This Is All (57 page)

By the time we arrived at the hotel, I wanted to pack up and go. For a while we talked about home. I didn’t talk about my growing friendship with Julie – the first time I hadn’t told him about something important to me (itself a kind of lie).

‘You seem a bit off,’ he said at one point. ‘Are you okay?’ I said my period was due and was hurting a bit. Another fib. He told me to lie down and he’d give me a massage. He knew that often helped. I let him and inevitably that led to us making love. For the first time I faked it. And I hated myself more for this lie than for all the others put together.

Will had another early start next day. The team had one more test in order to complete that part of their course. It would be finished by lunch time. We’d planned that I would go with Will and watch, then we’d spend the afternoon on our own together, and I’d catch an evening train home. When he got up I told him I felt ill (which was not a lie, I felt sick from unhappiness), I didn’t want to be a wet blanket, maybe it would be best if I went home that morning. He suggested I stay in my room till lunch time, maybe I’d feel better by then and we could spend the afternoon however I wanted. I said I had some work to do for school next day and feeling the way I was it would be better to go home and get it done and have an early night. ‘Is there something else?’ Will asked. ‘Have I done something wrong?’ No, I said, lying again, no,
but I could see why he’d tried to put me off coming to see him, he was so busy. ‘But you’re here now,’ he said, ‘and it’s worked out okay, hasn’t it? And we could have the afternoon together. Why waste the chance just because you’re feeling a bit off colour?’

I was lying in bed. Will was standing beside me, naked, in arm’s reach of his beautiful body that had always spelled me with every kind of yearning – to gaze at it for ever, to caress it for ever, to take care of it and protect it, to be held by it, to lie on it, for it to lie on me, to be entered by it – a yearning for all of this at the same time. He gave me a long, quizzing look. ‘You’ve never let your period stop us doing something we wanted to do before,’ he said. I almost gave in. The words were gathering in my throat, when he added, ‘The others, they’ll miss you. Hannah especially. She told me last night she really liked you.’

The spell broke. Had Hannah been there too, on Will’s body? Had he been with her where he had been with me?

‘Sorry, Will,’ I said, ‘but I have to go home.’

He didn’t say anything more, but pursed his lips, turned away and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

7

‘Work,’ Julie said, ‘that’s the answer. Work hard at school to occupy your mind. Work hard at your music to untangle your emotions. Read and meditate to keep in touch with your soul. If it’ll help, I’ll keep you company when I can. And if you like, we’ll jog together to keep your body fit and help sweat the poisons out. I think you might be misjudging Will, but even if you aren’t, these things happen. We all have to learn how to live through them without giving up. You’re no different from anyone else. Remember Shakespeare. Romeo
and Juliet suffer love’s labour’s lost. At one time or another most of us do. You said the way you’re feeling is like being tossed about in a storm. And it is, I know, I’ve been there. It’s like being in a tempest when it’s happening and you’re sure you’ll be torn apart. But the storm passes and though you may be shipwrecked and washed up on a foreign shore, all’s well that ends well. It might not be as you like it. It might not be the end you wanted. But you’ll survive and you’ll be glad you have. You’ll see. Believe me.’

And I did. I believed her. I needed to believe something or I’d have fallen into the slough of despond again. But believe in what, when your world seems to be falling apart? I didn’t believe in God. In any god at all. I didn’t have religion. I was Christian only because I was born in a Christian country – or a country which says it’s Christian. At such a time, when you do not believe in
something
, you can only believe in
someone
. Someone you trust so completely that their strength can help carry you through. Just then, there was no one I could trust like that, except Julie. So I accepted what she said. And as it turned out, the biggest help, the times I liked best during the next few weeks, were our daily meditations together. I would go to her house after school and would meditate for half an hour (the most she would allow me to begin with). Then, while she continued for another hour, I would sit beside her and read whatever she set for me.

When I got home from Julie’s on the Friday of the week after my visit to Will, Edward Malcolm called. Had I decided about his offer of a Saturday job? To be honest, I’d forgotten about it. People say all kinds of things at parties, and mostly they never follow them up. At the time, I’d thought Mr Malcolm was just being nice. But here he was, wanting an answer. He needed someone quickly, and if I didn’t want the job, he’d have to find someone else.

Work was the answer, Julie had said. She and school filled
the weekdays. But the prospect of weekends on my own seemed like a desert. A job with Mr Malcolm would fill the Saturdays and earn me some money. And spending money when you’re rock-bottom low in spirits is as comforting as bingeing on food. (I read somewhere the other day that we’ve become a compulsive consumer society because we’re a depressed society.) So I said yes, thanks, when should I start? Tomorrow, he said, his office at nine.

8

Stop. Wait. You know what’s going to happen next. As soon as I told you about Edward Malcolm at Dad’s promo you knew what was going to happen. Probably, you guessed when I told you about him coming to our table in Mario’s. Stories are like that, even true stories like mine. Anton Chekhov said something like, ‘If you mention a gun in the first act, you’d better make sure it’s used by the last act.’ Why? Because if you don’t the reader will feel cheated. Why mention the gun if it doesn’t matter? Stories can’t tell everything, so everything they tell has to play a part in the story. Readers expect it.

So you know, you’ve guessed, what’s going to happen. But I had to tell you about how we met and my dispirited state at the time because I want you to understand that what happened wasn’t just a cheap adventure, or that I engineered it. Nor did Edward.

‘Were you after me from the start?’ I asked him once, after we’d become lovers. ‘Was offering me a job part of an evil plot to seduce me, you dirty old man?’

‘Certainly not!’ he said in his ironic huffy-pompous voice, and didn’t laugh. But ironic or not, he never laughed when I made fun of his age. ‘I liked the look of you, who wouldn’t? I thought you were attractive and how lucky Will was.’

‘You thought I was attractive?’

‘Yes.’

‘You mean sexy?’

‘But not just in a sexy way. You’re more than that. And it’s the
more than that
that makes you sexy. To me, anyway. Compris?’

‘No.’ I said. I did, but was still suffering – needing to be bolstered, needing to be admired, needing to feel wanted – so I was hungry for details. ‘Examples, s’il vous plaît.’

‘Well, let’s see. You’re intelligent, and I admire intelligence.’

‘Thank you kindly.’

‘You’re funny. Witty is what I mean, which is better.’

‘Am I?’

The vulnerability that praise undresses.

‘You think about things. You actually enjoy thinking.’

‘I do?’

‘And you don’t accept easy answers. You say what you think—’

‘I try to. I want to.’

‘– and not what you’re expected to say. And when you speak, even when you’re just being funny, there’s some heat in it, some passion. You’re passionate. I like that. Very much.’

He paused. I glanced at him.

The doubt that vulnerability unleashes.

‘And,’ he said, smiling, ‘you do something with your eyes when you’re being very serious, a sort of sideways look through your glasses, squinting a bit, very sharp, checking the other person out. Like you’ve just looked at me.’

I faced him squarely. ‘And it turns you on.’

‘
Very
sexy.’

‘Then I’ll ration you. No more than two a day. Wouldn’t want to give you heart failure.’

‘Non non, mademoiselle. There’s much more risk of you losing your head.’

‘A heart for a head. I’d come off best.’

‘You think so?’

‘In my opinion. But honestly now, no blague. You weren’t plotting to have me when you offered me the job?’

‘Not at all, dear heart. I needed somebody to help out in the office on Saturdays, you were available, I thought you’d be fun, but no, I wasn’t plotting to
have
you.’

‘Not consciously maybe. But subconsciously?’

‘Perhaps. Who knows what brews in the deepest caverns of his mind? How can you know till it becomes conscious?’

‘But it did, didn’t it? Confess. When?’

‘The day we surveyed Conduit Fifty-three.’

Conduit Fifty-three was a sewer. The kind that’s a tunnel big enough to walk in – well, big enough for me; Edward had to keep his head down. I spent half the day plodging through crap.

I’d been working six weeks for him by then, it was two days before my seventeenth birthday and a couple of weeks before the start of the Christmas holidays, when Will would be home. The job was easy, letter-writing and filing, making phone calls, running errands, sending out invoices – that kind of routine stuff. Edward worked hard, we chatted during lunch, which we always ate in the office – sandwiches or salad that Edward sent me out to buy, too boring on their own so I got into the habit of picking out something extra. He enjoyed that – Cordelia’s Treat he called it. He was easy to work for and had done and said nothing in the slightest inappropriate. He was good-looking. I’d thought about him, the way you do in teenage. I’d wondered what he was like in bed, but nothing serious, no fantasies. Anyway, he was married and he and his wife Valerie (who hadn’t put in an appearance) had two children, David, aged nine, and Linda, aged seven. What attracted me most was his self-assurance, his confidence, what he, being a Francophile and rather proud of his fluency in French, would have called his savoir-faire.

The day before Conduit Fifty-three Edward rang to say he wouldn’t be in the office tomorrow, there was an urgent problem he had to do something about and needed my help with a difficult client. He knew from Dad’s party how good I was at ‘disarming the machismo’ of men like that, and he wondered if I’d go with him and keep the client happy while he, Edward, sized up the problem? It would take all day, a couple of hours each way by car, a posh lunch with the client, and – here he paused – a walk in a sewer – ‘kitted up in protective gear, of course, and breathing apparatus if you want it’. Would I go?

Why did I say yes almost without hesitation? One reason: that fatal feminine instinct, the desire to please the man, the boss, the alpha male. He’d asked me to do this shitty job because he needed me and must have thought I could do it. But wanting to please Edward wasn’t the only reason. What I was aware of was that I wanted to test myself. Could I walk in a sewer and not puke and not let
myself
down? Julie had once said, when we were discussing things we didn’t like doing and I’d said how I hated going to the dentist’s, that she never minded having a tooth drilled when she was upset because it was such a different kind of pain from emotional pain that it gave her some welcome relief. Maybe plodging through crap and not puking while keeping a grotty man happy and helping Edward, apart from the change of a day away from home and being paid for it, would provide a welcome relief from my yearning for Will, and if I performed well and learned something (sewers, after all, being vital to our daily welfare, we ought to know how they work) I’d be pleased with myself, which would boost my damaged self-esteem and make me feel better anyway.

Which it did. The more so because the walk in the sewer was both worse and more interesting than I’d expected. Even though kitted out in all-over protective gear, I still felt my body was being sullied. Out of pride and against Edward’s
advice I’d refused to wear breathing apparatus because neither he nor the client did (anything you can do I can do) and at first I regretted it, almost throwing up on my first intake of the foul air. But I made myself endure by force of will and by breathing, as Edward told me to do, through my mouth, not my nose, and surprisingly I got used to the smell quite quickly. But the rats we encountered were a different matter. They made my flesh crawl, and on their first appearance trotting along as if they owned the place and without any regard for us mere humans I made an instinctive grab at Edward’s arm.

At that moment, had Mr Client
¹
not been with us I might have caved in, turned tail and scarpered from the free-range rodentry. But with him yomping along behind me I couldn’t let myself or Edward down and he saw me clutch at Edward’s arm. ‘Hang onto me, sweetie,’ he crooned. ‘I’ll save you from the beasties.’ There was nothing I wanted less than to hang on to this sample of male arrogance, and being addressed as ‘sweetie’ put the resolve I needed into my backbone. Edward gave me a complicit look, I recovered my composure and we plodded on.

The incident also seemed to spark in me a bout of naughtiness. This took the form of extracting the urine from Mr Client without his catching on. One example comes to mind. To understand the joke – if it can be so honoured – I must tell you that I’d noticed floating in the sewerine stream a surprising number of used condoms, so many in fact that I began to wonder whether the entire population of the city above our heads was bonking every minute of the day, pausing only to catch their breath and dispose of their protective sheaths after each ejaculation. Neither of the men remarked on this, having, I suppose, seen it all before. Familiarity causes blindness. And so I poked at one or two of the passing prophylactics with my walking stick (necessary equipment on expeditions through sewage to help avoid slipping and falling into the gungy flow) and sang out as I did so in my most naïve girly tones, ‘Look at all these balloons. What a lot of parties people must be having today.’