Hello. You’ll be here and my voice in your hands.
But mainly she was quite reliable and willing to meet him at various hotels near Euston, or King’s Cross — his choice — suitably anonymous and seedy establishments.
Perhaps the only thing that limited how often they could be together was his ability to hide the cost of this or that dog-eared double room.
Perhaps he believed he would be lost if he saw her too frequently.
Because she was wholly willing. She gave him the purgatory of that.
Her acceptance — unrelenting acceptance — put a terror in his blood, a type of recurring vertigo. Whatever he requested, she would do: she would dress as he dictated, with barely a hesitation. She would be naked — he was very predictable — beneath her coat and visit bars with him in Loughborough Junction, Ealing, Hampton, places where he wouldn’t be known.
Hand slipped between her buttons in a cab coming back from Croydon and what I found, what I found, the deep sweet, my best girl’s ache.
Laughing in another hotel lift, on the rise, not being what you’d call subtle.
He explored her with harsh appetites for which he blamed her and also thanked her and also blamed her, helplessly punishing and offering. He possessed each access to her, tired her and she allowed him. He tied her up and took advantage, bought a dedicated camera for recording the indignities and marvels, her splendours.
For several months he stripped and beat her on each of their nights and she made no objection, made no sound. He didn’t intend to hurt her, but spanking was insufficient, so the shameful slap of his belt carried, no doubt, into neighbouring rooms, as did his own cries, his attempts to destroy her silence.
Which was the last straw.
In the end, her acquiescence broke his ingenuity.
Emily made a new nothing. She made it permanent.
He didn’t want to hit her, he simply couldn’t shake his desperation to leave her marked. Anyone else who undressed her afterwards would find the parallel bruises he had made, not extreme, but unmistakable. Because apparently he had the right. And, without him, she’d remain his statement — not of ownership, he promised her, but of love. He would bite her for similar reasons and hate that he had to and hate who he was.
‘Is there anyone? Emily?’
‘No.’
‘Look at me, though. Look at me and tell me there’s no one else.’
‘There’s no one else.’
‘Call me darling.’
‘Darling.’
And that distance in her eyes where she was unreachable and at her loveliest.
I knew there wasn’t anybody else, there wasn’t honestly even me.
‘You could say. . If you would just say, Emily. It would be all right and I wouldn’t be angry. I would just want you to tell me. Because I love you. Emily? You do know that, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I love you more than anything, and you’re my real wife and you have to know that. You’re the one that counts.’
Because she never mentioned love he dropped into harder and harder declarations until he couldn’t bear to hear himself, would nuzzle between her breasts and try to be deafened by her heartbeat as it pounced beneath his ear.
‘Darling Mark.’ The way a child would say it, or someone from another country, testing if they could.
‘Darling Emily. Thank you. Darling Emily.’
And when everything else was exhausted, he had to be alone with her and opened. ‘I would marry you if you asked. I would try and we could do that. We could. If you wanted. It would be complicated, but if you wanted.’
Although their initial excursions to bars delighted him, he learned he should steer her away from too much booze. Uncontrolled drinking made her bleak. Eventually he limited their rendezvous to the hotels, for her benefit. He did his best to care about her in that way and worried if she came to him unsteady or with her skin under that heavy sheen of previous alcohol. On evenings when she was too out of it, he kissed and held her and no more and was glad to feel her dreams shift in his arms. ‘Sweetheart, I have to go now, will you be okay? Are you okay? You should sleep. Keep asleep.’
I wanted to cure her.
I did right by her, almost constantly.
Only that one night when I let myself down. I fell.
I was closing the door, but I wanted to look at her, a parting glance: naked sprawl of my girl across our evidence, the disarray of a cheap fawn coverlet and dull white sheets, her bared feet towards me, plump. She was sleeping it off. She was sleeping me off.
‘Night-night, sweetheart.’ When I’d kissed her forehead and each closed eye, she’d tasted only pure.
This couple had walked along the corridor at my back and I’d been so absorbed that I hadn’t noticed.
And then I did.
And the three of us stood and I knew we were each one of us studying Emily.
I kept the door open — not for terribly long, a breath, a large instant — but I did give that much of her away. And it made me glad. I wanted them to understand that I could touch this angel and she’d got me.
She never knew and it didn’t harm her, and then I locked her up safe and the couple moved on.
She was mine, proved mine.
Emily.
He would drive Pauline about — short trips — dance with her or face her at unamusing parties, nod while she talked in supermarket queues, lean near her at the kitchen sink while she washed the dishes and he dried — he did his best to be compliantly domestic when he could — and he would be tight in a fury of needing Emily.
Mine.
Unlike his previous lovers, Emily made him have increasingly emotional sex with his wife. He would weep against Pauline’s neatly measured breathing and then have to agree to let her comfort him. His wife as a relief from the truth of fidelity — it was absurd.
Like staying in a railway station with no trains that we can catch.
Am I displaying hope or idiocy?
Are we? Or are we pretending this is acceptable, because we’re in company?
In it together.
A problem shared is not a problem, it’s a community.
And so forth.
We can’t claim it wasn’t more than possible to foresee — our likely future.
The fate of our nation.
And so forth.
I saw it. I stared at it, sort of, not for terribly long, a breath, a large instant.
Although I suspect my real focus was elsewhere. That’s likely.
I wasn’t alone in ignoring multiple warnings.
Even about trains.
As a student, he had decided he should seem to take an interest in the wider life. It enriched his social circle.
More girls.
His drive to be committedly well informed meant he’d attended a lecture by some playwright.
Face like a punched scatter cushion and a scholarship boy’s accent.
A laughably earnest audience had squeezed into the studio theatre at the Barbican Centre and been subjected to the usual liberal/left stuff — here we are in 1984 and it’s ever so much worse than the novel. Smug. The playwright cared. No one could match his extravagant caring, that was plain, and no one else had noticed and resisted the loss of their country’s virtue with quite his intellectual elan.