hard. I tasted blood metallic inside my mouth. I slid my hands down his knotty back, on to his buttocks and pulled him against me. We both sighed, and shifted our bodies slightly; my heart pounded against his, or was it his heart pounding against mine? The room smelt of sex, and the sheets were still slightly damp.
‘For work, Adam,’ I said. ‘I need clothes for work. I can’t just spend the whole day in bed.’
‘Why?’ He kissed the side of my neck. ‘Why can’t you? We have to make up for all the time we lost.’
‘I can’t just not go to work again.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, I just can’t. I’m not that kind of person. Don’t you ever have to work?’
He frowned but didn’t reply. Then he very deliberately sucked his index finger and slid it inside me. ‘Don’t go yet, Alice.’
‘Ten minutes. Ah, Christ, Adam…’
Afterwards I still didn’t have anything to wear. The clothes that I had worn yesterday were in a sweaty heap on the floor, and I had taken nothing else with me.
‘Here, put these on,’ said Adam, and chucked a pair of faded jeans on to the bed. ‘We can roll up the legs. And this. That’ll have to do for the morning. I’ll meet you at twelve thirty and take you shopping.’
‘But I might as well just get my stuff from the flat…’
‘No. Leave that for now. Don’t go back there. I’ll buy you some clothes. You don’t need much.’
I didn’t bother with underwear. I pulled on the jeans, which were rather loose and long but didn’t look so bad with a belt. Then the black silk shirt, which brushed softly against my jumpy skin and smelt of Adam. I took the leather thong out of my bag and put it round my neck.
‘There.’
‘Beautiful.’
He picked up a brush and pulled it through my tangled hair. He insisted on watching me pee, brush my teeth and apply mascara to my eyelashes. He didn’t take his eyes off me.
‘I’ve gone to pieces,’ I said to him in the mirror, trying to smile.
‘Think about me all morning.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Think about you.’
I did think about him all morning. My body throbbed with the memory of him. But I also thought about Jake and about the whole world that Jake and I had belonged to together. There was a bit of me that couldn’t comprehend how it was that I was still here, in my familiar office, stringing together well-worn sentences about the IUD and female fertility when I had thrown a bomb into my old life and watched it explode. I tried to imagine everything that had happened since I had left. Probably Jake would have told Pauline, at least. And she would have told everyone else. They would all meet up for drinks and talk about it and wonder and be shocked, and try to comfort Jake. And I, who had for so long been an established part of the group, would have become the object of their gossipy, shocked exchanges. Everyone would have an opinion about me; their own emphatic version.
If I had left that world – and I supposed that I had – had I then joined Adam’s world, full of men who climbed mountains and women who waited for them? As I sat at my desk and waited for the lunch hour, I reflected on how very little I knew about Adam, about his past or his present or his planned future. And the more I realized that he was a stranger to me, the more I longed for him.
He had already bought me several pairs of bras and knickers. We stood half hidden by a rail of dresses and smiled at each other and brushed each other’s hand. It was our first real date outside the flat.
‘These are ridiculously expensive,’ I said.
‘Try this on,’ he said.
He picked out a straight black dress, then a pair of tight-fitting trousers. I tried them on in the changing room, over the top of my new underwear, and stared at myself in the mirror. Expensive clothes made a difference. When I came out, clutching the garments, he thrust a chocolate-brown velvet dress at me, with a low neck, long sleeves and skirt cut on the bias, trailing the floor. It looked medieval and stunning and the price tag told me why. ‘I can’t.’
He frowned. ‘I want you to.’
We came out of the shop with two bags full of clothes that had cost more than my monthly pay packet. I was wearing the black trousers with a cream satin shirt. I thought of Jake saving up to buy me my coat and how his face had looked so eager and proud when he had handed it to me.
‘I feel like a kept woman.’
‘Listen.’ He stopped in the middle of the pavement and people flowed past us. ‘I want to keep you for ever.’
He had this knack for making flippant remarks turn deadly serious. I blushed and laughed but he stared at me, scowled almost.
‘Can I take you out for dinner?’ I asked. ‘I want you to tell me about your life.’
First, though, I had to collect some things from the flat. I had left my address book there, my diary, all my work things. Until I had got them, I would feel I was half there still. With a sick feeling in my stomach, I rang Jake at work, but he wasn’t there; they said he was ill. I rang the flat and he answered on the first ring.
‘Jake, it’s Alice,’ I said foolishly.
‘I recognized your voice,’ he replied drily.
‘Are you unwell?’
‘No.’
There was a silence.
‘Listen, I’m sorry but I need to come round and collect a few things.’
‘I’ll be at work during the daytime tomorrow. Do it then.’
‘I haven’t got my keys any more.’
I could hear him breathing on the other end. ‘You really burnt your bridges, didn’t you, Alice?’
We arranged that I should call in at six thirty. There was another pause. Then we both said goodbye, politely, and I put the phone down.
It’s amazing how you don’t really need to work at work, what you can get away with when you don’t care. I wish I’d discovered that before now. Nobody seemed to have noticed how late I had arrived that morning or how long I took for lunch. I went to another meeting in the afternoon, where once again I said very little and was congratulated afterwards by Mike for being so incisive. ‘You appear very in control of things at the moment, Alice,’ he said nervously. Giovanna had said almost the same thing in an e-mail earlier in the day. I shuffled paper round my desk, slid most of it into the bin, and told Claudia not to put calls through. At just after five thirty I went into the ladies’ and brushed my hair, washed my face, put lipstick on my sore lips and buttoned my coat up firmly so that no trace of my new, glossy clothes could be seen. Then I took my old familiar route back to the flat.
I was early, and I walked around for a bit. I didn’t want to take Jake by surprise, before he was prepared for me, and I certainly didn’t want to meet him on the street. I tried to think what I should say to him. The act of breaking off from him had immediately turned him into a stranger, someone more precious and vulnerable than the ironic, modest Jake I had lived with. At a few minutes past six thirty, I went to the door and pressed the buzzer. I heard feet running down the stairs, saw a shape approaching through the frosted glass.
‘Hello, Alice.’
It was Pauline.
‘Pauline.’ I didn’t know what to say to her. My best friend; the one I would have turned to in any other circumstance. She stood in the doorway. Her dark hair was tied up in a stern knot. She looked tired: there were faint smudges under her eyes. She wasn’t smiling. I realized that I was seeing her as if we had been apart from each other for months, not just a couple of days.
‘Can I come in?’
