London and the South-East

18

‘HELLO, PAUL?’

The voice is very familiar, but he does not immediately recognise it. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Martin here.’

‘Martin …’ Paul is unable to hide his surprise. For a moment he is perplexed, and Martin says nothing. There was something strange about his voice — an urgent, suppressed intensity. Still he is silent. Paul suspects that this is about the vomit. Tiresome. He says, ‘Um …’

Simultaneously, though, Martin starts to speak. ‘I really hope you’re strong enough to take this, Paul,’ he says.

I’m going to be sacked, Paul thinks.

So when Martin says, ‘I’ve just been with Heather,’ it seems a puzzling non sequitur.

What? Paul wonders. Heather? Why?

He quickly surmises that something must have happened to her. Even — his mind makes the sickening leap — that she is dead. I really hope you’re strong enough to take this, Paul. And how will he tell the children that their mother is dead? ‘What is it?’ he says quietly.

‘Paul, we’re having an affair. We’re in love.’ A pause. ‘Yes.’

Paul says nothing.

‘Yes,’ Martin says again, in a more sadly sympathetic tone, though still unable entirely to suppress the note of satisfaction. ‘For a few months now. Since, um —’ said as though looking it up in a diary — ‘since January.’

Expecting Paul to have something to say at this point, he waits for a moment, and then — when Paul still does not speak — his voice tilts unsurely, and he evinces for the first time a hint of embarrassment. ‘So, um.’

Standing in the lounge in his uniform, Paul is tempted to hang up and pretend that nothing has happened. Make his supper, watch television …

Martin is impatient. ‘She told me things haven’t been going too well between you,’ he says. ‘That’s what she told me. Is that true?’

‘I don’t think that’s any of your business, Martin,’ Paul says. It seems like a long time since he has spoken, and he is surprised to hear his voice — its stony, perfectly level tone.

‘No, I know.’ Martin seems to take the point — until a moment later, when he says, ‘It’s just that she told me —’

Paul interrupts him. ‘I don’t think it’s any of your business.’

‘No,’ Martin says. ‘No.’ And he sighs, obviously peeved.

‘Why are you calling me?’

‘Why am I calling you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I wanted to tell you,’ he says, as though it were obvious. ‘I thought you’d want to know. This is … It’s a fucked-up situation,’ he says. ‘I don’t like it. I’m sure you don’t. I want to see if there’s any way we can sort it out. It’s a fucked-up situation.’ Swearing is not like him — he is using the expression to show how serious he is. He is silent for a moment. He does not seem satisfied with the way things are going; and as if deciding to tear up what they have said so far and start again, he says — not without petulance — ‘Look, if I could just ask. What’s going on with you and Heather? I mean, what exactly is going on? Because she told me —’

‘Look, it’s none of your business, Martin. Thank you very much for your call. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you.’

He puts the phone down.

He is trembling. Trembling quite violently. In a form of trance — with an absent-minded expression on his face — he steps into the hall and quietly shuts the front door. (In his hurry to pick up the phone, he had left it open.) The situation, of course, does not feel particularly real. It was important for him to hang up on Martin, to be the one to end their talk, on his terms, ensuring that he had the last word, but now he is dissatisfied. Perhaps he should have asked Martin some questions — his head is loud with them now. Distractedly, in the middle of this mob of questions, he undertakes a first skimming survey of the previous few months, and finds them solid with evidence. The only strange thing is his surprise. Or perhaps not. It is, he thinks, strange that it should be Martin. Martin, of all people. Still trembling, he finds himself wandering through the house. He steps into the garden. He stands in the lounge.

It seems like some awful joke. Of course, Martin has long taken an obvious interest in Heather — making an obliging handyman of himself at the slightest murmur of need; lugging in the unwieldy apparatus for unblocking the drain; regrouting the shower while Paul watched snooker downstairs; passing hours in futile tinkering under the bonnet of her car. And Paul had quite liked having Martin as his handyman. He had always understood his motivation, of course — even Heather had stopped pretending that she did not see that — and to be so openly and extravagantly helpful to her sometimes seemed to verge on insolence, to be a direct expression of desire at which Paul might be expected to do something. If he did not, it was because he never saw Martin as any sort of threat. He was a joke. They all laughed at him — even the kids, even to his face sometimes — and Heather laughed most of all. In fact, laughing at Martin seemed to have become one of the mainstays of their own life together, one of the subjects to which they were able to turn for affirmation of what they shared — a way of asserting that they were akin, homogenous, members of a tiny tribe; because what they mocked in him were the many ways in which he seemed to differ from them — his obsession with high-tech novelty, his fondness for soft rock, his ineffably holier-than-thou aversion to alcohol, his love of whitewater rafting … And they had laughed — how they had laughed — at his smitten willingness to perform services for her. Paul even found his efforts to please quite touching. They seemed maladroit, naive, innocent, harmless — and because of this, incidents which would otherwise have made him suspicious met with no more than an indulgent laugh. Martin’s tie turning up in the sofa, for example. Paul did not know at first that it was his — he simply found a mysterious tie in the sofa. When Heather said, without hesitation, that it was Martin’s, everything seemed fine. If it had been someone else’s — Nigel the solicitor’s, say, for whom she worked at Gumley Rhodes — Paul would have spun all sorts of suspicious scenarios from its silk and polyester mix. As it was, he just laughed. Over tea, Martin had taken off his tie, and forgotten it. Paul handed it back to him himself while they waited for Heather on Easter Day. The sudden jump in the number of her evenings out might also have raised questions in his mind (and indeed he had questioned this sudden surge in her social life), but he did not suspect, ever, that the explanation might lie in her having an affair with Martin. Not even when he saw her, last Friday night, getting out of his car. How was it possible that he had not seen what was happening? And Easter Day … A ‘fucked-up’ situation indeed — one that was in front of his face, and that he had still somehow failed to see. Is he really such a fool? When he thinks about that day now — and he goes through it with the minute care of a chimp going through another chimp’s hair for nits — he understands that Martin, in his own mind, would already have taken possession of Heather, and that from his point of view it would thus have been Paul, paunchy and half asleep in the seat next to him, who was the interloper, not himself. And Paul had had an unpleasant premonition of the truth, shambling downstairs that afternoon, to find Martin in the Willisons’ lounge; he had seen them together — Heather, her parents, the children, and Martin — and had felt for a moment, with a frisson of exclusion that he, and not Martin, was the outsider there.

He tries Heather’s phone.

It is switched off.

Then, feeling a terrible need to leave the house, he walks out into the trembling streets. He does not see where he is going. Later, finding himself leg-weary, he waits for a bus on the Old Shoreham Road. He has walked as far as Mile Oak.

He is intensely impatient to hear what Heather will have to say for herself. What will she have to say for herself? In the lounge, still trembling a little, he punches her number into the phone.

She picks up immediately. ‘Hello?’ she says. She sounds frightened.

‘It’s me.’

‘Hello.’

‘I’ve spoken to Martin.’

Silence.

‘He told me everything.’

When she still says nothing, he says, matter-of-factly, ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in town. I’ll come home. Paul …’

‘Okay, I’ll see you at home.’

And for the second time that day he indulges in the satisfying violence of putting the phone down on someone as they speak. For a long time, he does not move. He looks lost in thought. In fact, his mind is empty. The Claymore seems futile somehow, but he takes it out — with its underdesigned, over-Scottish label, thistles and fluttering tartan — and pours himself some anyway. It tastes of watery alcohol with sharp overtones of sour vomit and a desultory smokiness, its lukewarmth somehow slightly sickening in itself.

It is twelve o’clock. High noon in Hove. Hearing Heather come into the hall, Paul is immediately aware that she is sobbing. She seems to snatch at her sobs as she shuts the front door. ‘Paul?’ she says, and there is a plaintive, almost desperate, note to her voice. ‘Paul?’

He does not move, though his heart is sprinting, and his failure to answer seems to trigger a quiet doubling of her tears. He hears her go into the kitchen and put something down. There follows an odd delay, and he has started to wonder — with a smear of dark rage — whether she is actually going to join him in the lounge at all, when he hears the muffled flush of the downstairs loo. The sound of the flush, though diminishing, becomes more defined as the loo door opens, and he leans forward and starts to fiddle with his spliff-making materials. He does not look at her when she appears in the doorway.

She is blowing her nose on a square of toilet tissue. ‘Paul,’ she says.

And absurdly, he says, ‘Yes?’ as though he does not know what she wants to talk to him about.

‘What did he tell you?’ she asks.

‘Martin?’ The name, he hears, has an entirely new sound.

‘M-hm.’ She is nervously working a little plastic lighter.

He seems to think for a few seconds; then he says, ‘Why don’t you tell me yourself, then I’ll tell you what he said.’

When he looks up, however, she is staring at the carpet, using her upturned hand as an ashtray. Looking at her, she seems a stranger. He thinks of the first few times that he saw her — when he had still not steeled himself to speak to her, and did not know her name — in the secretaries’ pool of Archway Publications, or peering through the Friday night mob in the Finnegans Wake — now he sees her like that again, sees what she looks like, her solid nose, powdery face, cornflower eyes. He notices her mannerisms, her posture. It is, for a moment, as though the intervening years have been unlived.

‘So?’ he says.

She still does not speak. She is staring at the carpet’s tired oatmeal nap.

‘Were you going to tell me yourself?’

They are both smoking. The room is full of slowly swirling smoke. His whole life of the past few months, perhaps longer, now seems like a fiction; something in which he was participating without understanding that it was not properly real. Perhaps this is partly why he has such a strangely theatrical sense of the situation. Leaving the room, he feels, will be like leaving a set. Slowly, he stands up. There are still so many questions, and he is leaving. The inquest has only just started and he is sick of it. It seems wearisome, pointless … He has forgotten to stub out his cigarette, and leaning down, he makes a quick, unthorough job of it — it is still smouldering in the ashtray when she says, ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to bed. I’m tired.’

‘Okay,’ she says softly. Then, ‘Sleep well.’

‘Yeah, I’ll try.’

She is suddenly in tears. ‘Paul,’ she says, ‘I don’t think you’re well.’

‘Why not?’

Putting one hand over her face, she shakes her head. ‘What is it?’ He stands there. ‘What is it?’ She sniffs a few times. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’ She is wiping her face with what is left of the paper tissue. ‘All this crap …’

‘What crap?’

‘Working at the supermarket. It’s mad.’

‘Is it?’

She blows her nose. ‘I mean, it must be pretty awful.’

‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘I’m tired, Heather.’

She nods, and moves aside to let him pass. ‘Sleep well.’

‘Yeah, I’ll try.’

‘Paul, I’m sorry.’

Everything seems unsatisfactory. He does not think he will be able to sleep. He even wonders whether to go back downstairs. His head is still seething with weary, insistent questions — questions he has asked so many times in the last few hours that they seem tedious, even unimportant to him now. With nothing else to do, he lies down, still in his clothes, and as soon as he does this and shuts his eyes, he knows that he will be able to sleep — that sleep, surprisingly, is pouring in on him, erasing everything.

When he wakes, earlier than usual, for an hour or so he lies in bed, wondering where he stands. His placid assumption — it is eerily placid — is that Heather is going to leave him. He is not sure how he feels about this. As he lies there exploring the soft shadows of the ceiling with his eyes, there are moments — only moments — of intense sadness and anger. Mostly there is just a numbness. He hears Oliver and Marie, hears Heather stomping up and down the stairs, her supervisory voice impressively ordinary. These muffled sounds seem to find him from the past; they are like memories of an earlier part of his life, mysteriously fresh in his mind on waking. Swinging himself out of bed, in his underpants he tiptoes into the bathroom. The equanimity with which he has been outstaring the situation for the past hour has suddenly vanished and he wishes he were able to get it back. To this end, he fumbles with the box of Felixstat, and thumbs one of the pills from the blister sheet; each is labelled with the name of a day of the week. They are not fast-acting, but in moments of stress to take one is to know, at least, that psychoactive reinforcements are on the way, and having swallowed ‘Tuesday’ he feels less frightened.

Downstairs, Heather is waiting in the smoke-filled lounge, in the macabre sulk of the silence. Sitting in the kitchen, Paul seems to be doing nothing. In fact he is doing something — he is not going into the lounge; and this not going is so engrossing that he forgets his porridge until summoned to the odour of scorched milk. He is not hungry, and spoons it into the bin, wondering — dispassionately for the most part, with only occasional minor needles of pain — what the mechanics of the affair were, how they worked things. Then, stopping his imaginings when they wander too far — towards a vision of Martin, naked, pipe-cleaner limbs and mousy pubic hair — he washes out the saucepan in which he made his porridge, scouring the brown burn-mark with unexpected ferocity. Then he smokes a cigarette, and in a hurry now, pulls on his jacket in the hall. On his way out, as he passes the open door of the lounge — the fact that the TV is not on lends the house a miserable air of emergency — he says only four words to Heather. ‘Do the children know?’

‘No, of course not,’ she says.

He waits alone at the bus stop on Portland Road. The spring evening is mild; ink-blue with cold, wet depths. Only in the last week have vestiges of daylight still lingered in the sky as he makes his way to work. The road is quiet, the shops shut, the many takeaways seemingly untroubled by customers. A few preoccupied cars whizz past. He takes a pre-rolled cigarette from his pocket and lights it — and as soon as he has done so, he sees the lights of the bus as it crests the rise, and snags briefly on each of the two stops visible higher up the road. In the dry peace of the non-foods aisle it is easy to imagine that nothing has happened — that nothing is happening. There, even when it occurs to him — as it frequently does, unpacking dishcloths or spray-headed bottles of shower cleaner — that they might be together, he is strangely untroubled.

A week later, things seem suspended in a sort of limbo — since they do not use the bed at the same time, it has not even been necessary for someone to move to the sofa; since they seldom see each other, the new situation has had little scope for showing up in the transactions of everyday life. It has started to seem as though things might go on as they are indefinitely.

Then one morning Heather suddenly opens final settlement negotiations. She has the bruisy circles under her eyes, the queasy pallor, the long-haul look of someone who has been up all night with her troublesome thoughts. ‘The house,’ she says. It is ten a.m. — Paul is microwaving a curry for his supper. ‘What about it?’

She sighs, slightly impatient. ‘Well, what are we going to do about it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you planning to keep it?’ she says.

‘Of course not.’

‘Well, nor am I. We’ve got to write to Norris.’

Norris Jones — the landlord. Paul nods. He wants to ask her where she is planning to live …

‘Where are you planning to live?’ she says.

He just shrugs.

‘You must have thought about it.’

‘No.’

‘You haven’t?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

This is true.

There is a sad pause. ‘Do you want me to write to him?’ Heather says. ‘Norris.’

‘If you want.’

‘It’s not what I want …’

‘Yes, write to him. Where are you planning to live?’

‘I don’t know. Martin wants me to live with him.’

‘Does he?’

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ she says. And then, ‘I’ll write that letter.’

Slumped in the blue flicker of the twenty-four-hour news, Paul wonders whether to write a letter of his own.

When he woke up, he had not moved for a while, spat out by oblivious sleep, and unwilling to leave the limited warmth of the bed. (Which was very stale and human-smelling — discoloured, discomposed, with sulphur-grey shadows on the pillows.) It was only his need to urinate that eventually pulled him into a sitting position — stage one of his self-extraction from the sweaty sheets; the heating was turned up too high, and he had been sweating into his sleep all afternoon. He was on the verge of performing stage two — standing shakily — when he was suddenly aware of an engine ticking over in the street outside. The sound had been discreetly present for some minutes. Standing shakily, he twitched the drape and looked out. The yellow Saab was waiting in the road. As he watched, Heather walked into view — she had shut the front door so quietly that he had not heard it. He saw Martin’s head turn in the shadowy interior to follow her with his eyes. Then he leaned over and opened the door; she said something as she lowered herself into the seat. The door slammed. With a snarl the car surged forward, and was immediately out of sight.

Silence.

Silence except for the low muffled noise of the television from Oli’s room.

Paul let the drape swing shut, wiping the street light from his face. He wondered why he was so painfully stunned. He had seen nothing surprising. It was, however, the first time that he had seen them together. He slipped into the bathroom. He has upped his dose of Felixstat, and taken the subsequent dopiness, the mothballing of most of his mind, without demur. Having swallowed the pills, he turned to the toilet, and making water stared at his face in the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. It was expressionless, yet somehow the despair — which did not seem too strong a word — was obvious; it seemed to seep out through the pores, through his dead, sad eyes. He flushed the toilet. On his way downstairs he knocked on Oliver’s door, and said, ‘Time for bed, Oli.’ The thought of being separated from the children hurts him surprisingly. Though he and Heather have not spoken of it, there seems no question of his seeing them in the future — why would he? — yet she implicitly expects him to babysit while she is out with Martin. Sometimes — on his own in the lounge while they sleep upstairs — this seems an emasculating imposition. More often, though, he finds himself holding onto the illusion of normality that it lends things. However, what he saw from the window, on top of Heather’s writing to Norris Jones, seems to have kyboshed that illusion, and in the blue flicker of the small hours he wonders whether to write anonymously to Watt; to set in front of him what Gerald said, and see what happens. While he is wondering what to write, he hears the Saab stop in the street outside. He waits, motionless, for several minutes until he hears one of its doors open and slam; it does not move on until Heather is inside, and the squeaky step squeaks under her weight.