JAMES
31 October 2016
Four
The sun is filtering through the bedroom curtains and Sophie is still asleep when James comes back up to their bedroom. Six-thirty, Monday morning. Nine days since the story broke.
It is the first time she has slept past five-thirty in all that time. He watches her, now, taking in her face, stripped of make-up, softened against the plump pillows. Her forehead is etched with lines and her tousled hair has a fine silver thread running from her temple. She still looks younger than forty-two but this past week has taken its toll.
He sheds his dressing gown and slips back into bed, not quite touching in case he wakes her. He has been up since five, poring through the newspapers that, thank God, have nothing on him – as if the press has finally accepted that the story has run its course. What was Alastair Campbell’s rule? That if a story was on the front page for eight days then the minister had to go? Or was it ten? Whatever the figure, he’d avoided both, and there was nothing in the Sundays. No sniff of anything further to come on social media, not even on Guido Fawkes, and Chris had heard nothing: all the indications were that the tabs had dug up nothing new.
Besides, they had a real story to latch on to this weekend. There has been a foiled terror plot, yet again. Two Islamic extremists from Mile End had been planning another 7/7-style attack and had been raided once they’d received supplies. The Met were paranoid about leaking details for fear of prejudicing the trial but the papers were full of speculation as to the amount of damage the ammunition could have caused. He hadn’t needed to lean on the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee to help flame the coverage: Malcolm Thwaites, pompous ex-Home Office minister that he was, would be working his way through his contacts, raising the risk of allowing Muslim asylum seekers to stay in this climate; pandering to the dog-whistle fears of his constituents and, beyond them, of white, insular Middle Britain. The affair of a junior minister few had heard of outside Westminster would fade into insignificance compared to the perceived risk of hordes of potential terrorists infiltrating the country.
He yawns, letting some of the tension of the past week ease from him, and Sophie stirs. He won’t wake her. Won’t even risk slipping his arm around her waist, let alone down between her legs. She is still behaving in a way that is decidedly frosty. Perfectly civil in front of the children and Cristina but chilly – and, yes, frigid – when they are alone. It is understandable, of course, but she can’t keep it up. Sex is the energy that fuses them together. She needs it just as he does; or at least she needs the affection and the affirmation that he still wants her.
That is what has hurt her so much about his thing with Olivia: he can see that, he isn’t stupid. He has been a shit, no question of it, and he has admitted it freely in those still, small moments in the night when she has finally let herself cry, and the rage she manages to control most of the time spills out in tight, sharp sobs. The trouble is, he wants sex more frequently than her; would have it every day if at all possible. It is a release – just like going for a run, or even having a piss. Something purely physical, an itch that needs to be scratched, a need that has to be answered. And for quite some time, since the children were tiny, she no longer seems to feel that same urgent need.
He decides to risk it: to wrap himself along the length of his slight wife. She is still tiny: her shape even sleeker than when she was a rower in her college women’s first eight. Her bottom pert, her legs toned from her regular running: her stomach just a little slacker – silvered with fine stretch marks from bearing Emily and Finn. It isn’t that he doesn’t desire her. Of course he does. But Olivia was there – virtually offering herself up on a plate. Plus she was undeniably gorgeous. Even now that he thinks of her as a bitch – for she had sanctioned the story in the papers even if she hadn’t gone to them herself – he can acknowledge her beauty. A body untouched by motherhood: tight, high breasts and skinny legs; blonde hair that shone and smelled of citrus; and a mouth as capable of cruelty – for she is clever; that was part of the attraction – as it is of temptation.
It was the first time he had been unfaithful. Well, the first since their marriage. Their engagement didn’t count – nor their student days. He had raced through girls at college as if he was compelled. Things had changed for a while after he’d met Sophie and she, rowing and finals had briefly combined to exhaust him; and yet, even then, he was still open to opportunities. That was what Oxford was about, wasn’t it? Exploration – intellectual, emotional, physical – of all kinds.
He had got away with it – in the same way that, as the only son with two older, doting sisters, he had always got away with things as a boy. Soph had never guessed that there were other women. He’d picked wisely: girls in different colleges, different years, reading different subjects, making it all possible. These were one-night stands that lasted two nights at most, for it was variety that he craved: the endless, surprising difference between one pair of breasts and the next; one woman’s cry and another’s; one soft, damp cunt or crook of an elbow or curve of a neck. For a young man who had spent five years of his adolescence in an all-male boarding school, and before that boarding at a prep, his first year at Oxford – and even more that glorious, exam-free second year, before he met Sophie – had brought immense, anarchic freedom.
On he’d romped through his mid-twenties, after they’d split up for six years, and through his late twenties: years when he’d worked as a management consultant and his City salary, and late nights working and then drinking, meant there was almost a surfeit of girls. And then, at twenty-nine he had bumped into Sophie again in a pub in Notting Hill and she was twenty-seven then, not a needy twenty: more self-assured and experienced; something of a challenge; a bit of a catch. She’d played hard to get for a while: wary, she’d said, of him behaving as recklessly as he had before; fearful that the crisis that had led him to dump her – for she had seen him at his most vulnerable and he couldn’t bear that – would come back to haunt them. But, despite her ambivalence, it was inevitable they would get back together. As he’d said in his wedding speech, trotting out a cliché he hadn’t taken the time to articulate more freshly, it felt as if he was coming home.
And he really thought he had satisfied his itch. That desire to sniff around. During their engagement, there had been a couple of friends with benefits: an ex-girlfriend who’d tried to dissuade him from marrying Soph in the months leading up to their wedding; a colleague who had become a bit of a stalker when she failed to recognise that he really did just want sex with no strings attached. That had shaken him a little. Amelia’s clinginess; those tremulous eyes – limpid pools of tears that had filled whenever he had sprung out of bed, leaving straight after sex; that final, irate phone call – her voice rising in a hysterical crescendo of pain until he’d silenced her with the off button. That had forced him to draw a line under his behaviour. Marriage, he decided, was when his fidelity would start.
And it had worked. For nearly twelve years, he had been completely faithful. The kids had made it easier. He had assumed he would be a traditional, semi-detached dad, rather like Charles, his own father; and yet they had changed him entirely – at least for a good, long while. He hadn’t felt it when they were babies. Had been fairly ambivalent when they had puked and gurgled and slept. But once they had begun to talk and ask questions then the all-encompassing love affair began. It had started with Emily but had become more intense with Finn: this burden of responsibility; the need to be someone his child – his son – respected. Not just an admirable but a good man.
Sometimes he found them unnerving. Those big, questioning eyes, that extreme innocence, the total trust. In his professional life, he wasn’t always entirely frank: he could get away with answers that didn’t fit the question and yet still manage to mollify or beguile. But not with them. With them, he feared they saw right through him. For his children, he had to be better than that.
And for a while, for quite a while, he had succeeded in being this good man. He had behaved as he knew he should do. Kept to those pledges made in that sixteenth-century church, in front of Sophie’s father, Max, who had made no pretence of keeping them, in the least. He would be a good man for her and their children and a better man than her father. And until a month before their twelfth wedding anniversary, he had managed it.
And then, in May, he had been in the House, late at night. The new Counter-Terrorism Bill. A late sitting. He had been racing through the cloisters after a vote towards Portcullis House, his stomach caving in with hunger, hoping to find something healthy to eat. And there she was: returning to collect a bag from his office after a night out with friends. She was tipsy: slightly, delightfully tipsy. Not something he’d seen her like before. And she had tripped on her heel as she’d passed him, and fallen against him; one hand reaching out for his forearm as her left foot had landed on the chill slate of the cloisters; a sheer stockinged foot, landing by his polished Church’s; mulberry-painted toenails just visible through the toe.
‘Oops – sorry, James,’ she had said, and bit her bottom lip as her laugh faded for it was all ‘Yes, Minister’ in the office, even though he knew they referred to him as James in his absence and he tried to get them to use their first names. She had kept her hand on his forearm as she steadied herself, and slipped that foot back into the shoe; and he had found himself holding the crook of her other elbow in his hand, as she righted herself again.
‘Are you all right? Can I get you a cab?’ He began to walk her towards the bell in New Palace Yard, concerned, solicitous: for she was a young woman who needed to get home safely, an employee slightly the worse for wear.
She had stopped and looked up at him in the moonlight, suddenly sober and just a little knowing.
‘I’d far rather have another drink.’
And so it had begun. The seeds of their affair sown that balmy, late-spring night as the sky turned navy and he had limited himself to a single beer and she a gin and tonic, out on the Terrace Bar. The Thames had slipped past and he had stared into its charcoal depths, watching the lights of St Thomas’s opposite – the hospital where his daughter was born – dapple the water. And he had known that he was letting go of his principles; that he was jeopardising everything that made him the man he was; the better man he wanted to be for his children – and he had barely cared.
They hadn’t consummated their relationship then. Didn’t even kiss: it was all too public and he was still telling himself he was resisting the inevitable. That happened a week later: seven days of the most painful, delicious foreplay of his life. Afterwards, he had apologised for it being so rushed; for him needing to consume her – for it felt like that – so quickly and entirely. She had smiled. A lazy smile. ‘There’ll be other opportunities.’ ‘Like now?’ ‘Like now.’
It had carried on, their fling, until three weeks ago. Intense, when there was the opportunity, but with physical breaks during the recess: a week in the South Hams near Sophie’s mother; a fortnight in Corsica, where he had taught the children to sail and made love to Sophie nightly; had seen his fling with Olivia as a madness; something he could and would finish as soon as parliament resumed.
He had tried to distance himself once he got back; told her it was over after the party conference. He had called her into his office, hoping that, this way, she wouldn’t make a scene; that they could be businesslike. Professional. It had been fun while it lasted but they both knew it couldn’t go on.
Her eyes had watered and her tone became clipped, a reaction he was familiar with and so was unperturbed by: the response of previous girlfriends; and, on the very rare occasions when he had disappointed her, of his mother, Tuppence.
‘So, we’re all fine then?’ he had made himself ask, only wanting to hear her say yes.
‘Yes, of course we are.’ She gave him a bright smile: chin up, her voice all perky and plucky, though she rather ruined it when it wobbled. ‘Of course we are.’
And that should have been it. Perhaps would have been if he hadn’t been a fool. If he hadn’t succumbed just the one last time.
He rolls towards Sophie, pulls her tight. He won’t dwell on what happened in the lift. Barely the most romantic setting but then there was little that was romantic about their relationship: he doesn’t need the Mail to remind him of that fact.
It must have been that that tipped Olivia over the edge: or rather his reaction to her afterwards. A flash of arrogance, perhaps, yes. But he’d thought it was a one-off; that a bout of fast and furious sex didn’t mean, as she predictably thought it did, that they were getting back together.
‘Thanks for that. Just what I needed.’ Feeling light-headed, he was uncharacteristically crass. He could see that now.
‘Does that mean?’
‘What?’ The lift had reached their floor and, as the doors opened, he stepped out into the narrow corridor and opened the committee corridor door; his mind already on the day’s events; uninterested in what she had to say.
Her eyes had swelled into pools of hurt but he couldn’t be doing with it. They were supposed to be giving evidence at a committee: were now running late. He just didn’t have the time.
Perhaps if he’d offered her a kiss, smoothed her hair, let her down gently. Perhaps if he’d been a bit less brutal then she wouldn’t have gone to the papers.
But he had just left her: her hair less sleek; her tights, he remembered this now, snagged where he had pulled at them; had left her just staring after him.
Sophie stirs, and rolls towards him; rouses him from the discomfort of the memory. He holds his breath, wary of causing her to shift away, feeling the familiar warmth of her body lying against his chest. Gingerly, he puts a hand between her shoulder blades then moves it lower towards the small of her back and pulls her into him.
She opens her eyes – a deep, startling blue – and for a moment seems surprised to be in such proximity. Little wonder: she has spent a week being as physically distant as possible.
‘Hello, my darling.’ He risks a gentle kiss on her forehead. She draws her face away, her brow furrowing in a crease between her eyes as if deciding whether to view this as an intrusion. He takes his hand away then places it behind her shoulder, lightly enclosing her within his arms.
‘OK?’ He leans forward; drops a kiss on her lips.
‘Don’t.’ She shrugs her shoulders, discontented, but doesn’t move away.
‘Soph – we can’t carry on like this.’
‘Can’t we?’ She looks up at him and he can see the hurt in her eyes and then something more promising: a mixture of defeat and hope that suggests she doesn’t want to continue in this state of chilly restraint.
He removes his arm, releasing her from the circle of his clasp and shifts back to look at her properly. There is a foot between them and he reaches across it to stroke the soft down of her cheek. For a moment she hesitates and then she turns her lips towards it and, as if she cannot help but do so, as if it is a force of habit, lightly kisses the palm of his hand. Her lids close, as if she knows she is being weak to concede.
He draws her back to him. Holds her close; trying to convey through the force of his hug how much she means to him. Her shoulders, tense for the past nine days, are tight but her breath comes out in a rush as if she is trying to relax, as if she wants that desperately.
‘There’s nothing in the papers today. It seems to be all over,’ he says, drawing back and kissing her on the top of her head.
‘Don’t say that. It’s tempting fate . . .’
‘Chris hasn’t heard a murmur all weekend. And there’s nothing today.’ He brushes over her superstition. ‘I really think we’re safe.’
‘We need to listen to Today.’ She rolls away from him as the clock radio switches on automatically for the six-thirty headlines: A predicted drop in interest rates; a British nurse with Ebola; another bomb in Syria.
They listen in silence. ‘Nothing,’ he says.
Her eyes well with tears: huge globes that topple. She swipes at her eyes and gives a surprisingly noisy sniff.
‘I’ve been so frightened.’
‘What about?’ He is bemused.
‘You know. In case the papers dig up any stuff about the Libertines.’
‘Pffsh. Not going to happen.’ He has boxed those days away; doesn’t let himself think about them; wishes she wouldn’t. ‘My conscience is clear about what happened then. You know that.’
She doesn’t answer.
‘Soph?’ He tips her chin; looks deep into her eyes; gives her his most persuasive, heartfelt smile. ‘Truly. It is.’
For a while they just lie there: her in his arms; his chin on the top of her head.
‘You’ve been my rock, you know?’
‘What else could I be?’
‘No, really. You’ve been my everything. You’ve had every right to be angry but you and the kids have got me through this.’ He peppers her face with kisses: a light dusting just as she likes it. She remains unresponsive. ‘I owe you so much, Sophie.’
She looks at him, then, and he can see a hint of the young woman he fell in love with beneath the layers of distrust that have built up over the past week.
‘If I’m going to carry on sticking by you – if we’re going to try and make us work – then I need to know that it’s completely over,’ she says.
‘We’ve been through this before,’ he sighs. ‘Christ, I’m hardly going to want to see the woman.’ He gives a bark of laughter. ‘Besides, our paths aren’t even going to meet. She’s on sick leave, and she’ll be moved to another office when she returns – if she returns. There’s no need for me to see her again.’
‘And I need to know that you won’t do this again . . . I can’t bear the humiliation.’ She gives a shudder and recoils from him, shifting up in bed and wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘I can’t be like my mother.’ She looks at him, accusatory. ‘We said we wouldn’t be like them – like my parents. When we married, you promised me.’
‘I know, I know.’ He looks down, conscious of the need to still play the penitent. ‘I don’t know what to say to convince you. I’ve – we’ve – all paid for my behaviour. It’s not something I’m ever going to repeat.
‘You are my world,’ he adds, sitting up and putting his arm around her shoulders. She doesn’t move away from him; and so he slides the second, exploratory, around her waist.
‘Don’t,’ she says, resisting now and shifting to the edge of the bed. ‘I’ve got to get the children up.’
‘But you do believe me?’ He gives her the look. The one she would normally find irresistible: a wide-eyed glance injected with a streak of disbelief.
‘I do.’ She leans against him, briefly, and gives a small, sad smile that acknowledges her weakness. ‘Fool that I am, I do.’
He kisses her, then: a proper kiss, mouth open with a hint of his tongue. A kiss that manages to be respectful while being far from chaste.
‘It’s over,’ he tells her, looking into her eyes and trying to convey a conviction he doesn’t feel entirely. ‘Everything is going to be OK.’