‘So people’ll know.’
‘Everyone’s gone home.’ His hand is on her thigh when the phone rings on the desk and he recoils as if bitten. He staggers to his feet.
‘Leave it!’ groans Emma.
‘I can’t leave it!’ He’s dragging on his trousers, as if talking to Fiona whilst naked from the waist down would be a betrayal too far, as if he’s terrified of sounding in some way bare-legged.
‘Hi, there! Hello, love! Yes, I know! Just walking out the door . . .’ Domestic issues are debated – pasta or stir-fry, TV or a DVD – and Emma distracts herself from her lover’s home life by retrieving her rolled-up underwear from beneath the desk where it lies with the paper-clips and pen tops. Dressing, she crosses to the window. There’s dust on the blades of the venetian blinds, outside a pink light hits the science block, and suddenly Emma wishes that she were in a park or on a beach or a European city square somewhere, just anywhere but here in this airless institutional room with a married man. How does it happen that you wake up one day, find yourself in your thirties and someone’s mistress? The word is repulsive, servile and she would rather not have it present in her mind, but can come up with no other. She is the boss’s mistress and the best that can be said of the circumstances is that at least there are no children involved.
The affair – another awful word – began the previous September, after the disastrous holiday in Corfu, the engagement ring in the calamari. ‘I think we want different things’ was the best that she could come up with, and the rest of the long, long fortnight passed in a haze of sunburn and sulking, self-pity and anxiety about whether the jewellers would take the ring back. Nothing in the world could be more melancholy than that unwanted engagement ring. It sat in the suitcase in their hotel room, emanating sadness like radiation.
She returned from the holiday looking brown and unhappy. Her mother, who knew about the proposal, who had practically bought her own dress for the wedding, raged and moaned at Emma for weeks until she began to question her rejection of the offer. But saying yes would feel like caving in, and Emma knew from novels that you should never cave in to marriage.
The affair had settled it. During a routine meeting she had burst into tears in Phil’s office, and he had crossed from behind the desk, put his arm round her, and pressed his mouth to the top of her head, almost as if to say ‘at last’. After work, he took her to this place he’d heard of, a gastropub, where you could get a pint but the food was great too. They had rib-eye steaks and goat’s cheese salad, and as their knees made contact beneath the big wooden table she had let it all flood out. After the second bottle of wine, it was all just a formality; the hug that became a kiss in the taxi home, the brown internal envelope in her pigeon hole (about last night, can’t stop thinking about you, felt this way for years, we need to talk, when can we talk?).
Everything Emma knew about adultery had come from TV dramas of the Seventies. She associated it with Cinzano and Triumph TR7s and cheese and wine parties, thought of it as something the middle-aged did, the middle classes mainly; golf, yachts, adultery. Now that she was actually involved in an affair – its paraphernalia of secret looks, hands held under tables, fondles in the stationery cupboard – she was surprised at how familiar it all was, and what a potent emotion lust could be, when combined with guilt and self-loathing.
One night, after sex on the set of her Christmas production of Grease, he had solemnly handed her a gift-wrapped box.
‘It’s a mobile phone!’
‘In case I need to hear your voice.’
Sitting on the bonnet of the Greased Lightning, she stared at the box and sighed. ‘Well I suppose it was bound to happen eventually.’
‘What’s up? Don’t you like it?’
‘No, it’s great.’ She smiled, remembering. ‘I just lost a bet with someone, that’s all.’
Sometimes, walking and talking on a clear autumn evening in a secret part of Hackney Marshes, or giggling at the school carol service, drunk on mulled wine with their hips touching – sometimes she thought she was in love with Phillip Godalming. He was a good, principled, passionate teacher, if a little pompous sometimes. He had nice eyes, he could be funny. For the first time in her life she was the subject of an almost obsessive sexual infatuation. Of course, at forty-four he was far too old and his body, beneath the pelt, had that slipped doughy quality, but he was an earnest and intense lover, sometimes a little too intense for her liking; a face-puller, a talker. She found it hard to believe that the same man who stood in assembly to talk about the charity fun run would use that kind of language. Sometimes she wanted to break off during sex and say ‘Mr Godalming – you swore!’
But nine months have passed now, the excitement has faded and she finds it harder to understand why she’s here, loitering in a school corridor on a beautiful summer’s evening. She should be with friends, or with a lover whom she’s proud of and can mention in front of other people. Sulky with guilt and embarrassment, she waits outside the boys’ loos while Phil washes himself with institutional soap. His Deputy Head of English and Theatre Studies and his mistress. Oh good God.
‘All done!’ he says, stepping out. He takes her hand in his, still damp from the washbasin, dropping it discreetly as they step out into the open air. He locks the main door, sets the alarm, and they walk to his car in the evening light, a professional distance apart, his leather briefcase occasionally banging the back of her shin.
‘I’d drive you to the tube, but—’
‘—best be on the safe side.’
They walk a little further.
‘Four more days to go!’ he says jauntily, to fill the silence.
‘Where are you off to again?’ she asks, even though she knows.
‘Corsica. Walking. Fiona loves to walk. Walking, walking, walking, always walking. She’s like Gandhi. Then in the evening, off come the walking boots, out like a light . . .’
‘Phil, please – don’t.’
‘Sorry. Sorry.’ To change the subject, he asks, ‘How about you?’
‘Might see family in Yorkshire. Staying here, working mostly.’
‘Working?’
‘You know. Writing.’
‘Ah, the writing.’ Like everyone, he says it as if he doesn’t believe her. ‘It’s not about you and me, is it? This famous book?’
‘No it’s not.’ They’re at his car now, and she is keen to be gone. ‘And anyway, I don’t know if you and me are all that interesting.’
He’s leaning against his blue Ford Sierra, gearing up for the big farewell, and now she has spoilt it. He frowns, bottom lip showing pink through his beard. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I don’t know, just . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘Phil, this, us. It doesn’t make me happy.’
‘You’re unhappy?’
‘Well, it’s not ideal is it? Once a week on an institutional carpet.’
‘You seemed pretty happy to me.’
‘I don’t mean satisfied. Good God, it’s not about sex, it’s the . . . circumstances.’
‘Well it makes me happy—’
‘Does it? Does it really though?’
‘As I recall it used to make you happy too.’
‘Excited I suppose, for a while.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Emma!’ He glares down at her as if she has been caught smoking in the girls’ loos. ‘I’ve got to go now! Why bring this up just as I’ve got to go?’
‘I’m sorry, I—’
‘I mean for fuck’s sake, Emma!’
‘Hey! Don’t talk to me like that!’
‘I’m not, I just, I’m just . . . Let’s just get through the summer holiday, shall we? And then we’ll work out what to do.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do, is there? We either stop or we carry on, and I don’t think we should carry on . . .’
He lowers his voice. ‘There is something else we can do . . . I can do.’ He looks around, then when he’s sure it’s safe he takes her hand. ‘I could tell her this summer.’
‘I don’t want you to tell her, Phil . . .’
‘While we’re away, or before even, next week . . .’
‘I don’t want you to tell her. There’s no point . . .’
‘Isn’t there?’
‘No!’
‘Because I think there is, I think there might be.’
‘Fine! Let’s talk next term, let’s, I don’t know – pencil-in a meeting.’