Exposure (24 page)

Just then he should have been laying his briefcase on the passenger seat of his car and heading back to his gently lit house in Holland Park. He would kiss Rosalind, tell her there were lovely smells coming from the kitchen, go up to change (cords, a checked shirt, a cashmere V-neck, loafers) and come down to help her by decanting the wine and laying the table, perhaps. But his mind presented him with two choices: recklessness or death. He felt like laughing, like crying. Why was he feigning a belief in this intoxicating rubbish?

'Just one little drink in secret?' She wrinkled her nose and smiled.

He met her eyes and felt another thrill pass through him. It was not exactly a sexual thrill—although she was almost comically attractive, an illustrated pin-up—it was the same thrill he had felt the time he stole a shilling from the floor underneath the till in Geoff Gilbert's shop when he was eight. It was the same thrill he had felt, perhaps a year or so later, when he stole a custard tart from the plate in Ivy Gilbert's kitchen. Aunty Ivy and Uncle Geoff, who were poor like them—whom he
stole
from. He had lost the shilling as he ran up the road towards the cliffs, but it hadn't mattered. The custard tart had got so coated in fluff from his pocket it was inedible and he had chucked it to a stray dog. But it hadn't been the shilling that was important; it hadn't been the custard tart. What was the important element? What had made him run as hard as he could up the cliff path feeling an electric storm in his chest?

He really must go home to Rosalind, he told himself. There would be a delicious dinner and good friends and the lullaby of their quiet habits at night: her light off first, her hand sleepily pressing his arm as she turned away from him. 'Don't read too long, darling,' she always said. Her face cream smelt of lilies—as it always had. On his bedside table was the same photograph he had on his desk, of the day he was sworn in as a QC, the picture that constituted the satisfaction of
nearly all his ambitions.
He was ashamed that he rarely looked at it without wishing it had been Luke, not Sophie, stuck out of the picture behind the camera. He missed his darling little daughter and the lost, picnic days of her perfect admiration, the days when he had known the answer to everything. It was so hard to believe she was thirty now.

Feeling as if he was setting fire to himself, but also to this terrible sense of dread, of loss, of tedium, of death, he said, 'All right, one drink. Why not? But I'll have to meet you there. You get a taxi and I'll come on afterwards.'

He followed her a few steps towards the road, watching the outrageous curve of her hips outlined by the streetlight ahead. He waited at the mouth of the alleyway, feeling a breathless relief to be out of such imminent danger. And he felt a kind of passion, too, though this was still somehow an abstraction from the idea of desire—a variation on the theme of desire, rather than the feeling itself, he thought. It struck him that Karen was the kind of girl his son would find attractive and this appealed to him shamelessly. Physically, she was an amalgamation of all the girls Luke had brought back. But Luke's girlfriends—in particular the current one, Lucy—were all dull, obsessive, preoccupied with becoming wives. They were all terrified of Alistair, sycophantic to Rosalind. It irritated Alistair to the point of incomprehension. There was no need for Luke to marry a girl like that because, unlike him, Luke had been lucky enough to start out with every advantage in the world. That boy had everything—
everything!

Karen put out her arm to a passing cab and it stopped beside her. She said something through the window to the driver and walked back towards him, smiling. 'If I go, you will definitely come? You won't just leave me waiting there like an idiot?'

She looked hopeful as a child in the streetlight in front of him, and his heart moved protectively. It was the first time she had shown her age by accident, rather than flaunting it calculatingly, like a low-cut dress. Of course, it was more dangerous this way. He told her he would meet her in the bar at the Ridgeley. She could order him a whisky and water.

To pass a little time he stood inside a delicatessen, pretending to examine a packet of breadsticks. What did she see him as? he wondered. A wealthy older man, the source of some unspecified luxury, some dubious paternal reassurance. Well, it was an age-old formula, wasn't it? The man behind the counter asked if he could help and Alistair said, no, he was fine. Just looking, he said.

He picked up a different packet of breadsticks and thought: What exactly is so awful about a drink, a litde flirtation, the possibility of more held tantalizingly ahead and ... approached, like golden hills and sunny vineyards? Of course he would turn back delicately at the last moment. He could do what the older man did—buy her some good champagne, order her some oysters, or whatever accorded with the picture in her mind. Attempt to fulfil the role—as he always did.

And in what sense was this role so inferior to the others he played? Just then it seemed only to be a rather wearisome question of aesthetics. What right did he have to think in these rarefied terms, anyway? The truth was, he did a passable tired-but-loving-husband but he undermined it by losing the thread of what he was saying, by pausing to wonder if his wife heard his voice any more. He did an uninspired wise-but-vague-loving-father and was secretly frightened of his own children, wary of exposure to their problems, of exposure
by
their problems. He really did not know how to help, what to say to them—and they must know it, he thought. Not that Luke challenged anyone much. Quite unexpectedly, he had put that terrible bolt through his eyebrow, but when he finally found a job that interested him, he simply took it out again. Old Luke was resilient, predictable. His darling, brilliant little daughter on the other hand—she starved herself, she cut her own arms. What did it all mean? He couldn't bear to imagine.

Sophie had begun to kiss his forehead when she greeted him—as one kisses children, or the old and confused.

Where was the beauty in any of this? These were thin performances and he saw through them
himself.
Somehow, in the years since both the children had left, since the satisfaction of
nearly all his ambitions,
he had got lost outside his own life. He did not know how to signal to Rosalind. Not that she would have noticed: she was so busy, these days, with those dreadful friends and their furniture catalogue.

He waited until three taxis had passed. Then he put down the breadsticks, walked on to the road and hailed one. He slammed the door after him.

There was plenty to distract the eye along the river. The Oxo tower stood out against the sky, lights were coming on in the restaurant boats and across the bridges and in many of the penthouse river-view flats, and each one of these lights was reflected in the glittering Thames. Very gradually, London was putting on its jewellery in preparation for Friday night.

Alistair began to feel calmer, less reckless. He told himself that there had been plenty of occasions on which he had noticed other women before.
Of course
there had been other occasions in almost forty years of marriage. But as he tried to remember these occasions, this sly old habit of his, he could come up with only one example. He had once had dinner with an Italian solicitor at a pub in King's Lynn when he was staying there defending a murder charge. Otherwise he had not been alone with—or alone and attracted to—a single other woman. Surely this avoidance of desire had taken thought and planning. It was almost frightening that he had never been conscious of it.

His briefcase slid across the seat as the taxi rounded a corner and some papers came out of the side pocket. He gathered them up and stuffed them into his pockets. Sylvia, her name was—the solicitor. Sylvia Dolci. She had been working on another case; she had been there only for the night. They had eaten good fish pie together and drunk Chablis and she told him about her litde daughter, her useless ex-husband. She was very funny, dry as the wine. He had liked the smell of her thin cigarettes. And all the way through, particularly when they had finished their coffee and the moment came for one or the other of them to ask for the bill, he had felt an overwhelming sense of missed opportunity. He remembered it as a physical sensation: it had been like rushing back for your towel down a corridor of hotel rooms and seeing someone else's room through a half-open door, an unlicensed glimpse for no more than a few seconds—the maid flipping up a sheet, brilliant in the sunshine, the better sea view, the brighter sunlight across the wall. The sensation was longing: for another life, which might so easily have been his. It had been Sylvia who asked for the bill, sighing conclusively.

They had said goodbye outside her room: 'So,
Alistair,'
she said, with the charmingly random emphasis that made her words seem translated and all the more exotic,'
thank
you. It was a lovely evening.'

'Yes, it was.'

' Yes
,' she said. She put her key into the lock and he noticed her eyes close tightly for a second. Then she turned back and kissed him on the cheek.'
Well.
Sleep well, then.'

'You too, Sylvia,' he told her.

And so he had passed on, twirling his key on his finger in an imitation of indifference, listening to the sad music of her door clicking shut. His heavy heart had dragged him deep into sleep.

That had been contemplating infidelity. What exactly was he contemplating now?

Alistair paid the cab driver and walked up the steps of the Ridgeley, past the absurd torches and the cream-jacketed doorman and through the rotating doors. The floor was white marble and the interior walls were made of frosted glass. Ahead there was a reception desk of glass twisted to look like gnarled branches with glass leaves that bounced the light off their rainbow surfaces. Two thin girls in white shift dresses, their hair scraped back, attended to a huge book of reservations. A young Japanese man approached the desk and both girls raised smiling faces.

To Alistair's left was the entrance to the bar. Sylvia Dolci, he thought, as he went through. They pronounced their Ts a little further forward in their mouths, Italians. He had watched her, anticipating the sight of her tongue against her teeth as she did it. She had shown him a picture of her dark-haired litde girl. 'She's very, very pretty,' he had told her, hoping Sylvia would catch his implication.

Karen was sitting discreetly in the corner behind the bar. She waved at him as he came in. Her face was a floodlight of youth, a blaring stereo of youth, which he wanted to tell one of his children to turn down immediately. What the hell was he doing?

'Here we are,' he said calmly, putting down his briefcase. He would have one drink.

'Whisky and water,' she said, holding out a glass to him. 'That's you done. Me? I still can't decide. They do hundreds of things here. Look.' She held out the clear plastic menu at him.

It was full of pretentiously conceived drinks that involved improbable verbs: 'muddled' blueberries, 'smashed' limes. Her face was a mixture of confusion, intimidation and excitement. It made him smile. 'Have a Bellini,' he said. 'You can't possibly go wrong with peach juice and champagne.'

She seemed pleased with this formulation. He had drunk Bellinis with Rosalind on their honeymoon in Rome. But, then, it was not inconceivable that everyone else he knew had drunk Bellinis on their honeymoon in Rome. The waiter stood beside them. 'A Bellini, please,' he said. 'And could we have an ashtray?'

He lit a match for the cigarette she had been holding uncertainly in the palm of her left hand.

'Oh, thank you. I've been
desperate
all day. There's nowhere to smoke any more, is there? Always one of those signs up, spoiling the party.' She scraped her hair off her face.

This was how she would look leaning back on her elbows in the bath, lifting her wet hair out of the water, he thought. 'Looks nice,' he said, 'your hair back like that.'

Why on earth did he feel able to speak to this girl so intimately? He checked himself—like a man who has fallen over and wonders if he has torn his coat, scuffed his shoes—and found himself intact. Karen held the cigarette in her teeth and tied back her hair with a band she had on her wrist. He was mystified but increasingly flattered by her desire to please him.

'Don't you smoke?' she said.

'Not any more.'

'Oh, shit, it's gone in my eyes. It only works in black-and-white films, doesn't it—holding it in your mouth like that?'

'Here.' He held out a napkin for her.

'I wish you smoked. It makes you feel guilty smoking on your own.'

She had left a light smudge of mascara under her left eye, which at once made her seem like a child dressing up in her mother's clothes. He wondered if he could draw her attention to it somehow, because it added to a fear that the immaculate young at the other tables were staring at him, appalled or amused.

'What the hell?' she said, exhaling. 'I can cope with a little guilt.'

The waiter arrived with the Bellini and a little bowl of what looked to Alistair like broken crackers in self-consciously irregular shapes. He picked one up, wondering what this meant. It sprang from an aesthetic he felt he was too removed from, too old, to appreciate. It tasted like nothing at all.

'So, d'you like being a brilliant barrister, then?' Karen said. 'You enjoy it all—wearing your wig and cape and all that?'

'Oh, I went into it for the wig and cape,' he said, smiling.

'Wigs'
she said, rolling her eyes. 'This is so delicious. What's it called
again?'

'A Bellini. I'm surprised Mr Giorgiou didn't introduce you to those.'

'Mr Giorgiou doesn't take me out much,' she said. 'He spends all his money on gambling anyways. And all the other girls. And you said we shouldn't talk about him.' She lengthened her mouth and put on a mock-pompous voice. 'It's unethical, I'm afraid.'

It was hard not to like her. She had finished half her drink already—in three gulps—and Alistair watched her push it away. 'Look, I'm rather old and predictable,' he said. 'Why don't you tell me about yourself?'