Mapping the Edge

  Of course—the smell. She knew now what the smell meant. It was the aroma of a darkroom, the sticky-sweet stench of developing and fixing chemicals. He was still at it, filling up the time turning negatives into positives. But if he had the ability to endlessly re-create his own wife, then why did he need the company of an inferior look-alike? Once again there were too many things in this that didn’t make sense. Once again she could feel herself getting scared. She put her glass on the floor.

  “I want to go back to the room now, please. I’m feeling a little ill. I think the wine has made me sick again.” He didn’t answer immediately, as if he was weighing it up: her needs against the terms of their deal. Was it her imagination or could she feel a tension starting to flood back in, like someone turning a stopcock key? “I think it’s the remains of the drug. Tomorrow I’ll be better,” she added carefully.

  “Of course.” He got up. “I understand. I will take you up. Oh, but I forget. First I have something to give you.” He bent down and slipped his hand under one of the large cushions on the sofa, pulling out a small parcel wrapped in silver paper.

  She took it gingerly.

  “Open it. It will help you sleep.”

  She had a sudden panic that it was something compromising, some intimate object of their life together for her to share. She thought of the nail varnish and the wardrobe full of newly cleaned clothes. Please, God, don’t let it be underwear, she thought.

  “Open it. Please.”

  She split the seam of tape carefully and folded back the paper. Through the tissue underneath, her fingers encountered a long thin ridge. The feel triggered a memory, and suddenly she knew what it was. She ripped away at the remaining covering. Lily’s wooden horse fell onto its side in her lap, its front leg prancing into empty air.

  “See,” he said. “Now you can believe what I say. In a few days you will be home and then you can give this to your daughter. Like it was you who bought it for her.”

  She couldn’t speak. As she ran her hands over the cool flanks, she saw herself back in the shop, a woman in love with her child, yet in need of some excitement to prove she was still herself. Is that what had attracted him to her; the smell of her restlessness? The world was full of other women with dark hair and pale skin. He could have picked a dozen others.

  What was it Estella and she always used to say when they were younger and life slapped them around a bit? It’s not the cards that you’re dealt, it’s the way that you play them. For many years she had assumed it had been Chris and then Lily who had made up the hand of her life, the one that would decide the fundamental balance between happiness and sorrow. Now she knew with awful clarity that that had only been a practice run and that the real hand, the one that would decide everything, was the one she was playing now.

  “Thank you,” she said, half under her breath, and she smiled, not because she necessarily believed what he had said, but because for that instant she did indeed feel grateful.

  “See,” he said quietly. “I was right about you. Look. You even smile like her. You should do it more often.”

  Away—Saturday P.M.

  SHE WAS SITTING cross-legged on the bed, the sheet draped around her shoulders. The room had cooled down with the dark. Or maybe she no longer had the heat of his body to rub up against. She looked at her watch: 9:20 P.M. In the restaurant he would have finished his drink and be thinking of food. For once she felt like making him wait. She dialed the number again, but this time when it connected all she got was the engaged tone. Maybe Lily hadn’t put the receiver back on the hook properly. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  The conversation between the two of them had been easy, peppered with tales of swimming lessons and fun fairs, until, that was, the last few moments when Lily had somehow picked up a shadow in her mother’s voice and responded to it by suddenly wanting her home again. Anna had tried to jolly her out of it, but had been undermined by the catch in her own throat, and the call had ended a little abruptly. Now she wanted to check that everything was all right. She redialed. Still the sharp persistent engaged signal. Oh, Lily, she said under her breath, it’s not a toy, sweetheart. You have to remember to put it back properly. . . .

  She thought of home and everyone gathered together for Saturday night. How fitting that Stella should have chosen this weekend for a visit. They hadn’t talked to each other in two or three weeks. Was that why she’d come? To check up on her?

  Maybe she should have told them what was going on. Stella or Paul. An affair with a married man would hardly have offended Paul’s morality. In the past the two of them had had a history of such confessions, embroidering tales of sexual fiasco to make each other laugh over late-night glasses of brandy. But since the arrival of Mike, their previous easy camaraderie—their intimacy without intimacy—had faded a little. And so she had said nothing to him about Samuel, and he in turn hadn’t been aware enough to ask.

  With Estella the reasons were more complex. Like many best friends they were very different; Anna’s spontaneous, often irresponsible style complementing Estella’s deliberately defensive one. But at root, for all her unpredictability, she, Anna, had always been the stable one, able to earth the painful detachment of a friend who had lost her mother at the age of ten and coped by closing down on all other offers of intimacy. Over the years the intensity of their friendship had been a surprise and a delight to them both. It had only been shaken once, during Anna’s affair with Chris and the fallout that followed it. Then Anna had no longer been the buoyant one, and her despair had proved dangerously contagious, so much so that when she had taken the train north without telling anyone it had partly been Estella’s overwhelming, almost panicky concern that she had needed to get away from. Of course she had never told Stella. It would have hurt her too much. But even when she had healed herself their relationship had taken time to recover, and the remaining scar tissue left Anna wary of telling her best friend absolutely everything, particularly when that everything included a married man whom she already knew she wasn’t going to resist.

  * * *

  This thing between her and Samuel had all happened so fast anyway. What had started out as a joke—a drunken Saturday evening spent exploring the lonely hearts column—had, by the next week, turned into an article sold to a features editor fretting about her paper’s reach into the thirty-something market, not to mention the barrenness of her own love life.

  “What if I decide I want to go to bed with one of them?” Anna had asked her, with a gentle cruelty.

  “All the better, so long as you change the names and it doesn’t turn into a date-rape piece. Nobody cares about those kinds of stories anymore.”

  But Anna had already known she wouldn’t sleep with them. Their voices had told her that the first night, something about the mix of supplication and arrogance in the tone. Still, she had entered into the spirit of things and left a few lively, encouraging messages. The take-up had been such that she had to get Patricia to baby-sit twice that first week.

  She’d met them both in one of the less flashy restaurants of Soho over the course of two evenings. Both of them were nice guys, but boring copy: one a divorced civil servant who, it emerged, very much wanted kids but didn’t seem that interested in the woman he’d have to live with to get them; the second a self-employed heritage consultant who had dropped out of the rat race but had recently grown tired of staring at the computer screen in his South London semi and was looking for a way to get out and meet people again.

  She in turn had arrived with a bag full of alternative lives to play out, but to her credit she had quickly realized there was no point in lying about all of it, that to write the article at all she had to feel something, and to feel something she had, at least in part, to expose herself. So she used what she could—which was Lily, her house, and her friends—and she turned the journalism into part-time English teaching at a local sixth form college. A full life, but not without its fault lines, she had thought as she unfolded it carefully
before them.

  The evenings had played out with remarkable similarity. In both cases they had set out their stalls and admired each other’s fruit, but it became clear early on that no one really wanted to buy, not wanting or willing enough to take the risk of what felt in some way like soiled goods. In both cases the conversation had started to flag toward the end of dessert and they skipped coffee, splitting the bills and saying their good-byes respectfully while still at the table, thus allowing them to leave separately. She had written them up in her head as she drove away.

  Later she found herself quietly depressed, as if the world were shot through with thin veins of sadness—not the dramatic stuff of tragedy, but the small everyday pain, enough to cause slow poisoning in the most balanced of people over the course of a lifetime. Thank God for Lily, she had thought fiercely, she burns brighter than any of them. But that night as they lay tangled together in bed she had a sudden image of her daughter all grown up and striding out of the house, independent, complete, a profound silence growing up in the wake of the door slam. Sentimental shit, she thought, as she went downstairs to get herself a glass of wine. But next morning she rang the Soulmates line and left a message of her own; funky, almost angry, rewriting Marvell’s “Coy Mistress” sentiments to throw down a gauntlet to the opposite sex. When she listened to it she realized with a slight shock that although it was fake it was at the same time real. At least it would make for a better article. Only men wanting to buy need apply for this one. Welcome back to the Anna who took risks, and wasn’t bothered with consequences.

  She rang it herself next weekend to check it was in. Amid breakfast chaos and the scramble to make the swimming lesson on time it sounded outrageous, almost drunk. By Monday night she had had six calls: life stories, sad chat, a flash of bravura here and there. His had been number four. It was not like any of the others:

  “Hi. I’ll tell you what I think, all right? I think this whole exercise has got more to do with the voice than the content. Okay, so I know not everybody is their voice. You old enough to remember Terence Stamp? Or maybe you’re more the Julie Burchill generation. But they’re the exceptions who prove the rule. So while you may or may not be what you say you are, your voice has got something about it. No doubt you’ll have already formed your own impression of mine.

  “Either way I suggest we give each other a get-out clause. There’s a restaurant at the top of the Oxo tower on the South Bank where the food isn’t worth the money but the view is good. I’ll be eating there on Tuesday of this week at nine P.M. Table 110. I’ve already booked it. You could come and have a look, and if you like what you see you could sit down. If not, don’t bother. There’s nothing lost. You could have a drink and appreciate the skyline. Who knows, you might meet someone else. I won’t ever know if you came or not. No one can miss what they’ve never had, eh? Though sometimes I think I already do. Good hunting.”

  He would, she thought as she listened, make a great article.

  She dressed down and was deliberately late. She parked the car on Waterloo Bridge and walked along the river beside the concrete sprawl of the National Theatre’s new extension. It was one of the first really hot days of summer, and there were people out everywhere walking and drinking, pretending that they were living in Paris, the Thames doing its sluggish best to fit in with the illusion. The walk had reminded Anna of how much she liked the city: its chutzpah, the way the eighties had reinvented it, teaching it how to pose. It had been a while since she had felt so benign toward it, so willing to play.

  At the top of the tower the bar had thinned out from the after-work crowd, but the restaurant was buzzing. The diners got the prime view—St. Paul’s and the City—the drinkers had to make do with new business developments and the occasional run of lights. Blade Runner it was not.

  Table 110 was next to the window. The waiter was keen to take her there himself, but she insisted she go alone. She wove her way through until 110 and its inhabitant were clearly in view. Because she had not allowed herself to feel anticipation it seemed unfair that she now experience disappointment.

  He was tall and well-dressed and at a generous estimate he might soon be celebrating his twenty-sixth birthday. It was less that he was bad-looking than that he was unformed, the smooth bits and the creases more like the ones from the original packing case than the results of any real living. His neck, she noticed, had a prominent Adam’s apple. It was hard to believe that that voice could emerge through such a narrow tunnel. He looked up and it was clear that he was waiting for someone. She turned quickly and managed not to catch his eye.

  She retreated to the bar. The wine came in a tall glass with a cool little Oxo logo imprinted on it. She glanced back at him. Was it his age or his face that made him creepy? Since when did good looks guarantee good sex, except in the movies? And who said she had to sleep with him anyway? This was about getting copy, not getting laid. She had a commission to deliver three thousand words on the dangers of the lonely-hearts culture. What the hell was she doing deciding not to meet him, now that she’d come this far? She felt as if she had caught herself out in some kind of lie, though she wasn’t exactly sure what it was.

  She started to construct a different kind of piece, refashioning her disappointment into something witty and clever, laughing at herself, then willing herself to be surprised. She slid off the stool and turned back toward him. He was on his feet, too. But not, it appeared, for her. Between the tables a small young woman with a mass of curly red hair was striding toward him. His smile grew wider to meet her and the narrowness of his neck seemed less of a problem. They kissed in a way that made it clear they had been there before, and she sank into the seat opposite.

  At the bar Anna stood holding her drink, for a second completely nonplussed.

  “All I can think is that he must earn more than I do.”

  It was the voice. She looked down and registered a guy sitting along from her at the bar with a book in his hands. She caught what might have been the word “Redemption” on the cover, but she was too busy trying to read the man to bother with the full title. “Table 110, right?”

  He made a grimace. “Meant to be, yes.”

  He was not as tall as his voice, but there was a chunky, solid feel to him. He had cropped dark hair flecked with gray and a big face that had done a lot of laughing and some of the other. Nothing to set the world alight, but there was something about the eyes that made it clear he didn’t give a toss about that. Not another rewrite, she thought, not yet. Without realizing it she wrapped the cloak of work around her a little tighter. Disguise. The great trick of it is that in the right circumstances it can allow one to be even more oneself.

  “I thought you said you booked it.”

  “I did, but obviously his influence is greater than mine. I gather it was an anniversary.”

  “Of what?”

  “What do you reckon? The first time he wore long trousers, or the first time he took them off?”

  She glanced over at the two of them. They were smiling at each other. “Oh, I think he’s already taken them off,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  He frowned. “I’m surprised she’s interested. If you were her, would you be?”

  She shrugged. “Well, I was and I wasn’t. Or were you too caught up in your book to notice? But, that’s not the point,” she said quietly. “You’re not looking properly. It’s not about sex. It’s about love.”

  “Oh—love.” And the way he undressed the word made it clear he didn’t have a lot of time for it. “No wonder I didn’t get the table.” He paused, holding her eyes. “I did get another one, though. Unless, that is, you’d prefer to stay drinking?”

  She looked out at the two views. On one side St. Paul’s, luminous, almost airborne on its floodlights, on the other scaffolding and eighties office blocks. “You lied about the view from the bar, you know.”

  He sighed. “I think ‘lied’ is a bit strong. Let’s say I exaggerated a little. The food will make up for it,
I promise.”

  Once at the table he seemed to lose interest in her, more focused on the menu and the art of getting the meal right. Anna, being largely bored by cuisine and its elevated place in modern culture, chalked up his first black mark. Great opening, no follow-through, she thought, knowing that she would remember some but not all of the running commentary when she came to put it down later that night. She looked at him looking at the menu. They were, at least, on first-name terms now. Samuel (long for Sam, no doubt). No second names yet. But at least this way she hadn’t had to lie. She already wondered about him.

  He glanced up. “Sorry. This won’t take long.”

  She shrugged. He went back to work, evidently a man who was used to being indulged. Monstrous confidence.

  The waiter came and they chatted together about the finer points of the braised lamb. She sat sliding her fingers up and down the wine stem. Maybe this impresses some women, she thought.

  “So,” he said, business finally complete. “Here we are. Voice to voice. How shall we start? We could do work, past relationships, present ones, or top ten favorite movies. Do you have a preferred itinerary?”

  Yes, monstrous confidence. But at least it wasn’t boring. Yet. She gave a short laugh. “How many times have you done this before?”

  “Well, more often than you, obviously,” he said, smiling. “Which is why I’ve changed my tactics.”

  “What? Voice over content?”

  “No. Substance over small talk.”

  “The cooking time of the lamb notwithstanding.”