Chapter Six

Peter has been here for almost one week now. I’m not sure how I feel about it. It is not exactly relaxing having him here – in fact, I feel quite tense almost all of the time. But there are moments of pure – joy? Is that the word? I’m not sure. There are certainly moments of release – and moments of much more shocking vulgarity than I had expected. Peter is quite a dark horse under that civilised veneer!

Can I stand it for ever, though? I discussed this with Peter before we took the plunge and he said that I would not have to if I did not like it; that he would ask me once a month if I wanted him to leave. Things are rarely as cut-and-dried as that, though, are they? One moment I might want him to go, the next moment, to stay. Asking him to leave would be as difficult as asking him to move in was in the first place.

There has been a lot in the news about the skeleton that the police found on the motorway. They haven’t identified it yet – or if they have, they are still claiming not to know who it is. Something tells me that it must be Kathryn. I suppose I always knew in my heart of hearts that this would have been what had happened to her: that she would have died violently. She was such a tart. I’m surprised that no-one from work has ‘come forward’ to volunteer the information that it might be her. People like being busybodies when they have nothing to lose or gain – except five minutes of glory, perhaps. And Kathryn is still remembered there.

In a funny sort of a way, I did love Kathryn. If I could have married anyone, it would have been her. I’m far from certain that she loved me, however. I was very young, but I had made rapid progress since I had joined the company, and I was certainly regarded as one of the movers and shakers of the future. Despite the advantages conferred by her degree – though, to be honest, within the company university degrees were regarded with a certain amount of ambivalence at the time – I’m sure that she saw me as a passport to a glittering career for herself. She paid me in full, though. The sex with her was amazing – far more sensational than anything I have experienced with anyone else, Peter not excepted: even at the time I realised that it was a tragedy that my heart was not in it.

I can see her now, sitting at her desk that first Christmas Eve. We were supposed to be leaving work early, but the phone kept on ringing. She leant across me as I grabbed the receiver and, snatching it away from me, pushed the cradle back down. “There”, she said. “That’s put a stop to that. Now we can concentrate on indulging in a bit of privacy for a change.” She was sitting on my desk, and she leaned right back across my shoulder. She was wearing a vee-necked sweater, and her breasts were swelling against the fabric. It was a pearly sort of colour. Gently I pulled her on to my knee, and she kissed me. I put my hand on one of her breasts, and she did not make me take it away. I went home with her that evening and we made love. Afterwards, I lay in the dark worrying about whether she had noticed how inexperienced I was and it may have been because of this that I did not stay; or maybe I just needed to be on my own. I came home in the early hours, before Christmas had properly begun. In the year that we were together, I never once spent the whole night with her.

She was always very curious about my family, which of course was difficult for me. I did not want to answer her questions, and I certainly had no intention of introducing her to either of my parents. Eventually I agreed that she should meet Bryony. We all met at the White Hart for a drink. She and Bryony hit it off immediately. There was quite a big age gap between them, though not as big as the one between me and Kathryn. But Kathryn and I were both working, while Bryony was planning to go to university a year later than her friends at school, so she must have been nineteen; and Kathryn was twenty-two, and had graduated the year before. She was almost four years older than I was, just as Tirzah was four years older than Ronald.

What is it about girls that makes them stick together in that infuriating way? I had been close to Bryony as a child – we were united against the horrors if our parents’ rows – and was now close of course to Kathryn, in the physical sense, anyway. But no sooner had they met than they developed this very intimate relationship which not so much excluded me, as made fun of me: it put me firmly on the outside. They didn’t seem to see how much it upset me. It also made me very angry. When I’m upset, I often can’t act; but when I’m angry I certainly can.

It was Kathryn’s fault, of course. She was that much older: and Bryony looked up to her. Bryony was such a little waif. Her hands were tiny. You could have taken one of them in yours and crushed the bones just by squeezing. Kathryn was quite different: she was buxom and curvy and would have been blowsy and overweight by now. Perhaps dying young is a gift. Never to get old, never to have to compromise, never to be full of the sorts of doubts and fears that have beset me both before and after Peter’s arrival.

Bryony was upset when Kathryn and I split up. She seemed to blame me, even though it was obvious that it could not possibly have been my fault. It was in vain that I told her Kathryn’s story of meeting Charles Heward on the train. She didn’t believe it for a minute; and when I thought about it, neither did I.

It was a Monday. I had not seen Kathryn in private for a few days, because she had spent the weekend with her mother in Derby. She had taken the day off work and planned to travel back in the afternoon. We had been going to meet friends for dinner. I had left the office early and Kathryn said that when she arrived she would pick up a pineapple and some flowers to take with us and come round to the flat later.

I knew as soon as she knocked on the door that there was something wrong. The fact that she did not use her key should have alerted me, but she could have forgotten it and it was only when I went to let her in that I knew that something unpleasant had happened. She was empty-handed, for one thing; and, for another, there was a kind of stricken look on her face. I realised later that it was simple guilt: but at the time I thought that she was ill, or that someone had distressed her. I went to kiss her, but she dodged me.

“Darling,” I said, “are you ill? What is it?”

She remained standing.

“Hedley,” she said, “I don’t know how to tell you this . . . I might as well come straight out with it . . . I’ve met someone else.”

At first I could not take it in. I thought that she must mean that she’d met a friend and couldn’t come to dinner that evening. Then it dawned on me that she was leaving me. I could not understand how she had managed to meet someone so quickly, or where they had met. She had told me in such a clichéd way, too.

“I will try to understand,” I said quietly. “But you must see that I’ve been pitched into the middle of what for me, if not for you, is a crisis, and I’m not sure how to cope. Can you explain to me? Who is it, for God’s sake?”

I had started calmly – and in fact, if I were honest with myself, I had begun to tire of Kathryn – or, perhaps more accurately, to realise that she and I were incompatible – but when I thought of her with someone else, it took me all my time not to let her see the rage that she had provoked.

She backed away from me. Perhaps she did see it. It made me want to hit her.

“His name is Charles. I met him on the train when I was going to Derby. I know that it is corny and phoney to say ‘love at first sight’, but it is the closest I can come to describing it. We were attracted to each other immediately. The journey was over far too soon, so we arranged to meet on Saturday evening for dinner. And – well – you don’t want me to spell it out, do you?”