Strangers (7 page)

Matthew was the only son of an industrialist, a self-made tycoon with a newspaper name. The family assumption had always been that Matthew would emulate his dynamic father. But from the day he was old enough to begin to assert himself, Matthew had refused to conform to his father’s requirements. His only interest at school had been woodwork, until he became really good at it – at which point he gave it up for ever. When his school contemporaries were heading for Oxford, Matthew turned his back on them and set out on the hippie trail to Afghanistan. He had supported his travels ever since with menial jobs, working in exchange for food, somewhere to sleep, for enough money to carry him on to the next place.

‘What were you thinking about in Mexico?’ Annie asked him.

‘I was thinking about what I should do. And then I felt the pull to come home, so I came. And here you are.’

‘Don’t you think,’ Annie said, ‘that you might have seized upon me because you think you ought to? That you’re trying to make me someone I’m not, to fill a need in yourself?’

He didn’t hesitate for a second. ‘No. You are the woman I want. You just are. I always knew I would recognize you, and I have. It’s the truth, Annie. You know it too. Admit it.’

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that we’ve been lovers in some previous life.’

Matthew dropped her arm and stared at her. ‘Certainly not. What d’you think I am? I don’t believe in all that mystical muck.’

They laughed until Annie wiped the tears out of her eyes and rested her forehead against his shoulder, and Matthew put his arms around her, still smiling. It was almost dark, and the cars swished rhythmically along the Mall under the thin glare of the street lights. She waited for him to kiss her. Matthew’s mouth moved against her hair.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said.

So he wasn’t going to kiss her. That made it easier, perhaps.

‘Let’s go and have something to eat.’ Annie moved away a little, regretting the warmth of his arm. ‘There’s a little Italian place in Victoria.’

‘I haven’t got any money,’ Matthew said.

‘My treat,’ she answered lightly.

They began to walk again and he caught her hand. Her ring scraped his fingers and he lifted their clasped hands to peer at it. The stones glinted coldly.

‘Oh dear, diamonds,’ he murmured. ‘I can’t give you any. Will you mind that? Will Martin want this one back?’

She was angry again then, her anger fuelled by a surge of guilt. She pulled her hand out of his and stuffed her clenched fists into the pockets of her jacket.

‘I’m going to marry Martin,’ she repeated. ‘Eight weeks from today. With a ring that matches this one.’

‘Very nice,’ Matthew said icily. They walked over the grass together, silent, both of them angry. But when Matthew spoke again his voice had softened.

‘What are you going to do, Annie?’

She shrugged her shoulders, suddenly bewildered. ‘I don’t know. Some thinking, like you. I just don’t know.’

‘I can wait,’ Matthew told her, and she knew that he would.

It wasn’t a double life, exactly. Half of it was a dream-world, and the other half was briskly real. She went to Louise’s several times, and stood for hours having the dress pinned on her. The invitations came from the printers and she went through the lists with her mother, and then addressed and stamped the dozens of envelopes. She spent weekends with Martin in the flat they had bought, painting the window frames and helping him to put up cupboards in the kitchen. And whenever she could she ran away to be with Matthew.

He drew her into his world, and she discovered with a kind of fascinated fear that Matthew existed without any constraints at all. He didn’t live anywhere. He drifted from a borrowed bedsitter to someone else’s sofa, and from there to an empty room over a shop where he slept on a blanket spread on the floor.

There was plenty of casual work in those days. He washed up in a café, and then spent a week labouring for a builder. He lived in the room over the shop because he was building display cabinets downstairs for the owner.

He never made plans, and he never worried about what might happen to him tomorrow. And so, Annie thought, he could give all his energy to enjoying whatever came. It was the quality of Matthew’s enjoyment that she loved. Afterwards, she thought that the hours she spent with him were the happiest of her life.

When he had money, he spent it without thinking. He loved good food, and he would dig out his one presentable outfit and take her to grand restaurants where he insisted on spending almost a whole week’s wages on a single meal. He derived such pleasure from the plush surroundings and the procession of exotic dishes that Annie couldn’t refuse to go, or even persuade him to let her pay her share.

‘You must know that it’s only any fun,’ Matthew said, ‘if you can’t afford to do it. My father eats lunch in places like this every day of his life, and all he ever wants is grilled sole and mineral water.’

When there was no money, Matthew was endlessly ingenious at finding free pleasures.

In his company Annie discovered tiny parks that she had never known existed, and she saw more pictures and sculptures and Wren churches than she had done in all her time as an art student. It didn’t even matter what they did, particularly. As long as she had an hour or two to spend with him, Matthew was happy. He seemed to want nothing more than her company and their activities, whether they were free or costly, were simply an extra, pleasurable bonus. When she was married and thought back to the benches beside the river and the faintly stuffy smell of the National Gallery, the elaborate dinners and the sudden taxis, she wondered if the times with Matthew were the last in her life when she had felt young.

He made her feel other things, too. They made love for the first time in the room over the shop. Annie had come straight from work. It was a warm evening at the beginning of June and she was wearing a sleeveless blue cotton dress. Her hair crackled with electricity over her shoulders, and when Matthew opened the door he reached out and put his hand underneath the thickness of it, his fingers stroking her neck.

After the first evening in St James’s Park, he had kissed her once or twice, lightly, almost jokingly. She had convinced herself that she was relieved that there was no more to it, and that she wasn’t betraying Martin in any way. But she had also known that Matthew was simply waiting, according to some system of his own, for the right time.

He took her hand and led her across the bare floorboards to the grey blanket with a single sleeping bag spread out on top of it. Annie saw an electric kettle, the neat tin box where Matthew kept his minimal supplies of food, his spare clothes folded tidily in an open suitcase. He stood behind her, lifting her hair and bending down to kiss the nape of her neck. He undid the buttons at the back of her dress and drew her against him, his hands over her breasts.

‘Here?’ Annie asked. She looked at the uncurtained windows with the sun lighting up the coating of grime and throwing elongated golden squares on the floor. She could feel Matthew’s smile curling against her neck.

‘My layers of dust are as effective as your net curtains.’

‘I don’t have net curtains.’

‘I expect your mother does.’

Her dress dropped to the floor and they stepped sideways, away from it, glued together. With the tip of his tongue, Matthew drew a line from the nape of her neck to the hollow at the base of her spine. Then, with his hands on the points of her hips, he turned her round to face him. Annie thought that she could see the sunlight shining straight through the taut skin over his cheekbones. Her hands were shaking but she reached out and unbuttoned his shirt, her movements echoing his. Then she looked at the shape of him, seeing the pale skin reddened from his labouring job, the bones arching at the base of his throat and the hollows behind them. She closed her eyes, and his mouth touched hers.

‘You see? It doesn’t matter where,’ Matthew said. He took her hand and led her to the blanket, and they lay down together.

It was the most perfectly erotic experience she had ever had. Matthew moved unhurriedly, almost dreamily, and he kissed the thin skin between her fingers, and each of her toes, and then the arches of her feet. He was so slow that she felt he was torturing her, but when at last he came inside her it was so quick and powerful that she heard herself cry out, as she had never done before. When at last they lay still, with Matthew’s arms around her and her head on his shoulder, she said softly, ‘I thought it only happened like that in films, and books.’

He smiled at her. ‘I knew objectively that it could probably happen in real life. But I’ve never known it like that before, either. We do belong together, Annie, my love. Listen to me. I love you.’

She felt real pain then, and she crouched in his arms trying to contain it. ‘Matthew, I …’

But he put his hand up to cover her mouth. ‘Be quiet,’ he ordered her.

Martin knew, of course. He turned to her one day, tidily putting his paintbrush down on the tin lid so that it wouldn’t drip gloss paint on to their kitchen floor.

‘Who is he, Annie?’

He was trying to sound casual. Annie knew him so well that she understood exactly why. He would try to make light of the threat for as long as he could. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t hurting him.

‘You don’t know him. I met him a month ago, at Louise’s.’

They were standing shoulder to shoulder now, looking out into the well of the block of flats with its smudges of pigeon droppings. She couldn’t see his face but she knew he would be frowning, the vertical lines deepening between his eyebrows.

Carefully, he said, ‘Do I need to worry about it?’

There was a long silence.
Decide
, Annie commanded herself.
You must decide
.

At last, recognizing her own cowardice and with the sense of a light fading somewhere as she had been afraid it would, she whispered, ‘No.’

Martin’s hand covered hers. There were paint splashes on his fingers. She could feel the set of his shoulders easing with relief.

‘I won’t worry, then.’ He squeezed her hand and let it go, and then picked up his brush to start work again.

‘What is it?’ he asked after a moment. ‘Pre-marital itch?’

‘I suppose so,’ she said dully. She despised herself for reducing Matthew to that, even for Martin’s sake.

The time trickled by. It was the hottest summer for years, and every day that passed seemed burnt into her memory by the blistering heat of the pavements and the hard blue light of the sky. Matthew finished his carpentry work at the shop and he moved out of the grubby little room. He was staying with another friend now, unrolling his sleeping bag on yet another sofa. Annie wouldn’t let him come to her flat because Martin had a key to it too. They met when and where they could, and she was amazed by his ability to make her forget everything else that was happening. He made her feel irresponsibly happy. When she was with him, she knew that this was reality, and the other half of her life, the half that was occupied with shopping for clothes for her honeymoon and choosing flowers for her bouquet, was the dreamworld.

Then, only a week before the wedding, Matthew asked her again.

They were at yet another friend’s home, but the house was empty for the weekend this time and so Matthew automatically made it his own. They were in bed, and Annie was lying with her hair spread out over the pillow. She was thinking exhaustedly,
This must be the last time
.

‘Annie, will you marry me?’

Traffic noises from the street outside, and evening birds twittering in the trees in the square. She had a taste of her future with Martin as she lay there. There would be evenings like this in a house that was really theirs. Peace, and comfort, cooking smells and simple domestic rhythms, and Martin who she knew, and understood, and loved. She closed her eyes so as not to see Matthew’s face, because what she felt for him went deeper than love.

‘I can’t jilt him,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t marry you.’

‘Those are two quite distinct and separate incapabilities,’ he told her gently. ‘Which is the real one?’

What would it be like to be married to Matthew?

There would be a succession of rented rooms, and Matthew would manage to make her feel that they were palaces. There would be the wild swings from penury to extravagance and back again, and no two days would ever follow each other in the same way. She was sure that they would be happy. Ever since she had known him he had made happiness blaze like fire inside her. What she didn’t know was how long that could last.

She was afraid that a day would come when the discomforts would begin to matter, and pleasure would fade into resentment. The shortcomings were her own. She was cautious and predictable and careful, and Matthew was none of those things. She longed to be like him, to cut herself loose and sail with him, but she couldn’t do it. She would live her life with Martin and it would be tranquil, and sunny, and safe. The peaks of joy would be out of her reach, but she didn’t think that there were troughs of despair waiting for her either.

She made herself meet Matthew’s steady grey stare.

‘I’m a coward,’ she said. ‘I can’t marry you.’

He bent his head. Their fingers were locked together and the knuckles of both hands were white. Then he looked up again.

‘I know why you think you can’t. You believe that married men have mortgages and salaries to meet them, and prospects and some kind of security to offer you. You’re afraid that after a while you’ll begin to resent me because I haven’t. That’s true, isn’t it?’

She nodded miserably. There was more than that, but that was the stupid, pedestrian nub of it.

‘Well. I went to see my father today. I asked him for a job in the company. There was a long lecture about having to start at the bottom like everyone else. Learn the business. Not expect any quarter just because I’m the boss’s son. Work hard and prove my worth.’ Matthew’s face was a picture of resigned boredom. It made her laugh in the midst of everything, and he beamed back at her. ‘I nearly threw one of his onyx inlaid executive toys at him, but I restrained myself for your sake. After the lecture he told me that he was glad I’d decided to pull myself up by my boot-straps …
boot-straps
, I promise you … and I could certainly have some simple tasks allotted to me within the corporate structure. So there, now.’ His smile was dazzling. ‘I’ll be so exactly like everyone else that only experts like you will be able to tell the difference. I’ll be able to buy you a diamond ring, and a three-piece suite and a Kenwood Chef, if that’s what you really want.’