Our House(62)

Because there’d be a third and a fourth and a fifth, that was why not. I extinguished the bathroom light and, with it, the thought.

‘Oh, Ali, it’s so beautiful here,’ Merle was saying, when I returned downstairs. Kirsty was supervising bedtime, the kids in rows of blow-up beds under the eaves. Bingo, Kirsty’s spaniel, and Alison’s Lab Rocky had passed out on the rug in the sitting room, no one fully sure what they might have ingested during the festivities.

‘We all helped make it nice,’ Alison said, surveying the debris over the top of her Prosecco glass.

‘Not the party stuff, the whole house. I wish I had your eye.’

Merle had never been a house-proud type; not like Alison with her on-trend paint finishes and dawn raids on New Covent Garden Market for her flowers. I remember seeing Merle once trimming her fingernails with kitchen scissors, brushing the cuttings onto the floor. She’d exit the kitchen with handfuls of G & Ts and turn off the light switch with her nose. She was spontaneous, playful, with a joie de vivre I’d always envied.

Still do.

As she took a deep gulp of wine, as if quenching thirst with a soft drink, I noticed the liquid in her flute was more effervescent than ours, bubbles leaping from the surface. ‘You’re not drinking, Merle?’

She pulled a face: the game was up. I sensed that she might have denied it had it been one of the others who’d asked. ‘Sparkling elderflower,’ she confessed.

‘Just this glass or the whole time?’

She shrugged.

‘You snake,’ Alison gasped. ‘I can’t believe you’ve infiltrated our nest. What’s going on?’

‘Nothing exciting,’ Merle said, ‘I’ve just been going sober in October.’

‘Why? The charity thing?’

‘Not exactly. Maybe, I just liked the rhyme?’

Alison snorted. This was too silly for Merle and she knew we knew that.

‘I’m never going sober,’ I said. I had an ancient instinct to protect her from further interrogation. ‘And I don’t care if Shakespeare said it in iambic pentameter . . .’

‘Oh, but you’re in a new relationship,’ Alison said. ‘That’s always a time of intoxication – in all senses of the word.’

I chuckled. ‘In my experience, it’s the old relationships that drive us to drink.’

Alison’s eye returned to Merle, who gazed past her to the clotted black world beyond the window.

‘Well, at least this is the last day of the month,’ Alison said, sighing.


Bram, Word document

After Rav and his sidekick had gone, I poured myself a vodka large enough to stun a farm animal and took a shower to scrub away the day’s toxins. The ingratiation and the avarice. The cold sweats. The strain. I’d arranged what I knew would be at best a distraction, at worst the introduction into my freakshow existence of another variable, another complication, another opportunity for regret.

The doorbell rang. In the hall mirror I looked passably human, if you didn’t peer too closely.

‘What a beautiful house, Bram!’ my guest exclaimed. She wore black – for sex not for mourning – but it might have been the latter as far as I was concerned.

‘Funnily enough, you’re not the first to say that today,’ I said. I could tell there was something weird going on with my face, not as bad as once before, in front of Fi, when I’d thought I was having a stroke, but bad enough for my guest to notice.

‘What’s the matter? You look upset. Has something happened?’

‘No, nothing.’ A smile, the broadest I could muster, pushed the cracks to the edges. ‘Just a tiring day. Come in and let’s have a very large drink.’

‘I like a man with a plan,’ Saskia said.

*

‘The clocks go back tonight,’ she said later, in bed, and it was inevitable that I would wish they could go back far longer than an hour. That they could take us back to September, undo everything that had been done. Maybe earlier than that. How much earlier? When I’d slept with that girl from work years ago, perhaps. Was that when the bindweed had started to grip?

Jodie, she was called. She was young, only twenty-three or something crazy like that. I remember the feeling I had as I drove home from the hotel the next day, not guilt – at least not real guilt, as I now know it – but more a need to acknowledge my own disgrace. To mark the passing of one era to the next.

‘If you could choose, how far would you turn back the clock?’ I asked Saskia. ‘I don’t mean hours, I mean months or even years. Where would you stop?’

‘I wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t do regret. Seriously, it’s one of my life philosophies. Don’t look at me like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like you’ve suddenly realized I’m an alien.’

‘You’re not the alien,’ I said. ‘I am.’

I kissed her again, not only because that was why she was here but also to end the conversation, which was getting maudlin and in danger of giving me away. She must have sensed some new element of yearning, though, because she broke off and said, ‘What is this, Bram?’

‘What’s what?’

‘This. Tonight.’

Oh God. Already. ‘What do you want it to be?’ I said.