the rules, and he’d have just what he needed to get me dumped for ever from the project. Imagine thinking that way, about a guy you were going to marry! And by then it was three or four in the morning and I wanted –’
The neglected undercurrent of Paul stirred between them. Gwen acknowledged it by lifting one corner of her mouth, not a smile, but sliding her lips around to the side of her face, making a squeegee sound inside her cheek. ‘Right – you wanted to be with someone who understood why you cared so much about all those antiquities.’
‘I got down into the street with my suitcases, and hailed a cab, and the whole thing just ran away with me. Arriving, departing. What was the name of any hotel, anyway? I felt all beaten up, and yet there was energy bubbling somewhere inside me. It was like I was right in the middle of a sentence with Paul, and I thought, Now I can talk straight to him because I’m free. So I told the cab driver to take me back to the airport.’
‘I still can’t believe you didn’t phone him!’
‘It was crazy. I thought – I imagined – that somehow he knew I was coming – or … I don’t know. Paul and I never used the phone; we always just walked in and saw each other first thing every morning. It felt like such a sure thing. I had his address and I – I was so excited – so impatient – like I was running to his arms. I wanted to amaze him. I thought it would make up for torturing him all summer talking about Mark. I kept remembering that expression on his face, when he put me in the taxi – open to whatever I decided. And this would be my answer, my fabulous, dramatic answer. I thought I was in love, Gwen, that’s the thing.’ Hilary swallowed a sob. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ she said loudly, defying it. ‘I’m so fucking tired.’
Gwen got up from her chair, slipped around the table, kneeled down beside Hilary, put her arms around her. ‘It’s fine. You have to give it time, Hil.’
‘I pounded on his door for ever!’ Hilary groaned. ‘What was I thinking?!’
‘You weren’t thinking, you were feeling.’
‘What was I feeling? None of it was real.’
‘So maybe that’s a problem people have about love. That they want it to feel passionate and impulsive. Maybe you did all this to make it feel like love when it wasn’t. To throw yourself, to jump blind. Maybe you needed the end of the world as you knew it.’
‘Christ, how does anyone ever know?’ Hilary turned her chair with a raw scrape and laid her cheek on Gwen’s hair; tears darkened the fine brown strands and swelled like beads on the flecks of green oil paint stuck to a few. ‘Any normal person would have given up and gone away, realised he wasn’t going to answer, assumed he wasn’t home.’
‘Shhh,’ said Gwen, rocking her gently. ‘It’s just as well he was there so it’s over already. One day you’ll laugh about it.’
‘When he finally opened the door, he was glowing. Hair tousled, no glasses, out of breath a little, giggling – and I still thought it was all for me. That he’d been waiting and hoping. He didn’t have on a shirt, his trousers were only half done up. It’s so embarrassing. I swear. I launched myself across the threshold, into the air, arms outstretched, before I even noticed the other man right behind him. This huge, hairy guy, half naked, twice Paul’s age.’
Gwen shook with laughter. ‘I’m sorry. I know how much it’s hurting you, but you tell it so perfectly, and I see this – tableau.’
Hilary pushed Gwen’s shoulders away, slapped at them, belligerent, half joking. ‘Bitch.’
‘Who talked first?’
‘Paul. Handled it easily. As if he were in white tie and tails and presenting me to a duchess, but with this kind of blandness, like he was – under hypnosis.’ She mimicked his English accent exaggeratedly: ‘“Ah – Hilary, what a surprise. Can I introduce you to my friend Orlando?” – or whatever the guy was called. But I didn’t meet him; he must have been as surprised as I was; made tracks. And then Paul said, “We were just having a bit of a rest, actually.”’ In her broadest American accent Hilary added, ‘Well, duh –’
‘And how’d you make your getaway?’
‘Badly. Really badly –’ Hilary started to laugh, too. ‘Some garbled junk about airplanes and how I had no idea what time it was and I was sorry and I’d call in the morning. To his credit, Paul did ask, “Is everything all right? Quite all right?”’
Hilary rolled her eyes. ‘Perfect. It’s all perfect. Can’t you see? My life is completely perfect. What does he care?’
Lawrence lifted his head a little as Gwen slid under the covers.
‘Sorry, darling,’ she whispered.
‘How is she now?’ he muttered. ‘OK?’ He laid a hand on Gwen’s thigh, squeezing it softly, then giving it a gentle shove, the cadence of goodnight.
‘I’ve got to find her someone to marry.’
Lawrence snorted into his pillow. ‘Wouldn’t it be enough to find her a place to live? Or maybe a job?’ He turned his head away, closing his eyes. ‘Why does she need to marry anyone?’
‘She still wants her old job. But we need to keep her away from Mark for a while. He’s so angry, it’s as if he’s lost his mind. She definitely doesn’t know how to pick men.’
His head came up again. ‘Do you know?’ Then dropped.
Gwen bent down and pressed her face into the nape of Lawrence’s neck, rubbing against his bristling hair where it was cut close at the back, metallic with grey. ‘OK,’ she admitted, ‘it was you who picked me. But by now, I can recognise the goods. Hilary feels so much, and she just throws herself at whatever – next it could be a passing car. I have to help her.’
Lawrence didn’t answer; he was asleep.
Upstairs in the studio, on her thin spare pillow, Hilary was thinking about Lawrence and Gwen lying side by side in their wide bed with its massive, blackened oak headboard. So much presence, that bed. An institution in itself, she thought. The thick modern mattress supported by the Jacobean frame, five hundred years or more of ageing wood hewn by hand with an axe – an oak tree reshaped as beams, posts, creaking pegs neatly filling invisible holes in the tight corners, and the broad exposed planks boldly, impressively carved.
Generations were born and died in that bed, Hilary thought. She saw them in pairs, producing a life, producing a death. In her mind’s eye, she only approximated the bodies, generic, strangely innocent, dressed in white like Gwen in her nightgown; what did Hilary know of their intimacy, in fact? She revered the idea of it. She pictured Lawrence and Gwen together throughout time, their hands folded on their breasts, not touching at all. Like figures carved in stone on a funeral monument. You could sleep for ever in that bed, she thought.
She had slept there herself during half of July and most of August when Gwen took Will to the cottage for the summer air and offered Hilary a vacation from the service flat. There had been a string of mornings so bright that Hilary had relished being called to them early by the birds. Relished dozing and dreaming in the half-light before dawn, under the pleasing shroud of Gwen’s stiffly laundered cotton sheets, slightly abrasive with London lime on the naked skin. How lucky, how certain, how easy I felt in that bed. Before all this mess.
Hilary longed for sleep now, for oblivion. But her mind raced on. I could get to hate Gwen, she thought. Both of them. It might seem easy to tell myself I don’t want what they have. But for whose benefit, that lie? The spinster’s bitter defiance, life at arm’s length. It’s a marriage I admire, and it’s their marriage. No way I can stay here more than a day or two. I have to tell her. Tomorrow – right away. Ask her to lend me money for one more ticket. Save what’s left of the credit cards.
Trouble with goddamned fucking New York is everybody’s apartments are so small. In London people have things like extra beds. She ran over in her mind