Man and Wife (25 page)

She smiled politely.

A laughing German tourist in a Glasgow Celtic shirt smashed into our table. He was clapping his hands and stamping his feet as Blunt jigged around with his arms so stiff by his side that they could have been tied there.

‘These crazy Irish,’ said the German. ‘They have such a good time, no?’

‘He lives in Hampstead,’ I said.
‘Hampstead in London.’

‘Crazy, crazy Irish.’

A cheer went up as the band, a bunch of crusty-looking hippies who resembled extras from
Braveheart
, tore into Van Morrison’s ‘One Irish Rover’.

Blunt went up a gear.

A coach party of Italians arrived, swelling the pub to overload. They placed their orders for Guinness with the red-haired student behind the bar. Blunt stubbed his toe on a large glass ashtray and began hopping around on one leg, grimacing in
agony. The tourists applauded excitedly, mistaking his injury for part of the official floorshow.

The German tourist nodded knowledgably. ‘Music is very important to the Irish. Boomtown Rats. Thin Lizzy. U2. It’s in their soul.’

He climbed on to the table with Blunt.

Eamon came back. He looked up at Blunt and the German, shaking his head. ‘Will you look what happens when they watch
Titanic
one time too many?’

A tray of pints was placed on the table and, trying to upstage the German, who was doing a basic acid house dance – arms waving, feet planted, the antithesis of the common or garden Riverdance – Blunt attempted to execute an advanced
Lord of the Dance
leap across the stout. That’s when he fell off the table and landed face first in an Australian tourist’s cheese and tomato toastie.

Eamon sipped his mineral water and smiled at Kazumi. My spirits dipped. Eamon wasn’t going to try to sleep with her, was he? The drugs had replaced the girls in his life. But now the drugs were gone.

Then the band got stuck into ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ and the whole place was up on its feet. A handsome young Italian approached Kazumi and asked her if she wanted to dance. Suddenly Evelyn Blunt was between them, his red face scowling, and a slice of tomato hanging from one sweaty eyebrow.

‘She’s taken, mate.’

They eventually threw us out.

The visitors were willing to go right through till dawn, but the young red-haired bartender had to get up for his IT course at college in the morning.

So the four of us walked back along a rutted country road where the only light was the twinkling canopy of stars and the only sound was the roaring boom of the sea.

That and the tourists throwing up in the coach car park.

It was hard to sleep in that farmhouse by the bay.

The night winds whipped off the Atlantic and made the
ancient timbers of the farmhouse creak and groan like a ship tossed on a stormy sea. And it was freezing – my M&S pyjamas were supplemented with an old
Fish on Friday
T-shirt and thermal socks, and I still shivered under the wafer-thin duvet that was there for the summer trade.

But tonight it wasn’t the cold or the noise that kept me awake. It was the thought of Kazumi huddled beneath the sheets of the room at the top of the house. That’s what truly kept me from sleeping. And that’s why I was awake when she knocked on my door at three in the morning.

She was wearing tartan pyjamas. That girl liked her tartan more than any Scot I ever knew. She was also wearing chunky socks and a woollen hat. It must have been even colder at the top of the building. I blinked at her, uncertain if this was a dream. Then she spoke. In a whisper, as if afraid of waking the house.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘It’s okay. What’s wrong?’

‘Problem in room.’

I followed her across the darkened living room and, carefully, up a short ladder to the top of the farmhouse. Evelyn Blunt was lying on his stomach across her bed, mouth agape and drooling, snoring loudly.

‘Said he went to toilet and got the wrong room coming back,’ she said.

We looked from the drunken hack to the rickety ladder that you needed to climb to enter this room. Nobody gets as drunk as that, I thought.

‘Big fat liar,’ Kazumi said.

‘Did he – did he hurt you at all?’

She shook her pretty head. ‘Grabbed my hot-water bottle and then fell asleep. I can’t wake him up.’

‘I’ll try.’ I shook his shoulder. ‘Wake up, Blunt, you’re in the wrong room. Wake up, you sweaty fat bastard.’

He moaned a bit and held my hand to his cheek, a look of inebriated ecstasy passing across his bloated features. It was no use. I couldn’t stir him.

‘You can have my room,’ I told her. ‘I’ll sleep on the couch.’

‘No, no, no.’

‘It’s not a problem. Really. Go on. You take my room.’

She looked at me for a moment. ‘Or we could – you know – share your room.’

In the silence you could hear the sea smashing against the shore.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We could always do that.’

As shy as two five-year-olds on our first day at school, we made our way back to my room. Then we quickly jumped into opposite sides of the bed, and my hopeful heart soared, although I knew that she was driven not by passion, but by the possibility of hypothermia.

I lay on my back, with Kazumi turned away from me. I could hear my breathing, feel her body warmth, and when I couldn’t stand it any more I reached out and lightly touched her ribs, feeling the brushed cotton of her tartan pyjamas on the palm of my hand.

‘No, Harry,’ she said, a bit sad, but not moving.

I took my hand away. I didn’t want to be like Blunt. Whatever else I was, I didn’t want to be that kind of man.

‘Why not?’

‘You’ve got a wife and son.’

‘It’s a bit more complicated than that.’

‘And other reasons.’

‘Like what?’ I tried out a little laugh. ‘Because you’re not that kind of girl? I know you’re not that kind of girl. That’s why I like you so much.’

‘I like you too. You’re nice.’

‘You do?’

‘Yes. You’re funny and kind. And lonely.’

‘Lonely? Am I?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Then what’s wrong?’

‘You’re not that kind of man.’ She rolled on to her back and looked at me, her brown eyes shining in the moonlight, like a girl in a song by Van Morrison.

I rolled on to my side, loving the way her black hair fell across her face. I touched her foot with mine, woolly sock against woolly sock. She placed the palm of her hand against my chest and it made me catch my breath. Our voices in the dark were as soft as prayers.

‘I want to sleep with you,’ I said.

‘Then close your eyes and go to sleep.’ Unsmiling.

‘You know what I mean. I want to make love to you.’

She shook her head. ‘You’re not free.’

‘The world wouldn’t care. It’s just you and me. We’re not hurting anyone. Nobody would know, Kazumi.’

‘We would know.’

She had me there.

‘I don’t want to be the kind of woman who sleeps with a married man. And you don’t want to be that kind of married man.’

‘I do.’

‘No, Harry. You’re better than that.’ She stroked my face. ‘Just hold me,’ she said, rolling on to her side. I pushed up against her, two layers of pyjamas between her bottom and my erection. I put my free arm around her waist and pulled her close. She lifted my arm, placed a chaste kiss on my wrist, and squeezed my hand. We stopped talking, and for a long time I listened to the winds whipping off the Atlantic, the old farmhouse creaking in the night and the soft sound of her breathing.

And as Kazumi slept in my arms, I wondered how you keep a life simple. Do you keep it simple by staying where you are?

Or by starting all over again?

twenty-one

She was gone when I awoke.

I could hear voices down on the rocky beach. From the window I saw Kazumi already up and taking her pictures of Eamon.

Huddled up inside a red fleece, he struck his carefully casual poses – staring moodily out to sea, staring moodily straight at the camera, staring moodily at nothing in particular – while she moved around him, briskly click-clicking her way through another roll, changing film, murmuring instructions and encouragement.

A Japanese person with a camera, I thought. One of the clichés of the modern world. The snapping hordes mindlessly documenting every tourist site, and then getting back on the bus. But as I watched Kazumi taking her photographs of Eamon on the wind-lashed beach by Dingle Bay, it seemed to me that this young woman with her camera was possessed by an insatiable curiosity for this world and everything in it, and I felt an enormous surge of tenderness for her and her camera.
Plead the fleeting moment to remain
, she had told me some poet said of photography. And that’s what she was doing. Pleading the fleeting moment to remain.

By the time I was washed and dressed, Eamon and Kazumi had moved further down the beach. She must have thought that she had the images she needed, because now they were working more slowly, trying things out. She crouched on the kelp-strewn rocks while Eamon slowly strolled towards her, hands stuffed
inside his pockets, staring – I guess you would call it moodily – at a point just above her head.

And although it filled me with regret to admit it, I thought that perhaps she was right after all. Sex last night would not have been wise. A one-night stand with Kazumi would have been a big mistake. Because one night with this woman would never be enough.

And what did that mean? What did it mean when one night was not enough?

It meant an affair.

I had worked with enough married men who were conducting affairs to know that they were hard work.

The one-way telephone communications, the constant fear of discovery, the guilt, the anxiety, the tears at Christmas and New Year when home and hearth were calling, the feeling of being constantly and forever torn. And the lying. It couldn’t be done without the lying.

I wasn’t the man for all of that. I didn’t have the heart. I couldn’t do it to Cyd. Or myself. Or Kazumi. At least that’s how I felt in the light of day with Kazumi fifty metres away, not wrapped up in tartan pyjamas and my arms.

I had been true to my wife.

I had done the right thing.

So why did I feel so miserable?

There was a low, mournful mooing by my side. It was Blunt, green around the gills and still buttoning his shirt. A muted belch escaped his lips. His face was covered in a thin film of sweat.

‘Must have got a bad pint,’ he said, wandering off down to the beach where Kazumi was taking a final few shots of Eamon.

And I didn’t want to be so stuck on this young woman I hardly knew. Cyd was more than my wife and my lover. She was my best friend. At least until the other man came into our lives.

I remembered the moments that measured out our love. Cyd and I had had our share of good times. Looking at the lights by the Thames, the first night we ever spent together, last Christmas Day when everything struck us as hilarious,
from Ibiza DJ Brucie Doll’s tiny turntables to my mum’s appalled expression as she inserted the stuffing up the turkey’s rear end.

But what had really forged the bond between us were the other times, the bad times. My son in the hospital, his head split open from a fall in the park. The wrenching sadness of my divorce from Gina. Cyd was there for me through all of that, and I knew she cared about me in a way that nobody else in the world did.

But now it felt like I was losing my wife, and finding a gap in my life that Kazumi was filling, even if she didn’t want to.

That gap the size of a family, and the shape of a heart.

One night I had cooked dinner for the four of us. Cyd and me, Peggy and Pat. Since I married Cyd, my cooking skills had atrophied. But I thought I would do it one night. Do it for the family.

The four of us were sitting around the table’s points of the compass. At the start Cyd and Pat had made a good job of feigning enthusiasm for my cooking, even if what Peggy said sounded spiced with sarcasm.

‘Spaghetti Bolognese, Harry. Mmmm, I can’t wait!’

‘Hah! You might have to, Peg!’

There was sometimes a sickening jollity in the exchanges between my stepdaughter and myself.

‘Make sure the pasta is
al dente
, will you?’ she advised imperiously. ‘I don’t like it too soft. You
do
know what I mean by
al dente
, don’t you?’

I stirred my bubbling meat and tomato sauce at the stove, my smile stiff with tension.

‘You know you have to essentially treat it like a stew, don’t you?’ Cyd said gently. ‘It takes a long, long time simmering that amount of meat.’

‘Please,’ I said, trying to keep it friendly. ‘My turn to cook tonight, okay?’

I cooked spaghetti Bolognese. Spag Bog. Can’t go wrong. I used to cook this stuff all the time when Pat and I were living
alone. But for some reason I had it in my head that spaghetti Bolognese was a quick dish to prepare. I thought it took as long as – I don’t know. As long as it takes them to bring it to you in a restaurant. But I was wrong about spaghetti Bolognese, just as I have been wrong about so many things.

After an hour or so, Peggy was impatiently tapping Lucy Doll Secret Agent against the table. Pat was gawping at the remote control in his fist, as if waiting for a sign. And Cyd – after asking me really nicely if I minded – was doing her tax return. And still I stood at the stove, stirring the sauce that was taking inexplicably longer than any restaurant. I thought that maybe it wasn’t spaghetti Bolognese that I cooked so quickly and so easily for Pat and myself. Maybe it was spaghetti pesto. Yes, that was it. Spaghetti pesto was the one that was done in minutes. You just opened the can and chucked it on the pasta. It was simple and tasty. Green spaghetti, my son had called it.

Now, two years on from the days of green spaghetti, he dropped the remote control. It clattered against the wooden floor. ‘Whoops,’ he said, smirking around the table, looking for supportive laughter. Peggy and Cyd ignored him.

I picked up the remote and angrily stuffed it inside my apron pocket.