Close Relations (20 page)

He picked up his jacket. She put her arms around him and
hugged him, her cheek pressed against his. And then somehow their heads turned and they were kissing. How soft her lips were, how sweet the taste of her tongue! He felt a dam unblocking. The water gushed through, flooding him.

They disentangled themselves. He was trembling.

‘Think I'd better go,' he said. He picked up his things and left.

That weekend the weather changed. The wind swung to the north, the temperature plummeted. Sleet blew across the streets, sending people scuttling for shelter. Trains were delayed, leaving passengers stamping their feet on station platforms. Freezing fog brought the Ml to a standstill. Torrential rain caused chaos in Southern Europe, and out in the Gulf of Mexico a hurricane tore across the Windward Isles, leaving behind a trail of wreckage. Yet New York was enjoying its warmest November since records began. The experts were baffled. As the century drew to its close, nature flexed herself and made the earth tremble.

Outside The Birches, the garden was frozen as if the gear of the past had locked and life would never get started again. Gordon moved slowly around the house. It was Saturday. Dorothy was away, visiting an aged aunt who had broken her hip. Gordon gazed at the dishwasher but he hadn't the energy to open it and put in his dirty plates. The paper lay unread, its Saturday supplements still folded within it. The house felt chilly. He wandered around, putting his hand on the radiators. Was April's central heating working all right? He had forgotten to bleed her rads.

He gazed out at the houses opposite – detached, half-timbered. Their inhabitants were supposed to be familiar to him – they were his neighbours, for God's sake. The Bosworths, who had lived there as long as he had; the Dorrells, whose son used to borrow his jump-leads to start his car. For over twenty years Gordon had lived there and yet time seemed to have telescoped; his street was as alien as
when he had first arrived.

He stood on the upstairs landing, looking into the girls' bedrooms. His wife had long ago taken over Prudence's, which faced south, and had installed her sewing machine there. Heaps of washing were stacked on the ironing board; Dorothy always put off the ironing until there was something good on the radio. The other two rooms had long ago lost all traces of their occupants. It was as if his daughters had never existed. Their childhood seemed to have passed in a flash; they had simply perched in this house like migrating birds.

He went downstairs. He thought: it happens all the time. Married man falls for younger woman. The papers are full of it. However, this description didn't fit him. What he felt was more complicated than that, more profound. It was as if he had lived his life in monochrome and now, suddenly, he was experiencing colour. Had he felt like this long ago, when he had first met Dorothy? He couldn't remember it. His body ached with desire – yes, he could admit it. But it was more than lust. It was as if a door had opened and out there, beyond it, the world was sunnier and more intense. If he surrendered himself up and stepped through the door, then anything was possible.

Oh, it was more than that, he hadn't the words for it. He was unused to thinking like this; by the evening he felt as if he had been heaving sacks of cement all day. Dorothy was staying away overnight. He was alone. He didn't put on the TV; it seemed too brash an intrusion, Anthea Turner yacking at him. He chewed some spearmint gum. April had given him a packet to help him stop smoking. He felt like a gum-chewing imposter in his own home. He put on a CD – a Mozart piano concerto that Prudence had given him. Most of his collection consisted of Broadway hits. Nowadays it was Mozart, however, who spoke to his heart.

Rubbing his neck – it ached from painting April's ceiling – Gordon pulled open a cupboard and took out the photo albums. He opened one. Dorothy stood on the steps of their first flat – how many years ago? Nearly half a century. She
held the baby Louise in her arms. He closed the album and opened another. He looked at a holiday snapshot of his three daughters. Wearing their swimsuits, they sat around the table outside the caravan. They gazed at the camera warily as if, all those years ago, they already suspected him of one day betraying them.

He closed the book. He had done nothing yet – just told some harmless lies and concocted some small alibis. Already, however, his soul had left this house. Closed in their plastic albums, his children could sense that. Even the furniture looked accusing. The street lamp shone into the room – he hadn't drawn the curtains and made the room cosy, he hadn't Dorothy's home-making instincts. The place felt unlived-in. He was a lone man, roaming through rooms that no longer belonged to him. Every bone in his body ached for April; he longed to pick up the phone and speak to her. He knew he must resist the temptation. He must forget about her and remove her from his life.

Outside, the land was locked into its own paralysis. Indoors, Gordon, who didn't know how to get through the evening, sat at his desk and toyed with his paperwork. He had some inner prompting to put his things in order, as a man does when he has been told he is going to die.

Out beyond Beaconsfield the hills were dusted with white. Robert, driving in his BMW, skidded on some ice and nearly ended up in a ditch, like the badger. Imogen stayed in her bedroom copying out her friend Sandra's notes on
Cold Comfort Farm
. It was the only set book she liked; in general she found her A levels a struggle. Jamie had sailed through his, which of course only made it worse. It wasn't fair, him being tall and blond whilst she was stunted and dark. If she didn't shave them, her legs would be practically as hairy as her father's. Could Karl really find her attractive? For the twentieth time she opened her
Student's Guide to the Ancient World
and took out the photo. Karl, his eyebrows raised,
stared at her. Depending on her mood, his expression changed. Sometimes he looked at her with such ardency that her bowels melted. Sometimes he looked as if he had seen a ghost.

She drew the photo to her and kissed it. His mouth opened against hers, his breathing quickened. She ran her finger along his stubbly cheek. She replayed the moment when his hand had reached into her lap for a chip. At the time she had sat there rigidly, waiting for something else to happen. Now, faint with desire, she could make him do exactly what she wanted.

On Monday it was still bitterly cold. Gordon got up at seven, as usual. He ate breakfast with his wife – cornflakes and toast, no more fry-ups. He went to work. He drove a new plasterer over to Orpington to put in a day on a flat conversion. He picked up some brochures for fitted kitchens and delivered them to Frank, who made some suggestive remarks at his expense. He dropped in on Farleigh Road, where a lone chippie worked on a job that should have been finished weeks before.

His phone rang. It was Mrs Malik. She asked after his health and then said that she was worried about her pipes bursting. It gave him a jolt to hear her voice – the last voice he had heard before the trap-door had opened and he had been flooded with light. As she twittered down the phone – she was one of his more anxious customers – he felt a wave of fondness for her.

The afternoon dragged by. Gordon willed it to end. On the other hand, playing for time, he urged it to go on for ever. He told himself that it was a normal Monday. After work he would go home to his wife, eat a meal, put his feet up. Those who worked with him noticed no difference. He was the same old Gordon – brisk, fidgety, jokey. None of them noticed – why should they? – when at four-thirty he made his decision.

He was standing on a landing, halfway up the stairs in the house they were renovating in Dawlish Road. Down in the basement there was the sound of hammering. Gordon took out his phone and pressed his home number.

Dorothy answered. ‘Hello?'

Gordon stood there, poised. He could climb the stairs or descend them. Now or never; he had the choice. Behind him, plastic sheeting flapped in the empty window-frame.

He said: ‘Never guess who I bumped into. This bloke Graham, same regiment as me – you know, up at Nottingham.' Behind him the plastic slapped as if it were trying to attract his attention. ‘So he's in London for the night and he said why don't him and me go out for a drink, maybe a bite to eat. That okay?'

Dorothy said that was fine. He switched off the phone and went downstairs to his car.

April was working the day shift that week. At six-thirty she left the Cardiac Unit, buttoning up her coat. She stepped out of the hospital lobby and paused, looking up at the sky. She wound a red scarf around her neck.

Gordon drove up to her, stopped the car and opened the door. She looked at him. Wordlessly she climbed in. He drove her home to Brixton. Still they didn't speak. They climbed the stairs to her flat – she picked up her mail on the way – and went into the bedroom. She switched on the light and sat on the bed.

‘You shouldn't be here,' she said.

He nodded. She sloughed off her coat. She raised her arms like a child and he pulled off her sweater. Beneath it she wore her uniform. He undid the buttons at her neck. She unbuckled her belt. One by one the letters slid off the bed. She sat there, gazing at them scattered on the carpet.

She raised her head and frowned, searching his face. He put his arms around her and pulled her to him.

IT WAS MID-DECEMBER,
four weeks since Prudence had seen Stephen or heard his voice. Her weak, vacillating lover had finally taken a decision and stuck with it. At times she could admire him for this. If his pain at their separation – amputation seemed a better description – were anything like hers, then he was demonstrating a remarkable strength of character. On the other hand, she presumed that it was easier for him: he had returned to a wife and children whom he loved, and whom he had never left in the first place. Maybe – horrible thought – he was forgetting her. The water of his family life had risen up and closed over the past. She was starting to realise that she, too, must get on with her life without him. She must stop these one-way conversations with him that still carried on in her head.
Can you believe what Alan said to me in the marketing meeting? What do you think about this Princess Di business?
She longed to know if he had found another job but there was nobody she could ask. His removal, not only from her life but from Beveridge and Bunyan, meant that he had disappeared from the lives of the few remaining colleagues at the office with whom he had been close. She hadn't met any of his other friends, she had been kept secret, so she couldn't keep track of him through them. She had been cut off from him as if he had died.

She had told her sisters what had happened – reluctantly, in the case of Maddy, because she knew that Maddy had never liked Stephen and though her sister wasn't the type to say
I told you so,
she wasn't a crowing sort of person, the
confirmation of her suspicions about Stephen, that he was simply a philanderer, seemed crudely simplistic and caused Prudence to rush to his defence and say that it was she herself who had broken it off. ‘He only honoured my decision,' she had said. Maddy sometimes made her talk pompously.

She tried to get on with her life. Britain was full of women like herself, tender episodes in the lives of men who had returned to their families. Oh, but she missed him! The day of the party she put on the black slip she had bought for their night of pleasure. She stood in the bedroom, stroking her silky flanks. She remembered how that night had ended: not with love, but with a dash to hospital to sit beside her father's bed in Intensive Care. Later, this had struck her as a premonition.

Maddy didn't like parties.
Who are all these people?
she would think.
What are they doing here?
What was she doing here? What was the point of standing there, wearing shoes that hurt, being shouted at by somebody who didn't have the slightest interest in her and whom she couldn't hear anyway? They laughed uproariously at jokes whose punchline she couldn't catch. They looked over her shoulder. Years of living abroad had set her apart from English people, whose preoccupations seemed parochial. Sometimes they politely asked her about herself but they had never heard of the places she had been, and even if they had they soon got bored anyway. She felt inadequate and yet prickly. She wanted to go home. She never felt that she was wearing the right clothes and the cigarette smoke made her eyes water. Besides, there was only so much orange juice she could get down before she started to feel sick.

So it was with some reluctance that she accompanied Erin to the editorial department party at Unimedia House. She went simply because Erin suggested it and she was so pleased to be asked that she agreed. She was also mildly curious to see where her sister worked. Maddy was no
book-reader, she had little knowledge of Prudence's job. In fact, she realised with shame, she had only once visited the old premises in Bloomsbury. But now she was in love with a novelist she found herself drawn to the place, as a woman who has fallen in love with an Arsenal supporter suddenly wants to go to a football match. However, when she arrived at the building – a huge, modern place – she felt chastened that it was her love for Erin rather than for her sister which had prompted her to come.

How impressive Prudence was! She wore an unfamiliar black dress – almost slinky, in fact – with gold stuff around the neck. She was the hostess, smiling and confident, a Prudence that Maddy had never seen. Maddy's heart swelled with pride. Her sister, in charge of all these people! Fifty of them, at least. They looked intimidating. Prudence climbed onto a platform and tapped her glass for silence. Maddy, just for a moment, wished that her parents were here. In some sense Erin had been right: she had always felt intellectually inferior to her sister. But Erin was an only child; she had no understanding of sisterly love, the thickness of its brew and the complex feelings that rose to the surface when it was stirred.