‘Try these,’ said Farida, passing out St John’s Wort tablets. ‘My auntie swears by them.’
Natalie blithely swallowed one, her mind elsewhere. Skittish and insouciant, she sped through her work. At five thirty, when everyone was packing up, she hurried outside to the car park. His Audi was parked in its designated space: P. TOMLINSON. There was room next to it, so she backed her car into the gap and returned inside.
Management always worked late. Natalie lingered in the toilets. Through the window she could see the twelfth floor, up on the other wing of the building. His window was still lit. She misted herself with Arpège.
You press this, here, it immobilizes the engine.
How helpless a woman is when her car won’t start! How hard Natalie tried, the engine turning over, grindingly, and soon dwindling to the feeblest of groans. Only a few moments and she believed in her own lie, she was good at that, she came from a family of self-deluders.
In the rear-view mirror she saw Phillip emerge from the building and, bent against the wind, make his way towards her. He knocked on her window. Reluctantly, she wound it down.
‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. I’m fine.’
‘You sure?’
She burst into tears. She could do this, by thinking of her goldfish that had died.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said.
‘I’m fine,’ she sobbed. ‘Go away!’
‘Budge up.’
She shifted into the passenger seat. ‘Bloody car,’ she muttered and blew her nose.
‘A damsel in distress . . . such a rare sight nowadays.’ He tried to rev the engine. ‘Battery’s flat. Allow me to come to your rescue with my trusty jump leads.’
His eyes flickered down to her legs. Her skirt had ridden up, exposing her thighs.
‘Haven’t you got to get home?’ she asked.
‘I’m in no hurry,’ he said.
‘That true?’
‘I’m utterly at your disposal.’ He smiled at her.
The car park was almost empty now; there was room for him to reverse his car and manoeuvre it into the mating position next to hers, bonnet to bonnet. He fiddled inside the engine, fixing the leads. She could tell, by the hunch of his back, that he knew she was watching him.
Straightening up, he rubbed his fingers with a handkerchief. ‘Ready to be charged up?’ he asked, eyebrows raised.
‘I feel awful, after what I said to you,’ she snuffled.
‘Don’t think of it.’ His eyes moved up and down her body. She smiled, weakly.
They sat in their respective cars, revving the engines. Natalie’s didn’t fire. Through the leads, she could feel his lust vibrating. Catching his eye, she shrugged at him. He shrugged back and switched off his engine. Through their windscreens they gazed at each other. She felt a rush of gratitude, that he was helping her even as she tricked him, that they were both in this together. He opened her door and held out his hand.
‘Do you forgive me for earlier, Natalie?’ he asked.
She nodded.
He took her hand. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’m driving you home.’
He accelerated fast, up the slip road. Flung back in her seat, Natalie thought: How manly he is! She could forgive him the laborious, damsel-in-distress gallantry. As he sped along the motorway, veering around lorries, flashing dawdling cars, she surrendered herself to voluptuous anticipation. She knew she had ensnared him: first through anger, then through tears. They were already plunged into intimacy.
She turned to him. ‘Sorry I snapped at you,’ she said. ‘I was in a bit of a state. My boyfriend and I, we split up last month.’
‘Ah.’ He paused. ‘So how do you feel?’
‘Great.’ She smiled at him. ‘Really great.’
He turned to look at her. ‘Footloose and fancy-free?’
He was nervous, she could tell. The bravado of his driving was only to impress her. One hand casually gripped the wheel while the other clenched and unclenched in his lap. She gazed at his profile. Like many faces, when seen from the side he was another person: weak chin, beakier nose than she had realized. This, however, didn’t dampen her lust – the sharp and thrilling lust one feels for a stranger with whom one plans soon to be intimate, their skin as yet unfelt under their clothes.
‘Aren’t I the lucky one,’ he said. ‘Taking home the prettiest girl in the office.’
He parked outside her flat. He gazed out of the window. A torn police tape dangled from a lamp-post; another incident must have taken place.
‘Crap area, right?’ she said. ‘I don’t plan to stay here long.’
Phillip switched off the engine and turned to her. The streetlamp illuminated the fur around his ears. She thought: We’re just animals, the two of us. Mammals on heat.
‘Want to come up for a drink?’ she asked.
She closed the door. Phillip pulled her against him and kissed her clumsily, their noses bumping. Even Natalie was taken by surprise. Dropping her bag, she clasped him in his bulky sheepskin jacket. His head knocked against the wall; the mirror skewed sideways.
‘I’ve been wanting to do this all day,’ he muttered.
They fumbled off each other’s coats and stumbled into the bedroom. It was chilly, its curtains still closed from the morning. In the darkness Natalie groped for the bed, pulling him with her; she helped him yank off her tights and knickers. He slewed her round on the bed, manhandling her as if she were a rag doll. He pushed her legs apart and plunged his head between them.
She had to admit that he was a skilled lover in a virtuoso, look-at-me sort of way. She could tell he was going through his paces to show her what he was capable of – first the moist nuzzlings, his lizard tongue flicking in and out, then the swift undressing, the nipple-licking, the cunty kisses on her mouth and the efficient rolling-on of a condom. He slid in, startling her. ‘Am I hurting you?’ he whispered smugly.
She pulled his head close and silenced him with her lips. Wrapping her strong, thin arms around him she was flooded with such pleasure that she forgot there had been a plan to this.
The next two weeks were a surprise to her. Heated by Phillip’s passion, her heart melted. He wasn’t her type – too clean-cut, too male-model – but there was a thrill to it, having an affair with her superior: snatched kisses in the toilets, a frisson when he stood in the office talking to Mrs Roe (‘No can do, Stella’) and their eyes met. Passing him in the corridor when he was talking to a colleague (‘It’s your turn to give Fraser a bollocking’). Sitting at her desk, thighs aching from lovemaking, Natalie found messages to hotlips on her screen. Can’t wait for tonite. When he wandered into Accounts – which he did nowadays on the smallest pretext – when he paused at her desk the sounds around them drained away, as they did when she thought of her plan; they left herself and Phillip, alone in the world.
And he was besotted, no doubt about that. Lying in her arms, listening to the shouts echoing down in the street, he whispered: ‘I’m going to take you away from all this.’
‘Where to?’
He ran his finger down her freckled arm. ‘Anywhere but here. You deserve better.’
‘I know.’
He enfolded her, he made her yielding and female, she astonished herself. But then he went home. He never stayed the night, he said he had to take his dog around the block before bed.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Arnold. He has a prostate problem.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘You can laugh, you’re not a bloke. Thank God.’
He never asked her over to his place, which was out beyond Dewsbury. His ex-girlfriend, with whom he had recently split up, still had a key.
‘Thing is, people think we’re still together. She hasn’t told anyone.’
‘They’ve got to know, sooner or later.’
‘She’s taken it very badly. She’s still got some stuff in the flat and she just pops in, without warning.’
‘Sounds loopy to me.’
&nb
sp; ‘If she saw you, she’d go berserk.’
‘Why don’t you change the locks?’
‘I’ll get it sorted out, I promise. You don’t mind, do you?’
With the generosity of the victor, Natalie shook her head. She was still drugged with love. She smiled at the security guard in Reception; she sent Phillip an e-mail when he was in the middle of a meeting with some people from Stuttgart. She pictured his face as he read it. Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, he’d be saying, rising to his feet. I have to check some data in the other office. She waited for him in the ladies’ cloakroom, her knickers draped over the cubicle door. How thrilling, the danger!
‘What if someone comes in?’ he whispered.
‘Shut up.’
She unzipped his trousers, sat him on the toilet and, straddling him, fucked him with a furious passion. Afterwards they slumped against each other, limp and laughing.
He gazed at her, wiping her damp hair from her forehead. ‘Oh Natalie Natalie, where have you been all my life?’ He zipped up his trousers. ‘Listen, sweetheart – don’t tell anybody about us, OK? Don’t want any gossip, you know what offices are like.’ He kissed her. ‘I want to keep you all to myself.’ And then he went back to his meeting.
The new, compliant Natalie went along with this. She lived for the night. The flat was no longer desolate for her, with its relics of Kieran’s occupation – his scrawled writing on her video cassettes, his Teach Yourself Spanish from his short-lived evening class. So potent once, they were now defused and could no longer upset her; Kieran had gone, and simply left objects behind. Her flat was transformed by erotic anticipation; for two weeks it became a palace of love as if it had never known a normal, hair-drying, telly-watching evening. She was a terrible cook but she bought prawns and mangoes and put wine in the fridge to chill. She bought scented candles and stuck them around the bathroom, as one does in the early days of love; she and Phillip sat in the bath together, their jack-knifed knees draped with foam, her toes caressing his balls.
As they sat there, the mirror steaming up, she told him about her childhood. She had worked it up into a series of anecdotes by now; they gained in drama with each telling. By now her past felt as if it had happened to somebody else.
‘Shredded Wheat?’ he asked. ‘For three days?’
‘I was only little. I didn’t know how to work the tin opener.’
‘What about the baby?’
‘I gave it to him too. He liked it, actually.’
‘Didn’t the milk go sour?’
‘I nicked some from outside the flat next door. And then my mum came home so that was all right.’
‘Doesn’t sound all right to me. The woman was an alcoholic.’
‘Is. She’s still around, somewhere.’ Applying the word ‘alcoholic’ to her mother was as startling as applying ‘arranged marriage’ to Farida; it made her into a case, something no doubt her mother would cheerfully admit. Janey, when she wasn’t boozily weeping, was a cheerful woman. You could say that for her.
‘Weren’t the social services involved?’ he asked.
‘They took away two of the younger ones but we kept moving around, see. They couldn’t catch up. Halifax, York . . . I knew it was going to happen when she told me to keep my clothes on when I went to bed.’
‘You’re a survivor, aren’t you?’
She scooped up water and spilt it over his knees. ‘You’ve got to look after yourself in this world. Nobody else is going to do it for you.’ She could always get a man’s sympathy by talking about her parents. This was the one thing they had done for her. ‘My parents never grew up, see. They were sixties kids.’ She told him how her father had bailed out when she was little, going to Ibiza and smoking dope, working on the boats, going off to Thailand to live with what’s-her-name.
Phillip gazed at her tenderly. ‘Do you miss him?’
‘Oh, there’s been plenty since him. No shortage of blokes when my mum was around.’ She thought of Raymond, creeping in at night when her mother was asleep. She would save the Raymond stories till later. ‘She’s been shacked up with five of them since then.’
‘That the truth?’
She nodded. ‘I wouldn’t lie about something like that.’
‘What would you lie about?’
‘What would you?’
‘I asked first,’ he said.
She gazed at the sliver of soap. ‘Sometimes I start with a lie, then I find out it wasn’t needed at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s become the truth.’
For once, she had spoken from the heart.
Phillip left, to go home. She gazed at him over the landing as he descended the stairs. He was nearly forty; from here, she could see his thinning hair.
Back in the bathroom she stood in front of the steamed-up mirror. In the condensation she wrote, with her finger, N. TOMLINSON . . . She watched the letters weep.
She longed for Phillip to spend the night. She wanted to wake up with him in the morning and lend him her toothbrush. Maybe he liked listening to the Today programme. She didn’t mind; she ought to know what was happening in the world. He could even bring his dog around; she liked all animals except the slithery kind. She lusted after him, she wanted to see more of him; it was as simple as that.
She didn’t see him on Thursday; he was at a conference in London. By Friday she was missing him keenly. During her morning break she went to his smokers’ doorway but he wasn’t there. Taking the elevator to the twelfth floor, she sauntered past his office but his desk was empty. She didn’t dare enter; he had advised her not to, it might arouse suspicions. ‘Mrs Johns has eyes like a hawk,’ he said. Back at her desk Natalie rang his mobile but it had been switched off.
At lunchtime, in the canteen, she saw Mrs Johns. Lips pursed, she was picking her way through a biryani. Natalie stopped at her table. ‘I’ve been looking for Mr Tomlinson.’
‘He’s in meetings all day.’ Mrs Johns removed a piece of cinnamon bark and placed it on the side of her plate. ‘If you want an appointment, phone on Monday.’
Outside there was a rumble of thunder. Natalie comforted herself with the knowledge, gleaned from Phillip, that Mrs Johns’s husband had left her for a twenty-eight-year-old IT consultant.
She sat down with Sioban, who closed the book she was reading, Do It Yourself Conveyancing. ‘Did you know that the best way to get rid of wrinkles is to rub them with haemorrhoid cream?’
I’m getting old, thought Natalie. I’m nearly thirty-three, there are lines between my eyes, soon I’ll be too old for anybody to love. Sioban’s bookmark was a boarding pass. Her security guard had taken her to Paris for an illicit weekend. They had spent the night together; they had woken in a strange hotel room and brushed their teeth in unison.
All afternoon the storm raged. Over the blips of the computers and the hum of conversation – its volume always rose on Friday afternoons – over this Natalie could hear the rain lashing at the windows. Why didn’t Phillip phone? As yet they had made no date for the weekend. In fact, both weekends she had known him he had been busy, the first at a badminton tournament and the second visiting his parents in Keighley.
At the time she just felt mild vexation. He was busy, after all; his work was a lot more demanding than hers. This wouldn’t be difficult. ‘You’re wasted in that job,’ he said, ‘bright girl like you.’ She suspected nothing, for love had made her stupid.
At five thirty the others started packing up. She waited until six, then she wrote him a note, Home all evening, phone me. She slipped it into a plastic folder extracted from Mrs Roe’s cupboard. She and Phillip often stuck things under the windscreens of each other’s cars – jokes, assignations. Like the e-mails it gave them a frisson, thrumming beneath the surface of their days.
Natalie left the building. The wind sent her reeling; the moors had their own climate, ten degrees colder than anywhere else. Up on the twelfth floor, Phillip’s window was still lit. Bent against the rain, sh
e hurried across to his car.
Another vehicle, however, was parked in its place: a hatchback. Natalie pressed her face against its window. A child’s seat was strapped into the rear.
Puzzled, she straightened up. Around her doors slammed, engines revved. A man was getting into the next car; she recognized him, he had been smoking with Phillip that first day.
‘Whose car’s in Mr Tomlinson’s space?’ she shouted at him, through the rain.
‘Must be Melanie’s.’
‘Whose?’ She raised her voice.
‘MELANIE’S!’ he yelled. ‘His wife’s.’
A good liar knows about detail – not too much, which might arouse suspicions, for which innocent person can accurately itemize their actions? Just enough to casually suggest a life, a fictitious scenario of which only the iceberg tip is visible. It’s an art, of doubtful moral value but more useful than most, and Natalie herself was a deft practitioner. Indeed, over the coming months she would exploit her skill to breaking point. Part of the pain, in discovering Phillip’s deception, part of the pain and loss was the discovery that in the lying stakes she had met her match. He was a man after her own heart.
Phillip had a wife, Melanie, and two children: Kelly, eighteen months, and Tom, four. He didn’t have a dog. Arnold, whose urinary problems had roused Natalie’s sympathy, was simply a figment of Phillip’s surprisingly fertile imagination. No wonder he had had to get home each night. What was Natalie called? Late meetings, business dinners?
All this Natalie discovered as they sat in her car, the rain drumming on the roof. She had ambushed Phillip as he left the building.
‘I’m crazy about you,’ he said.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Crazy.’
‘You creep!’
‘I was going to tell you – at the beginning I thought you must know – but then it was too late—’
‘You lying prick, you – you—’ She tried to hit him but there was no room. Uselessly she pummelled him with her fists; the sheepskin jacket was too thick.
‘Melanie and I—’
‘Fuck Melanie—’
‘Melanie and me, we’re not happy, the marriage has been dead for years—’