Perhaps I simply “satisfied” him. That’s not to claim credit. He simply crashed, sated, as men quite often ungraciously do (“men”: hark at me) into unconsciousness. He was the vet, but I put him to sleep. Not much pillow talk? Scarcely any, really — if I’d even wanted it.
I just lay awake, not particularly wishing to sleep, or even feeling ignored. Not even, I’ll be honest, assailed by feelings of guilt and remorse. Just thinking steadily to myself, as if I actually needed this sleeping stranger at my side to set my thoughts in motion.
Not unlike now. It’s an old and perennial situation, perhaps. You have it all to come, Kate. A woman does her best to be a lover, then, before she knows it, she becomes a mother, a sleeping charge beside her. But, of course, Mike here’s not a stranger. And when I was lying there beside Alan Fraser, I was thinking mainly of your father. It’s what I mean by comparison.
Oh how I love your father.
The room was on a first-floor corner, one of the best in the hotel. It actually had a four-poster bed. He’d forked out for the five-star Gifford Park and I’d been too polite or too amenable, if those are the right words, to protest. How much would it have cost him — just to fall asleep? I had the feeling that the place might have had some previous sentimental significance for him and I didn’t want to probe. And I was certainly too tactful or too compliant to broach its unsettling significance for me. Not so much the place itself (though now it has just such a significance), but the location. Did it have to be Sussex, and not so very far from the ancestral domains of the Hooks?
You see my dilemma? What am I to say, with barely a week now to go? “Cancel it?” Or, more preposterously: “Could it be some other hotel?” I have my excuse and my get-out, of course: you. You and my perfectly appropriate mother’s instinct. How can we possibly even consider our anniversary, even if it is our twenty-fifth, at such a time as this? How can we just go off so soon and leave our bruised and shaken nestlings all by themselves?
Have I brought you now fully up to speed?
And yet I can see all your dad’s reasons, all his needs and urgent contingency planning. It even makes sense: time for you to be alone, to think and talk it through. You’re not helpless babies. And it is our twenty-fifth. I can see how the Sussex thing works now: our territory. Only six miles or so from Birle and at least, for him, there’ll be that umbilical going off in that direction. And — with that direction in mind — what will Grannie Helen think if we don’t do something special for our special anniversary?
Suppose it’s the same room. Oh lord. Suppose (is it possible after seventeen years?) it’s even the same bed. Mike would have gone for the best, of course he would, no expense spared. He’ll have asked for the best — one of the reasons he booked so long in advance.
I can’t get out of it. I’ll just have to pretend, smile and pretend. Or treat it as some grotesque and appalling opportunity for confession. On top of everything else? Mikey, forgive me, forgive me. It was, believe me, all in a good cause.
The trouble is I know that he — which really means we — will put it to you. We’ll ask you to judge us tomorrow in all kinds of ways, but we’ll ask for your verdict on this tricky secondary matter. Namely whether you think it’s right that, at this particular, traumatic point in your lives, we should swan off to a five-star hotel, leaving you here with the contents of the fridge.
But my hunch is that you will give us your “permission.” I can’t put myself in your shoes, but that’s my hunch, or in one sense it’s my earnest hope, since that will mean that what’s about to occur tomorrow will have gone, so far as such a thing can, “well.” But in one respect your letting us go off like reprieved offenders to celebrate our wedding anniversary won’t help me at all.
I want it both ways. I want both to go and not to go to the Gifford Park. I want you to listen to these things I’m telling you and not to hear them at all. You see what I mean? Every twist and turn.
A corner room. I can’t remember the number. It’s just as well, perhaps. There were aquatints of Sussex scenes on the wall. A sepia photograph of some tweeded folk piled into a shooting brake. It had a fine view, through a latticed, wisteria-hung window, of those ever-suggestive Downs. And it had a chintz-hung four-poster bed with spiralled-oak pillars. Picture your mother in such a room, seventeen years ago, an unfamiliar man beside her, rain falling outside, drenching the wisteria leaves. Did it really happen, that curious little enterprise? It seems now both insignificant and far off, and flagrant as a just discovered crime. And yet it served its practical purpose, it’s true to say that without that bizarre excursion, mysteriously involving a trip to Paris at the same time, there might never have been you.
Your dad’s shown me the glossy brochure he was sent. I already knew: a Jacobean manor house, seat of the Akenhurst family, grandly added to in the nineteenth century by the Giffords, who made a fortune in rubber. Our room — then, I mean, Alan’s and mine — was in the Jacobean bit. There was a creaking, ancient staircase that made you feel, at once, that you were engaged in an act of stealth. Long-bearded, white-ruffed faces watched your every step. It’s inconceivable that something so old and worthy of preservation can have been transformed beyond all uncomfortable recognition in less than twenty years. I can only hope.
Outside, there was, and must still be, a lovely garden: lawns, yew walks, fountains and some sets of just slightly vulgar statuary, a foible of the Giffords, depicting classical scenes. Diana and Actaeon inevitably, Narcissus bending over a pool. We’d done a tour of their half-clad forms before dinner. I thought of them out there in the rain, like creatures in some petrified zoo, the drops forming on the stone nipples and chins. The Giffords, with their rubbery new money, had gone for ancestry and myth.
His skin had its strange but distinct, personal-sweat smelclass="underline" mine must have had, to him, its own smell too. An individual, yet generic scent. At thirty-two, I could just about remember it from earlier days: the animal tang of someone you’ve never been naked with before.
Or ever again, in this case. We didn’t waste too much time over our departure the following morning. It was clear, bright weather again. Sunlight gleamed in the puddles on the terrace. The curves of the Downs were like a sure draughts-man’s line. I’d slept eventually, and perfectly soundly. And my mind was crystal-sharp and made up. I knew it was all right now, I knew it was perfectly fine.
I asked Alan to drop me at East Croydon, so I could take the train from there. So I could muster again some token illusion that I’d returned from Paris, by a Gatwick flight which would have departed, allowing for the time difference, at around ten o’clock. Another train from Victoria to Herne Hill. I had only a light, one-night case. The rather slinky small black dress inside it would have been explained by the cocktail party I’d been required to attend.
I was ready to abide, scrupulously, by another pretence that in seventeen years your father has never even suspected, let alone uncovered. But he scarcely asked about my time in Paris, because very soon after I got back I changed the topic quickly and emphatically. Perhaps I’d overwhelmed him, anyway, in that still grief-shadowed spring, with the happy, glad-to-be-home light in my face, with the hug I gave him, pressing myself against him hard. It was a fine Saturday in May, not quite lunchtime. I said, “Let’s go for a walk in Dulwich Park, Mikey. Let’s have a look at the ducks. Let’s have a drink in the Greyhound. I did some thinking while I was in Paris, and on the plane just now. A.I.D.: I’m absolutely sure. No problem, I want to go ahead.”