There is movement. On the floor, on the rug that softens the sofa grouping, their bodies mostly hidden by the furniture. Becky cranes her neck a little. She sees a woman’s head, and Matthew on top of her, and the woman is not his wife, cannot be unless Antonia has gone blonde. She notices a tall-heeled foot, black shoe with a red sole, sliding off the rug, onto the flagstone, like a calf’s leg slipping outward as it takes a first step.
The woman says something to the man. Her arm goes up – pushing him or reaching for him? He catches her by the wrist and moves that arm back onto the rug – and his breathing, his grunting, deepens. The woman’s face contorts. Perhaps close to orgasm. Perhaps uncomfortable.
The woman turns her head and looks straight at Becky. And opens her mouth, as if about to speak – or call out – or warn him – or—
Chapter 2
That night in bed, restless under her covers, Becky goes from hot to cold, aggravated by the duvet’s shortness, its longness and finally its mere existence. Window up, window down, she cannot seem to find a simple point of balance between sweating and shivering. She lies on her front, her back, curled up, stretched out, grasping and un-grasping her wrist.
Matthew Kingsman. Oxford man. Family man. Film man. There is a waterlogged feeling in her. Perhaps it is disappointment, though that would be irrational. Matthew is a free agent in a free country. He can do as he pleases, and it is no business of hers.
She tells herself she has been naïve: that people do this all the time. Flings, dalliances, affairs, trust-bending, trust-breaking. There are of course open marriages whose openness isn’t advertised to one and all. People have sex with people they shouldn’t, all the time, particularly in her industry where everyone is looking at themselves, and if not at themselves then at each other, in the mirror or through a camera or on screen. Bodies attractive enough to sell tickets win easy lays, quick fucks, promotions. She gets it. It shouldn’t be news to her. She needs to loosen the fuck up.
Successful people are boundary-benders, boundary-breakers, and maybe it is Becky who should be taking a lesson from this rather than sitting here in judgement. She has so much to learn. She aches under the weight of it, aches at how childish she still is.
All these thoughts ricochet off the sides of her, like a ball in a pinball machine.
She considers for the hundredth time how, with the kitchen lights behind her, she must only have been a silhouette. How she turned and ran so quickly and quietly that perhaps if they were drunk she’ll be remembered as something that couldn’t have happened. A shadow in the corner of the eye, with nothing there on second glance. She was never there. If he asked – and why would he ever ask? – she would look blankly back and deny everything.
It is none of her business how two people have sex. Some people like to dress up. Some people play rough, hold each other down and tie each other up by the wrists, silence and hurt each other. She knows all that. She’s not completely naïve.
At five in the morning, and with just two hours left before it’s time to wake Maisie for school, Becky admits defeat and leaves her bed, padding quietly to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Maisie will sleep through the kettle whistle, through the smell of coffee, through all of it. Maisie rarely dreams. She sleeps like a child whose days are straightforward, which is precisely how Becky has laboured to arrange them.
Becky breathes in her home and the smell of washing powder and the ghost of last night’s chilli and tries to calm the thud-crack in her heart. She looks around her small kitchen and at all the boundaries that surround her in her old East London maisonette; at the low ceilings and narrow rooms, at the double-glazed, triple-locked door that leads out onto a paved patio. At the window grills that slide across and meet in the middle. At the moose-headed coat hook in the hallway that holds her black lycra running top and the pair of creased and dusty wide-legged trousers she’d once worn for weekly self-defence classes at the local gym.
At first, what she learnt there made her feel safer than any triple-locked door. She enjoyed making a fist in a boxing glove so her wrists didn’t snap and her tendons didn’t bruise, and how to deliver a punch with speed and precision. She had felt reassured and emboldened by the tight wrap of the gloves around her wrists and how they made her arms feel bionic, almost not her own. She had enjoyed the feeling of strength return to her body.
But she abandoned the lessons when she began using her new-found skills in unconstructive ways. There wasn’t a local gym class on earth that would teach her the skills she needed to defend her against herself.
Becky tries not to panic about how much she has to do, how she will manage a day’s work, a flight to Cannes and a couple more hours’ peppiness for all those new people who will need impressing. All on no sleep whatsoever? Back in her bedroom she lightly folds a dress and rolls up a cotton shirt and two T-shirts. Fills her washbag. Pulls out pants and socks and assembles it all in a pleasing jigsaw inside her carry-on suitcase: two carbon-scented copies of the Medea script at its base.
She makes notes on her Cannes meetings, banishing thoughts of that silken hair spilling out onto the kitchen floor, coming up with six ways to pitch her idea to six different kinds of people.
But she knows what she really wants to do
