In a Dark, Dark Wood(40)
‘Right, scuse I,’ Flo said with another yawn. ‘I’d better make a start on supper.’
‘Want a hand?’ Clare said, and Flo’s face lit up. Her smile was extraordinary – it transformed her whole face.
‘Really? I feel like you should be acting like the queen of the day.’
‘Nah, come on. I’ll chop or something.’
She heaved herself up off the sofa and they left the room, Clare’s arm slung companionably round Flo’s shoulders. Tom looked after them, as they left.
‘Funny couple, aren’t they?’ he said as they left the room.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘I can’t quite fit the Clare I know together with Flo. They’re so … different.’
The remark shouldn’t have made sense, given that they were so physically similar, and both dressed in an almost identical uniform of grey stonewash jeans and stripey top. But I knew what he meant.
Nina stretched. ‘They’ve got one really important interest in common though.’
‘What’s that?’
‘They both think Clare’s the centre of the f*cking universe.’
Tom snorted, and I tried not to laugh. Nina only looked sideways out of her glinting dark eyes, a little wry smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. Then she stretched, and shrugged, all in one fluid movement.
‘Right. I might phone the old trouble and strife.’ She pulled out her mobile and then made a face. ‘No reception. How’s yours, Lee?’
Nora. But there was only so many times I could correct people without seeming obsessively controlling.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and felt in my pockets. ‘That’s odd. It’s not here. I’m sure I had it at the shooting range – I remember checking Twitter. Maybe I left it in the car. I don’t think I’d have any reception either, though – I haven’t had a bar since I got here. You got a bit of reception from our room earlier, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah.’ Nina had picked up the phone receiver and was jiggling the cradle. ‘This one’s still out. OK. I’m going upstairs to hang off the balcony and try to get a bar or two. Maybe I can send a text.’
‘What’s so urgent?’ Tom asked.
Nina shook her head. ‘Nothing. Just … you know. I miss her.’
‘Fair play.’
We both watched as she disappeared upstairs, long legs eating up the stairs two at a time. Tom sighed and stretched out on the couch.
‘Are you not phoning Bruce?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘To tell the truth we had a bit of a … disagreement, let’s call it. Before I left.’
‘Oh right.’ I kept my voice neutral.
I never know what to say in these situations. I hate people prying into my business, so I assume others will feel the same way. But sometimes they want to spill, it seems, and then you look cold and odd, backing away from their confidences. I try to be completely non-judgemental – not pushing for secrets, not repelling confessions. And in truth, although part of me really doesn’t want to hear their petty jealousies and weird obsessions, there’s another part of me that wants to egg them on. It’s that part of me that stands there nodding, taking notes, filing it all away. It’s like opening up the back of the machine to see the crude workings grinding away inside. There’s a disappointment in the banality of what makes people tick, but at the same time, there’s a kind of fascination at seeing the inner coils and cogs.
The trouble is that the next day they almost invariably resent you for having seen them naked and unguarded. So I’m deliberately reserved and non-committal, trying not to lead them on. But somehow it doesn’t seem to work. All too often I end up pinned to the wall at parties, listening to a long tale of how so-and-so f*cked them over, and then he said this, and then she got off with him, and then his ex did that …
You’d think people would be wary of spilling to a writer. You’d think they’d know that we’re essentially birds of carrion, picking over the corpses of dead affairs and forgotten arguments to recycle them in our work – zombie reincarnations of their former selves, stitched into a macabre new patchwork of our own devising.
Tom, if anyone, should have known that. But it didn’t stop him. He was speaking now, his voice a bored drawl that didn’t disguise the fact that he was clearly still angry with his husband. ‘… What you’ve got to understand is that Bruce gave James his first big chance, he directed him in Black Ties, White Lies back in … God, what, we must be talking seven, eight years ago? And maybe – I mean, I don’t know – I never asked what went on, but Bruce wasn’t exactly renowned for his professional chastity. We weren’t together then of course. But naturally Bruce feels that James owes him a certain amount, and maybe equally naturally James feels that he doesn’t. I know that Bruce was pretty angry over the business with Corialanus and the fact that Eamonn sided with James … And then when those rumours got round about him and Richard, well, there was only one place those could have come from. Bruce swore he never sent that text to Clive.’
He carried on, a stream of names and places that meant nothing to me, and plays that had only the sketchiest impression in my own cultural landscape. The politics flowed over me, but the point was clear: Bruce was angry with James and had a past with him – of whatever kind. Bruce had not wanted Tom to come to this hen night. Tom had come.