an old friend.
‘Yes,’ Nina said. ‘I understand.’
Because of the simplicity of her response, and also because he did see her face so clearly and close up with the marks of time and grief in it, he felt his doubts gather together and lift and swing away from him. He was left with pure conviction.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I loved you the other night, at Andrew’s. In that bathroom.’
He also wanted her, more insistently than he had ever wanted Vicky or any of the women he had ever known.
She put her hand up to his mouth, to stop him, but he caught it and held it.
‘I love you,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t know how this has happened. I didn’t ask for it, but it’s here and I don’t want it to go away. I don’t want you to go away, never, never.’
He was whispering to her, with his lips against her face. All the perspectives had changed. The room had become a sanctuary, benign and familiar and precious for that, and the horizons beyond it had vanished as if a thick, kindly mist had descended.
‘You don’t love me. You can’t love me because you don’t know me,’ Nina told him. Richard had known her, after their years together.
‘I do know you. What more do I need to learn?’
He undid her clothes and peeled them off her tea-freckled shoulders. He kissed her skin and tasted the warm saltiness of it, and pushed her back until they lay in the bed’s hollow and gazed into the reflections in each other’s eyes.
‘Take off your clothes too,’ she ordered him.
He clawed at the buttons and buckles, discarding the business carapace. Her knuckles clashed against his as their hands worked. Then, when he knelt above her, she stared up at him and her lips and eyelids were thickened with lust. He remembered how she had looked the first time, in her unornamented bedroom.
Nina’s hand descended on him, and she watched the effect through half-closed eyes. A moment later they were tangled together, mouths and hands and limbs. Her narrow hips insinuated themselves beneath him, snakily lifting, not offering herself but commanding him. She was different from Vicky, who waited to be led. Vicky was not submissive, not exactly, but there was an understanding that she preferred to bestow rather than to demand. There was a moment’s pure confusion as the woman beneath him receded and then merged with the familiar images of his wife, and then split away to resume her own identity, utterly strange to him.
The marriage of strangeness with intimacy was like a chemical entering his bloodstream, sending such a narcotic kick through his body that he was afraid he would come now, too soon, like a boy.
‘Tell me what you think. What you feel,’ she demanded when he came into her. And then, ‘Oh, I want you.’
‘You’ve got me. Nina, Nina. I think you are extraordinary, unmatchable. I feel like fucking you for ever.’
He wanted to bury himself, to shoot himself into a milky galaxy of stars inside her. He wanted to become timeless and fathomless, as if he had died and turned into a star, as his mother had long ago promised he would do.
Instead, their coupling in the motel room was quick, and feverish. The carnality of it startled them both. There was no time, as they had felt there was time the first night. They longed to reclaim one another after the separation. There were the Frosts’ dinner party and London and the days in between to be obliterated, and the car showroom and the salesman and the motel itself. They went at each other blindly, as if it was the last thing they would ever do.
Afterwards, lying with Nina’s hair spread over his eyes and her weight on top of him, Gordon imagined the noise they had made penetrating the stud walls into the mirror boxes on either side of them, and into the ones beyond those, and he prayed fervently that they were empty.
When his breathing became even again he stroked her hair away and peered upwards, trying to see her face. She was staring at the woodchip wallpaper. He was at once intensely jealous of whatever it was that held her attention away from him.
‘I meant it, you know.’
‘Meant?’
‘I love you.’
‘Hush.’
Her face, the skin over the bone, and the rest of her body, had now become irrelevant, although he loved them also with a kind of detached affection. He was much more vividly aware of the internal spark, the invisible imp, that animated her. He wanted to catch hold of it, and wondered at his own possessiveness.
‘Tell me more about Richard.’
‘I was thinking about him just then. How did you know?’
‘A guess. Not a particularly inspired one.’
She leaned over him, her small bumpy breasts falling against his chest.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that I had withdrawn from you. I think of him often. It’s very odd when someone who is quite young and apparently fit dies suddenly, like Richard did. One minute the person is there, filling your life, and then in a day, in an hour, he is completely gone and will never come back.’
‘What do you feel now?’
‘I’m not sure. Grateful, usually. For what we had, you know.’
He digested that for a moment.
‘What do you want from me?’
He heard himself asking, like a petulant boy, for reassurance, compliments, approval.
Nina propped her head on one elbow, looking down at him. She appeared to be amused, and he was momentarily irritated by her.
‘I mean, I’m only a simple bloody engineer. I’m not rich or smart or clever. I don’t know the right restaurants in London, I can’t even fix the right restaurant here. I’m married, I’ve got three kids, too much work to do …’
She cut him short. ‘I don’t want anything from you.’
Then she indicated the room. He examined the MDF fittings and plyboard wardrobe with plastic knobs, the wall-mounted mirror and the round tin tray bearing a kettle and a sugar bowl filled with teabags, sachets of coffee and milk powder.
‘Just this,’ she said. And with a touch of coquetry she ran the flat of her hand up his flank, over the thickening flesh at his waist to rest on his chest. Under her hand, it seemed to Gordon that she had it in her power to make the drab place beautiful, and to invest him with more significance than he could ever truly possess. He felt a lick of undiluted happiness.
‘Are you afraid of it? Of me?’ Nina demanded.
‘No. Not a bit. I can’t believe my luck, that’s all.’
‘Or I mine,’ she told him softly.
He saw that she was cold and he drew the covers around her shoulders. She settled herself comfortably against him and they lay in silence for a minute.
‘I won’t try to take you away from Vicky.’
