The Things We Do to Our Friends(42)

The west of Edinburgh wasn’t for us. It was too corporate: chain shops and towering office blocks bleeding into cheap sandwich shops, into conference centers, into expensive hotels with gyms and no signs because the people who went to them didn’t need the directions.

At one of these gyms, Tom Landore engaged in an extremely thorough, timed stretching routine every Wednesday evening, one I associated with someone who had an unhealthy obsession with injury prevention. Tabitha assured me that this was just an occupational hazard of being old. In her head, erratic behavior presented by anyone over the age of thirty-five could be explained by them being very old.

Afterward, he enjoyed an aggressive match of squash against another man of a similar age. After forty minutes of sweaty, swearing play, he had a shower for precisely five minutes—icy cold for the final two—then retreated to the sauna for twenty minutes. This was despite the fact he had one at home where he could bask like a fat seal on a rock. After his sauna, he dressed before leaving on the dot at 8 p.m.

All of this came through the filter of Imogen, and who knew how she had quite so much detailed intel. She used the term fat seal gleefully as she passed on her biting assessment. I couldn’t tell if her disgust was aimed at him or at me.

The first time I met him, he entered and sat down with a nod. I imagined the almost pleasurable soreness in his neck, in his back, the muscles worked right to the brink of exhaustion.

He closed his eyes, moving his neck to one side and then to the other.

I thought he would be leery, panting on me with hot breath, but, of course, it wasn’t like that at all. He maintained perfect etiquette in the sauna, following a protocol that I didn’t know existed. I’d never been into a spa before. In France I was too young, in Hull I was too poor, and in Edinburgh I was too busy.

There was no one else in the sauna, and he gave me a quick smile and sat opposite me at a respectful distance. My hair was tied up tightly in a bun and I wore a plain black one-piece. I didn’t look like Eve Landore, that was for sure. Hair stripped back from my face and no makeup. I leaned inward to the hot coals, where a bucket of water sat with a ladle poking from the top.

“Do you mind?” I asked, even though I felt like I was melting almost immediately, because I wasn’t used to it.

He opened one eye lazily.

“Absolutely not,” he replied, letting out a deep sigh and relaxing back in the heat.

I poured.

“I like it as hot as possible,” I said, not flirtatiously, just factually. Also a lie.

“Me too.” His eyes were closed again. “Pump out all the toxins.”

He grunted and tried to tuck his foot under his inner thigh. Tabitha would have known the proper name for this silly-looking stretch.

I tried not to make a face. Men always seemed so confident about stretching anywhere, positions that I would never contort myself into in public.

“Yes.” I cocked my head to the side. A gesture stolen from Tabitha. “What have you been playing?”

“Oh, just a friendly game of squash.”

“Well, I hope you won.”

He opened both eyes now. He seemed to want to converse.

“Indeed, I did.” In future conversations, I would always ask him, and he would always say he won, which wasn’t true.

“Enjoy your sauna.”

I left, making sure to close the door firmly.

And that was it. The first time I met Tom Landore. For him, it was probably an entirely forgettable experience, one he’d had many times before—a girl, a few words, and nothing more. The challenge for me was to make it more.

I showered and met Tabitha and Ava outside, where we walked together.

The next time I was there again in the sauna he gave me a nod of acknowledgment. I introduced myself and so did he.

“Looks like you really do like the heat,” he commented.

And so, Tom Landore and I began.





34


The things I learned about Tom Landore over the coming weeks rose like steam from the coals, the words teased out in the dim sauna. A very hot and clammy form of therapy.

He hated his job. It was boring and his colleagues didn’t appreciate him. His underlings were lazy or rude; they didn’t follow the simplest of directions. His boss was a nightmare; she asked far too much of him and she didn’t appreciate him either—if anything, she took the credit for his ideas and passed them off as her own. His wife was always so distracted; she didn’t care about anything apart from the house and the children (surely there were other things in life, deeper things to care about?). The children had somehow turned out to be very expensive and they expected so much. Everything had been so easy for them and he wondered if he’d been too soft? The schools he’d sent them away to had made them grasp for more—for ski lessons and ugly, expensive trainers. He didn’t know if he liked what they’d become but felt guilty to say it, to even think it, because it was probably his fault. He couldn’t believe he was saying it to me, a stranger. He blushed deeply when he called me a stranger. He was at the age where he was starting to understand that there were some things he wouldn’t ever do, things he didn’t even necessarily want to do, oddly creative ambitions like becoming an actor, but still, it was upsetting that these thoughts, these possibilities, were no longer viable. It wasn’t pessimistic to say it was too late, it was just realistic, and he wasn’t sure when that had happened, the day when things had changed. These aren’t things you can talk about. They’re not things anyone talks about.