leaned forward and took a flake of croissant off my lower lip. He poured me a second cup of coffee.
‘We’ve got to talk,’ I said again. He waited. ‘I mean, I don’t know who you are. I don’t know your second name or anything about you at all.’
He shrugged. ‘My name’s Adam Tallis,’ he said simply, as if that answered all my questions about him.
‘What do you do?’
‘Do?’ he asked, as if it were all far away and long ago.
‘Different things, in different places, to get money. But what I really do is climb, when I can.’
‘What? Mountains?’ I sounded about twelve, squeaky and amazed.
He laughed. ‘Yeah, mountains. I do stuff on my own, and I guide.’
‘Guide?’ I was becoming an echo.
‘Put up tents, short-rope rich tourists up famous peaks so they can pretend they’ve climbed them. That sort of thing.’
I remembered his scars, his strong arms. A climber. Well, I had never met any climbers before.
‘Sounds…’ I was going to say ‘exciting’, but then I stopped myself from saying something else stupid and instead added, ‘… like something I don’t know anything about.’ I smiled at him, feeling giddy with the utter newness of it all. Vertigo.
‘That’s all right,’ he said.
‘I’m Alice Loudon,’ I said, feeling foolish. A few minutes ago we’d been making love and staring into each other’s faces with a rapt attention. What could I say about myself that made any sense in this little room? ‘I’m a scientist, in a way, though now I work for a company called Drakon. They’re very well known. I’m managing a project there. I come from Worcestershire. I have a boyfriend and I share a flat with him. I shouldn’t be here. This is wrong. That’s about all.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Adam. He took the cup of coffee out of my hands. ‘No, it isn’t all. You’ve got blonde hair and deep grey eyes and a turned-up nose, and when you smile your face crinkles up. I saw you and I couldn’t look away. You’re a witch, you cast a spell on me. You don’t know what you’re doing here. You spent the weekend deciding you must never see me again. But I spent the whole weekend knowing we have to be together. And what you want to do is to take off your clothes in front of me, right now.’
‘But my whole life…’ I started. I couldn’t go on because I no longer knew what my whole life was meant to be. Here we were, in a little room in Soho, and the past had been erased and the future too, and it was just me and him and I had no idea of what I should do.
I spent the whole day there. We made love, and we talked, although later I couldn’t remember what about, just little things, odd memories. At eleven he put on jeans and a sweatshirt and trainers and went to the market. He came back and fed me melon, cold and juicy. At one, he made us omelettes and chopped up tomatoes and opened a bottle of champagne. It was real champagne, not just sparkling white wine. He held the glass while I drank. He drank himself and fed me from his mouth. He laid me down and told me about my body, listing its virtues as if cataloguing them. He listened to every word I said, really listened, as if he were storing it all up to remember later. Sex and talk and food blurred into each other. We ate food as if we were eating each other, and touched each other while we talked. We fucked in the shower and on the bed and on the floor. I wanted the day to go on for ever. I felt so happy I ached with it; so renewed I hardly recognized myself. Whenever he took his hands off me I felt cold, abandoned.
‘I have to go,’ I said at last. It was dark outside.
‘I want to give you something,’ he said, and untied the leather thong with its silver spiral from his neck.
‘But I can’t wear it.’
‘Touch it sometimes. Put it in your bra, in your knickers.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘Crazy for you.’
I took the necklace, and promised I would ring him and this time he knew it was true. Then I headed for home. For Jake.
Five
The following days were a blur of lunch-times, early evenings, one whole night when Jake was away at a conference, a blur of sex and of food that could be easily bought and easily eaten: bread, fruit, cheese, tomatoes, wine. And I lied and lied and lied, as I had never done before in my life, to Jake and to friends and to people at work. I was forced to fabricate a series of alternative fictional worlds of appointments and meetings and visits behind which I could live my secret life with Adam. The effort of making sure that the lies were consistent, of remembering what I had said to which person, was enormous. Is it a defence that I was drunk with something I barely understood?
One time Adam had pulled on some clothes to buy something for us to eat. When he had clattered down the stairs, I wrapped the duvet around me, went to the window and watched him head across the road, dodging through the traffic, towards the Berwick Street market. After he had vanished from view, I looked at other people walking along the street, in a hurry to get somewhere, or dawdling, looking in windows. How could they get through their lives without the passion that I was feeling? How could they think it was important to get on at work or to plan their holiday or buy something when what mattered in life was this, the way I was feeling?
Everything in my life outside that Soho room seemed a matter of indifference. Work was a charade I was putting on for my colleagues. I was impersonating a busy, ambitious manager. I still cared about my friends, I just didn’t want to see them. My home felt like an office or a launderette, somewhere I had to pass through occasionally in order to fulfil an obligation. And Jake. And Jake. That was the bad bit. I felt like somebody on a runaway train. Somewhere ahead, a mile or five thousand miles ahead, were the terminus, buffers and disaster, but for the moment all I could feel was delirious speed. Adam reappeared around the corner. He looked up at the window and saw me. He didn’t smile or wave, but he quickened his pace. I was his magnet; he mine.
When we had finished eating I licked the tomato pulp off his fingers.
‘You know what I love about you?’
‘What?’
‘
‘Do you want me to put them on?’
‘No, but…’
‘But what?’
‘When you went outside just now, I watched you as you went. And I mainly thought that this was wonderful.’
‘That’s right,’ said Adam.
‘Yes, but I suppose I was also secretly thinking that one day we’re going to have to go out there, into the world. I mean both of us, together, in some way. Meet people, do things, you know.’ As I spoke the words, they sounded strange as if I were talking about Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. I became alarmed. ‘It depends what you want, of course.’
Adam frowned. ‘I want you,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, not knowing what ‘yes’ meant. We were silent for a long time and then I said, ‘You know so little about me, and I know so little about you. We come from different worlds.’ Adam shrugged. He didn’t believe any of
