Nicci French - Killing Me Softly

‘Jake, Alice!’ Clive shouted, from one end of the table. I sat squeezed against Jake, my thigh against his, at the other end, but Clive waved me over. ‘I called her,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Gail,’ he said, slightly indignantly. ‘She said yes. I’m going to meet her for a drink next week.’

‘There you are,’ I said, making myself do an imitation of a person having fun. ‘I’ll become a freelance agony aunt.’

‘I thought of suggesting that she come tonight. But then I thought the Crew might be too much for her on a first meeting.’

I looked around the table. ‘The Crew sometimes seems too much for me.’

‘Oh, come on, you’re the life and soul of the party.’

‘Why does that sound so dreary, I wonder?’

I was sitting next to Sylvie. Across from me was Julie with a man I didn’t know. On the other side of Sylvie was Jake’s sister, Pauline, who was there with Tom, her fairly new husband. Pauline caught my eye and gave me a smile of greeting. She is probably my closest friend and I had been trying not to think of her for the past couple of days. I smiled back.

I started to pick at somebody else’s onion bhaji and concentrate on what Sylvie was telling me, which was about a man she’d been seeing, most specifically what they’d been doing in bed, or on the bed, or on the floor. She lit another cigarette and drew deeply from it. ‘What most men don’t seem to understand is that when they arrange your legs over their shoulders so that they can go deeper in, it can really hurt. When Frank did it last night, I thought he was going to pull my coil out. But you’re the coil expert,’ she added, with an earnestly analytical air.

Sylvie was the only person I knew who satisfied my basic interest in what other people actually do when they have sex. I was generally resistant about replying with confessions of my own. Especially now. ‘Maybe I should introduce you to our designers,’ I said. ‘You could road-test our new IUD for us.’

‘Road-test?’ said Sylvie, grinning wolfishly, her teeth white and her lips painted bright red. ‘A night with Frank is like the Monte Carlo rally. I felt so sore today that I could hardly sit down at work. I’d complain to Frank about it but he’d take it as some backhanded compliment, which I don’t mean at all. I’m sure you’re much better than I am at getting what you want. Sexually, I mean.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, looking around to see if anybody was listening to what we were saying. Tables, indeed whole restaurants, had a way of falling silent when Sylvie was talking. I preferred her alone in situations where there was absolutely no risk of being overheard. I poured myself another glass of red wine and half emptied it in a gulp. At this rate, and on a practically empty stomach, I’d be drunk soon. Maybe then I would feel less bad. I stared at the menu. ‘I’ll have, urn…’ My voice trailed away. I thought I’d seen someone outside the restaurant window in a black leather jacket. But when I looked again no one was there. Of course not. ‘Maybe just a vegetable dish,’ I said.

I felt Jake’s hand on my shoulder as he moved across to our end of the table. He wanted to be near me, but just at the moment I could hardly bear it. I had an absurd impulse to tell him everything. I tilted my head on to his shoulder, then drank some more wine and laughed when everyone else laughed and nodded occasionally when the intonation of a sentence seemed to demand a response. If I could see him just one more time, I would be able to bear it, I told myself. There was someone out there. Obviously it wasn’t him, but someone in a dark jacket was outside in the cold. I looked at Jake. He was having an animated conversation with Sylvie about a film they had both seen last week. ‘No, he just pretended to do it,’ he was saying.

I stood up, my chair scraping loudly. ‘Sorry, just got to go to the bathroom, I’ll be back in a minute.’

I went to the end of the restaurant, near the stairs that led down to the toilets, then glanced back. No one was watching me: they were all turned to each other, drinking, talking. They looked such a happy group. I slipped through the front door and outside. The cold air hit me so that I gasped as I breathed it. I looked around. He was there, a few yards down the street, beside a telephone box. Waiting.

I ran to him. ‘How dare you follow me,’ I hissed. ‘How dare you?’ Then I kissed him. I buried my face against his, pushed my lips against his, and wrapped my arms around him and strained my body against him. He pushed his hands through my hair and yanked my head back until I was looking into his eyes, then said, ‘You weren’t going to ring me, were you?’ He rammed me up against the wall and held me there while he kissed me again.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I can’t. Can’t do this.’ Oh, but I can, I can.

‘You have to,’ he said. He pulled me into the shadow of the telephone box and undid my coat and felt my breast under my shirt. I moaned and tilted my head back and he kissed my neck. His stubble rasped against my skin.

‘I’ve got to go back,’ I said, still straining against him. ‘I’ll come to your flat, I promise.’

He took his hand from my breast and moved it to my leg and then up my leg and against my knickers and I felt a finger inside me.

‘When?’ he asked, looking at me.

‘Monday,’ I gasped. ‘I’ll come at nine o’clock on Monday morning.’

He let me go and raised his hand. Deliberately, so I could see, he put his shiny finger into his mouth and licked it.

On Sunday, we painted the room that was going to be my study. I tied my hair back in a scarf and wore some of Jake’s old jeans and still managed to drop pea-green paint on my hands and face. We had a late lunch and in the afternoon we watched an old movie on television, arm in arm on the sofa. I went to bed early, after an hour-long bath, saying I still had a bit of a stomach-ache. When Jake climbed in beside me later, I pretended to be asleep, though I lay awake for hours in the dark. I planned what I would wear. I thought about how I would hold him, learn his body, trace his ribs and his vertebrae, touch the full, soft lips with my finger. I was terrified.

The next morning I got out of bed first, had another bath, and told Jake I would be working quite late, that I might have to go to a meeting in Edgware with clients. At the tube station, I rang Drakon and left a message for Claudia, saying I was ill in bed, and please on no account to disturb me. I flagged down a taxi – it didn’t occur to me to go by underground – and gave Adam’s address. I tried not to think about what I was doing. I tried not to think about Jake, his cheerful bony face, his eagerness. I looked out of the window as the cab crawled slowly through the rush-hour traffic. I brushed my hair again, and fiddled with the velvet buttons on my coat, which Jake had bought me at Christmas. I tried to remember my old telephone number, and couldn’t. If anyone looked inside the taxi, they would just see a woman in a severe black coat on her way to work. I could still change my mind.

I rang the doorbell and Adam was there before I had time to arrange my smile, my jokey greeting. We nearly fucked on the stairs, but made it into the flat. We didn’t take off our clothes or lie down. He parted my coat and lifted my skirt above my waist and pushed into me, standing up, and it was over in a minute.

Then he took off my coat, straightened my shirt and kissed me on my eyes and mouth. Healing me.

‘We have to talk,’ I said. ‘We have to think about…’

‘I know. Wait.’ He went into the tiny kitchen and I heard him grinding coffee. ‘Here we are.’ Adam put a pot of coffee and a couple of almond croissants on the small table. ‘I bought these downstairs.’