Killing Me Softly

Eleven

‘Don’t move. Stay just as you are.’ Adam stood at the end of the bed, staring down at me through the viewnnder of a camera, a Polaroid. I stared back, muzzily. I was lying on top of the sheets, naked. Only my feet were under the covers. The winter sun shone weakly through the thin closed curtain.

‘Did I go to sleep again? How long have you been there?’

‘Don’t move, Alice.’ A flash momentarily dazzled me, there was a whir and the plastic card emerged, as if the camera had poked its tongue out at me.

‘At least you won’t be taking it to Boots to be developed.’

‘Put your arms above your head. That’s right.’ He came over and pushed my hair away from my face, then stood back once again. He was fully dressed, armed with his camera, a look of dispassionate concentration on his face.

‘Open your legs a bit more.’

‘I’m cold.’

‘I’ll make you warm soon. Wait.’

Once again, the camera flashed.

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Why?’ He put down the camera and sat beside me. The two images were tossed beside me on the bed. I watched myself take shape. The pictures looked cruel to me, my skin looking flushed, pallid, spotty. I thought of police photographers in films at the scene of the crime,then tried not to. He picked up my hand, which was still flung obediently above my head, and pressed it against his cheek. ‘Because I want to.’ He turned his mouth into my palm.

The phone rang and we looked at each other. ‘Don’t pick it up,’ I said. ‘It’ll be him again.’

‘Him?’

‘Or her.’

We waited until the phone stopped ringing.

‘What if it’s Jake?’ I said. ‘Making those calls.’

‘Jake?’

‘Who else would it be? You hadn’t been getting them before, you say, and they started as soon as I moved in.’ I looked at him. ‘Or maybe it’s a friend.’

Adam shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said, and picked up the camera again, but I struggled into a sitting position.

‘I must get up, Adam. Can you put the bar fire on for me?’

The flat, the top floor of a tall Victorian house, was Spartan. It had no central heating and little furniture. My clothes took up one corner of the large, dark cupboard, and Adam’s possessions were neatly stacked in the corner of the bedroom, still packed. The carpets were worn, the curtains flimsy, and in the kitchen a bare bulb hung above the small stove. We rarely cooked, but ate in small, dimly lit restaurants each evening before coming back to the high bed and hot touch. I felt half blinded by passion. Everything was blurred and unreal except me and Adam. All my life until now I had been a free agent, in control of my life and sure of where I was going. None of my relationships had really diverted me from that. Now I felt rudderless, lost. I would give up anything for the feel of his hands on my body. Sometimes, in the dark early hours of morning when I woke first and was lying unheld in a stranger’s bed and he was still in a secret world of dreams, or perhaps when leaving work, before I saw Adam and felt his continuing rapture, I felt scared. The loss of myself in another.

This morning I hurt. In the bathroom mirror, I saw that there was a livid scratch running down my neck and my lips were puffy. Adam came in and stood behind me. Our eyes met in the mirror. He licked a finger, then ran it down the scratch. I pulled on my clothes and turned towards him.

‘Who was before me, Adam? No, don’t just shrug. I’m serious.’

He paused for a moment, as if weighing up possibilities.

‘Let’s make a deal,’ he said. It sounded horribly formal but, then, I suppose it had to be. Usually details of one’s past love life leak out in late-night confessions, post-coital exchanges, little snippets of information offered as signs of intimacy or trust. We had done none of that. Adam held out my jacket for me. ‘We’ll have a late breakfast down the road, then I’ve got to go and pick up some stuff. And then,’ he opened the door, ‘we’ll meet up back here and you can tell me who you’ve had, and I will tell you.’

‘Everyone?’

‘Everyone.’

‘… and before him, there was Rob. Rob was a graphic designer, he thought he was an artist. He was quite a lot older than me, and he had a daughter of ten by his first wife. He was rather a quiet man, but…’

‘What did you do?’

‘What?’

‘What did you do together?’

‘You know, films, pubs, walks –’

‘You know what I mean.’

I knew what he meant, of course I did. ‘God, Adam. Different things, you know. It was years ago. I can’t remember specifics.’ A lie, of course.

‘Were you in love with him?’

I thought wistfully of Rob’s nice face, some good times. I’d adored him, for a time at least. ‘No.’

‘Go on.’

This was unsettling. Adam was seated opposite me, the table between us. His hands were steepled together; his eyes were boring into me. Talking about sex was difficult enough for me anyway, let alone under this interrogation.

‘There was Laurence, but that didn’t last long,’ I mumbled. Laurence had been funny, hopeless.

‘Yes?’

‘And Joe, who I used to work with.’

‘You were in the same office as him?’

‘Sort of. And no, Adam, we didn’t do it behind the photocopier.’

I ploughed grimly on. I’d been expecting this to be an erotic mutual confession, ending in bed. It was turning out to be a cold, dry tale of the men who had been both irrelevant and important to me in a way I didn’t want to explain to Adam, here at this table. ‘Then before that, it was school and university, and, well, you know…’ I tailed off. The thought of going through the rather short list of boyfriends and drunken one-night stands defeated me. I took a deep breath. ‘Well, if this is what you want. Michael. Then Gareth. And then Simon, who I went out with for a year and a half, and a man called Christopher, once.’ He looked at me. ‘And a man whose name I never knew, at a party I didn’t want to go to. There.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So who did you have sex with first? How old were you?’

‘I was old compared to my friends. Michael, when I was seventeen.’

‘What was it like?’

Somehow the question seemed unembarrassing. Perhaps because it seemed so long ago, and the girl I had been was such a stranger to the woman I was now. It had been captivating. Strange. Fascinating.

‘Awful,’ I said. ‘Painful. Pleasureless.’

He leaned across the table but still didn’t touch me.

‘Have you always liked sex?’

‘Uh, not always.’

‘Have you ever pretended?’

‘Every woman has.’

‘With me?’

‘Never. God, no.’

‘Can we fuck now?’ He was still sitting quite apart from me, straight-backed on the uncomfortable kitchen chair.

I managed a laugh. ‘No way, Adam. It’s your turn.’

He sighed and sat back and held up his fingers, counting off affairs as if he were an accountant. ‘Before you, there was Lily, who I met last summer. Before her there was Françoise for a couple of years. Before her there was… er…’

‘Is it difficult to remember?’ I asked sarcastically, but with a tremor in my voice. I hoped he wouldn’t notice.

‘It’s not hard,’ he said. ‘Lisa. And before Lisa there was a girl called Penny.’ There was a pause. ‘Good climber.’

‘How long did Penny last?’ I had expected a catalogue of conquests, not this efficient list of serious relationships. I felt an acid rush of panic in my stomach.

‘Eighteen months, something like that.’

‘Oh.’ We sat in silence. ‘Were you faithful?’ I forced myself to ask. I really wanted to ask if they were all beautiful, all more beautiful than me.

He looked at me across the table. ‘It wasn’t like that. They weren’t that sort of exclusive thing.’

‘How many times were you unfaithful?’

‘I used to see other people.’

‘How many?’

He frowned.

‘Come on, Adam. Once, twice, twenty times, forty or fifty times?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Something like forty or fifty?’

‘Alice, come here.’

‘No! No – this is – I feel awful. I mean, why am I different?’ A thought struck me. ‘You haven’t…’

‘No!’ His voice was sharp. ‘Christ, Alice, can’t you see? Can’t you feel? There’s no one except you now.’

‘How do I know?’ I heard my voice wail. ‘I feel I arrived a bit late at the party.’ All those women crowding his life. I didn’t stand a chance.

He stood up and walked round the table. He pulled me to my feet and cupped my face in his hands. ‘You know, Alice, don’t you?’

I shook my head.

‘Alice, look at me.’ He forced my head up and looked deep, deep into me. ‘Alice, will you trust me? Will you do something for me?’

‘It depends,’ I said, sulkily, like a cross child.

‘Wait,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

It wasn’t a minute, but it was only a few minutes. I had hardly finished a cup of coffee when the doorbell rang. He’s got a key, I said to myself, and didn’t respond, but he didn’t come in and rang again. So I sighed and went down. I opened the door and Adam wasn’t there. A toot made me jump. I looked round and saw that he was sitting in a car, something old and nondescript. I walked over and bent my face down to the driver’s window.

‘What do you think?’

‘Is it ours?’ I asked.

‘For the afternoon. Get in.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Trust me.’

‘It had better be good. Shouldn’t I lock the house?’

‘I’ll do that. I’ve got to get something.’

I seriously thought of not obeying but then walked round to the passenger side and got in. Meanwhile Adam ran in through the front door and returned a minute later.

‘What were you getting?’

‘My wallet,’ he said. ‘And this.’ He tossed the Polaroid camera on to the back seat.

Oh, God, I thought, but didn’t say anything.

I stayed awake long enough to see that we were leaving London on the MI but then, as I always do when being driven anywhere, I fell asleep. When I was jolted awake for a moment, I saw that we were off the motorway in scrubby, wild countryside.

‘Where are we?’ I said.

‘It’s a mystery tour,’ Adam said, with a smile.

I drifted off to a half-sleep and when I woke up properly noticed an old Saxon church by the road in an otherwise featureless landscape. ‘Eadmund with an A,’ I said sleepily.

‘He lost his head,’ said Adam, beside me.

‘What?’

‘He was an Anglo-Saxon king. The Vikings caught him and killed him and cut him up and scattered his body all over the place. His followers couldn’t find him and there was a miracle. The head shouted, "Here I am," until they found it.’

‘I wish that bunches of keys did that. I’ve often wished that my house keys would shout, "Here I am," so that I wouldn’t have to search every single pocket of everything I own to find them.’

At a fork in the road there was an ornate war monument with an eagle on it to people in the RAF. We went right.

‘We’re here,’ said Adam.

He pulled into the side of the road and switched off the engine.

‘Where?’ I said.

Adam reached into the back of the car for the camera. ‘Come,’ he said.

‘I should have brought my boots.’

‘We’re only walking a couple of hundred yards.’

Adam took my hand and we walked away from the road, along a path. Then we turned off the path, into some trees and then up a slope, slippery with leaves still decaying from last autumn. Adam had been silent and thoughtful. I was almost startled when he began to speak.

‘I climbed K2 a few years ago,’ he said. I nodded and said something affirmative but he seemed lost in his own world. ‘Lots of great, great climbers have never done it, lots of great climbers have died trying. When I was at the top I knew intellectually that it was almost certainly the greatest climbing thing I would ever do, but I felt nothing. I looked around but…’ He made a contemptuous gesture. ‘I was up there for about fifteen minutes, waiting for Kevin Doyle to join me. All the while I was calculating the time, checking my equipment, going through the supplies in my head, deciding on the route down. Even as I looked around, the mountain was just there as a problem.’

‘So why do you do it?’

He scowled. ‘No, you don’t get my point. Look.’ We were emerging from the trees on to some grass, almost moorland. ‘This is the landscape I love.’ He put his arms round me. ‘I was once here before, and I thought it was one of the loveliest spots I had ever seen. We’re in one of the most crowded islands on earth but here we are on a patch of grass that’s off a path that’s off a track that’s off the road. Look at it with my eyes, Alice. Look down there, the church we passed nestling in the land as if it had grown there. And look round there at the fields, underneath it but they seem close up: a table of green fields. Come and stand here, by this hawthorn bush.’

Adam positioned me quite carefully and then stood facing me, looking around, as if orienting himself precisely. I shook him off, bewildered and uncomfortable. What had all this to do with his dozens of infidelities?

‘And then there’s you, Alice, my only love,’ he said, standing back and looking at me, as if I were a precious ornament he had put into a shop window. ‘You know the story that we are all broken into two halves and we spend our lives looking for our other self. Every affair we have, however stupid or trivial, has a bit of that hope that this might be it, our other self.’ His eyes turned dark suddenly, like the surface of a lake when a cloud has moved in front of the sun. I shivered in front of the hawthorn bush. ‘That’s why they can end so badly, because you feel you’ve been betrayed.’ He looked round and then back at me. ‘But with you, I know.’ I felt myself gasp, my eyes water. ‘Stand still, I want to take a photograph of you.’

‘Christ, Adam, don’t be so odd. Just kiss me, hold me.’

He shook his head and raised the camera in front of his face. ‘I wanted to photograph you here, in this place, at the moment that I asked you to marry me.’

There was a flash. I felt my knees give way. I sat down on the damp grass and he ran forward and took hold of me. ‘Are you all right?’

Was I all right? A feeling of extraordinary joy rose up in me. I stood up and laughed and kissed him on the mouth, firmly: a pledge.

‘Is that a yes?’

‘Of course it is, you idiot. Yes. Yes yes yes.’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Here she is.’

And there, indeed, I was, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, taking shape, colours deepening, outline hardening.

‘There we are,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘It’s a moment, but it’s also a promise. For ever.’

I took the picture and put it in my purse. ‘For ever,’ I said.

Adam seized my wrist with an urgency that startled me. ‘You mean it, don’t you, Alice? I’ve given myself before and I’ve been let down before. That’s why I brought you here, so that we could make this vow to each other.’ He looked at me fiercely, as if he were threatening me. ‘This vow is more important than any marriage.’ Then he softened. ‘I couldn’t bear to lose you. I could never bear to let you go.’

I took him in my arms. I held his head and I kissed his mouth, his eyes, the firm jaw and the hollow of his neck. I told him I was his, and he was mine. I felt his tears on my skin, hot and salty. My only love.