When things got difficult, I didn’t need him.
‘You’re fantastic, Alex. Like no one else. Nothing like this has ever happened to me… you’re like a drug. I’m hooked, you know that… but it’s just selfishness. I blame myself. I hate myself.’
‘As long as you don’t blame me.’
But I knew he did blame me. You could sometimes feel it in the way he fucked, when he’d drunk a little at lunchtime and his dark blue eyes had an angry look. He battered my body into the bed as if he wanted to obliterate me even as he roared in orgasm.
That could be exciting too. Once or twice, but not as a habit. I thought the anger was becoming a habit. I don’t like being blamed, or obliterated.
(And maybe I was just a little peeved that he’d never offered to leave his wife, his large-hipped wife and bad-tempered children — at least, they were always bad-tempered with me. He doted blindly on those kids, sniggering Fiona, beetle-browed Robert… not that I would have left Christopher, but I feel Stuart might have offered to leave. It deprived me of the pleasure of telling him not to.)
After five years I was tired of it. I was forty-seven, I was forty-eight… One year Chris didn’t want to go to Toledo. He’d never shown that he suspected me, but he was very definite; Toledo was over. I found that I agreed with him. And I needed a baby, not a lover.
I arranged to meet Stuart in a little farmhouse I rented in the hills above Malaga. Kirsty thought he was on a lecture tour, Chris thought I needed to be alone after the crisis we’d lived through in Portugal. Stuart thought I needed to make love to him, but I only needed to end the chapter. I was eager to fly on to Christopher in Switzerland, our last port of call in Europe. The desire for a child had made me love him again. Stuart had become irrelevant.
The hills were dusty, lethally dry. The photo of the farmhouse had not included the gigantic pylon ten feet away, so the humming and singing and moaning of the wires almost drowned the frantic chirrups of the crickets.
He arrived tired and thirsty, ecstatic to see me. His face was faintly powdered with dust, which made his eyes very dark, theatrical-looking. I could see how much he wanted me. He hugged me, pulling my hips against him.
‘I thought about this every minute of the journey…’
There wasn’t any point in dragging things out. ‘Stuart, wait — I’m sorry. The fun’s gone out of it, my darling.’
And so the unpleasantness began. We argued for hours; the pylon echoed us, singing mournfully across the baked hillside.
‘I’m glad to hear I was a bit of fun… I’ve been in love with you for seven years —’
‘— Six, actually —’
‘I’ve cheated my wife and let down my children. I did it willingly, but not just for fun. You can’t just drop me, just like that, as if it didn’t mean anything.’
I found he was right, it didn’t mean anything. I always go cold when people bully me. I said I wouldn’t meet him again. He grabbed hold of me by the upper arms and shook me against the wall like a rat. We were miles from anywhere, my head hit the cupboard, my neck whiplashed sickeningly. My heart started thumping. Fear and rage. Don’t dare to touch me, don’t dare to hurt me. I screamed like a banshee and kicked him hard, the satisfying contact of shoe and bone — how often we’d played footsy under the table — and then as I saw his face go pale and he grabbed my hair and yanked me towards him I did what I never thought I could do, for after all they had loved me tenderly — I grabbed his cock and balls and squeezed. I squeezed till the bones of my knuckles ached. His roar of pain was like the echo of an orgasm, it followed me as I ran outside, abandoning my book and my shoes, then Stuart came after me, half-doubled up. I jumped into the Land Rover and slammed the door and stared straight in front as he rapped on the window, trying not to hear the abuse he shouted — the engine caught and I revved like a demon up the slope that led to the long track down. I felt powerful driving barefoot up the hill, saving myself, at one with the machine, but the downhill track was a different matter, a switchback nightmare, narrow and steep, the slippery white surface only inches wider than the wheels of the borrowed Land Rover; I screeched down the hillside like a rally-driver, but giggling and frightened, smelling my own sweat, scattering dust and goats and butterflies, making a blue-clad farmer stare and spray the road instead of his olives.
I was relieved, of course. I’d had a narrow escape, he was obviously crazy. For a moment I’d thought that my luck was running out, I’d thought my sins were catching up with me. I even made a vow not to be unfaithful again.
I flew into Geneva cool and immaculate, two days earlier than I had first planned, and wept with joy to see Chris at the airport. I said to him, as he took me in his arms, ‘You’re the only thing in the world that matters. I haven’t told you often enough that I love you —’
‘You have told me. I know you love me.’
‘And now we’re going to be a real family.’
How sure I was, how stupidly sure, that he would be able to give me a baby.
Then the thing we had never expected happened; Isaac flew out to see us in Switzerland. Not the family I wanted, the family I had.
We were staying in Montana Vermala, a skiing resort in the Swiss Valais with spectacular views across to the Alps. Cool, cool, so cool and fresh, they still had snow, even in summer, I remember the way it flushed at sunset… It was nearly sunset when the telephone rang.
I was in the bath with a gin and tonic and the door open so I could watch the sunset through the spectacular arched windows in the bedroom. I remember my body felt warm and loose from the water and the day’s first drink slipping into my bloodstream, I was back with Chris, we were safe from Stuart, Chris was reading the paper, everything was calm.
‘Isaac who?’ I heard Chris saying. ‘Are you sure?… No, tell him to wait…’ The pauses were long. I could hear him breathing. ‘I’ll be down in a minute. Ten minutes. He can wait in the bar. No, not now!’
When Chris put the phone down, he turned towards me, staring through the doorway but not seeing me, and his mouth had a frightening old man’s droop. ‘I’m sorry, Alex,’ he said. ‘Isaac has come out to see us.’
‘My God.’
‘He must have got the address from the bank… we’ll have to see him.’
‘Of course.’
‘He has no bloody right —’
‘Most people would say he had.’ I was shocked, but adrenalin was filtering through, I had to keep cool, I had to be strong. It had caught up with us, what we had done. ‘Don’t worry, darling. You look terrible. We can carry it off. We’ll take him out to dinner.’
‘You don’t understand how I feel,’ said Chris. He never usually said things like that. I got out of the bath with a movement that I thought would be decisive and graceful, like a swan taking off, but I only succeeded in drowning the floor. It wasn’t like me; I hate clumsiness. I snatched up a towel, which seemed too small, it was the hand-toweclass="underline" what was the matter with me? The skin on my legs was pink, half-cooked. My hair was a nest of dark rats’ tails in the mirror. But I had to think about him, not me.
‘I do understand. You’ve had a terrible shock.’ Perhaps I sounded over-solicitous, for it only succeeded in irritating him.
‘Well how about you, don’t you feel anything? He’s your child too — I mean, he lived with us.’
‘Darling I sympathise. I’m on your side.’
He stared at me as if I were someone else. ‘I feel so fucking appallingly guilty. I feel such a shit. I’m afraid of him. I’m afraid of what I’m going to see. I mean, what will he be like? What if he’s horribly changed?’