Beneath the Skin(76)
Sophie propped herself up and examined her face with a grin.
‘You need to practise. Haven’t you tried doing it yourself? With your fingers. Everyone else does.’ Her green eyes were mischievous and mocking. She slipped a hand down between Antonia’s thighs, into her panties and touched. Soft but firm. ‘Like this? And this? Use spit if you’re dry.’
‘Stop!’ Antonia declared. But it was too late. Like static electricity she’d felt it and Sophie had seen. Sophie knew.
Antonia flips on to her belly on the king-sized bed, her body goosebumped, although she’s so hot. The closest she ever came to feeling that frisson was with the razor blade. Her Friday night treat. Until the night of David’s death. As inappropriate as it was, she had felt it then. Desire. Lust. Growing and swelling inside her. Mike had held her when she cried and she’d felt it then, like a spreading blaze. She wanted him to fuck her, to take her and fuck her. But it was only a craving, a thought, a feeling. She would never act on it. David was dead. Olivia was her friend.
There have been moments when she’s caught a flash, a dark glint of connection in Mike’s eyes when he’s looked at her. But it’s happened so fleetingly that she doesn’t know, she isn’t sure. He’s always brought Rachel with him too. Which is fine, she is lovely. Mike is just caring and kind, like a brother, like a father. Isn’t he? Then there’s Olivia. Nice Mumsy Olivia. Olivia her friend who she wouldn’t betray. Until yesterday, at the wake. When she passed Sami and Olivia in the kitchen. When she clearly heard their conversation.
Olivia isn’t asleep. She was awake when Mike climbed into bed late last night. His breath became deep and slow the moment his head touched the pillow. The innocent sleep, she thought, as she continued to stare at images through her closed eyelids. ‘Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care.’
She wonders if she’s slept at all. The same pictures are still here this morning. That of Sami naked. Sami smiling. Sami declaring his love. But she feels cold and dispassionate. She doesn’t recognise the woman in the images. The woman who’s so gluttonous and uninhibited, the woman who fucked her husband’s close friend in her marital bed for weeks. Moments of madness? On another planet? Frailty? Yes frailty, she thinks. That woman has succumbed to flattery and she despises her for it.
Olivia writes the newspaper article behind her closed eyes. ‘Counsel for the defence argued that the respondent was at a low point in her life. She’d recently miscarried a baby. Her husband had become remote. She suspected him of having an affair. She felt unattractive and ignored. She no longer worked and felt she’d lost her identity. It was therefore inevitable that, subjected to a sustained onslaught of compliments and flattery, she would revert to the frailty of all womankind.’
Though hardly justification for what she’s done, it’s true. Yet if she’s honest, it wasn’t just a silly woman’s frailty, it was also deliberate and vengeful. Like that Old Testament God. If Mike was having an affair with Judith, then why shouldn’t she? Who better than one of his closest friends? Poetic justice, she thought at the time. Which was wrong. Wrong on any level, she knows.
Divine retribution and wrath. That woman tempted fate and must now face the consequences.
Sami is in the tiny walled garden of his townhouse, listening to the discordant peal of St James’s church bells. A wedding, he assumes. A couple’s happy day, a thought that he quickly dismisses.
The perimeter of the garden is lined with high red-brick beds filled with plants he can’t name. They’re bowed, losing their leaves or their colour, looking to Sami as though they’re dying a slow death.
He rakes up the fallen leaves in his hands wearing Sophie’s Marigolds, then snips off the protruding bare branches with secateurs, carefully picking up the spiky twigs and putting them in a black bin liner. Pruning makes him feel like his dad. ‘Preparing for life after death,’ as he puts it. Sami thinks he’ll call him later and have a chat. ‘Hey, Dad. Guess what I’ve been doing. How’s the leg?’
He knows his dad’s been lucky, really. A relatively small stroke, affecting just his left side. And only seven months ago, so still room for improvement. But his personality has changed from the gregarious successful barrister he was to a moody recluse stuck at home with too many women. Or maybe he’s just depressed. Sami has never been depressed. Miserable as a boy, granted, but never depressed. He vaguely understands that it can happen with illness and stress, when life goes awry. But he misses the old dad very much. As a child he would go to him in his study, even when it was forbidden, to escape the smother of Martha’s love. He’d sit there in silence, reading a comic or playing with a toy, while his dad read his brief for court the next day. Nothing was ever said, but Sami felt his father understood how difficult it was to sever the tie of Martha’s intense maternal love. To grow from fat boy to man, when he really wanted to be a mummy’s boy forever.
It could so easily have been Dad in that coffin, he thinks as he crouches down. He scoops up a fistful of soil, letting it slip back to the ground through his fingers.
Thank God David didn’t have children. Losing a father must be unbearable, even when you’re supposed to be a man. Sami has thought a lot about David since the funeral, more than he imagined he would. It’s the end of an era. There’ll be no more dinner parties at White Gables. Friday in the pub will never be the same. There’ll be no more banter between them. No more soft jibes.