The Scrabble board sits abandoned on the dining-room table, an unfinished orgy, the tiles scattered, the little white muslin bag upended. They don’t eat at home a lot, or together.
The dispiritedness with which she’d removed her jacket and then her silk camisole had not gone unnoticed by her opponent, Hal, the man she’d lived with for many years, sometimes irritably but for the most fondly as the heat went out of them. He’d unbuttoned his own shirt and unbuckled his own belt with no more zest. They didn’t even have the heart to go on with the game. Maybe they’d invite another couple round. Maybe they wouldn’t. The one time they’d tried had been an agony. Laughter had saved them – just. But they had bags of cruel time ahead of them. Bags almost as full as the bag of Scrabble tiles. How much more laughter, over the coming years, could they call on?
It had, of course, been his suggestion. As had the photographs. And her taking her top off at the beach. All perfectly harmless in intention, she knew, but they harmed her. You can be modest without being prudish, she thought. Or at least she could. You can not want to play along for the perfectly good reason that you simply don’t.
‘You look really good,’ he told her, as though how she looked – meaning how she looked to him, and to whoever else gawped at her on the beach – was the problem. She knew how she looked and liked how she looked. She looked after herself, for herself. Self-respect, her mother called it. She saw it more as self-honour. What people called ‘a bit of fun’ was only fun if you found it so. Otherwise, it was trespass.
She cared for Hal. That she could no longer express her feelings for him with greater fervour saddened her. For him, she thought, the kindest thing would be a mistress, if he didn’t already have one. She was not going to suggest that. She knew there was nothing like permission to take the zip out of an infidelity. She wouldn’t have wanted him telling her she was free to find a lover. They were each the reason the other had to look elsewhere, each equally to blame and each equally blameless and, except when they carelessly allowed staleness to stare them in the face, as on the beach or when playing Scrabble, the ancient rituals for saving marriages or sort-of marriages worked well enough for them. To her mind, spicing up the home front was a sort of blasphemy. You honour feelings that were once important by letting them wear themselves out naturally. When time is up, time is up. You don’t say ‘Darling, we need to talk.’ You don’t use the word ‘space’. You remember your manners, stay out late and tell lies.
That, too, was a species of love.
It helps that they are both successful in spheres so antithetical there is no likelihood of their circumferences ever touching. She does words, he does things. He has the bigger company, manufacturing executive games and gadgets of his own invention. Right this minute – the year is 1995 – he has an idea for an electric scooter for adults. Her production company is niche, making low-budget television programmes, in which people speak a lot, for the smaller channels. That she earns a reasonable amount of money is down to Asian countries, and occasionally America enjoying, or at the very least buying, the programmes she makes. Though she doesn’t always work for the BBC, everything about her programmes suggests the BBC, to Asians and Americans at least.
Each respects how well the other has done. But because it would upset them to sit and remember the schemes they hatched as half-dating sixth-formers, when her greatest ambition was to be a librarian, and his to invent machines that would appeal to men in a hurry like him – because fruition is as melancholy as frustration when it no longer unites in happiness those who planned and dreamed – they steer clear of the subject. Words of formal congratulation do the job of kisses and champagne. The proof of their having loved each other once is that they have the practical decency not to refer to it.
She has lunch with her friend Lucasta whose husband has left her for an older woman. ‘He says he is desperate to have some excitement in his life,’ the friend says.
‘An older woman? It would seem, in that case, that he is desperate to have some quiet.’
‘Older doesn’t mean quieter, as you know full well.’
‘Old doesn’t mean quieter, I agree. Older is something else. She can’t be more vivacious than you.’
‘That’s not for me to say. But she is quite the livewire, I’ll give her that.’
‘Oh God, Lucasta, you’ve met her!’
‘We work together.’
‘Worse and worse. So tell me what makes her so lively that a man would leave you for her. Does she chair-dance?’
‘I can see what he sees in her, is all I’m saying.’
‘Then why don’t you run off with her?’
‘If I were to run off with any woman—’
They both laugh at the outlandishness of that suggestion.
They call for the bill. ‘We’ll just have to see,’ the friend says.
‘What do you mean “We’ll just have to see”?’
‘How long it lasts. This isn’t the end of the story.’ A few tears flow but she recovers quickly. ‘He’ll come back.’
‘You know that?’
‘I know that. He’s done it before.’
‘Ah!’
‘Ah what?’
‘Just ah. And you’ll take him?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I doubt I would.’
‘I’ve never thought of you as the jealous type, Lily.’
‘Everyone is the jealous type. But it wouldn’t be jealousy in this case. I’d find it hard to forgive him the discourtesy.’
‘I don’t even know what that means.’
‘He shouldn’t involve you in his search for whatever it is he wants.’
‘We’re friends. He has to talk to me.’
‘Friends! You’re married.’
More tears. ‘Things aren’t so black and white.’
‘All right, you’re married friends. But we are supposed to spare our friends.’
‘What if I’m to blame?’
‘For what?’
‘For not giving him … whatever.’
‘You’re not. He’s just as much to blame for wanting it so badly. A human want is not a human right. And he’s more to blame for making you feel responsible.’
‘So what’s he to do? Take up yoga? Run a marathon?’
‘Tell him to take himself in hand.’
‘Don’t be disgusting.’
‘Nothing disgusting about it. Americans do it all the time. Americans actually think that’s what sex is. And it’s worked fine for the rest of the world for millennia. What’s disgusting is making you question yourself. He didn’t have to tell you you don’t excite him.’
‘We have been together a long time.’
‘We’ve all been together a long time.’
‘We’ve been together longer than most. We met when we were fourteen. That’s more than thirty years ago. He says he wants to know what he’s been missing.’
‘With an older woman he knows what he’s been missing. I presume he had a mother.’
‘I think I am a little more understanding than you.’
‘So will you now take an older lover while you’re waiting for him to decide when he’s had enough of his?’
‘In my place, would you?’
She lets her eyes glide around the restaurant, without settling on anyone or anything in particular. At the next table two City men pause from laughing over nothing to slurping oysters. It would seem they are in a race to see who can slurp the most.
‘Only if one presented himself.’
‘And if one doesn’t?’
‘I’d stay in and read a book.’
Miss Picky – that was her girlfriends’ nickname for her. Well, Miss Picky, not everyone could afford the luxury of waiting.