He sat up in bed reading Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom by the dim light of the bedside lamp, reading of El Aurens leading the Yahoo life. Trust Fitz to have a numbered first edition. Every couple of pages he flipped back to the opening line, wondering how much effort, how many revisions had gone into an opener that once read could never be forgotten – ‘Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances.’
His father had given him a copy for his eleventh birthday. A precious gift, a private edition. He had got scarcely further than the first page – a prose so difficult, a mind so extraordinary, beyond the grasp of a child – and had protested to his father, ‘Not another book about the war, Dad?’ ‘No,’ said his father, ‘it is so much else besides.’ The English had gone on reliving the war, much as they now did with the one after. He had never forgotten the line, and he had long pondered, through the numbing ritual of chapel at his school, the idea of an ‘indifferent heaven’, but he had never finished the book. He was forty-seven, forty-eight in August; perhaps he was ready for it now. He had lived half a lifetime under that same ‘indifferent heaven’.
The door opened softly and Anna crept in. She pushed the door to with her backside and leant on it. He heard the click of the latch, the sharp intake of breath and counted the seconds until she spoke.
‘I don’t suppose you fancy a fuck, do you, Troy?’
He didn’t. He wanted to read. He looked at her across the top of his book. She had her back pressed to the door, as though fearing someone might come in. Or that he might leave. One palm spread across the wood panel, one fist bunched in the candlewick fabric of her dressing-gown, pulling it closed over her bosom. They hadn’t made love in years. Even then it had been a mistake.
‘OK,’ he said.
She let the dressing-gown fall behind her. Her nightie was hideous. A synthetic fabric in a floral pattern meant to put you off flowers, a horticultural contraceptive meant to put you off sex.
‘It’s practical,’ Anna said. ‘Warm. Besides you haven’t seen me out of it yet.’
She reached for the hem and paused with it bunched at her thighs like a spent hula-hoop.
‘Are you going to put the light out?’
‘No.’
‘On your own head be it.’
Her face disappeared into the nightie, accompanied by a vicious crackle of static.
‘See! Big bum! Fat legs! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!’
Of course she had changed. In all the ways she was saying she had. But he could not understand the fuss she was making. She dived beneath the sheets as though picked out by the glare of limelight not the forty watts of Troy’s reading lamp. All he could see was the top of her head.
‘Put it out!’ said a voice muffled by the sheets.
He lay T.E. Lawrence face down on the bedside table and switched the lamp off. A quick yank of the curtain and they had traded electricity for moonlight. Anna surfaced. She had a beautiful face. Small and dark, with big black eyes not unlike his own. An un-English face. Looking up at him from her rabbit hole.
‘It’s been an age.’
‘Where’s Angus?’ he asked.
‘Are you trying to piss on it, Troy?’
Angus was Anna’s husband. A colossal, red-headed drunk, former hero of the Battle of Britain, one-legged escapee from Colditz. Daring, decorated, drunk – he’d been in a tailspin for years.
‘No. I just—’
‘He can’t get it up any more. The bastard’s wasted the best years of my life. I’m forty-three. No kids, a marriage that comes and goes like the sun in Wimbledon week, a husband who’s pissed every night – Oh God, Troy. I don’t don’t don’t want to talk about Angus!’
She pulled the sheets over her head and vanished. From beneath them he heard her say, ‘Gone walkabout again. Weeks ago.’
‘Sorry.’
‘If you’re so concerned about the sod, go down the Streeb and Spigot and look for him in the sawdust—’
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’
Her head popped up again.
‘Oh fuck, Troy. Just touch me, will you?’
He ran his fingers through her hair and brought them to rest on one ear.
‘Nooooot theeeeeere yooooou fooool!’
He had no idea four syllables could be stretched to such length.
A cold coming they had of it. He couldn’t come. He was glad there wasn’t a clock in the room, because it felt like hours of pounding meat and if it were he’d rather not know. He thought Anna might have come. He rather hoped she had. He hated to think that she was finding it the butchery that he was.
‘I say, Troy. You couldn’t . . . well . . . you couldn’t just sort of well . . . come. Could you? It’s just that I’m getting a bit . . . well . . . you know . . .’
Anna squirmed under him. Feeling cramp in one leg, she slipped it over his shoulder and stretched out the muscles in her thigh and calf. Just as Valentina Vassilievna Asimova had done. The last time he had fucked. Valentina Vassilievna Asimova. A freezing night in Moscow. Call me Vivi. A violet-eyed imp with maroon nipples, curled beneath him. Legs in the air. Hands roaming blindly across his face. And thinking of Valentina Vassilievna Asimova, he slipped Anna’s other leg across his shoulder.
‘Ooh,’ she said.
And thinking of Valentina Vassilievna Asimova, he came.
Later, much later, Anna spoke. Her hand resting on his stomach, below the rise of his ribcage. Her fingers tracing circles in the sparse column of hair that stretched from balls to belly button.
‘You’re getting awfully thin, you know.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘How much do you weigh?’
‘’Bout nine and a half stone. Average for a bloke my size, I should think.’
‘Have you weighed yourself lately?’
‘Don’t have to. Been the same weight since I was twenty or so.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Eh?’
‘Troy. You’re more like eight and a half stone or maybe even less. Look.’
She pulled at the skin of his belly.
‘There’s nothing here. No adipose tissue. It’s tight as a drum.’
‘Quite. As it should be.’
‘Troy. We’re at the age when we put weight on, not lose it. Feel!’
She took his hand, tucked it into the roll of her spare tyre. It was like prodding marshmallow. After all her complaints about dimples, big bum and fat thighs, it didn’t seem necessary. After a night of flesh-slapping intimacy, it didn’t seem necessary.
‘That’s fat. It’s normal at my age. Your age. I wish to God it weren’t. Troy, you’re a bag of bones.’
‘Can we go to sleep now?’
‘Are you sleeping OK?’
Fitz had asked much the same question. He did not much care to answer. He had one arm around her. He slipped it down her back to her waist. Pulled her in closer, and with the other hand made show of pulling the sheets and blankets higher and tighter. The infinitesimally small nest of intimacy. The bounded frontier of conjugality, far short of the ridge where the west commences, never gazed at the moon never lost their senses. The illusive voice that cried, ‘Do, by all means, fence me in.’
He could not kid himself she’d fallen for it – but she had fallen asleep. He prised himself free of her, slipped on his dressing-gown and went in search of food. The main staircase led down to the hall. Further along, the back stairs led directly to the kitchen, in the west wing. The corridor was dark, only a shaft of light from one of the bedroom doors gave him anything to aim for. As he got nearer, the door swung on its hinges and the shaft became a flood. He stopped, scarcely believing what he saw. Tereshkov stood with his back to him. Not for him the coyness of lights out. Every light in the room burned as he fucked Tara Ffitch from behind. She knelt on the bed; he stood with his back straight and his knees bent, thrusting at her – and standing on the bed, legs astride her sister, head up, back arched, eyes closed, Caro shoved her cunt in his face and played her lips across his. This was believable.
What was not was the casual, the relaxed figure of Fitz, in an armchair, by a reading lamp, a cigar and a hefty glass of brandy on the go, watching – just watching. Head nodding gently, knees crossed, all but tapping his foot to the human rhythm as though the groans and moans of coitus – for real or for fake – were more a concert on the Third Programme than a Home Servicing.
Suddenly he turned and was speaking to Troy. Mouthing words silently that Troy could not make out. Logically he should be saying ‘sod off ’, but he wasn’t. He was beckoning. Troy entered, bent down to Fitz to hear what he was saying.
‘Pull upa chair, old boy. Make yourself comfortable. Tara’s in fine voice tonight.’
Troy fled.