I thought about it for two seconds and then typed a reply.
Go on, then.
She walked off and I watched her go. When she reached the doorway, she didn’t look back.
I deleted the messages and met her after work.
We sat in an alcove in a basement bar sipping halves of lager.
‘What a cliché!’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘I just… Nothing,’ I said, since I could see that she didn’t know what I was talking about.
She caught my hand under the table and held on to it. I could feel a pulse where the tip of my finger pressed against the base of her thumb, but I didn’t know whose it was. I could smell a powerful scent coming off her and I didn’t think it had come out of a bottle. She was wearing a blouse, as she had been at the weekend, and again it was unbuttoned a little further than you might expect it to be. I imagined her unfastening a button or two as she stepped down into the gloom of this empty bar (we had left work separately and she had arrived first) and I felt both excited in a visceral, animal sense and overwhelmingly tired at the same time, and not just physically. I didn’t want this to happen. All I had to do was explain that to her, briefly, remind her of what we had agreed, and leave, walk up the stairs into the sunlight and not look back. Quit the job if necessary, get another. It wasn’t like I was wedded to my employer like I was wedded to Veronica. There were a dozen jobs like mine available at any one time.
And at the same time I did want it to happen. A part of me wanted it to happen. Something in my stomach wanted it to happen. Something in my trousers wanted it to happen. But also something in my brain. Something in my brain both wanted it to happen and wanted it not to happen.
Either it would happen or it wouldn’t happen. And if it happened, either it would fuck everything up or it wouldn’t. And if it fucked everything up, either I would end up having to kill myself or I wouldn’t.
We finished our drinks and I let Susan Ashton leave first. I got another drink and sat in the semi-darkness brooding, worrying, flipping coins in my head.
When I got home, Veronica was in the kitchen with the children. She was hovering with a cloth while they spooned food into their mouths, occasionally missing.
‘Hello honey,’ she said, getting up to kiss me.
‘Hello darling,’ I said. ‘How’s my favourite girl? Oops, I mean how are my favourite girls?’
Laura giggled. She didn’t necessarily know what was funny, but she had learned to laugh at the joke.
‘Have you been for a drink?’ Veronica asked.
I looked at her quizzically.
‘I can taste it.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A few of the lads were going out. Someone’s birthday.’
Veronica smiled and I leaned in to wipe some food away from Jonathan’s chin. I saw the tiny round scar at the corner of his eye, caused by his sister having accidentally caught him with a pencil. At least, we hoped it was accidental.
Although I stayed in the kitchen and helped clean up and then cooked our food, I felt as if I wasn’t there, as if I had already moved out into some miserable bedsit where I would barely have enough shelf space for my copies of my own book, which had been published to widespread apathy the year before, never mind my library. I knew what I had to do. I just didn’t know if I could do it.
At the weekend, I told Veronica a despicable lie and took a train from Waterloo to Feltham. I walked the short distance from the station to the address Susan Ashton had given me, my stomach churning not so much with butterflies as with unknown lacy-winged insects, patent-leather beetles and hairy moths like winged cigars.
We had sex in her bed with sunlight slanting in through the slats of the silver venetian blind. I could hear the planes coming in to land a mile or so to the north, but the noise was too faint. It lacked detail, character, specificity. The deep bass rumble of a 747 was inaudible at that distance. I couldn’t feel the vibration in my bones. In purely mechanical terms it was good sex, but the tenderness was simulated. We didn’t talk, or if we did what we said meant nothing, like the sex. Susan Ashton was beautiful, but the connection between us was an illusion, an accident of time and place. The artificiality of the previous weekend. The car park. The expensive leather seats of her Golf GTI. The planes. Most of the time it seemed to me that she was switched off. Now and then she would flicker into life and you’d see it in her eyes and you’d want her, or you’d want some small part of her. You didn’t really want her and she didn’t really want you.
Nevertheless.
‘That was nice,’ I said.
‘Very nice,’ she agreed.
‘Of course, it must never happen again,’ I said.
‘Of course not.’
But I meant it this time.
I took the train back to Waterloo and switched to the Tube. When I got home, Veronica and the children were out. I filled a bucket with warm soapy water and cleaned the bathroom. I scrubbed the surfaces until they shone. I went through the kitchen cupboards and threw out everything that was past its sell-by date. I ran out to the shops and bought new stuff. I filled the fruit bowl and arranged some flowers in a vase. I didn’t question whether Veronica would see through all of this. I just did it. By mid-afternoon I had finished and was beginning to get a bit twitchy. No note had been left. We didn’t generally do much on a Saturday, just tended to hang around the house. I had thought the only place they were likely to be was the park, but not for this long. By the end of the afternoon I was checking in Veronica’s wardrobe and in the kids’ drawers to see if there were any unexplained gaps. I sat in my tiny box-room study. I switched the computer on and switched it off again. I sat on my swivel chair and spun around. The dummies made the room seem even smaller than it was. I had a full-size female dummy and two child-size mannequins that I’d picked up from second-hand shops on the Holloway Road. Veronica didn’t mind them, she said, as long as they stayed in my room.
They weren’t going anywhere.
‘You’re not going anywhere, are you?’ I said, my voice loud in the empty house.
I looked at the bookcase. At the end of one shelf at eye level was a row of orange spines with black lettering. Bigger than A-format, slightly larger even than B-format, but not quite C. A somewhat awkward size, in other words. My novel, published the year before. Out of print, forgotten by the few people who had bought it and read it or been sent a review copy and never opened it. I took one out from the row, held it up to my nose and flicked through the pages. It had never had a smell, so I don’t know why I expected it to have acquired one over time. I looked at the publisher’s name at the bottom of the spine. A one-man operation whom few people had ever heard of publishing a book no one wanted to read. That was fair enough. If a book was rejected by all the publishers in town, that was generally thought to be a sign that it was either no good or it could not be imagined that anyone would want to read it. Or not enough people, anyway. Smaller publishers existed for the more marginal stuff and somehow they survived on subsidies or by having the odd surprise success. Most of these, too, had rejected my novel. I didn’t blame them for it. I was grateful to the publisher who had taken it on. He’d done a couple of books before. He was smaller than the small presses. He would not have been expecting to have the odd surprise success.
I’d been toying with ideas, writing experimental passages, when I’d met Veronica. Meeting her had seemed to galvanise me and I’d written the book in a couple of years, in snatched moments, late at night, early in the morning, finishing it when the twins were about a year old. Veronica wasn’t sure about it. It was macabre, she said, as if that were a criticism, which I guessed it was if you didn’t like the macabre. I understood why she didn’t really like it a great deal, and I didn’t pretend it was just because she was a lawyer and didn’t read a lot of fiction. She thought it was all a bit close, uncomfortably so. The female character in the book could be her, she said. The children could be ours. It wasn’t, and they weren’t, but I understood the objection.