HONOR HAS NEVER been to Paul’s house before. He invites her whenever he invites the rest of the department, for drinks or the end-of-term barbecue, but she always makes her excuses. Even before they were lovers, she hasn’t wanted to see his house and the way he lives. But today is different. Today she is different.
Now, she stands on the doorstep, holding a bottle of wine. His house is a 1930s semi-detached in Headington, surrounded by similar houses. The stucco is painted white and the door is painted pillar-box red. It’s not at all the kind of house she’s imagined him in.
She hears voices through the door before it’s opened by a blonde woman wearing a yellow trouser suit. She looks utterly ordinary.
His wife.
‘Hello,’ she says, smiling. ‘You must be Honor. You’re a bit early – no one else has arrived yet. You can help me put things on skewers, if you don’t mind.’
‘That will be fine,’ says Honor automatically. She steps into Paul’s house, her lover’s house. Wellies and plimsolls are piled up by the door. A collection of macs hangs from pegs.
‘Come through to the kitchen and I’ll get you a drink. Oh, my name’s Wendy, by the way.’
‘I know,’ says Honor. ‘It’s nice to meet you at last.’
She follows Wendy through carpeted rooms. There are bookshelves, wallpaper, chintz sofas, striped curtains. Flowers in vases, ashtrays on tables. A paperback novel lies open on a chair. A rag doll’s feet protrude from underneath a sofa. A model of a Spitfire half-completed on a side table. The house smells of coffee and flowers and tobacco, a scent that Honor recognizes from Paul’s clothes.
This could be anyone’s house. Anyone’s at all.
The kitchen is white and yellow, like Wendy. Children’s drawings are Sellotaped to the cabinets. ‘I’ve started on the gin already,’ Wendy admits, giving Honor a perfectly ordinary smile. ‘I need a cushion to get through these events. Everyone’s so clever and there are so many politics, you feel you’re on the verge of saying the wrong thing all the time. Can I pour you one?’
‘No, thank you,’ says Honor. ‘Water will be fine.’
Wendy is petite, with a tidy figure and hair tied back into a ponytail. She wears hooped earrings. Wendy fills a glass from the tap and hands it to Honor, and Honor looks at the gold and diamond engagement ring that Wendy is wearing. The ring he chose. He gave it to her and asked him to marry him.
It is a perfectly ordinary ring.
‘I’ve heard so much about you from Paul,’ says Wendy. ‘He says you’re absolutely brilliant, one of the finest minds he’s ever encountered. I’ve never heard such praise from him.’
Is there a meaning underneath what she’s said? Honor searches Wendy’s face, but can’t find it. But then she doesn’t know Wendy, for all her ordinariness. Wendy could mean anything.
‘It’s very nice of him,’ says Honor. ‘Paul is the brilliant one, of course. Is he in?’
‘He’s nipped out with the children to pick up some more food for the barbecue. Well, he’s taken two of them – the littlest is upstairs with a cold. They always seem to pick up a bug when you’ve got plans or you’re entertaining, don’t they? Do you have children?’
‘No,’ says Honor.
That morning the doctor confirmed the test results. Ten weeks pregnant, nearly through the first trimester already. ‘At thirty-five, you’re a bit old to be having a first baby, Miss Levinson,’ he said, and Honor had not corrected the title. ‘You’re what we call an elderly primogravidas. But you’re healthy as a horse, so I shouldn’t worry.’
From counting backwards, Honor has deduced that this baby was conceived in Paul’s office one lunchtime, with the blinds drawn over the windows, Honor burying her face in Paul’s neck to keep herself silent. When she opened the door to leave him afterwards, her hair pinned back up, her clothes straightened, there was a student waiting outside. She couldn’t know how much, if anything, he had overheard. But nothing had been said, not yet. She has not heard anything, at least, and she can’t tell if the glances she is receiving from other staff are significant, or not. She has always received glances. She will receive more, soon, when she begins to show.
‘But you’ve got a career,’ says Wendy. ‘So that must be rewarding. How does it feel, though, to be in that men’s club? They’re all men, aren’t they? Except for the secretary. I would go spare.’
‘I don’t mind. I like men.’
Wendy finishes her gin and tonic and looks at it ruefully. ‘I’m going to be sozzled before anyone turns up at this rate. Would you mind putting some veg on these kebab skewers?’
Honor is trying to get a grip on a slippery cherry tomato when the front door opens and she hears feet running towards the kitchen. ‘Mum, can we have an ice cream now?’ yells a tow-headed girl in shorts, crowding up to Wendy. A second equally blonde girl follows, holding a tub of ice cream.
‘Your father is such a pushover,’ says Wendy. ‘Did he remember the sausages as well?’
‘Yeah, he—’
And then Paul is there, in the kitchen, wearing a shirt open at the collar, holding a plastic bag, saying ‘Do you doubt me’
He stops. He looks at Honor, and immediately away. Then back again, with his face prepared. He does not meet her eyes.
‘Oh, hello, Honor, I didn’t know you were here already.’ He kisses her briefly on her cheek and Honor feels his lips, smells the tobacco and coffee and flowers. Remembers the last time they were together alone, in a B&B near Chipping Norton. How they made instant coffee and talked about Heidegger, his hand resting on her naked breast. Two weeks ago. Honor had started to suspect then, but she hadn’t had a test yet.
‘Has Wendy put you to work?’ he asks.
‘Anyone who walks into this kitchen gets put to work.’ Wendy takes the plastic bag and peers into it. ‘Oh Paul, you got the wrong sausages.’
‘There’s such a thing as wrong sausages?’
‘Yes, nobody likes this kind. And I asked for two packets. Honestly, Paul, I’m nervous as a cat already, I don’t need to be worrying about the sausages.’
‘I’ll go back to the shop.’
‘No, people will be here in a minute.’
‘Mum, can I have an ice cream?’
Honor wipes her hands on a tea towel and says, ‘I will just find the loo if you don’t mind.’
‘Upstairs, first door on the landing,’ says Wendy, going to the refrigerator.
This house is full of things. Books, records, flowers, furniture, pictures. A relationship shored up with objects and history. Honor walks through the rooms and thinks, Everything in this room has its story in their marriage, a private story not accessible to outsiders. Wendy gave Paul this; he chose this to please her; this was a wedding gift; their firstborn made this in school.
Honor and Paul have no setting together. They meet in hotels and in his office, and once – only once – in her flat. She can’t picture them with a chintz sofa, a ceramic ashtray, a cot upstairs. A narrative behind things.
She touches a photograph, framed in silver, next to the Spitfire model. It’s a posed photo, taken in this room from the looks of it: Wendy, Paul, the three girls, two blonde, the youngest with dark hair like Paul’s. Wendy wears pink lipstick and a flowered frock. From the length of Paul’s hair and the size of the children, it was taken a few years ago. Perhaps around the time that Honor met Paul. There’s no trace of it in his face in the photograph, though: no sign that he’s met a woman he desires. He’s just smiling. An ordinary father. An ordinary house.
Honor is reflected in the glass. Her face is severe, with its prominent nose and chin, its high cheekbones. Her eyes are dark, her black hair pinned up at the back of her head. She has recently found threads of silver in it.
A sound comes from the corner of the room, and Honor starts. A third child is curled up on the sofa. The smallest girl, with the dark hair. She cuddles her doll and sucks her thumb.
‘Hello,’ Honor says to her. After a pause, the girl removes her thumb from her mouth.
‘My mummy and daddy told me not to talk to strangers.’
‘A very good policy.’
Paul enters the room; she feels it as a shift in the temperature of the air. She is sensitive to his every movement, as she has been since the moment she first saw him.
‘I’ve got to go back to the shop,’ he says, and catches Honor’s wrist in his hand. ‘Listen,’ he begins softly, and Honor tilts her head towards the child. He drops her arm.
‘Are you feeling any better, Alice?’ he says to the child, going to her and sitting beside her. He puts his hand on her forehead, a gesture he has done a thousand times, and in that gesture Honor sees it all. All the minutes and hours and days and years that she has not been part of.
The tenderness that he would give their child in her womb, this same tenderness, would steal from this child on this sofa right now. It would steal from the ordinary house, the ordinary woman in the kitchen giving ice cream to her two girls.
She lays her hand on her stomach, still flat. She closes her eyes and apologizes to her future baby for stealing from him, too.
‘I’ll go to the shop for you,’ she tells Paul. ‘You stay here.’
She walks out of the door and she does not come back.