The Love of My Life(53)

‘They’re not eating out of my hand! Don’t be ridiculous!’

Jill went off to wee, muttering about taking lessons.

I realised she wasn’t entirely wrong when I returned to the group. A fight broke out about who was going to sit next to me, and, without any conscious plan to do so, I found myself leading a conversation that had everyone in stitches.

The ability to charm strangers is one of many things you learn as a military child. You need to be fearless and funny when you start in a new schoolroom – and there are many new schoolrooms – but you also need to seem as if you don’t care at all.

I didn’t really know any other way of being. Not then.

Jeremy came up to me at the bar when it was my round. ‘Sorry,’ he said, with the sort of indulgent smile that suggested he wasn’t sorry at all. ‘Pack of beasts, aren’t they?’

If anything, I’d say he was proud of them. He looked oddly familiar, I thought, but I couldn’t quite place him.

There was Jeremy, there were two Hugos – ‘fat Hugo’ and ‘twat Hugo’, a Briggs and a David. Jeremy told me they’d graduated ten years ago but came back annually for a ‘boys’ weekend’. He told me he worked for the BBC, in London. He was attractive and obviously intelligent. Unlike his friends, however, he wore his brainpower lightly: I rather liked him.

Jill and I drank hard. Jill was rolling out her foulest language, which was how she flirted – her secret weapon against girly girls. She spent a lot of time with one of the Hugos, but when he started chatting up a waif in a deerstalker, she barrelled off to talk to Briggs.

They flirted with me, too, but only one seemed determined to win. I felt his eyes on me, watched him dispatch his competitors one by one, and by midnight we were sitting above West Sands in the velvet darkness, hands inside each other’s clothes, the unseen sea pitching in and out. I told him what I was going to do to him later, and in that moment I entirely bought this version of myself.

He left my house at 6.45 in the morning. ‘I’ve got to get back to London,’ he said. ‘Train’s at 7.45 from Leuchars and I don’t even know where the others are.’

‘Do you have a mobile phone?’ I asked. I couldn’t afford one, but lots of other students were getting them.

He smiled, as if this was an adorable question. He was thirty; he lived and worked in London – of course he had a mobile phone. ‘I do, but it’s dead, and I don’t know my number. Give me yours and I’ll call.’

I scribbled our landline on a piece of paper, even though I doubted I’d hear from him again. Then I pulled my duvet around myself, luxuriously, as if this was the sort of thing I did all the time. ‘Well, see you! It was fun.’

Jill came into my room a few moments after he’d left. Mascara was flaking under her eyes, her pyjamas were stained with red wine.

‘Er, morning,’ she said. ‘Everything OK?’

I nodded, smiling.

She turned to look out of the window. ‘I’m afraid he’s married,’ she said, watching him walk up the street.

I sat up. ‘What? No he’s not!’

‘Oh, yes he is,’ she said, sitting on my bed. ‘Sorry to have to break this to you, Em.’

After a moment, when I realised she wasn’t joking, I closed my eyes. ‘No.’

‘Affirmative, I’m afraid. He told me last night.’

‘When?’ I stared at her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You didn’t ask him . . . ?’

‘What, if he was married?’

‘Er – yes?’

I shook my head. ‘No. I just . . . Isn’t it reasonable to assume a man’s single, if he’s trying to kiss you?’

Jill started laughing. ‘Do you know anything about men, Emily?’

‘Oh God. No.’

She nodded, sympathetically. ‘I take it you had sex?’

We’d been at it all night. ‘I wish you’d told me,’ I said, but I just sounded petulant.

‘When, Em? When was I meant to tell you? You two disappeared from the pub without warning! What was I supposed to do?’

I groaned. She was right.

‘Just tell me you used a condom!’

‘Of course,’ I said, miserably. ‘Oh, God, I feel horrible.’

She climbed in next to me. ‘It’s what’s commonly known as a bummer, Em. I’m sorry.’ She slid down the bed and pulled the duvet up over us. ‘I suggest we sleep it off and then go and eat several burgers.’

So that’s what we did. But she was in a strange mood all day, and I felt I’d somehow let her down.

He didn’t call, and I was relieved. It had been exciting, for a few hours, to feel wanted – to be willingly selected by someone older, someone at the helm of his own existence. But he had stood at an altar and said ‘I do’ to someone else, in front of all of their friends.

And had Jill not told me, I would never have known: that’s what made me really angry. No remorse. No quiet doubts. He had put himself inside my body, this married man, and his only thought had been of orgasm. His, mine, his again, mine again.

I thought about her often, as the days passed: his wife in London. Had he done this to her before? Did she know? Had she ever confronted him? Did they have some sort of arrangement?