You can say what you like about fake ones.
But you can’t deny that they are a lot less trouble.
The way I come to sleep with Vanessa is that I find her standing outside the college with Witold handing out new leaflets for the school.
The massed ranks of late Christmas shoppers are not paying them any attention so Vanessa is folding the flyers into little paper planes and throwing them into the crowd. Witold is watching her with an embarrassed grin.
“Study with the best!” she cries, launching a leaflet at a middle-aged businessman. “Estudia en Churchill’s! Studia alla Churchill’s! Studieren in Churchill’s!”
“What are you doing, Vanessa?” I ask her, rubbing my back.
“Getting new students!” she laughs. “Nauka w Churchill’s! Etudiez à Churchill’s!”
“Well, knock it off,” I smile.
“But nobody’s interested,” she says, stamping her foot and giving me one of her sulky pouts. She puts her hands on her hips. “It’s Christmas.”
“Just give them out normally,” I tell her. “Please.”
“What will you do for me? Give me an exam paper in advance?”
“I’ll buy you a drink.” Vanessa is the kind of woman who makes you think that banter is compulsory. “As it’s Christmas. You know. A glass of German wine or something.”
“Anything but German wine.”
“I like German wine,” Witold says.
And so later I find myself in the Eamon de Valera having a drink with Vanessa. She is not herself. She doesn’t dance, or flirt, or shout across the pub to someone. She tells me that she is not going back to France for the holiday-it’s difficult to know where she should go now that her parents are divorced-but staying in London is even worse.
“Why’s that?”
She looks at me for a second.
“Because I will not see my boyfriend,” she says. “He will be with his family.”
Later still I see pictures of the boyfriend in Vanessa’s flat.
It is a good flat in an affluent part of town, nothing like the tiny bedsit that Yumi lives in, or the room in a shared house that Hiroko occupies. Vanessa has her own small but beautiful one-bedroom flat in one of the swankier parts of north London. It must cost well over £1,000 a month and judging by the number of photographs of Vanessa and her boyfriend-this gym-fit forty-year-old, his arm casually circled around Vanessa’s waist, a platinum wedding ring glinting on the third finger of his left hand, a wide white smile on his face-I guess that he is the one paying the bills.
“Difficult time of year for him,” Vanessa says, picking up a photograph of the pair of them sitting outside some country pub. “He has to be with his family.” She replaces the picture. “His children. And her. But he doesn’t sleep with her anymore. He really doesn’t.”
I go to bed with Vanessa and that cheers her up. Not because of my dazzling sexual technique but because she seems to find it mildly amusing being in bed with me. She’s physically very different from Yumi or Hiroko. Just everything. Her hair, her breasts, her hips, her skin. I find the novelty exciting-I’m very exciting-and I’m about to say rash things, but luckily Vanessa’s small smile stops me from saying anything stupid. I know that she takes tonight very lightly because somebody already owns her heart.
And I understand completely. I’m not offended.
Later she has a little cry into the pillow and I can hold her without saying, “What’s wrong, darling, what’s wrong?” because I know for certain that it has absolutely nothing to do with me.
I lie awake in the darkness of a strange bed and I think about Yumi. About Hiroko. About Vanessa. About waiting in the arrivals hall at Heathrow. About how I have realized that I need never be lonely again.
And I know why I am attracted to the girls in the arrivals hall. It’s not because, as a nut doctor might suggest, a permanent attachment is unlikely.
It’s because they are all a long way from home.
Even if they have many friends here, even if they are happy in this city, they have their lonely hours. They don’t have someone who is always there. They don’t have to rush home to anyone.
They are all ultimately alone.
It’s funny. They sort of remind me of me.
17
I AM TRUE TO MY WIFE. Even in these other beds, with these women who sometimes talk in their sleep in a language I do not understand, I am always true to my wife.
Because nobody else touches me. Nobody even comes close.
And I come to see that as a kind of blessing. To love without loving-it’s not so bad once you get used to it. To be that far beyond harm, where nothing can hurt you and nothing can be taken away from you-is that really such a bad place to be? There’s a lot to be said for the meaningless relationship. The meaningless relationship is hugely underrated.
There are no little lies told in these trysts, these transactions. The rented rooms we meet in are not cold places. Far from it. There’s no contempt, no boredom, no constant searching for an exit sign. We are there because we want to be there. The death by a thousand cuts that you get in most marriages-there’s none of that.
And who is to say that these relationships are meaningless?
I like you-you’re nice.
Is that really so meaningless?
Or is that all the meaning you need?
Things start to go wrong when Vanessa gives me an apple.
There’s a knock on the staff room door and Hamish gets it. When he turns to look at me-his impressively plucked eyebrows lifting wryly above his handsome face-I see Vanessa’s smiling blond head over his shoulder. She has a shiny red apple in her fist. Bringing me an apple is a very Vanessa thing to do.
Both genuinely affectionate and mildly mocking.
“An apple for my teacher.”
“Sweet.”
Then she softly places a kiss on my lips-still acting as if it’s all a joke, which it is to her-and just at that moment Lisa Smith comes up the stairs and sees us. Vanessa turns away laughing, oblivious of the principal’s dirty looks. Or perhaps she just doesn’t care. But Lisa glares at me for a few long seconds as if she wishes I were dead by the side of the road. She goes into her office on the other side of the corridor.
Back in the staff room Hamish and Lenny are both looking at me. Hamish mumbles something to me but I am not quite sure if it’s, “You should watch that, mate”-meaning Vanessa-or “You should wash that, mate”-meaning the apple.
Lenny, once he gets over his initial shock, is more forthright.
“Vanessa? You haven’t got a multiple-entry visa there, have you, mate? You’re not going full speed up the newly opened Euro tunnel, are you?”
Before I can lie to him the phone rings and Lisa Smith tells Hamish that she wants to see me in her office. Now.
“Jesus,” says Lenny. “She’s going to have your bollocks for ethnic earrings, mate.”
Lenny lifts his eyebrows and smirks. There is a hideous admiration in his eyes.
I’m not like Lenny the Lech, I tell myself. I’m not.
“I don’t understand, Lenny. You get away with murder. And I get lifted. Why haven’t you ever been busted?”
“Why? Because I’ve never screwed any of the students, mate.”
“What?”
“It’s all talk with me, mate. Dirty talk, I’ll grant you. Filthy talk, even. But I wouldn’t actually put my barnacle-encrusted old todger anywhere near this lot. Are you kidding? In the current climate, it’s more than my knob’s worth.”
“Never?”
“Not once. Well, there was a cute little Croat who let me put my hand inside her Wonderbra at last year’s Christmas party. But that modest handful is the only penetration there has ever been.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“It’s true, mate. Besides, what would all these hot young things want with a fat old cunt like me? Go on, off you go.”
So it’s true. I’m nothing like Lenny the Lech. I’m much worse.