Carrie Williams - The Exchange

We sat down, and the bus rumbled along the Bayswater Road towards Oxford Street. It looped around Marble Arch and began to go down Park Lane. I clutched at the side of the bus, staring at the luxury car showrooms but mostly at the hotels. The Dorchester, The Metropolitan, The Four Seasons – all were places of almost mythical significance for me. Within them, I thought to myself, deals were made, marriages began and ended, affairs were committed, and a thousand debaucheries took place. Night after night after night, the beautiful, the bold and sometimes the damned come to this stretch of road to play out their dramas against a background of wealth and glamour. But it was an allure that had a seedy side to it, something grubby, and that was what made it fascinating to me. The rich, I knew from experience, were dirty bastards too – in fact, they could be the dirtiest bastards of all.

Kyle’s hand on my shoulder startled me from my reverie. He was gesturing over to a pair of elaborate stainless steel and bronze gates giving access into Hyde Park.

‘… the Queen Elizabeth Gate,’ he was saying, ‘built in honour of the Queen Mother.’ He gestured in front of him. ‘And now we’re coming up to the Wellington Arch, which was …’

His words – together with those of the live onboard commentary – faded in the buzz of traffic as I turned back to ogle the hotels. I wanted to be inside them, not sitting next to this well-intentioned but ultimately rather dull violinist, listening to him crap on about London’s history. Who really cared about that? What I wanted to know was what was going on in those hotel rooms and bars, and what exactly I was missing out on.

As we halted at the bottom of Park Lane, waiting for a break in the traffic before continuing our tour, I looked at Kyle a bit sheepishly. I hoped he didn’t think I was rude. I was grateful that he was making time to take me in hand like this, whatever his motive. And perhaps I was just being vain and presumptuous, thinking that he was at all interested in me.

I smiled at him. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Were you and Rachel an item?’

He blinked at me, surprised more, I imagine, by my directness than by the question itself.

‘We were.’ He stared off into the distance, seemingly unwilling to divulge any more. I didn’t push it, but after a few minutes he spoke again.

‘We were together for a few years,’ he said. ‘I did think it would be for good. But then suddenly it was over – pffff’ – he mimicked the action of someone extinguishing a candle with both hands – ‘and she didn’t want to know any more.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That must have been hard. Was it long ago, that you split up?’

He shook his head. ‘Only a couple of months. And we stayed friends – still saw quite a lot of each other. So I was kind of living in hope that she was just going through a weird phase – that before long we’d get back together. But then suddenly, this … this exchange or whatever you want to call it.’

For a moment he looked at me almost reproachfully, as if it were all my fault. I shook my head, about to tell him that I didn’t force Rachel into this lifeswap, when he spoke again.

‘What about you?’ he said.

‘Me?’

‘Anyone special in your life?’ he prodded, and I couldn’t swear to it but it seemed to me he blushed.

I looked away too, more for his sake than mine. ‘I have a boyfriend, yes,’ I responded at length.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Konrad,' I replied, adding in explanation, ‘He’s half German. A model.’

Kyle turned back to me, and his next question startled me with its vulnerability.

‘Is he very handsome?’ he said, and though I nodded, what I really wanted to do was to grab his hand and say, But so are you, Kyle. In many ways you’re much more handsome than that pretty-boy preener .

But as soon as the instinctive movement made itself known to my brain, I almost recoiled in horror. Handsome Kyle might be, but he was not my type. For all his good looks, he was a square.

I forced a smile, gesturing in front of me. ‘Nice house,’ I said, and Kyle laughed politely as the bus pulled up in front of Buckingham Palace for photo opportunities.

***

Kyle was well aware that I didn’t know a soul in London, and so I found myself without a ready excuse when he invited me, at the end of our bus tour, for dinner at his flat in Hampstead a couple of evenings later. A couple of friends were going to be there, he said – an opera singer and a dancer at Sadler’s Wells. They were intrigued about me, he said.

I raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t believe that he had told them what I did for a living, and I wanted to ask him what they did know about me. I wasn’t going to pretend to be something I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to be an object of prurient scrutiny either. I kept quiet, however, deciding to play it by ear.

And after a couple more days of loafing around the flat and aimless walks in Hyde Park, resisting the call of Park Lane, I felt glad of the offer of company and was actually looking forward to the dinner party. I was also, in a contained way, looking forward to seeing Kyle again. I didn’t know anybody who moved in high cultural circles, like he did, and I found myself interested in him. What would his flat be like? What were his friends like? What was his background, and how had he arrived where he had?

I had long been fascinated by other people’s career paths, never having had one of my own. Life, I often felt, was just something that happened to me, without my really thinking or planning. It had always been this way, and until recently it had never occurred to me to be any other way. But looking at Kyle I felt the strength of having a trajectory, a calling. Kyle, it seemed, knew where he was going. His plans weren’t failsafe, of course – hence his crumbling when Rachel dumped him. But in general he seemed like someone with an overview, a direction in life. He certainly wasn’t the kind of person who would suddenly find himself in a strange city, knowing no one, going half out of their mind with boredom and longing to stir something up, no matter what.

I dressed demurely, for me – there was very little that could be described as toned-down in my wardrobe, but with an uncharacteristically minimal use of accessories and good underwear I found that my black-lace pencil dress didn’t look too sluttish. I went relatively easy on the make-up too. It wasn’t that I was trying not to be me, but I was trying to think about context: a dinner party with a classical music crowd in Hampstead required a little restraint, in some respects.

I arrived on time too, which was virtually unheard of: in Paris, my lateness was a standing joke with Konrad, friends, and the other girls at the club, many of whom found themselves covering for me when I rolled in half an hour after a shift had started. I didn’t mean it to happen, but as Konrad often pointed out, I had trouble ‘getting my shit together’. Not that he could talk, but that was another story. Wherever I seemed to go, chaos inevitably followed, and that went for my time-keeping too.

Kyle answered the door, dressed in snug navy chinos and a well-pressed white shirt. I smiled indulgently, and at once felt like a wife must do who makes the same old excuses for her husband all her life. He was a boring dresser, but underneath it he was a lovely guy. And perhaps I was using his clothes to judge him unfairly and quite wrongly.

I thought of Rachel. Rachel knew what Kyle was like in bed. Not that I could ask her. I hadn’t even met her – I knew her even less than I knew Kyle. Our conversations, via Facebook, had been relatively brief, lacking in intimacies.

We’d had no contact since taking over residence in each other’s home, in each other’s life , though of course the opportunity was there. I wondered if that was because Rachel had just breezed into my life, found her feet without hesitation. Here I was, stumbling around, while she just got on with it.