Exposure (25 page)

'About me?'

'Yes.'

She thought for a moment, and then she laughed and picked up the drink again. 'I can't think what to say ... God, I'm nothing special. What can I tell you?' Her mind ran through a series of the actions that apparently constituted her existence—eating toast in the tiny kitchen at home, putting on her makeup in the bathroom mirror, the way she banged drunkenly into the side of the toilet cubicle in a club when she pulled up her knickers and tights. None of it was good enough to tell him. For a moment, she felt despair—the despair that came when she watched her brother stoned unconscious in front of the telly. She felt her feet sweating in the cheap shoes and wondered if there would be dye on her feet.

Imagine if they made you show your feet, she thought, picturing a surreal humiliation in the hotel lobby, in which wealthy and clean were divided from poor and hopelessly stained. Her heart thudded in anger. I'd kick them in the face, she told herself. Fuck the lot of them.

'Well, I can tell you what I want to be, if you like,' she said brightly. 'I want to go into fashion—you know, design dresses and stuff. Beautiful dresses and coats and skirts. Maybe I'd do jewellery too. Underwear. Who knows? I'd love that. It's not just bullshit—I've applied for the course and everything.'

'I didn't doubt it. You seem very determined.'

She eyed him suspiciously for a second. 'Yes, well, I am. I've had to be, with my family. Not that I do that whole blame-it-all-on-your-parents bullshit American thing, but it does get you down. My parents are just slobs, really. Fat whales on the couch—that type. They drink. My litde brother nicks cars. It's your dream set-up.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Gives you something to run from, doesn't it? God, don't get me started,' she said, her eyes full of humour, which she abruptly held back. She looked at him, at his suit and tie. She took in the expensive watch, the cufflinks, the good cashmere coat on the seat beside him. He had a handsome face even if he was old. There was friendliness in it, genuine curiosity, which was not how men usually were. Usually they looked at your legs, your tits, over your shoulder until you'd finished talking. They waited to get their sex. And he was nervous, too, which was sweet. He kept glancing at the people at the table near them wondering if they were watching him. She took out another cigarette and he lit a match for her and leant across the table with it. She liked him. Why not tell him about herself? Even though he was posh, he was not like Lexi and his friends, always thinking people hadn't realized who they were and had given them the smaller table or forgotten to comp them the champagne. Alistair looked like he cared more about people than things.

'So my parents are disgusting,' she said. 'You wouldn't believe it. It's like—as an example—this Christmas my dad wandered off in the middle of our dinner. Mum had done turkey, sprouts, the works. We couldn't believe it because it's usually a row and something out of the freezer, but not this time. This was like your Christmas miracle.

'But, of course, Dad has to ruin it. Why—who knows? He's just one of those people that spoils things. Like my brother, I guess. Anyway, the exact second it's ready he goes out for a "breath of air" and it all starts to go cold. My sister, Yvonne, she's older than me with three kids and one on the way—I know,' she said, shaking her head at Alistair. 'Birth control? They're always at it, her and Mick. Anyway, Yvonne goes, "Oh, just let him fuck off, Mum, it'll be nicer without him." So we gave his to the dog. Yvonne puts this paper hat on him and sat him on Dad's chair. It was pretty funny. A dog at the head of the table! And it
was
nicer without Dad—until he didn't come home for a
whole week
after that.'

'What on earth had happened?'

'Drunk.'
She swung her head from side to side in time to her words: 'Drunk, drunk, drunk. Bastard got so drunk, when they found him in the doorway of Tesco in the high street he couldn't remember who he was.'

'My God.'

'Couldn't remember his own name.
He had forgotten his whole life. Can you imagine that?'

Actually, he could. This evening, he
could
imagine lying nameless in the doorway of Tesco. 'You need another Bellini,' he said.

She looked at her empty glass. 'Oh dear. My father's daughter, hey?'

'Not at all. Please don't if you don't want one. Don't let me—'

'Oh, no—I'm not being like that. I do want one,' she said. 'But I'm not getting all tipsy on my own, though—you have to as well.'

He picked up his glass and drained it, returning her smile with his eyes. It was impossible to feel sorry for her, in spite of the depressing family life, which he could imagine only too well. He remembered his mother drinking, laughing in the kitchen with a male guest—the horror of seeing a parent disgraced like that. Why did he not feel sorry for Karen? Perhaps she was simply too young. It was good to be near her. This was doing nobody any harm.

'Look, shall I order a bottle of champagne?' he said.

'Oh, a bottle of champagne would be
lovely
.' She clapped her hands.
'Thank
you. That would be
lovely.'

He ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon and some more cigarettes for her—because he had noticed she only had a few in her packet and this felt like the right thing to do. As he ordered, he watched her from the corner of his eye and noticed the way she tempered her excitement, schooling it under her nervous hands, holding it down in her lap. It touched him. He felt moved to nostalgia by the mock-up of knowing sophistication on her face. Must his own face have been like that at one time?

While they drank the champagne she told him stories about her life, her school, her friends. She spoke well, with a compelling sense of irony that had her rolling her eyes at the ugliness of her family. How superior this was to the tortured secrecy of his own youth, he thought, to the wincing and the clenched fist and the short sharp lessons he had taught himself in the privacy of the loo. He had punished himself viciously for those early catastrophic errors at lunch with Rosalind's family, at dinner with her father at his club. He had left doors open in those days, exposed himself by accident to their scrutiny—

'But hang on—your parents were
married,
surely?' his new sister-in-law had asked, silencing the lunch-table. Even the carpet had seemed to hold its breath. And on some other occasion his father-in-law had laughed, sherry in hand, still certain he must have misheard—

'What?
Never
been abroad in your whole life?'

It still made Alistair shudder to remember these incidents. It had never occurred to him to make a joke of his background, as Karen did. But, then, he mustn't forget that times had changed, England had changed. People were 'themselves' now in a way that had not been encouraged when he was young. It had been an unspoken agreement between himself and Rosalind that he should at least appear to be the right sort of young man. How could she have married him otherwise? As it was, her parents had been deeply disappointed by his obvious lack of private wealth.

'Five of us,' Karen was saying, 'with this fake "Save the Rainforests" tin, dancing to this old Madonna tape. You can't believe people fell for it, really. People actually gave us money.'

He refilled their glasses and enjoyed the work the champagne was doing on his empty stomach. His face felt flushed—but with exhilaration rather than embarrassment now. The colour had come into her cheeks, too. He thought she was incredibly pretty as she smiled at him, saying, 'God, different
worlds,
hey?'

Could
sympathy
breed desire? He wanted to kiss her panicky mouth, to hold down all the fluttering energy with the weight of his own body. 'No. Not so different,' he said.

'Oh, come on. You must think I'm awful. Vulgar litde tart.'

'No. I think you're going to get exactly what you want out of life and that you must be very careful what that is.'

'Oh, what does that mean? That's one of those Chinese riddles.'

He laughed. 'Nothing Chinese about it.'

'You know what I mean. Something that sounds all meaningful but you can't work it out.'

'Well, I meant it,' he said. 'And it was supposed to be a sort of compliment.'

She observed him for a moment. 'I've never met a man who said so litde about themselves. I mean, I don't know anything about you. Most guys have found a way to tell you what they earn and what they drive within five minutes. Not you, though.'

'Maybe I'm too old to show off'

'You're a man, aren't you?'

'You don't think we improve with age?'

'Well, I'll tell you in a bit, shall I? I've only seen you drink.'

He looked away and tried to rationalize the longing. His mouth was watering and he swallowed. His throat felt swollen. Again he saw her in red stockings, laughing cruelly at his old body.

She giggled. 'Come on—play fair!
You
know I've got a no-good thieving brother and a sister at it like a rabbit and two disgusting, drunk parents. I know you've got a grey coat and a briefcase and—what are they? Green?
Green
eyes. Is that some kind of barrister's trick?'

'No tricks, no riddles,' he said. 'I think they're green, aren't they? I'm told they're green. My daughter has them.'

She leant across the table and put her hand on his cheek. He felt her breath on his mouth and his heart jolted.

'Green,' she said. 'Same age as me, probably—your daughter. What's her name?'

'Sophie.'

'Sophie,' she said delicately, trying on the more refined existence like a diamond bracelet.

She sat back. 'So, what about
you,
then?'

'Me?'

She tilted sideways and glanced under the table. 'You'll have to do. I can't see anyone else.'

'Goodness, I'm no good at this. Where should I start?'

He looked so shy, so anxious, she thought. 'Oh, wherever. Just say something.'

Oddly, it did not occur to him to pick a detail from the past forty years of his life. 'Well, I grew up in Dover,' he said. 'I grew up in grotty seaside Dover in a dingy little boarding-house with my mother. She wasn't married and I don't know who my father was. That was pretty scandalous in those days.'

A waitress passed with a tray of drinks. He felt his heart racing with a kind of hilarious excitement.

'My mother always told me they were planning to marry when he got killed in the war, but I suppose it stopped adding up as a story when I reached the age of, oh, about eight. I remember I threw all my toy soldiers into the sea. I can't imagine anyone else believed it at all. Nothing was ever said, though. She was popular in the area—grew up there and so on—and to talk about it would have meant judging her, I suppose. People hid it for her so they could carry on enjoying her company, really. We never discussed it either. I haven't seen her for, God, forty years now—is it forty years?—possibly so as to avoid the conversation.'

He felt like laughing. Not only had he never told a single person the naked facts of his past, he had never arranged them in this way. Could forty years really have been spent in avoidance of a conversation? Here he was, suddenly able to tell it all to a girl he had never met before.

Karen was open-mouthed. 'Shit. How come you're so ...' She circled her hand.

'Educated?'

'No. So
posh-
sounding.'

He laughed hard. Yes, that was the interesting bit. How come he sounded as if he had grown up like his wife, like his own children? 'Oh, it's fake,' he said.

'What do you
mean?
What d'you mean its fake?'

'I mean it's put on. I learnt it at university. I copied my friend Philip's accent.'

She began to laugh now, uncontrollably, gleefully, and he felt himself tumbling after her, down a grassy hill, landing breathless at the bottom in the sunshine. 'I think that's
brilliant,'
she said, 'fucking
brilliant.'
She raised her drink. 'Two old bullshitters?'

They clinked glasses, but as he drank, she whispered, 'You know what I think?'

He had no idea what she thought—or what he thought himself. And what did any of it matter? 'No idea,' he said.

'Let's get a room.'

His heart almost stopped. He watched her finish her drink and press her lips together with sudden pragmatism. 'It's pricey here, though,' she said.

'Is it?' he said, not hearing himself speak. He felt rather dizzy after the whisky, which must have been a double, and more than half a bottle of champagne. He had only had a bit of shepherd's pie for lunch.

'Yeah, it's pricey. But what's money for?' Karen said.

He stared at her in a kind of blank panic and she stared back. She seemed to want an answer. 'I don't know,' he said quickly. 'I'm not sure.'

It was true: he didn't know what money was for. He had known when the children were at home, when there were school fees to be paid, family holidays to go on. And he had bought Rosalind a pearl necklace with an emerald and diamond clasp for her fifty-ninth birthday. That was something. Something beautiful in a velvet box: 'the good things in life'. Wasn't that a phrase of his mother's? He remembered how he had loathed the pleasure she took in her 'precious' ornaments. He had run away from her 'good things in life', dreading them physically as if they were radioactive waste.

'You can
afford
it, can't you?' Karen said casually, her gaze as steady as a jeweller's on his face.

'Yes.'

'Well, I think money's for doing exactly what you like,' she said.

'Yes, I expect you're right.'

'Well, what do you
like,
Alistair?' She was beginning to feel confident, sexy. Your shoes didn't matter, for Christ's sake, if you were young and pretty. This older man, this brilliant barrister, was all nervous in front of her because she was young and pretty. It was so funny she had to bite her lip. 'I bet I can guess some things,' she told him.

His mind ran involuntarily through a rather unexpected list of pleasures: the taste of whisky, the smell of lilies, eight dusty chimes from the clock in the drawing room signalling the end of the day, the creak of his leather armchair and the weight of a book in his hand. Was that really all there was? He could not tell her this. He could not tell himself this. What about the red stockings? Suddenly he couldn't summon them up. 'Isn't it sad?' he said sarcastically. 'I seem to have forgotten.'