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25. SUMMER 2013

Robert’s neck is stiff, his eyes dry. Catherine’s lover is dead. Jesus. That’s why she thought she hadn’t needed to tell him. She thought she’d got away with it. Her lover was never going to turn up on their doorstep. No wonder she’d been depressed. She was grieving. Had she fallen in love? Not in such a short time surely. But did it make her think she was missing something? Robert had spent the night in the car, taking the bottle of whiskey with him when he stormed out of the house. She begged him to stay, begged him to listen. She even ran after him.

He only drove up into the next street, he didn’t go far. He didn’t know where to go so he parked and sat there, half expecting her to appear at the bottom of the road, having run after him. He kept checking in the rearview mirror, but she didn’t come, and so he reclined his seat and finished the whiskey.

He should feel sick from it, but he doesn’t. It is his wife who conjures up the nausea. Her lies — he doesn’t want to hear any more and he ignores all her calls, finally switching his phone off. His anger is solid within him and he clings to it, to stop himself disintegrating. It sickens him to think how she has manipulated him, but he should have known. It’s the tool of her trade, something he’s always admired: her ability to persuade people to do things they’d prefer not to. He never dreamed she’d use that trick on him.

He started reading the book last night while he swigged on whiskey but he didn’t get far. He was too distracted and couldn’t concentrate, but he will read it today, this morning. He’d slept on the backseat, curled up like a baby, his knees tucked into his chest. He is still in the back, sitting upright now, as if he’s waiting for his driver. His head aches and his mouth tastes as if he’s drunk the contents of the toilet before it’s been flushed. He reaches to the front of the car and jams three extra-strength bits of gum into his mouth. He needs food, he needs coffee, and he needs time to sit and read. He can’t drive though, he daren’t risk it. He must still be over the limit. So he locks up the car, straightens his clothes, and heads off to the bus stop.

It is five thirty. He has hours before he needs to be at work for his first meeting. He waits for the bus. It is a beautiful day, sunny, quiet still. He is the only person waiting, but when the bus pulls up, there are a couple of people already on it. People he doesn’t normally travel to work with. He guesses that the young African woman is going home after a night shift. He notices the edge of a uniform below her anorak. She looks tired, deep purple rings under her eyes. A hospital worker perhaps, but he thinks auxiliary not medical. And he thinks, a good woman: a woman who works shifts to support herself and her family; a woman without vanity, who has no time for affairs and deceit. He wonders whether his thoughts are racist, and decides they probably are, this presumption of simplicity — the imposition of worthiness to her existence. And the elderly man, Eastern European, he guesses, with a knitted hat even in the summer, and a rucksack with a lunch Robert can smell from two seats away. A builder, he guesses, off to tart up some privileged Londoner’s home. A home like his. Where this man, who should have retired by now, will be begrudged cups of coffee and the use of the toilet. On him, Robert imposes a quiet dignity, a silence from where he observes the lives of the people he works for without making judgments on them. When he gets up, ready for his stop, Robert smiles, first at the woman, then the man, but neither notices him. Sanctimonious twit is his judgment on himself.

This is a morning of firsts, and he finds a small café, the type he would never normally choose, but which is the only one open at six in the morning around Berkeley Square. He asks for tomatoes on toast. Brown bread, not white. No, toast please, not fried. And a cup of tea, which, when it arrives, is the colour of toffee. He has chosen a corner at the back and settles down to read.

He can’t resist reading the last line first. He agrees with it. It really is “a pity,” these omissions of his wife, her “omission” to tell him anything. She only wants to talk now because she’s been cornered. He admires the restraint in the language but can’t share it. It’s more than a fucking pity. “Deadly?” An idle threat. He feels no need to protect her.

Last night she tried to convince him that the book was not how it had been. It hadn’t happened like that. But he couldn’t listen to her; he couldn’t stand the sound of her voice. It was fake. Everything about her felt fake. Of course she would say that and, as far as he’s concerned, she’s lost her chance to give him her version. He can only trust this printed word. She had her chance years ago and now he can’t believe anything she says because he knows it will be nuanced. She will try anything to excuse the inexcusable. And it is inexcusable, because of Nicholas. Because he was there.

Less than a week ago it would have been a luxury to have hours to sit in a café and read a book, but now it makes his mouth dry and his fingers shake. He flips back to the first page:

Victoria station on a grey, wet Thursday afternoon. The perfect day on which to escape. Two young people queued at the ticket office, clutching at each other’s hands, then letting go again, but not for long. They couldn’t bear not to be connected for more than a couple of minutes…

It is not the sort of book Robert would normally read, but now, in these circumstances, it is a real page-turner. He can see why it might have attracted Nicholas and why he would have kept reading. It is easy, fluid and light, about a young man, younger than Nicholas, who travels across Europe with his girlfriend. Robert reads of their anticipation and sense of adventure. They have thrown in their jobs to go travelling, determined not to squander their youth. Two people still young enough to travel on a young person’s railcard. The smell of trains at night; waking in the morning and arriving in another country; pulling down the window and breathing in Mediterranean skies as they speed through landscapes of freedom. They are in love. They are meant to be together.

What seeps through the airy text, and what Robert imagines had kept Catherine from dismissing the book after the first few chapters, is the slow-coming dark of tragedy. This paradise will be short lived. All the good things — the smells, the tastes, the heat — are tinged with the threat that they cannot last. By the time Robert has moved from tea to coffee and the couple have arrived in Nice, bad news from home pulls the girlfriend, Sarah, back to England. John, her boyfriend, says he’ll return with her but Sarah will not hear of it. She knows how much this trip means to John; how long he has thought about it, planned for it, saved for it. Sarah is the sort of girl every parent would like their son to be with. There is a tearful farewell at Nice station. John buys a postcard and sits in a café to write to his parents. He buys a pack of Gauloise and smokes one. Sarah doesn’t like smoking. Even his parents don’t know that he smokes. He buys a stamp, posts his card, and then continues his journey alone. So now it starts, thinks Robert, and he orders black coffee.