provide a report. We had time for a bath.
“I’d like to see your show,” he said. “I’d like to see you perform.”
“Come tomorrow,” I said. “We’re performing for a group of four-year-olds just up the road in Primrose Hill.”
“I can’t,” he said, looking away.
“Oh,” I said primly, hating myself. “Family business.”
“I can’t get out of it,” he said. “I would if I could.”
“That’s quite all right,” I said. This was why I didn’t sleep with married men-the shame and the pain and the guilt of it.
“Are you cross?”
“Not at all.”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you want me to be cross?”
He picked up my hand and held it to his cheek. “I’m in love with you, Nadia. I’ve fallen in love.”
“Don’t say that. It frightens me. It makes me feel too happy.”
EIGHT
Five- and six-year-old girls make the best audiences. They are sweet and admiring, and sit in decorous rows in their silky pastel dresses, with their hair in plaits and their feet in patent leather shoes. When I call one of them up to the front to help me, she’ll put her finger in her mouth and speak in a whisper. Eight- and nine-year-old boys are the worst. They jeer at us, and shout out that they know the disappeared object is in my pocket, and they push each other about and surge forward to inspect my box of tricks. They snigger when I drop a ball. The puppet show is for sissies, they say. They sing “Happy Birthday” in a sarcastic shout. They burst all the balloons. And Zach and I have an unbreakable rule: Nobody in double figures.
This party was for five-year-old boys, with a few girls drifting round the edges. It was in a large and handsome house in Primrose Hill that had steps leading up to the front door, an entrance hall you could turn several cartwheels in before reaching the other side, a kitchen the size of my flat, a living room filled with children that stretched back, across a pale, deep carpet, to French windows. The garden was long and well tended, with a patio, a goldfish pond, a series of trellised arches, clipped box hedges, white roses.
“Blimey,” I whispered at Zach.
“Just don’t break anything,” he whispered back.
The birthday boy was called Oliver, and he was small and plump; his cheeks were blotchy with excitement; his friends raged round him like random atoms while he ripped wrapping paper off presents. His mother was called Mrs. Wyndham, and she looked very tall and very thin and very rich and already seemed terminally irritated by the party that was just beginning. She looked doubtfully at me and Zach.
“There are twenty-four of them,” she said. “Rather boisterous. You know what boys are like.”
“We do,” said Zach, dolefully.
“No problem,” I said. “If the children go into the garden for a few minutes, we can set up in the living room.” I walked into the living room and clapped my hands. “Kids, run outside now. We’ll call you when the show is about to begin.”
There was a stampede through the French windows. Mrs. Wyndham ran after them, wailing something about her camellia.
Zach and I had made the puppet theater together. We had sawed and nailed. On a canvas sheet we had painted blue mountains, a green forest, the inside of a cottage. We had even made one of our puppets, a lion, out of papier-mache. It was messy, took ages, and looks like a lump of dried plasticine with a wonky face painted on its knobbly, asymmetrical surface. We bought the rest from a specialist shop. We have a couple of short plays, which Zach wrote. After all, he’s the writer. That’s what he says he does when anyone asks him. “I write novels,” he says firmly, maybe adding as an afterthought that he subsidizes his writing with other things, like being a children’s entertainer.
His puppet shows are short and complicated and involve too many different voices. Today’s had a boy, a girl, a wizard, a bird, a butterfly, a clown, a fox. I always feel very sweaty afterward.
Zach already knew about the letter, of course, and the police, and all of the precautions they were taking. He’d met Lynne today, for we had given him a lift to Primrose Hill, and he’d sat in the front beside her and talked to her about chaos theory and how the population of India was about to pass one billion while she maneuvered through the traffic, looking dazed.
As we were slotting together the theater, he asked me if I was at all scared by the business.
“No.” I hesitated as I hooked the curtains across the miniature stage. But I had to tell someone. “More excited, as a matter of fact.”
“That sounds a bit perverse.”
“The thing is, Zach, can you keep a secret?” I didn’t wait for him to reply. I knew he couldn’t. He’s famous for being like a sieve. “I’m having a thing with one of the policemen.”
“What?”
“I know. It’s a bit weird, but-”
“Nadia.” He took hold of my shoulders so I had to stop what I was doing. “Are you insane? You can’t do this.”
“Can’t?”
Zach gestured wildly, as if he couldn’t show by words alone how badly I was behaving.
“It’s not on. It’s wrong. It’s like having an affair with your doctor. He’s taking advantage of you, of your vulnerability. Can’t you see? Look, I’m sure that you see it as something beautiful and pure and important, but you’ve just split up with Max and you’re jumping into bed with someone who’s supposed to be protecting you.”
“Shut up, Zach.”
“Father figure. You have to stop it, Nadia.”
“He’s married,” I added miserably. Just saying it made my chest hurt.
Zach gave a sarcastic snort. “But of course.”
“He’s very attractive. I mean I’d never have thought…” I shivered as I remembered that morning, just a few hours ago, when he’d taken over from Lynne for an hour, and we’d made love in the bathroom, up against the tiled wall, fumbling at each other’s clothing, desperate.
“Nadia,” Zach said urgently. “Oh fuck, here they come.”
The boys had returned from the garden.
After the show, I got Oliver to help me do my pathetic magic trick, and the wand collapsed every time he touched it, and all the children shouted “Abracadabra!” as loudly as they could, and Mrs. Wyndham winced in the doorway. Then I asked them to give me strange objects that I could juggle with. One vile child, called Carver, presented me with a cheese grater he had found in the kitchen, but I didn’t think Mrs. W wanted blood on the carpet. I chose a melon, a napkin ring, and a drumstick, and I didn’t drop any of them. Zach blew up long balloons and twisted them into animal shapes. Then the children bolted into the kitchen for sausages on sticks and jam- filled biscuits and a birthday cake in the shape of a train. And it was over. Zach was desperate for his cigarette, so I pushed him outside.
