Close Relations Read online

  ‘So why did you stay so long?’

  ‘I just – didn’t fit here,’ she said. ‘England didn’t fit me.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘That’s because you’re eighteen. With me, it was more than that.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Because –’

  She stopped. Her father’s face had appeared at the window. He waved at them, through the glass, and started hammering at the gutter.

  When someone is in love with a married man, evidence of family contentment is too much to bear. His own home life, of course, is beyond thinking about. But the domestic lives of others are painful too, being a shadowy reminder of his. Oh the easy intimacy, so casually taken for granted by those enjoying it! Prudence tried not to be affected by her sister’s house but so much stopped her in her tracks – scrawled notes stuck to the fridge, shopping lists with items on them such as Coco Pops, that only people’s children want . . . Below this, a layer below, lay the evidence of the past, things that belonged to a younger Jamie and Imogen and that no doubt littered the boys’ rooms in Stephen’s house – abandoned roller-skates, battered boxes of Cluedo. Prudence didn’t envy Louise’s marriage – she herself wouldn’t want to be married to Robert – but the sight of their bedroom filled her with self-pity.

  She had gone upstairs to fetch a magazine. Louise was a magazine-addict and had kept a copy of Elle that contained an interview with one of Prudence’s authors. Their bedroom was a large, corner room, its walls washed peachy pink. Robert’s and Louise’s clothes were strewn over the chairs; the disordered intimacy made Prudence feel like an intruder. Master bedroom. The words rebuffed outsiders. Master bedroom with en suite bathroom. The phrase implied a life of sensuality behind closed doors, of frequent couplings and sluicings. Prudence gazed through the door. The towel-rail was hung with lace knickers and black stockings; Robert liked to buy Louise fancy underwear for her birthday. Louise’s bedside table was heaped with magazines. Robert’s side was piled with heavy new hardbacks – the latest brat-pack American novelist, a weighty volume called Plunder and Plenty: The New World Order. The chest of drawers was crammed with photographs of their wedding, their children, and snapshots of parties with friends of theirs that Prudence had never met.

  As she stood there, thunder rumbled outside. It started to rain. She went to look out of the window. Down in the driveway she could see the abandoned hosepipe next to the BMW. Robert sat inside his car. From this angle she could see his legs. She remembered thinking, vaguely, that he must have got into his car to escape the rain. If she had really thought about it she would have realised that he could have easily run into the house – that nobody, a few yards from their own front door, would choose to take shelter in their car.

  In fact, Robert was making a phone call. He kept his head bent, as if he were rummaging in the glove compartment. But Prudence couldn’t see this from her angle and besides she was too busy speculating about her own painful and unsatisfactory state of affairs to think about those of anybody else.

  Later, she gave Maddy a lift to London. It was still raining. The oncoming headlights blurred and smeared as the windscreen wipers slewed to and fro. They didn’t talk; somehow, after three years’ separation, there was too much to say. Maddy told her sister the address of a flat in Tufnell Park, the place she was going to stay. When they arrived, Prudence unloaded the luggage and helped her with it to the door.

  She drove home to Clapham. It was eight o’clock. On Sunday evenings she felt a loneliness that stretched beyond Stephen. In the houses lamps glowed behind closed curtains. Attic rooms bloomed with the nervy flicker of TVs. Everyone in the world was utterly alone, all those people who believed themselves companioned, they lived alone and they would die alone. Yet simultaneously Prudence felt that she was the only person who was really lonely. This sensation was peculiar to Sunday nights.

  She arrived in her street, Titchmere Road, and parked her car. It was a long road of red-brick Victoriana, those claustrophobic façades and surprisingly spacious interiors that are characteristic of Clapham. Commuters used the street as a rat run, a short cut from the southern suburbs to the City. Various traffic-calming devices – humps, narrowed bits – failed to calm the traffic in the rush hour; in fact, just made it more impatient. In twelve hours Prudence herself would be joining them; only twelve hours to go before she could rejoin the human race.

  She climbed up to her flat. It was on the first floor. The man upstairs was engaged in his nightly spring-clean, an operation which seemed to consist of dragging heavy items of furniture across the floor. She had a recurring fantasy that Mr Witherall, a timid bachelor, was in fact a serial killer and that every night he had to clean up the evidence and conceal dismembered limbs behind the wardrobe.

  She went into the kitchen. Her cat, Cedric, brushed against her shin. Long ago she knew a man who used to brush her cheek with the knuckle of his hand. He had married and gone to live in Vancouver. On the draining board sat the morning’s washed-up cup and plate, exactly where she had left them. Her African violets sat moistly in their pots. Her flat had the stilled, Marie Celeste air of all flats belonging to single people; sometimes, in the past, she had found this comforting.

  She went into her living room and switched on the lamp. A pile of manuscripts lay on the table, waiting for her. The top one was called Commuter or Computer: Work in the Second Millennium. Upstairs there was a thud. Mr Witherall had felled his latest victim.

  She looked at the answerphone. It said ‘1’. She switched it on.

  It was Stephen’s voice. ‘Listen, she’s taken the boys swimming.’ His voice was low and urgent. ‘If you’re back before five, phone me. I’ll come right over. We can have an hour. Oh darling . . .’

  Prudence was a methodical woman. Before she did anything she walked across the room and closed the curtains. Then she sat down on the arm of the chair. She gripped her stomach; the noise was wrenched out of her guts. Coming from this composed person it was a shocking sound – a howl of animal pain.

  Two

  BEVERIDGE AND BUNYAN had been established in Bloomsbury since 1933. It was an old family firm, though the Beveridge side of it had long ago ceased to exist and remained but a ghostly presence. There was an other-worldly air about the premises too – a pair of shabby Georgian buildings near the British Museum, reputedly haunted by an eighteenth-century poet of unrecognised genius who, Chatterton-like, killed himself in the attic amidst a welter of rejection slips. Once this part of London was the hub of the publishing business. Every other building housed an imprint – Deutsch, Nelson, Hamish Hamilton. Behind mahogany desks sat editors of the old school, gentlemen of letters who peppered their memos with Latin quotations, took their authors out to epic lunches at Bertorelli’s and who could be spotted at four-thirty weaving their way back through Bedford Square before issuing forth to their clubs. Only their ghosts remained. They themselves were extinct; their successors had been merged, rationalised, bought-up and despatched to post-modern office blocks rising from no man’s lands of orbital loop-roads and security gates, situated in unappealing parts of London miles from the Garrick.

  Beveridge and Bunyan had held out longer than the others. Over the years it had resisted change and stubbornly stayed on in Bloomsbury. The place had a certain musty charm. There was an office cat. The editor in charge of religious books still insisted on using a typewriter. In the lobby, under a faded photograph of Mr Beveridge and Mr Bunyan, sat the receptionist Muriel. She was a bewhiskered matron who had been there for ever and whose wall was stuck with postcards sent by holidaymaking members of staff. She ran the switchboard; she knew all the gossip – people’s ailments, their problems with their children. It was Muriel who first heard the rumour of a buy-out by Unimedia, through various hush-hush calls from Frankfurt to their chairman Arthur Bunyan.

  Unimedia was a German-based communications empire. It owned newspapers and TV stations; it owned paper mills and software companies in Euro
pe and the United States. It already had a majority shareholding in another publishing group, the result of a takeover bid in the early nineties. It had been sniffing around Beveridge and Bunyan for some time, for despite its air of gentility B&B in fact made a healthy profit. This was due to publishing various standard legal textbooks and a series of EFL course books that were used in schools throughout the developing world. So in April the company was bought up and the last of the Mr Bunyans, a man whose heart lay in fly-fishing, retired to his home next to the River Test.

  Since then the place had been shaken out of its long slumber. The first swathe of redundancies and early retirements had removed various old time-servers. Prudence had mixed feelings about this. Though she was sorry to see her colleagues go, their jobs merged or their positions taken by corporate suits who seemed to regard books as just another commodity – though she was sorry to see this, she also found it invigorating. Coming from her background, she had always resented the old boy network. Publishing used to be full of them; privileged, patronising, invariably male, they had kept the best jobs for themselves, relegating women to the lowlier editorial posts or, if the girls were pretty, the publicity department where they could charm journalists over spritzers at lunchtime. Didn’t they realise that the world had changed? One of them, Prudence’s former managing director, had once boasted: ‘I’ve only been into my wife’s kitchen twice, and once was to put out a fire.’ Her new MD was a coarse Australian called Alan Watkins who cracked jokes and who chain-smoked in meetings, setting off the alarms. He had fought his way up from nowhere, like her father, and though his ruthlessness dismayed her she also found him refreshing.

  It was Monday morning. Unlike most of Britain’s workers Prudence longed for the arrival of Monday. For two days, throughout the interminable weekend, she hadn’t seen Stephen. She couldn’t phone him; he couldn’t phone her. Yesterday’s painfully frustrating message had been a rare occurrence. Each week the shutters came down. He was closed away with his family in Dulwich, in a house she had never seen and that she tried not to imagine.

  She knew his routines. He played football with his sons on Saturday afternoons; he went to Sainsbury. He was a husband. The word grew in her like a tumour. Husband . . . a rounded, smug word, a word describing a man who belonged to somebody else. She told herself it was just a collection of letters, a gathering of dots, but she couldn’t convince herself. Like all married people he spoke so casually of we. ‘We had to go to this boring residents meeting, I wished I was with you.’ He tried to be tactful, to imply that his marriage was unhappy. ‘We had an awful row on Sunday morning.’ Though he was trying to reassure her, it was the we that cut into her heart. Sunday morning . . . croissants in bed . . . sheets rumpled by the previous night’s lovemaking, though he promised her that sex between himself and his wife had ceased.

  He called his wife she; so did Prudence. Never by name. The verbal courtesies of a married man speaking to his mistress occurred so naturally that she sometimes suspected he had done this before. He strenuously denied it. He said that until he met Prudence he had been faithful to his wife but even this hurt her. ‘Faithful’ was such a beautiful word. She had looked it up in her Shorter Oxford Dictionary. ‘Faithful: firm in a fidelity or allegiance to a person to whom one is bound by any tie; constant, loyal, true.’ Her heart, sinking, had barely been cheered by ‘Conscientious in the fulfilment of duty’.

  Prudence approached the office. Despite the traffic roaring down Museum Street there was a shiny, rinsed feeling in the air. Last night’s rain had washed the pavements clean. In a few minutes she would be seeing Stephen. Her spirits rose; suddenly the street had the bustling optimism of a Frank Capra movie. Luigi, who ran the snack bar opposite, trundled in a trolley of fruit-juice packs. A woman polished the brass plate of the occult bookshop on the corner. Outside Beveridge and Bunyan a green van was parked on the pavement. It said Fox Gardening Services. A woman unloaded plants from it.

  Beveridge and Bunyan occupied two houses, knocked through to make them interconnecting. Prudence’s office was on the ground floor – a narrow, partitioned-off space with a window onto the street. Trish, her secretary, was pouring boiling water into the cafetière. Trish was a bouncy, uncomplicated girl; she lived with, and supported, a flabby young man called Don who Prudence suspected was gay.

  ‘So did you persuade him to go bungee-jumping?’

  Trish shook her head. ‘He’s such a wimp. How was your weekend?’

  ‘Went to my sister’s. The one in the country.’ Prudence suspected, rightly, that her secretary considered her life spinsterly. ‘My little sister arrived from Nigeria.’

  ‘Want a Hobnob?’ Trish offered her a biscuit. She popped one into her mouth and opened the diary. ‘Editorial at ten, jackets at twelve and lunch with Elspeth Wilmslow.’ This was an author who was writing a book about paint techniques. Prudence suspected there were enough of these already. ‘Shall I book Pièro’s?’

  ‘No, the Groucho. She’s coming all the way from Huddersfield. She might want to bump into someone famous.’

  Prudence looked at the pile of manuscripts on her desk. She was halfway through editing – well, rewriting – the book of pasta recipes. She was also working on a Whither Britain Now-type monograph by a Guardian columnist, which might do well if its publication coincided with a Labour win at the next election. On the other hand, it might not. At times she felt that every book in the world had already been written countless times and was simply being reissued, disguised under another title. This didn’t dismay her; not on Monday morning, not when she was waiting for a tap on the door.

  A tap. She swung round. Stephen stood there. He wore his green corduroy jacket. Her chest folded within itself.

  ‘Morning, Trish. Pru. Has Bill shown you the mock-ups for the authors’ cards?’

  ‘Not yet.’ She looked at Stephen’s clothes. She longed to buy him something new. She couldn’t even buy him a pair of socks. ‘Alan wants to see us both at four.’ She turned to her secretary. ‘Trish dear, could you photocopy these?’ Why did she call her dear? Because Trish was bathed in her happiness.

  Trish left. She was not a curious person; she suspected nothing.

  Stephen said: ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He shut the door. They collided, bumping against the edge of the desk. After two days they always felt awkward with each other, especially in the broad daylight of the office. The hiatus of the weekend set them back to being acquaintances. His interlude of family life made him strange to her, all over again. It usually took them until Tuesday to recover their old intimacy. Prudence rubbed her cheek against his, shyly. He smelled of the aftershave his wife must have given him. It seemed to have a stronger aroma on Monday mornings.

  ‘I didn’t dare go out in case you rang,’ he whispered. ‘I sat there for an hour. Then they came home, all smelling of chlorine.’ He drew back and touched her hair. ‘My love, I wanted you so badly.’

  ‘Did you really?’ She hadn’t smoked a cigarette yet; she wanted to keep her breath fresh for him.

  ‘Shall I tell you which bits?’

  Prudence froze. A face had appeared at the window. It was the gardener, from the van. Prudence jumped back and busied herself, riffling through her mail. The woman didn’t seem to have noticed them. She was replanting the window-box. She pulled out the summer bedding – white geraniums – and flung them out of sight.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ said Prudence.

  ‘I want to run my finger down the inside of your thigh,’ Stephen murmured, standing on the other side of the desk.

  ‘I want to suck your fingers, one by one . . .’ she said.

  ‘I want to take your breast in my mouth . . . I want to be inside you, now . . .’

  Prudence picked up a letter. Her hand trembled. ‘I want to lie with my arms around you all through the night . . .’ She stopped. Trish came in. Prudence said: ‘See you at four then, in Alan’s office.’

  �
�And could you run me up a budget for the bulimia book?’ he asked.

  He left. Prudence sat down heavily in the swivel chair.

  Stephen Miller was a charming, weak man of forty-six. He had always been susceptible to women. He liked talking to them; he liked the sort of things they talked about. He sought out their company. In this respect he was unusual for an English man of his class – upper-middle, public school. They responded by finding him endearing, though he was far from handsome. He was a soft man, chubby in fact, with sandy hair and freckled hands. He had a dry, amused way of talking, as if nothing much mattered in the end, life was a baffling business. He wore bow ties and scruffy corduroy jackets which devoted girlfriends, in the past, had repaired for him. He had been to Oxford. He was well-read, there was something of the absent-minded schoolteacher about him which had lulled women into thinking they were safe in his company. He was a romantic. If he forgot someone’s birthday, because he was forgetful, he made up for it by an extravagant present the next day, because he was extravagent. In his publishing career he had frequently been bailed out by a devoted series of assistants – underpaid, over-educated women who covered up for him and took the blame. They didn’t resent him for this because he thanked them profusely and took them out to lunch.

  Stephen liked lunch. During it he invariably drank too much, charging it to the firm of course, and all afternoon his secretary had to make excuses for him and tell callers he was in a meeting. There are many such men as Stephen, supported by invisible women. This is because, even in the the last years of the nineties, there are still women who willingly do so.

  Prudence was an intelligent woman. Love had not blinded her to Stephen’s weaknesses. He had been her boss for three years now; on occasion she, too, had bailed him out. He was the editorial director, responsible for the trade lists at B&B – fiction, children’s and – Prudence’s section – general nonfiction. He had slid into the job through a combination of flair and charm; he was particularly good at wooing authors from other publishers. He was also close friends with the Bunyan family, having been at All Souls with one of the sons where they had performed together in amateur dramatics.