Soft (24 page)

He parked on the north side of a narrow, elongated square. Her house was part of a terrace of tall houses, all built out of the same beige brick, their front doors guarded by pillars of dark-pink marble. He followed her up the steps, his eyes on a level with the hem of her skirt, which swayed giddily against the backs of her thighs. She undid three locks, then they were in.

Once inside the flat he could no longer hear his footsteps. The carpet was deep enough to silence any movement. It was like walking on snow. They moved along a dark passageway towards the back of the house. In the kitchen she switched on a lamp and opened the fridge. She poured a glass of chilled white wine for him and a tumbler of sparkling water for herself,
then she led him into the living-room. They lay down on the sofa with the lights out and the TV on. Some cable channel. He watched the flicker of the pictures on her skin, the play of light and shadow hectic, almost tribal …

After a while he thought he heard a car pull up outside the house. With the TV on, though, he couldn't be sure. A key could turn in the front door, and then that carpet, deep as snow. Her husband could be standing in the room before they noticed. And even then –

Japan, he told himself. Korea.

Later, she asked if he was thirsty.

‘Yes,' he said.

She left the sofa and walked naked across the room, her spine shifting in the half-light, a subtle movement that reminded him, just for a moment, of the tail of a kite.

She returned with a tall glass and handed it to him.

‘What's this?' he asked.

She smiled. ‘Guess.' She fitted her body next to his, her skin cooled by the walk out to the kitchen.

He brought the glass to his lips and tasted it. Kwench!.

‘It's not bad,' she said. ‘I've been buying it.'

At some point in the middle of the night he leaned over her and saw that she was staring up into the dark. The whites of her eyes were slightly marbled, like the surface of the moon. He could just hear the sound of her breathing – as delicate as wind in grass, not the tidal ebb and flow of someone sleeping.

‘It's not you, is it?' he said.

She stared at him without moving.

He spoke again. ‘It's not you who's going to the papers?'

‘What about?' she said.

He examined her face for signs that she might be lying, but she only sounded confused and the confusion didn't seem feigned. It wasn't her. It couldn't be. The glass of Kwench! she had offered him was just a glass of Kwench!.

‘What is it?' she whispered. ‘What are you talking about?'

He lay down, the back of his head fitting into a hollow in the pillow. Above him the darkness was vibrating.

‘Jimmy, you're scaring me.'

‘It's all right,' he said, ‘it's nothing. Go back to sleep.'

In the morning, as she was dressing, she suddenly said, ‘You woke me up last night. Do you remember?'

He looked at her in the bathroom mirror. She was standing behind him, in the middle of the bedroom, her face tense with wonder at the memory. ‘You asked me all these questions,' she said.

‘Did I?'

‘Yes. You asked me if I'd been to the papers.'

‘The newspapers?'

‘I suppose so.' She moved to the chest of drawers and opened it. ‘It was strange. Like you thought I was going to sell them a story or something. You were really worried about it …'

Still looking at her in the mirror, Jimmy shook his head.

‘I must have been dreaming,' he said.

During the weeks that followed her return from New Orleans Glade slept badly. Most nights, between the hours of two and three, she would hear the phone ringing in the corridor outside her room. She knew who it was. She could imagine him in his apartment in Miami, bright blocks of evening sunlight stacked against the walls, the ocean in the window, tropical, metallic-green. He'd be sitting with one leg thrown casually over the arm of a chair, a joint burning between his fingers. If you loosened his striped tie, then opened the top three buttons of his shirt and slid your hand inside, you'd feel sweat on the surface of his skin, a light, clean sweat, as pure as water …

At first she found it almost impossible not to answer – and he let the phone ring for a long time too, suspecting, rightly, that she was there. She lay in bed with her eyes wide open, listening. Some nights she counted the number of times the phone rang, and was surprised by his patience, his persistence; she wouldn't have expected it. Other nights she pretended that it was a just another sound, and that it had no more relevance to her than a clap of thunder or a car-alarm. After a week, not answering became a habit. In the end, though, she had to unplug the phone before she went to bed. Even then, somehow, she could sense him trying to get through. And she knew what he would say if she let him speak to her. He'd say she was weird, changing her flight like that, behind his back, sneaking out of the hotel at dawn. And then not picking up the phone,
not
communicating.
‘Jesus, Glade, what's going on? Are you having some kind of breakdown? Are you depressed?' He'd start using words like ‘shrink', which she didn't like (why would someone want to make you smaller?). So what was the point? She missed him, of course she did – the whole inside of her was hollow with the knowledge that he was gone – but she needed to hold on to some initiative of her own, the feeling that she'd had in New Orleans at five-thirty in the morning.
The airport, please.

Yes, she was right to have ignored Tom's calls. If she'd made a mistake at all, it was in telling Sally why. They were sitting at the kitchen table late one night, the window a black mirror revealing a second version of the room, bleaker, more ethereal. Sally had been complaining about the phone ringing, how it woke her, and Glade felt she owed her flat-mate an explanation. She began to tell Sally about the party in the house on Chestnut Street, and what had happened later, in the car … Sally couldn't believe what she was hearing. If something like that had happened to her, she said, she would have called the police. She would have sued. Though Glade felt uneasy now, she continued with her story, ending with the conversation that had taken place at the wedding, under the cedar tree. Afterwards, Sally was silent for a moment, then she sighed and lit a cigarette. ‘Well, I always said you should ditch him.'

Glade shook her head. ‘I don't know.'

‘After the way he treated you?'

‘I mean, I'm not sure if I ditched him,' Glade said. ‘Maybe he ditched me.' The word felt odd in her mouth, as if she had a different tongue. She ought to use her own words, she thought. Not other people's.

‘Does it matter?' Sally was saying. ‘As long as you get rid of him. For Christ's sake, the man's an animal.' She paused, inhaled, tapped some ash into a saucer. Then she said it again: ‘He's an animal.'

‘I don't know,' Glade said slowly. ‘What if I love him?'

She was thinking of the first night, when they left the bar on Decatur Street and called in at their hotel to collect the car. While they were in their room, she remembered the painting she had brought with her. She held it out in front of her, saying simply, ‘It's a present.' He had seemed perplexed at first, to be receiving something, but then he unwrapped it and carried it over to the tall lamp by the window. He looked at her, his mouth smiling, but his eyes and eyebrows puzzled, then he looked back at the painting again. He didn't understand it, but he wanted to.

‘What is it?' he said at last.

She moved towards him. ‘What do you think it is?'

‘I don't know.' He tilted the picture one way, then the other. ‘A pyramid?'

She grinned. ‘You remember the mountain I told you about?'

‘This is it?'

‘Yes.' She joined him by the window. It was strange how light the colours had seemed in London, and how dark they looked suddenly, in New Orleans. ‘Do you like it?'

‘Yes, I do. I like it.' He hesitated. ‘Has it got a title?'

‘It's on the back.'

He turned the painting over.
‘Paddington.'
He nodded to himself, then turned uncertainly towards her, the blond hairs on his forearms crimson in the lamplight. ‘They took it away, though, right?'

When she thought about loving Tom, trying to decide whether she did or didn't, this was one of the moments that always came to mind.

Sally stubbed her cigarette out. ‘Well, I'd ditch him if I were you.' She yawned and then stood up. ‘I'm going to bed.'

After Sally had left the room, Glade sat at the table, wishing she'd said nothing. She listened to the taps running, the toilet flushing, the door to Sally's bedroom closing.

She felt stupid, so stupid.

That night she dreamed the mountain had returned, and she woke the next morning with a lightness inside her, believing for a few moments that it was true. It isn't there, she told herself as she dressed for work. You just dreamed it, that's all. Somehow, though, her heart was lifting against her ribs in anticipation. Somehow, she had to check.

On her way to Paddington she tried not to think. Instead, she concentrated on the air in her lungs, the sun on her face, the paving-stones beneath her feet. As she crossed Portobello Road she saw a man juggling avocados. He winked at her. She walked on, through streets that smelled of exhaust-fumes, blossom and, once, deliciously, of toast.

When she peered over the corrugated-iron fence, the mountain wasn't there, of course, only the ground it had once stood on, and no shadow on that ground, no charmed circle of dark earth, not one trace or memory of its existence. She felt something inside her slip, give way. Why had she come? All she had done was prove she was without something she had loved; she had reminded herself of a lack, an absence. She heard her own voice, thin but defiant, in a garden several thousand miles away.
Do you think we should just forget about it completely?
As she stood on the narrow strip of pavement, hands gripping the top of the fence, her mouth began to crumple.
It's all right. I won't make a fuss.
Then the tears came. She didn't think she'd ever cried so hard, the sounds wrenched out of her, her whole body shuddering. She lowered herself into a sitting position, her back against the corrugated iron, her forehead resting on her drawn-up knees. Cars rushed round the curve in front of her.

When the crying stopped at last, and she looked up, the light seemed to have changed. She had no idea how long she had been sitting there. Twenty minutes? An hour? She stood up shakily. Wiped her eyes, her cheeks. She supposed she
would be late for work. She thought of how she must look, her skin raw, her eyelids rimmed with red. What would she tell them at the restaurant?

At that moment a white van accelerated round the bend, its headlights flashing as it came towards her. The man behind the wheel showed her his tongue, just the tip of it; she saw it flicker in and out between his lips. His face was pale and damp, like mushrooms after they've been peeled.

She stared after the van, waiting until it had dipped down into the underpass, then she turned and walked in the opposite direction. For the next few minutes she walked faster than usual, past the timber yard, over the railway bridge and down into the station, using the back entrance, and it was only then, when she was under its high, curved roof, among the rushing people and the strange, burnt smell of trains, that she slowed down.

The sorrow that washed over her that morning stayed with her. At work she pretended to have hayfever – she even took the medication, so as to lend her story authenticity – but, in private, she cried so much that her eyes swelled and her throat tasted of blood. Sometimes, on the good days, she painted pictures of the mountain. Each picture was bathed in the same fierce orange glare. She wasn't sure it was such a great improvement – the landscape now looked apocalyptic, the train in the background on its way to some terrifying destination – but she didn't seem to have any choice in the matter. Then, towards the end of May, Charlie Moore sent her a postcard. He wanted her to visit him the following weekend. She could think of nothing she would rather do. This was the sign of a true friend, she thought, that he could time something so perfectly without even realising.

A Saturday, then. Just after two-thirty in the afternoon. The bus roared and staggered along the narrow, tangled streets of Camberwell. Outside, the heat pressed down out of a strangely dazzling grey sky. Everything she could see looked dusty: the
buildings, the cars – even the grass. London could look like that in the summer, as though it needed wiping with a damp cloth. She imagined for a moment that the world was the size of a tennis ball, and that it was lying on a high shelf in her father's caravan.

From the bus-stop on the main road she had to walk a distance of about a mile to reach the squat where Charlie lived. A woman called from behind a fence, a boy on a bicycle turned circles in a drive. The stillness of the suburbs. She stopped on a bridge and, leaning on the parapet, stared at the railway tracks below. A polished silver stripe down the middle of each rail, the bright-brown of the rust on either side. Nettles massed on the embankments and, further up, a stand of buddleia grew tall against a freshly painted fence. She supposed she was waiting to see a train, but she stayed on the bridge for fifteen or twenty minutes, the sun breaking through the high cloud cover, and no train came. Perhaps, after all, the line was disused. So many were, in England. And suddenly she realised that this was the feeling she would like to pass on, to her children, if she ever had any, the feeling of standing on a bridge somewhere, the sun warming the back of her head, her shoulders, and just the smell of buddleia, its blunt mauve flowers, the smell of rust and nettles too, and almost nothing moving. The feeling of being entirely in the present, with nothing to look back on, nothing to look forward to. A feeling of reprieve, a kind of grace. This feeling more than any other.