Nicola Rayner - The Girl Before You

There had been a few dalliances, as he’d put it, when he first moved to London and she was in St Anthony’s. Alice had got her head around those – just about – and retaliated with an unsatisfactory dalliance or two of her own. Much more painful had been the affair he’d had with a family friend in Witney when he was spending a lot of time there as an MP. After visiting one weekend, Alice had found a scrunchie in the bed of their cottage. There had been a terrible scene. His mother had got involved, leaping to George’s defence, of course. ‘What do you expect him to do if you’re in London working all the time?’ she’d said accusingly. ‘And it’s not as if you have children.’

Her words stayed with Alice. It was as close as his mother had got to direct hostility, but there had been an undercurrent of disapproval as long as she could remember. When the affair ended around four years ago, she and George started trying for a baby, but she couldn’t conceive. There was some talk of IVF after a couple of years, but then there had been a new case for her, a new project for him. There had always seemed to be something more pressing to focus on first and now her body was changing, her cycles were becoming longer. Her mother had had an early menopause, too. It seemed that their chance had passed.

The train fills up fairly quickly as it travels west. By Oxford Street, Alice is boxed in by bodies. It’s stuffy in the packed carriage. Even the air whistling in through the carriage-door window smells stale. The acidity of the vomit burns her throat. Alice swallows, leans her head against the glass partition and looks through the door at the people clustered in the next carriage. One of them is wearing a green dress Alice recognises – she has the same one. It’s made of wool with a high neck: she must be sweltering. Alice’s gaze ascends the woman’s body, up to her hairline. Her hair is swept up in a wide cream scarf, but the strands escaping it are, Alice can see, bright red.

She swallows again, closes her eyes and opens them. Her eyeballs are dry and tired. She pushes herself up a little from her seat, straining to see just a fraction of the woman’s face, but it is turned into the crowd. You’re being ridiculous, she tells herself. Are you going to do this every time you see a woman with red hair?

As the tube begins to slow as it reaches Bond Street, Alice sees the redhead push towards the door. If she could just check, just see her face, then she would know. She gets up from her seat, stepping over bags, nudging past people. ‘Excuse me,’ she mutters, swinging her arms out to steady herself. A woman in a too-tight navy skirt sighs at her loudly.

The blurred faces waiting on the platform come into focus. There’s a wall of them outside. Alice fights through in the direction of the next carriage, but there is no sign of the woman she saw. She pushes faster through the crowd, but it is difficult against the tide of passengers getting on the train. Can she see red hair falling from a cream scarf? Is that a green dress vanishing into the distance?

Everybody knows what goes on in the first-floor loos during college parties. Still, Kat’s heart sinks as she hears the unmistakable sound of two bodies shuffling into the cubicle next to her. In the right kind of mood, she might get a kick out of it, but she’s feeling flat tonight. The twinges of pain in her abdomen had returned just as she and Ruth had arrived at the party and bumped into Richard. And even though Kat was wearing what she thought of as her Jessica Rabbit dress, with a slit in the fabric so high it almost reached her knickers – a poor choice, in hindsight – he had barely registered her.

‘Who was he?’ Ruth asked afterwards. ‘He seemed nice.’

‘Richard Wiseman,’ Kat said shortly. ‘And he is.’ She’d thought of adding, He likes you , but then George, who had wheedled his way back into Ruth’s favour, had bounded over and grabbed Ruth by the waist, and the evening had gone in a different direction. Kat wondered briefly if Richard’s lack of interest had anything to do with the couple of one-night stands she’d had since she’d last seen him. Her most recent conquest, a skinny guitarist she’d met at the union, had been insatiable.

‘You’re really something,’ he said, but a week later all that remained of him was a touch of this cystitis, making her dash for the loo and then just sit there in agony while nothing came out.

They’re making a hell of a racket next door. It sounds as if he’s carrying her into the cubicle like some chivalric knight, then drops her so she loses her balance, crashing against the flimsy partition.

‘For fuck’s sake, George,’ giggles a girl’s voice that sounds like Ruth’s. ‘Do be careful with me.’

‘That wasn’t my intention,’ George chuckles.

The partition creaks as they push up against it, kissing. Kat shifts her legs away so that Ruth won’t be able to recognise her shoes.

Very close to Kat’s head, George grunts. There’s the sound of a zip.

Ruth giggles again. ‘We’re all wrong on paper, aren’t we?’ she says.

‘All wrong.’ George’s voice gets muffled in her hair.

More shuffling. The ceramic clunk of the toilet seat closing, the creak of George sitting down.

The noise of the music reverberates through the floor. There’s the sound of another zip being undone, more kissing. Kat doesn’t want to hear her friend have sex. She gets to her feet as quietly as she can. Somewhere on the landing a door slams, and the gust of air makes the bathroom door fan open and close again.

‘George,’ Ruth says and her meaning is unmistakable. ‘George.’

His voice is thick. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Could we take it more slowly?’

‘More slowly …’ He says the words ponderously.

‘Yeah.’ Ruth’s voice sounds small.

Kat feels a stab of empathy for her friend.

‘I thought you were different.’ The twinkle has gone from his voice. ‘More adventurous.’

‘I am.’

He sighs. ‘OK. Do you want to go back down? Because I left the party for you.’

‘How generous of you.’ Ruth is trying to make light of it.

A zip coming up.

‘George.’

‘Look, Ruth, I know where this is going.’ There’s a rearrangement in the cubicle’s choreography: Ruth moving off his lap, George getting to his feet. ‘First time, you want it to be special … blah blah, candlelight and music. That’s OK, that’s fine. Go and do that with someone else and then come back to me when you want a proper fuck.’

‘George.’ Ruth sounds as if she has a knot in her throat. ‘Why are you being such a prick?’

George chuckles, back to his cheeky self again. ‘That’s just who I am. You must have heard.’

The bolt of the door slides open and George is gone. Kat hears Ruth lock the door and there is a moment, as they both sit there, breathing, when she thinks she will say, ‘Ruth, it’s me. I’m sorry.’ When she thinks she will repeat Richard’s words: ‘He is an unspeakable cunt.’ But then there are footsteps and the sound of laughter, and Ruth is up and out of the cubicle and a girl’s voice is saying, ‘All right, Ruth?’ And Ruth is saying, ‘Yes, yes, just a bit too much wine,’ and the other girl laughs and then there’s the sound of the tap, the hand-dryer, footsteps.

Kat waits until the girl has gone into a cubicle herself before she returns to the party. She sees George before she sees Ruth. He is near the drinks table with Dan and after a couple of moments there’s a burst of laughter from their direction.