‘Take me back,’ he says and walks past me, close enough that I smell his sweat.
I watch him walk back towards the control tower. Beyond him, the plane that had taken a pass over the airfield is now coming in to land. I watch its wings dip one way and then the other as it approaches the runway. Finally the pilot levels the wings as his undercarriage touches down and twenty yards later he drops the nose and the front wheel also meets the grass. The plane is travelling very slowly now. There is not that sense of something travelling far too fast that you get as a passenger on a jet touching down. The plane is always too fast, too heavy, the runway too short.
This looks much easier, much safer. The plane weighs nothing, is barely moving. It’s hard to imagine how it could go wrong.
I catch up with Lewis in the car park. He’s sitting in the car waiting for me, staring out of the window. I wonder how he got in. Surely I locked the car. I always lock the car. It’s a reflex.
I get in and stick the key in the ignition, but don’t turn it for a moment. I swivel in my seat and look at him, but his whole upper body is angled in the other direction. I start the engine and as I engage first gear I give his knee a good hard knock with the gear stick.
He fails to react.
We drive back to the M60 in silence. Even when we both look up at the sound of a small plane passing over the car, even then nothing is said. It does occur to me to ask him if it’s a Piper or a Cessna, but I keep schtum.
It’s not far from junction 11 back round to south Manchester, but when no one is speaking, motorway time gets stretched. We travel in the inside lane, doing a steady sixty-five. There’s a regular vroom as cars overtake us in the middle lane. The exit signs become generic designs, blue boards covered in meaningless white symbols. The colours of the other cars correspond to a randomly generated pattern dominated by silver, red and white. Every other vehicle is a van or a truck. I switch off and enter a kind of semi-trance. The car drives itself.
After we had sex in her Golf GTI at Hatton Cross Underground station car park, Susan Ashton and I agreed that while it was fun, it was a one-off. Indeed, we said, that was why it was fun. We exchanged remarks along these lines in comically breathless voices as we panted to get our breath back and huge planes continued to thunder over our heads as they came in to land just a few hundred yards to the west.
After disengaging, I had moved back to the passenger side and allowed myself to sink back into the expensive leather seat. Susan Ashton had reached a hand under her own seat and passed me a box of tissues.
‘Well prepared,’ I said and we both laughed.
‘That was nice,’ I said.
‘Very nice,’ she agreed.
She busied herself with a tissue and I belted my trousers and she pulled down the sun visor and adjusted her make-up in the mirror and I pressed the on/off switch on the cassette player and ‘Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime’ by the Korgis squirmed synthetically out of the loudspeakers. I looked at her and we both burst out laughing. We tried to sing along, but we got the giggles. At the end of the track, she switched it off and we sat there in silence for a while, occasionally smiling to ourselves.
‘It’ll be all right, you know, with Tony,’ I said.
‘And you’ll be fine with Veronica,’ she countered.
‘Everything will work out,’ I said.
‘It’ll be like this never happened,’ she said.
And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ and I laughed and after a moment she laughed too.
She offered me a lift.
‘What, to Feltham?’ I said. ‘You want to introduce me to Tony?’
She smiled, then the smile quickly vanished and a look of worry crossed her face for the first time.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘This can’t happen again,’ she said.
‘I know. I know it can’t,’ I said. ‘Veronica wouldn’t hear of it.’
She looked at me with the kind of look a parent gives a naughty child.
‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘I’ll get the Tube. You gave me a lift to the Tube, that’s all.’
‘Go on, bugger off,’ she said and leaned over towards me.
I tilted across to meet her lips and her rebuttoned blouse gaped in front of me and just at that moment a 747 flew over the car, making it vibrate. We lingered on the kiss for a moment, then parted and I caught her looking at me. It was a look that suggested to me that this whole one-off thing was not necessarily going to work. Not because I was so irresistible or anything. I didn’t have any illusions about that. But there was something in the look, something I’d noticed at several points during the staff development weekend. A mixture of panic, abandon, desire. It almost felt like a dare.
As I reluctantly pulled away, I reached into the rear of the car and caught hold of her bra.
‘Don’t forget this,’ I said.
She smiled and I reached for the door handle, grabbing my bag from the footwell.
‘See you.’
‘See you.’
On the Tube back into London I sat opposite a young mother and her two small children. They were too young to be fighting with each other and causing her problems of that kind, but they were hard work all the same. She wiped their noses and checked their nappies and gently admonished them when they tried to climb on to my seat. By the time the train reached Acton Town, she looked worn out and I was experiencing a full-blown attack of remorse. I felt that my guilt was stamped across my forehead for everyone to read — this woman, the other passengers, even the woman’s tiny innocent children. How would Veronica not see it there the moment I walked in the door?
I got off the Tube at Hammersmith and phoned home from a call box. The conversation was a little strained, almost as if she already knew. But this was silly. She was just reaching the end of a long weekend’s solo childcare and wanted me back to take them off her. She needed a break. ‘Where are you?’ she said.
I wondered that myself.
The pact that Susan Ashton and I had made, such as it was, lasted about a week. I struggled through the days, feeling guilty about what had happened when I was at home and watching Veronica feeding the twins, and guilty about the fact that, whenever I saw Susan Ashton at work, I wanted it to happen again.
Above all, I felt depressed by the predictability of it all, by the fact that it was such a terrible cliché. I was a weak male, easily tempted. I had spent a weekend away from the company of my wife, leaving her to look after our very young children, and I had succumbed to the oldest temptation in the world. And then I felt guilty that I was more upset by its being a cliché than I was about the fact that I had cheated on my wife and that I wanted to do it again.
I watched Veronica while she slept and I knew that nothing had changed, really, between the two of us. I still loved her and I felt she probably still loved me, but we had allowed the stress of childcare to obscure that love, to get in the way. We had reacted to perceived injustices in the division of labour in a tiresomely predictable and destructive way, bitching and sniping at each other, sometimes at home just the four of us, but also on the few occasions we got to go out and be with other people. We bitched about each other when we were out separately with our own friends and we bitched about each other when we were out together with mutual friends. We’d see them looking at each other, perhaps in recognition, but more likely in grateful realisation that someone’s marriage was in a worse state than their own. So they thought.
Susan Ashton stopped by my desk in a crowded office on a spurious errand and typed out a message in the document I had open on screen.
Do you want to go for a drink after work?