‘Fina, I’ve told you this before: I think most men — at least all the men I’ve ever known — just want as much as they can get.’
‘As much sex.’
‘Right. Men are programmed to spread their seed as widely as possible — scientists acknowledge that.’
‘But this wasn’t just raw sex, was it? It wasn’t so urgent that you did it standing up wherever the need took you — they wrote love-letters and so did you. You courted them, you had “something special” with this one and that one.’
‘Jesus, Fina!’ Her feet were on the floor; my lap felt empty.
‘What?’
‘Not everything can be explained.’
‘Try.’
‘Do you know the poem by Baudelaire “To a Woman Passing by”?’
‘No.’
‘He sees her in the street, in the deafening street that howls around him — a tall, slender woman in deep mourning, her hand lifting and swinging the hem of her skirt as she walks. She’s agile and noble, with a statuesque leg. They look at each other, he says he drinks from her eyes. He knows he’ll never see her again, and he ends the poem with, “O you whom I could have loved, o you who knew it!”’
‘Right — so he was deeply moved by a statuesque leg and I know that you are too. But he doesn’t say he wooed this woman until he got her into the sack.’
‘Maybe she was too agile for him.’
‘Stick to the point — you brought up that poem because we were talking about romantic love as opposed to straight shagging. Apart from anything else, romance is time-consuming. How many can you handle at the same time?’
‘I think that’s a rhetorical question.’
‘Answer it anyhow, please.’
‘I don’t think you’re asking how many I can handle — what you want to know is why I did what I did.’
‘OK, tell me that.’
‘It’s very hard to spell it out.’
‘Not everything can be easy, Jonno.’
‘I keep feeling as if I’m going to lose you for ever.’
‘Don’t be so cowardly — whatever you tell me won’t lose me more than you’ve done already.’
‘Then maybe I’ve already lost you for ever.’
‘Whatever happens, it’s better to be honest with me and yourself, isn’t it?’
‘I’ll try. The thing is, to me the sexual act was secondary — it was the idea that excited me: the idea of pulling a woman out of the unknown, someone you’ve never seen before but you sense a possibility and you want to get to that point where she lets you into her innermost privacy.’
‘And then what? Then you move on to the next one?’
I shrugged. ‘I never moved on from you, Fina.’
‘No, I was the home base — I can see that. But when you were having these affairs, didn’t you think there might be consequences if I found out?’
‘I didn’t think you’d find out.’
‘But the deception itself has consequences — what you were doing had to make you different from the Jonathan I thought was with me. You must have compared me with the others: how I was in bed, how I looked, smelled, tasted, felt; the sounds I made, the things I said while I thought I was alone with the Jonathan I knew. So it was like a cloak of invisibility for you — you knew something that I didn’t — we weren’t both coming from the same place.’
I found nothing to say.
‘And there’s the matter of the contract between us: it wasn’t written down, it wasn’t even spoken. But we did have an unspoken contract: you knew that you could trust me not to have anyone else on the side, and in accepting my fidelity and letting me believe in yours you made a contract with me. But you didn’t honour it. Do you believe in such a thing as honour?’
‘Yes.’
‘And does honour matter to you?’
‘Of course it does, Fina.’
‘Can you explain how you can reconcile that belief with what you did?’
Takemitsu had stopped. There was only silence and the noises from outside. I heard the voices of other women in strange beds. Look at me, said Au Tonneau: empty. ‘You know I can’t explain that,’ I said. ‘You say you’re not attacking me but you’ve demolished me completely. My behaviour was dishonourable and I can’t find any way of justifying it. All I can do is say I’m sorry and hope you’ll give me a second chance.’
‘The thing is, Jonno, I wonder if you’ll ever change. I think maybe you’re afraid of women and that’s why you have to keep knocking them over like tenpins. If you’ve needed to do that up to now, how are you going to stop?’
‘I’ll stop because I want you back and I don’t want to lose you again.’
‘You say that now but can I ever trust you again? If I were to come back, could I ever believe anything you told me? In bed together, could I believe that it was just the two of us alone and private, with no one else getting between us?’
‘We could try making love, see how it feels,’ I said stupidly.
‘“Making love”. There’s a whole lot of making going on but there’s not that much love about. Let’s move on to the Rinyo-Clacton thing. What kills me is that I’d never have gone to bed with him if you hadn’t been unfaithful. Your infidelities made me leave you and my leaving led to both of us ending up with Mr R-C and maybe HIV.’
‘You could have said no to him.’
‘Yes, and so could you. And here we are. I feel so tired — I can’t talk any more tonight.’
‘Don’t go back to Zoë’s,’ I said. ‘Sleep here.’
‘But I want to sleep alone. Can I use the couch?’
‘Take the bed. At least I’ll have the smell of you when you’ve gone.’
So once more we slept our separate sleeps. In the flat where we’d had so many sleeps together.
26. Insect Life
When I woke up on Saturday morning I felt more myself than I’d done for a long time; then I realised it was because I’d gone to sleep knowing that Serafina was sleeping in our bed, in the bed where she belonged. It was quarter past eight and there were comfortable sounds and the smell of coffee coming from the kitchen. My next thought was, O God, next year at this time — probably sooner — I’ll be dead if I don’t do something about Mr Rinyo-Clacton. And why do I always think of him as Mr?
Serafina was already dressed, bright-eyed and wide awake, ready for the day. ‘Good morning,’ she said as I came into the kitchen.
‘Good morning. How was your night?’
‘Wonderful. I still haven’t got used to that futon at Zoë’s place.’
‘You can sleep here every night, you know.’ I moved my mouth towards hers for a good-morning kiss. She turned so that I caught her on the cheek. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Will you be around when I come out of the shower?’
‘Yes, I don’t have to leave for a while yet. Bacon and eggs?’
‘Sounds good.’
After breakfast I phoned Eurostar and booked us on the 08:23 from Waterloo on Monday. The telephone is a wall model that I never got round to fixing to the wall. The cord that connects the handset to the base is a thing of tightly coiled ringlets that often get entangled in each other and cause me to drop one or both parts of the telephone, which is what I did after booking the seats on Eurostar. The base fell to the floor and out of a recess in it rolled a small wad of tissue and a little hightech bug — I’d seen enough thrillers to recognise such things. There’d been nothing to secure the device, no glue or tape or Blu-Tack, just that little wad of tissue that would allow it to fall out at the slightest jolt. I took the thing into the bathroom, lifted the lid of the cistern, and dropped it into the water so he could have a good listen whenever the toilet was flushed. Then I phoned Eurostar and changed the booking to Tuesday, after which I phoned Paris and booked the hotel.