A Small Indiscretion Page 6

  It was crowded on the train and Malcolm was standing very close to me, both of us holding on to the overhead bar. He leaned in as he talked so I would hear him over the noise of the train. He explained that if he—if we—were awarded the contract, it would be the largest project he’d ever engineered, the final link connecting the Docklands to London, a triumph of twentieth-century redevelopment.

  He had a quiet voice that trailed off at the end of his sentences. When he spoke, I had the odd sensation of a warm whirring at the back of my head, an almost hypnotic sense of friendship and safety and calm. Instead of using his authority to his advantage, he seemed to be trying to even things up between us.

  The train stopped. Malcolm placed his arm under my elbow as the doors opened and we stepped onto the platform and walked up the stairs, onto a sidewalk cast in shadow by the tallest skyscraper in London. The meeting was on the top floor. Men were assembled around a table. Malcolm gave me a chair and introduced me.

  “This is Annie Black,” he said. “She’s come from California to keep us organized.”

  I took careful notes on a yellow legal pad Malcolm produced from his briefcase. I recorded the technical terms as best I could. Lunch afterward was in a pub. All the men ordered pints, and I ordered one, then another, no longer caring that women in England customarily ordered only a half. I had been full of doubt that morning, dressing for the interview. I had stared at myself in the mirror and seen not clear skin and long legs and long hair, but my eyebrows, too thick and dark, and my overlapping bottom teeth, and the earring holes in my ears, one lower than the other. But after the second pint in the pub in Canary Wharf that day, the curtain dropped again, and the men began to talk to me, and I felt attractive. I felt it was a wonderful country I had landed in, where I could pass a workday afternoon in the company of men who were paying me to drink for free.

  WHEN WE RETURNED to the office that first day it was nearly six o’clock.

  “There’s a computer for you,” Malcolm said.

  I sat down at what would become my desk. Malcolm handed me an office key and said that unfortunately he’d have to be heading home. He said he would pay me in cash every Friday, so I wouldn’t have to worry about taxes, and he would pay me double for overtime. He cautioned me against staying too late. He didn’t want to tire me out on my first day.

  “You don’t have to pay me for tonight.”

  “Of course I’ll pay you,” he said. “Don’t be silly. It’s not my money anyway.”

  “Whose money is it?”

  “It’s the investor’s money. The investor being chiefly my father-in-law. If we can get a bit more out of him, we can move into proper office space in Canary Wharf.”

  He seemed to be sharing a confidence, so I did, too. I told him how I was waiting for a wire from my father, and how, in the meantime, I’d persuaded the hostel to let me stay on credit.

  He said nothing for a moment. Then he set his briefcase back on the desk and popped it open. “Let me give you something for this week,” he said. “An advance.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “It’s no problem,” he said. He removed a handful of bills and held them out to me. “Please.”

  His hand was trembling and his voice seemed suddenly tender. The change alarmed me so much I nearly refused the money. But I didn’t. I took it. And I didn’t refuse him the other time that really mattered, either.

  I STAYED IN the office a long while that first night, studying the picture of Malcolm’s wife and daughter on his desk, reading documents about the Docklands redevelopment Malcolm had left for me, and fiddling with my computer. By the time I locked up it was midnight, and when I reached the tube station it was closed. The streets were empty. There were gates pulled across the windows of the shops and even the pubs were shut. There were no taxis and no buses and I had left my street map at the hostel in Earl’s Court. I stood on the sidewalk at the entrance to the tube station, pushing the metal chain back and forth across its entrance with my foot.

  I set out walking. I reached the Thames at Westminster. The river was black and quiet. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament were lit yellow in the night sky. I had no hat and no gloves and no coat, and I could sense the cold, along with the possibility of fear at being alone in a foreign city late at night. But it was as if I stood inside protective glass, and those feelings could not really reach me. Some new power had risen in me. All my tight cavities were opening and warning voices were fading. I had only myself to worry about, and if I wanted, I could simply choose not to worry at all.

  Finally there was a red double-decker bus creeping through the roundabout at Whitehall. I got on, then got off again after a while because I was not sure the bus was headed in the right direction. Somehow, I found my way back to the hostel. The very next day I took the money Malcolm had given me and bought myself the winter coat.

  Ten

  LATE MARCH. Frost on the window this morning, and outside, a cold, cloudless sky. I turned the heater off last week but now I’ve turned it back on again. I feel you not as an absence today, but as a presence. It’s your hurt that’s here, though we don’t know exactly what the hurt is about. It’s a large, cold hand I can’t scoot around because I can’t see it, but I know it’s present, because I helped put it here myself.

  I will try to paint for you London as I remember it at nineteen, then twenty, all the while knowing my picture will be imperfect. Not only because memory itself is imperfect. Not only because I was young. Not only because I was a stranger in a foreign city, seeing it then and remembering it now in my own dialect, through the veil of my own customs. But also because the London I paint is colored by the pencil I hold, and the pencil I hold wants a picture with an ending we can all bear.

  Malcolm arrived at the office each morning at nine o’clock sharp. He had two suits, which he alternated, and a gray raincoat that draped like a tarp over his enormous frame. Each evening at seven he prepared for his departure, lifting his briefcase from the floor beside his desk, popping it open, replacing his notebook and pen and snapping the case quietly closed. It was an old-fashioned briefcase with a hard shell, the kind that could withstand the trauma of being ejected from the back of a motorcycle taking a roundabout at an unsafe speed—and had, he told me. He injected this story and others, abruptly, into random conversations, as if trying to make me understand that what I saw of him was not all there was, that he existed beyond the walls of the office we shared. It was in this same way that he first told me about his wife.

  It was a Friday, and we had, at his suggestion, left work at five for a drink in the pub around the corner. We sat in a booth and he ordered us pints and asked me pointed questions about myself—my course of study in college, my aspirations, my childhood. I told him about the failed intervention, the money, Veronica Cox. I told him I had been majoring in French, and that once I’d saved enough money I hoped to travel on the Continent, beginning in France. He told me his wife’s family kept a Paris penthouse—the top floor of a small hotel—and that I must come along sometime for a holiday.

  I told him my mother was a nurse and that my father was currently unemployed. He told me that when he was young his parents had wanted him to go into medicine or law. He’d wanted to be a scientist. Somehow he’d ended up in civil engineering, with a specialty in structural engineering. He and his wife had lived in central London when they were first married, then moved to Richmond after their daughter was born. They had a cottage out back they let out to boarders sometimes, or friends in need of a place to sleep. Right now it was inhabited by the son of a family friend, John Ardghal, who’d given Malcolm his first job out of university. The son’s name was Patrick.

  Louise spent quite a bit of time in the garden, he told me, and was involved in the Royal Horticultural Society in London. That was what she’d gotten involved in when their daughter had gone off to school. She was also interested in collecting art, especially photography. Patrick, their boarder, liked to take pictu
res.

  “Patrick’s not a bad bloke,” Malcolm said. “Only his father ran into financial trouble, and I’m afraid that sent Patrick off course. He’s been out of university I’d guess eight years now, but he’s still dallying with the photography. He needs a bit of keeping on track.”

  Then, in the same halting tone he’d been using all evening, he told me that Patrick and Louise shared other interests, too, not just photography.

  He raised his eyebrows. “If you can guess what I mean,” he said.

  I set my beer down on the table.

  “But it’s all on the up-and-up. It was never hidden from me. In fact,” he said, “I engineered it, in a way.”

  “You mean they’re having an affair?”

  He laughed a funny little laugh. “If you want to call it that.”

  I must have looked shocked, because he took pains to explain that it had been his own idea, intended to bring Louise up out of what he called “a midlife malaise.” This malaise had been brought on by turning forty and being alone in the house after Daisy went off to boarding school, where she was not adjusting as well as they’d hoped. The worry over Daisy had gotten to Louise, or Daisy’s absence had, or some combination of that and turning forty and confronting the future in a new way. Malcolm thought what she needed was a distraction, an outside interest, and he’d suggested the Horticultural Society, but that hadn’t helped. Then Patrick moved in, and Malcolm observed a mutual attraction, and engineered an encounter, or at least encouraged it, after their annual summer party. He’d even thought to go upstairs and get a condom and bring it out to the cottage, knowing that under the circumstances Louise wouldn’t think of it herself.

  I leaned close, not wanting to miss any inflection or detail. I was not shocked or disgusted by his confidence. I was intrigued, and impressed.

  “We were young when we met, you see,” he said. “When we married. Neither of us had a chance to come into our own, romantically speaking. More than anything, it’s a decision not to be threatened. In a way, it’s been invigorating.”

  There was a tentative, almost helpless quality in him that affected me. There were also the low lights, the thick mugs of beer and the rowdy abandon of a London pub on a Friday afternoon. A wave of feeling rose in me. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to offer him something. I wanted to reach out and lay my hand over his. I did reach out and lay my hand over his, and I smiled.

  He leaned in toward me, without warning, and delivered a kiss that landed not on my lips but on the crease under my nose. He laughed self-consciously. He folded his other hand over mine and began to stroke my knuckles with his thumb. I looked at his hand and, perhaps under the influence of the beer, I studied it with some absorption. His thumb was extraordinarily large, something extra he’d been given, a special piece of bone and flesh moving back and forth across my skin. I wanted to remove my hand. I wanted to undo, unequivocally, what I had done. But I did not want to put an end to the action before it had begun. I was ever conscious of my virginity, a burden that seemed more weighty and ridiculous the longer I carried it with me, and Malcolm was a man in a suit, married, twice my age, wholly unsuitable on several counts and therefore able to offer me precisely the sort of romantic entanglement I’d envisioned when I set off for Europe—one that could be indulged in, then abandoned without further complication. I took what seemed to me the middle ground. I liberated my hand slowly, then reached for my pint and downed what remained of my beer.

  “But you’re married,” I said.

  It was an entirely fabricated moral sentiment, but I put it forward that night, and over and over again as the autumn ebbed and winter took hold, because it was convenient to claim the high ground while I decided what I wanted. In this way I set down a pattern—advance followed by halfhearted retreat—that pursued us all day in the office as he talked into the Dictaphone and I typed, as we assembled the bid, the mammoth document, the tables and drawings and photographs, then as we revised and reassembled and resubmitted. We retired more and more often to the pub in the afternoons, always drinking the same bitter beer and always sitting in the same corner booth. Malcolm left the pub dutifully each evening at seven, encouraging me to leave when he did and walking me to the tube, or sometimes giving me a ride home on the back of his motorcycle. I’d wrap my arms around his waist, the sky pressing down overhead, any words attempted between us lost to the wind. It was at the end of these rides, when he’d ridden onto the sidewalk in front of Victoria House, that I often nearly invited him to my room.

  What stopped me? I was not afraid of getting hurt. I was not worried about offending his wife, though I pretended I was. I was afraid something would change. I liked my job very much. I liked having my own key and my own desk and my own computer, and I didn’t want to risk losing that, or the camaraderie we had settled into, our bantering and our flirtation, our friendship. His devoted efforts to win me, not only by complimenting me often, and anticipating my needs, but by doling out more and more responsibility for the bid, and by giving me raise after raise and even a new title, “office manager,” which he had printed on thick white business cards. If I gave in to him, if we consummated our flirtation, our days together in the office would be changed. And if we went to bed together, I might not live up to the expectations that had been building in him all this time. I would be a disappointment, or worse, he would be, and I would have to pretend he was not.

  “Let me walk you up,” he’d say.

  “That’s all right.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “You’re married, Malcolm.”

  “So is my wife.”

  But he did not push me. He was a gentleman, and I loathed and admired him for it. He must have had no idea how easily I would have given in, if only he’d taken me in hand. Once, standing outside Victoria House in the cold, he told me that in a perfect world he would begin again with me. I would be the woman with whom he made a family. I knew for certain, at that moment, that I had been right to refuse him.

  And yet, as the weeks wore on, I imagined it unjust that at seven every night he left me to collect his wife. I imagined I was lonely in my blue room at Victoria House, and maybe I was lonely, but I also remember a singular happiness and relief returning there in the evenings as long as I had not had too much to drink. When I was drunk, I sometimes became indignant thinking of Malcolm abandoning me to make his way to the Horticultural Society to collect Louise and drive her home. Was Malcolm’s devotion the result of obligation or duty? Did he perceive Louise as a noose around his neck, or did he love her? Did he refuse to keep her waiting because he was afraid of her, or because he did not want to make her unhappy? I suspect it was the latter—he wanted her to be happy—and what is that, if not love?

  I wonder now, too, whether he wasn’t a little relieved to leave me at the end of the day. Perhaps Louise was relieved, too, when she found herself in her own bed, with Malcolm, instead of in the cottage with Patrick. Their arrangement was intoxicating, but it must have been burdensome, and wearing, too.

  Eleven

  THIS MORNING I WOKE to a silent house. I checked the girls’ rooms, first Polly’s, then Clara’s, and found them empty. Had they been taken from me in the night? Who would take them? Jonathan? Why would he take them when he has them half the time?

  I called out their names. Silence. I called again, growing frantic, opening and closing the front door, then the back. I had misplaced you, and now I was losing them, too.

  Then I heard them scream “April Fools!” and they threw the living room curtain from over their heads and emerged, squealing and beaming. They’d been hiding over the heating vent, impressively silent, sheltering themselves from the frigid spring morning.

  Later, Clara said, very seriously, “Can I tell you something?”

  “Yes,” I said, “tell me something.”

  “There are a lot of answers to one question.”

  “Which question?”

  “Well, like, what’s black and white and r
ed all over?”

  “What is black and white and red all over?”

  “Well, a newspaper. That’s the easy answer.”

  “And what are the hard answers?”

  “A penguin in a blender,” Clara said.

  “Ooh. Ouch.”

  “A zebra with a sunburn,” she continued.

  “My goodness. What else?”

  “That’s all,” she said, and she reached out and hugged me around the waist. She’s begun to hug me differently than she used to. She doesn’t turn her face to the side but keeps it straight ahead, so that her nose is pushed directly into my belly.

  I leaned down and whispered: “Did you miss me when you were at Daddy’s?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  I kissed her on the forehead. “Good,” I managed to say. And I almost meant it. I’m happy she’s independent. I’m happy Polly is, too. You weren’t when you were their age. Sleepovers, school trips, me going away to work in the store: You used to throw your arms around my neck and hang on until I detached you limb by limb.

  ON THE FIFTEENTH day of your stay in the hospital last September, you were taken off propofol. The trauma-center doctor expected you to emerge from the coma within a matter of hours, or a few days at the very most. It was a week shy of your twenty-first birthday, and I was already imagining my mother and father bringing the girls to the hospital to see you on the big day. I was anticipating the joy on your face, and theirs, when they presented you with a birthday cake you would not be able to eat, but that you would know had been baked in your honor.