Infidelity (4 page)

I agreed with her about that, as I was to agree with her about so much. I used to try to explain that same point to clients who seemed to think I should be able to inoculate them against experience. Some of them tried to do it for their kids, mostly to disastrous effect. That always struck me as a way of setting prejudices in place, right from the start. Tell people what to look for and they'll see it, right enough.

‘Those three are rather like my London family, you know. I wanted you to meet them before you started drawing too many conclusions about me. The four of us . . . well, we've known each other for over twenty years.'

‘And always been singing together?' I knew about the therapeutic effects of choral bonding – some of my clients, eyes shining, had spoken with religious fervour about the joy of it.

‘It's how we met, singing together at University College. A few of us started eating together as well. Hanging out. It sort of developed, and we gradually became dependent on each other, I guess, though we're an odd mixture. After all this time, we know almost everything about each other. We trust each other. I'd say we love each other, near enough to unconditionally.'

‘And you do this every month?'

‘We call it our First Wednesday pact. Whoever's in London. Not always at my place. We rotate rather haphazardly.'

‘Was I an intruder?'

‘You were. But we welcome occasional intruders. Especially interesting ones from far away. I wanted you to meet them right at the start of . . . well, of our friendship. I always rush things, by the way. You'll learn that about me. They were on their worst behaviour, of course. We tend to be a bit unruly when one of us brings a guest – the rest of us generally manage to act like rather unpleasant younger siblings. Sorry.'

‘No, I was fascinated. The names, especially.'

‘Oh yes, the names. Well, Fox is easy. It's not a character assessment, just a rhyme. Her husband has never been one of us and doesn't fully approve. But he's away in Switzerland most of the time, so he can't really object. And Fox, as you might have gathered, is the opposite of a chattel.'

‘E?'

‘Well, what would you call someone whose real name is Eadelmarr Saxe-Hopetoun?'

‘In Australia he'd be Eddie. Or Hopeless.'

‘Jelly gave you his card, so I suppose you worked that out. These etymologies barely register with us any more – it's been so long.'

I glanced at Jelly's card. Kenneth Yelland. I looked blankly at Sarah.

‘KY? Jelly?' she said. ‘We thought it was terribly racy when we were nineteen. It kind of stuck. If you said Kenneth, let alone Ken, I'd barely know who you were talking about. When he feels the need to explain, he tells people he was dubbed Jelly after Jelly Roll Morton. He does play jazz piano, by the way, as well as singing like the very devil, so that's quite a convincing cover. He also has some of the dingier characteristics of Morton.'

‘And you're Sar. Never Sarah?'

She laughed. ‘Oh, Sarah to absolutely everyone but them. My mother
loathes
Sar, as you'd expect.'

‘I can imagine.'

‘It must seem childish, I suppose. We're all in our forties, for God's sake. But we've been through a great deal together – including a disastrous period when we tried to launch ourselves as a professional a cappella group – so we're very attached to each other. Quirky nicknames are part of the argot.'

I nodded. It looked as if Sarah and her friends had formed a more intimate, more enduring little herd than most of us ever manage – inside families or out.

‘I'm bound to talk about these people a lot, Tom. We have no secrets from each other, and I wanted you to know who they are. That's all. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to see them again if you don't want to. Though I hope you might want to, occasionally.'

It took a moment to absorb the import of that, and I allowed myself to bask in its implication. We had embarked on some kind of journey, Sarah and I. I smiled at her and allowed a cluster of possibil­ities to form inside my head.

She said: ‘Perhaps you and I will become firm friends, too, Tom Harper. Perhaps we'll create our own little rituals. Who knows?'

The swish of tyres on the wet pavement outside served as a lush soundtrack to that moment. I became aware of a ticking clock somewhere and looked at my watch.

‘Weird as it may sound, I should be getting back to Fiona's flat.'

‘You make it sound like boarding school.'

‘It's about as uncomfortable as a boarding school, I can tell you. Still, it's been a very convenient arrangement while she's been away. But this is clean-up night. She comes back in the morning.'

‘And then what?'

‘I've booked into some sort of private hotel round the corner from Fiona's flat. I'll move in tomorrow on a week-to-week basis. After that, a bit of travel – I have relatives in Scotland to visit. I haven't yet decided whether I'll need to look for something more permanent. I'm still not sure how long I'll be staying, whether I'll be working – anything, really.'

Sarah didn't miss a beat. ‘I have a perfectly good guest room going to waste, you know,' she said. ‘You could camp here quite comfortably while you worked out what to do next. I'm never here on weekends, so you'd have the run of the place. It's a thought, isn't it?'

Looking back on that moment, it seems more extraordinary than it did at the time. Then, I was simply intrigued and a little excited by the sense that I was looking over a wall, peering into Sarah's life. I allowed myself to be shown her bijou guest room, opening straight off the living room, its masculine tone a surprising counterpoint to the living area.

‘There's an ensuite bathroom, and the kitchen's right next door, so you're quite self-contained. My room and the main bathroom are down the other end, out of harm's way. Think about it.'

‘This is a remarkably generous offer.'

‘Not if you're prepared to regard me as a friend, it isn't. Most of my friends have camped here at one time or another. E was here for several months of last year, when his life fell apart. Fox often stays for a week or two. Anyway, Australians are always bunking in with each other in London, and my mother makes me a kind of honorary Australian, doesn't she?'

I donned my coat again and we walked to her front door. We stood close to each other for a moment, then embraced in a way that could have been merely friendly but felt more promising than that. I inhaled the smell of her hair and kissed her on both cheeks. She smiled and surprised me by kissing me lightly on the lips. We stepped apart and she opened the door.

‘Thank you for dinner, and for the glimpse of the inner sanctum – the place and the people. I am, by the way.'

‘You are . . .?'

‘Prepared to regard you as a friend.'

There was another pause while we smiled at each other again.

‘I was very impressed by your spirited response to Jelly's silliness, you know. I'm impressed by a lot of things about you, Tom Harper.'

‘I'll call you,' I said, lost for anything more eloquent.

‘I have Mother tomorrow, of course, but I'm free on Friday afternoon if you'd like to do something touristy. A walk along the Thames, perhaps? You won't be at a loose end forever, I realise. Call me tomorrow night if you're interested.'

Outside, looking for a cab, it was almost impossible to believe I was in London. Or that Sarah Delacour, sighted in a gallery barely two weeks ago, was offering me a place to stay. Or that we were already declaring ourselves to be friends. Or that I had held her, briefly, in my arms. ‘I always rush things,' she had said, and I was keen to learn what that might mean.

I raised my face to the night sky and welcomed the shock of sleet on my skin.

5

‘F
eeling strong? I thought a brisk walk along Vauxhall Bridge Road, across the bridge, up the Albert Embankment to Southbank, coffee at the Tate Modern with perhaps a quick peek inside. Then we can loop back to Waterloo, with a pit stop at Blackfriars on the way – if that last bit wouldn't be too boringly repetitive. I confess Blackfriars is part of my Friday pre-train ritual.'

Ritual was to be a recurring theme with Sarah. So was haste. I had collected her from Vincent Square; she had given me a key to her apartment and invited me to move my stuff in over the weekend – or not. ‘Entirely up to you,' she had said, with the reckless air I was already coming to recognise as one of her hallmarks.

I hadn't committed myself, though, and was still quite unsure of how to respond to an offer that seemed, from almost every point of view, too good to be true. I had moved my belongings into the so-called private hotel around the corner from Fiona – a rather down-market affair that had probably never been any grander (or warmer) than it was now. Sarah's offer was tempting, of course, so why did I hesitate? One thing, and only one, restrained me: I had no wish to become ‘the friend in the spare room'. That struck me as a premature narrowing of options; I had higher aspirations.

I expressed enthusiasm for Sarah's plans for our afternoon together, and she slipped her gloved hand inside my arm as we set off in the direction of the Thames. She was wearing a soft brimmed hat the colour of her eyes, a matching woollen scarf and the heavy black overcoat I recognised from our first encounter at the Royal Academy. I had noticed on our walk from Blackfriars to Waterloo that the rhythm of walking seemed to put her into deep thought. As we got into our stride, she fell silent once again, with her head down.

I wondered if people said to her, as they often do to me: ‘You think too much.' I imagined that would irritate her as much as it has always irritated me. I've never understood the concept of
not
thinking. A dead person doesn't think – though they're not persons, either, as we generally understand the term. If your brain and central nervous system are functioning, you're thinking. Perhaps people mean I think about the wrong things. Or I think in too focused a way. Or I think of things they wish I wouldn't – such as why any of us do the things we do.

As we walked, I became conscious of Sarah muttering quietly. It sounded like an incantation.

‘Speak up,' I said with a grin. ‘Can I join in?' I knew I was on thin ice. If Sarah was anything like me, ‘penny for your thoughts' would be almost as annoying as ‘you think too much'.

‘Oh, sorry. I'm working on “Puss in Boots” at present, and it's a corker, really. Do you know it? Everyone has a rough idea of the story – most English kids of my generation saw the pantomime when they were little – but I find very few people actually know the rhyme.'

I confessed I didn't, so Sarah began chanting it more audibly, exaggerating the rhythm in time with our steps.

A miller lay dying – he made his last will;

He left his three sons his cat, ass and mill:

To the eldest the mill, to the second the ass;

The third had the cat, and he cried out ‘Alas!

I must starve now, unless I take Pussy to eat!'

I joined in and we marched along like a couple of kids, the words, like any chant, becoming more and more meaningless as we repeated them.

‘No wonder it's not in most of the anthologies,' Sarah said at last, pausing to catch her breath. ‘Too gruesome.'

‘I don't think I even knew it was a nursery rhyme. I thought it was only ever a fairy tale, and most of them are pretty grim. No pun intended.'

‘Very true,' Sarah said. ‘If you had known that rhyme and could tell me something of its provenance, I'd have given you a gold star – except I don't believe in rewards, but that's another subject. Do you know who wrote the story?'

‘Not Hans Christian Andersen.'

Sarah stopped and we turned to face the river. ‘No, not Andersen. Nor Grimm. Nor Aesop. So who was it?'

‘I'm afraid you've already exhausted my knowledge of these matters.'

‘Giovanni Francesco Straparola.'

‘Never heard of him. When was this?'

‘Oh, middle of the sixteenth century. But the story came to English via a French translation by Charles Perrault, so Perrault gets most of the credit.'

‘Never heard of him, either.'

‘They were both great collectors of fairy tales. End of tutorial.'

‘Don't stop. I love hearing you talk about this.' The truth was, I was enjoying the sound of her voice. I wanted her to keep talking about anything at all.

‘No. Time for some lurid tales from the counsellor's couch.'

‘No, you go on. Anyway, I didn't have a couch.'

‘But you said . . .'

‘That was a sofa masquerading as a couch. I've told you that story. Tell me about Monsieur Perrault.'

‘You want me to teach you for nothing? My students pay good money to hear all this. Or their parents do. Or the government. Anyway . . . if you've seen the panto, you'll recall that the third son didn't eat the cat – the cat had quite other ideas. He was a power freak. Ordered up some boots to give himself gravitas and deployed his many talents, nefarious and otherwise, to set his master on the road to fame and fortune. The usual thing – ogres, lots of magic, lots of deception, lots of wheedling, until he finally acquired a castle by dubious means and installed his master in it, replete with a new identity. The miller's son thought this was all very nice but, of course, he was now totally beholden to Puss. He was actually a horrible fellow, that cat.'

‘I do vaguely remember some of that. Sounds quite heavy for a kids' story, though.'

‘Oh, Perrault's version wasn't intended for children at all, strangely enough. He was pitching it at the upper crust of French society. Thought they were in need of moral instruction – especially about using ends to justify means. Sound familiar?'

‘And how did Monsieur Perrault feel about his inspirational fable ending up as a kids' fairy tale?'

‘No idea. But isn't that the fate of everything we write, Tom? We can agonise over the words as much as we like, but readers will do whatever they like with them.'

We continued walking, not quite in silence – Sarah had reverted to muttering her rhyme, as if further repetition might unlock some secret meaning.

It was a sparkling winter's day, chilly but bright. The drizzle that had seemed permanent for the past week had finally cleared.

‘Let's sit down for a while, shall we?' Sarah pointed to a bench facing the river and we settled on it together, her hand still tucked into my arm and her body pressed against mine, possibly only for warmth. The river was busy with working boats and tourist ferries. Improbably, an androgynous figure in a wetsuit paddled by on a very Australian-looking surf ski.

After a few minutes' silence, I said: ‘May I ask you something?' I was determined to raise at least one of the several questions puzzling me, though I realised I was mostly looking for arguments in favour of saying yes to the guest room.

Sarah turned towards me and looked straight into my eyes, smiling as she did on that first afternoon in the Royal Academy, two weeks ago. (Had it really only been two weeks? Was this to be like a shipboard romance, I wondered – sudden, sweet, and swiftly gone?)

‘Ask me anything,' she said, ‘but I have to warn you about something. I'm a bit unusual in this respect. I will answer truthfully.'

‘Is that so unusual?'

‘Perhaps you didn't hear what I said. I will answer truthfully – whatever you ask me – so be very sure you want a truthful answer before you ask. Lots of people don't like that. Don't want the truth.'

‘I think I'd always want the truth.'

‘I rather imagined you would. That's why you need to be careful about what you ask. Do you understand what I'm saying? I'm a person who hates secrets, Tom. I hate deception. I don't volunteer much about myself, but if anyone asks me something, they get the truth, and I expect the same in return. I'll tell you no more than you ask, but I'll tell you no less, either.' This was said pleasantly, but with absolute firmness.

Given that opportunity to ask one thing, to discover one thing about Sarah, many questions surged into my mind. Where did her money come from? None of my business. Where did she go on Friday nights? No need to rush that – perhaps to a house in the country where she sought solitude; perhaps to some kind of assignation I'd rather not yet know about. I had seen no photographs of men in her apartment. The only framed photo on display was of Sarah herself.

The question I really wanted answered was the obvious one. ‘E said they always give Sar's new pets a rough time at first. How shall I put this? Is there a category called “Sar's pets” that's familiar to your inner circle? If I'm merely the latest in a long line of such creatures, I think I'd prefer to know, roughly speaking, the fate of my predecessors.'

Sarah laughed with obvious delight. ‘How very blokey of you to ask such a thing, Tom Harper. I'm quite touched. All right, you've asked me, so I'll tell you. Of course there have been a few. More than a few, I suppose, over the years, but a couple reasonably recently. By the way, I honestly can't see that this has any relevance to where our friendship might lead us. I told you on Wednesday I have no secrets from the group and I told you I wanted them to meet you. Everything's quite transparent.'

‘Still, I was intrigued by E's rather arresting turn of phrase.'

‘E, as you will have noticed, has the very opposite of a wicked sense of humour. His sense of humour, such as it is, is as clunky as a truck. He can't get past the idea that it's amusing to humiliate people. I'm sorry if you were embarrassed.'

‘Intrigued more than embarrassed. Just wondering, that's all.'

‘Idle curiosity, Tom? Idleness ill becomes any of us.'

‘So?' I felt foolish having raised this, but now my curiosity was anything but idle.

‘Without trawling through my entire sexual history – I would if you asked me, though we would both find it terribly tedious – I have introduced two other men to the First Wednesday group in the past few years. One last year and one about three years ago. I thought each of them was wonderful and I thought each would play a significant role in my life. I was wrong both times.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Surely you're not sorry, Tom.
I
was sorry. I made a complete fool of myself over the first one. But surely
you're
not sorry. Here we are, after all, on the threshold of
something.
'

‘I think I meant I was sorry to have brought it up.'

‘I knew you would. As soon as those words slipped out of E's gormless mouth I knew you would, sooner or later.'

‘Am I already so predictable?'

‘You're a man. Anyway, I hardly expect you'd have thought I was a celibate forty-year-old, waiting for Mr Right. No, I'm not celibate. I've never been celibate, not since my second night in college. Or possibly earlier than that, depending how technical you want to be. You've met one of my former lovers already. No nostalgic traces there, by the way, on either side, in case you're wondering. Ancient history.'

I remained silent. I did not wish to learn which of the two First Wednesday males was a former lover.

‘Perhaps I should add that my friendship with the man I introduced to the group three years ago was like a short, sharp shock. I've already told you I rush things, but that was too reckless, even for me. The worst misjudgement of my life, in fact. Apart from my choice of father, of course.'

‘And last year's?'

‘Last year's what?'

‘You said you'd introduced one man three years ago and one last year.' I had made myself feel foolish pursuing this, but not so foolish that I could restrain myself from asking.

‘Not a complete disaster, but still another terrible error of judgement. All other considerations aside, he couldn't grasp the distinction between a colon and a semicolon, and he always accused me of inferring things when he meant implying. He, by the way, was such a concrete thinker, I could never have accused him of implying anything. He spelt everything out. Everything. Oh, and he had a tiny cock. Satisfied?'

Sarah's eyebrows were arched in a challenge.

‘E did make it sound rather like a steady stream,' I said, knowing I sounded absurd.

‘Poor E.
Alone and palely loitering
– perfect description of E. He'll never quite manage to commit himself to any woman long-term – he's too frightened to make himself vulnerable. Music is his true love. But he likes to tease people. It's a type of power trip. I shouldn't have to tell you that.'

‘And I shouldn't have brought this up.'

‘You should bring up anything you want to bring up, Tom. That's the kind of relationship we're going to have, you and I, if we're going to have any relationship at all. No secrets. Nothing bottled up. No hiding from each other.'

‘I'd like to live like that. I'm not sure it's possible, but I'd like to.'

‘Then you're about to find out if you can.'

‘I'm happy to try.'

‘So why don't you ask me the real question, instead of that silly tangential one about “Sar's pets”.'

I gazed at the river, dark and deep, and wondered how far to go with this. Had we reached a crossroads in this intense conversation, where the wrong choice would lead me into trouble? Why had I felt the need to know any of this stuff, so early in our relationship? Wouldn't it have been wiser to let time pass, to let everything evolve?