David Szalay - Spring

Mysteriously, in the pub there was no sign of her. He did notice two untouched pints—a pint of lager and a pint of Guinness—on an empty table. It was the Guinness that threw him. He had never known her to drink Guinness.

She answered her phone in the Ladies and said that yes, those were their pints, and she would be with him in a minute.

Ten minutes later she sat down opposite him.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

She had put a yellow Selfridges box, wrapped up with black ribbon, on the table. It was not for him, as for a moment he fondly imagined. It was a present from her friend, the one who was moving abroad—a pair of ivory silk pyjamas, neatly folded in tissue paper.

Later, in the forty-watt light of his bathroom, she would put them on. There was a lot that had to happen first, however.

They had to talk. Small talk. The house in Kent woodland where she had spent Saturday night. Her friend Venetia lived there with her fiancé and his eccentric father. She had quit her television job in London and now spent her time working in the woods—kerfing and piling and pollarding. She was not quite as happy there as she had hoped she would be. She had suggested to Katherine that she move into one of the old oast houses on the property—a suggestion that Katherine was apparently not dismissing out of hand. On Saturday there had been some sort of party. There had evidently been single men there, which made James short with jealousy for a minute or two. She wasn’t talking about the men, though, she was talking about the woodland. She was full of praise for that old woodland, which she said was on the point of exploding verdantly in super-super-slow motion. She said he would have loved it there.

He offered to make some supper and they walked slowly home. They walked through Mecklenburgh Square, hooked snugly together at the shoulders, the waist. For a few moments, there, in Mecklenburgh Square, everything seemed okay.

She stepped out of her sopping shoes while he turned on the electric fire in the living room. It was an old-fashioned one, made to look like a hearth of coals. It was ticking and starting to pulse with orange light when she sat down on the sofa and pulled her legs up underneath her. The drizzle whispered on the skylight. The fire ticked. Hugo yawned. There was something nice about it. There was something so nice about it…

‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ he said.

‘Okay.’

He went to the kitchen, and a minute later shouted, ‘I’m going to put the water on for the pasta.’

He had just done so when he turned and saw her standing in the doorway. ‘James,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t want to be your girlfriend.’

When he said nothing, she laughed nervously and said, ‘You probably don’t want to make supper for me now.’

When he still said nothing, she said, more seriously, ‘Do you want me to leave?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry, James. I’m sorry I’m so shit at this…’

‘Why?’ he said.

She said, ‘I… I’ll tell you.’ It was a struggle though. She stood there opening her mouth and shutting it. She laughed. ‘I’ll spit it out,’ she said. Even then, it took another minute. She was looking off to the side when she finally said it. ‘I… I want… to see… Fraser.’

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

She said, ‘Should we have a glass of wine?’

The initial shock was subsiding. And it might have been worse. It was just Fraser. Fraser. There had been trouble with him before.

It was true that this did seem more serious. She was sitting there on the sofa saying things like, ‘I know I shouldn’t have started this in the first place. I wasn’t emotionally available. It was selfish of me. She looked very solemn. ‘I haven’t been honest with you, James. I’ve never been honest with you. I’m sorry.’

His most immediate concern was what would happen that night —the prospect of not spending the night with her that night was an utterly terrible one. He needed her more than ever that night, after what she had said. The prospect of spending the night alone … The prospect of her just leaving … He might eventually fall asleep, and then wake a few hours later, in the desolate misery of first light, with the whole day waiting there… He poured more wine.

Now she was talking about the oast houses. There were a few of them on the property in Kent, and she was saying that she wished they could all—he took ‘they’ to mean the two of them plus Fraser—live in their own oast house ‘and just visit each other when we wanted to’. Though why he and Fraser would ever want to visit each other… And what would happen if he wanted to visit her and found Fraser already there, in her oast house? Or if one night together they should be interrupted by Fraser’s heavy knock?

She was quite tipsy now. She stuck out her glass for more wine. ‘I’m sorry, James,’ she said. She smiled wistfully. Then she kissed him, properly and at length, on the mouth. ‘I want to stay the night,’ she whispered. ‘Is that okay?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I want you to.’

‘It would be just too sad otherwise.’

Once that was settled, they ate a piece of Parmesan and finished the wine. Then she went and put on her new silk pyjamas. Then he took them off. And what followed was ferociously heightened with the sense that it was now in some way illicit, with the furious, urgent sense that it might be the last time.

*

In the morning everything seemed evanescent. On the point of evaporating. Outside time. They lay there holding each other in the halflight.

She said, ‘What do you think I should do?’

There was a whole minute of silence.

(A minute, he now thinks, in which everything stood still, and everything was still possible, waiting to hear what he would say…)

Finally he sighed with what seemed like frustration or impatience and said—‘I don’t know, Katherine. I don’t know.’

She squeezed him.

‘Will you make some coffee?’

When he had made it he let in some more light, and they had it sitting side by side, propped on pillows.

‘What time is it?’ she said.

He picked up his watch. ‘Eight fifteen.’

‘I have to go.’

He watched her leave the warm sheets and tiptoe out. Heard her exchange a few words with Hugo. Listened to the shower’s feeble sputter. To the quiet when it stopped.

Still wonderfully, luxuriously naked (her nakedness seemed like a wonderful luxury now) she sat down on the edge of the bed, in the soft shaft of London light that seeped down from the street. ‘I might not see you for a while,’ she said. He nodded. With his knuckles he stroked her sternum. She kissed him. Then she went to the living room to dress, and left.

In fact, they saw each other the very next day. Toby invited them for a drink—together, as if they were an item—near his Finsbury Square office. When Toby left, they stayed for another drink. In fact, they stayed until kicking-out time, by which point a tacit understanding seemed to have emerged that they would spend the night at her place.

They had to take two buses to get there. The first was totally empty as it leaped and jittered over the tarmac of the New North Road. They sat on the lower deck, near the door, kissing quietly in the harsh damp light. From Essex Road station they would have walked if it wasn’t pouring so determinedly, if there weren’t streams in the streets and waterfalls plunging into the drains—it was only two short stops on the 38 that emerged from the turbulent opacity of the night, and then a sprint down Packington Street which left them soaked. In the kitchen they stuffed their faces with a pack of saucisson sec. Once upstairs, they spent a lot of time, in various states of undress, looking through some photo albums she had produced from somewhere—earlier versions of Katherine Persson. He was still looking at them when she said (she was far from sober), ‘What happens here?’ and poked his hairy perineum.