David Szalay - Spring

‘What?’ he says quietly. ‘What is it? Tell me.’

She does not tell him. She pushes him off her and says, ‘I’m going to get ready for bed.’

‘Okay,’ he says, propped on an elbow. ‘I’ll watch you.’

‘If you want.’

‘I do.’

He follows her upstairs. There, however, she takes her pyjamas from under her pillow and leaves him on his own. Eventually he lies down and stares at the ceiling. That this has something to do with the man who was here last night is obvious—it was obviously a significant visit, and if it was significant, he is pretty sure he knows who it was. In her pyjamas now, she takes a hairbrush from where her things are laid out—her perfumes and make-up, her lacquered pots of junk jewellery—and starts to sweep her hair. She holds it out to the side and sweeps it vigorously. ‘Are you going to stay?’ she says, lifting the duvet on her side.

‘I’ll stay for a while. Hugo’s at home. Otherwise I’d stay the night.’

‘M-hm.’

They lie there for a few minutes in the lamplight—her under the duvet, him fully dressed on top of it. Then he jumps up, takes everything off and joins her underneath. His eagerness, maybe, makes her laugh kindly. ‘You like being naked, don’t you,’ she says. ‘I saw Fraser yesterday.’

To hear her say it is surprisingly painful.

‘I know.’

‘You know?’ she says, sitting up.

‘I heard him. When we were talking on the phone.’

‘You heard him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you hear?’

He tells her.

‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘I didn’t know it was him. I didn’t know who it was.’

He tells her that he noticed the way she lost the thread of what they were saying on the phone, that he heard the tension in her voice. She laughs when he tells her these things. And the way he tells them is meant to be funny—it is meant to turn the whole thing into a harmless farce—and he laughs too. She says, ‘I’m so sorry, James. It was so unlucky he walked in just when I was talking to you. I heard the doorbell and I had this whoosh of adrenalin, and then when I heard him talking to Summer, I wanted to hear what they were saying. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry if I sounded tense. I’m sorry it was so obvious.’

‘That’s okay,’ he says, still quite lightly.

Then, ‘Why was he here? What happened?’

She sighs and flops onto the pillow.

Overhead there is an old-fashioned ceiling fan with wicker blades—like something from a tropical hotel, pre-air conditioning. It was there when she moved into the flat. She never uses it, does not even know if it still works. ‘He phoned me in Morocco. The day we were supposed to go to the mountains. That morning.’ She says they hadn’t spoken for a year, that she was surprised and upset. ‘I mean it was upsetting,’ she says. ‘He said he was just phoning to say hi. I said I was in Morocco. He wanted to know what I was doing there. I said I was with someone and told him to leave me alone. That was it. I was upset, though. I’m sorry if I seemed… upset. Or out of sorts or something.’

Lying on his back with his left arm under his head, he puts his other hand pensively inside her pyjama trousers and strokes her pubic hair. ‘That’s okay,’ he says.

He is trying to remember that day. Exactly a week ago. The hour at the poolside, the warm wind stirring the line of palm trees, the shadow of the hotel on the water…

‘I thought you went to the mountains,’ he says.

Surprisingly, she laughs. ‘No, of course not.’

And that night, the terrace on top of the hotel in the Nouvelle Ville, over the thick smog of the town. The hotel turned out to be a sort of whorehouse. They saw one of the men who worked in their own hotel making for the lift and its full ashtray with two fat whores… Yes, she had been upset. He thought she was upset with him for making them miss the minibus to the mountains, and then taking her to a whorehouse. In fact, it had been something else entirely. Nothing to do with him.

She says, ‘A few days ago he phoned me again. He said he wanted to see me. I told him I didn’t want to see him. He insisted. He said he had something to say. So yesterday we went for a drink.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said… he wants to try again.’

They lie there in silence.

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said… I said… I said I’d think about it.’

She turns her head on the pillow. He is just lying there, staring straight up. ‘Are you crying?’ she says softly.

He shakes his head.

‘I said I’d tell him within a week,’ she says.

He is seeing the ceiling fan with a strange intensity. It is as if the whole world has shrunk to that old fan—its off-white wicker blades, its thick stalk, the plastic housing of its motor, and the weighted string of tiny stainless-steel spheres that hangs from the housing.

‘I don’t need a week, though. I know what I’m going to tell him.’

‘What are you going to tell him?’ And then, feeling a need to justify himself, such is his sense that Fraser King has some sort of primacy over him in this situation, ‘I think you should tell me if…’

‘Of course.’

Still, she does not speak for a few seconds.

From the start he has frequently had the sense that she is measuring him against Fraser King—measuring him in every way, from the most obviously physical to the most ineffably emotional—measuring him, and finding him wanting. There have been times when seeing her lost in thought—for instance on the Eurostar as it left Lille Europe—he experienced the precise, painful feeling that she would prefer to be there with Fraser King than with him. That she would prefer to be anywhere with Fraser King than with him. And yet now she is telling him, in effect, that this is not true. Hearing her say it, he feels a hint of euphoria. Fraser King is no longer a factor. Everything is now okay.

It is a feeling that lasts only a few seconds, until she says, ‘I don’t think we should see each other for a while.’

And when that elicits a prolonged silence, ‘I’m sorry.’

He turns to her and sighs and they smile wistfully at each other.

She lets him slip his arm under her neck and snuggles up to him. The way she does this makes him improve his prognosis. When she says she does not think they should see each other ‘for a while’, what he now takes her to mean is maybe a week or two—until she has told Fraser that she intends to turn him down. Poor Fraser.

‘I’m sorry, James,’ she says.

‘I understand.’

‘Thanks for being so magnanimous.’

‘That’s okay,’ he says. (She laughs.) Easy to be magnanimous when he is the one in her bed. He says, ‘When you say a while…’

‘Mm.’

‘What do you mean?’

She shakes her head—he feels it move in the hollow of his neck. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I just… I don’t know. Sorry.’ And as if it were part of the apology, she strokes his leg with her foot.

Still studying the ceiling fan, he twists a lock of her hair around his finger. Then he turns onto his side, and studies her face. She submits to this study with a small smile. For the first time that night she does not try to move away when he kisses her on the mouth. Indeed, she even opens her mouth, and there is an immediate surge to heart-hammering intensity. She does not let this last long, however. He encircles her with his arms and squeezes her. She squeezes him too, and for a long time they lie there like that.

‘Should I turn off the light?’ she whispers.

‘If you want.’

With a sudden twisting movement she turns and sits, takes a sip of water—with water in her mouth she offers him the glass, he shakes his head—and switches off the light.