We talked about my work – he’d read a little about the case I had been working on. For once, I didn’t find myself second-guessing, assuming he was asking out of politeness, while he waited for Miranda to rescue him, or for someone more stimulating to come along. He was turned towards me on his stool, his knees pointing towards mine. A body language expert would have said that all the signs were very good. Or very bad, depending upon which way you looked at it. But I didn’t think anything of it, still. Or, if I did, I pushed those thoughts away. They were ridiculous, weren’t they?
We talked about the first time we’d met (he didn’t remember the previous occasion, at the Summer Ball, and I was too proud to correct him), when he had come out of the bathroom clutching his towel.
‘There I was,’ he said, ‘half naked, and there you were, looking so elegant.’
I was surprised by this; I had always just assumed he thought I was Miranda’s uglier, more boring friend. Elegant. I realised that I would be turning that word over in my mind for a while.
‘This is so nice,’ he said to me at one point. ‘Isn’t it nice? Just chatting, like this? How have we never done this before?’ His breath was laced with whisky, true, but I still felt his words warm me. And I realised he wasn’t quite as arrogant as I had always thought – and also, clearly, not so perfect. Perhaps the years had rubbed some of the shine off him, and I hadn’t stopped to notice. Or perhaps he had always been like this. Either way, he seemed much nicer, more humble, than I had ever appreciated. The sober me might have been able to point out that this was probably just Julien’s famous charisma at work. But the drunk me liked it very much.
Because at some point I realised that we were both very drunk. ‘I should go home,’ I said. Though I realised that I didn’t want to, and not just because of the depressing thought of the sterile single-person flat that awaited me. It was because I was actually having fun. I was enjoying his company. But I made a big show of finishing my glass, and getting down from my seat. As I slid from my seat and wobbled on my heels, I discovered that I was even drunker than I had thought. He got down from his stool, and I saw him sway on his feet, too.
‘You can’t go home on your own,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk you back. It’s not safe.’
For some reason I didn’t bother to tell him that I walked home alone every night and that I’d been more drunk than this before when I did, sometimes with a complete stranger in tow. I think we both knew, even then, that it was mainly an excuse to keep the conversation going, to stay in one another’s company.
I don’t remember which of us made the first move. I just recall that suddenly we were standing in an empty alleyway, and all I could hear was the sound of our breathing. Just beyond that alleyway was the thoroughfare of Cheapside and cars and people, and beyond that the whole city, lit up, chaotic, with all its millions of inhabitants. But in that dark passage it was just the two of us, and we were both breathing very loudly. And neither of us was suddenly quite so drunk. That flash of desire had sobered us. And then there was the light pressure of his thumbs on my hipbones, and I could feel the greater pressure of him between my legs, how hard he was. And I took his hand and guided it up, beneath my skirt, and he groaned against my neck.
The sex was quick: it had to be, in that public place. Anyone could have come across us, at any moment. It was also very good. I came embarrassingly quickly. But he, despite the alcohol and the awkwardness of our position (he had to hold me up against the wall), followed soon after. It was the strangeness of it, I think, the illicitness of it, that made it incredibly exciting. Afterwards, we stayed glued together for several seconds, his face in my neck. I couldn’t believe what we had done.
He said it out loud. ‘I can’t believe that just happened.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Let’s … Let’s just pretend it didn’t.’ A small secret part of me was thinking: Would anyone have done? Was I just some girl in a bar, the right place, the right time. Or was it me?
These things should not have mattered, I knew. And yet they did. Because for so long I had assumed he saw me as the colourless, uninteresting counterpart, and that was why he had hardly bothered to speak to me. Now, here, was a new, thrilling possibility. That in fact he had desired me.
MIRANDA
I turn at the sound of footsteps behind me on the path. It’s Julien, clutching a towel about his waist, his feet skidding on the mud.
‘I’ve made a big mistake,’ he says in a let’s-all-be-adults tone. ‘I know I’ve made a big mistake. But I’ve been under a lot of stress.’
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘you’ve been under a lot of stress?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s – a deal went bad. And I’d cut Mark in on it. He wasn’t happy.’
I think back to what Mark said on the first night, when he grabbed me. The reference to Julien’s ‘dirty little secret’. The choice of words had struck me as odd at the time. I’d thought he was talking about the insider trading, but now I understand. ‘He knew,’ I say, ‘didn’t he? About you and—’ I can’t bring myself to say her name, ‘—her.’
‘I let something slip, when I was very drunk. I felt so guilty … I wanted his advice. He is – was – my best mate. And now he’s threatening me, Manda.’
He looks ridiculously sorry for himself. I really, truly detest him, in this moment. Not just for what he has done, but for his cowardice, his pathetic self-pity. ‘All of this,’ I say, ‘has been brought on by you, you fucking idiot. All of it because you always want a little bit more. You always think you’re entitled to a bigger share. I should have seen this coming a mile off. Of course you were going to have an affair. Though I would never in a million years have thought of Katie. I thought you might have better taste than that.’
He grimaces then, a little quirk of the mouth, and for a surreal moment I actually think he might be about to defend her to me. Clearly, he thinks better of it. I know him too well; he’s more worried about saving his own bacon.
‘She seduced me, Manda.’
My skin crawls. ‘Don’t fucking call me that,’ I hiss.
‘Sorry. But I want to make that clear. It was all her. I think … I think she had a plan, from the moment she saw me sitting there in that bar. I think she knew, looking at me, at the state I was in – that I would have been incapable of resisting. I didn’t have a chance. It was like that time in Ibiza.’
‘What time in Ibiza?’
‘Oh God.’ He looks as though he immediately regrets having said anything. He rubs his face with a hand. ‘You might as well know. That holiday we all went on. The last night. She came on to me. It was … crazy. I was a bit out of it, and I was missing you … She was like a woman possessed, Manda – sorry. She was all over me.’
I stare at him, bile rising in my throat. Ibiza. While I was at my grandmother’s funeral … he was sleeping with my best friend. It wasn’t that long after we’d first started going out, well before we were married – all of which makes it worse, means that that disgusting secret has been there between us for all that time. Julien is clearly regretting having revealed any of this to me. He makes a kind of desperate sweeping gesture with his hand, as though trying to brush it from view, and says, ‘But … what I want to say is, I didn’t mean any of it.’
It would almost be amusing, I think. To watch him falter, to continue to dig himself into this particular grave. Amusing if, that is, he weren’t my husband, the man to whom I have given over a decade – all my youth – and if I weren’t really the butt of this particular joke.
‘Anyway,’ Julien hurries on – he must see the disgust and utter incredulity on my face – ‘when we bumped into each other in that bar … I think she saw I was at a low point. You’d been treating me like a second-class citizen. Barely speaking to me. I felt like an utter failure, a disappointment. She made me feel … desired, desirable. I tried to call a stop to it. I went around to her apartment the next day, to tell her to call it off. But she wouldn’t let me do it. I was so weak, I see that. She was like a drug habit I couldn’t shake—’
I hold up a hand. ‘What script are you reading from, Julien? Do you have so little respect for me that you think I’m really going to buy any of this pathetic, clichéd crap?’