Interzone 251 (4 page)

It’s quite square, and white as snow. A few small freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are the same blue I remember from that long-ago night drive across Scotland; they have that slight lack of focus which the eyes of longsighted people sometimes have. She has a very mobile mouth; her lips are never still, even when the rest of her face is in repose. She wears her dark, curly hair to shoulder-length; her eyebrows are even darker than her hair. There’s not a trace of makeup on her face, the only colour being small tinges of pink at the peak of her cheekbones, and yet there seems to be a glow about her, that aura which pregnant women sometimes acquire.

She is as beautiful as she was when we first met, when she was five and I was eight.

And this is what’s puzzling me as we make the usual small talk – aren’t we both looking splendid, yes, I had a good train ride, she walked across the park from Marble Arch tube station, oh, we could have walked together if we’d known because I came on foot from Paddington. I can see a clear line of descent, as it were, from the magical child who was bundled up warm in the back seat of the car, all those years ago, to the woman sitting across from me. What I
can’t
see, though, is any way the glowering adolescent I annoyed over a bad meal in Edinburgh could have become the Lindsay in front of me. Just to begin with, she appears several inches shorter than she was then – although I put that down to the way ungainly teenagers seem to have longer limbs than ordinary human beings do.

We order a light lunch – salads, a bottle of some innocuous German white wine. I’m not really in the mood for eating. I’m entranced by this creature, just as I once was. If I were younger, I’d say I was falling in love with her, but it isn’t that. I wish in a way it were. That would be, somehow, easier to cope with.

What I do know is that, if indeed Lindsay is pregnant, then I’m not the father. We spent no night of passion together. I know this for a certainty. In the old tales men lost themselves in Faeryland and dallied with the Queen, yet later forgot entirely their lovemaking. They forgot only because the Queen could cast a spell upon their minds; otherwise they’d have remembered everything until the last breath left their body. It would surely be this way with Lindsay. Surely there’d be some kind of body-memory? Surely?

Yet who she is is a mystery to me. I hardly dare even touch her hand.

We wait until the food’s arrived before, moving carefully and warily like participants in a minuet, we approach the reason for our being here.

“I’m not asking you to bear any…paternal responsibility, Nick,” she says, spearing a slice of tomato.

“Before we even start going into that,” I say, “I think we need to sort out what actually happened.”

“You said that on the phone.”

“Tell me the story from your side.”

“You’re serious?”

“I really am.”

She smiles. “I’m not sure I like the notion of having to remind you.”

“That’s the trouble, Lindsay. It’s not a reminder. I don’t have any knowledge of this – and I’m not pretending.” I remember what Dverna said the other day. “I’m not trying to play any kind of stupid game. I truly don’t know what’s going on.”

She sighs, and reaches out her hand to place it over mine on the table. Her touch is cool and dry, as I imagined it would be.

“Well, you remember, back in July, you came and stayed with us for that business meeting you—”

“No, Lindsay. I
don’t
remember that. I had to cancel. I had the flu.”

“You seemed a little under the weather, but—”

“I was in Bristol. I never even got as far as the station. I had to cancel my appointment, and I lost the job because of it.” Not that there weren’t plenty of other jobs, because there’s always demand for a freelance accountant, but the Sitemaster contract was one I’d been particularly keen to nail down.
C’est la vie.

“I’m trying to tell you something,” says Lindsay.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have interrupted.”

“You were a little under the weather, I said. I don’t mean you were sniffling or feverish, or anything like that. You seemed a little…confused, maybe? There was something artificial about you, as if you were playing a role, like one does in front of people one doesn’t know very well. Dad said later you seemed so out of kilter with your normal self he could have passed you in the street without recognising you. Me, I hadn’t seen you since I was, what, fourteen, fifteen, so you didn’t seem so strange to me, but I could still tell…” She takes a deep breath. “You don’t do drugs, do you?”

“Just single malt whisky, and then not often enough.”

“We wondered, the three of us, after you’d left, if that was why you seemed so… Of course, Mum and Dad didn’t know what else had happened while you were there.” She stares at me meaningfully with those cloudy blue eyes.

The McBrides have one of those big old tall houses a couple of miles south of Edinburgh’s centre, built of red sandstone and built to last. Most of the other houses up and down the street have been converted for flats or into hotels – well, bed-and-breakfasts, really. Where the McBrides sometimes put houseguests is in a small stone shed at the bottom of the back garden – a “guest chalet,” as Elsa likes grandly to call it. It was probably a stable at one point. Now it has a comfortable little bedroom, with a loo and a shower room off it. Just right for a night or three; any longer and it’d start to get claustrophobic, I’d guess. But there’s more privacy than in the main house.

I arrived, so Lindsay tells me, in the middle of the Thursday evening. My train had got in late, having sat for a couple of hours outside Newcastle for no reason anyone had ever thought to tell us. The McBrides had held dinner for me – which was easy because, it being summer, dinner was a cold chicken curry salad, one of Elsa’s specialities. We sat around the table long after we’d finished eating. I said no to the port Connor produced, because I wanted to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for my meeting with the Sitemaster people the next day. And then off down the garden path I trotted…

“You were really energised when you got home the next day,” says Lindsay. She’s stroking the back of my hand with her thumb, the kind of gesture longstanding lovers make. “You said the meeting went really well and you were certain the job was yours.”

When I got home, she tells me, it was about one o’clock and she was alone in the house. Connor and Elsa were still out at work, and weren’t expected home until seven. Lindsay, who’d completed her finals in biochemistry a couple of weeks earlier, was basically just having fun lolling around the house and relaxing with books.

“Nothing for it but you were going to take me out to lunch at the Haddon House to celebrate, which we did.” She has the very clear, almost accentless voice you sometimes find in Scots people, with the same timbre as a choirboy’s singing. She doesn’t say why it was we both ended up in the “guest chalet”, just that this was where we went when we got home from lunch. There’s no embarrassment about her, no girlish blushes. She’s quite matter-of-fact, and amused more than anything else.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen. It was a monumental abuse of hospitality. Your dad’ll be wanting to beat me to a pulp.”

She chuckles. “You didn’t have any choice in the matter. It was my idea. Do you remember that time when we were both wee, Nick, and we were taken for a long ride in that awful old boat of a car Dad used to have?”

“I remember it.”

“I fell in love with you then, Nick, and I’ve never completely fallen out of it again.”

“I know what you mean. But—”

“But what, Nick?”

I was about to say to her that all my life I’ve felt that same way, except that it’s the eight-year-old boy who’s loving the five-year-old girl, and the situation, and the memory of an encounter that was special and shining and greater than life, and can never be repeated. But I bite the words back, realising how cruelly they might strike her, as if the grown-up Lindsay was valueless.

I mumble something vacuous about the past being hard to recapture.

“Oh, we had our merry moments, you and I,” she says after a pause. “The room was full of sunlight and there was a sea gull in the garden telling all the other birds this was his own special territory. And then, finally, I realised what time it was and that I’d better run inside and have a bath to wash the smell of sex off me before Mum and Dad got home.” She chuckles again.

I can’t imagine what her face would look like in passion.

Her eyes are serious once more. “And you can remember
nothing
of this, Nick?”

I play the gallant. “I wish I did. You’re a very lovely woman, Lindsay.” I almost called her a
young
woman, but caught myself in time.

“Nor the evening? I think Mum was fairly sure something had been going on, but she didn’t know what and she wasn’t about to ask. And Dad – well, you know Dad. All evening long it was a secret that just you and I shared.”

Once again I’m struck by how badly this doppelgänger of mine behaved. Connor and Elsa are old and trusted friends, the closest thing I have any longer to family. I suppose that makes Lindsay family, too. And she was old enough to be making her own decisions about what she did. Even so, I’ve betrayed their trust abominably, adulterously banging their darling only daughter in the garden shed. Or my doppelgänger did. I’m finding this very confusing to think about.

“Late at night,” she says, “after the folks had gone to bed I tiptoed out to you in my white nightie and we made love for the one last time. If anyone had looked out of a back window and seen me in the garden, they’d have thought they were seeing a ghost.”

The waiter sidles up to us. Neither of us has finished our meal. We indicate to him to take the plates away. I ask for a coffee, Lindsay for a tea. “Don’t bother bringing milk,” she says. “I like it the way nature intended.”

He goes away.

I’m shaking my head. I know there are tears in my eyes, tears I don’t want her to see. There’s a part of me, and it isn’t the eight-year-old boy any longer, that desperately, desperately wishes I could remember what Lindsay so clearly remembers. If it weren’t for my nutbrown maid in Bristol, the person who is everyone to me, I could imagine myself falling deeply for Lindsay and even believing it was love. Her beauty and her air of reserve are tugging at me. I’ve never once thought of two-timing Dverna – it’s an impossibility, like water running uphill – and I’m not thinking about it seriously even now, but the fact that I’m thinking about it
at all
says something about the effect Lindsay is having on me.

“And you say it wasn’t you?” Her voice is very quiet now, so low I can barely pick it up amid the waves of other people’s conversation.

“It wasn’t. It can’t have been. I was at home nursing my head and feeling sorry for myself. A summer flu. Dverna remembers it well.”

“Dverna,” says Lindsay. “Who’s Dverna?”

***

It’s later in
the day. We’re out in the middle of the Serpentine on one of those rowing boats you can hire by the hour. I’m rowing. Lindsay is sitting in the stern looking as if she should be wearing a straw boater and wielding a parasol. I’m not going to catch the six-oh-three.

She believes me now. At first she was incredulous that I could be married without her knowing anything about it, even more so when I told her she was at the wedding. It was only when I produced the little digital picture frame I carry with me and showed her the picture Dverna and I persuaded an old Frenchman to take of us the weekend we went to Cologne that she began to be persuaded. That was just before I paid the bill for our lunches. After we left the restaurant we ambled around the park, both rather selfconsciously not looking at the pairs of young lovers sprawling on the grass. Then, on an impulse, we hired this boat. It gives us a space that’s separated from the rest of the world.

“I had this dream, Nick,” she’s saying, trailing her fingers in the water. “This very presumptuous dream. I wasn’t going to put any pressure on you, but I thought that maybe, just maybe, you’d say some of the things were true that you told me in Edinburgh, and you’d suggest we raise the bairn together. I’ve always thought you and I would end up together. Oh, I’m not saying I’ve been entirely chaste while I was waiting for our hour to come, but there haven’t been that many I’ve bedded, either. I don’t make a habit of throwing myself into men’s arms, the way I did with you. I seduced you – not that you needed much seducing – because I believed this was the way the script was written, and I was just following it. And now I find you already have your own lovely lady, that you’re following your own script. A different script. One that doesn’t have a part for me in it.”

A silence falls between us. Then: “Do you remember,” I say, trying not to sound too puffed from the rowing, “you told me you and your parents thought I seemed a bit odd, a bit artificial, not really myself…”

“I think it even more now.” She lifts a hand to stop me misunderstanding. “No, what I mean is, you’re yourself today. It makes the person I was with in Edinburgh seem even more unlike you. You were like a sort of perfect CGI animation of yourself – it was a precise replica of you, but still we could sense there was something awry. You were
too real
, in a way.”

I didn’t notice until we climbed into the boat that she’s wearing little black sandals. All the rest that she’s wearing is either white or nearly so. She’s staring at those little black sandals now.

“Like someone in the wrong world,” she says.

“Do you think that can be it?” I say nervously.

“That it was the you from the next-door universe?” She gives a little, unconvincing laugh. “It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, but it’d open up a whole lot of new questions, too.”

She ignores my comment. “You talked about a doppelgänger earlier, but that wouldn’t make sense. I could believe, if I believed in supernatural beasties, that a spirit could…could, you know, make me believe it and I were having carnal knowledge.” She rolls the old-fashioned term on her tongue, relishing it. “But I can’t believe it would leave me pregnant after.”