At the London station, she calmly collects her thoughts. Smiles impishly at the imagined face of her husband, waiting all this time for the final ingredients for the salad, back at their house. She catches the tube to Victoria and connects with the last train departure to Brighton.
Once, with her lover, she had gone there for a weekend, yeah a dirty week-end, she supposes. It was on the eve of a political party conference and the seaside resort had been full of grim-faced politicians and swarms of television journalists. She’d spent most of her time outside the hotel room where they had fucked more times than she had thought possible in the space of thirty-six hours, absolutely terrified of venturing across her spouse, or some colleagues of his who might be familiar with her, even though he worked on the business and economics side and she well knew he could not be in Brighton right then.
Katherine spent the night ambling up and down the seafront, enjoying the coolness of the marine breeze and sea air after the Turkish bath of her London suburbs and the publisher’s offices where she worked. It was wonderfully quiet; no drunks to accost her, just alone with her thoughts, the memories, the scars of lust, the mess that her life now was.
Her lover had betrayed her. And she, in turn, had betrayed both men.
She wanted to wipe her mind clean of everything, to erase the wrong-doing and the pain she had inflicted on them. To start anew, like a baby arriving into the world, free of fault, innocent, like a blank tape ready for a new set of experiences, a new life almost.
In the morning, she booked herself into a small bed and breakfast on a square facing the old pier. She shopped for new clothes, which she paid for by credit card. She ate fish and chips, like a tourist and even found the Haagen-Dazs ice-cream parlour she remembered from a previous visit to one of the backstreets. Maraschino cherry delight. The weather was warm but nowhere near as bad as London. On the promenade, she bought a floppy straw hat to protect her pale skin from the fierce sun. She took a nap in the afternoon in the cramped room of the small hotel. Before dozing off, she had switched the TV on and seen her husband on screen looking all jolly and smug on the business lunch programme, reporting from the car park of an automotive parts factory. It had been recorded two days earlier. She awoke later from a dreamfree sleep, enjoyed a leisurely bath during which she depilated her legs and cut her toe nails, and, clean and refreshed, slipped on the new lightweight dress she had purchased earlier, low-cut, dark blue with white polka dots, billowing away down over her long legs from a high waist.
“First night away,” she remarked to herself, as she walked out into the dusk.
She meets this guy in a pseudo-Texan Cantina. He says he’s from one of the unions. She’s had a couple of beers, and he offers her a glass of tequila. It burns her throat and stomach.
“I canvass for Labour locally, where I live,” she tells him, to indicate that at least they share the same political affiliation. She’s always suspected, despite his indifferent denials, that that bastard of a lover she’d been involved with had actually voted Tory. How in hell could she have slept with him?
He smiles at her, well, more of a leer really.
So what? she thinks.
She follows him, his name is Adam Smith, back to the bar of the Old Ship where he is staying for the conference. It’s already pretty late, and there are only a handful of people left in the penumbra of the bar. She has a couple of vodka and oranges. Her head feels light. Better this than the heavy burden of all the memories and the guilt, she reckons.
“Is that a wedding ring?” the guy enquires, pointing at her finger.
“Yes,” she answers. “Does it bother you?”
It all floods back. How her lover would delicately slip both the wedding and the thin engagement rings off her fingers before ceremoniously undressing her from top to bottom, before they would make love in the basement to the sound of the whirring fan and the light of the long-life candle she herself had bought near the Reject Shop on Tottenham Court Road.
“No, I was just wondering, that’s all,” he remarks.
“If it bothers you, I can take them off,” Katherine says.
“No, no,” he says, annoyed by this turn of events. But while he is still saying this, she has already wet her finger and slipped both the rings off, deliberately dropping them at the bottom of her glass.
“Satisfied?” she asks.
Is she drunk, he wonders? “They’ll be closing the bar any minute, I reckon,” he says, ignoring her earlier remark. “Can I entice you up to my room for a final nightcap?”
She isn’t drunk. Just a bit lost, she guesses. She looks at this man called Smith of all things. His tie isn’t straight, his shirt has a few drink stains, scattered across its front. She can read him like a map. But what the hell?
“Yeah, why not?” she answers, grabbing her bag still loaded with the manuscript from her old life, and stands up, abandoning the rings in the half-empty glass of booze.
As he inserts the electronic card into the door, he leers at her again. Why must he be so obvious, Katherine thinks?
The door swings open.
He stands aside and Katherine walks in.
The room is medium-sized, dominated by a large king-size bed. A door on the right leads to a bathroom. On the walls, anonymous prints of naval victories from the Napoleonic wars. She smiles; it might have been worse: it could have been the classic print of the Eurasian woman with the blue face. If it had been, she thinks she might have walked straight out again.
He follows her in and the door slams quietly.
He walks to the bedside table where a large bottle of scotch stands, no, bourbon. Four Roses.
He takes his jacket off. His shirt is straining at the waist, his girth stretching the button holes.
“Drink?” Adam suggests.
She hates the stuff but answers “Why not?” That’s how it’s supposed to go, isn’t it?
“So,” he sits down on the edge of the orange-brown bed-spread, loosens his tie. “How much?”
“How much what?” She hesitantly sips the harsh booze from the glass.
“How much do you charge? All that married woman crap doesn’t cut much ice, you know. I don’t care, I’ll pay the going rate.” He takes a thick black leather wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket. Opens it and pulls out two fifty pound notes. Katherine notices there are quite a lot more where they came from.
He hands her the cash. “Okay,” she says, taking it.
She stands to begin undressing.
He smiles.
She unzips the dress where it cinches her waist and pulls it up above her head. And off. All she is wearing is her underwear. The black bustier and knickers set and the matching suspender belt and dark stockings. What she always wore for the assignments with her lover. Her skin is pale, her tummy flat like a marble table, her thighs full, the tight suspender belt biting in to the skin above her hips.
She moves to unhook the bustier but Adam interjects: “No, keep your top on. You haven’t got much up there. I’d rather you didn’t.”
She stands there, legs apart, wondering what to do next. Thinking, why am I so passive? I know what I’m doing. Fleetingly, she remembers how, one night, in the thrall of rapture, he had whispered in her ear: “One day, Kate, you will walk all the sexual stations of the Cross, you see.” At the time, she hadn’t quite understood, but had found it sexy, him saying things like that, it fired her lust up even more. Now, she was beginning to understand.
He gulps down the contents of his glass. She obliges, doing the same. He pours more bourbon.