“Mark?”
I nearly died when I heard Nancy’s voice. She was striding through the kitchen toward me, and the card was still lying on my desk. I quickly drew a sheaf of papers toward me and covered it, but only just in time. Heart beating horribly, feeling almost dizzy, I turned to look at her, trying to haul an expression of bland normality across my face.
“What’s this?” she demanded, holding her hand up in front of me. It was dark in the room, and I couldn’t see at first. Then I saw. It was a hair. A dark brown hair.
“It looks like a hair,” I said carefully, shuffling papers on the desk.
“I know what it fucking is,” she snapped. “It was in the bed. I wonder how it got there.”
Jesus Christ, I thought. She knows.
I stared at her with my mouth clamped shut and wavered on the edge of telling the truth, of getting it over with. I thought it would happen some other, calmer, way, but you never know. Perhaps this was the pause into which I had to drop the information that I was in love with someone else.
Then, belatedly, I realized that Alice had never been in the bedroom. Even since the night of the canal she’d only ever been in the living room and the downstairs hall. Maybe the kitchen, but certainly not the bedroom. I blinked at Nancy, confused.
“It’s that bloody cat,” she shouted, instantly livid in the way that always disarmed and frightened me. “It’s been on our fucking bed.”
“What cat?”
“The cat who’s always fucking outside. Your little friend.” She sneered violently, face almost unrecognizable. “You’ve had it in here.”
“I haven’t. What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you deny, don’t you—”
Unable to finish, Nancy simply threw herself at me and smashed me across the face. Shocked, I stumbled backward and she whacked me across the chin, and then pummeled her fists against my chest as I struggled to grab hold of her hands. She was trying to say something but it kept breaking up into furious sobs. In the end, before I could catch her hands, she took a step backward and stood very still. She stared at me for a moment, and then turned and walked quickly out of the room.
I spent the night on the sofa and was awake long after the last long, moaning sound had floated out to me from the bedroom. It may sound like selfish evasion, but I really felt I couldn’t go to comfort her. The only way I could make her feel better was by lying, so in the end I stayed away.
I had plenty of time to finish writing the card to Alice, but found it difficult to remember exactly what I’d been going to say. In the end I struggled into a shallow, cramped sleep, and when I woke Nancy was already gone for the day.
I felt tired and hollow as I drove to meet Alice in the center of town. I still didn’t actually know where she lived, or even her phone number. She hadn’t volunteered the information, and I could always contact her via the courier firm. I was content with that until I could enter her life without any skulking around.
I remember very clearly the way she looked, standing on the pavement and watching out for my car. She was wearing a long black woolen skirt and a thick sweater of various chestnut colors. Her hair was backlit by morning light, and when she smiled as I pulled over toward her I had a moment of plunging doubt. I don’t have any right to be with her, I thought. I already have someone, and Alice is far and away too wonderful. But she put her arms around me, and kissed my nose, and the feeling went away.
I have never driven so slowly on a motorway as that morning with Alice. I’d put some tapes in the car, music I knew we both liked, but they never made it out of the glove compartment. They simply weren’t necessary. I sat in the slow lane and pootled along at sixty miles an hour, and we talked or sat in silence, sometimes glancing across at each other and grinning.
The road cuts through several hills, and when we reached the first cutting we both gasped at once. The embankment was a blaze of poppies, nodding in a gathering wind, and when we’d left them behind I turned to Alice and for the first time said I loved her. She stared at me for a long time, and in the end I had to glance away at the road. When I looked back she was looking straight ahead and smiling, her eyes shining with held-back tears.
My meeting took just under fifteen minutes. I think my client was rather taken aback, but who cares. We spent the rest of the day walking around the shops, picking up books and looking at them, stopping for two cups of tea. As we came laughing out of a record store she slung her arm around my back, and very conscious of what I was doing, I put mine around her shoulders. Though she was tall it felt comfortable, and there it stayed.
By about five I was getting tense, and we pulled into another café to have more tea, and so I could make my phone call. I left Alice sitting at the table waiting to order and went to the other side of the restaurant to use the booth. As I listened to the phone ringing I willed myself to be calm, and turned my back on the room to concentrate on what I was saying.
“Hello?”
When Nancy answered I barely recognized her. Her voice was like that of a querulously frightened old woman who’d not been expecting a call. I nearly put the phone down, but she realized who it was and immediately started crying.
It took me about twenty minutes to calm her even a little. She’d left the team-building at lunchtime, claiming illness. Then she’d gone to Sainsbury’s. She had eaten two Sara Lee chocolate cakes, a fudge roll, a packet of cereal, and three packets of biscuits. She’d gone to the bathroom, vomited, and then started again. I think she’d been sick again at least once, but I couldn’t really make sense of part of what she said. It was so mixed up with abject apologies to me that the sentences became confused, and I couldn’t tell whether she was talking about the night before or about the half-eaten packet of Jell-O she still had in her hand.
Feeling a little frightened and completely unaware of anything outside the cubicle I was standing in, I did what I could to focus her until what she was saying made a little more sense. I gave up trying to say that no apology was needed for last night and in the end just told her everything was all right. She promised to stop eating for a while and to watch television instead. I said I’d be back as soon as I could.
I had to. I loved her. There was nothing else I could do.
When the last of my change was gone I told her to take care and slowly replaced the handset. I stared at the wood paneling in front of me and gradually became aware of the noise from the restaurant on the other side of the glass door behind me. Eventually I turned and looked out.
Alice was sitting at the table, watching the passing throng. She looked beautiful, and strong, and about two thousand miles away.
We drove back to London in silence. Most of the talking was done in the restaurant. It didn’t take very long. I said I couldn’t leave Nancy in the state that she was in, and Alice nodded once, tightly, and put her cigarettes in her bag.
She said that she’d sort of known, perhaps even before we’d got to Cambridge. I got angry then, and said she couldn’t have done, because I hadn’t known myself. She got angry back when I said we’d still be friends, and she was in the right, I suppose. It was a stupid thing for me to say.
Awkwardly I asked if she’d be all right, and she said, yes, in the sense that she’d survive. I tried to explain that was the difference, that Nancy might not be able to. She shrugged and said that was the other difference: Nancy would never have to find out if she could. The more we talked the more my head felt it was going to explode, the more my eyes felt as if they could burst with the pain and run in bloody lines down my cold cheeks. In the end she grew businesslike and paid the bill, and we walked slowly back to the car.