Sweet Tooth (21 page)

On the way home – has he ever walked more slowly? – he would have stopped in that same pub for another fortifying drink, but he does not have on him even the price of a half pint. Perhaps it’s just as well. He needs a clear head
and clean breath. It takes him an hour to walk the mile to his house.

She is cooking with the children when he comes in.
He lingers in the doorway of the kitchen watching his little family at work on a cake. It was terribly sad, the way Jake and Naomi’s precious heads bobbed so eagerly at their mother’s murmured instructions
. He goes upstairs and lies on the bed in the spare room, staring at the ceiling. He feels heavy and tired and wonders if he is suffering from shock. And yet, despite the awful truth he has learned that day, he is troubled now by something new and equally shocking. Shocking? Is that the right word?

When he was downstairs just now watching Monica and the children, there was a moment when she glanced back over her shoulder at him. Their eyes met. He knows her well enough, he has seen that look many times before and has always welcomed it. It promises much. It is a tacit suggestion that when the moment is right, when the children are asleep, they should seize their chance and obliterate all thoughts of domestic duties. In the new circumstances, with what he knows now, he should be repelled. But he is excited by that glance because it came from a stranger, from a woman he knows nothing about beyond her obvious taste for destruction.
He had seen her in a silent movie and realised that he had never understood her
. He had got her all wrong. She was no longer his familiar. In the kitchen
he had seen her with fresh eyes and realised, as though for the first time, how beautiful she was. Beautiful and mad. Here was someone he had just met, at a party say, noticed her across a crowded room, the sort of woman who, with a single unambiguous look, offers a dangerous and thrilling invitation
.

He has been doggedly faithful throughout his marriage. His fidelity now seems like one more aspect of the general constriction and failure in his life. His marriage is over, there can be no going back, for how can he live with her now? How can he trust a woman who has stolen from him and
lied? It’s over. But here is the chance of an affair. An affair with madness. If she needs help, then this is what he can offer.

That evening he plays with the children, cleans the hamster’s cage with them, gets them into their pyjamas, and reads to them three times over, once together, then to Jake on his own, then to Naomi. It is at times like these that his life makes sense. How soothing it is, the scent of clean bedlinen and minty toothpaste breath, and his children’s eagerness to hear the adventures of imaginary beings, and how touching, to watch the children’s eyes grow heavy as they struggle to hang on to the priceless last minutes of their day, and finally fail. All the while he is aware of Monica moving about downstairs, he hears the distinctive clunk of the oven door a few times and is aroused by the simple distracting logic: if there is to be food, if they are eating together, then there will be sex.

When he goes down, their tiny sitting room has been tidied, the usual junk has been cleared from the dining table and there is candlelight, Art Blakey on the hi-fi, a bottle of wine on the table and a roast chicken in an earthenware dish.
When he remembered the police film – his thoughts kept returning to it – he hated her. And when she came in from the kitchen in fresh skirt and blouse, bearing two wine glasses, he wanted her
. What is missing now is the love, or the guilty memory of love, or the need for it, and that is a liberation. She has become another woman, devious, deceitful, unkind, even cruel, and he is about to make love to her.

During the meal they avoid talk of the ill-feeling that has stifled their marriage for months. They don’t even talk about the children as they so often do. Instead they talk about successful family holidays in the past, and holidays they will take with the children when Jake is a little older. It is all false, none of it will ever happen.
Then they talked politics, of strikes and the state of emergency and the sense of impending ruin in parliament, in cities, in the country’s sense of itself – they talked of all the ruin but their own
. He watches her closely as she talks, and knows that every word is a lie. Doesn’t she think it extraordinary, as he does, that after all this silence they are behaving as though nothing has happened? She is counting on sex to put everything right. He wants her all the more. And more again when she asks in passing about the insurance claim and expresses concern.
Amazing. What an actress. It was as if she was alone and he was watching her through a peep-hole
. He has no intention of confronting her. If he did, they would surely row, because she would deny everything. Or she would tell him that her financial dependence forced her to desperate measures. And he would have to point out that all their accounts are jointly held and that he has as little money as she does. But this way they will make love and he at least will know that it is for the very last time.
He would make love to a liar and a thief, to a woman he would never know. And she in turn would convince herself that
she
was making love to a liar and a thief. And doing so in the spirit of forgiveness
.

In my opinion Tom Haley spent too long over this farewell chicken dinner, and it seemed especially drawn out on a second reading. It wasn’t necessary to mention the vegetables, or to tell us that the wine was a Burgundy. My train was approaching Clapham Junction as I turned the pages to locate the finale. I was tempted to skip it altogether. I made no claims to sophistication – I was a simple sort of reader, temperamentally bound to consider Sebastian as Tom’s double, the bearer of his sexual prowess, the receptacle of his sexual anxieties. I became uneasy whenever one of his male characters became intimate with a woman, with
another
woman. But I was curious too, I had to watch. If Monica was daffy as well as deceitful (what was this angelology business?) then there was something obtuse and dark in Sebastian. His decision not to confront his wife about her deception may have been a cruel exercise of power for sexual ends, or a simple matter of cowardice, of an essentially English preference to avoid a scene. It didn’t reflect well on Tom.

Over the years, uxorious repetition has streamlined the process and they are
swiftly naked and embracing on the bed
. They have been married long enough to be thorough experts on each other’s needs, and the ending of long weeks of
froideur
and abstinence surely contribute a certain bonus, but it can’t explain away the passion that overwhelms them now.
Their customary, companionable rhythms were violently discarded
. They are hungry, ferocious, extravagant and loud. At one point little Naomi in the next room
let out a cry in her sleep, a pure silvery rising wail in the dark that they mistook at first for a cat
. The couple freeze and wait for her to settle.

And then came the final lines of ‘Pawnography’, with the characters perched uneasily on ecstasy’s summit. The desolation was to follow, off the page. The reader was spared the worst.

The sound was so icy and bleak that he imagined his daughter had seen in her dreams the unavoidable future, all the sorrow and confusion to come, and he felt himself shrink in horror. But the moment passed, and soon Sebastian and Monica sank again, or they rose, for there seemed to be no physical dimensions in the space they swam or tumbled through, only sensation, only pleasure so focused, so pointed it was a reminder of pain
.

13

M
ax was taking a week’s holiday in Taormina with his fiancée, so there could be no immediate debriefing when I returned to the office. I lived in a state of suspension. Friday came and there was no word from Tom Haley. I decided that if he’d visited the office in Upper Regent Street that day, he must have made a firm decision against seeing me. On Monday I picked up a letter from a PO Box service in Park Lane. A Freedom International secretary had typed a memo confirming that Mr Haley had come by on Friday in the late morning, stayed an hour, asked many questions and seemed impressed by the Foundation’s work. I should have felt encouraged, and I suppose I was in a remote sort of way. But mostly I felt I’d been dumped. Haley’s thumb action, I decided, was reflexive, the sort of move he tried on any woman he thought he had a chance with. I schemed sulkily, imagining that when he finally told me he would deign to accept the Foundation’s money, I would wreck his chances by telling Max that he had turned us down and that we should look for someone else.

At work the one topic was the war in the Middle East. Even the most light-headed of the society girls among the secretaries was drawn into the daily drama. People were saying that with the Americans lining up behind Israel and
the Soviets behind Egypt and Syria and the Palestinian cause, there was potential for the sort of proxy war that could bring us a step closer to a nuclear exchange. A new Cuban Missile Crisis! A wall map went up in our corridor with sticky plastic beads representing the opposing divisions and arrows to show their recent movements. The Israelis, reeling from the surprise attack on Yom Kippur, began to pull themselves together, the Egyptians and Syrians made some tactical errors, the United States airlifted weapons to their ally, Moscow issued warnings. All this should have excited me more than it did, daily life should have had a keener edge. Civilisation threatened by nuclear war, and I’m brooding about a stranger who caressed my palm with his thumb. Monstrous solipsism.

But I wasn’t only thinking of Tom. I was also worrying about Shirley. Six weeks had passed since our parting at the Bees Make Honey gig. She had left her place, her desk at the Registry, at the end of a working week without saying goodbye to anyone. Three days later a new new-joiner was in her place. Some of the girls who had gloomily predicted Shirley’s promotion were now saying that she was forced to leave because she was
not one of us
. I’d been too angry with my old friend to seek her out. At the time I was relieved that she crept away without a fuss. But as the weeks passed, the sense of betrayal faded. I began to think that in her place I would have done the same. Perhaps with greater willingness, given my hunger for approval. I suspected that she’d been wrong – I wasn’t being followed. But I was missing her, her boisterous laugh, the heavy hand on my wrist when she wanted to confide, her carefree taste for rock and roll. By comparison, the rest of us at work were timid and buttoned up, even when we were gossiping or teasing each other.

My evenings now were empty. I came home from work, took my groceries from ‘my’ corner of the fridge, cooked my supper, passed the time with the solicitors if they happened to be around, then read in my room in my boxy little armchair until eleven, my bedtime. That October I was absorbed by
the short stories of William Trevor. The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands. The young girl alone in her bedsit, washing her hair in the basin, daydreaming about a man from Brighton who didn’t get in touch, about the best friend who had vanished from her life, about another man she had fallen for whom she must meet tomorrow to hear about his wedding plans. How grey and sad.

A week after my meeting with Haley I walked from Camden to the Holloway Road with all kinds of foolish hopes, and apologies at the ready. But Shirley had abandoned her room and had left no forwarding address. I didn’t have her parents’ address in Ilford and they wouldn’t give it to me at work. I looked up Bedworld in the Yellow Pages and spoke to an unhelpful assistant. Mr Shilling could not come to the phone, his daughter didn’t work there and might or might not be away. A letter addressed to her care of Bedworld might or might not reach her. I wrote a postcard, unnaturally cheery, pretending nothing had happened between us. I asked her to get in touch. I didn’t expect a reply.

I was due to meet Max on his first day back at work. That morning I had a miserable time getting to the office. Everyone did. It was cold and the rain fell in that steady, pitiless way it has in a city, letting you know it could go on for a month. There was a bomb scare on the Victoria line. The Provisional IRA had phoned a newspaper and given a special code. So I walked the last mile to the office, past queues for buses, too long to be worth joining. Part of the fabric of my umbrella had come away from the spokes, which gave me the appearance of a Chaplinesque tramp. My court shoes had cracks in the leather that sucked in the damp. On the news-stands every front page carried the story of OPEC’s ‘oil price shock’. The West was being punished with a hefty rise for supporting Israel. Exports to the US were embargoed. The leaders of the mineworkers’ union were holding a special meeting to discuss how best they could exploit the situation. We were doomed.
The skies grew darker over the Conduit Street crowds shuffling along, hunched into their raincoats, trying to keep their umbrellas out of each other’s faces. It was only October and barely four degrees above freezing – a taste of the long winter to come. I thought back gloomily to the talk I’d attended with Shirley, and how every vile prediction was coming true. I remembered those turned heads, those accusing looks, my black mark, and my old anger against her revived and my mood darkened further. Her friendship had been a pretence, I was a dupe, I belonged in another line of work. I wished I was still in my soft sagging bed with the pillow over my head.

I was already late but I checked the PO Box first before running round the corner to Leconfield House. I spent a quarter of an hour in the women’s bathroom, trying to dry my hair on the roller towel and wiping the puddle stains from my tights. Max was a lost cause but I had my dignity to protect. I was ten minutes late when I squeezed into his triangular office, conscious of how cold and wet my feet were. I watched him across his desk as he arranged his files and made a show of being business-like. Did he look different after a week of making love in Taormina to Dr Ruth? He’d had a haircut before coming back to work and his ears had reverted to jug formation. There was no gleam of new confidence in his eyes, or dark patches beneath them. Beyond the new white shirt and a tie of a darker blue and a new dark suit, I saw no transformation. Was it just possible that they took separate rooms to save themselves for their wedding night? Not from what I knew of medical types and their long and rowdy apprenticeships. Even if Max, in obedience to some improbable instruction from his mother, had made a half-hearted attempt to hang back, Dr Ruth would have eaten him alive. The body, in all its frailty, was her profession. Well, I still wanted Max, but I also wanted Tom Haley and that was protection of a sort, if I ignored the fact that he wasn’t interested in me.