The Restoration of Otto Laird (20 page)

Neither said anything for quite some time. It was he who finally spoke into the darkness.

‘I apologised to Daniel. While reading him his bedtime story. I told him we could take his boomerang to the Heath this weekend.'

‘What did he say?'

‘He was very pleased. He kissed me on the cheek. He asked me if I would stay in London longer this time.'

A deeper silence.

‘I'm not sure you appreciate how difficult this is for me, Cyn. I, too, feel like smashing windows, sometimes. It's impossible. So many commitments. It takes up all the energy I have. I don't know how I became ensnared in this work. But if I pull out of the project now they would probably sue the partnership. I have to see it through. Once it's out of the way, things should be better. I'll be able to see more of the two of you, then.'

Cynthia, who had been lying totally still, stirred.

‘You've said that before, but it never seems to happen.'

She gripped a handful of coverlet, pulling it across her as she turned away.

Several minutes passed before Otto spoke again.

‘So what do we do?'

The clock ticked beside him.

‘Cyn? What do we do?'

She didn't answer. The clock was ticking. It appeared she had fallen asleep.

Nineteen

It started some months later, in the spring of 1974, while Otto was in Paris on business. Sandrine, a friend of Pierre's, was a lecturer in history at the Sorbonne. Mercantile capitalism was her speciality; capitalism in all its forms her enemy. Her radical views had hardened since the faltering of the student protests in 1968. She now believed that anarchism was the only way forward. Otto was fascinated, if a little alarmed, by the strength of her anger. She made a striking contrast to the people with whom he usually mixed these days. Sandrine, he suspected, would never want a conservatory.

They met one evening at a café in the Latin Quarter, the day after Otto first arrived in the city. He was staying at a modest apartment in the south-eastern corner of the 18th arrondissement, having turned down the chance of something plusher in the 1st. He wanted to free himself, if only for a few short weeks, from the pampered life to which he had become accustomed.

As he left his apartment on that warm spring evening and caught the Metro down to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he felt nervous and strangely excited, craving some kind of rupture from the routine and stress of the past few years. He was to find what he desired in his apartment in the 18th and, more especially, in Sandrine.

He remembered now that the discussion became quite heated, on that first night in the café. They were talking about 1968, and the reasons why the protests had failed to bring about fundamental changes in society.

‘What would you know about it?' Sandrine asked Otto, drawing deeply on her cigarette, blowing smoke into his face like an accusation. ‘All you have heard has come down to you second hand, through old footage and the words of journalists. What really happened on the streets back then is as distant from your own experience as the English Civil War. I was there – I was a part of it. I saw exactly what happened. Where were you when the revolutionary moment arrived?'

Pushing a pram around Hampstead Heath, Otto thought, but he stopped himself short of a confession. Instead he stuttered into an embarrassed silence. Pierre laughed at his crestfallen expression, at the degree to which the fight appeared to have drained from him.

‘Has the world of soft furnishings really softened you, too?' he asked, taking his usual swipe at Cynthia's fast-growing fabrics empire. ‘Ten years ago you would have risen to such a question, not blushed and stammered like today. You need to wake yourself up again, Otto; get that political consciousness of yours back into gear. Have you not seen what is happening around you in the world, these days? The Red Brigades – Baader–Meinhof: these are violent and uncompromising times we are living through. The stakes are high – capitalism is on the brink. The imperialists have been kicked out of Africa and Asia in the past few decades. Soon, perhaps, it will be time for them to face the music on their own soil. There simply isn't time, any more, for your polite English manners.'

Otto was annoyed by Pierre's ridiculous tough-guy act, adopted, he suspected, as a means of trying to impress Sandrine. He thought it over later as he stood at the urinals, a couple of drunken professors standing and swaying to either side of him.

Red Brigades – who is he trying to kid? Pierre is even softer than I am. He practically passed out when we struck that squirrel on the road to Orléans – he wanted us to take it to the local hospital. He would no more take a life, or support anyone who did so, than play a round of golf with Richard Nixon.

Sandrine, too, had irritated Otto – with her self-righteous swagger and the facefuls of cigarette smoke. Who were these people to start lecturing anyone? Pampered academics, protected from reality by the very state they claimed to oppose; biting the hand that fed them, but only so much. There they sat, talking revolution over an expensive bottle of Bordeaux.

Otto felt himself provoked in other ways, too. The conversation was stimulating; Sandrine's mind sharp. Somewhere in her early thirties, around ten years younger than Otto, she was teaching on a post-doctoral placement. Her thesis had been vivaed the year before and was already on its way to publication: an analysis of the early trading activities of the East India Company. During the course of the evening, she stared nonchalantly at Otto through heavy-lidded eyes, sizing him up as he spoke. Her tall frame was athletic; her short hair, almost a crop, emphasised the graceful line of her neck.

‘You're an interesting man,' she said, as they exchanged telephone numbers at the end of the evening, ‘A little uptight, maybe, but interesting.'

Kissing him on each cheek before parting, she allowed her fingers to brush across his chest.

The next day she called and asked him over to her apartment for dinner. She lived in Montparnasse, she told him – would he rather have meat or fish? Otto surprised himself at the swiftness with which he had accepted; almost pathetically grateful, it seemed to him later, and burying in advance all sense of guilt. As he was preparing for the evening ahead, his hands shook visibly as he ran them through his scalp before the bathroom mirror. The thick hair was greying now, but the body was reasonably well preserved. The silhouette of the younger man was just about recognisable; the profile squintable into flattery, as he checked the stomach and pectorals. Physically, at least, he had not transformed into a sad and bloated parody of himself.

Thinking of Sandrine, he once more felt hopelessly flattered – excited by the predatory nonchalance with which she had looked him over the evening before. She had worn a leather jacket and no make-up, he recalled; a plain white T-shirt with no brassiere. As he lay in the bath of his shabby apartment, soaking his private parts like a prospector panning for gold, Otto remembered the heated exchange that had developed between them, the great care with which he had avoided glancing down at her prominent nipples; sensing that, if he did so, she might just tear off his face.

Something new is happening, he thought, as he climbed from the bath and dressed for dinner.

All those soft lines and soft ideals of the 1960s had disappeared somewhere. A harder new mentality had arisen. Sandrine embodied it. But he hadn't noticed any of this; it caught him unawares. It hadn't yet reached as far as Hampstead.

Otto expected a one-night stand with Sandrine, but the affair lasted nearly two years. Or, to be more accurate, the one-night stand lasted nearly two years. There was no emotional attachment on either side, and therein lay its unexpected longevity. During Otto's stay in Paris, they met three times a week and made love to an abandoned, almost desperate tempo. She was demanding and experimental – everything, in fact, he had hoped for when shaking with anticipation before their first meal together. They were ferocious in their lovemaking, using each other up like a fossil-fuel reserve. Afterwards, they fell back onto the bed, exhausted, and worked their way through a packet of Gitanes. Drawing deep on his cigarette, Otto turned and blew smoke into Sandrine's upturned face. She had succeeded, by this time, in putting to flight all of his adopted English reserve.

Her pillow talk veered between the polemical and the personal, flitting around restlessly from one subject to the next. The OPEC crisis, industrial unrest at Renault, hunting for crabs with her brothers in Finistère. Otto struggled to follow her train of thought as he stubbed out his cigarette and drifted slowly from consciousness, the cool sheet sliding from his buttocks as he turned. But then he would feel her hand upon his stomach, her smoky tongue work inside his mouth, and it would start all over again.

He rarely stayed the night; or only occasionally, if it was too late to think of calling for a cab and easier to await the first Metro of the morning. Generally, Sandrine preferred to sleep alone. Otto did, too, but for different reasons. She never once asked him about his marriage, and he never asked her if there were other men – or women. It was something he had taken as read. Just once, she had discussed marriage with him, in a very general sense. As so often, it was for her a political issue.

‘It is the greatest barrier society must overcome,' she told him. ‘The notion of two human beings possessing each other – body and soul, in their entirety – has to be the craziest lie of them all.'

Otto understood what she meant – theoretically, at least. He knew the argument: the emergence of the nuclear family as an offshoot of industrial capitalism. The modern family unit, Sandrine explained to him, had developed from an economic imperative, the need to maximise productive efficiency, whatever the woolly-headed romantics of this world might choose to believe. At an abstract level, she might have had a point. But life was never lived out in the abstract. It was filled with all these people, getting in the way and staking their claim. Otto's life was filled with Cynthia, with the many events they had experienced, with and through each other over the course of the past two decades. It was also filled with Daniel, with the several Daniels they had already seen come and go during the first eight years of his life. Otto wanted to explain all this to Sandrine, to wave away the smoke that sometimes clouded her thoughts as well as her handsome face. But he felt too tired, too warm in the sheets that carried her scent; and besides, he didn't want to risk bringing his other life into this one. He didn't want to risk waking up.

Otto returned to the city regularly to see her, using as an excuse his connection with Pierre. He even kept on the rundown apartment in the 18th arrondissement, making it easier for them to meet whenever he was passing through the Gare du Nord on his way to somewhere else. For almost two years, Otto now conceded to himself, the betrayal of his family had been absolute.

No more excuses. You probably lapsed before Cynthia did, so face up to it.

Yet throughout the duration of the affair he had continually played odd games with himself, establishing little rules and regulations that, to him at the time, seemed to make his behaviour more acceptable. He had never once telephoned Cynthia from Sandrine's apartment, for instance – always returning to his own in order to do so. If he knew he would be speaking to Daniel, he wouldn't even phone home from his own apartment, associated as it was with the odd visit from Sandrine. Instead he would call up from a public booth, in the shadow of the Gare du Nord, feeding in the ten-centime coins and asking Daniel in a distracted voice about his day at school.

Strange, the games that conscience plays, he thought. Did it really make you feel any differently?

Evidently it did, because the affair came to an end only once the two worlds of Otto came into inevitable collision, some time in early 1976. Sandrine telephoned him at the house in Hampstead. He had no idea why, she had never done it before, and later he came to suspect it was her way of bringing the whole episode to a close.

If she was bored with me, he later asked himself, sexually or otherwise – then why didn't she tell me to my face?

Perhaps she was more squeamish regarding such matters than she liked to admit.

Otto had answered the telephone that evening, and there followed a minute or two of frantic and inarticulate whispers. He couldn't remember what was said, exactly, but Cynthia had been listening on the extension in the bedroom. As they passed in the corridor, she told him she would like a word about the conversation she had just overheard. He nodded and retired to the living room to await his sentence.

When putting Daniel to bed that evening, Cynthia was as smiling, attentive and patient with her son as ever. After tucking him in for the night and kissing him lightly on the forehead, she closed his bedroom door and descended the stairs, carefully closing two more intervening doors before passing through her study to the living room. Shutting that door, too, she walked calmly to the centre of the room where Otto sat waiting for her and let the rage explode from within her.

‘What the fuck has been going on?' she asked, not giving him the chance to attempt a preliminary apology. ‘Who the fuck was that woman? Just how long have you been fucking her? And what the fuck is she doing calling up my husband in our fucking home?'

Her voice cracked on the final three words; the fury spilling over.

Otto was chastened into silence by her wrath. The middle-aged fantasy he had been living out for the past two years came crashing down around his ears. So it was real, there were consequences. And there they were, in front of him. Cynthia was sobbing hard in her anger, but trying all the while to stop herself. She wiped her face in a matter-of-fact way that made it all the more difficult to watch. It was years since Otto had seen her so upset – not since their early days together, when there had been some silly argument and they had separated for a few weeks. But then they had been in their twenties. Cynthia was in her forties now. Seeing her in this distressed and undignified state both shocked and nonplussed Otto.