The Lie of You: I Will Have What Is Mine

THE LIE OF YOU

Previously published as
I Will Have What is Mine

JANE LYTHELL

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To my heroic mum Margaret Lythell Clarke

APRIL

Kathy thinks she has everything: the job; the baby; the friends and him. But she does not have my will. It is all on the surface with her. She has no hidden places. She does not know about her dark side, or about others’. She always believes the best of people.

When I heard that she had got the promotion to editor I called her at home and asked to see her. I said that I needed to discuss my position with her. She was about to agree to meet me. At the last minute she changed her mind.

‘Let’s meet for lunch in my first week back, OK, Heja? I really need to be at home these last few days.’

Ever since I told her in my interview that my name was pronounced hay-ah, with a soft J, she has tended to overuse it in her speech. It irritates me. I pressed her, saying that it was important that we meet as soon as possible. That offers were being made to me. That if she valued my contribution to the magazine...

She struggled. She finds it hard to say no to people. The baby started to whimper and this fortified her.

‘I’m sorry, Heja, it really will have to wait till I get back. I must go now. See you soon and thanks for calling.’

On her first day back at work she was wearing an orange silk shirt and a grey pencil skirt with expensive two-tone shoes, black with tan. The skirt was a bit tight over her stomach and her breasts were full. She hasn’t completely shed her baby weight. She has thick wavy dark hair and strong dark eyebrows. The team members, Laura, Karen, Tim and Stephanie, all clustered around her. They said how pleased they were that she was back; how well she looked. She is not beautiful. She is not even typically pretty. Her skin is good. It has a glow to it and her eyes are quite fine, almond shaped and hazel. Her face is too full of expression and demands a response. It is wearing to look at her.

She spent that first morning with Philip Parr, the publisher of the magazine, in his large glass box of an office. In the afternoon she called a team meeting. There are six of us in the team, including her assistant Aisha. She explained how she wanted to take the magazine forward. She leaned forward in her chair and asked us all for our views. She believes in communication, you see, in management through praise and encouragement. The others all made comments. I said nothing. At no point did she call me aside and arrange our lunch.

On her second day back she stopped at my desk.

‘Now, our lunch. Can you do Friday, Heja?’ she said, all brightness and friendliness.

I said Wednesday would be better for me. She could not do Wednesday, so I agreed. I have not had any offers. And I do not plan to leave the magazine. This way I am able to see her every day.

APRIL

At lunch today I sat across the table from Heja, savouring a great juicy mound of spaghetti vongole with guilty relish because it had so much garlic in it. I adore garlic but knew it would come through into my breast milk tonight. Heja had chosen grilled sea bream with fennel – the sort of dish you can eat without splattering spaghetti sauce everywhere. Just as well too, as she was dressed in an ice-blue linen shirt and a tailored cream jacket, groomed and immaculate as she always is. She wears her hair in this French plait, scraped back from her forehead, and it makes her look rather untouchable. She has lovely high cheekbones and her hair is ashy blonde and fine and if I were her I would have it cut very short and boyish. She could carry off a cut like that.

We discussed the current issue of the magazine in a desultory way. I knew she was building up to something because she’d asked for this meeting – in fact, she had pressed for it. She seemed rather distracted, though, and as I was talking to her she often rested her eyes over my right shoulder as if she wasn’t that interested in what I was saying, and this was mildly disconcerting. Then my coffee arrived and I was thinking, That’s good, she won’t raise anything major now. Perhaps she had just wanted to reconnect after all these months. She was drinking green tea. I’ve noticed she’s very health conscious, and she swallowed two capsules of evening primrose oil with her tea.

She launched into a speech about how I should make her my deputy. She talked in that stilted way she does, always perfect English, but a bit too perfect, so that you know it’s a second language.

‘While you were away I wrote articles for all the sections,’ she said.

Now I was the one who was finding it hard to concentrate on Heja.

There was this couple at the next table who were having a nasty argument. The man had his arms crossed over his chest and he was staring furiously at his empty pudding plate, which was smeared with raspberry sauce. The woman was agitated and colour flooded up her neck and into her face as she twisted a napkin. I saw a waiter approach their table and then he hesitated and I thought he must be used to such scenes, so many unhappy couples. Heja was coming to an end.

‘I
have
essentially been working as deputy editor while you were on maternity leave and I would like more responsibility.’

‘You’ve been doing a great job, Heja, and I’m really grateful for all you’ve done. We’re such a small team and the magazine just doesn’t need a deputy editor, and Philip simply wouldn’t agree.’

Why had I invoked Philip, the big boss, in this way? Why couldn’t I have just said no to Heja in a kind but firm voice? She hadn’t been at the magazine long and a promotion so soon was just not on.

The unhappy couple had turned their attention to paying their bill. He had thrown his credit card down contemptuously on the table and looked away and she was ostentatiously counting out notes and coins, leaving exactly half the amount of the bill, her face taut and ugly.

Heja leaned forward towards me now and she crackled with a kind of pent-up energy. ‘You have such demands on your time now, I thought you would welcome some extra support.’

I almost snapped at her then. ‘That won’t be a problem. We’re a good team and we all know what we’re doing.’

Yet my heart was beating fast as I called for the bill.

During the afternoon I felt slightly sick and anxious, probably prompted by Heja’s comment. Why was I sitting in my glass-panelled office with piles of work on my desk, acting the editor? Why had I even gone for the promotion? I just wanted to get home to Billy and hold him close. As the day wore on it was as if the umbilical cord had never been cut and I was being tugged back to his sweet-smelling head and strong-sucking mouth. I was still breastfeeding every evening when I got back from work. I took out his photograph from my bag and looked at his dear little face and my breasts started to tighten and tingle. Then I put it on the side and pulled the production schedule over.

Karen, the production manager, came into my office and sat down at the meeting table. As I walked over to her I noticed she was looking up at me oddly.

Aisha, my assistant, came in at that moment and said, ‘What have you spilled on yourself?’

I looked down. Two wet circles had formed on the front of my shirt. My breasts had leaked.

APRIL

I have a dark green convertible with pale grey leather seats and I take great pleasure in it. It is one of the ways I have been kind to myself. She left work before me. As I walked towards my car I thought about how she was at our lunch. There had been something coarse about the way she had tucked into that pasta. She likes her food too much. If she is not careful she will run to fat in middle age. Her attention has also fragmented. She used to be more focused.

The car door is heavy but the engineering is so perfect that it glides open and allows me to slide into my seat. I lock the doors and turn on my CD player. I am working my way through every version of Rachmaninov’s four piano concertos. I am seeking the perfect recording of each one. For the third it is Martha Argerich’s tour de force in Berlin in 1982. She brings out the darkness as well as the wild ecstasy of Rachmaninov.

I drive home over Waterloo Bridge. I like to see the buildings at night with their lights reflected in the river. I admire the brutal bulk of Lasdun’s National Theatre. The British are too timid about architecture and they criticized his achievement. They are wrong. His building will outlive its critics. Architecture is the most important thing in the world. We spend our lives in buildings. We are born in them. We grow in them. We make love in them. We work and think in them. Usually we die in them. Buildings stand after we have died. Buildings can get sick, like us, but only if the architect has been stupid or lazy or greedy. Great buildings live long and noble lives.

My lover, Robert, is coming round this evening. The sex is good and it helps me to sleep. I never let him stay the night with me. He has accepted this as one of my quirks, which he is prepared to humour. Robert is highly sexed. I think he is quite turned on by the idea that he comes to my flat for sex and then has to leave. He never showers afterwards. He just dresses and goes. He told me he likes my smell on him when he gets back to his flat.

He is American and recently qualified as a psychoanalyst. I cannot imagine going to see him as a patient, though. His manner is too sincere. He likes to be liked and I cannot see him having the right level of aloofness to become a great analyst. He has come to analysis late. He tells me that age is an advantage in an analyst. It is a job you get better at as you get older. You can still practise when you are eighty, he said. He had no idea what pain it gave me when he said that. The skin on his face is pockmarked and his lips are fleshy. When you look at him your eyes are drawn to his large dark brown eyes, which are serious and thickly lashed, like a child’s. He is always trying to draw me out. He does not do this in an obvious way. He rarely asks me a direct question.

Instead he will say, ‘Just now when I mentioned my father’s death you looked so sad.’ He waits for me to fill the silence that is vibrating between us. He wants a revelation from me and I say nothing. Early in our relationship, frustrated by my reserve, he asked me if I had ever been in analysis.