The Water Room(53)
Something will turn up soon, she thought, peering up into the scudding black world above the high-street rooftops. Something has to.
17
* * *
INFIDELITIES
She would always remember how strangely the day had begun.
A Krakatoa dawn, intense and viridescent, had been obliterated by dim silhouettes of cloud, great grey cargo ships bearing fresh supplies of rain. By noon it had grown so dark that she had been forced to switch on the hall lights, and, not knowing what to do for the best, waited for the call.
She had known it would be George before the second ring. They had established the pattern of communication whenever he travelled, to fit around the time differences. If he was further west, he never rang before one. Further east, and he would call just as she was having breakfast. He never grew tired of waiting in airport lounges or dining late in half-empty hotels. He seemed to have deliberately chosen work that would deny him the comforts of home life. He was meeting factory representatives in company branches around the world, but she often wondered if he could have delegated these tasks and requested an administrative position in London. Perhaps, like Kallie’s partner, it was something to do with never having taken a gap year; perhaps he too imagined that beneath the jacket and tie he was a backpacker, free to watch dawn from mountaintops and follow the contours of the shorelines. Except that his journeys took him to places no student would choose to visit. And on that day the call came at the wrong time, the pattern disrupted. He was only in Paris—no distance at all—but something was wrong.
According to the readout on her receiver, he stayed on the line for no longer than four minutes. Barely time to boil an egg; certainly not long enough to discuss a divorce. She had been half-expecting him to raise the subject for almost a year. When she added up the days they had spent together, the total came to little more than three months in twelve, but it was still a bitter shock. He recited the guilty man’s litany: It’s me, not you . . . You’ve done nothing wrong . . . I need to rethink my life . . . I’m holding you back . . . I can’t expect you to wait for me. But it rang so false that she knew there was someone else involved, that there would be a younger version of herself, probably living in Paris, where so many trips had taken him lately. He wouldn’t rethink his life, merely repeat it with someone more naive. She resented the fact that he had reached the decision without her involvement. Let someone else deal with his intermittent sex drive now, she thought. Let someone else feel the weight of his damp flesh on top of her. I hope it’s worth it.
From an early age, Heather had worked hard to have the life presented in style magazines; but it hadn’t turned out like that. She had hated the kind of women who hung out at sports events with an agenda for searching out the right class of man, yet she had done exactly the same, attending fixtures in the season’s calendar, frequenting the fashionable Kensington restaurants and bars until meeting George. Her desire to establish such a specific lifestyle had separated her from Kallie, whose honesty and simplicity were quite uncalculating.
He had promised her the London house; he would sign it over tomorrow, but there would be nothing else. She was sure he would move his base of operations to Paris and live with his younger-Heather clone, this year’s more desirable model. Heather would join the ranks of embittered divorcees who prowled the cafés of the King’s Road, sipping their lattes and stalking certain designer stores because the staff were cute, dining with women in similar situations, discussing shoes and spas and drinking a little too much wine over lunch. And the worst part about being cast into this tastefully appointed limbo was that she only had herself to blame. She had made a single, humiliating mistake that would taunt her for the rest of her life.
‘Come through to the studio. It’s better that you’re here while my husband’s still out. You look absurdly well.’
Monica Greenwood led the way through the cramped apartment occupying the top half of the house in Belsize Park. Every spare inch of space had been filled with books and canvases. When shelves had overflowed, paperbacks had been stacked in precarious piles along the already narrow hallway, beside jam jars of turpentine and linseed oil. Monica looked much as he’d remembered. Although her hair was now more studiedly blond, it was still carelessly tied back, kept from her face while she worked on her paintings. Her figure was fuller, subject to the natural effects of a miraculous maturity. She looked sumptuous in jeans and an acrylic-stained sweatshirt, comfortable in this stage of her life. Too much time had passed for John May to remember if he had truly been in love with her, but he had certainly been bewitched at some point during the national miners’ strike.