rose. ‘I’m sorry to have imposed myself on you like this. You must be wanting to get on with your evening. I could wait for Fred outside –’
Juliet stood up to stop her going. She had to admit that Caroline was rather impressive after all. ‘It’s nice to meet you, and very kind of you to come and collect the boy and hugely impressive that you found us. Khyber Road isn’t in the A to Z, so we’re entirely off the map.’
Caroline looked as if she could find anyone anywhere. ‘I live nearby, actually.’ Not in the tower blocks, nor on the estate, but on the other side of Clapham Junction.
‘I live with people from work – Jane and Graham. We’re married.’
‘You’re married?’
‘Me? No, no, did I say me? No, no, I’m not married, they are. Graham and Jane. No. Them. Graham and Jane.’
Caroline’s face was scarlet, as if the fire she was staring into had suddenly produced some actual heat. Juliet watched her fiddle with the tear in her skirt, and wondered.
Fred appeared, wearing some old trousers and an untucked shirt, and they set off awkwardly into the night. Juliet wished them well but she was not hopeful. It must take a lot to make someone like Caroline blush, she thought, and she was right. Later, after Fred had walked Caroline home and Jane had taken her sleeping pill, Graham would creep into the box room they rented to Caroline for most of their mortgage payment, and it would be his finger that would find the hole in the tartan taffeta, and enlarge it.
When Barbara came back with a bottle of wine and saw Jacob sitting on the sofa as he always did, half kneeling and almost curled, she had to stop herself saying, ‘You look as if you never left’, or ‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ What pleased Jacob was knowing silence, so Barbara looked briefly struck and then got on with pouring them both a drink. Even though two people could have sat between them, she felt the shock of being close to him again. It had been three weeks since he moved out, if it could be called that.
‘What is it like then, your room?’
‘It has all I need – a table, a bed.’
‘I know, Jakes. A table, a bed, a scrap of cashmere, a drop of cognac …’
‘Oh come on, don’t be so leaden.’ Jacob’s mouth tightened at the corners as if someone had turned two screws. No one else teased him or called him by anything other than his full name.
‘Where do you wash?’
‘In the sink.’
‘I hope Tania hasn’t made the mistake of laying on hot water.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘You must be in heaven.’ Barbara still found her husband so interesting that she leaned back in order to scrutinise him more thoroughly. She knew what he was made of, parts that did not belong together and which ought not to fit: a bulky, almost square forehead, a cleft chin, a mouth unbalanced by the comparative slightness of the lower lip, a long thin nose with flared nostrils, heavy brows, and wide pale eyes that scattered light. Although he looked still, even disengaged, Jacob was continuously in the throes of process and adjustment, at a chemical level barely discernible to the eye. From moment to moment, he was a different creature.
Now, without moving or speaking, Jacob stopped being a man laying claim to a home and became nervous and rigid, a boy. To stop herself feeling sorry for him, wanting to do something for him, Barbara got up and went to run a bath.
‘Come on, Jakes.’
He would not look at her but let her raise him to his feet and steer him into the bathroom. As she reached round him to close the door, he leant back against it, pulling her towards him. They were about the same height and their bodies were the same mixture of angles and curves.
With Jacob pinned to the door, Barbara caught sight of herself in the mirror that ran along one wall, floor to ceiling. She looked clumsy, aggressive and unwelcome. ‘Christ, I feel like a man,’ she said and took a step backwards.
Jacob caught her arms with his fingertips. He turned his head away and slumped a little. Poor Jacob. Barbara pressed a hand against his jeans and felt a flick of attention. She knelt down, unbuttoned his flies and took the whole of his soft cock into her mouth. For the few moments in which nothing happened, Barbara felt the purest and most generous tenderness. She would have taken his body into her mouth entire, if she could.
Jacob made the small sound he made when he came, undressed and slipped into the water. Barbara stood in the middle of the stone floor and hitched her skirt up to her thighs before deciding to announce that she needed to pee, only she chose to say ‘piss’, ‘I really must piss’, and did so noisily, keeping her eyes fixed on his as she talked: ‘I love the light in here, how it’s so sort of steely and marine. Do you remember what you said when we first had it done? How it was like being in a bathysphere.’ She stood up and took off her clothes, at first angrily and then coquettishly. She had been undressing in front of Jacob for twenty years and wanted him to realise what that meant, and to want still to watch.
Naked, she hesitated. ‘They were right about all those scatter spots giving it a salty atmosphere. Absolutely right. It’s my favourite room.’ Then she put one foot on the edge of the bath, her groin towards his face.
He made no space for her. ‘I know.’
‘It’s yours, too, isn’t it? Your favourite room,’ she continued, climbing in to crouch at his feet.
‘Don’t you think,’ Jacob was saying as he stood up so abruptly that the water rocked, collided with itself and washed over the side, ‘that you overdid it? Just a bit?’
He got dressed, still wet, and had his hand on the front door when she jumped out of the water and ran naked through the flat to stand behind him.
He waited, blank and tolerant, as she fought to control her voice: ‘You wanted it … as much as … I did … more … so … don’t … don’t … make me feel … all this is … just …’
Jacob had buttoned his shirt wrongly and left it half untucked, not because he was in a hurry but because this was what he did. About five years earlier, Barbara had stopped finding it charming but she had never done what she did now, which was to reach out and tidy him up.
‘You’re forty-three, not seventeen.’
In his smallest, most exhausted voice: ‘May I go now?’
Juliet wrapped herself up in an eiderdown, turned on the television and drank whisky from a teacup, as if that made it good for her. Nothing worked. The room did not become anything more than its four brown walls, its grey windows and warped door; it did nothing to hold her. Damp sat in the icy air and the air sat in her lungs so that what circulated in her body was a kind of slush, neither forming nor melting, grubby, soggy and chill. She wondered why a stranger’s voice could affect her so much.
The pain began, as it often did, when her thoughts ran out. The first twinge at the base of her spine repeated itself and then unfurled, pushed and gripped. I’m not in agony, she thought, it’s not like earache or toothache or being burned, but the pain travelled and accumulated until it possessed her. More than that, it occupied her so fully that she felt thrown out of herself.
