Something to Hide (5 page)

IT WAS JEREMY
on the phone – Jeremy, Bev's husband. He said he'd just flown in from West Africa and was here for a week on business.

‘Bev's sent you a present,' he said. ‘Shall I swing by and drop it off?'

So I said sure thing and I'd give him some supper. What time would suit? Jeremy said how about tonight? He was totally free because he knew nobody in London nowadays, he'd lived abroad for too long, and besides it would be great to see me. So now here he is on the doorstep, a big fleshy man with that booming laugh I remember so well.

‘God you look gorgeous,' he says. ‘Flushed and disordered, like an Irishwoman lost on the Tube.'

‘I've been cooking. I'm hot.'

He embraces me warmly. He's always been a great hugger. I've even seen him hug the waitress when leaving a restaurant.

It's been five years since I've seen Jeremy. He's put on weight but he's still an attractive man, weathered by laughter and sunshine and fizzing with energy. Big nose, big mouth, big appetites; I remember how he used to knock back the booze and he's already sniffing dinner with relish. His hair is now almost white, masses of it, but it suits him. So, ridiculously, does his shirt. It's printed with flamingoes, the sort of thing you'd wear on the beach. He looks like a dodgy arms dealer but there's always been something dodgy about Jeremy. He's one of those restless, flamboyant men who gets easily bored and who likes to entertain himself by shocking people.
Why are lesbians always so fat and ugly
? Some people would find him offensive but I don't care. He makes me laugh and I've had precious little of that recently. How can he bear to be married to someone as boring as Bev?

‘She bought you this,' he says, giving me a package. ‘She got it at the Baboon Sanctuary.'

We sit down at the kitchen table and I open the parcel. It's tied with flimsy, third-world string. Inside are two wooden napkin rings painted with monkey faces.

‘You know how crazy she is about animals.' He points to the monkeys. ‘These chaps are eaten as bushmeat, actually. Very tasty, apparently. A bit like grouse.'

‘Eat a lot of grouse, do they, in West Africa?'

He raises his eyebrows: ‘Only in season,' and pulls a Champagne bottle out of a bag.

‘Anyway, it's very kind of her,' I say. ‘How is Bev?'

‘Busy busy busy. The energy of the woman! Feeding half the population of rabid dogs and haranguing people about their emaciated donkeys. You can imagine how well that goes down.' He pops open the Champagne. ‘And then there's her aromatherapy, she's converted one of the bedrooms into a salon, it's a roaring success with all the NGO staff, she's raking it in. I expect she told you in her emails.'

Indeed she has, at length. Bev used to be a nurse but she got into alternative therapies long after everyone else. Aromatherapy is hardly alternative nowadays, is it? In fact it's pretty suburban. Like round-robins.

‘She's always had a good head for business,' says Jeremy. ‘Thank God somebody has.'

‘But you're a lawyer—'

‘I've always been hopeless with money.'

‘—with that vast drug company—'

‘Not any more.'

‘What?'

‘I'll tell you later.' He fills our glasses. ‘First I want to hear about you. How have you been? What have you done to your hair? It looks all—'

‘Irish.'

‘It suits you.' He clinks my glass. ‘Christ it's good to be back, blossoms and greenery and yallery. I can't tell you how much I miss the spring.' He gives me a broad smile. ‘And it's more than good to see you, darling Petra. You and your house, the mother ship. Never sell this place, will you? Promise?'

It's full of memories for him, that's why. Bev and I used to share the basement flat, years ago. That was when Jeremy met her and they fell in love. He and this house go back a long way and he holds it in some affection. He's visited many times since then, of course, when he and Bev have been in London. They have even stayed a couple of times in my daughter's old room.

But Jeremy's never visited on his own. It doesn't feel awkward, however. He's not one of those constipated Brits who're at an emotional loss without their wives. Quite the opposite. He's chatty and curious and likes nothing better than talking about relationships, preferably whilst getting drunk. My kind of guy.
Every
woman's kind of guy. Surely nobody likes the strong silent type except gay bodybuilders.

‘How's the internet lark going?' he asks. ‘Met anybody you fancy?'

I tell him about my latest disaster and we agree that men called Barry are not to be trusted.

‘Look at you,' he says, ‘a scrumptious woman in her prime—'

‘You mean I'm old.'

‘Don't be ridiculous. Half the men in London have been in love with you.'

‘Have! There, you see!'

‘Stop being so touchy.' He settles himself comfortably. ‘Now, tell me about the others. I want to hear stories from the wilder shores of love.'

‘It's a jungle out there.'

‘Literally, in my case.'

‘Plenty of grouse, though.'

He laughs, and lights a cigarette. He's the only man I know who still smokes. Living abroad does that; it fixes people in a former era. The same with their perceptions of home. To Jeremy, London is still a city with bobbies on the beat.

So he pours out more Champagne and I entertain him with my romantic disasters. From the safety of the marital bed, couples like to hear about the hurly-burly of the chaise longue. Not that there's been much hurly-burly but I beef it up to get that booming laugh. I tell him about spotting Alan on the TV news, about the internet man who took out his false teeth before he ate; about the
sensitive, tactile
pensioner who asked if I liked to play – presumably some sort of sport, until he told me. I tell Jeremy about the Cadbury's area manager who showed me photos of his dead wife and the man who talked me through the wiring on his Vauxhall Astra.

I omit, of course, the reality of my life – the great voids of echoing loneliness, the bitter envy of couples I see walking hand-in-hand on Hampstead Heath, greeting their grandchildren at Victoria station, consulting cinema listings in Patisserie Valerie, strolling through the Saatchi Gallery sneering at the artwork, getting their prescriptions for glucosomin and statins together, catching each other's eye at parties, going on weekend breaks to Lisbon, putting me in the back seat of their cars, doing every fucking thing together,
we we we
; or, if not, knowing the other one is at home, the lamps lit, the drinks poured and upstairs their double bed waiting in which they can snuggle together under the duvet, safe from the horrors of the dark, and cheating, for one more night together, their inevitable death.

I omit all this.

We've finished the Champagne by now and I've uncorked a bottle of Rioja. Both Jeremy and I have a good head for drink and match each other glass for glass; he says it's one of the things he admires most about me. Bev gets giggly after one gin and tonic and then falls asleep. I wonder if he'd change his mind if he saw me alone at the end of the evening, gripping the banister as I stumble up to the bathroom where I gulp down tumblers of water and gaze in the mirror at the sweating, wrinkled tomato that is allegedly my face.

Jeremy is wandering around the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down, familiarizing himself with the place again. It's a beautiful evening; the sun shines through the window, burnishing the saucepans hanging above the oven. It's nice to have him here, idly popping grapes into his mouth. He's gazing at the photos jammed around a picture frame.

‘Good Lord, has Jack had a baby?'

I nod. ‘I'm a grandmother. Well, a granny-by-Skype.'

‘Lucky you.' He and Bev don't have children. According to Bev their peripatetic lifestyle has been unsuitable for a family. ‘To be perfectly frank, neither of us wants one,' she told me once. ‘It might sound selfish, but we're just so happy in each other's company we've never needed little sprogs to make us feel complete.'

We're just so happy
. The woman has the hide of a rhinoceros. Always did. Bev and I went to school together. I remember her in the toilets when we were thirteen. I had a livid eruption of acne over my forehead and chin. Frowning at herself in the mirror she inspected, with a shudder, a minute pimple on her cheek. ‘Ugh, look at this. Isn't it disgusting? What on earth am I going to do?
Ugh
.'

Jeremy is an old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes kind of chap so I've roasted us a leg of lamb, purchased from Waitrose, which has cunningly disguised itself as a local street market whilst simultaneously wiping out the real one whose cheery stallholders were the last people on earth to call me
darling
. Swaying slightly, I split open a packet of frozen peas and empty them into a saucepan.

‘Know how long they take to cook?' says Jeremy. ‘Same time it takes to sing “I Can't Get No Satisfaction”. That's our method, anyway.'

Suddenly my good mood vanishes. I'm filled with such a black, bitter envy that it stops my breath. Jeremy and Bev, swaying together in their tropical kitchen, belting out the Stones song. I can't bear it.
I can't bear it.

‘That's too long,' I snap. ‘They'd be soggy by then.'

I don't want Jeremy, of course I don't. I just long, with all my heart, for such silliness. For thirty-five years of larkiness and laughter with the man I love. What has Bev done to deserve it? She's not particularly beautiful; she's not particularly clever. She's not even particularly nice.

It's all luck, isn't it? Luck and timing. When you're young you're a plum, ripening on the branch. The man who shook me down was Paul, a chap who never sang while he cooked. Who never noticed my hair or, indeed, made any comment about me at all. Over the years I felt myself fading, like the typing on fax paper. In moments of desperation I used to prod him for compliments. Once, in despair, I asked him,
Aren't you lucky to be married to a woman with such long, slim thighs?
Humiliating, isn't it? No wonder he looked startled. By the end of the marriage I was marginally deranged.

Communication. That's what I longed for. Paul was a good lover; that's how he expressed his emotions. A handsome man whose handsome body spoke to mine. But all those unsaid words I had swilling around my head – they had nowhere to go and they died a million deaths. After a while, with no ears to hear them, they stopped existing at all.

Paul spent years up a ladder, restoring the cornices. With a chisel, and a stiff little brush, and some sort of steam machine that kept breaking down, he silently toiled away, scraping off the layers of paint. Nobody could speak to him up there, he mustn't be disturbed. When my marriage was over I used to look up at the plasterwork, acanthus leaves and tiny scrolls, and think how every inch was an unsaid conversation and who gave a shit about cornices anyway? Sometimes I wondered if he talked to his lovers more than he talked to me. This made me more jealous than the sex.

Jeremy and I sit down to eat. ‘So what are you up to this week?' I ask him.

‘Few meetings. Bit of shopping, see my old mum in Marlborough. I really ought to catch up on some culture, bloody starved for it out there, if I watch the DVD of
Ocean's Eleven
one more time I'll slit my throat. You're arty. What should I see?'

It turns out that he's never been to Tate Modern. I haven't much work at the moment so we agree to meet there tomorrow afternoon.

I'm calling it Ngotoland, the West African country where Jeremy lives. I've changed the name of his town, too. It's just a precaution; I hope I won't need it. Likewise with the name of the pharmaceutical company for whom he used to work.

Used to, because he doesn't any more.

As I've said, Jeremy is slightly dodgy. It's part of his charm. He likes to sail close to the wind, he gets his kicks that way. Bev calls him a handful but that's putting it mildly. He's reckless and impulsive and drinks too much. I remember some incident in Kuala Lumpur, when he was working out there – some road accident that was later hushed up. He's always been a manic driver. When we were young he had a Triumph Stag and I remember us careering from party to party, me and Bev screaming as he shot all the lights down the Fulham Road. Long ago he would have been an adventurer, seeking his fortune in the Gold Rush or on the North West Frontier, dressed as a Pashtun and speaking the language like a native. Some people are born in the wrong century and he's one of them. Of course there's plenty of reckless men around, they brought our economy to its knees, but I could hardly see Jeremy on the trading floor at Lehman Brothers. He's a maverick, a loner.

That's why it's surprised me, that he's been employed by a corporate giant like Zonac all these years. But it turns out he's always been freelance – a troubleshooter, working in the morally dubious area of litigation.

Which is what took him to West Africa.

We're sitting in a café outside Tate Modern, the sun on our faces, sharing a slice of carrot cake. Hoards of tourists shuffle through the entrance; a bunch of schoolchildren jostle each other as they're swallowed up inside. It's such a beautiful day, however, that we simply can't bear to go in. We agreed about this, what the hell, let's just not, and feel pleasurably like truants. It's so warm that Jeremy's in his shirtsleeves (striped this time, he's been in a meeting) and I'm wearing a T-shirt. I surrender myself up to the sun, voluptuously, as he tells me what's been happening in Ngotoland.

It concerns a tribe called the Kikanda. Apparently they're hunter-gatherers who live deep in the bush. Until recently, their habits hadn't changed since the Stone Age. They have a nomadic existence, the men disappearing for weeks, hunting animals with poisoned arrows, while the women gather nuts and fruits; they speak in a language of clicks and whistles.