Nicholas Royle - First Novel

‘Well prepared,’ I said and we both laughed.

‘That was nice,’ I said.

‘Very nice,’ she agreed.

She busied herself with a tissue and I belted my trousers and she pulled down the sun visor and adjusted her make-up in the mirror and I pressed the on/off switch on the cassette player and ‘Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime’ by the Korgis squirmed synthetically out of the loudspeakers. I looked at her and we both burst out laughing. We tried to sing along, but we got the giggles. At the end of the track, she switched it off and we sat there in silence for a while, occasionally smiling to ourselves.

‘It’ll be all right, you know, with Tony,’ I said.

‘And you’ll be fine with Veronica,’ she countered.

‘Everything will work out,’ I said.

‘It’ll be like this never happened,’ she said.

And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ and I laughed and after a moment she laughed too.

She offered me a lift.

‘What, to Feltham?’ I said. ‘You want to introduce me to Tony?’

She smiled, then the smile quickly vanished and a look of worry crossed her face for the first time.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘This can’t happen again,’ she said.

‘I know. I know it can’t,’ I said. ‘Veronica wouldn’t hear of it.’

She looked at me with the kind of look a parent gives a naughty child.

‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘I’ll get the Tube. You gave me a lift to the Tube, that’s all.’

‘Go on, bugger off,’ she said and leaned over towards me.

I tilted across to meet her lips and her rebuttoned blouse gaped in front of me and just at that moment a 747 flew over the car, making it vibrate. We lingered on the kiss for a moment, then parted and I caught her looking at me. It was a look that suggested to me that this whole one-off thing was not necessarily going to work. Not because I was so irresistible or anything. I didn’t have any illusions about that. But there was something in the look, something I’d noticed at several points during the staff development weekend. A mixture of panic, abandon, desire. It almost felt like a dare.

As I reluctantly pulled away, I reached into the rear of the car and caught hold of her bra.

‘Don’t forget this,’ I said.

She smiled and I reached for the door handle, grabbing my bag from the footwell.

‘See you.’

‘See you.’

On the Tube back into London I sat opposite a young mother and her two small children. They were too young to be fighting with each other and causing her problems of that kind, but they were hard work all the same. She wiped their noses and checked their nappies and gently admonished them when they tried to climb on to my seat. By the time the train reached Acton Town, she looked worn out and I was experiencing a full-blown attack of remorse. I felt that my guilt was stamped across my forehead for everyone to read — this woman, the other passengers, even the woman’s tiny innocent children. How would Veronica not see it there the moment I walked in the door?

I got off the Tube at Hammersmith and phoned home from a call box. The conversation was a little strained, almost as if she already knew. But this was silly. She was just reaching the end of a long weekend’s solo childcare and wanted me back to take them off her. She needed a break. ‘Where are you?’ she said.

I wondered that myself.

The pact that Susan Ashton and I had made, such as it was, lasted about a week. I struggled through the days, feeling guilty about what had happened when I was at home and watching Veronica feeding the twins, and guilty about the fact that, whenever I saw Susan Ashton at work, I wanted it to happen again.

Above all, I felt depressed by the predictability of it all, by the fact that it was such a terrible cliché. I was a weak male, easily tempted. I had spent a weekend away from the company of my wife, leaving her to look after our very young children, and I had succumbed to the oldest temptation in the world. And then I felt guilty that I was more upset by its being a cliché than I was about the fact that I had cheated on my wife and that I wanted to do it again.

I watched Veronica while she slept and I knew that nothing had changed, really, between the two of us. I still loved her and I felt she probably still loved me, but we had allowed the stress of childcare to obscure that love, to get in the way. We had reacted to perceived injustices in the division of labour in a tiresomely predictable and destructive way, bitching and sniping at each other, sometimes at home just the four of us, but also on the few occasions we got to go out and be with other people. We bitched about each other when we were out separately with our own friends and we bitched about each other when we were out together with mutual friends. We’d see them looking at each other, perhaps in recognition, but more likely in grateful realisation that someone’s marriage was in a worse state than their own. So they thought.

Susan Ashton stopped by my desk in a crowded office on a spurious errand and typed out a message in the document I had open on screen.

Do you want to go for a drink after work?

I thought about it for two seconds and then typed a reply.

Go on, then.

She walked off and I watched her go. When she reached the doorway, she didn’t look back.

I deleted the messages and met her after work.

We sat in an alcove in a basement bar sipping halves of lager.

‘What a cliché!’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘I just… Nothing,’ I said, since I could see that she didn’t know what I was talking about.

She caught my hand under the table and held on to it. I could feel a pulse where the tip of my finger pressed against the base of her thumb, but I didn’t know whose it was. I could smell a powerful scent coming off her and I didn’t think it had come out of a bottle. She was wearing a blouse, as she had been at the weekend, and again it was unbuttoned a little further than you might expect it to be. I imagined her unfastening a button or two as she stepped down into the gloom of this empty bar (we had left work separately and she had arrived first) and I felt both excited in a visceral, animal sense and overwhelmingly tired at the same time, and not just physically. I didn’t want this to happen. All I had to do was explain that to her, briefly, remind her of what we had agreed, and leave, walk up the stairs into the sunlight and not look back. Quit the job if necessary, get another. It wasn’t like I was wedded to my employer like I was wedded to Veronica. There were a dozen jobs like mine available at any one time.

And at the same time I did want it to happen. A part of me wanted it to happen. Something in my stomach wanted it to happen. Something in my trousers wanted it to happen. But also something in my brain. Something in my brain both wanted it to happen and wanted it not to happen.

Either it would happen or it wouldn’t happen. And if it happened, either it would fuck everything up or it wouldn’t. And if it fucked everything up, either I would end up having to kill myself or I wouldn’t.

We finished our drinks and I let Susan Ashton leave first. I got another drink and sat in the semi-darkness brooding, worrying, flipping coins in my head.

When I got home, Veronica was in the kitchen with the children. She was hovering with a cloth while they spooned food into their mouths, occasionally missing.

‘Hello honey,’ she said, getting up to kiss me.

‘Hello darling,’ I said. ‘How’s my favourite girl? Oops, I mean how are my favourite girls?’

Laura giggled. She didn’t necessarily know what was funny, but she had learned to laugh at the joke.

‘Have you been for a drink?’ Veronica asked.