Lifesaver (30 page)

‘What?’

‘That she was only doing it as a way of getting closer to me. And as much as I appreciated her help, it pissed my wife off no end, and to be honest, it annoyed me too, that somebody could be using my son like that.’

I gulped, and felt my face flush. He must never find out, I thought. What I’d done was even worse: used
him
to get close to Max.

‘Anyway, then Marilyn left, and I think Pamela thought it was her chance, that she could muscle in and fill the space. More than fill the space,’ he said with a grimace, and I couldn’t help smiling.

‘It was awful. I had to sit her down and explain that although I really liked her, it would never work. I wasn’t looking for anyone new. I didn’t know if Marilyn was coming back or not. I said everything I could possibly say without actually coming out with the words, “I wouldn’t fancy you if you were the last woman alive.” But I think she’s still hoping.’

I remembered the envy in her small, hollow eyes - but I was more interesting in discovering that Adam’s wife was called Marilyn. The name suited her, I thought, visualising her in the photo on the shelf. I opened my mouth to ask where she was now, what had happened, whether he still didn’t know if she was coming back; but decided that discretion was the better part of valour. All in good time, I thought.

‘You’re very easy to talk to,’ I blurted out instead. We were standing in the galley kitchen, leaning against the counters. When I turned to pick up my cold tumbler of whisky, I caught sight of our reflections in the curved chrome surface of the kettle, an arched tableau of total completeness: Adam and I contained at the epicentre of our own silver and spotlit universe. I had the oddest feeling of contentment, that here was a place I was needed; that I belonged. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but I amazed myself by seemingly managing to erase all traces of my old life as Anna: Ken, Lil, Vicky, the babies - hers and mine. At that moment I felt that all that I was, and wanted to be, was reflected before me in that kettle, and borne through the rooms of that little terraced house on the sentient breath of the sleeping boy upstairs.

‘So are you,’ replied Adam, and he put his hand on my shoulder. His touch was so gentle—not hesitant, just tender—but none the less I nearly jumped out of my skin. He was looking into my eyes and in an instant all my comfortable feelings of the moment before vanished, and my knees started to tremble. I had to put both my palms flat on the kitchen counter behind me to hold me up, and I couldn’t meet his gaze. Blushing like a schoolgirl, I stared at the floor. My heart was pounding and I suddenly became aware of that evening’s linguine sitting like a breeze block in my stomach. Adam moved closer to me. I didn’t notice that I’d stopped breathing until I heard myself gasping unromantically, like a fish out of water. I also realized that I was absolutely, knuckle-whiteningly
terrified
. It had been seven years since anyone other than Ken had looked at me like that.

‘You’re so gorgeous,’ he whispered, and I felt his breath tickle the side of my face. Unbidden by my conscious mind, my arms slipped themselves around his waist and pulled him even nearer until we were hugging. He nestled his head into the crook of my neck, and the smell of him was both familiar and like a distant memory; a Chinese whisper of remembered scents.

‘Anna,’ he sighed. Then he looked up and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. We were finally eye to eye, and the air between our parted lips seemed to crackle and fizz with anticipation as we moved closer together. Just as his mouth had found mine, and our lips touched with a crackle that throbbed deep within me, a small, disconsolate voice floated down the stairs in an interruption of such immaculate comedy timing that we both jumped apart, red-faced and laughing.

‘Daddy! Daddy! I want you!’

‘That’s my boy,’ said Adam sardonically. ‘Sorry, Anna, I’ll just go and see what he wants. He’s probably had a bad dream.’

Let
me
go to him, I begged silently, even though I knew it wouldn’t have been appropriate. I hadn’t got to that stage—yet. As I checked my tousled reflection in the kettle, I thought it wouldn’t be long, though, before I was, and the thought made my heart soar. Then I wondered, idly, what Ken was up to while I was kissing another man, although I found that I didn’t even feel guilty. He would never know. I’d found something to make me feel contentment, for the first time since Holly died; and I was buggered if I was going to let anything stand in the way of it. In the long run it might even benefit Ken and me, I thought, just for me to feel needed again.

Adam came down the stairs, grabbed a beaker and began running the cold tap to fill it up. ‘He just wants a drink,’ he said. ‘Don’t move—no, on second thoughts, why don’t you go and sit down in there? I won’t be a moment,’ and he raced off again.

I wandered through to the living room, my ears straining to hear Max’s sleepy querulous voice again. I heard a few murmurs, but nothing I could distinguish as words. I sat down on the still-rumpled sofa, feeling every nerve ending tingling with anticipation and worry. How should I sit? Like the babysitter, bolt upright with feigned innocence? Or perhaps I ought to have conceded to the moment and arranged myself seductively, one leg bent up, or both, maybe, in a full-length sultry lounge? After some considerable dithering, I settled for a faux-relaxed sort of flop against the back of the sofa, slipping off my sandals first to give an impression of extreme casualness. Then I changed my mind, and pulled my legs up so that my feet were flat on the sofa cushion, and I was hugging my knees. I scratched a few stray brushstrokes of nail polish away from the edges of my toes, and waited.

I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure that I’d have gone through with it, if Adam had come down wanting to carry on where it looked as if we had been heading. As much as I wanted to be there with him and Max, and as little guilt as I seemed to be feeling, I still loathed the thought of being unfaithful to Ken. I’d always had such secret scorn for friends or colleagues who breathily gushed about their sordid affairs—actors in rep had plenty of opportunities for infidelity, and often availed themselves of said opportunities. To me, though, wedding vows were sacred, let alone the colossal betrayal being perpetrated on the innocent partner. It was the lowest of the low, a cheap trick arising from boredom or frustration,or the depressing thought that they were obliged to have sex with nobody other than their spouse for the rest of their natural lives… But if that really was such a depressing thought for them, then I had no sympathy. It had been their choice. Nobody had forced them to get married, and if they hadn’t wanted to stay faithful, why bother getting hitched in the first place?

That was what I’d always thought. I truly believed I wanted to grow old with Ken, and to have his children—although that was easier said than done. But this - and I could scarcely believe I was qualifying it—was different. This was about Max, at the end of the day.

‘You look miles away,’ said Adam, who, I noticed, had also taken his shoes and socks off. He was standing at the foot of the stairs, smiling at me, with the empty red beaker in his hand. His feet were compact and chunky, with the toes in a perfectly neat curve from big to little. Ken’s were the opposite: toes all different shapes and sizes, ungainly bony chaos. ‘What are you thinking?’

I grinned back at him, swallowing my turmoil like medicine. ‘I was actually just thinking that I can’t stand it when people say “at the end of the day”.’

‘Really? I don’t mind that one too much. It’s “you know what I mean” that drives me nuts. There’s a caretaker at the college who can’t say a single sentence without finishing it with “know what I mean”?’ He padded silently into the kitchen, left the beaker on the counter, collected his whisky glass, and returned to join me.

‘Has Max gone back to sleep?’

‘Probably, by now. Even when he shouts downstairs, he’s never fully awake. He just wants to know I’m still there, I think.’

He turned to face me, sitting sideways on the sofa next to me as if he was about to propose. ‘So, Anna,’ he said. ‘I’m not very good at all this stuff, and I don’t want you to think I’m bombarding you—I know we’re already going out on Monday night, but I wondered if you’d like to come swimming with Max and I tomorrow as well? I mean, obviously, say no if you’re busy…

Ken jumped into my mind then, in his tennis whites, on court. I was watching him serve, for some reason, admiring the way his shirt rode up to expose his sinewy midriff as he lifted his arm high to serve, and the resounding thwack of the ball as it sped in a green blur across the net. Ken looked incredibly sexy when he served.

But I made him jump out again, just as fast. I couldn’t let myself think about Ken. It had nothing to do with Ken, and anyway, he was probably in a Karaoke bar in Tokyo by now, chucking back the sake and being flirted with blonde English hostesses on their gap year. A chance to be with Max - that was what I’d been angling for all along.

‘I’d love to,’ I said.

Adam kissed me again, more decisively. That’s it, I thought. Whatever else happened, I would never be able to undo that moment. I could never again say that I’d been completely faithful to my husband. My legs were shaking so much that I was glad I was sitting down, and I felt as if I’d never been kissed before in my entire life. I’d almost hoped that he would be a terrible kisser, one of those ones with great fat tongues which they shoved into your mouth and left there, like it was your job to do something with it; or with terrible breath—but no. His kiss was so tender: somehow bespoke, as if I couldn’t have ordered a better fit. The longer it went on, the more my fear and guilt evaporated, and I began to melt into it. He pushed me gently back against the arm of the sofa, and I felt his welcome weight pin me down and hold me there, and the twitch and swell of him through his jeans against my thigh. Another man’s penis. I wondered what it looked like.

‘You smell lovely,’ I muttered, when we came up for air.

‘You taste lovely,’ he replied, stroking my face.

I didn’t want to sleep with him, though. Ken had once said that he would probably forgive me a drunken snog—most likely because he would want me to say the same for him—but that if I ever slept with another man, that would be us finished. So I mentally classified what Adam and I had just been doing as your common-and—garden drunken snog. Despite the fact that Adam seemed utterly sober, and the five glasses of wine I’d consumed had had little effect on me other than to stain my tongue and lips a bluish purple colour.

‘Do you often go swimming?’ I asked, just for something to say, as Adam pulled my legs across his lap and began to caress my bare feet. It felt wonderful. My mother was the only person who’d ever stroked my feet, and in the strong rasp of Adam’s fingers across my instep, I thought I sensed an echo of my mother’s soft hands, like the satiny sheen of a conker inside its spiky case.

‘When I can,’ said Adam. ‘When it’s not too cold. The forecast’s not so great for tomorrow, but he’ll be disappointed if we can’t go.’ I clearly had so much longing in my eyes that he laughed. ‘And I can see that you’ll be, too.’

‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ I said, blushing.

Adam squeezed my toes. ‘So am I. And so will Max be.’

It had been worth giving up my holiday for, after all.

I eventually left Adam’s house at around two in the morning, my chin sore with stubble rash and my eyes stinging with tiredness. As I slumped in the back of the cab, trying to process the night’s events, I realized I must have been drunker than I’d thought, since I couldn’t shake the conviction that I was returning home to Ken, and not to a small, bare flat next to a village pond. I still didn’t feel guilty; not exactly—although perhaps a true realization of infidelity took its time to sink in, like an un-absorbent cloth trying to mop up a viscous spillage. I was just sad to think of our big, empty house, windows dark and air undisturbed. If Holly were alive, there’d have been life in that house. If Holly had been alive, everything would have been different.

I fell asleep as soon as I got into the bed, and didn’t open my eyes again until ten o’clock the next day, when I awoke with a shaft of sunlight dazzling me, and unfamiliar yellow flowery curtains flapping in morning breeze at the open window. I’d been dreaming about our wedding: the best day of my life. The dream rekindled the joy I’d felt that day, and a residue of it remained with me, like sleep in my eyes, bringing a lump to my throat at the knowledge that such pure emotion felt lost to me now, forever, it seemed.

It had been a genuine, almost out-of-control joy. Like fearless and exhilarating trampolining. I had no flowing or complete memory of the event, not in any narrative sense; but instead a choppy stack of thin recollections as though the day had been sliced up into a myriad cross-sectioned moments, any one of which could be pulled out and examined at random. It was a macabre comparison, but it reminded me of the executed convict who’d donated his body to medical science to be sawn up into thousands of paper-thin rings, which were then photographed and entered into a computer to obtain a 3-D picture of a human body, inside and out.

Sometimes when I tried to remember my marriage service, all I could summon up was the feel of the heinously uncomfortable underwear I’d rashly allowed the dress designer to recommend. I’d have been much happier in a G-string, but she’d persuaded me into what were, essentially, just a very expensive pair of Big Pants, which cut into my waist and squeezed the cheeks of my bottom. I had a vague memory of the trendy liberal vicar, who’d agreed to marry us in church despite the fact that Ken was already divorced. The vicar had had a habit of earnestly removing his glasses every two minutes to emphasise his words, and then putting them back on again.

There were memories of other feelings, too: the tenderness I’d felt at the sight of the two rings nestled into the plum velvet box proffered by the best man; one ring chunky like a sturdy first-born twin, the other one delicate, its ailing sibling. I’d forgotten the words of the ceremony, but not the muffled clearing of throats, the coughing of the congregation, and the vicar’s glasses coming off and going back on.