David Szalay - Spring

‘What d’you think?’ Simon said, eyeing them.

James stuck out his lower lip and nodded appraisingly. Freddy had a nervous swig from his hip flask.

The transaction transacted, they went into the house and had a heart-stopping fry-up prepared by Mrs Miller. It was an awkward meal. When James asked about the name Absent Oelemberg—what did it mean? — Miller just shook his head and said, ‘No idea.’

‘It’s probably French,’ James suggested politely.

Miller shrugged and went on feeding his smooth, fat face.

In London, Michael was being arrested.

The mare’s first run was in late December, in a novices’ hurdle at Huntingdon. (Though Professional Equine Investments no longer existed, and she would have to be sold, James had decided to land the touch first. Now that the service had failed he needed the money more than ever. He would be staking every penny he had on her, and he hoped to win enough to live on for a year or more, while he worked out what to do next.) Huntingdon was Miller’s local track. He had informed his new owners that it was where the touch would take place in March, and he wanted her to have run poorly there on at least one previous occasion. He also said that they should ‘have a few quid on’. When they looked at him in surprise, he said, ‘She won’t be winning. Not today.’ He said they should put the money on over the Internet, where it would leave indelible traces, so that when it was time to land the touch, if the stewards had any questions, they would be able to prove that they always followed her, win or lose. And in December she did lose. In the leathern privacy of his Range Rover, Miller had told them she wasn’t fit, and she looked unhealthily exhausted as she trailed in last with her tongue lolling out of her smoking head and the jockey standing up in his irons. His name was Tom. He was a stable insider, the son of Miller’s head lad. Later, in the pub—not the nearest pub to the track, an obscure village pub twenty miles away somewhere in the stunning flatness of the Fens—James noticed him whispering something to Miller, who nodded and patted him on the back.

Her next run was two weeks later, also at Huntingdon. She was twenty to one that day (James still had his few quid on) and she finished tenth of twelve. Miller was not keen to talk about what measures he was taking to make sure she performed so ignominiously, and anyway James had other things on his mind, or one other thing—Katherine, who he met at Toby’s wedding. The previous night he had taken her on the lamplit tour of the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and then for dinner. It was nearly midnight when he walked her to the tube at Holborn. (She had declined an invitation for a nightcap at his flat.) They stopped on the pavement at the station entrance.

‘Well…’ he said. ‘I hope…’

‘Can I kiss you?’

It was so sudden that he just said, ‘M-hm,’ and she stood on tip-toe and kissed him wetly on the mouth.

A few moments later the Saturday-night hubbub of station and street swam back. ‘I’ll see you next week,’ she said.

‘Okay…’

She went into the lightbox of the station, and he watched her through the snapping ticket barriers.

The next morning he was up early to take the train to Huntingdon.

The mare had not run since that murky January day. There was a scare when the meeting at which her final prep run was supposed to have taken place, at Fakenham, was abandoned due to waterlogging. That was while he was in Marrakech. Miller had said he would enter her for something else.

‘Fontwell, Wednesday,’ Freddy says.

‘Fontwell?’

‘It’s in Sussex.’

‘I know. What race?’

Freddy shrugs. ‘He did tell me,’ he says. ‘Some novices’ hurdle. Do you want to get something to eat? A kebab?’ There is a kebab place on Earls Court Road that Freddy particularly likes. He is on first-name terms with Mehmet and the others there.

‘No, I can’t,’ James says, looking at his watch.

‘Why not?’

‘I have to meet someone.’

He has been waiting for this moment, the moment when he sees her, for nearly a week now. She is already there, sitting at a small table with a vodka and tonic. And something is up—when he tries to kiss her she moves her head to the side, though not enough to prevent their lips from smudgily touching. She seems unnaturally still, except for her eyes, which are nervously mobile. When he touches her she hardly seems to notice. There is, however, something strangely playful about all this. There is something strangely playful about the impish S-shaped smile which sits in her small lips while he talks. That is probably why he is not worrying, not even about her visitor of yesterday night, whoever he was. Why he is even enjoying it. Why it is even exciting him. There is even something playful about the way that she will not let him kiss her on the mouth. Whenever he tries—and leaning towards her, he tries often—she smiles and turns her face away. They stay in the pub for two drinks—she has another V & T—and then she says she wants to get something to eat and they walk to a noodle place she knows on Upper Street.

There, things are less playful. She seems sadder. She drinks water. They share a platter of fried pastry parcels. They each have a deep bowl of soupy noodles. They still only talk about insignificant things—for some reason, he is explaining to her how the stock market works. Though she lets him take her hands in his, she looks down at her empty soup bowl when he does. He notices her rosy, tattered cuticles—they are even worse than usual. Her hands are usually a fiery pink, weathered by soap and water, wrinkled on the knuckles, the nails snipped very short. So different from her feet, which he has told her more than once are the prettiest he has ever seen—small and smooth, with soft pretty toes, and the same even ivory hue all over.

When he tries to kiss her, she turns her head away again. There is nothing playful about the way she does it now, and for the first time he looks pained and says, ‘What is it?’

Instead of answering, she asks him whether he wants to see the photos she took in Morocco.

‘Of course,’ he says.

Outside he puts up the umbrella. They have to squeeze together to fit under it. They have not been in such proximity all evening and he smells the faded scent of the perfume—so familiar a smell, lingering in woollens—that she put on in the morning when she went to work. It is only a short walk to her flat. They have made this ingress together many times. They know what to do. He shakes out the umbrella and takes off his shoes. She turns on some lights and starts to make mint tea. When he puts his arms around her, however, she looks at him quizzically, as if it is something he has never done until that moment. ‘Why won’t you kiss me?’ he says.

‘I just won’t.’

‘What do you mean you just won’t?’

She leaves the kitchen with the mugs.

‘What do you mean you just won’t?’ he says, sitting down next to her on the sofa. When he tries to, she sucks in her lips and shakes her head. She laughs, and lets herself flop over to the side, so that she is half-lying there. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says, leaning over her. ‘What is it?’

Looking up at him, her eyes move like insects on the surface of a pond, with quick little movements, this way, that way, unable to stay still. ‘Why don’t you ask me some questions?’ she suggests.

‘What sort of questions?’

She shrugs with mock secretiveness and for a moment makes her eyes very wide.

‘What sort of questions?’ he says again.

She sighs, and lets her head loll on the velvet of the sofa. He is looking at her face from a strange perspective, more or less up her nostrils. She is looking up into the tasselled pink lampshade on the table next to the sofa. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Just…’