn’t want to have kids because he didn’t really love me. That was the state my mind was in. And after my father died, I thought there was something almost reverent about being a parent, like if you had the chance to be one you shouldn’t throw that away. Maybe you felt that too after your dad passed away. But I was…I was…”

She is suddenly tripping over her thoughts, too scared to hear them come out.

“Tell me.”

“Alec, you can’t ever tell him that I told you this. Okay? There’s only a handful of people in the world who know about it.”

“You can trust me.”

“It’s just I wanted children so badly. So I did a terrible thing. I tricked Fort into getting us pregnant. I stopped using birth control, and then when I got pregnant, I told him.”

“How did he react?”

“He went crazy. We were living in New York. But Fort, you know, he’s totally against termination, so he agreed that I could keep her.”

There’s only one possible outcome to this story, the worst outcome of all.

“But I lost her. Three months in, there was a miscarriage and…”

“I’m so sorry.”

Katharine’s face is an awful picture of despair. In an attempt to appear resilient, she is struggling to bury tears.

“Well, what can you do, huh?” she says, with a shrug. “It was just one of those things. I was paying the penalty for deceiving him.”

“Is that how you see it?”

“It gives me a sort of comfort to see it that way. Maybe it isn’t true. I don’t know. Anyway, pretty soon after that, work brought us here to London, but it’s never been the same between us. Never. We just have the friendship.”

“He’s Misstra Know-It-All” comes on the stereo system, a song I like, and it distracts me. What I should properly be feeling now is a sense of honor at being made privy to the secrets of their marriage, but even as Katharine is relating the most intimate history of her relationship with Fortner, my mind is caught between the loyalty demanded of friendship and a growing desire to take advantage of her vulnerability. When she is speaking, I have tried to look solely at her eyes, at the bridge of her nose, but every time she has looked away I have stolen glimpses of her calves, her wrists, the nape of her neck.

“You’ve repaired that?”

“It’s a slow process. I was very honest with Fortner about how I’d gotten pregnant. I told him that it had been a deliberate act on my part. That was a mistake. It would have been better to lie, to blame the Pill or something. But somehow I wanted him to know, like an act of defiance.”

“Sure, I can see that.”

“It’s so good having someone who understands,” she says. “I mean, you’ve had your heart broken, you’ve been through some tough times. You know how all this feels.”

“Perhaps,” I say, nodding. “But not to the extent that you’ve been through it.”

“It’s not so bad,” she says. She is attempting to come out of her contemplative mood into something more positive. “In a lot of ways, I’m lucky. Fort’s great, you know? He’s so smart and funny and laid-back and wise.”

“Oh yeah, he’s great.”

“Hey,” she says.

“What?”

“Thanks for listening. Thanks for being here for me when I needed you.”

“That’s all right. Don’t mention it.”

In a single fluid movement, she stands and crosses the room to where I am sitting, crouching down low in her thick Highland socks. Before I have had time to say anything, she has wrapped her arms around my neck, whispering, “Thank you, you’re sweet,” into my hair. The weight of her is so perfect. I put my hand lightly on her back.

She stops hugging first and withdraws. Now we are looking at each other. Still on her haunches, Katharine smiles and, very softly, touches the side of my face with her hand, drawing her fingers down to the line of my jaw. She lets them linger there and then slowly takes her hand away, bringing it to rest in her lap. There is a look in her eyes that promises the impossible, but something prevents me from acting on it. This is the moment, this is the time to do it, but after all the thought-dreams and the longings and the signals coding back and forth between us, I do not respond. Before I have even properly thought about it, I am saying, “I should get a cab.”

It was pure instinct, something defensive, an exact intimation of the correct thing to do. I could not spend the night with her without jeopardizing everything.

“What,
now
?” She leans backward and her relaxed smile disguises well any disappointment she may be feeling. “It’s not even eleven o’clock.”

“But it’s late. You’ll want to—”

“No, it’s not.”

I don’t want to offend her, so I say, “You want me to stick around?”

“Sure. Relax. I’ll fix us a whiskey.”

She gives my knee a squeeze and I simply can’t believe that I have just let that happen. Just kiss her. Just give in to what is inevitable.

“Okay, then, maybe just a quick one.”

She stands slowly, as if expecting me at any moment to pull her down onto the sofa. Just the action of her moving releases that exquisite scent as she turns and walks into the kitchen. I hear Fortner’s frozen Volvic falling into glass tumblers, then the slow glug-glug of whiskey being poured onto ice. The noise of her moving quietly around on the polished wooden floor fills me with regret.

“You take water in it, don’t you?” she asks, coming back in with the drinks.

“Yes.”

She hands me a glass and sits beside me on the sofa.

“Can I ask you something?” she says, taking a sip of her whiskey straightaway. It is as if she has plucked up the courage for a big subject while she was in the kitchen.

“Of course.”

Tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, she tries to make the question sound as easygoing as possible.

“Are you happy, Alec? I mean really happy?”

The question takes me by surprise. I have to be very careful what I say here.

“Yes and no. Why?”

“I just worry about you sometimes. You seem a little unsettled.”

“It’s just nerves.”

“What d’you mean nerves? What about?”

It was a mistake to say that, to speak of nervousness. I’ll have to shift the subject, work from memory.

“I was joking. Not nervousness exactly. I’m just in a constantly fraught state because of Abnex.”

“Why?”

“Because of the pressure to do the best job that I can. Because of the feeling of being watched and listened in on all the time. Because of the demands Alan and Harry put on me. All that stuff. I’m so tired. It’s so easy to get locked into a particular lifestyle in London, a particular way of thinking. And right now all I seem to worry about is work. There’s nothing else.”

Katharine has tilted her head to one side, eyes welled up with concern.

“You’ll get the job, won’t you?”

“Probably, yes. They wouldn’t spend all that money training someone just to chuck them out after a year. But it still hangs over me.” I take a sip from the whiskey tumbler and a slipped ice cube chills my top lip. “The truth is I have this deep-seated fear of failure. I seem to have lived with it all my life. Not a fear of personal failure, exactly. I’ve always been very sure and certain of my own abilities. But a fear of others’ thinking that I’m a failure. Maybe they’re the same thing.”

Katharine smiles crookedly, as if she is finding it difficult to concentrate.

“It’s like this, Kathy. I want to be recognized as someone who stands apart. But even at school I was always following on the heels of other students—just one or two, that’s all—who were more able than I was. Smarter in the classroom, quicker witted in the playground, faster on the football pitch. They had a sort of effortlessness about them which I have never had. And I always coveted that. I feel as though I have lived my life suspended between brilliance and mediocrity, you know? Neither ordinary nor exceptional. Do you ever feel like that?”

“I think we all do, all the time,” she replies, lightly shrugging. “We try to kid ourselves that we’re in some way distinct from everyone else. More valuable, more interesting. We create this illusion of personal superiority. Actually, I think men in particular do that. A whole lot more than women, as a matter of fact.”