Thursday Afternoon — Nick
Charlotte was standing in front of a huge purple canvas which said nothing to me but seemed to please her in some obscure way; but then she saw the picture while I watched her — deliberately eccentric in her clashing colours, vast striped skirt which looked a couple of sizes too large and billowed as she walked, dreadful canvas espadrilles. And yet she got away with it, like the weird pictures in the gallery: twentieth-century art getting away with it at the Tate, not seeking approval but demanding a place as of right.
To have gone straight back to Cambridge, the office, home to Marion, jet-lagged as indeed I was, would have been beyond endurance; things had gone too well in California to descend to that so soon. I had asked Charlotte to be at the airport, almost bullied her into it, but the sight of her, bizarre and beautiful, produced surprise, not at her being there, but at the hedonistic sensation of seeing her. It was more than I had imagined.
The airport was crowded, people rushing together after long, maybe only short, separations, clinging to one another, hugging and kissing, cumbersome cases between them to accentuate the awkwardness of reunion.
Charlotte and I saw each other and took it slowly, carefully avoiding touching one another as if the illegitimacy of our relationship made it unseemly in such a public place to behave like everyone else. Stilted greetings were exchanged. ‘Hello there,’ I think she said in her BBC announcer’s voice, ‘Hello there, how jolly nice to see you,’ she might have extended it. And in the same way I had spoken to her, lifting the quality of my speech as I always did with her.
It was a trick I had used for years; back in the days of journalism I’d drop a few consonants to encourage a candid interview with the hoi polloi, and then put them back with emphasis to question the people who mattered. It had worked well, the chameleon tongue, and if there was something vaguely despicable about it, what did that matter if the results were achieved? And besides I had never seen any value in the ‘I am what I am’ approach, lowly origins shoved down people’s throats with aggressive defiance and pride. I looked at it from that end of the spectrum because I knew what I had been and preferred to forget it. The trick had become second nature but Charlotte was the first person who, it had occurred to me, might not be fooled, and it had never greatly mattered before.
So I stood before her, ya ya-ing, on my guard against a slip of the old tongue, lifted, excited, entranced by what she did to me. Charlotte was ‘class’ I would have said at one time when the chasm between ‘them’ and ‘us’ had seemed greater. Now she was the embodiment of what I felt was my due, but standing there, in her crazy colours, a barely perceptible tremble in her jaw, the rhubarb voices all around us fading from existence, my temples buzzed, my hands felt clammy and my heart thumped out of phase. Or so it seemed in those first few moments of inane discourse while we each talked but didn’t really hear the words the other spoke, only the sound of the voice as part of the whole presence.
A flash of white light cut between us and I swung round knocking my arm against something hard. It was a camera, still held poised between the photographer’s hands. It clattered to the ground and the three of us stared down at it in dismay and then the picture-taker and I both began to talk at the same time: what did he think he was doing? what the hell did I think I was doing, smashing his camera? Why did he take our picture? Charlotte wanted to know. He thought she was someone else — well known, didn’t he, and anyway why did we have to smash his camera, damn us to hell.
‘Come on,’ I said to Charlotte, moving close and taking her arm, steering her away. On the way out I saw a woman who looked like Marion. I thought it was her at first and instinctively quickened our pace. Guilty, furtive, jumpy, smashing cameras, hiding from my wife, I stopped short in the glass showcase created by the two sets of exit doors, dropped my bag, swung Charlotte into my arms and kissed her with enough force, passion and lust to make a picture worthwhile and the rhubarb people gawp and sigh.
‘That was nice,’ Charlotte said as we got into a taxi.
‘Over the top, I’m sorry,’ I murmured. ‘I feel like a kid, you know, all this sudden lust.’
‘I rather like it. It’s so unexpected from you — the big businessman. You look so, I don’t know, removed from that kind of thing in those clothes — with your briefcase.’
‘You are funny, weird and funny,’ I said, wanting to touch her again.
‘Do you have to go back this afternoon?’ I asked a few moments later.
‘Not particularly.’
‘Right, let’s go somewhere.’
‘London. I love London. Tea at Fortnum and Mason’s and we could go to the Tate. There’s an exhibition. I thought I wouldn’t get to it.’
I had never been to the Tate before, never even thought of it. Art galleries were places you either grew up with or knew nothing about, kept beyond the bounds of comprehension through ignorance and prejudice by parents who felt threatened by anything more highbrow than a bingo hall. But that was no excuse, if excuse there had to be; it was just that there was never any time, not until someone like Charlotte came along and wanted to spend an afternoon looking at pictures. Then there was no question but that it should be done. Nothing else, apart from taking her to bed, was more desirable.
I glanced at the picture next to the purple mass and rather liked it. There was no meaning to be seen in it, none that I could fathom, but it was pleasing in an inexplicable way, maybe simply because it was part of the ambience of a place which belonged to Charlotte. And the time didn’t feel wasted, not as it would in other circumstances. There was a sense of investment in the future, it was like watching the trailer to a film you intended seeing in its entirety.
That I had come to this point, of wanting the whole and not just the part that had dominated every other affair, gave an illogical twist to that sense of investment, as the sort of future I envisaged with Charlotte would mean divorce and all the awfulness that went with it: a financial mess that would probably drag on for months, years. The new house I would have to leave, Marion would have to be provided for, and I would lose my son. The ramifications of an afternoon spent in the Tate were colossal. But if I was aware of all this that afternoon the actuality was sufficiently remote and the moment too sanguine; the high-pitched optimism that accompanies being with the one particular person had put aside the other considerations.
How do you describe that feeling which, I suppose, is termed falling in love? It’s akin to success, heady and colourful, it’s there inside, energizing, heightening awareness; the essence of being so that you wonder at how the black and white days that preceded could have been endured. But having realized it and accepted, I felt impatient to get on with it. I wanted to act and consolidate, to secure Charlotte and get on with the rest of life with her as a part of it. My success in California would produce new accounts. Pro-Publicity had to expand further.
This I told Charlotte in the penthouse flat above Pro’s London suite as we lay in bed after tea at Fortnum & Mason. It was the first time I had taken her to the flat. I had not even told her of its existence until that afternoon, deliberately, because maybe I had known early on that it was going to be different and had not wanted to risk attracting her with the trappings, which was probably unfair, but human enough.
‘You never told me about all this,’ she said.
‘I didn’t want you to run off with me for my view of London,’ I said. From the bed you could see clear across to the other side of the Thames.
‘You thought I might be a gold digger?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well I am, you know, and who said anything about running off together?’
‘I did,’ I said, watching her.
‘Oh Nick. It’s not that easy, is it?’ she asked, as if I could reassure her that it was.
‘No.’
‘Well let’s not talk about it, please,’ she implored, climbing out of the bed and going over to the wall of smoked glass that divided us from the rush and buzz of the city far below.
‘It’s so peaceful up here. I feel more at ease than I do at home. Sort of tranquil inside. Serene you might say,’ she said, stretching as if it was early morning.
‘I think we must. Talk about, I mean.’
‘Not now, Nick. Not at this moment. No intrusions.’ She turned and came back to the bed.
‘How many other women have you brought up here?’ she asked with superficial lasciviousness.
‘Oh, fifty or sixty. I thought you said no intrusions.’
‘Is that all!’
‘Give or take a few.’
‘I bet there have been hundreds.’
‘Probably. Does that bother you?’
‘Nope.’
‘Stay tonight,’ I said.
‘Yes. I’ll stay,’ she said, as I reached for her hand. ‘Nick, you’re going to have to decide things. I don’t think I can. I didn’t expect this to happen.’
Neither had I, not in the very beginning. Nothing could have been more unlikely.
There had been other affairs, most of them brief, sordid little liaisons which had started more by accident than design and then quickly degenerated into tedious sessions of guilt and recrimination. A couple of them had been Marion’s friends, bored housewives at parties, full of booze or bravado, until the next time when they would start being silly, making demands, disappointing and predictable.
Sometimes I felt that Marion knew and I would despise her for saying nothing but when it was over there would be a period when the tranquillity of our home had renewed appeal. Marion had never been a demanding woman, she wanted little out of life other than a home of her own, and all day to be in it. Charlotte seemed to want neither.
I had not intended dealing with her myself that first morning when she came to Pro’s offices in Cambridge. I was spending more and more time in London and it was only by chance that I happened to be there, but Charlotte had my name and insisted that her appointment was with me. She strode into my office, nervous and vaguely belligerent to counteract it, one of those arty crafty women, I thought, who parade originality with an inverted chic consisting of clothes bought from jumble sales, ethnic jewellery and plain speaking. I had begun to wonder why she had bothered to come at all as she appeared to have made up her mind to turn down the work before knowing anything about it. And then she had come back with a good design but totally the wrong one for the job, arrogantly ignoring the brief I had given her because she thought she knew better.
When I saw her again myself, the second and the third time, even semi-subconsciously making a point of being in Cambridge the day she was due to come, made little sense to me then. If I had thought about it there was the likelihood she would not turn up the third time: she obviously did not like it when I caught her out over the lie about the amount of work she had and she could not need the money, married to a solicitor. But such supposition would have judged her wrongly, and even though I expected to see her again felt an odd sense of relief when she arrived with the revised design.
She was wearing a faded pair of jeans this time, and a ridiculous T shirt with a big smiling sun printed on it, although her own expression was wary and hostile as she undid her folio and took out the drawings.
I studied them for a few minutes but could see at once that they were right.
‘This is more like it,’ I said in a way that would irritate her. ‘In fact, quite good,’ I added, glancing up at her. I was surprised to see that her expression had changed to one of open relief, although she quickly recovered herself, adopting an insolent look of disdain.
‘I think the first design was better,’ she said.
My initial impulse was to ignore her, we had already been through all that, but her attitude was beginning to annoy me. It had been vaguely amusing at first but she was carrying it too far.
‘It seems that I can’t win,’ I said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said, as if she had misheard me.
‘I think you know what I mean,’ I said.
I carried on looking at her, wondering why I was bothering to make something of her manner. Talented graphic designers were not that hard to find.
She stared back at me and for a moment I thought she was going to get up and leave; and then a curious little smile crossed her face and she said: ‘Do you always have to be the winner?’
Still we looked at one another and smiling a little myself I said: ‘But of course!’
The moment kept coming back to me for the rest of the day. I could not get it out of my mind, the slight uneven curve of her mouth when she had smiled, the glint of recognition in her eyes.
And so we began to play the game, with semi-subliminal tactics not admitted, even to ourselves, I think, not until later when the time came that we wanted endlessly to talk about, and dissect, every little manoeuvre and how we had felt at the time, the uncertainties, were there any? Had that been possible? The naive relief of love made us childlike in mutual wonderment at what had happened to us, to two such unlikely people, but then those of us who have thought it impossible to experience such emotions fall hardest, as they say. We’re taken by surprise by our own depths of feeling and part of the euphoria is in relishing the unlikelihood of it all.
Yet we do things which are contrary to our desires, even in the beginning, before the game has really started, because that is the way it is played. The next time Charlotte came to the office I did not see her but asked Piers to instead.
‘What a dreadful woman,’ he said to me the following day, ‘but talented.’
‘The talented ones are always difficult. They’re the only ones that can get away with it,’ I told him somewhat pointedly.
Piers Whitton-Howard was of the same mould. Insufferable a good deal of the time, he was none the less an asset to Pro and as such I put up with his supercilious arrogance, or at least managed to ignore it most of the time.
Piers wore his old school tie like an open challenge. I had employed him to widen Pro’s range of accounts and to look after things when I was abroad. He had brought with him a big fat juicy account with a food manufacturer who produced a world-famous marmalade. Piers wanted partnership in Pro and had tried to use the Morgan-Mackie account as his lever. The fact that he had failed rankled deeply and he seldom missed an opportunity to accentuate the difference in our backgrounds. He would invite me to have dinner with him at his London club and go into long deliberations over the choice of wine, slyly asking my opinion in the hope of exposing the ignorance he assumed. Basically he resented me and the position of power I had over him. No family background worth mentioning. No birthright connections. No old school tie. All unforgivable because I had made money while the Whitton-Howards, now reduced to genteel poverty, had to earn theirs from the likes of me.
The Whitton-Howards of this world have always seemed like fair game to me, to be cultivated for their usefulness; or maybe it’s just that ultimately chips on shoulders are as hard to remove as silver spoons. And so Piers and I resented one another and fought a constant battle beneath a veneer of civility and wit, although I think I enjoyed it more than he. I pandered to his vanity because it was amusing to do so, and he performed better puffed up. Occasionally he still angled towards the partnership question but I had ousted him from the marmalade account and he knew that had weakened his position. Without MM Foods — an account worth £200,000 a year — he could no longer dangle the threat of leaving Pro and starting his own rival firm.
Taking on the MM account myself had meant still longer hours working. I had tried to discuss the problem with Marion who would listen without really hearing, having closed her mind to the possibility of understanding anything to do with Pro. Inevitably she would merely complain that I spent less and less time at home as it was and another account could only make things worse.
It also made it a bad time to begin another affair which, by their nature, take up time which cannot be combined with doing anything else, although Charlotte continued working for me and this provided an easy alibi for both of us.
Dreadful and talented, she continued to argue about the work. Proud Charlotte, a pedigree person full of potential, and like Piers, somehow thwarted. It had given me a peculiar sense of power and retribution to employ him. Retribution for exactly what — the silver spoon syndrome, the sickening perpetuation of the accident of birth — it was after all hard to identify without admitting to the sort of foolish defensive prejudice I thought I had overcome. It was harder still to recognize the same motive in wanting Charlotte. Even now I can say that she is not really beautiful and that initially I did not find her attractive in that way. She was, as Piers confirmed, initially quite dreadful.
Spasmodic at first, our meetings then became regular and longer although they seemed shorter and shorter, filled with agile conversation which quickly widened beyond business. What we talked about I can hardly remember, only the quality of our comprehension, surprising and intoxicating.
But it was not enough.
One day in early August I had taken her to a pub for lunch. It was in one of the villages outside Cambridge, a low-ceilinged beamy old place with an unhurried atmosphere. I had chosen it deliberately because of its remoteness, as if discretion was already necessary, but by chance, or so it seemed, Piers turned up and joined us.
At first he had appeared mildly taken aback to find me lunching with Charlotte. He was polite and charming, but a touch wary as if remembering his pronouncement to me about her. But Charlotte, no longer so defensive about her ability, had long since shed her dreadfulness. The two of them, discovering that neither was as uncomfortable as they had thought, launched into a discussion about shooting — Piers’ sport and apparently that of Charlotte’s husband. Both had shot grouse in the Highlands the previous season, it transpired, and surely they had met? And did Mr Charlotte know so and so, yes, and Piers the Smuthers-Carruthers? And so on and so on. They verbally cavorted over shared acquaintances, ridiculously amazed at the smallness of their world — the exclusive world of the endangered species; and I listened and felt excluded and derisive and jealous.
‘I thought you were in London this afternoon,’ I interrupted to Piers in a way that suggested he should be. ‘Perhaps you should shoot off,’ I added, somewhat too acidly.
He and Charlotte looked at me in surprise, as if they had momentarily forgotten I was there. Both seemed slightly embarrassed, even a little put out. A pair of startled thoroughbreds. Piers quickly recovered.
‘I’m on my way. I’m on my way!’ he said, leaping up and backing off with exaggerated haste.
When he had gone Charlotte and I sat in silence, she fiddling with her empty glass, running her fingers up and down the stem. I felt angry with her, with Piers, with myself. I could feel a bearlike mood coming on and felt inclined to indulge it.
‘We’d better go then,’ I said, standing up. ‘You’ll be late collecting your daughter from school.’
She followed me outside. The sun was still hot and blindingly bright.
‘I don’t have to collect her today, she’s going to tea with a friend,’ Charlotte mumbled, brushing past me.
‘Where are you going?’ I called after her.
She stopped and spun round.
‘The car’s over here,’ I said.
‘I forgot I hadn’t brought my own,’ she said crossly.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Yes there is.’
‘Well if you really want to know, I thought you were rather rude just now.’
We were standing about ten feet apart in the empty car park, glaring at one another.
‘I thought you were bloody rude actually,’ I said, trying to control my anger. Who the hell did she think she was with her assumption of the right to criticize?
We carried on glaring. It seemed that neither of us could think of anything sufficiently virulent to say next.
She spoke first.
‘This is stupid,’ she said, flinging her arms out in exasperation. ‘I mean, why, what’s the point? What do you want?’
I could feel the sun burning on the back of my neck. I felt incredibly angry with her still.
‘I’ll give you one guess,’ I said, feeling my chest tighten. ‘And it is stupid.’
*
Neither of us mentioned the fact that we were not driving back into Cambridge. We had gone to the car still enraged with one another but with a tacit understanding that things had moved on. We drove further into the countryside, passing fields full of ripe crops, golden and bristling in the heat of the sun. We stopped in a field entrance and got out of the car. We climbed over the stile into a grassy meadow. Still we said little, as if to talk now might lead us to reconsider what was in our minds. When we reached the far side of the meadow Charlotte halted and turned to look back the way we had come as if to make sure nobody had seen or followed. I put my hand on her shoulder and bent my head to kiss her. The sweet excitement coursed between us. We moved on and found a shady patch of grass under a solitary elm. Next to it was an old plough, rusty and embedded in the ground, cow parsley springing up between its shafts.
Charlotte sat down. The setting was hers in her flouncy skirt and bare legs, the diluted sunlight filtering through the leaves of the elm and flickering in her hair. That’s how I picture her, anyway, when I think back, although it could be that I have built up the picture since to suit the memory. I remember feeling out of place in my well-pressed suit and Gucci shoes. I think I was more awkward than I care even to remember. I sat down beside her and somehow we bridged the awkward gap. We needed to be serious and engrossed and we were, although I remember more acutely the physical sensation of wanting her. But the grass was not the soft inviting bed it appeared to be. It was coarse and spiky and uncomfortable and distracting.
‘What is it?’ Charlotte asked, when I paused in mid-grapple.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said, quite irritably. ‘We’re not a couple of kids.’
‘I thought it was what you wanted,’ she said. A smile came to her lips and she added, ‘A roll in the hay.’ It seemed that suddenly she found the situation amusing.
‘Stop it,’ I said, but I couldn’t help smiling myself.
We looked at one another and laughed in relief.
‘Back to nature?’ I said.
‘Yes, if you like,’ she laughed again. ‘It seemed nice here, less sordid than a bed in a hotel, or the back of a car.’
‘Somehow it seems more natural to use hotels these days,’ I said.
‘I suppose so, but I still prefer a field in the sun.’
‘You speak from experience?’
‘Maybe.’
Charlotte was still sitting under the tree, her knees drawn up and her arms clasped round them. She glanced up at me and then looked away, half smiling in that peculiarly individual way of hers, the line of her mouth slightly uneven.
And so it happened the first time with Charlotte in a field. It was uncomfortable and probably undignified, half-clothed in the coarse grass, the sense of exposure making me take her with urgency and force. But that afternoon, only a couple of weeks before I went to America, did not really change anything, only speeded up what was already happening. Perhaps it would run its course and finish, like most affairs, in regret and ultimately cold detachment. There was no way of knowing, although it felt different. Urgent and necessary. Charlotte seemed filled with a bright, carefree energy. Everything delighted her, from driving the Jaguar (which she did at great speed, listening to opera) to looking at pictures in the Tate.
‘Shall we go now?’ she had said, taking my arm.
‘But we haven’t seen everything,’ I pointed out, as if I really wanted to spend any more time in the gallery.
‘No. It’s better to look at only a few paintings otherwise they become a blur. Sometimes I’ve come here to look at just one picture.’
‘How did you avoid seeing the others?’ I asked, gently facetious.
‘You think I’m mad, don’t you, but it would be like spoiling a good meal by eating too much,’ she explained earnestly.
‘It’s all right, Charlotte, I think I know what you mean,’ I assured her.
Tea at Fortnum and Mason — the same place I took Germaine when she came to London. Charlotte and I sat either side of one of the green marble tables in the Fountain Room. I soaked up her presence and we told one another about the places we had been and people we knew and mourned the fact that neither could be shared, revelling in the poignancy of it all. I was enjoying being in love with her, experiencing the intensity of such feeling. It was a bonus in life I was grateful not to have missed. But there it was, I saw it as an interlude and not something that could just run on indefinitely in its present form. There was the rest of life, and tomorrow, in just a few hours, it would be more pressing, more important than the luxurious intensity of today. That I wanted it to move on and into a different form was more clear when I took Charlotte to the penthouse flat and started to think about the future.
‘Are you under suspicion?’ I asked her as she lay beside me in bed.
‘You mean from Dan?’ she said. ‘Maybe, although there’s no reason for him to suspect.’
‘People talk.’
‘But nobody knows. Only Frances, and she wouldn’t say anything.’
‘They talk even more when they don’t know but merely suspect. They do it to see whether they are right. People have seen us together — Piers, and there must have been others.’
‘What about your wife?’
‘I think she knows,’ I said.
‘But she can’t,’ she protested. ‘We’ve never even met.’
‘Oh I’m not saying that she knows it’s you, only that she suspects an affair.’
‘Isn’t it funny,’ she said next, ‘but I’ve never really thought of it as an affair. Affair sounds so, over the top. Serious. Other people have affairs.’
‘So what are we doing?’ I said, deliberately losing patience to provoke her. ‘Conducting an intellectual boxing match with time out for a quick poke now and then?’
‘That’s nasty. Why do you have to be nasty?’
‘Because you exasperate me, Charlotte. You don’t know what you want.’
‘I suppose I don’t,’ she agreed. ‘But is it strictly necessary to know what one wants all the time?’
‘Yes, I think it is,’ I said, ‘there are too many people who don’t know what they want.’
‘But you haven’t said either,’ she said. ‘You haven’t really decided, have you, Nick? Wanting and doing, there’s the difference.’