Angela couldn’t get out of bed. She’d drunk most of the wine and a quarter of a bottle of vodka the night before. She burrowed her head in the pillow and made small whimpering noises. She could hear Gregory downstairs making tea. She could tell from the smell of the aftershave in the room that he had already showered, shaved and dressed. She turned her head slowly and squinted at the alarm clock on the bedside table; it was ten minutes past eight. She was going to be late for work again. She dreaded going into the agency and seeing the reproachful faces of the other workers.
Gregory came into the bedroom carrying two mugs of tea. He put one on the bedside table next to her, using the Stephen King novel he was reading as a coaster. She turned over and sat up in bed, then pulled the duvet up to cover her breasts when she realised that she was naked.
“There’s a snowman in the garden,” said Gregory.
Her brain wasn’t engaged yet. She couldn’t remember what she had planned to tell him. Her wits were not yet sufficiently exercised by deception. To give herself time she picked up the mug and sipped the scalding tea.
“I built the snowman as a surprise, for you,” she said. Her tongue was burning from the tea. She interpreted this as a suitable punishment for a liar. Gregory handed the pink disposable lighter to her and said, “Thank you, I’ve given him a more cheerful mouth, I stuck a piece of orange peel in.”
She badly needed a cigarette, but there was a rule that she wouldn’t smoke in the bedroom.
“Can I, Gregory, just this once?” she said, reaching for a packet of cigarettes in her bedside drawer.
“Slut,” he said, but he was half-smiling. So she lit a cigarette and leaned her head against the pink, padded headboard.
“I might take the morning off,” she said. “I feel terrible.”
“That’s my fault,” he said. “I wore you out last night, didn’t I, slut? Didn’t I, you fat, dirty whore?”
“Gregory!” she protested. She had never heard him use such language before, to her or to anyone else. He dragged the duvet off the bed, and threw it on to the floor. He kicked his shoes off and unbuckled the belt in the waistband of his trousers, and continued to call her ‘slut’, ‘whore’ and even ‘harlot’. He removed his trousers and tartan boxer shorts and she saw that his penis was hard. There was nowhere to stub the cigarette out. She tried to roll off the bed, but he pushed her down and said, “Smoke it, whore! Smoke it!”
Then he sprawled her legs apart, and pushed his erection inside her. It was painful and she cried out. Then he told her the things he had intended to tell her the night before. He was pleased now that she had fallen asleep in front of the fire. It would be far worse to hear such things in the marital bed in a cold north light.
“I’m going to tell you now, slut. I’m going to tell you about me and my women. I had my first affair two days after we came back from honeymoon. Marcia, remember Marcia. God she was gorgeous. Gorgeous. Her arse, Jesus!” Underneath him Angela tried to remember Marcia, but could only think of a snaggle-toothed woman who had once worked in the optician’s next to Lowood’s Linens.
“Then there was Mrs Daventry. You know Mrs Dav-entry, I had her at the back of the shop on top of a bale of towels, just after I’d closed up. She was tight and wet and I made her come three times.”
Angela did know Mrs Daventry. She was the linen buyer for a local chain of hotels, one of Gregory’s best customers, but she was surely out of Gregory’s league…
“And so many whores, every shape, colour, age, two whores a week. Pay them to dress up. Schoolgirls, nurses, French maids, women queue up for me. Rub against me in the shop…”
He was breathing heavily now and she knew that he would come soon.
“Tell me Angie,” he moaned, “tell me about the men you’ve had, you whore, you slut.”
He had a picture in his mind of the tall man stroking Angela’s breasts. He moved the picture on a frame and the man was sucking Angela’s nipples, then Gregory lost everything. As he ejaculated, he shouted, “Tell me!”
But Angela told him nothing.
As they dressed and washed, neither of them mentioned Marcia or Mrs Daventry, or the whores. Gregory put on his best overcoat and a Russian-style hat made of astrakhan. He went out and backed Angela’s car out of ‘the drive and parked it in the road. This gave him an excuse to study the interior of the car, but he found nothing to tell him the identity of the tall man with the dog. Before he came back into the house he dropped Angela’s car keys down a drain. He wanted to make her suffer. She accepted his offer of a lift, and pretended to believe him when he claimed to have dropped the keys accidentally. They talked about their forthcoming holiday in Barbados during the journey into town, and kissed goodbye before Angela got out of the car.
When she got to work, there was a yellow post-it note, stuck to the computer screen on her desk. On it was written, ‘Same place, usual time’.
The agency was busy all morning, the phone rang constantly with enquiries about late Christmas bookings, and people queued at the counters, desperate to get away from dreary England. The temperature had risen slightly in the night, and a thaw was under way; but the air was heavy with moisture and the ground was covered in dirty slush. Angela thought about Christopher constantly. She had told him the truth about the baby and he still wanted to see her. She vowed to make herself more beautiful for him.
All the time she was talking to customers she was thinking about leg waxing, pedicures and dyeing the grey in her hair. She kept making small mistakes and was constantly apologising.
Eventually she could bear the confinement no longer and announced to the girls that she was going out for an hour. She gave them no explanation, but as soon as she’d shut the door Claire said to Lisa, “She’s got a fancy man.”