Exposure (65 page)

Had meeting Arianne taught him the tremendous importance of his heart? But it was not important
above all else!

He put his hand over his face as he thought of his ex-girlfriend, Lucy, and of the ten-line email he had written to her as a note of dismissal. He recalled the countless messages she had left on his voicemail, like little fistfuls of flowers on a grave. He and Lucy had been boyfriend and girlfriend for two whole years!
How many hundreds of times they had made love! They had learnt to sleep peacefully together, she had looked after him when he had a hangover, she had massaged his neck when he was tired; she had kept note of allergies, passions, loathings. She had always remembered to wish him luck or to congratulate him. She had done things to please him in bed that he knew she had found embarrassing.

And the awful thing was that she had done all this while enduring his constant uncertainty about whether she was the right girl for him. And, in the end, he had abandoned her in the course of just one evening for the sake of someone with a more beautiful face, longer arms and legs, a more vibrant personality. And in turn, just as Jessica had implied, the same had been done to him.

All this talk of the 'right' girl or the 'right' man, with its romantic astrological implications. It sounded much more practical when you told the truth: people went for clear eyes, thick hair, height, IQ. And yet love did come out of all the bartering. He had truly loved Arianne. But it was as if love was the design fault in an otherwise effective genetic machine.

Whatever the truth of this idea, it was certain that the question had not been whether Lucy was the 'right girl' for him but whether he was simply the 'wrong man'—for anyone.

And it was also certain that as much as his guilt over Lucy was genuine, he was dwelling on it because what he had done to Mila was worse. What he had done to Mila was
unthinkable.
When the memory of it threatened to overwhelm the horizon, he could think of nothing to do but run. First he ran up the steps, slamming and locking the door behind him. Then he snatched up his wallet and keys from the hall table and ran out on to the street.

 

With infinite gentleness, Alistair carried Rosalind's bag across the check-in hall. He had insisted on doing this - even though she was plainly far fitter than he, what with his ridiculous limp. He nodded to her—'
Yes, yes, of course, you go on'
—and she rushed off ahead in search of the right desk. When she found it, she waved and smiled at him and he lurched off in her direction, feeling ungainly. He was in more pain than he would have admitted.

'You all right? Leg OK?' she said as he arrived, but she was fiddling with her bag and not really waiting for his reply. He saw that she had asked after him out of habit—and, just then, he could only find this beautiful.

'Fine, thanks,' he said, knowing she would not hear. She was so excited—it was rather amazing to see. There was a thrilling breathlessness in her voice.

There were two couples and a man ahead of them. They shuffled along as the man went up to the desk with his bag and ticket.

'Shouldn't be long,' Rosalind said.

'No,' he agreed, 'no time at all.'

As he watched her make sure, for the umpteenth time, that she had her passport and reference number, he remembered an odd thing about the circumstances in which they had got engaged. They had re-met after a long gap. He had resigned ninety-nine per cent of himself to the fact that she was beyond his expectations and had allowed himself to drift out of touch. But Rosalind had appeared unexpectedly at the Christmas party of an old St Hilda's friend of his. This friend, whose name he had now forgotten, had known Suzannah, who had brought her little sister along.

As far as Alistair could remember, the party had taken place around the time he was taken on by Alan Campbell's chambers. He had been astonished by Rosalind's being in London. With a smile, he remembered proposing they raise their glasses of eggnog to St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

But where had he imagined she would be if not in London? He could clearly recall his own relief that she was there. It had involved the realization that he would not now have to endure a long period of attempting simultaneously to put her out of his mind and also, in the hope of astonishing her one day, of drearily beginning to
make something of himself
Yes, he remembered the relief clearly, but not where she had been going or why she had not gone.

The check-in queue shuffled forwards and he racked his mind. Suddenly it struck him. Of course: 'The Big Adventure'! She and Lara Siskin had been planning to go off on a tour of Italy and then Lara was injured or ill so the trip was called off. Suzannah had often brought it up bitchily at the beginning of their marriage when she whinged about not going on holiday enough. She would mention the
wasted
tickets and say what a
waste
it was that Rozzy hadn't had the guts to go on her own.

He had been furious with Suzannah for being so rude to her sister, who merely shrugged and called herself'a silly sausage'. But also, less flatteringly to himself, he remembered being glad that Rosalind hadn't had 'the guts' to go on her own. He had been glad in a practical sense, because she had been at the party, but also in an emotional sense, because he hadn't really wanted his wife to have 'guts'. He had always relied on her dependence on him more than he cared to admit. Had he ensured it by patronizing her, by dismissing her interests as trivial, by implying that she was only qualified to express an opinion on household matters? He had undervalued her, that was for certain, but it had never dawned on him that this negligence might have been a subtle form of domestic violence.

The ground steward fixed labels on to Rosalind's luggage and shunted it on to the conveyor-belt. 'Well, there it goes,' Rosalind said, plainly stunned that this was really happening.

'Yes. There it goes,' Alistair said, smiling at her. Apparently he could only repeat variations of her words back to her. As if he had none of his own. He knew he must try to stay calm.

They moved off towards the 'departures' sign and arrived a few feet in front of a row of desks and Passport officials. Rosalind stood in front of this view, embarrassed by the literalness of the barriers. She thought Alistair looked so sad and left out. 'Well, thank you very much for bringing me,' she said.

'Have a wonderful time, darling. A
really wonderful
time.'

She faced him. 'You will be all right, won't you, Alistair?'

'Me? I'll be fine. I shall miss you. But I'll be fine. Well,' he said awkwardly, pressing his lips to her cheek, knowing he had no right to kiss her mouth, 'well, you'd better go.'

But as he moved back, he found he could not let go of her and his hands gripped her arms, just as they had in the hallway at home a little while before. His heart leapt with fear that she might change her mind and leave him after all. Space ... independence ... perspective ... She would see how stupid she had always been to love him!

As ever, Rosalind had understood his fears. She said, 'I suppose you'd like me to bring you back some photographs?'

Only she would have thought to say that, he thought. It was the perfect, most moderate kind of reassurance—a cool hand on his brow. She intended to come back with photographs. 'I'd like that so much, darling,' he said.

Alistair wondered how, throughout the course of their marriage, he had ever ceased to be amazed by the depths of Rosalind's generosity towards him. It was as if he had been unable to acknowledge its significance precisely because it was being wasted on him. Suddenly he felt that he might cry but he knew that this would be deeply inappropriate—mere self-indulgence.

She smiled at him and he knew they understood each other. She was not promising that they would be happy immediately—as she had so reasonably put it, there was 'a lot to live through'—but she was at least promising to come back. This was more than good enough, far better than he deserved.

None the less, it was still his instinctive desire to push for more, to cross-examine her until he understood her intentions precisely, until he had forced out of her some kind of legally binding guarantee. His heart jolted again, but he stopped himself. He knew that this was meaningless.

All his life he had applied standards to himself that no human being could have met. It struck him then that if he had always had cause to despair, this was a fitting punishment for spending his time so foolishly. Of course, all he had wanted was to hold something completely still—his own image in the pool at the very least—in defiance of the constant flow of doubt, the fear of being discovered. But how lonely he had been in his own exacting company!

And now here were his worst fears. Here were change and uncertainty, in the most intimate area of his life: Rosalind. He simply let them be. And it was with a sense of the beautiful and mystifying injustice in the world that he acknowledged that, after all he had done wrong, he felt blessed with—hope.

Perhaps there are two kinds of people in the world: those who make life their subject and those who are the subject themselves. One act of violence had knocked Alistair Langford from the first category into the second. He watched his dignified wife hand her passport to the official and he waved and smiled at her as she went through.

Luke was out of breath. He had spent a frantic hour and a half, having to return once to the house for proof of identity, and to visit several branches of his bank. Now he ran back home from the high street. In his pocket was a wad of fifty-pound notes, which amounted to two thousand pounds. It was all he had had left in his account.

He had not been outside in the morning for a few weeks now. All was bright and busy on the high street and although the noise was an assault on his funereal mood, he was glad that other people were happy. In the queue at the bank, he had even attempted to count blessings: just to be white and male, to have no inherited deformities, to have an ordinary blood type—these things gave you an enormous head start.

Of course, he had been born into far more than this. But even with all that he had, Arianne had not loved him—had not even acknowledged him as a recipient of love. He had merely been, as she said, 'a temporary thing'. Her heart had not stopped at Luke Langford because the exchange had not seemed fair to her. His heart and mind and body for
hers
? No, not a good deal. He had aspired to her, but she had not aspired to him.

Why the hell had Rosalind promised him he was perfect? How
could
she have done that?

In self-disgust, he literally spat these last two thoughts out of his head. He knew perfectly well that his mother had always shown him unconditional support and had always done her best to prevent him falling through the gaps in Alistair's love. And on the one occasion his mother had needed his protection, after all that had happened to her marriage, to her heart essentially, which, in spite of her age, was
no less real than his own,
he had not really been listening. He had let her do his scrambled eggs the way he liked them and thought about himself.

When he went down to the annexe, he found Mila awake. She looked at him in puzzlement and said, 'I do not sleep. But I am so tired.'

He adopted the calm voice he had designed for the occasion. 'Well, you've been through a lot,' he told her. 'You're upset.'

'We are so
like!
she said, smiling at him. 'You also do not sleep if upset.'

Luke gritted his teeth and put the wad of money on the arm of the sofa. But just as he did so, Mila turned and ran to the mirror in the shower room. For a moment he was unsure if she had seen it, but when she spoke he knew she had not.

'Oh, is so ugly my face!' she cried. 'I think is bad for children see me!'

She was visible through the doorway. She tried to arrange her hair so that it covered some of the swelling, but it would not stay in place. She called out to him, 'Luke? How you say place in sea where is no one? Is
little little
country—very little.'

'Island?' Luke suggested. He wished she would just turn round, but who was he to interrupt the flow of her happiness?

'Yes, is right. Always you know! It is so clever.'

'But it's my own language,' he said.

Mila ignored this. 'Yes, I go in island for my face is nice again. Is nobody in there look me.' She giggled. 'But I think I like you also come. We are two people only in whole island. There is passport control: "
Only Luke and Mila"\
Yes?'

He said nothing in reply and to an onlooker he might even have appeared not to be listening, but with each high note of her joy, he could feel himself collapsing inside. Very slowly, he began the business of folding and tidying away illusions about his own essential goodness, which he had long carried in his mind. Here they would remain, assuming their place among the other souvenirs of his childhood—his old sports medals and school photographs, his first-aid certificates.

Oblivious to all this, Mila went on, 'And also we eat fruit of trees and we go to the sea for wash and is beautiful sun!'

She came out of the shower room, and as she did so, she allowed the hair she had been piling on top of her head to tumble down around her shoulders. She was smiling and as her eyes caught sight of the wad of banknotes, she thought for one extraordinary moment that Luke had anticipated her dream. He had brought money for a holiday! They would go away together—not out of England, of course, because she had no passport—but somewhere as quiet as an island.

But the look in his eyes could not have allowed this to last. She understood immediately. Her body visibly shrank - her shoulders hunched, her head lowered, she drew her arms in against herself. She cowered. Luke said, 'Look, Mila, everything is going to be
OK.
I've called my friend Jess. OK? You can stay with her for a few days until you find somewhere. You just
can't
stay here now, that's all. I'm sorry. But Jess is lovely and ... I'll put you in a cab,' he said. 'I've called you a cab.'