Our House(33)

She was wearing skinny jeans and a very tight pink top. You could see the outline of her bra, the way the elastic cut into her skin, and dark spots under her arms – it was humid for late September, more like late summer. Her eyeliner had run and maybe her lipstick too. Even in repose her lips didn’t quite meet.

‘What?’ I said, seeing Rog watching me.

‘I’m not saying anything, mate.’ He winked. ‘By which I mean I’m not saying anything to Alison.’

‘You can say what you like. I’m a free agent.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yep. We’re both allowed to see other people, it’s agreed. Just not at the house.’

‘Which gives you, what, five nights a week on the pull?’

‘You think it’s that easy?’

Gunshots of laughter from a group of women at a table by the window saved me from answering. The woman I had my eye on was not with this group – she was younger, in her early-to mid-thirties.

‘Oh,’ Rog remembered, ‘Alison said the mums’ book group are meeting here. Not theirs, a rival one. You’d think they could confine that sort of thing to the kitchen.’

‘I know. Is nothing sacred any more?’

This was the shtick among us emasculated husbands (and soon-to-be-ex-husbands): faux old-school chauvinism. In the same spirit, when Rog headed for the door and I said I’d hang about for one for the road, he just grinned at me like it was the 1950s and boys will be boys.

I crossed the bar and, without asking, bought the girl another glass of the white wine she was drinking. Caught her eye and held it, bold but respectful. Twelve years of marital devotion (those two lapses notwithstanding) and it was as if I was a bachelor in my early thirties again. Maybe it was this easy – so long as I didn’t think about the horror, of course.

She told me her name was Wendy and she lived in Beckenham, had come to Alder Rise that evening to help a friend paint the kitchen of her new flat on Engleby Close.

‘She’s not out tonight?’

‘Was. She went home. It’s been a tiring day.’

‘You’re not too tired, then?’

‘Not yet.’ She made no attempt to mask her desire, leaning close as she spoke. ‘Were they your boys at the market the other day?’

‘Yep. Leo and Harry, a real pair of rascals.’

‘I thought they were cute.’

She had a South London accent, with a slight ‘f’ to her pronunciation of ‘th’ and an attractively grainy quality to it.

‘You got kids?’ I asked.

She rocked back slightly. ‘No.’

I made no reaction to this. In any case, she was as keen to get on with it as I was and after half an hour of small talk, we left. In the street, she slipped her arm through mine, the first physical touch between us. It was a relief that even in the grip of my situation I responded like a normal man.

There was no moon that night, I remember.

As we reached Trinity Avenue, she gave a tug of my arm as if to turn.

‘Why’re you going down there?’ I said.

‘I thought you said this is your street?’

‘No, I’m in the block of flats on the other side of the park. The white building.’

‘Oh, okay.’ She moved closer, mouth in my ear. ‘Lead the way, sir.’

‘We’ll walk through the park – if you’re not afraid I’ll molest you.’

Fi would have said I should be very careful making jokes like that these days, but Wendy did not. I had the distinct thought that I was free to choose different women now, that they didn’t have to be the Alder Rise kind, with their educated, entitled, post-feminist sensibilities. Obviously, pre-feminist was too much to hope for. (Joke.) The thought sent a backdraught of optimism, for a moment generalized but then narrowing into the instinct that I might have got away with that thing that day. In the space of a few hours I’d downgraded ‘horror’ to ‘situation’ to ‘that thing that day’, and I had that last pint or two to thank for it. I had Wendy.

‘Cool building,’ she said, when we arrived at Baby Deco.

‘Lower your expectations,’ I told her. ‘It’s just a rented studio. Kind of the caretaker’s quarters.’

‘Wow, you make it sound like quite the lair.’

We’d hardly closed the door behind us and we were falling on each other, kissing with unexpected force, and she was pulling at my clothes and groaning about what she wanted me to do to her and I had the brief, ungallant thought that the less attractive a woman was the better she tended to be at this bad-girl sort of thing, which worked, it really worked, and I thought just in time to push out of my sightline the novel Fi had left on the table by the bed and that only the previous night I had flicked through, imagining the same sentences flowing through her mind and making her frown. The idea that I should have done that was excruciating now.

Yes, this was long overdue.

‘Something on your mind?’ Wendy murmured.

‘Why?’

‘You seem a bit distracted.’

‘Sorry. Allow me to show how hard I’m concentrating.’

She laughed. I could see she was pleased with the repartee (if you could call it that), that she wanted to make something memorable of this encounter, and I played along because I couldn’t exactly announce that what I wanted was something utterly forgettable.