David Szalay - Spring

When she was dried and dressed, they went out and, holding each other tightly, traversed the windy tray of Brunswick Square. They had a late lunch at an Italian place on Lamb’s Conduit Street. When they left the restaurant it was twilight. On the way home they passed the Renoir and had a look at what was on. All of which made him think, as they stood there looking at the programme, of another day when they had done exactly the same things. That Tuesday in the first week of February, when London was under a hard, dark frost. That February afternoon he had fed her forkfuls of strawberry tart while she looked through his limited selection of DVDs, finally and sentimentally settling on Brief Encounter —which he had never seen; it had been free with a Sunday newspaper. They had not been watching the film long, however, when he noticed that she had surreptitiously undone her jeans and had her hand inside them, and though she went very pink and smiled distractedly, she did not stop what she was doing. He said, ‘I doubt this film has ever had that effect on anyone until now.’ Which elicited a small hiccup of a laugh. Then he pulled the jeans first halfway down her thighs, then over her knees and finally free of her feet. The film plodded stoically on, oblivious to what was happening on the sofa. ‘There’s your train,’ said Celia Johnson. ‘Yes, I know,’ said Trevor Howard.

‘Squeeze my nipples,’ said Katherine. ‘It will make me have an orgasm. Use your teeth…’ she whispered urgently. ‘Your…’ It overtook her in mid-phrase, a sudden open-mouthed expulsion of air from her lungs as she struggled to seize him with all four of her limbs, her shouts quickly subsiding into a series of soblike sounds, quiet sobs. She shuddered as some sort of aftershock seemed to tickle through her, and went limp in his embrace. They lay there for a minute until she sighed and with an exaggerated mwah! kissed him on the mouth. Putting her hand on it, she said she had to decide what word she was going to use for his… Well that was the point. She needed a word for it. All the existing words, she thought, sounded vulgar, were swearwords, or silly, or had a frigid medical neutrality. With such an imperfect vocabulary it was not an easy thing to speak of. She would have to find her own word, she said, with her hand on it. A private word. Of necessity, a private word.

As they had that afternoon in February, they had sex on the sofa, and she left at eightish, to do her second nightshift.

*

Saturday was Sunderland’s Imperial Cup day at Sandown Park. The one o’clock train from Waterloo to Esher was full and most of the people on it were on their way to the track. There were loudmouths in office suits and tubby young women in tiny dresses despite the frost still lingering in the shadows of the trackside playing fields of south-west London. James spent the journey squashed in next to a man in his twenties, one of a party of men in suits and the only one of them to have a seat. His hair, plastered to his forehead at the front, was otherwise massively mussed up and stiffened with mousse. The tips of his tan winkle-pickers were medieval in their elongated pointiness. He might have had a hangover—his pale-lashed eyes were pink, and he was telling the others, in a strong hoarse voice, how much he had drunk last night.

It was a cold, sunny day at Sandown Park. From the stand, London was visible in the distance. It filled the whole horizon. James took the escalator down to the paddock to inspect the horses in the first, the novices’ handicap hurdle. He was passing through the Esher Hall when he saw someone who looked familiar. It was J. P. McManus, the legendary punter, the patron saint of the winter game, standing there in the tatty hangar of the hall like any impoverished mug holding a plastic pint pot. Telling himself that if this man had the humility to hang out in the Esher Hall wearing a shapeless middle-management overcoat, then the least he deserved was to be left alone, James did not introduce himself or ask J. P. what he was on. (Probably nothing. His approach to punting was well known. It was a matter of price. Everybody knew that. They knew that serious pros did not look for winners, they looked for prices. ) He just watched him for a minute talking shyly to some people he seemed to know, and then took the escalator upstairs.

Later, Dusky Warbler, a horse he had been following all winter, very nearly won the Imperial Cup. He was sent off at twenty to one, and James had £10 each way with one of the scarfed and hatted bookmakers in the huge shadow of the stand. It was a photo finish. The shrieking peaked as the two horses passed the line together. ‘Pho-dagraph, pho-dagraph,’ intoned an unflappable voice over the PA system. When a minute later the other horse was named the winner, there was some tattered shouting and the stand started to empty. Trooping downstairs to the winner’s enclosure on the far side of the paddock, James was still in a sweat of exhilaration.

She thought he was in London. She wanted to meet now. He explained that that wasn’t possible—he was in Surrey—and she sounded frustrated when she said, ‘Well when can you meet?’

They met at eight—or quarter past, he was late—in Mecklenburgh Street. She was waiting at the top of the area steps. She was, he thought, surprisingly smartly dressed. She was perfumy. Her shoes had a nice height of heel. The question was: where were they going to eat? As they walked through Mecklenburgh Square she put it to him. ‘Where are we going to eat?’ she said. The plan, it had been his idea, was to make an evening of it. (Hence the nice dress, the earrings, the heels.) However, he was tired—all that wintry fresh air and movement—and he didn’t mind where they ate, as long as it was nearby. For some time he didn’t say anything. Her heels ticked off the seconds. ‘What do you feel like?’ he said eventually.

‘I don’t want to have to decide,’ she said. ‘I want you to take me somewhere.’

‘Okay.’ They walked on in silence for a few steps. ‘What do you feel like, though?’

‘I don’t want to have to decide!’ she said heatedly. ‘That’s the point. I want you to decide.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll decide.’

They ended up nowhere more imaginative than Carluccio’s. He suggested it when she started to show obvious signs of fed-upness. Her shoes were hurting her—she had not dressed to wander around for half an hour. And she was tired too, of course. They were installed at a table, furnished with wine and antipasti. He told her that he had seen J. P. McManus at Sandown. ‘Who’s J. P. McManus?’ she said, eating a succulent olive, dripping spots of oil on the tablecloth.

She was talking about something else when he lost the thread of what she was saying. He was looking expressionlessly over her shoulder, out through the front of the restaurant—opposite was a line of terraced houses with fanlights and plain facades, like the ones on Mecklenburgh Street. Student flats, probably…

‘What is it?’ she said, turning in her seat to see what he was looking at.

‘Oh…’ he murmured. ‘Nothing.’

‘What?’ she insisted, still looking over her shoulder.

‘No, I was just looking at those houses on the other side of the street.’

‘Why?’

‘I once looked at a flat in one of them.’

‘Oh. Did you take it?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t very nice.’

She waited for him to say more.

He didn’t.

Then the waiter floated up to them and they ordered some dessert. She suggested they take it home and have it there. So he asked the waiter to pack it up for them, and also to pay. This seemed to take a long time, and while they were waiting, he yawned, shielding his mouth with his hand.