The circumstances didn’t inhibit her as to volume. She pushed a knuckle into his anus as he thrusted.
Dominic smirked at Neil when they returned to the table. Tony pretended he hadn’t seen them. It was only the second time in his life that he had been so reckless. There was suicidal indifference in the recklessness, and also something like the opposite, a roulette spin for a richer life.
Understanding that this beginning could drive them apart they never mentioned it. She emailed; they went out for dinner without colleagues or sex, at the restaurant or afterwards, as if Roxanna were an ancient goddess who might magically have her virginity restored. Her parents had fled Tehran for England during the revolution, she told him. They moved to America while she was at university, separating not long afterwards, but she had stayed in London. She was thirty-five: one careful owner, like him, Neil concluded from oblique references to her romantic past.
He went to Zurich, on to Singapore, and didn’t see her for two weeks. The third time, at a restaurant in Notting Hill, she announced that she had something to tell him. That’s it, Neil thought.
‘Neil, I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant, Neil.’ Once-in-a-lifetime news, but no other way than just to say it.
You used something, right?
I’ll take care of it.
He managed not to ask either Is it mine? or Are you going to keep it?, a double feat of self-restraint for which he was afterwards grateful. Her grin suggested that the second question would in any case have been redundant. His stomach sank, but he sensed another part of him levitating, taking off.
You could have a kid out there, you know.
They agreed that they would wait before she moved in but they didn’t. After all he was alone in that overwhelming apartment, with Sam for the odd weekend. She could always move out again, they told each other. For New Year’s Eve they went to Bilbao, dancing to a street band in the alleys of the old town. The first time the doll-sized knee or elbow poked at him through her belly, Neil felt as if he could fly; her new anatomy became so familiar to him, swelled so incrementally, that it came to seem this bloated form was the end-point, her finished state, rather than a beginning. He turned forty shortly before the baby was due, feeling that a lot of his life was behind him, and that little of that life was his.
They called her Leila. Neil was fascinated by her skin tone, which was neither Roxanna’s nor his but a golden hybrid of her own. He convinced himself that he could glimpse his mother in her brow and around her eyes. He tried to imagine his mother as a grandparent, but he knew the speculation was a lie, that he couldn’t ever know how she would have been. They enlisted a night nurse, a Ukrainian named Olesya, whom Tony had recommended. Olesya was pretty, defeatedly overweight, discreetly religious (Orthodox crucifix, mumbled imprecations, homeland pain written into the creases on her forehead and at the corners of her mouth).
Roxanna was in bed. Leila was asleep on his chest, her four limbs bent under her like a frog’s. Olesya lifted the weightless body off him and ushered Neil out of the flat, shooing him away with a wise smile and a broken-English instruction to ‘Go your friends.’
To begin with he didn’t quite admit where he was heading. He pretended to himself that he was only driving. It was a cold grey night with a starless London sky. He drove across town, to the back of the pub in Southwark where he had first met Claire, after that to the end of Westminster Bridge that abutted the bowling arcade and the still-spinning wheel. He drove along the Strand, looking for the doorway they had shared with those Australian girls, he couldn’t remember their names, his and Adam’s alternate secret, which hadn’t been enough. On his homeward loop he trawled the road at the back of Paddington Station to find the café in which he and Adam had sat, sussing out where they stood, whether the other was real, at their first meeting in England. Adam had worn his ridiculous cap.
The locations didn’t tally with Neil’s memories. Thinking about the nineties, the images came back to him washed-out and grimy: brown food and miserabilist films, boxy cars and chewing gum on the pavement, the streets in the centre of town streamed in filth, the rubbish bins removed lest terrorists stash bombs in them. In Neil’s mind the contrast between that time and neon now replayed Dorothy’s transition from dowdy Kansas to Technicolor Munchkinland. Scanning the unfamiliar shopfronts, Neil reckoned that the café had become an oyster bar. The airline office was now a high-concept fast-fooderie, he thought.
So inconsiderate, these changes. How were you ever supposed to find your way back, recover your old you, when the city was so different, as different, almost, as you were? You needed your own private London, preserved in formaldehyde, an archipelago museum of your imperishable moments. Instead your places were bulldozed and replaced with someone else’s memories.
I’m going crazy, Neil thought, as he sat in his car, half mounted on the pavement, being hooted by taxi drivers, stalking a bar that had once been a café in which, a long time before, he had talked with a man who used to be his friend. A friend he hadn’t seen for three years.
‘I’m going crazy,’ he said out loud. ‘Sorry,’ he said to no one, and to Adam, and to Rose, and drove himself back to Bayswater.
***
There was the usual rigmarole of pretending he might go back to sleep without relieving himself. Perhaps if he lay on his other side, or curled up, like this… Finally Adam levered himself out of bed, as quietly as he could, his senses muted as if he were underwater, eyes outraged at being called upon to open, and, when they did, reporting an unfamiliar room, doors and windows bafflingly transposed, so that for a moment he wondered whether he was dreaming. The croaking of frogs outside the window tipped him off. His brain cranked up, and he padded to the cork-floored bathroom between their room and the children’s. The door snapped shut, too loudly. Adam swore, counterproductively, but no one seemed to wake.
He had a challenging nocturnal erection. Sighing, he throttled his penis with his right hand, gripped the towel rail with his left, preparing to double over, as if he were executing a dive with pike — a fraught manoeuvre, but the surest way, when he was engorged, to avoid spraying urine across the seat and onto the floor, which would result in either an icky clean-up now or, if he neglected that courtesy, a bollocking from Claire in the morning. He bent his dick through another ten degrees, the organ bucking and resisting, and swore again.
The latch clicked as the bathroom door reopened. Adam straightened up and turned round, still clutching the angry penis, the look on his face on the cusp between ecstasy and excruciation.
‘Oh,’ Claire said. ‘Oh, Adam.’
He followed her gaze to his genitals. So far it hadn’t caused him much trouble, this penis. Less than he might have expected. Less grief than Neil’s had caused them.
‘It isn’t what you think,’ Adam said, releasing his grip. ‘Clezzy, really. It’s… I’m just trying to piss.’
Claire hesitated for a moment before acquiescing with a sleepy smile. She squeezed past him to the toilet, naked, yawning as she peed, wiping herself robotically. The trust that they had almost lost had come back to them.
‘Well,’ she said, standing up. ‘We’re awake now.’
She took hold of the penis with one hand, made a shush sign with the other, and led him silently back to bed.
Three years before, as open-mindedly as he could, Adam had considered the possibility that he found the thought of Claire and Neil arousing. Briefly he wondered whether he might be on the high road to a life of orgies in south London warehouses (like the ones that, so one of the secretaries told him on his second day in the office, Hardy liked to attend), where he would be locked in a cage to watch while strangers fucked his wife. That wasn’t it, he soon decided; he was as vanilla in his lusts as in his other tastes. Her brush with Neil had been a jolt rather than a turn-on, more medical than erotic, mild electrotherapy administered to a struggling heart. Or perhaps it was simply a coincidence when, a few weeks later — weeks of him ruminating on car journeys, his jaw grinding ominously, Claire glancing at him in silence as Harry and Ruby garrotted each other in the back — their sex life came back to them, too, like a rediscovered hobby. That summer they were anyway emerging from the tunnel of the children’s infancy: the phase of repurposed bodies and burgled privacy, of holidays that were marathons of arse-wiping and miscalculated discipline, their sexual punctuation being, if Adam were lucky, one perfunctory, grisly hand-job. The mutual neglect that began as a necessity and developed into a stand-off. They blinkingly began to see each other again.