Nothing to do with that. It’s history.’
‘What history?’
‘Tell me yours first.’
He held me so that my chin rested in the hollow of his shoulder. I closed my eyes and listened while he described his childhood. He was the middle one of three boys, children of a City solicitor and a career mother. They lived in a good house in Hampshire and the brothers played cricket in the garden and sailed dinghies, and went to a suitable public school and then on to appropriate universities.
‘Not very interesting, you see,’ Peter said.
‘It is to me. Where are your brothers now?’
He told me that they were both lawyers and both married, and made a joke about it being such a conservative family that his own minute deviations from this norm were regarded as acts of rebellion.
‘No wife, you mean?’
‘No law, no wife. But I have had a couple of girlfriends. I’m quite normal, you know.’
I did know already, but I wanted to know more about his background because he was so safe and rational, the living equivalent of the scent of clean laundry. Everything about Peter Stafford, past and present, was a magnet to me.
Probably after that we started to make love again and so his original question to me was forgotten. I avoided talking about my own history that time, although eventually, of course, I did confess it to him.
In any case, within three months Peter and I were married.
He asked me once or twice if I had seen our new neighbour again, and I told him no. Then I met Lisa parking her car as I was coming back from a walk in Hyde Park. We talked for a minute or two, and on impulse I asked her if she would like to come and have dinner with us the following week. To my surprise she accepted. She was lonelier than I had calculated and Baz had not yet been replaced.
Lisa rang the doorbell late, well after all the other guests had arrived. Peter answered the door and I heard him introducing himself and then Lisa’s laughing response before he shepherd her into the drawing room. She was wearing a short, slippery red dress with a little pink cardigan shrugged over it, and red suede shoes. Our guests collectively sat upright, our old friends Clive and Sally Marr and Mark and Gerard from upstairs, and the visiting American woman associate of Peter’s, and the young portrait painter and his girlfriend whom I had invited in an attempt to span the age gap between Lisa and the rest of us. Her arrival was like a shaft of daylight coming into the nighttime gathering.
I saw her looking around at the room that was identical in shape and size, and yet so different from hers.
‘Your flat is very smart,’ she said, after we had greeted each other.
‘Is it?’
‘Definitely.’
I introduced her to the others and as she moved around I saw that what she brought with her wasn’t exactly light, but warmth. Aside from her youth and her prettiness, she had genuine heat that thawed the formality of the occasion. Clive Marr unwound his long arms and legs from their self-protective embrace and shook her hand, and Jessy the American woman smilingly made room for her on the sofa. I hitched my black woollen sleeves round my wrists. I was glad that Lisa Kirk was entirely natural and at ease, and that she didn’t need her hostess’s protection. My hands were cold, so I went closer to the fire and warmed them.
The evening took off. Clive told a funny story I had never heard before about his days as a houseman under an autocratic consultant who thought his inveterate stutter was an affectation. ‘D-d-d-iverticulitis, Dr Marr?’ he mimicked, embedding his own impediment within the fearsome doctor’s voice with surgical precision.
Everyone laughed including Lisa, and Clive looked boyish with pleasure.
Dan Cruickshank the portrait painter gossiped indiscreetly about the royal princess who was currently sitting for him, and Mark and Gerard leaned forward greedily to catch the details. From across the room Peter smiled at me, his eyes creasing behind his glasses. I smiled back, buckling my mouth into a curve against a sense of alarm that I didn’t yet recognise.
We went into the next room to eat. The candles reflected tapering ovals of light off glass and polished wood. Lisa studied Peter’s pictures, a pair of splashy Hodgkins and a small Bacon. She had taken off her little pink cardigan and her shoulders were bare except for thin straps. Her skin was pale and the candlelight seemed to strike off it, breaking and intensifying into painterly slashes of green and peach and yellow so that I narrowed my eyes to make it recombine, wondering if I had already had too much to drink.
‘Lisa, would you like to sit here?’
Peter drew out the chair next to his. I took the other end of the table, between Gerard and Dan. The talk and laughter swelled and I sliced and spooned food on to plates and watched it disappear. After long years of conditioning myself, I didn’t any longer care much about eating. But I had plenty of time at my disposal to prepare meals like this one and cooking was still one of my pleasures.
At my end of the table Dan and Sally and Jessy were talking about portraiture. Peter had wanted Dan to paint me and we had met originally to talk about the project. I had hedged and demurred, because I didn’t want to sit and be scrutinised so closely, and in the end the idea had come to nothing. But we had remained friends with Dan and therefore also the current one of his series of girlfriends.
‘I would still like her to sit for me, but I don’t think I can persuade her,’ Dan was saying.
‘You should keep trying,’ Gerard advised.
Lisa had been deep in conversation with Peter. Her attentiveness to him made her seem taut as a stretched bow with the arrow in the notch and ready to fly. But now she turned her head. Our eyes met and locked.
‘It would be a wonderful picture. When I first saw Cary I was almost too afraid to speak to her.’
‘Why is that?’ I asked, in spite of myself.
‘Because of the way you look.’
There seemed to be a shift in air pressure, as in the seconds before the sound of an approaching tube train becomes audible. The way you look. When I was much younger I possessed an outlandish kind of beauty. I was six feet tall, with a smooth face that make-up artists could paint over with a hundred other faces. I used my appearance to earn money as a photographic model. But I was past forty now and what was left of my extreme looks had been for a long time more an affliction than a blessing because they were at odds with what I felt inside. It was like having always to wear a mask, only it was also a mask that age kept on distorting.
‘I remember that you talked quite a lot, in fact,’ I said, recalling the confidences about Baz and his new girlfriend and the pregnancy.
There was that change in air pressure again, a movement of the atmosphere that made you suck in a breath to reinflate your lungs. In the sudden silence that was broken only by the clink of cutlery I realised that the new atmospheric component was hostility. It had replaced the oxygen.
Lisa and I were still looking at each other, the glance twisting between us like razor wire. Peter sat in his place at the head of our table, his eyes still mild behind his glasses, maybe unaware of the arrow pointed at him. But I think he did feel
