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It was a strange mistake, for a clever and perceptive man who is usually so accurate in his judgements.
When it became obvious that we were not going to have children, I lodged myself in Dunollie Mansions like a hermit crab in its shell. I loved the screen of summer leaves and filigree winter twigs across the windows. I loved the thick walls and floors, and the almost dreamlike sense of seclusion, and the way Derek soft-footedly took care of the building. I liked the other quiet, discreet couples and the safety of the solid doors. There was no shock or violence or mayhem here, nor could I ever imagine anything of the sort disturbing our calm routines. I became a recluse.
We still gave dinner parties, of course, and went out to dinners in return, and to the opera and weekends in the country and on holidays, but I became an emotional solitary. Peter and I continued to look after each other and no doubt loved each other, but the woman he had taken home from the photographer’s party ceased to exist.
Obliterated by history.
Then came Lisa Kirk, with her red TARDIS and trendy furniture and the full heat of youth, smarting from Baz’s rejection and wishing for the baby she thought should have been hers. She saw in Peter Stafford exactly what I had seen myself, all those years before.
As I say, it was therefore only a matter of time.
Until Christmas, I reckon, give or take a week or two. I never quite got to the bottom of how it began. When I put the question to Peter he answered, shamefacedly, ‘We met for a drink, that’s all. She wanted some business advice.’
‘Where did you meet for a drink? How did it happen? Did she call you at the office and suggest this assignation?’
‘Cary, does it matter? Why do you need to know?’
‘Because I do,’ I snapped. But he wouldn’t tell me and in fact I didn’t need to know. This is how things unravel, that’s all. It’s nothing unusual. I had even watched my mother go through it, when my father ran off with Lesley.
It was quite early in the new year, this year that has now turned to October, and Peter and I were driving over to Fulham to have Sunday lunch with our friends Clive and Sally. It was one of those colourless London winter days when the sky and the river and even the buildings lack definition, and everything seems looming, as at the onset of seasickness. My handbag was at my feet, in the carpeted footwell of the current old car: an Alvis, silver-grey. Although Peter has now replaced it with a new BMW 5-series, no doubt at Lisa’s instigation.
I looked down for the handbag, intending to blow my nose or swallow a headache pill or something, and I saw a fragment under the seat mounting. Peter’s cars are always so impeccably looked after, it surprised me to see a piece of litter that might have been a sweet wrapper. I picked it up and looked down at it lying in the palm of my hand. Peter was occupied with the traffic at South Kensington.
What I had found was a little golden label, reading ‘Bag Shot by Lisa Kirk’.
Like a business card, but more eloquent. I put it in my pocket and said nothing.
The signs had been there for some time and now I was able to read them.
I began a horrible regime of espionage. Whenever Peter was working late, or when he telephoned to say he had an unexpected meeting or a new client to see, I would slip up the well-swept shallow stairs to Lisa’s door. I would ring the bell and then tap on the thick swimmy glass but – funnily enough – she was never at home either.
On the evenings when Peter did come home I would listen. I had never been able to hear Mrs Bobinski moving around, but then I had never tried to. Now I could suddenly hear the faint creak of floorboards, the vibrating bass of her music, the click of a door closing. Lisa at home.
‘What’s wrong?’ Peter asked.
I know, but I’m not ready to let you know that I know. That’s what’s wrong.
I’m on the beach again, another day. The sea is very flat, aluminium-coloured under a high, hazy sky. There is no breath of wind. A sailing boat crosses the mouth of the bay, the masts bare and the engines drumming. A shadow falls across my book.
A tall man with a white shirt and loose trousers, and creased Moroccan slippers with squashed pointed toes. I can see a narrow crescent of suntanned foot, between the leather slipper and where the cuff of his trousers dips over the heel.
‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a copy of TheTimes here. Finished with it. Would you like it?’
Inglis man.
He holds out the folded paper and I am so surprised that I take it.
‘Thank you.’
‘Nice to know what’s going on in the world,’ he says. And then he moves on, diagonally across the sand to the margin of the silver water, where wet sand makes a khaki ribbon. I watch him walk along the water’s edge, into the distance. The paper had bled a smudge of newsprint on to my palm and fingertips.
In the end it wasn’t Peter I confronted. One evening when he was sitting in his armchair reading a report I left the flat and went upstairs to knock on Lisa’s door.
She had the grace to look startled and apprehension dawned in her wide eyes.
‘May I come in?’
She held the door wider and I marched inside. In the kitchen, with a yoghurt pot with a spoon stuck in it on the table – I felt that I was interrupting a child’s tea – I turned on her.
‘What are you doing with my husband?’
There are a dozen possible responses to a question like that. Innocence, affront, evasion, denial.
To her credit, Lisa only nodded quietly. After a moment’s thought she said, ‘Just what you imagine, I suppose.’
‘What does this mean?’
She pursed her lips and mournfully widened her eyes even further, a risible expression that was her attempt at high seriousness.
‘That we are in love with each other.’
I gaped at her for an instant, silenced by this mouthful of garbage. I remembered what she had said at the dinner weeks ago – ohyes,onceIknewyou – and how the airy assumption had infuriated me. But that was nothing compared with the ballooning rage I felt now.
What did this airhead know about love and what right did she have to claim Peter’s?
With one arm I swept the yoghurt pot and its spoon and assorted bits of crockery off the table. With one foot I kicked the red door of the TARDIS so that it shuddered. If Peter had been in our kitchen below he would surely have heard it. When I could speak I yelled at her, ‘Don’t talk such fucking crap. Don’t say another word.’
There was a mess of spilled yoghurt and broken crockery on the floor. But Lisa kept her eyes on me, and there was at last real shock and proper concern in her face.
I’ll teach you about feelings, you china doll.
‘You don’t know anything. You’ll never know anything about me or Peter. You are to leave him alone. To leave us alone. Do you understand?’
For extra emphasis I kicked the refrigerator again. There was a tiny dent in the lower corner of the door and my toes hurt.
‘Cary …’
Even in this absurd and undignified situation I could see how lovely she was with the light shining through her thin skin and the smooth flesh of her arms. Her thin fingers curled round the back of one of her uncomfortable chairs. Maybe she was contemplating how to lift it and bring it down on my head. Only she couldn’t have reached high enough.
‘Leave us alone,’ I repeated, with the anger starting to ooze out of me. I felt like a crumpled paper bag.
‘It’s too late for that.’
There was the confidence again, bred out of youth and arrogance. I wasn’t going to win. History decreed it.
What to do now?
‘I don’t care. It isn’t too late,’ I lied.
‘God, look. I love him and he loves me.’ Her words rang true now, suddenly, reality unleashed by my fury. Lisa Kirk wouldn’t let go. This wasn’t some monochrome Baz at issue; this was important to her.
But we weren’t just two alley cats fighting over a fish head, either. There was a third person involved in this. It was Peter who would determine what happened, of course. Briefly I felt the warmth of his familiarity around me, a security blanket. All would be well, because he had always made it well.
‘We’ll see,’ I said. I turned round and walked out of the kitchen, closed Lisa’s front door behind me and ran back down the stairs to our flat.
Peter was still reading. He hadn’t even noticed that I had gone.
I said nothing to him, not a word. I cooked supper and we ate together and watched the ten o’clock news. There was silence from upstairs. By being normal, I thought, maybe I could make everything normal. That shows how irrational I was.
There is a little covered souk at the centre of Branc.
I am lingering by one of the stalls, breathing in the scents of cumin and cinnamon. There are fat hessian sacks spilling out a dozen different spices and herbs, and heaps of glossy dates and dried figs. The stallholder is a fat man in a vast white shirt with a little striped waistcoat pinched around his shoulders. I am biting into the date he has passed to me to sample when a voice says, ‘I’ve got another Times, but not with me. I can drop it into the hotel later. If you would like, of course.’
Inglis man, again.
I turn round and we look at each other. He is wearing a loose shirt, pale trousers and the leather slippers. He looks ordinary, unremarkable, but familiar. He fits in here in the souk – unlike me – but I find that I can imagine him equally at home on a cricket pitch in Hampshire or in a restaurant in London.
‘Hello?’ he prompts. I have been staring at him.
‘I’m sorry. Thank you, that’s kind.’
‘Are you all right?’
The pretence seems more trouble than it’s worth. I say very softly, on an expiring breath, ‘No.’
‘No. Would you like to come and drink some coffee with me?’
Whatever my intentions might have been I find that I am following him. We duck out briefly into the white sunlight and cross a square to some tables under canvas parasols.
And then we are sitting facing each other, with a tent of shade cutting us off from the heat and brightness. Little cups of Turkish coffee arrive, with glasses of cool water and a dish of almond kernels. I pick up a nut and bite it in half, examining the marks made by my teeth in the white flesh. Then I sip at the thick, sweet coffee and gaze across the square to a mosque and the needle points of the minarets. I realise with a shock that softens my spine that I am at ease in the man’s company, am not talking or laughing or fending off. I am just sitting, enjoying the shade and the view and the faint grittiness of the coffee on my tongue.
‘I have a boat,’ the man says, before I even know his name.
And I have agreed to go for a sail in his boat, still before I even know his name.
It didn’t take long for Peter to hear about my visit to Lisa. He came home early the next day, wearing an expression I had never seen before. A guarded look, edged with defiance.
‘Is it true?’ I asked him, once he had taken off his coat and put his briefcase down on the chair in the hallway.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Although I did. ‘Are you in love with her?’
He spread his hands, a gesture of expiring patience that brought the first dart of dislike out of me.
‘No. Yes, I suppose so. I didn’t go looking for it. These things just happen.’
Like getting hit by a bus, I suppose. You are just standing there, minding your own business, when adultery comes along and runs you over. Although, when I thought about it, having Lisa Kirk set her sights on you must be not unlike being ploughed over by a bus. The dislike intensified and it made me want to cry. The idea of disliking Peter was so outlandish.
After that there was a predictable series of ugly events and confrontations.
I wept, Peter retreated, Lisa widened her eyes. Instead of a calm backwater, Dunollie Mansions became a place full of gusts of misery and disbelief.
In the end, after weeks of grief and entreaty, Peter moved out and into a flat in Baron’s Court. Lisa drifted there with him and I stayed put. It was as if my husband and his new lover had climbed into the red TARDIS, pulled the door shut behind them and dematerialised. Some time later Selina had the idea that the two of us might go on a Turkish holiday together.
And now I am going on a boat trip. It is another unseasonably hot day, although the sky is hazed with a layer of thin cloud. The white sky slides into a pearl-grey sea with no line of separation. There is a small boat waiting at the jetty near the corner of the bay, as Inglis man told me there would be, and as I plod towards it I can see the man lying on the roof of the tiny cabin, straw hat tilted over his eyes and ankles crossed, apparently asleep. His hearing must be supernaturally good, however, because I am still a way off and treading quietly over the rocks when in one fluid movement he sits up and raises his arm in greeting.
He takes my hand and helps me down into the cockpit. There are cushions on the seats and the space is shaded by an awning, and I sit down with relief to be partly out of the brooding heat. Through the cabin door I can see a neat area with narrow bunks separated by a folding table.
‘No wind,’ the man says, hunching his shoulders.
‘No.’
‘I don’t like moving under engine power, but I think we shall have to. Maybe we’ll pick up a breeze outside the bay.’
I look down into the water, which is so clear that I can see the rocks ten feet beneath the surface as if they were lying under plate glass, and then up into the colourless sky.
‘Maybe,’ I agree. I don’t mind whether we find a breeze or not, or whatever else may be going to happen. I’m happy to be here, rocked by the water and with the shipshape little wooden cockpit around me.
The man starts up the engine and a drift of blue smoke rises from the stern. He jumps on to the jetty and releases the bow rope, and as the prow swings outwards in a slow arc he unties the stern and leaps back to join me and the boat. A minute later we are heading out to sea. In companionable silence we watch the water, and my white hotel and its companions as they fall away behind us.
‘I don’t know your name,’ I say.
He tilts his head sideways and looks at me. None of his features is distinctive, nor is the composite they make, yet the suggestion of familiarity comes back again. I know that I don’t know him, but I feel easy in his company.
‘Mine is Catherine Stafford. Cary.’
‘Andreas,’ he says. He makes a small adjustment to the tiller to bring us round parallel to the shore.
‘There,’ he says with satisfaction. And then, gesturing to the tiller, ‘Do you mind, just for a moment?’
I slide across and take his place as he moves forward. He runs up a sail and at once the wind fills it. Water drums under the hull and a wake churns behind us and I tighten my grasp on the tiller. I lift my head to look at the masthead, and the wind and our quickening speed make me smile. When Andreas moves back again I start to move out of his place but he makes a sign to indicate that I should stay put.
‘I can’t sail.’
‘You are sailing.’
And he is right, I am. Pleasure swells in me until I feel as taut as the white sail. We seem to skim over the water. I watch the coastline and the villages that run down into the bays like clusters of sugar cubes shaken in the fold of a napkin. The scenery is calm rather than beautiful, painted in shades of aquamarine and sepia. Andreas points out the places and tells me their names.
‘Do you live here?’ I ask.
‘Some of the time.’
After a while we pass a massive outcrop of rock, where cormorants shuffle against the sky. Immediately behind the rock, hidden by it except from an oblique angle, there is a tongue of sand between two steep rock cliffs.
‘That’s where we are going.’
‘It looks beautiful.’
