When he tries to kiss her, she turns her head away again. There is nothing playful about the way she does it now, and for the first time he looks pained and says, ‘What is it?’
Instead of answering, she asks him whether he wants to see the photos she took in Morocco.
‘Of course,’ he says.
Outside he puts up the umbrella. They have to squeeze together to fit under it. They have not been in such proximity all evening and he smells the faded scent of the perfume—so familiar a smell, lingering in woollens—that she put on in the morning when she went to work. It is only a short walk to her flat. They have made this ingress together many times. They know what to do. He shakes out the umbrella and takes off his shoes. She turns on some lights and starts to make mint tea. When he puts his arms around her, however, she looks at him quizzically, as if it is something he has never done until that moment. ‘Why won’t you kiss me?’ he says.
‘I just won’t.’
‘What do you mean you just won’t?’
She leaves the kitchen with the mugs.
‘What do you mean you just won’t?’ he says, sitting down next to her on the sofa. When he tries to, she sucks in her lips and shakes her head. She laughs, and lets herself flop over to the side, so that she is half-lying there. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says, leaning over her. ‘What is it?’
Looking up at him, her eyes move like insects on the surface of a pond, with quick little movements, this way, that way, unable to stay still. ‘Why don’t you ask me some questions?’ she suggests.
‘What sort of questions?’
She shrugs with mock secretiveness and for a moment makes her eyes very wide.
‘What sort of questions?’ he says again.
She sighs, and lets her head loll on the velvet of the sofa. He is looking at her face from a strange perspective, more or less up her nostrils. She is looking up into the tasselled pink lampshade on the table next to the sofa. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Just…’
‘What?’ he says quietly. ‘What is it? Tell me.’
She does not tell him. She pushes him off her and says, ‘I’m going to get ready for bed.’
‘Okay,’ he says, propped on an elbow. ‘I’ll watch you.’
‘If you want.’
‘I do.’
He follows her upstairs. There, however, she takes her pyjamas from under her pillow and leaves him on his own. Eventually he lies down and stares at the ceiling. That this has something to do with the man who was here last night is obvious—it was obviously a significant visit, and if it was significant, he is pretty sure he knows who it was. In her pyjamas now, she takes a hairbrush from where her things are laid out—her perfumes and make-up, her lacquered pots of junk jewellery—and starts to sweep her hair. She holds it out to the side and sweeps it vigorously. ‘Are you going to stay?’ she says, lifting the duvet on her side.
‘I’ll stay for a while. Hugo’s at home. Otherwise I’d stay the night.’
‘M-hm.’
They lie there for a few minutes in the lamplight—her under the duvet, him fully dressed on top of it. Then he jumps up, takes everything off and joins her underneath. His eagerness, maybe, makes her laugh kindly. ‘You like being naked, don’t you,’ she says. ‘I saw Fraser yesterday.’
To hear her say it is surprisingly painful.
‘I know.’
‘You know?’ she says, sitting up.
‘I heard him. When we were talking on the phone.’
‘You heard him?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you hear?’
He tells her.
‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘I didn’t know it was him. I didn’t know who it was.’
He tells her that he noticed the way she lost the thread of what they were saying on the phone, that he heard the tension in her voice. She laughs when he tells her these things. And the way he tells them is meant to be funny—it is meant to turn the whole thing into a harmless farce—and he laughs too. She says, ‘I’m so sorry, James. It was so unlucky he walked in just when I was talking to you. I heard the doorbell and I had this whoosh of adrenalin, and then when I heard him talking to Summer, I wanted to hear what they were saying. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry if I sounded tense. I’m sorry it was so obvious.’
‘That’s okay,’ he says, still quite lightly.
Then, ‘Why was he here? What happened?’
She sighs and flops onto the pillow.
Overhead there is an old-fashioned ceiling fan with wicker blades—like something from a tropical hotel, pre-air conditioning. It was there when she moved into the flat. She never uses it, does not even know if it still works. ‘He phoned me in Morocco. The day we were supposed to go to the mountains. That morning.’ She says they hadn’t spoken for a year, that she was surprised and upset. ‘I mean it was upsetting,’ she says. ‘He said he was just phoning to say hi. I said I was in Morocco. He wanted to know what I was doing there. I said I was with someone and told him to leave me alone. That was it. I was upset, though. I’m sorry if I seemed… upset. Or out of sorts or something.’
Lying on his back with his left arm under his head, he puts his other hand pensively inside her pyjama trousers and strokes her pubic hair. ‘That’s okay,’ he says.
He is trying to remember that day. Exactly a week ago. The hour at the poolside, the warm wind stirring the line of palm trees, the shadow of the hotel on the water…
‘I thought you went to the mountains,’ he says.
Surprisingly, she laughs. ‘No, of course not.’
And that night, the terrace on top of the hotel in the Nouvelle Ville, over the thick smog of the town. The hotel turned out to be a sort of whorehouse. They saw one of the men who worked in their own hotel making for the lift and its full ashtray with two fat whores… Yes, she had been upset. He thought she was upset with him for making them miss the minibus to the mountains, and then taking her to a whorehouse. In fact, it had been something else entirely. Nothing to do with him.
She says, ‘A few days ago he phoned me again. He said he wanted to see me. I told him I didn’t want to see him. He insisted. He said he had something to say. So yesterday we went for a drink.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said… he wants to try again.’
They lie there in silence.
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said… I said… I said I’d think about it.’
She turns her head on the pillow. He is just lying there, staring straight up. ‘Are you crying?’ she says softly.
He shakes his head.
‘I said I’d tell him within a week,’ she says.
He is seeing the ceiling fan with a strange intensity. It is as if the whole world has shrunk to that old fan—its off-white wicker blades, its thick stalk, the plastic housing of its motor, and the weighted string of tiny stainless-steel spheres that hangs from the housing.
‘I don’t need a week, though. I know what I’m going to tell him.’
‘What are you going to tell him?’ And then, feeling a need to justify himself, such is his sense that Fraser King has some sort of primacy over him in this situation, ‘I think you should tell me if…’