Siege

Six

CAT MANOLIS PACED THE hotel room, wondering if it was work or the interminably heavy London traffic that was delaying her lover.

Their affair had started innocently enough. The occasional shared smile as they passed each other in the corridor at work, or in the gym beneath the building, where they both worked out; the first conversation on the treadmill at 7.30 one morning; the knowing look he’d given her. Even then it had been weeks before he’d asked her out for a coffee. Everything had had to be so secret. It was the same old thing. He was trapped in a loveless marriage, a handsome, charismatic man in need of female attention, possessed of the kind of power that was always such an aphrodisiac, even to a woman barely half his age.

They’d met for coffee one Saturday morning in a pretty little café on the South Bank. He’d made an excuse to his wife, telling her he had to come into town, and they’d spent a snatched couple of hours together. They’d walked along the banks of the Thames, and Cat had put her arm through his as they talked. She’d told him about her upbringing in Nice, how she’d been the only child of a father who was long gone by the time she was born, and a mother who’d never forgiven her for it, as if she was somehow to blame for his fecklessness. How she’d gone off the rails (although she refused to give him too many details about how low she’d fallen) before pulling herself together and marrying a man who was the love of her life, only to lose him a week before her twenty-fourth birthday. It was grief, then, that had brought her to London five years earlier.

He’d seemed genuinely touched by her story and had told her his own more familiar one: how he’d been with the same woman since university, how they’d once been in love, and how, over the thirty years and three children since, their love had faded to nothing more than a hollow husk, leaving him desperate to be free of the marriage.

‘I care for you very much,’ he’d said gently when it was time for them to part. He’d looked into her eyes as he spoke so she’d know his words were heartfelt.

They’d kissed passionately. It had been something that was always going to happen, and it seemed to last for a long, long time.

When they’d finally broken apart, they’d promised to meet again as soon as circumstances allowed.

Since then they’d had three separate trysts – all involving coffee, followed by a walk, though never in the same place – and all the time they’d been moving towards this day. When they would finally sleep together for the first time. Michael had wanted to consummate their relationship at Cat’s apartment, but she’d explained that it would be impractical given that she shared her place with three other women, so they’d settled for the far more romantic destination of the Stanhope on Park Lane.

Cat was dressed seductively in a simple sleeveless black dress that finished just above the knee, sheer black hold-up stockings, and black court shoes with four-inch heels. Usually she dressed far more modestly and, as she stopped and looked at herself in the room’s full-length mirror, she felt a frisson of excitement. She looked good. There was no doubt about it. Michael would melt when he saw her.

If, of course, he turned up.

She looked at her watch. It was five to four. He was almost half an hour late. And he hadn’t even called. She couldn’t call him either. She was under strict instructions never to call him. Too easy to get found out, he’d said, and then that’ll be it for both of us.

Trying to hide her concern, she poured a glass of Evian from the mini-bar and took a long sip, contemplating breaking the law and annoying Michael at the same time by lighting a cigarette.

If she had to wait, then she might as well make the most of it.