TRY TO DOZE OFF AGAIN, but I can’t sleep for thinking how Richard and I have changed. First time we met was fifteen years ago at university; I was picketing Barclays Bank and he was opening an account there. I shouted something about South Africa — How dare you invest in brutality? — and Rich walked over to our righteous huddle and I handed him a leaflet, which he studied politely.
“My, that does sound bad,” he said, before inviting me for coffee.
Richard Shattock was the poshest man I had ever met. When he spoke, he sounded as though Kenneth Branagh had swallowed Kenneth More. Forearmed with the knowledge that all public schoolboys were emotionally stunted berks, I was unclear what to do when it became clear that this one was capable of more affection than I had ever known. Rich didn’t want to save the world like my idealistic friends; he just made it a better place simply by being in it.
We made love for the first time six days later in his college room under the eaves. The sun was falling in a dusty gold column through the skylight as he solemnly unpinned my Cyclists Against the Bomb badge and said, “I’m sure the Russians will sleep more soundly, Kate, for knowing you have passed your Cycling Proficiency Test.”
Had I ever laughed at myself before? Certainly the sound that came out that night was rusty with lack of use, a stopped-up spring gurgling into life. “Your Bournville chocolate laugh,” Richard called it, “because it’s dark and bitter and northern and it makes me want to eat you.” It’s the sound I still like best: the sound of when we were us.
I remember how much I loved his body, but even more I loved the way my body felt in relation to his — for every straight edge a curve — the vertebrae down his back like rocky steps down into a cave of pleasure. By day we cycled across the Fens and shouted “Hill!” whenever we felt the slightest incline, but at night we explored another terrain.
When Rich and I first started sleeping together — I mean actually sleeping, not having sex — we would lie in the middle of the bed face-to-face, close enough to feel the gusts of each other’s warm nighttime breath. My breasts would be pushed against his chest and my legs — I still can’t figure this out — disappeared over and under his like a mermaid’s tail. When I think of us in bed back then, I think of the shape of a sea horse.
Over time we began to face outwards. You could probably date that, our first separation, to the purchase of a king-size bed in the late eighties. And then, with the arrival of our first child, the battle for sleep began. Bed became a place you sank into rather than dived into. We who had slipped in and out of consciousness as easily as we slipped in and out of each other — entrances and exits blurred by kissing — were now jealously guarding our place of rest. My body shocked me by bristling at anything that threatened to take away its remaining strength. A stray knee or elbow was enough to spark a boundary war. I remember starting to notice how loud Rich’s sneezes were, how eccentrically articulated. Har-
When we were still students we had traveled round Europe by train, and one night we wound up in a small hotel in Munich where we collapsed in giggles on the bed. It looked like a double, but when you pulled the cover back it turned out to be two mattresses, divided and united by a thin wooden strip which made any meeting in the middle an effort rather than an inevitability. It all felt so Teutonic. “You be East Germany and I’ll be West,” I remember saying to Rich as we lay there on our separate halves in the light of the streetlamp. We laughed, but in time I came to wonder whether the Munich arrangement was the true marriage bed: practical, passionless, putting asunder what God had joined together.
7:41 A.M. After breakfast, Ben, wearing a bib like a Jackson Pollock, is terribly clingy. Paula peels him off me when Winston arrives to drive me to work. “All right, sweetheart, it’s all right,” I hear Paula say as I pull the door behind me.
Sitting in the back of Pegasus, I try to read the
“Do you think we could avoid the New North lights, Winston, and cut round the back? I’m not convinced this is the quickest way.”
He doesn’t answer for a while but allows the track to finish. Then, with the final chord still thrumming in the air, he says, “You know, lady, where I come from it takes a long time to do things suddenly.”
“Kate, my name is Kate.”
“I know what your name is,” he says. “Way I see it, rushing around just a waste of time. Fly too fast, lady, and you pass your nest.”
The laugh I laugh sounds darker than usual. “Well, I’m afraid that is the more leisurely perspective afforded to the driver of the minicab.”
Winston doesn’t bite back at my snottiness, he just gives it a long gaze in the mirror and says thoughtfully, “You think I want to be you?
That’s it. “Look, I don’t pay you for psychotherapy. I pay you to get me to Broadgate in the shortest time possible, a feat which seems increasingly beyond you. If you don’t mind, I’ll get out here. It’s quicker to walk.”
As I hand over the twenty and Winston digs into his pocket for change, he begins to sing:
8:33 A.M. OFFICES OF EDWIN MORGAN FORSTER. Shoot out of lift straight into Celia Harmsworth.
“Something on your jacket, dear?” smirks the head of Human Resources.
“Just back from the cleaners, actually.” I glance down at my shoulder to see a smeary mess, an epaulette of Ben’s banana porridge. No, God, how can you do this to me?
“I’m amazed how you manage this job, Katharine,” coos Celia, clearly delighted at further proof that I can’t.
(Celia is one of those spinsters who adored being the only woman in a man’s world; it was a license to feel pretty before girlies like me showed up and ruined her monopoly.)
“Must be such a struggle with all those kiddies,” she offers helpfully. “I was saying to Robin Cooper-Clark when you were away for — half term, was it? — I don’t know how she does it.”
“Two.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Two. All those kiddies. I have two of them. That’s one less than Robin has.”
Turn on my heel, walk over to desk, shrug off stained jacket, shove in bottom drawer. Incredible noise from the window. Out on the ledge, the pigeons have decided to move in together. The male is sitting there with a twig in his mouth looking faintly foolish and disbelieving. I recognize the expression. It’s the look Rich gives when I bring home a flatpack of shelves for self-assembly. The female, meanwhile, is busy forming a heap of other twigs into a raftlike structure roughly the size of a dinner plate. Oh, this is great, now they’re building a nest.
“Guy, did you get onto the Corporation about the hawk man? Damn pigeons are about to start a breeding program out there.”
I check my neck in handbag mirror for any Ben bites — no, all clear — and then I stalk coolly into meeting with Robin Cooper-Clark and other senior managers to begin my presentation. It goes remarkably well. All eyes in the room are glued on me, especially those of the bastard Chris Bunce. Am obviously starting to command serious respect: the tactic of behaving like a man, never mentioning the children, etc., is clearly paying off.
As I switch from slides to overheads, it suddenly occurs to me that I am the only person in the room without a penis. Not a good thought to have right now, Kate. Can we not think about dicks in a gathering of seventeen men? Talking of which, do they have to stare at me quite so intently? Look down. Am wearing red Agent Provocateur
