Shatter (41 page)

‘Is she al right?’

‘She says so. She’s in London.’

‘Where is she staying?’

‘I don’t know.’

Julianne brushes her hands over her hips, smoothing her gown.

‘I love your dress. It’s stunning.’

‘Thank you.’

‘When did you get it?’

‘In Rome.’

‘You didn’t tel me.’

‘It was my bonus.’

‘Dirk bought it for you?’

‘He saw me admiring it. I didn’t know he was going to buy it. He surprised me.’

‘A bonus for what?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You said it was a bonus.’

‘Oh, yes, for al the long hours. We worked so hard. I’m exhausted.’

She doesn’t seem to notice how hot it’s become in here and how difficult it is to breathe.

She takes my hand. ‘I want you to meet Dirk. I’ve told him how clever you are.’

I’m being led through the crowd. Bodies simply part. Dirk and Eugene are chatting to col eagues beneath the jaws of a dinosaur that looks ready to eat them. We wait and listen. Every one of Dirk’s utterances is a statement of personal principle: opinionated, loud and dogmatic. There’s a lul . Julianne fil s it.

‘Dirk, this is Joe, my husband. Joe this is Dirk Cresswel .’

He has a fearsome grip; a finger crushing, show-me-the-whites-of-your-eyes sort of handshake. I try to match it. He smiles.

‘Do you work in finance, Joe?’ he asks.

I shake my head.

‘Very wise. What do you do? Oh, that’s right, I remember Jules mentioning that you were a shrink.’

I glance towards Julianne. Eugene Franklin has asked her something and she’s no longer listening.

Dirk suddenly turns his back to me. Not completely. A shoulder.

Others in the circle are more interesting or easier to impress. I feel like a footman, standing cap in hand, waiting to be dismissed.

A waiter passes with a tray of canapés. Dirk comments on the foie gras, which isn’t bad, he says, but he’s had better at a little restaurant in Montparnasse, a favourite of Hemingway’s.

‘It tastes pretty good if you come from Somerset,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ answers Dirk. ‘Thankful y, we’re not al from Somerset.’

It gets a laugh. I want to put a kink in his perfectly straight nose with my fist. He carries on talking about Paris in a voice ful of privilege and bravado that cuts right through me and reminds me of everything I hate about bul ies.

I drift away looking for another drink. I meet up with Flip again, who introduces me to her boyfriend, who’s a dealer.

‘Shares, not drugs,’ he says.

I wonder how many times he’s used that line.

By now I’ve passed from the tipsy state to being grimly drunk. I shouldn’t be drinking at al , but every time I contemplate switching to mineral water, I find another champagne flute in my hand.

Just before midnight I go looking for Julianne. I’m drunk. I want to leave. She’s not on the dance floor or beneath the dinosaur. I walk up the staircase and peer into dark corners. It’s crazy, I know, but I keep expecting to find her with Dirk’s tongue in her mouth and his hands in her dress. Surprisingly, I don’t feel angry or bitter. This is the materialisation of a certainty that has been with me for weeks.

I walk outside the main doors. There she is, backed up against a stone pil ar. Dirk is in front of her with one hand braced against the stone cutting off her escape.

He spies me approaching. ‘Speak of the devil. Having a good time?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ I turn to Julianne. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I was looking for you. Dirk thought he saw you coming outside.’

‘No.’

Dirk’s hand slips down, touching her shoulder.

‘Please take your hand off her,’ I say, unable to recognise my own voice.

Julianne’s eyes go wide.

Dirk grins. ‘You seem to have the wrong end of the stick, my friend.’

Julianne tries to laugh it off. ‘Come on, Joe, I think it’s time to go. I’l get my coat.’

She ducks under his arm. Dirk looks at me with a mixture of pity and triumph.

‘Too much champagne, my friend. It happens to the best of us.’

‘I’m
not
your friend. Don’t touch my wife again.’

‘My apologies,’ he says. ‘I’m a very tactile person.’ He holds up his hands as though producing the evidence. ‘Sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding.’

‘There is no misunderstanding,’ I reply. ‘I know what you’re doing. So does everyone else here. You want to sleep with my wife. Maybe you already have. And then you’l swagger off and brag about it to your clubster mates on golfing weekends to the Algarve or shooting weekends in Scotland.

‘You’re “Mr Hole in One”. You’re “Dead-Eye Dirk”. You flirt with other men’s wives and then take them to dinner at Sketch and back to a little boutique hotel in London which has matching robes and an oversized bath with a spa.

‘You try to impress them by name-dropping— first names only of course: Nigel a and Charles, Madonna and Guy, Victoria and David— because you think it’s going to make you more attractive to these women, but underneath that sun-bed tan and sixty-quid haircut you’re an overpaid glorified salesman, who can’t even sel himself.’

A crowd is being sucked inwards, unable to resist a playground fight where someone has taken on the school bul y. Julianne comes rushing back, pushing through onlookers, knowing something terrible is afoot. She says my name. She begs me to shut up and tugs at my arm, but it’s too late.

‘You see, I know your type, Dirk. I know your shabby superior smile and condescending attitude towards waiters and tradesmen and shopgirls. You use sarcasm and overweening formality to gloss over the fact that you have no real influence or power.

‘So you try to make up for this by taking away what other men have. You tel yourself it’s the chal enge that excites you; the chase, but the truth is you can’t hold onto a woman for more than a few weeks because pretty quickly they work out that you’re a pretentious, stuck-up, self-centred bastard and then you’re fucked.’

‘Please, Joe, don’t say any more. Please shut up.’

‘I notice things, Dirk, little details about people. Take you, for example. Your fingernails are flat and yel owing. It’s a sign of an iron deficiency. Maybe your kidneys aren’t working properly.

If I were you I’d go easy on the Viagra for a while until I got myself checked out.’

52

By the time I reach the hotel room Julianne has locked herself in the bathroom. I tap on the door.

‘Go away.’

‘Please open up.’

‘No.’

I press my ear to a wooden panel and imagine I hear the faint silky slithering of her gown. She might be kneeling, pressing her ear against the door, opposite mine.

‘Why do you do it, Joe? Whenever I’m happy you do something to mess it up.’

I take a deep breath. ‘I found a receipt from Italy. You threw it away.’

She doesn’t respond.

‘It was for room service. Breakfast. Champagne, bacon, eggs, pancakes… more food than you could ever eat.’

‘You went through my receipts?’

‘I found it.’

‘You went through the rubbish— spying on me.’

‘I wasn’t spying. I know what you normal y have for breakfast. Fresh fruit. Yoghurt. Bircher muesli…’

My certainty and loneliness are now so intense they seem perfectly matched. I’m drunk. I’m trembling. I’m remembering the events of the night.

‘I saw the way Dirk looked at you. He couldn’t keep his hands off you. And I heard the snide comments and the whispers. Everyone in that room thinks he’s sleeping with you.’

‘And you do too! You think I’m fucking Dirk. You think I ordered breakfast after we fucked al night?’

She hasn’t denied it yet. She hasn’t explained.

‘Why didn’t you tel me about the dress?’

‘He only gave it to me yesterday.’

‘Was the lingerie also a bonus… a present from him?’

She doesn’t answer. I press my ear harder to the door and wait. I hear her sigh and move away. A tap is turned on. I wait. My knees are stiff. I feel a coppery taste in my mouth, a hangover in the making.

Final y she speaks, ‘I want you to think very careful y before you ask me the question, Joe.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You want to know if I fucked Dirk? Ask me. But when you do, remember what’s going to die. Trust. Nothing can bring it back, Joe. I want you to understand that.’

The door opens. I step back. Julianne has wrapped a white towel ing robe around her and cinched it tightly at the waist. Without meeting my eyes, she walks to the bed and lies down, facing away from me. The mattress springs barely move under her weight.

Her dress is lying on the bathroom floor. I fight the urge to pick it up and run it through my fingers, to rip it into shreds and flush it away.

‘I’m not going to ask,’ I say.

‘But you stil think it. You think I’ve been unfaithful.’

‘I’m not sure.’

She fal s silent. The sadness is suffocating.

‘It was a joke,’ she whispers. ‘We worked real y late to close the deal, tying up the loose ends. I crashed. Exhausted. It was too late to cal London so I emailed Eugene with the news. He didn’t get the message until he arrived at the office. He told his secretary to cal my hotel and order me a champagne breakfast. She didn’t know what to order so he said: “Order the whole damn menu”.

‘I was asleep. Room service knocked on my door. There were three trol eys of food. I rang the kitchen and said there must be a mistake. They told me my company had ordered me breakfast.

‘Dirk phoned from his room. Eugene had done the same thing to him. I was too tired to eat. I rol ed over and went back to sleep.’

My left hand is shaking in my lap. ‘Why didn’t you mention it? I picked you up at the station and you didn’t tel me.’

‘You’d just watched a woman jump off a bridge, Joe.’

‘You could have told me later.’

‘It was Eugene’s idea of a joke. I didn’t think it was very funny. I hate seeing food go to waste.’

My tuxedo feels like a straightjacket. I look around the hotel room with its pseudo luxuries and generic furnishings. It’s the sort of place that Dirk would bring another man’s wife.

‘I saw the way he looked at you… staring at your breasts, putting his hand on your back, sliding it lower. I didn’t imagine that. I didn’t imagine the whispers and innuendos.’

‘I heard them too,’ she replies. ‘And I ignored them.’

‘He bought you lingerie… and that dress.’

‘So what! You think I sleep with men who buy me things. What does that make me, Joe? Is that what you think of me?’

‘No.’

I sit on the bed next to her. She seems to flinch and move further away. The alcohol has hit my head, which is pounding. Through the open bathroom door, I barely recognise my own reflection.

Julianne speaks.

‘Everyone knows Dirk is a sleaze. You should hear the jokes in the secretarial pool. The man puts his business card in the women’s toilets like he’s touting for clients. Eugene’s secretary, Sal y, cal ed his bluff in the summer. In the middle of the office she unzipped Dirk’s fly, grabbed his penis and said, “Is that al you’ve got? For someone who talks about it so much, Dirk, I thought you’d have something more substantial to back it up.” You should have seen Dirk. I thought he’d swal owed his tongue.’

Devoid of emotion, her voice is a monotone, unable to raise itself an octave above disappointment or sadness.

‘In the old days you would never have let a man get away with touching you like Dirk did tonight.’

‘In the old days I didn’t need this job.’

‘He
wants
people to think he’s sleeping with you.’

‘Which is only a problem if people believe him.’

‘Why didn’t you tel me about him?’

‘I did. You were never listening. Every time I mention work, you turn off. You don’t care, Joe. My career isn’t important to you.’

I want to deny it. I want to accuse her of changing the subject and trying to deflect blame.

‘You think I choose to be away from you and the girls?’ she says. ‘Every night I’m away, I go to bed thinking about you. I wake up thinking about you. The only reason I don’t think about you
all
the time is that I have a job to do. I
have
to work. We decided that. We chose to move out of London for the sake of the girls and for your health.’

I’m about to argue but Julianne hasn’t finished.

‘You don’t know hard it is… being away from home.’ She says.’ Missing things. Cal ing and finding out that Emma has learned a skip or hop on one leg or to ride her tricycle. Finding out that Charlie has had her first period or is being bul ied at school. But do you know what hurts the most? When Emma fel over the other day, when she was hurt and scared, she cal ed for you. She wanted
your
words,
your
hugs. What sort of mother can’t comfort her own child?’

‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’ I say, reaching across the bed to hold her. She shrugs my hands away. I have lost that privilege. I must gain it back. I’m normal y so good with words, but now I can’t think of anything to free her from her disappointment in me, to win her heart, to be
her
boy.

Countless times I told myself there had to be an innocent explanation for the hotel receipt and the lingerie and the phone cal s, but instead of believing this, I spent weeks trying to
prove
Julianne’s guilt.

I stand, swaying. The curtains are open. A cold stream of headlights is edging along Kensington High Street. Above the opposite rooftops I see the glowing dome of the Royal Albert Hal .

Julianne whispers, ‘I don’t know you any more, Joe. You’re sad. You’re so, so sad. And you carry it around with you or it hangs over you like a cloud, infecting everyone around you.’

‘I’m not sad.’

‘You are. You worry about your disease. You worry about me. You worry about the girls. That’s why you’re sad. You
think
you’re the same man, Joe, but it’s not true. You don’t trust people any more. You don’t warm to them or go out of your way to meet them. You don’t have any friends.’

‘Yes I do. What about Ruiz?’

‘The man who once arrested you for murder.’