heard from her since. What? Yes – the offer on the place we like, it’s all going ahead. Listen, I think I’m going to go up to Crouch End – I have keys. Is that OK about the meeting then? Cool. Yes. Tomorrow’s fine.’
Shit. Thea’s text late last night. Alice grabs her phone and fires off a message.
u ok?
After two minutes too long, she sends another.
u ok? Axx
Thea could cry with relief. Help is at hand. Alice is there. no. Tx
u at home? Axxx
yes – can u come?? need u, v v much Txx
k. on my way – so is Saul
Saul? Coming here? No no no! Shit. I don’t want to see him. I’ve got to go.
When Headfuck Boy had dumped Thea, her heart had been broken and the pain had been terrible and exquisite but in a cathartically Brontë-like way. However, Saul hadn’t broken her heart. If he’d wilfully broken her heart, at least she could hurl herself into a romantic vortex of grieving, sobbing and deluded hope. Instead, Thea was lumbered with his insidious secret and it was asphyxiating. A broken heart was a walk in the park compared to this. All she’d been able to do for twenty-four hours was pace her flat and hyperventilate, rush to the toilet trying to throw up something other than bile-bitter emptiness. She’d been incapable of rationally assessing what she’d seen, the black-and-white facts had been too mammoth for her mind. So, of course she’d ignored Saul’s calls. Of course she’d deleted his goodnight and goodmorning and Thea sweetie, where ARE you messages. And of course she is rushing out of her flat, knowing he is on his way over.
Today, she feels even worse than yesterday; at least yesterday she’d had something to throw up and too much to think about. Today, she feels hollow and doomed and exhausted. There cannot be any explanation, any escape from what she’d seen. The bare facts are emblazoned, as harsh as a neon strip-light; but she can’t close her eyes to them, she can’t flinch away – they are imprinted on her mind’s eye anyway. She feels wretched; beyond distraught. Horror, disbelief, anger and hurt collide cataclysmically. Saul had done something unbelievable but she has to believe it because she saw it with her own eyes. She finds herself alternately repulsed by him yet somehow scared of him too; she swings from yelling out loud that she never wants to see him again, to sobbing silently at the terrifying notion of a future without him.
He isn’t who I thought he was. He is someone else. My Saul is gone. Who is this other Saul? Who is this person? A man who does terrible things.
Yesterday Thea reeled from the shock. However, the surges of adrenalin, the unremitting need to throw up, offered a bizarre respite, a temporary distraction, from deciphering the facts and admitting to the meaning. Today, she is consumed by the deceit, mangled by the hideousness of it all. Reality looms large and there is no escape from the truth.
Saul – do that?
Yes.
Him – with them?
Yes.
How dare he claim love and affection for me while paying for sex elsewhere. You cannot do the one and also the other. It is ethically impossible. It is morally reprehensible. Either love has lost its meaning or he never loved me in the first place. You simply cannot have sex with prostitutes and love your partner. And that’s a fact. And the fact is that yesterday, at lunchtime, when I fancied a sandwich, Saul fancied a fuck.
Thea stumbles out from her flat. She shivers spasmodically despite the day being even more beautiful than yesterday. With shoulders hunched, she walks clutching her hollow, aching stomach. Her face is ashen, she’s wearing slippers and an agitated expression and people stare as if they know what has befallen her, as if she is indelibly branded, stigmatized. Poor wretch – she’s just found out her boyfriend uses hookers. Look at the state of her, staggering down Topsfield Parade – she’s walking in the road! Is she mad? Is she drunk? Is she ill? No, she’s discovered her boyfriend pays for sex. God, how awful.
‘Alice?’
‘Thea,’ Alice answers immediately, ‘are you OK? What’s going on? I’m on my way, I’m in a cab, in Dartmouth Park – but the traffic is a nightmare. Is Saul there yet?’
‘But Alice – I don’t want to see Saul.’
Alice is stunned into silence. The thought ‘not in a million years did I consider that’ scorches her. What has he done, the bastard? She’ll kill him. ‘Where are you?’
‘Outside.’
‘Outside where?’
‘Outside down a side street.’
‘Are you still in Crouch End? Walk to one end of the street and tell me the name. Don’t hang up.’
The taxi costs a fortune. The driver doesn’t know Crouch End so he’s fine with Alice rifling through his A–Z and directing him.
‘Left – leftleftleft!’ Alice barks. ‘There! There she is. Slow down. Just stop, will you? Just stop and wait a sec – well, put your bloody hazard lights on, then. I’m coming back.’
Thea is pacing ten yards one way, then ten yards the other. She looks up at the sound of Alice’s footsteps and stands still.
‘Come on,’ Alice says with calm kindness, her arm around Thea’s shoulder, as if assisting a little old lady or a very small child across the road, ‘I’m here.’
It was a little like knowing exactly what to do in an emergency. Outside of a dire situation, one fears one will lose the presence of mind to think straight, act on intelligence and do the right thing. However, when such circumstances arise, suddenly one reacts sagaciously and efficiently. And so it was with Alice.
‘Alice, is Saul writing something on prostitutes? Are you publishing something in Adam about buying sex?’
‘No.’
‘I saw him go into a brothel yesterday, Alice. I waited for him to come out again. He did.’
Alice knew instinctively not to let the shock show. She knew not to rubbish what Thea claimed, neither to attack or defend Saul just yet, nor to raise or dash Thea’s hopes. The recovery position she needed to put Thea in was to calm her down, make her feel safe and listen without prejudice and with minimal comment. Just then, it didn’t matter whether Saul had or hadn’t, whether he was a bastard deserving castration or a maligned man, whether Thea should go to an STD clinic, whether Thea should confront Saul, whether or not their relationship could survive this. Instead, there were practical measures to be taken which were far more pressing. Alice knew Thea had to eat, needed to sleep, must not be on her own and that Saul had to be fobbed off, temporarily at least. If Alice phoned him on Thea’s behalf, he’d know there was a crisis and he would afford them no peace.
‘Do you see?’ Alice asked Thea, whom she’d taken back to Hampstead, made a hot-water bottle for and made drink flat Coca-Cola. ‘It makes sense. You need to call him. And quickly.’
Thea looked at her phone for some time. And then she dialled because Alice kept telling her to.
‘Hiya!’ she acted for all her worth, contriving to sound as breezy as anything, glancing at Alice for bolstering, hating his stupid lovely voice.
‘Thea, thank Christ!’ Saul exclaimed. ‘Jesus, where have you been?’
‘I lost my phone yesterday,’ Thea claimed convincingly, ‘when I was shopping. And I went to collect it and decided to take the day off.’
‘But no one knew where you were!’ Saul protested.
‘But I phoned work,’ Thea lied, ‘and