The Sick Rose (22 page)

He got to his feet as the bus swung under the Hammersmith flyover. She curled into a ball as he rounded the top of the spiral staircase, close enough to touch, but he didn’t give her a second glance. Louisa misjudged the step down and had to grab onto a passer-by to stop herself falling into the gutter. It took half a minute to convince the middle-aged woman that she wasn’t trying to mug her, during which time the city had swallowed him. Hammersmith was not as familiar to her as it used to be; the big roundabout was a building site, an office block half-built on top of the Tube station. A pneumatic drill struck up and confused her senses. The pavements were swarming with pedestrians – shoppers, office workers, and pensioners – milling in all directions. He could be anywhere. She almost screamed his name.

Eventually she saw him on a traffic island opposite the Odeon, hostage to the red man. Despite its name, the Hammersmith Odeon wasn’t a cinema any more but a huge theatre that staged gigs for bands at the other end of the career ladder than Glasslake. Did being so near to such a prestigious venue inspire Adam, daunt him or make him bitter? She would give anything for an hour’s access-all-areas pass to the inside of his mind. The row of front doors were all closed. Adam walked past these, into a little side yard between the Odeon and the back entrance of a shabby pub with a peeling mural of a toucan on the wall. By the time she had made it over the three pedestrian crossings that divided her from him, he had disappeared behind a barricade of silver beer kegs. Heavy with sweat, hood still up, Louisa walked the length of the yard twice. The only place he could have gone was through a side door of the Odeon marked
Staff Only
. A keypad kept her out.

What did it mean? Had the band made some breakthrough he hadn’t told her about? Had she misjudged him? She barely had time to consider her new questions before the side door opened and he came out. She crouched behind the beer kegs. Adam was wearing a pale blue tabard, the kind tea-ladies wear, and in either hand he had a black bin liner full of rubbish that he lobbed into the dumpsters lining the wall. Louisa tried to deal with what she was seeing. A minute or so later he emerged again, this time carrying a mop and bucket. What she saw broke her heart and fixed it at the same time. No wonder he was secretive and ashamed; he was sweeping the stage he should have been treading. It would not be lack of trust but an excess of pride that made him hide it from her. She held her breath; for him to spot her now would be disastrous. Something about the sight of him in dirty overalls made her love him more than ever. She would wait for the right time to tell him she knew about his secret job. Perhaps she never would. It was such an innocent secret.

She waited until she was back on the Hammersmith Road to take her hood off. The spring breeze on her face was the sweetest relief she had ever known. The only pity was that he had not felt he could tell her himself, but that would come, that level of trust and intimacy would come if only she could resist the temptation to force it.

She could tell that Dev was at the mews before she opened the front door; the smell of spices and garlic and onions curled down from the extractor fan. Dev’s cooking was the best thing about him. Yesterday she wouldn’t have been able to stomach his food but today she had second helpings of the vegetarian curry, then thirds. He was having a good-natured argument with Nick about how a little bit of ghee didn’t hurt anyone in moderation. Nick was intransigent in his defence of sunflower oil and the benefits of polyunsaturated fat. Whatever this was cooked with got Louisa’s vote: she ladled the third helping onto her plate.

‘It’s nice to see you eating properly,’ said Nick. ‘You know, if you want to lose weight the best thing is balanced diet and exercise. Starvation diets only lead the body to lose water and muscle, not burn fat. You’ve still got that gym membership whenever you want it.’

‘I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you just give me the money and I can go clubbing? Dancing’s exercise.’

‘Nice try, but I don’t think swaying gently to The Sisters of Mercy after six pints of cider counts,’ said Leah. ‘You’re in a good mood today. What’s his name?’

‘Ha bloody ha,’ said Louisa. She shot Miranda a warning glance but her sister did not seem in the mood for point-scoring: rather, she was looking at her with an almost parental concern. The problem with Miranda was that she would never understand any relationship that wasn’t exactly like her own.

Because she was no longer waiting for his call, it came. This time, her breezy tone was not an affectation.

‘Is everything all right?’ said Adam, ‘You seem a bit distant.’

If by distant he meant that she wasn’t begging to see more of him, he was right. It worked in a way that fake calm never did, because he invited her to come and watch him rehearse in the Shepherd’s Bush studio the following day. Heavy with the opiates of satisfied curiosity and spiced carbohydrates, she stretched out on her bed. She was asleep within minutes.

Chapter 29

November 2009

Paul awoke with a jolt, remembered, disbelieved, then looked two inches to his left for confirmation of the truth. Louisa was still now but a couple of hours ago she had been everywhere at once. The thing he couldn’t get over was the
movement
. Was that how it was supposed to be? It was the opposite of his rigid experience with Gemma. Not that that meant it had been good. The opposite of bad sex, he now knew, was just a different kind of bad sex. Of course it had been intensely pleasurable, at least for ten seconds, but he knew he hadn’t performed well or even understood what was happening for much of it. He had come here because he had wanted to tell someone about Daniel; he had sought an ear and got a whole body.

His mouth was dry; he peered around the room for some water. It was lit only in patches by several old-fashioned, health-and-safety-contravening oil lamps that stood about on tables and ledges. He was pretty sure they had already been burning when she let him in. He could smell their faint petroleum odour and that sickening eggy gas smell, too. These were overlaid with the strange herbal scent that seemed to follow Louisa wherever she went. He saw no bottles or jugs of water, just books on every surface. There was a ledge stacked with them directly by his head. They weren’t normal books like the ones he enjoyed; the shapes, sizes and covers were all wrong and they had titles like
Grow Your Own Drugs
and
A History of Women in the Garden
.

Throwing off at least two duvets and a slippery counterpane, he got out of bed. Immediately his skin goosefleshed. He made his way over to the pull-down table and felt its surface for a glass or bottle. There was a framed formal photograph of her with a girl who must be her sister, both of them wearing saris, and a dozen curling snapshots of two dark-eyed, curly-haired children were Blu-tacked to the peeling veneer walls. Still there was no water. Dozens of bottles lined the shelves but they were strange undrinkable potions, from large plastic containers to smaller ones with oily labels. Here was where the strange smell was at its sweetest.

At last, in the murky depths of the back of the caravan, he found a tinny little sink with a tap. He put his mouth underneath the tap to drink and misjudged: the water clattered noisily into the basin. Paul turned the tap off quickly, and looked over at Louisa. She didn’t seem to have stirred. He tripped over a fat wormy pipe which supplied the gas fire that dominated this half of the van. Its surface was slightly warm but it gave out no heat.

Cold and exhaustion suddenly got the better of him and he slipped back under the covers. Louisa’s body was a combination of spongy flesh and unyielding muscle and her skin was the softest thing he had ever touched. He wondered if she would want to do it again in the morning. The thought thrilled and terrified him. Despite his thirst, he felt a faint pressing in his bladder and knew he’d have to piss before he could fuck again. On the horns of this eternal dilemma, he went back to sleep.

Louisa heard the water attack the sink and felt Paul get back into bed but she played dead until his breathing became slow and even. What had she been
thinking
? She reflected on the men she had been with since leaving London: until now she had chosen her partners well, her unerring instinct for physically
simpatico
lovers only growing sharper with age. The men had had little in common but their sex, she had known brown skin and white skin, middle-aged flesh and young, although never this young. None had suspected that, when it all happened, she would close her eyes and pretend it was Adam on top of her, underneath her, behind her, inside her. Like the ritual, she knew that it was an absurd, almost dangerous compulsion, but she couldn’t resist feeling close to him again. And anyway, it was the only way she could come.

The proxy lust she felt for Paul had been building for so long that it had not occurred to her that being with him would be less than perfect. She had been expecting the impossible, she saw that now; the resurrection of the dead. The first kiss had been promising but he had floundered as things progressed. When she had had Adam’s likeness in her arms, she could open her eyes to the image but not close her other senses. Afterwards there had been a brittle silence in the room and the facts presented themselves to her like a list of criminal charges: he was young, he was vulnerable, he was inexperienced, perhaps to the point of virginity, she was old enough to be his mother, and though not his employer she had a duty of care to him that did not extend this far under any interpretation of the phrase. He was also the first man – the first
person
– she had allowed into her caravan, the first man in her home since Laurence and only the second since Adam, and in doing so she had put herself in a position of weakness. She should have hidden, never opened the door to him, but she had heard his voice and thought – what? That it was a sign? That it was fate? Inwardly she chastised herself for allowing her grief and a stupid romantic notion (and the drink) to get the better of her. It could not happen again. All she could do at this stage was think of damage limitation strategies, but none were forthcoming.

Paul rolled over onto his back and, despite herself, something in Louisa stirred. He
was
beautiful, and ridiculously young – how long had it been since she had lain with a boy like this, smooth flesh with the skin over his abdomen as tight as a tambourine? The more she looked at him, the less like Adam he seemed. Crop the black hair that fell in his eyes even when he was asleep and she might never have noticed a resemblance in the first place.

Without his back story it was impossible to know the truth about him. How long had he known where she lived? Had he been to the van before? If so, this either made him touchingly sincere or horribly calculating. She forced herself to remember that no one at Kelstice had a clean past, although not everyone had their transgressions carefully documented in Demetra’s files. How many days or weeks had he been keeping her secret? (Her secondary secret, of course, for no one knew about the primary one apart from the Other Man and he had his own reasons for keeping quiet.)

The next time she woke up the hands on her alarm clock glowed a pale green 6 a.m. It would not get light for another hour or so but she knew she would not go back to sleep; on a weekday, she would be up by now. She wrapped herself in her moon-and-stars coverlet, tiptoed to the washroom, pulled the door behind her with the softest of clicks. She had got used to the volume of the chemical toilet flush. Now, she heard it through her guest’s ears. There was no way he could have slept through that.

He hadn’t. He was sitting up as she came in, his hair having doubled in size in the night.

‘Can I go to the toilet, please?’ he said, like a five-year-old in class.

‘Of course you can.’

He cupped his hands over his groin and sidled into the washroom without meeting her eye. She heard him splashing about with soap and water and wondered if he was using her toothbrush. When he came back, he took a mincing little run at the bed before hiding himself under the covers. This time he did look at her, as though he was waiting for her to tell him what to do. It was obvious that she was going to have to steer this situation and she had absolutely no idea how to begin. To buy herself thinking time, she fell back on the time-honoured English strategy for alleviating social excruciation.

‘Um. Would you like a cup of tea?’ she said.

‘Yes please.’

She busied herself about the small ceremony, glad of the engulfing steam and the roar of the boiling water.

‘How do you take it?’

‘Milk and two sugars, please.’

‘Oh. I haven’t got any sugar, how awkward.’

She thought that his burst of laughter surprised him as much as her. ‘What’s funny?’

‘Well. You’ve woken up with one of your staff. Lack of sugar isn’t the awkward bit.’

She joined in his laughter and then looked at the bed. ‘Do you mind if I . . .?’

‘It’s your bed,’ he said, but threw back the covers prop­rietorially. She got in but didn’t take her blanket off and they drank their tea in self-consciously chaste companionship.

‘I’m sorry,’ they both said at the same time. She was taken back to their first meeting at the top of the knoll; then, as now, it had been all mutual apologies and brittle tension.

‘What for?’ he asked.

‘Jumping on you like that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really give you much choice in the matter.’