‘Probably more politically correct to call him a sex-addict,’ Tim says, ‘than a sex-pest.’
I round on Dante. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘He’s my brother.’ He makes a helpless gesture. ‘But I tried to make sure you were never alone with him. I didn’t want you working together, but he was adamant.’
Maybe that explains Dante’s antipathy. ‘I thought you just didn’t like me?’
‘I don’t. I don’t like you.’
Tim interjects: ‘Why not?’ He sounds angry.
‘She’s bossy. It’s her way or the highway.’
‘If she was a man, you’d call her efficient.’
I’ve a question. ‘So was that all a line about Ruthie seeing Ozzie Brown for the past two and a half years?’
‘No. That’s true.’
‘What about Greta?’ I ask. ‘Greta from Matthew’s work? Is he – yes? Oh, God.’ I knew it. The wolfish way he’d behaved in my dream. And despite all the weirdness of this evening, I have to say, fair play to me. Ten out of ten for intuition. ‘So what happens now?’ I ask.
‘You stop working for him with immediate effect.’ Tim’s emphatic.
‘Send a bill for the remaining hours.’ Dante says. ‘I’ll sort it out. And I’m sorry for everything.’
‘Hardly your fault your brother can’t keep his lad in his pants.’ Alastair has clearly never felt so far up the moral high ground.
Dante offers me his hand and says, ‘Pleasure not to be working with you any longer.’
‘Likewise,’ I reply.
After he’s been swallowed by the crowds, Alastair says, ‘Sorry, Amy, if you thought you and Matthew had a thing going.’
‘I didn’t.’ He’s good-looking but, I don’t know … Not sexy. Not to me, anyway. Something was warning me off him.
‘By all accounts he’d get up on a cracked plate.’ Alastair shakes his head sorrowfully.
‘Oh, Alastair.’ Tim’s tone is bone-dry. ‘This might be the happiest night of your life.’
‘Well, I’m going to the disco to dance to the Killers,’ I say. ‘Are either of you coming?’
Josh might be there, he might not, but right now all I want to do is get drunk and dance.
68
Saturday, 12 November, day sixty-one
The heat wakes me. It’s roasting in my tiny hotel room, like being buried alive in a furnace, and even though it’s only just gone seven, I must get out.
I have a quick shower, pull a comb through my hair and lipstick across my mouth, throw on my coat and slip through the lobby, still peopled with randomers in last night’s party threads, out into the day.
The sky is streaked mauve and royal blue – it’ll be properly light soon – and the breeze is brisk and pleasantly chilly. I’m headed for the sea: I want to hear the waves and breathe in the salty air. The pebbles crunch under my too-high boots as I make for the water’s edge. There’s no one out here but me – the entire hotel is probably still deep in a drunken sleep. It’s a wonder I’m awake myself. I’d danced like a mad thing with Alastair for hours and hours and it was nearly three when I’d tumbled into bed.
Mind you, I’m not fully with it. I’ve that disconnected thing hangovers give, where everything seems to be happening at one remove, almost as if I’m watching a movie of my life.
The small, polite waves aren’t doing it for me. Huge, crashy breakers would be better at clearing my head.
I called it wrong with Matthew Carlisle, which is all kinds of disappointing. I’ve started the rehabilitation of a man who doesn’t deserve any of it. And the loss of income is a bummer, especially coming up to Christmas. At least I didn’t sleep with him. Small mercies and all that.
Along the beach, a person appears out of the dawn gloom, heading in my direction. Someone else who’s woken early and is walking off a hangover. It’s a tall man in a dark overcoat, his collar turned up against the chill. In my numbed, dreamy state, I almost convince myself that I’ve conjured him out of my imagination. It’s Josh.
Our eyes meet, we walk directly towards each other, and when we’re a few inches from touching, we stop. Neither of us smiles.
‘So?’ he says. ‘How’ve you been?’
Although it’s over a year since we’ve spoken, we’ve bypassed all social niceties and gone straight to the intimacy we shared during those lunches we shouldn’t have had. And I don’t know how he found out, but he knows about Hugh. ‘Mmm, my marriage has gone a bit weird.’
His eyes are sympathetic. ‘Aye.’
My lips clamp tightly together. I’m ashamed.
‘I haven’t been stalking you,’ he says, ‘but I still think about you, and now and again I … check Facebook. Sometimes I can’t not.’
I shrug. ‘How are things with you?’
‘The same.’
‘Your wife still doesn’t understand you?’
‘Don’t.’
‘Sorry.’ Fervently I add, ‘I am sorry. It’s guilt.’
‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’
That’s not true. ‘I keep wondering if it was my fault that Hugh left. If he knew subconsciously that I’d been cheating. Because I was cheating, even if we never did anything, you and I.’
The breeze smacks a gust of chilly sea spray-speckled air against me, but I don’t shift; it’s a great relief to be face to face with Josh, to be talking about this.
‘Can I ask you something?’ he says. ‘If you hadn’t been married and I hadn’t been married, would you have …?’
I think about it, really consider it. ‘I’m not sure we’re temperamentally suited.’ I could never have been so honest without the distancing effects of my hangover. ‘But the physical thing, attraction, whatever you want to call it, that was, um, strong.’
Something flares in his eyes. ‘Aye. It was.’ Then he adds, ‘Still is. At least in my case.’
Wearily, I admit it. ‘Me too.’
‘Right, ah …’ He swallows hard. ‘So what’s stopping you?’
Very little. I’ve already lost my marriage. ‘Your wife.’
‘You want me to leave her?’
‘Christ, no! The opposite.’
Perhaps it’s disillusionment in the wake of the revelations about Matthew Carlisle. Finding out what he’s really like, so soon after seeing the photos of Hugh, is making me think that monogamy is a lost cause. No one seems able for it. Not Hugh, not Matthew, not Josh, maybe not even Tim.
It’s as if everything has turned to ashes and, right now, I feel there’s very little left to lose. Well, except this notion I have of myself as a decent person. And that’s probably no longer enough to stop me.
When I first started obsessing about Josh, my mad hope was for something magical to finesse away all awkward ethical considerations. But nothing is going to do that. If this is what I want, it’s up to me, a grown-up, to make a grown-up decision.
‘In every life we do stuff that isn’t congruent with our moral core,’ I say. ‘Right?’
‘Right.’ He sounds wary.
‘We do things we know we shouldn’t because we’re weak and want-y.’
His eyes have narrowed as he tries to follow my philosophy.
‘Josh.’ My tone is strict. ‘You’re never to talk about leaving her. You’re not to leave her. And this needs to be time-limited. It’s the only way I can okay it with my conscience. Until the end of the year, then it stops.’
‘What do you … Amy, what are you saying?’
‘Tuesday night, in London. Book a room.’
69
Monday, 14 November, day sixty-three
Not black satin. And certainly not red satin. No corsets, no basques, nothing remotely tacky. Nothing lace, nothing crotchless, nothing kinky.
In the end I buy plain black knickers and bra. Maybe they’re not entirely plain, they have a sateen sheen, but there aren’t any hidden surprises, like no back to the pants.
Reluctantly I also buy stockings and a suspender belt because I simply can’t do tights to him, not on our first night. And I won’t do hold-up stockings to myself, they can’t be trusted not to detach themselves from my thighs and float down my legs just when I’m crossing a crowded bar.
And now it really is time to go back to work, my Monday lunch hour has lasted 128 minutes.
‘How’d you get on?’ Alastair asks, when I slink back into the office.
‘Where’s Tim?’
Alastair nods at the meeting room and its closed door. ‘In there.’