Learning by Heart (2 page)

Joshua came to the door. ‘Going to the pictures,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ he told him. ‘I’m going to help make a film. Only a few days. Be back soon.’

‘See Harry’s party.’

One of Joshua’s playschool friends was having a birthday party at the weekend, the event so shrouded in mystery and excitement that Joshua had had sleepless nights over it.

‘I’ll take you there,’ Nick promised. ‘Don’t you worry.’

‘Saturday.’

‘Saturday.’ His heart turned over with regret. He would make it up to Joshua, he thought. Joshua, who didn’t even know that he had been betrayed.

After supper, he packed his case upstairs, then went down. It was ten o’clock.

Zeph was watching television, a glass of wine balanced on her knee.

‘So,’ he said, sitting opposite her, ‘suppose you tell me what’s the matter?’

‘Is anything?’ she asked, her eyes on the screen.

‘Come on,’ he said.

‘What?’ Now she looked at him.

‘That face,’ he told her. ‘That expression. Have I forgotten something?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘At least give me a clue.’

She held his gaze. He got up, went over to her and put his hand on her arm. She recoiled, and he half-crouched to her level. He had been going to kiss her. He wanted more than that, too – he wanted to make love to her. Josh was asleep. He remembered the days when they took each other anywhere, even here, on the floor in front of the fire. Not so long ago.

She had tucked her arm into the depths of the chair, and sipped some wine.

‘Zeph?’

‘Why don’t you go to bed?’ she said. ‘You’ve got an early start.’

‘Come with me.’

‘I’m watching this,’ she said, and nodded at the television.

Puzzled, he considered her, then straightened up. ‘Are you sulking?’ he asked.

‘What do you think I’ve got to sulk about?’

‘My going to Paris.’

‘No.’

‘Or going anywhere, probably.’

She flashed him a look, took another sip, and stood up. ‘I don’t begrudge you going anywhere,’ she murmured, and turned off the television. ‘That was a story you concocted.’

‘Excuse
me
! You made a big deal out of my going to Hay-on-Wye, and I was a fucking speaker, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Don’t swear at me,’ she said. She walked out to the kitchen.

He followed her. ‘Well, you did,’ he insisted.

He heard her sigh. ‘I don’t care where you go,’ she said.

‘Oh, is that so?’ he retorted. ‘You don’t care – and that’s why you create such a bloody atmosphere every time.’

His wife was washing the wine glass; slowly and methodically, she dried it with a tea-cloth, and placed it on the shelf, aligning it precisely with the others.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

‘I’m going to my mother’s,’ she replied. She folded the tea-cloth and faced him, leaning against the draining-board.

Her answer took the wind out of his sails. He thought she had been angling for an invitation to the set, to Paris.

‘Somerset?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘But you haven’t been in months.’

‘I rang Mum this afternoon. I’m going in the morning.’

‘Well, ring her again and say you’ve changed your mind,’ he said.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘To please you?’

He laughed in exasperation. ‘No, to please you, you silly bitch.’

She eyed him levelly. There was a long pause. ‘Why do you do that?’ she asked.

‘Do what?’

‘Use that kind of language to me.’

‘
Use that kind of language
?’ he repeated, astonished. ‘What’s this? The Campaign for Clean Speech? Who the hell have you come as tonight? Did I miss a scene change?’

‘You ridicule me,’ she said quietly.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘don’t be ridiculous and I won’t have to.’ He spread his hands and grinned at her. ‘Problem solved.’

‘You think you’re very funny.’ It was a kind of weary admission to herself.

‘But I
am
funny,’ he objected, still grinning. ‘It’s one of the things they pay me for. Didn’t you know?’

‘But you’re not funny,’ she said tonelessly. ‘You’re facetious.’

He took a breath. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘So I’m a not very funny bastard. OK. Slap me, huh? Slap me hard. Come to bed.’

She didn’t reply.

‘Or to Paris,’ he said. ‘Or both.’

Still there was nothing.

‘Look, Zeph,’ he told her. ‘It’s fucking late.’

‘Stop saying that. Josh copies you.’

‘He does?’

‘Yes.’

‘He said that?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘A couple of days ago.’

‘He did?’ Nick laughed. ‘Cute guy.’ The idea creased him up. ‘What a cute guy.’

Zeph put a hand to her forehead. Once, she would have laughed too – in horror perhaps, but certainly at the absurdity of it. She wasn’t laughing now. She wasn’t even smiling. She was pressing her fingers to her eyes, then her mouth.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘come to Paris – please. Or don’t. Whatever you want. Come to bed or don’t. But, Zeph, don’t give me this routine. If I’ve done something, for God’s sake spit it out, and if I haven’t, well, goodnight. I’m sorry you’re pissed off about whatever it is.’ And he turned to go.

‘I won’t come to bed with you,’ she said, very softly, at his back. ‘I won’t do that again.’

He thought he’d misheard her. He looked back. ‘What?’ he said.

‘I’m not sleeping with you again,’ she said.

He started to smile, thinking it was some kind of wind-up. She used to tease him quite a lot. They had shared an understanding about it, that she could wrong-foot him and make him almost lose his temper before he realized it was a joke. It had been quite a turn-on. She could do it superbly. But it hadn’t happened for a long time now – like everything else that had come easily to them. They had lost it somewhere, the ease of being together. Some time in the past year, or maybe some time since Josh was born – anyway, so recently that he could still believe it was how they really were and that, one day, he would wake up and find that they had rediscovered the old ease and humour, and that the awkwardness between them had been a dream.

‘I’m not joking,’ she said.

He walked back into the room and stared at her.

She held his gaze, then went to the bookcase and took out a sheet of newspaper that had been slipped between two paperbacks. She glanced at it, then gave it to him.

It was the gossip column from that morning’s tabloid. There was a photograph of Nick and the actress in the film he was working on. They had been caught, mid-stumble, coming out of a club. His arm was round her waist. She was gazing up at him, her hand on his midriff.

He read the short article beneath it, ‘Bella James Steadies New Scriptwriter’s Nerves,’ then something – his heart thumped grudgingly – about this being his first script, and how the lovely second daughter of dashing theatre impresario, now a star in her own right … seen dining together …

When he looked up, Zeph’s expression hadn’t changed. It was as inscrutable, emotionless, as it had been all evening.

He felt short of breath, nauseous. He held out the page, angled towards her. ‘It’s just a picture,’ he said.

She waited, gauging his reaction. ‘When?’

‘When what?’

‘When was it taken?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe last month.’

‘It was one of the nights you were late,’ she said.

‘It might have been,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘An occasion that doesn’t matter?’

‘It was Patrick’s birthday,’ he said, remembering. ‘I just got roped in.’

It didn’t feel as he had thought it would. He had dreaded being found out. He had tried to imagine Zeph’s reaction, and pushed the thought from his mind a hundred times. He would never be found out, he had reasoned. Bella would never say anything. He certainly wouldn’t. It had been short-lived, and it was over.

Zeph went to the window and drew the curtain tighter, rearranging its folds, her back to him. Then she pulled the chair straight.

‘Zeph,’ he said, ‘it’s just a picture.’

‘Oh, yes?’ she murmured. She turned back to him.

‘You know what the papers are like.’

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I don’t. You didn’t, either, until this film.’

‘Well, what am I expected to do?’ he asked. ‘I can’t say no, can I?’

‘You could invite me,’ she said.

‘It was just a drink, and it turned into a party on the spur of the moment,’ he told her. ‘It was nothing.’

She began to laugh. ‘And you a writer!’ she said. ‘I’d have thought you could come up with better dialogue than that.’ She shook her head.

A strange sense of injustice choked him. She should be crying. Wasn’t that what wives did, when they suspected their husbands of infidelity? Why didn’t she cry?

‘I can’t believe you could get so worked up about a photograph,’ he said.

‘So you’re not having an affair with the …’ Zeph glanced at the newspaper article, which he was still holding ‘… the lovely second daughter?’

‘An affair?’ he echoed. ‘You’d believe this bloody journalist?’

She fixed him with a stare. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t.’

Relief washed through him. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s just … you know what they’re like …’

She held out her hand in a gesture designed to stop him coming any closer to her. ‘I wouldn’t believe it,’ she said, ‘unless someone else had told me it was true.’

Such was the shock that he actually stopped breathing. ‘What?’

‘Unless someone else had told me,’ she repeated.

He opened his arms helplessly. ‘Who would tell you a thing like that?’

‘Jess Turner.’

Nick’s stomach dropped. They had known Jess Turner for several years. He was an actor, and had dated one of Zeph’s girlfriends. They had made up foursomes for more than a year. ‘I haven’t seen Jess in months,’ he said.

‘Neither have I,’ she replied. ‘Until today.’

He watched her sit down again. She brought her legs underneath her and crossed her arms composedly over her chest. He thought that he saw a flicker of the pain she was holding in.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘Jess …’

‘He’s in
Equatorial
at the Duke of York’s,’ she said.

‘I know that.’

‘And so is the
first
daughter of the dashing theatre impresario.’

There was a beat. Two.

‘Of course she is,’ Nick said dully.

Zeph looked at him as he sat down opposite her. He felt the drag of defeat, the exhaustion of the secret carried and revealed.

‘I was going down St Martin’s Lane,’ she said, ‘to the National. He came out of the theatre.’

Nick put his head into his hands.

‘He came up to me and said he was sorry.’ Nick said nothing. ‘I asked him what he meant,’ Zeph went on. ‘I hadn’t seen the article. He walked me across the road and bought me the paper.’

That fuckhead
, Nick thought savagely, his hands obscuring his face from his wife.

‘Everybody knew,’ Zeph said. ‘Everyone but me, apparently.’

A terrible prolonged silence descended. He dared not look up. He feared her implacability, the face he had seen when he first came through the door, more than anything else.

‘Don’t go to Somerset,’ he said, into his hands.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘I won’t go to Paris.’

‘But you’re needed there,’ she said bitterly. ‘And she’ll be there.’

He dropped his hands. Zeph was getting out of her chair. He scrambled to his feet as she made to walk past him. He caught her arm. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Zeph, please. Listen to me.’

‘Let go,’ she said.

He heard the tears, although she did not shed them. ‘Zeph,’ he said, ‘I’ve been tried here, judge and jury. Don’t pass sentence on me. Please.’

‘You don’t deny it’s true.’

‘No,’ he responded finally. ‘But Zeph … it wasn’t like that.’

‘Like what, exactly?’

‘It wasn’t … it was just …’ He dropped her arm. She made no move to leave.

‘How long?’ she asked.

‘Not long.’

‘A month? Two months?’

‘I saw her half a dozen times.’

‘Since just before Christmas?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘When you started work on this film.’

‘Yes. Zeph—’

‘You started an affair the first day you met her?’ Zeph asked. ‘Did you sleep with her the first day?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

‘Where did you sleep with her?’ she insisted, her voice rising.

He stared miserably at his feet. Suddenly she snatched the article from him and tore it in two. ‘You bastard,’ she said. ‘She must be ten years younger than you. How the hell did you get her to want you?’ She threw the pieces down in revulsion. ‘What did you say?’ she demanded. ‘That your wife didn’t understand you? Some cliché like that? That we really hadn’t been getting on, maybe had never got on. Perhaps you told her I didn’t love you.’ She stared at him. ‘Let me think,’ she said. ‘That we never had sex – that’s a good one. It would have made her determined to give you what your wife wouldn’t.’

She was staring at him intently. ‘You did,’ she murmured. ‘That’s what you told her.’ She let out a gasp. ‘Oh, Nick – you liar.’

‘I didn’t say exactly that,’ he protested.

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Not
exactly
that? Well, what the hell,
exactly
, did you tell her?’

‘Zeph—’

‘Tell me!’ she shouted. And she hit him. She bunched her fist and hit him in the chest. It was so unexpected that he fell backwards a couple of paces. ‘Tell me,’ she repeated. Her voice dropped low. ‘Tell me, or I swear I’ll kill you, Nick. Tell me.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘That’s what I told her.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ she whispered. She turned away from him and put her hands over her face. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I can’t believe this.’

‘I know I’m to blame as much as you—’

She wheeled round, aghast. ‘I’m to blame?’ she cried.

‘No, no … I meant … Christ,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t know what I mean. Just that we haven’t been close for months – a year even, not since Josh, really …’

‘And that justifies it, does it?’ She was staring at him open-mouthed.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t. I’m just trying to tell you. I’ve missed you, I—’

‘So your answer was to take up with a stranger,’ she said. And her façade crumbled. She started to cry.