David Szalay - Spring

‘Nothing,’ he murmured, still looking at the photos.

‘No…’ she mused, leaning over him, tickling it. ‘I suppose not. With me it all happens there…’

‘Mm…’

‘It’s funny to think that nothing happens there with you.’

‘No…’

‘With you I suppose it happens here …’

He left early the next morning—Hugo was in Mecklenburgh Street—with a perfunctory halitosis-laced kiss in the steady headache of first light. Still, so much for not seeing him for a while. The question was—what now?

On Friday he sent her a hopeful text— See you this weekend?

There was silence until Saturday morning, when this popped out of the ether— No honey sorry doing things this weekend x

He wondered what she was doing. It occurred to him, of course, that she might be with Fraser. In a strange way, he hoped she was. Fraser was somehow part of the furniture. He had probably been sharing her with Fraser, without knowing it, for weeks. He was used to that idea. It was the idea that she might be with someone else, someone other than Fraser—or even on her own—that was the heavier thought. And it did weigh on him, as that Saturday wasted away unused. Partly it was just a matter of knowledge. He was very keen to know what she was doing. To know whether she was with Fraser, or with someone else, or on her own. Not knowing was what was hard.

Friday morning the wind was screaming and yelling, screaming and yelling at him to shake a leg. He pressed out his Silk Cut and flung off the duvet. Today was the day. Today was the day he had been waiting for for more than a year. In the white nook of the kitchen, where the wind was fighting the unsnug window, he took the Tropicana from the fridgelet. The fact was, they were destined to be together, in spite of everything that had happened. It was pretty simple. He loved her, she loved him, and it had been like that from the very first moment. The moment when she looked up from the front desk, her manner as intimidatingly poised and together as always, and saw him there…

Pow!

A coup de foudre. (Or Cupid’s twang.) Love at first sight. That never happened to some people. Some people never had that. Then last year he had nearly fucked it up—no, he had fucked it up—and now fate was offering him a second chance. So do not fuck it up again, Fraser, he instructed himself, pissing noisily in the wind-hammered suntrap of the bathroom.

He took a shower.

They were just so wonderfully easy, those long talks they had on the phone practically every night now. It was as if nothing had happened. Everything forgiven and forgotten. Amor vincit omnia. They still laughed at the same things. The same things made them happy. The same things made them sad. They understood each other. Soulmates. That was so obvious there was no fighting it. There was just no fighting it.

‘Let’s try again, Katie,’ he had said last week, when they had just laughed at something together.

And then, ‘Hello? You still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here.’ Her lovely English voice.

‘So,’ he said, ‘are we gonna try again?’

And she said. ‘What exactly would that entail?’

‘What would it entail?’… He said, ‘Why don’t we go away somewhere. Why don’t we go away for a weekend somewhere. No pressure. Just see where things stand.’

He did not expect her to say yes straight away, and she didn’t.

First she just laughed as if the whole thing was a joke.

Then she made him wait a few days.

She was stronger than he was. He knew that. Smarter and stronger. (Some men would find that hard to take—a smarter, stronger woman.) Strong as she was, though, she was suffering too. And she was doing all sorts of things to try and numb that suffering. That was her way. She wouldn’t just suffer passively, like he sometimes did. She would never do that.

Towelling his furred solidity, his thoughts touched with a new twinge of shame on the incident that had provoked all this suffering. It was an incident that had preoccupied him much since last fall—sleepless nights and such—and specially the last few months. It was tough for a man like him to be married and do that sort of work. You know the sort of work. The model taking off one set of underwear and putting on another on the other side of the screen, talking merrily. Only the two of them in the windowless studio with the stainless-steel sink in the corner. And then she steps out from behind the screen and he tells her to lie down on the furskin and look sexy, or strike a Christine Keeler pose and look sexy, or use some prop and look sexy… Part of the trouble was he found women like that—women like Felicity, for instance—very easy to engage with. They liked him. They liked his energy; they liked his playfulness. It’s fair to say there were typically a lot of warm feelings in that studio. And a lot of flirting—which was part of the job. The job was to make them look sexy, and to make them look sexy he had to make them feel sexy, so he had his professional patter. The thing is, when you say stuff like that, even if you don’t mean it, even if you’re just saying it, it has its effect. There is no such thing as a purely professional situation. That was something he had learned. He knew that all too well.

So they were alone in the warm studio, him and Felicity, a man and a woman, and it was late at night. And it was her idea to do the artistic shots. She was the one who said, as she stepped out of one set of transparent panties and into another, ‘When we’ve finished these, I want to do a few arty ones for my portfolio. Is that okay?’ And what was he gonna say? No, it’s not okay? I don’t think that’s a very sensible idea? Listen, this was his job. He and Felicity were working together. A household name on the UK high street was paying him for those shots. Those shots were paying the mortgage. (Though they were just test shots. Felicity and the other models were just on try-out. Only one of them would feature in the pictures which would be on the side of every bus in the country next year. And it’s possible that some of them, Felicity included, mistakenly thought that Fraser would have some say in deciding which of them it would be.)

They had just started the artistic shots—i.e. the nudes—i.e. he was in an isolated studio late at night with a naked underwear model—and she was making various pouts and swoony faces at the lens, and he was sort of squatting there over her, almost sitting on her legs, near enough to feel the warmth of her peachy skin, and telling her how sexy she looked, and how hot she was making him feel… No, there is no such thing as a purely professional situation.

When she started to undo his trousers he said, ‘Oh no,’ as if something terrible had happened. ‘No,’ he said, frowning tragically as she lowered the zip. ‘No…’ He was pleading with her, and she ignored him.

An hour later he drove her home.

And she invited him in.

And he sat at the wheel with a look of terrible pain on his face. Why did it have to happen when she was out of town? Why did this have to happen when she was in Madrid, for Chrissakes?

Well, he went in. And he has suffered for it ever since. Even when he was living with Felicity last summer, he was suffering. (And she threw him out as soon as she realised he wouldn’t be useful to her professionally, that was the sort of person she was.) Yes, he has suffered for it, and he needed to suffer. That’s the way he sees it now. To make himself worthy of her again, he needed to suffer. He needed to spend a year in purgatory. And now he had.