Fallout (19 page)

She dried her eyes. And now it came into her mind that she would have to get up, and leave the safety of the damp cloakroom. She would have to face him. They were married, after all. But she could not get up. She had no idea where she could go. She wanted her mother. She began to cry again, weak, but was stopped by the front door slamming above her.

She sat still and silent, holding her breath.

She waited. She waited long enough to get colder and uncomfortable, and listened stiffly to the house creaking around her and then she heard Tony’s voice, distantly calling her name. She shut her eyes.

She heard him coming down the stairs above her head like footsteps in a game of hide-and-seek.

‘Nina, darling?’

There was a gentle tap on the door. She stood up and after a moment opened the door.

He was very neat and it looked as if he had combed his hair. He held out his hand and smiled, ruefully.

‘Darling, you can’t stay in there all night.’

She shook her head.

‘Shall we go upstairs?’ he said. ‘It’s awfully late, I should think you’re exhausted.’

She looked at him, dazed.

‘I don’t know what came over me,’ he said. Then his composure crumpled. ‘I’m sorry.’ Childlike tears brimmed. ‘In our house. I’m so sorry. You couldn’t loathe me as much as I loathe myself. My darling.’

His face was melted, features blurring. She realised he had been crying before and must have cleaned himself up to come to her.

‘I don’t loathe you,’ she said. He kept crying, his hands hanging helplessly at his side.

She reached out and took one of them.

Gripping her fingers, he knelt on the kitchen floor at her feet. He pressed her hand to his brow.

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t change how much I love you. Forgive me.’

Nina felt dizzy. She leaned her back against the toilet door, her husband kneeling at her feet.

‘Get up,’ she said. ‘Come on, it’s time for bed.’

He stood up and wiped his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘let’s go on up.’ There was a fresh red stain on the knees of his trousers where he had knelt in a puddle of red wine.

He took her hand and led her up the stairs. As they crossed the landing and passed the back room, she glanced in, wonderingly, through the open door at the blameless
Nina’s room
they had always said was hers.

‘Shh,’ he said. ‘Come on. Don’t be cross.’

And they went on up to bed. He spent longer in the bathroom than usual, and so did she.

Luke woke in the clean morning. The sunlight shone straight in onto his bed through the open curtains. He sat up, rubbed his face, looked out of the window at the blue sky over the rooftops and thought of Nina.

Leigh and Paul were not awake yet. He made some coffee and did two hours’ work on the new play with sharp concentration and lovely peace. Then he bathed, rigorously, found clothes from the clean pile in his room – put last night’s in the dirty – and took his keys and wallet. It was still too early, she wouldn’t be at the theatre yet. He couldn’t go to her house. She was married. He laughed at that, standing alone in his room, laughing at the idea she was married. It wasn’t real. She wasn’t anybody’s.

It was still only twelve o’clock. He thought he would try to do some more work but the morning had got away from him so he took a paperback from the shelf, shoved it in his jacket pocket and started out, opening the front door just as Leigh came out of the bedroom in one of Paul’s shirts.

‘Morning,’ she said, croakily. ‘Is there coffee?’

‘No milk,’ said Luke, who didn’t take it but knew she did.

‘Are you going to the shops?’

‘If you like.’

He thundered down the stairs into the street. It was mild. It didn’t feel like November, it felt earlier in the year.

He walked to the corner shop and bought milk, eggs, a newspaper and some sliced bread and chocolate and went back up to the flat. Leigh was lying on the sofa with her legs stretching out from beneath Paul’s shirt and a cushion over her face.

‘I hate wine,’ she said. ‘Why? Why?’

Luke put down the shopping, took the bar of Cadbury’s from the bag, and went over to the sofa. He knelt and slit the wrapper with his thumb. Leigh turned her head beneath the cushion. He lifted the corner, gently, and broke off a square of chocolate.

‘You smell of shaving,’ she said, with her eyes closed.

She opened her mouth and he put a square of chocolate inside it. She put the cushion over her face again. He looked at her bare, long white legs, crossed at the ankle over the sofa arm and the shirt tails barely covering the top of her thighs.

Leigh held out her hand. He stopped looking at her legs and gave her some more chocolate. She took the cushion off her head and turned to look at him. When she woke she always had make-up smudged round her eyes like a 1920s film star and her lips were full – from sleeping or the dreams she’d had.

‘So?’ she said.

He was embarrassed and proud at the same time. ‘It was good. Nina . . .’ Saying her name out loud was strange, like giving everything away. ‘That Nina Jacobs,’ he said, ‘she’s a nice girl.’

Leigh knew what he meant. She always knew what he meant.

‘That’s one way of describing her,’ she said. ‘Married girl is another. Not that that would make any difference to you.’

Luke shrugged. Got up quickly. ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ he said, and did. ‘See you later.’

And then he left.

Leigh sat up.

‘See you later,’ she said to the closed door, hugging her knees to her chest tightly for protection as Paul slept on in their bedroom.

Luke walked to the King’s Road and along it, past the Chelsea mothers with their neatly dressed children and other people, long hair and platforms, hats, patterns, like a different species. He went to the top of Tite Street and stood about on the corner, scanning the faces that passed by, absurdly happy and thinking he might see Nina.

He sat on a bench in Sloane Square and watched the people going in and out of the tube, teenagers meeting and laughing by the
Standard
seller on the pavement, and the closed Royal Court, tattered posters, litter. Pigeons hopped and scrabbled about his feet, sidling up to a tramp on the next bench and pecking around his string-tied boots. A man in a pinstripe suit with a kipper tie came and sat nearby, taking sandwiches in Tupperware out of his briefcase then closing it to use as a table. The pigeons moved in on him and the tramp did, too, shuffling over to ask for change, reaching out his blackened hands, but the kipper-tie man turned away and pretended he was alone.

The Court was showing Arnold Wesker’s
The Old Ones
. Luke had seen it three times, partly to further the argument with Jack Payne, Graft’s director, whose voice in Luke’s head, even in his absence, still fought its laboured corner. Jack had thought the Court a soap manufacturer – called it that – a fairytale machine for a lazy society to pass cud through its seven stomachs, a funeral party for socialism. Even now he had gone, and Graft gone with him, Luke mentally fenced with Jack’s absolutism, even now he was exasperated at being dictated to. He checked his watch. One o’clock. No matinée. She wouldn’t even be out of bed yet.

Nina had woken very early, her stomach screwed up with emptiness and bile, coming immediately to consciousness as if she hadn’t slept. When Tony got up he didn’t go to his study but went out without acknowledging her, and when the house was quiet she sat up against the pillows. Mrs Wills came in at ten. Nina ran a bath, lying for a long time in the pine-scented bubbles, and let the telephone ring. It would be her mother. She had arrived early the night before and not spoken to Nina before she left. She would want to talk about the party. Nina didn’t know what she might say to her, she had no face to present to the world. She lifted her wet legs and arms from beneath the water, shining and female, and examined them coldly. She washed her hair, dried it. She took a Valium. She dressed. The phone rang all morning, and Nina ignored it.

She slipped quietly out of the house at two and walked down to the Embankment, staring at the slow-moving brown river and wondering at the world she now inhabited. Then, earlier than she needed to, she went to the theatre. It was the only safe place.

Luke stood in the alleyway by the stage door remembering Leigh would come into the theatre too, not just Nina, and he didn’t want her to see him waiting there. It had begun to feel like winter now as night came on, sharp and tinged with frost and smoke. The day had been a half-hour, a blink, a bright, clean, ready intake of breath for the moment she would arrive. If Tony Moore was with her he would go home – he could back out of sight easily – disappear. It was like a happy game, for all its importance.

The purring rumble of a black cab. The squeak of brakes and the
for hire
sign switched back on. The door opening. Nina.

She was alone. She paid the cab driver, then turned – and stopped when she saw him.

She was pale. Guarded. He didn’t know if it meant guarded from him. Suddenly he felt scared – of her, or for her – scared of himself.

‘Hello,’ he said.

She didn’t answer him, she just shook her head.

‘Can we go somewhere?’ He felt foolish. ‘Can we talk or something?’

She began to walk – but not towards him, past him, looking down.

‘Wait.’ He put his hand on her arm, halting her, but withdrew it immediately. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Last night—’ Then he stopped because if she didn’t remember the same thing he did then there was nothing to say.

But then she looked up at him and he saw she was desolate. He had to keep himself from reaching out to hold her.

‘I have to get inside,’ she said. And she went past him to the stage door, rapping on it urgently.

He didn’t follow her. It wasn’t right to pursue somebody who was already hunted.

‘Tomorrow?’ he said as loss erased the gilded notions of his dreaming day.

She paused, as if alerted to the reality of him for the first time. And before she went inside she nodded.

Luke queued for a standby in the upper circle and sat in darkness as the prison doors closed. This time it wasn’t Seston’s captivity, or even his own, but only Nina’s. The cold light came up on the stage. She entered, blind; she knelt, she bowed her head and Luke hurt with the need to free her. He sat in his seat with all the other strangers and watched her subjugation, her fight, and her defeat.

The rest of the week was the same. In the mornings he worked on the new play, staying as long as he could in the controllable, rigorous world inside his head, and then he would surrender, and go to the theatre and wait for Nina. She would get out of the taxi, acknowledge him, perhaps smile, and he found that each day he waited he could do it more quietly and was more passive, that he entered the held framework she imposed, as if that in itself was being with her.

‘You can’t go wherever it is that you go today,’ said Paul. ‘We’ve got to meet John Wisdom in his office and then Lou Farthing.’

‘Where’s the first one?’

‘Floral Street.’

‘All right.’

They were eating eggs that Luke had fried at lunchtime in the kitchen at the flat. Leigh had finished and was washing up.

‘Will you bring the new play?’ asked Paul.

‘
Diversion
? It’s not done.’

‘Can you talk about it, then? He’ll want to know what you’re doing.’

‘Yeah. I can try.’

‘This could be good.’

Luke nodded, head down, eating. ‘Yeah.’

Leigh turned round, drying her hands on a tea towel. ‘Do you care, Luke?’ she said suddenly. ‘If you sell your play?’ Her voice was hard.

Luke looked at her. ‘I haven’t thought about it.’

‘Well, why do you do it?’ She was blazing, angry with him for some reason.

‘Why do I do what? Write?’ He was confused, surprised that Leigh, of all people, would ask him that.

‘Yes, what’s it
for
?’

‘It’s for – I just have to do it. I don’t know. It’s what I do.’

‘Well, you’re not a baby – you must have a plan.’

Paul turned around. ‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing. I just think – Paul is doing everything, running around for months, trying to get something done for you, trying to get things together.’

‘I know that,’ said Luke. ‘I know he is.’

‘Well, aren’t you
grateful
? Are you ambitious?’

‘Ambitious?’ The word didn’t mean anything. He had hopes, and love, but not that.

‘What is it that you want, Luke?’ she pushed.

‘Leigh . . .’ said Paul.

I want Nina
, thought Luke, and didn’t say.

‘Well?’ said Leigh. ‘Well?’

‘I don’t think about what might happen,’ said Luke. ‘I just write. It’s all I can do. I try to do it well.’ There was silence. ‘I am grateful,’ he said.

Paul looked away. ‘Nah—’

‘For God’s sake! Just forget about it,’ said Leigh, and left them alone.

Paul exchanged a
women
look with Luke.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You do your thing, I do mine.’

‘Yeah. I know,’ said Luke.

Paul got up to go after her. She had gone into their bedroom and started to make the bed, furiously.

‘You know he spends every afternoon at the theatre,’ she said, not looking round, ‘trying to chat up Nina Jacobs? And then he stays and watches the bloody play most nights.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Paul, watching her violently tucking in sheets. ‘He’s weird about girls. Does it matter?’

‘I don’t
mind
all the stupid girls.’ Her voice was very harsh. ‘I’m just so scared he’s wrecking himself over her when he’s worked so hard and you’re trying to get his work seen and I hate it. We all used to be
different
,’ she said, stopping and standing with her back to him, spiky. He went to her and put his arms round her from behind.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘it’s okay.’

She turned and buried her head in his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I’m being such a bitch.’