David Szalay - Spring

‘It was stupid. I’m sorry.’

‘Where are you?’

There is a momentary silence. ‘I’m at Nick’s.’

She thinks of asking to speak to Nick. Then she says, ‘I’ll be home tomorrow night.’

She had not asked for the number in order to prove, by phoning him on it from Madrid, that he was at Nick’s. It proved no such thing, though he seemed to think she thought it did. He was quite stupid sometimes. (She had always worried—it was one of the things she worried about—that he just wasn’t intelligent enough for her.) Perhaps he wasn’t so stupid, though. Perhaps, in his instinctive way, he understood that she did not want to know the truth. That she probably wouldn’t phone the number because she did not want to know that it was not Nick’s number. Which she didn’t. And since she didn’t, why do it? Why phone it?

‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice. ‘Hello?’ the woman says again. ‘Who is this?’

‘Is Nick there? Please.’

‘Nick?’ It is obvious from the way she says it that there is no Nick there, ever. And then she says, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong number.’

She wrote it all down. In writing, Fraser was obviously a shit. And she, poor little thing, still loved him. What was so terrible was that she still loved him. She did not want to throw him out. It was something she had to force herself to do, in the knowledge that she should, like putting her fingers down her throat. And when she did, it was he who shed most of the tears.

What was so terrible was that she still loved him. She did not want to. She wanted to love someone else, and within a few weeks she tried. She was just about to tell him, this prospective lover, that she didn’t fancy him at all, that she had no interest in him whatsoever, when he was kissing her. She slept with him that very night. He was sweet, intelligent, had a BMW. Within two weeks it was a sad failure—and then there was someone else fighting his little trickle of tears, his wobbly mouth, and only just losing. There was someone else earnestly wanting to know what everyone always wants to know.

Why?

*

They stopped to fill up and have something to eat at a service station somewhere near the heart of England. The sky was mild. The sky was neutral. Neutral like the system of slip roads and parking spaces, like the sharp white arrows stencilled on the tarmac, like the lines of stationary HGVs, the surrounding flat land, the inveterate soughing of the motorway. A place of horizontals. A non-place. Fraser was paying for the petrol.

While they ate—toasted paninis that looked like they had been flattened by a truck tyre—he talked about various people she half-knew, friends of his. Filling her in on what they were up to. There was something fairly lugubrious about this. Probably it was the thorough, systematic way he was working through them. He was talking about Ed O’Keefe, the veteran pap who was also well known in the soft-focus world of ‘erotica’, and some tax difficulties he was having with the Inland Revenue—or was it the VAT man? — when she interrupted him with what immediately seemed like obvious hostility. ‘Should I drive for a while?’ she said.

He stopped speaking. He looked hurt.

‘Do you want me to drive for a while?’ she said.

‘If you want.’

They walked across the tarmac in silence and took their seats in the old Golf’s muffling interior, and she drove them through Yorkshire, as neutral Midlands afternoon sloped into northern evening. Until they stopped, Fraser had done most of the talking, and now that he had shut up they travelled predominantly in silence. It was to be expected, she thought—noticeably more philosophical now that she was occupied with wheel and pedals—that it would be like this. It would have been naïve to expect anything else. Except that she did seem to have expected something else—she looked quickly over her shoulder as she moved out to overtake—which presumably made her naïve… What had she expected? Just something… Something less painful. It was painful, that was the thing. Though the pain was low-level, it had been there since the morning, and she just wasn’t used to it any more. Since the end of last year, she seemed to have had the manage of it. She had filled up her time. She had left none of it vacant for pain to squat in, and in the process, she seemed to have forgotten the most obvious thing about pain—it was painful.

He was asleep now, in the passenger seat, with his head fallen and his hands in his lap. He had nodded off somewhere near Sheffield. He didn’t say anything for ten minutes, then there was a single short snore. Though her first instinct was to wake him, she did not. With him asleep, she was able to imagine, staring out at the motorway’s soothingly neutral space, that she was on her own, which had the effect of lessening the pain. When she did pick him up in her peripheral vision, though, it was stranger in a way to be there with him asleep than it was with him awake—with him just sleeping there, it was spookily as if the whole year of separation simply hadn’t happened.

She flicked on the headlights.

The traffic streamed north in slate-blue twilight. On the other side, the traffic streamed south. That would be them, she thought, in forty-eight hours…

Since this morning, he had been trying very hard to be light. Unfortunately he wasn’t light. He was heavy. It had been more and more obvious as the hours wore on. He just didn’t have the energy to keep up the jolly-jolly act. When she thought about it, it was not surprising that he seemed depressed. The facts were quite depressing. He was forty-eight and lived on his own in a studio flat, scraping a living from menial photographic work. He saw his daughters once a fortnight or less. Physically, he seemed to be losing it swiftly now—his hair, his shape, his je ne sais quoi … He still smoked. He had no savings. No prospects. She took her eyes off the surging motorway for a second and, suddenly feeling sorry for him—the feeling pierced her shockingly, made tears spring into her eyes—she placed her hand for a moment on his sleeping thigh.

A little while later he woke up.

‘Where are we?’ he said.

‘Nearly at Newcastle.’

‘Do you want me to drive?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s okay.’ The driving was therapeutic, analgesic.

He moved in his seat. Yawned. Lit a Silk Cut. ‘Maybe we should have picked somewhere nearer London,’ he said, snapping open the ashtray.

‘Yeah, or taken a plane.’

He yawned again.

‘Anyway…’ she said. ‘It was your idea.’

*

The hotel was one of the most famous and expensive in Edinburgh. At about eight thirty—the last stretch, from Tyneside, had been surprisingly long—they strayed scruffily into the lobby with their sports holdalls. The lobby. A huge open fire. Stags’ heads.

‘I, uh… I got a reservation,’ Fraser said.

‘Okay, sir,’ said the man in the tartan tie. ‘What’s the nim?’

‘It’s uh… King.’

‘How much are you paying for this?’ she whispered frantically, while the tartan tie fussed with formalities.

Fraser shushed her with a hand on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about it. To tell you the truth, I got a special deal. So don’t worry.’

A second tartan tie had been summoned and to this man—a Lithuanian—they handed their pitiful luggage.

‘Should we eat first,’ Fraser said, ‘or do you want to have a shower first?’

She said she wanted to eat first, and they went upstairs for a few minutes to freshen up. The Lithuanian, having shown them how to turn on the TV, waited for twenty seconds then withdrew untipped. She was feeling strange—she stood there in the air of plush expectancy (Fraser was in the wetroom) wishing she was at home. Or at least that home was nearby, escapable to at any time. She felt trapped there, standing next to the troubling question of the tartan-festooned four-poster. This, she thought, was the inevitable bed. This was what the weekend was all about. It was what they had been speeding up the M1 towards—he had had his foot to the floor the whole way, while he was driving—and what troubled her as she stood there was a sense that she might not want to sleep with him in it. She did not know whether she wanted to. Where once it was the most important, the most essential thing in her life, she felt, standing there, that she would need to think about it. She was just not sure what it would mean. What would it mean?