Nicci French: Killing Me Softly

Adam stroked my hair and made me shiver. ‘Why ask me anything?’ he said.

‘Don’t you want to know about me? Don’t you want to know the details of what my work involves?’

‘Tell me the details of what your work involves.’

‘You don’t really want to know.’

‘I do. If you think what you do is important, then I want to know.’

‘I told you already that I work for a large pharmaceutical company. For the last year I’ve been seconded to a group who are developing a new model intrauterine device. There.’

‘You haven’t told me about you,’ Adam said. ‘Are you designing it?’

‘No.’

‘Are you doing the scientific research?’

‘No.’

‘Are you marketing it?’

‘No.’

‘Well, what the fuck are you doing?’

I laughed. ‘It reminds me of a lesson I had at Sunday School when I was a child. I put up my hand and I said that I knew that the Father was God, and that the Son was Jesus, but what did the Holy Spirit do?’

‘What did the teacher say?’

‘He had a word with my mother. But in the development of the Drakloop III, I’m like the Holy Spirit. I interface, arrange, drift around, go to meetings. In short, I’m a manager.’

Adam smiled and then looked serious. ‘Do you like that?’

I thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know, I don’t think I’ve said this clearly, even to myself. The problem is that I used to like the routine part of being a scientist that other people find boring. I liked working on the protocols, setting up the equipment, making the observations, doing the figures, writing up the results.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I suppose I was too good at it. I got promoted. But I shouldn’t be saying all of this. If I’m not careful you’ll discover what a boring woman you’ve inveigled into your bed.’ Adam didn’t laugh or say anything, so I got embarrassed and clumsily tried to change the subject. ‘I’ve never done much outdoors. Have you climbed big mountains?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Really big ones? Like Everest?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘That’s amazing.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not amazing. Everest isn’t…’ he searched for the right word ‘… a technically interesting challenge.’

‘Are you saying it’s easy?’

‘No, nothing above eight thousand metres is easy. But if you’re not too unlucky with the weather then Everest is a walk-in. People are led up there who aren’t real climbers. They’re just rich enough to hire people who are real climbers.’

‘But you’ve been to the top?’

Adam looked uncomfortable, as if it was difficult to explain to someone who couldn’t possibly understand. ‘I’ve been on the mountain several times. I guided a commercial expedition in ’ninety-four and I went to the summit.’

‘What was it like?’

‘I hated it. I was on the summit with ten people taking pictures. And the mountain… Everest should be something holy. When I went there it was like a tourist site that was turning into a rubbish dump – old oxygen cylinders, bits of tent, frozen turds all over the place, flapping ropes, dead bodies. Kilimanjaro’s even worse.’

‘Have you just been climbing now?’

‘Not since last spring.’

‘Was that Everest?’

‘No. I was one of the guides for hire on a mountain called Chungawat.’

‘I’ve never heard of it. Is it near Everest?’

‘Pretty near.’

‘Is it more dangerous than Everest?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you get to the top?’

‘No.’

Adam’s mood had darkened. His eyes were narrow, uncommunicative. ‘What is it, Adam?’ He didn’t reply.

‘Is it… ?’ I ran my fingers down his leg to his foot and to the mutilated toes.

‘Yes,’ he said.

I kissed them. ‘Was it very terrible?’

‘You mean the toes? Not really.’

‘I mean the whole thing.’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘Will you tell me all about it some day?’

‘Some day. Not now.’

I kissed his foot, his ankle and worked my way up. Some day, I promised myself.

‘You look tired.’

‘Pressure of work,’ I lied.

There was one person I hadn’t felt able to put off. I used to meet Pauline almost every week for lunch and usually we’d wander into a shop or two together, where she would watch indulgently as I tried on impractical garments: summer dresses in winter; velvet and wool in summer; clothes for a different life. Today I was walking along with her while she did some shopping. We bought a couple of sandwiches from a bar on the edge of Covent Garden then queued at a coffee shop and then at a cheese shop.

I immediately knew I’d said the wrong thing. We never said things like ‘pressure of work’ to each other. I suddenly felt like a double agent.

‘How’s Jake?’ she asked.

‘Very fine,’ I said. ‘The tunnel thing is almost… Jake is lovely. He’s absolutely lovely.’

Pauline looked at me with a new concern. ‘Is everything all right, Alice? Remember, this is my big brother you’re talking about. If anybody describes Jake as absolutely lovely, there must be some kind of a problem.’

I laughed and she laughed and the moment passed. She bought her large bag of coffee beans and two takeaway polystyrene cups of coffee and we walked slowly towards Covent Garden and found a bench. This was a bit better. It was a sunny, clear, very cold day, and the coffee burned my lips pleasantly.

‘How’s married life?’ I asked.

Pauline looked at me very seriously. She was a striking woman whose straight dark hair could suggest severity, if you didn’t know better. ‘I’ve stopped taking the Pill,’ she said.

‘Because of the scares?’ I asked. ‘It’s not really…’

‘No,’ she laughed, ‘I’ve just stopped. I haven’t changed to anything.’

‘Oh, my God,’ I said, with a half-scream, and hugged her. ‘Are you ready for this? Isn’t it a bit too soon?’

‘It’s always too soon, I think,’ Pauline said. ‘Anyway, nothing’s happened yet.’

‘So you haven’t started standing on your head after sex, or whatever it is you’re meant to do.’

So we chattered about fertility and pregnancy and maternity leave and the more we talked the worse I felt. Up to this moment, I had thought of Adam as a dark, strictly private betrayal. I knew I was doing something awful to Jake but now, looking at Pauline, her cheeks flushed red in the cold but also with the excitement, maybe, of impending pregnancy, and her hands clutched round the coffee, and the mist from between her narrow lips, I had a sudden mad sense that all of it was operating under a misapprehension. The world wasn’t as she thought it was and it was my fault.

We both looked at our empty coffee cups, laughed and stood up. I gave her a close hug and pushed my face against hers.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘What for?’

‘Most people don’t tell you about trying for a baby until they’re into their second trimester.’

‘Oh, Alice,’ she said reprovingly. ‘I couldn’t not tell you that.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said suddenly. ‘I’ve got a meeting.’

‘Where?’

‘Oh,’ I said taken aback. ‘In, er, Soho.’

‘I’ll walk along with you. It’s on my way.’

‘That would be lovely,’ I said, in anguish.

On the way Pauline talked about Guy, who had broken off with her suddenly and brutally not much more than eighteen months earlier.

‘Do you remember the way I was then?’ she asked, with a little grimace and looking, for the moment, just like her brother. I nodded, thinking frantically about how I was to handle this. Should I pretend to go into an office? That wouldn’t work. Should I say I had forgotten the address? ‘Of course you do. You saved my life. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repay you for all you did for me then.’ She held up her bag of coffee. ‘I probably drank about that much coffee in your old flat while crying into your whisky. God, I thought I would never be able to cross the road again on my own, let alone function and be happy.’