Killing Me Softly

He looked at me across the table. ‘It wasn’t like that. They weren’t that sort of exclusive thing.’

‘How many times were you unfaithful?’

‘I used to see other people.’

‘How many?’

He frowned.

‘Come on, Adam. Once, twice, twenty times, forty or fifty times?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Something like forty or fifty?’

‘Alice, come here.’

‘No! No – this is – I feel awful. I mean, why am I different?’ A thought struck me. ‘You haven’t…’

‘No!’ His voice was sharp. ‘Christ, Alice, can’t you see? Can’t you feel? There’s no one except you now.’

‘How do I know?’ I heard my voice wail. ‘I feel I arrived a bit late at the party.’ All those women crowding his life. I didn’t stand a chance.

He stood up and walked round the table. He pulled me to my feet and cupped my face in his hands. ‘You know, Alice, don’t you?’

I shook my head.

‘Alice, look at me.’ He forced my head up and looked deep, deep into me. ‘Alice, will you trust me? Will you do something for me?’

‘It depends,’ I said, sulkily, like a cross child.

‘Wait,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

It wasn’t a minute, but it was only a few minutes. I had hardly finished a cup of coffee when the doorbell rang. He’s got a key, I said to myself, and didn’t respond, but he didn’t come in and rang again. So I sighed and went down. I opened the door and Adam wasn’t there. A toot made me jump. I looked round and saw that he was sitting in a car, something old and nondescript. I walked over and bent my face down to the driver’s window.

‘What do you think?’

‘Is it ours?’ I asked.

‘For the afternoon. Get in.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Trust me.’

‘It had better be good. Shouldn’t I lock the house?’

‘I’ll do that. I’ve got to get something.’

I seriously thought of not obeying but then walked round to the passenger side and got in. Meanwhile Adam ran in through the front door and returned a minute later.

‘What were you getting?’

‘My wallet,’ he said. ‘And this.’ He tossed the Polaroid camera on to the back seat.

Oh, God, I thought, but didn’t say anything.

I stayed awake long enough to see that we were leaving London on the MI but then, as I always do when being driven anywhere, I fell asleep. When I was jolted awake for a moment, I saw that we were off the motorway in scrubby, wild countryside.

‘Where are we?’ I said.

‘It’s a mystery tour,’ Adam said, with a smile.

I drifted off to a half-sleep and when I woke up properly noticed an old Saxon church by the road in an otherwise featureless landscape. ‘Eadmund with an A,’ I said sleepily.

‘He lost his head,’ said Adam, beside me.

‘What?’

‘He was an Anglo-Saxon king. The Vikings caught him and killed him and cut him up and scattered his body all over the place. His followers couldn’t find him and there was a miracle. The head shouted, 'Here I am,' until they found it.’

‘I wish that bunches of keys did that. I’ve often wished that my house keys would shout, 'Here I am,' so that I wouldn’t have to search every single pocket of everything I own to find them.’

At a fork in the road there was an ornate war monument with an eagle on it to people in the RAF. We went right.

‘We’re here,’ said Adam.

He pulled into the side of the road and switched off the engine.

‘Where?’ I said.

Adam reached into the back of the car for the camera. ‘Come,’ he said.

‘I should have brought my boots.’

‘We’re only walking a couple of hundred yards.’

Adam took my hand and we walked away from the road, along a path. Then we turned off the path, into some trees and then up a slope, slippery with leaves still decaying from last autumn. Adam had been silent and thoughtful. I was almost startled when he began to speak.

‘I climbed K2 a few years ago,’ he said. I nodded and said something affirmative but he seemed lost in his own world. ‘Lots of great, great climbers have never done it, lots of great climbers have died trying. When I was at the top I knew intellectually that it was almost certainly the greatest climbing thing I would ever do, but I felt nothing. I looked around but…’ He made a contemptuous gesture. ‘I was up there for about fifteen minutes, waiting for Kevin Doyle to join me. All the while I was calculating the time, checking my equipment, going through the supplies in my head, deciding on the route down. Even as I looked around, the mountain was just there as a problem.’

‘So why do you do it?’

He scowled. ‘No, you don’t get my point. Look.’ We were emerging from the trees on to some grass, almost moorland. ‘This is the landscape I love.’ He put his arms round me. ‘I was once here before, and I thought it was one of the loveliest spots I had ever seen. We’re in one of the most crowded islands on earth but here we are on a patch of grass that’s off a path that’s off a track that’s off the road. Look at it with my eyes, Alice. Look down there, the church we passed nestling in the land as if it had grown there. And look round there at the fields, underneath it but they seem close up: a table of green fields. Come and stand here, by this hawthorn bush.’

Adam positioned me quite carefully and then stood facing me, looking around, as if orienting himself precisely. I shook him off, bewildered and uncomfortable. What had all this to do with his dozens of infidelities?

‘And then there’s you, Alice, my only love,’ he said, standing back and looking at me, as if I were a precious ornament he had put into a shop window. ‘You know the story that we are all broken into two halves and we spend our lives looking for our other self. Every affair we have, however stupid or trivial, has a bit of that hope that this might be it, our other self.’ His eyes turned dark suddenly, like the surface of a lake when a cloud has moved in front of the sun. I shivered in front of the hawthorn bush. ‘That’s why they can end so badly, because you feel you’ve been betrayed.’ He looked round and then back at me. ‘But with you, I know.’ I felt myself gasp, my eyes water. ‘Stand still, I want to take a photograph of you.’

‘Christ, Adam, don’t be so odd. Just kiss me, hold me.’

He shook his head and raised the camera in front of his face. ‘I wanted to photograph you here, in this place, at the moment that I asked you to marry me.’

There was a flash. I felt my knees give way. I sat down on the damp grass and he ran forward and took hold of me. ‘Are you all right?’

Was I all right? A feeling of extraordinary joy rose up in me. I stood up and laughed and kissed him on the mouth, firmly: a pledge.

‘Is that a yes?’

‘Of course it is, you idiot. Yes. Yes yes yes.’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Here she is.’

And there, indeed, I was, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, taking shape, colours deepening, outline hardening.