Someone Else's Shoes(17)
She takes off the jacket and tosses it onto the bed, then washes her face and arms thoroughly with the cheap soap. She checks the thin, slightly rough towels—apparently laundered—then dries off with them. She sees herself in the mirror, her hair still scraped back in the ponytail from her shower at the gym, her face free of makeup. She looks ten years older, furious, exhausted. She sits on the edge of the bed (hotel bedspreads make her shudder. Have you seen what shows up under ultraviolet light?) and waits for Magda to call.
* * *
? ? ?
“He says somewhere low key and busy so that he doesn’t attract attention. He is worried about Ari finding out. He wants to meet in a British pub.”
“A pub. Okay.” She remembers a pub she had stopped outside to refasten the awful shoes. “The White Horse. Tell him to meet me at the White Horse. How will I know who he is?”
“He knows what you look like. He will find you. He says you must be there from eight p.m.”
“Eight o’clock tonight? That’s four hours away. Can’t he get here sooner?”
“He says eight o’clock. He will be there with what you want. Wait inside. He will find you.”
Nisha stares at the carpet. Her voice, when it emerges, is less confident. “Can I trust him, Magda? Do we know what he has?”
There is a short silence.
“He says he will be there, Mrs. Cantor. I just tell you what he told me.”
* * *
? ? ?
It takes sixteen paces to go fully backward and forward around the bed in the little room. It is thirteen hundred and forty-eight paces before she finally stops. Her heart is racing, a Rolodex of thoughts spinning as she registers what Carl has done, what he has tried to do to her. She has witnessed Carl’s ruthlessness with his business enemies, the way he would summarily bring down a guillotine on even long-standing relationships without turning a hair. One minute they were embedded in the inner circle, lunched handsomely, lent a driver or consulted over late-night cognac with jokes and bonhomie, the next it was as if they had simply been erased. He would pick up and drop people as they suited him, and it was as if he could barely remember their names afterward. Carl has never worried about parking tickets, legal problems or employment tribunals. He always says that’s why he employs other people, to sort out life’s “messes.”
She realizes that she, his wife, has suddenly morphed into one of his messes.
There is a tight knot in Nisha’s stomach that just keeps getting tighter, as if someone were pulling a cord around her waist. Every time she stops walking, she feels as if she can’t breathe properly, as if the air won’t reach the bottom of her lungs. She needs a drink, but she doesn’t want to drink the water (what might be lurking in those pipes?), and she doesn’t want to leave the room to get a bottled water in case Magda calls, so she deliberates and finally makes herself an instant coffee, boiling the kettle three times with fresh water before she feels safe drinking it. (She had once watched a Morning Show item when they said some guests had used kettles to boil-wash their underwear. It had actually given her nightmares.)
And what was she going to tell Ray? He’d have to know eventually, of course. They would concoct some mealy-mouthed statement about people changing, not being able to live together any more, but Mummy and Daddy still loved each other blah-blah-blah. Carl would probably get a lawyer to write his. And she would have to put on a brave face, pretend that this was what she had wanted too. Make it as easy and light as possible so that Ray could cope with it.
Who was it? That’s the question, a drumbeat running through her head underneath every new thought. She runs through a mental list of eligible women who had raised her internal red flag in the past months: a little too much attention, a casual hand on an arm at a fundraising dinner, a whispered joke through heavily glossed lips. There were always women, and she has watched them carefully, always closely monitoring the vibrations in the atmosphere. She had known something was off, but she couldn’t think who might be behind it. Or that Carl, reliably—sometimes annoyingly—libidinous, was suddenly tired more often than he was not. It wasn’t that she enjoyed the morning attentions she was obliged to give him, but it unnerved her more when they stopped. She never asked him what was wrong—she was not the kind of woman to be needy—but she’d bought new, outrageous, lingerie, and taken charge of matters when he got back from his last trip, using tricks she knew he couldn’t resist. He was less tired then. Of course he was. But even as she held him in the sweaty aftermath there was something different, a discordant note humming away in the background. She had known, oh, she had known, and that was what had finally persuaded her to seek insurance.
Well, thank God she had.
She’s hungry. That’s not unusual: Nisha has been hungry her whole adult life (you think you could maintain a figure like hers otherwise?). But she thinks back and realizes suddenly that she has eaten nothing at all today. She goes to the tray with the plastic kettle and there, in a brightly colored wrapper, are two packets of cheap cookies with something unidentifiable and creamy in them. She scans one of the little packets suspiciously. Carbs have been the enemy for so many decades that it requires a huge mental leap to persuade herself that on this occasion she needs to consume them. God, what she really wants is a cigarette. She hasn’t wanted a cigarette for five years, but she would actually kill for one right now.