‘Dead?’
‘Yes,’ she said. She picked up her drink and took the size of swal ow her sweet little mother-in-law would have considered vulgar. ‘Dead. She may be breaking her heart over that piano, but she’s got her girls, hasn’t she? She’s stil got those girls.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Scott had a hangover. It was a peculiarly discouraging hangover because he had had neither the seductively reckless intention of getting drunk nor the reward of losing inhibition during the process, but had merely gone on accepting drinks and buying rounds, with a passive kind of aimlessness, until he found himself tottering unsteadily under the railway arch outside the Clavering Building and wondering why it was so difficult to extricate his keys from his pocket.
It was then, as he stood fumbling and cursing, that Donna had caught up with him. Two summers before, he’d had something going with Donna, who worked in the same law firm as he did and who thought his ability to play the piano was a very hot attribute indeed. They had spent a lot of nights and weekends together on the modern, black- framed bed in Scott’s flat, and then Donna had begun to ask to meet Margaret, and to stock the fridge with probiotic yoghurts, and berries in plastic boxes, and to col ect Scott’s work suits from the dry cleaner’s, and Scott had, in response, devised ways of avoiding her in the office and leaving clubs and pubs before she did. When she cornered him, and demanded to know what he was playing at, he said exactly what was in his mind, which was that sex was one thing, but love was quite another, and she should know that he thought sex with her was great. In revenge, she went out, immediately, with Colin from the family department, who was divorced and drove a BMW, and it didn’t seem to strike her that Scott, after a pang or two of competitive sexual jealousy, hardly minded at al . There’d been Clare, from accounts, anyway, even if that only lasted six weeks, after she’d borrowed two hundred quid from him and never paid it back.
But recently, Donna had started to be very nice to Scott again. Not flirtatious nice, but just friendly and pleasant and cheerful, which made Scott look at her rather as he had first looked at her two years ago, and she had picked up these tentative signals in an instant, and had watched, and waited, and last night, at the end of one of those post-work office-col eague social sessions that seemed like a good idea at the time, she had fol owed him down the hil from the city centre to the Clavering Building, and slipped her hand into his trouser pocket from behind, and pul ed his keys out with no trouble at al . And then she had taken him into his own building, and up to his own flat, and into his own bed, and he had felt, then, quite pleased to acquiesce, and, a bit later, for a short while, positive and energetic, and, later stil , perfectly content to fal down, down into slumber with Donna against his back and her breath stroking between his shoulder blades in little warm puffs.
In the morning, she was gone. She had slipped out from beside him, smoothed the pil ow she had lain on, dressed, and left. There was no evidence she had been there, no hairs in the basin, no damp towels. His toothbrush was dry. The only thing that proved to him that she had not been part of a giant alcoholic hal ucination the night before – if pressed, Scott knew he probably couldn’t even name the last club they had al been to –
was that on the kitchen worktop was an empty tumbler and a foil square of Alka-Seltzer tablets. Scott ran water into the tumbler, and dropped two of the tablets into it, holding the glass away from him, eyes screwed shut, as if the fizzing of the tablets as they dissolved was too much for a head as tender as his to bear.
He drank. Then he held his breath. There were always a few seconds, with Alka-Seltzer, when you wondered whether you would throw it up as fast as you had swal owed it. Nothing happened. He ran another glass of water, and drank that. Then he bent and inserted his face sideways under the tap, and let the water splash across his eyes and ears and down his neck.
In the bathroom mirror, he looked at himself with revulsion. Being so dark meant a navy-blue chin most mornings. Today, his skin was yel owish grey and there were bruises around his eyes and he looked il . Which he was. Poisoned. His liver must be in despair.
‘You are,’ he said to his reflection, ‘too old for this. Any day now, you’l just be sad. Sad, sad, sad, sad.’ He shut his eyes. This was the moment self-pity usual y kicked in, the self-pity which had lain in wait for him ever since a history master at school – who had had his own reasons for ingratiating himself with the better- looking boys – had taken him aside, after Richie had left, and put an arm round his shoulders and said, in a voice intense with understanding sympathy, ‘I am very, very sorry for you, my boy.’ Scott had broken down. The history master had been very adept at comforting him, had made him feel there was no loss of manliness in weeping.
‘Just not in front of your mother,’ the history master said. ‘She has enough to bear. Come to me, when things get too much. Come to me. It wil be our secret.’
The word ‘secret’ had alarmed Scott. But the feeling of warmth, of understanding, remained. Al his life since then, Scott could summon up, at wil , the adolescent desolation of that moment, and the permission he had been given – whatever the motive – to grieve for his loss, and for the loneliness it left him in. Now standing naked in his bathroom, feeling disgusting and disgusted in every atom of his maltreated body, he waited to be given the pardon of self-pity. But it wouldn’t come.
‘Fuck,’ Scott said to the mirror.
He picked up the spray can of shaving foam, and pressed the nozzle. Nothing happened. He shook the can. It rattled emptily. He flung it furiously across the bathroom and it clattered into the shower tray. He picked an already used disposable razor out of the soap dish, and, with his other hand, attempted to lather a cake of soap onto his chin. He was two unsatisfactory stripes down the left-hand side when his phone rang.
Of course, he couldn’t find it. Last night’s clothes – his work suit, a shirt, socks, underpants – were in a shameful stew on the floor. From somewhere inside the mess, his phone was ringing. It would be Donna. Not content with the gentle hint of the Alka-Seltzer, she would be ringing to make sure he was awake and would not be late for work. She would also, no doubt, be after some little reference to last night, some little reassurance that he had wanted what had happened, that she had, somehow, reminded him of what he had been missing, that they might now—He found the phone, in the back pocket of his trousers, just as it stopped ringing. ‘One missed cal ’, said the screen. He pressed Select. ‘Mam’, the screen said helpful y.
Scott went back to the bathroom, and found a towel. He wound it round his waist, and then he took the phone into the sitting room, to look at the view rather than at his own dispiriting face. It was seven-forty in the morning. What could Margaret want, at seven-forty in the morning, unless she was il ? Scott dial ed her number, and then stood, leaning against the windowsil , and looked at the rain outside, fal ing in soft, wet sheets through the girders of the Tyne Bridge and into the river below.
‘Were you in the shower?’ Margaret said.
‘Sort of—’
‘Sorry to ring so early, but I’ve got a long day—’
