Charles Cumming - A spy by nature

Needing to be away from her as much as she needs to be away from me, I stand and edge my way along the table back out into the room. I stand facing her, Kate staring beyond me at an opposite wall.

“I need to splash some water on my face.”

No reply.

So I turn and leave the kitchen, walk upstairs to the bathroom, and lock the door.

I see things that are not hers immediately. A can of shaving foam at the edge of the bath. Contact-lens cleaners and a small plastic case beside the sink. Two toothbrushes in the mug beside them. After everything that has happened, now this.

I sit on the edge of the bath, head bowed. On the floor, a pair of white boxer shorts. Why didn’t she hide them?

There is a window open and a cold wind buffets the glass, knocking the wooden frame against a brick wall outside. I tell myself that Kate is a pretty girl and that pretty girls have boyfriends and that this is all inevitable. But somehow it doesn’t help. Why didn’t she hide his things?

I drive myself crazy with images. Don’t. It’s too late for that. This is payback for Anna, for all of them. One man, two years later, his saline and his toothbrush laid out in the bathroom. You have to get used to that.

It was him on the phone.

I run cold water over my face at the sink but cannot stop the questions, the doubts. That he is good in bed, funny, capable of bringing out qualities in Kate that I suppressed. I cannot stop thinking that he makes her happier than I did.

Does Saul know about this? Did he meet him at that party?

Don’t. Don’t wonder what he looks like, what he does for a living, how much money he has or what stories he tells.

She will have met his friends.

They would have been to Paris, to movies, cooked for each other and fucked all night. Don’t. Don’t picture them in bed together, because that has nothing to do with your feelings for Kate and everything to do with your vanity. I just don’t want him to be better than I was.

Just let it go. Think about Cohen and let it go.

God, the speed with which she has recovered.

When I come back downstairs Kate has moved into the sitting room, bunched up on the sofa with a fresh cup of tea and a face like stone. She looks different now, now that I know she has a boyfriend, a man living here under the same roof. The one I feared all those nights.

“Not much has changed up there,” I say.

She cannot even look at me. My temper snaps.

“Kate, if you want me to go, I’ll go. But please, don’t sit there with this air of disappointment, this condescension, because I didn’t come here for that. I genuinely believe that I would never have done this if we were still together.”

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare blame this on me.”

“You’re right. I shouldn’t blame you. It’s not your fault. I would have done it anyway. Just like I slept with someone behind your back. It’s in my genes, you say. And for the last time, I’m sorry that I took you for granted. I’m sorry I wasn’t the person you thought you deserved. You had dreams for me that I couldn’t fulfill, and I fucked up. And now I’ve got involved in a murky business that you find reprehensible. I don’t blame you.”

She looks up at me, twitching with moral authority. Nothing that I say will ever satisfy her. Let’s have this out.

“If I thought this would happen, do you think I would have done it? Do you? Do you think that if I knew it would come to something like this that I wouldn’t have put a stop to it? It was straightforward in the planning, that’s all I can tell you. I was doing a job that I thought was useful and loyal and significant.”

“Straightforward in the planning?” Her laugh here is contemptuous, the slender jaw gaped with sarcasm. “Jesus. Straightforward in the planning?”

“Let’s not do that thing where we pick each other’s sentences apart, okay? It’s demeaning.”

“You never think, Alec. That’s just it with you. That’s just exactly the problem. It’s what happened with us, it’s what’s happening now. You take things on with no thought to the consequences, with nothing in your mind but how it can make you feel better about yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s an affair with a girl at your fucking office or some needless industrial espionage that leads to an innocent guy getting the shit kicked out of him. It’s always the same thing. You can’t live life without turning it into a lie.”

“That isn’t the case. It’s not that bad.”

“Not that bad?” she says. “You never stopped lying to me. For the last six months we were together, we barely slept together…”

Here we go. Actress time.

“Get over it, Kate. It’s history.”

“And when we did, those few times, I had to shut my eyes, I had to hold off the scream in my head. I did it for you. I let you fuck me because somewhere I still felt love for you, all the time knowing that that love had been corrupted, bit by bit, until all I felt was pity. Toward the end I could barely look at you. I couldn’t touch you. And I’m not sure you even noticed that. I would lie beside you in bed and actually dread your weight, your smell. And do you know why? Because you were soaked in lies. Deceit was all over you. I should have been the first person, the only person, that you might have been open with. But instead, I was the one person that you lied to more or less the whole time.”

I have heard all this before. The words have changed, but the well-worn message remains exactly the same. It is her standard tactic, a withering assault on my masculinity, disowning our sex life to wound me. My regrets about JUSTIFY, my fears for Cohen, are of no consequence to her. She does not see herself as my friend. There is still too much that she feels enraged by. Nothing has changed, nothing at all. It is still impossible to talk to Kate without her twisting a subject until it becomes a conversation about her. This is the selfishness in her that I had forgotten.

She is still not finished. She puts her tea on the small table beside the sofa and shakes her head with disappointment.

“In the beginning, when we first met, I saw you like someone might see a jigsaw. Just starting off. You were seventeen and I didn’t know how you would work out, the shape of you. And then, as I got to know you, as the jigsaw came together, I saw that you were just made up of lies. Not big lies, not all the infidelities or womanizing or cheating or anything really dangerous, but weak, cowardly, fearful lies. And you lied because you were afraid of me. You were afraid of everybody. To console me you would open your mouth and something sweet and caring would come out, but I couldn’t know if it was deeply felt. I couldn’t know if you really meant it or if you just liked the sound of those words in the room, the way the sentences altered my face. I felt that you were never with me. You couldn’t let me near you, you couldn’t let anyone near you. Your whole life is just a process of holding people off in case they have an effect on you.”

I do not deserve this. She has never found it in herself to forgive me. The damage to her self-esteem was just too great. I came here today on an impulse, to tell her things as a friend that I had never told anyone else. And yet she wants to use my confession as an excuse to criticize me for things that happened between us more than two years ago. The only thing that is of any interest to Kate is Kate. I had forgotten that.

“I’m going to go,” I tell her very firmly, with no doubt in my mind that this is the right thing to do. “I don’t have time to be talking about this. I need to find out about Harry and then get home. I’m sorry you weren’t able to see the bigger picture, I really am. But I’m trusting you not to speak to anybody about what I’ve told you. You’ve given me your word, and I trust you. Because if you do, it would certainly mean the end of my career. I could even be killed.”