Page 57

FIFTY-FIVE TWO YEARS EARLIER

We have a baby now, Martha and I. Nala. She is two months old.

It was my idea to have a baby. I do love children.

Animals and children are what keep me from the darkness.

You would think, possibly, from the sorts of things I’ve done, that I inhabit a dark place.

You would assume that people who do dark things must think dark thoughts and have dark dreams and feel blackness all around them.

But no, not at all. Most of the time I would ascribe a kind of muted greeny-blue to the color of my existence.

Nothing too bright, nothing too delicate, just a bland midrange color.

Obviously, different moods and hormonal changes affect the color, but it is never black.

And I put that down to love, to children, to food, to dogs, to finding the perfect pair of shoes, the way the light catches a woman’s hair, the top of her cheekbone. I’m not all bad, in other words.

And this baby, this child, my God, she is exquisite.

I’d imagined a struggle to get pregnant at our ages.

Martha was forty-five when she found out, forty-six when the baby came.

All natural. No IVF, no fertility treatment, a smooth pregnancy, a good birth, a healthy baby.

She has golden hair and blue eyes and thick eyelashes and soft feet that I can’t stop kissing.

She makes shapes out of her mouth that delight me and amuse me.

I feel sure that she is the best and most beautiful baby in the world.

And yes, I know I have had other babies, and of course I felt the same for them as I feel for Nala.

But the difference is the way I feel about Martha.

The boys I had with Amanda were tainted in many ways by the way I felt about Amanda.

The girls I had with Laura were tainted by the way I felt about her, especially toward the end, when I couldn’t even bear to look at her.

Thankfully, Tara and I did not procreate.

But Nala came from me and Martha, a perfect union.

Martha says she is tired. She says that carrying a baby, delivering a baby, taking care of a baby, when you are in your forties is ten times harder than doing it in your twenties and thirties.

I can tell she is ashamed of the way her body looks.

She told me it took her five years to get it back to normal after Jonah was born, and now she is back at square one, except older. But she looks beautiful to me.

My father was uxorious toward my mother—I always found it quite revolting—and in many, if not all, of my previous relationships I have played the role of the uxorious husband to a T.

Subtly, of course, because modern women do not want to feel smothered or controlled.

I make my feelings very clear and plain because that is what women want.

Transparency. But this is the first time, the very first time, I have not had to play the role.

And it scares me sometimes. It scares me that I worry about her leaving me.

That I worry about her tiring of me. I’ve never worried about a woman getting bored by me before.

Or at least not before I was bored by them.

I want more for Martha, and more for Nala. I want more for me, for fuck’s sake.

I have a client in Hastings. She lives in a penthouse flat in a twenties block overlooking the sea.

It’s carpeted from edge to edge in a thick cream deep-pile, all the furniture is white and gold, and her bed has a net canopy with lace trim.

The whole apartment smells of dead marriages and lonely nights and adult children who never visit.

Her name is Jessie, and she is almost seventy.

Like all my clients, she keeps herself in good condition, but she is very much at the upper end of what I can stomach, age-wise.

She was in her fifties the first time I met her, not far off the age I am now, and in a way, we have become friends.

She doesn’t ask too many questions, just enough to make me feel like a human being, and she is very gentle and very clever.

Her husband died quite suddenly of a brain aneurysm in his early fifties and she couldn’t stomach the dating scene, so she found me.

I like her very much. I almost toyed with the idea of entering into a romantic relationship with her in the early days, especially when I realized that she was sitting on all her dead husband’s investments.

(“I don’t need the money,” she’d said. “What’s the point?

I’ll let it sit there and gather interest and then the kids can have it when I’m gone.

”) But I realized that was never going to be what she wanted from me, far from it.

I arrange to visit her a few days after Nala turns two months old. I haven’t seen her for over a year—I think she was starting to get used to the idea of life without sex—but I need a reason to be by the coast and Jessie gives me one.

The lift opens directly into her apartment and she greets me sweetly with a hug.

I tell her she looks gorgeous, and she tells me I look as wonderful as ever, and she makes us each a G & T, which we drink on her balcony even though it’s late January and the temperature is barely hitting double figures.

She tells me that she’ll pay me for my visit either way, but she’s not entirely sure she wants to have sex.

“Nothing personal.” She rests her hand over mine and smiles. “Just a feeling I have that I am moving on. Somewhere. No idea where!” She laughs. “But I’m glad you got in touch as I felt bad about not saying a proper goodbye to you, after all these years.”

I feel a muscle in my cheek twitch as I sense in the air between us that something is coming. My breath catches and I try to keep my face neutral.

“I want to give you something.” She touches my knee and then gets up and heads indoors and I bite my lip to stop myself smiling because I can’t help thinking that she is going to give me money, or at the very least something of monetary value.

She returns with something wrapped in a handkerchief. Before she unwraps it, she turns to me and says, “I worry about you, André. I know you say you’re happy, but I don’t believe you. A man like you should have a family, a life, a future.”

My flesh ripples with goose bumps.

“Here.” She unwraps the contents of the handkerchief. Inside is a pebble.

A pebble.

She passes it to me, and I throw her a questioning look.

“I picked this up on the beach when I was twenty-one. Just down there.” She gestures below.

“The day we moved into this apartment. I put it in my pocket, and I said to myself, Jessie Bland, you have your whole life ahead of you, but this pebble will be here long after you’ve gone.

Someone else might pick it up one day and carry it with them for a while.

So, I want you to have it now. And I want you to think of me when you look at it.

And I want you to think of your future. And once you’ve found your way, I want you to pass this pebble on to someone else who’s lost. Will you do that for me? Do you promise?”

I blink, very slowly, and stare at the pebble.

The pebble is nondescript, verging on ugly, and Jessie’s accompanying monologue is trite and meaningless.

I have no idea what she was thinking, and I have no idea what to say.

Rage pulses gently at my temples, my fist closes hard over the pebble, I make my face into a pleasant smile, and I say, “Yes. I promise.” But then, from nowhere, more words appear.

“Ha!” I say quite forcefully. “For a minute there I thought you were going to give me something valuable! To set me up in a new life!” I laugh, overloudly, so that she thinks I am making a joke.

But I can tell she knows I mean it and she gives me a sympathetic look that makes me feel quite murderous.

“Oh, André,” she says, folding the handkerchief neatly into a square. “I wish I could. I would love to give you everything. But those wretched children of mine—I can’t do that to them. That would be an act of such cruel vindictiveness, I couldn’t live with myself.”

Her words hit me like a slingshot to the gullet.

I picture my mother, although I was not there to witness the moment, sitting at a big leather-topped desk in her solicitor’s office thirty years ago, signing the piece of paper that robbed me of my inheritance, that changed the course of my life, that brought me from there to here.

And then, in my mind’s eye, my mother’s face morphs into Jessie’s face, and I picture myself forcing the pebble deep down Jessie’s throat.

I picture it so clearly that for a moment I almost imagine I might do it.

But that moment passes, the swishing and swooping in my head subsides, the ringing in my eardrums quietens.

I tuck the pebble into my pocket, and I pat Jessie’s hand.

“I understand,” I say. “I was only kidding you. Of course I don’t want your money. ”

“Just my body, yes,” she replies with a wink that almost turns my stomach.

“Exactly,” I reply. “Exactly.”

When I leave Jessie’s apartment half an hour later, I remove the pebble from my pocket and toss it forcefully across the beach, where it lands with a smack against the others. It feels symbolic in some way, but I’m not sure how.

In my other pocket is the envelope of cash that Jessie insisted I take with me, even though we didn’t have sex—￡500.

And in the inside pocket of my jacket is a man’s watch.

In my haste to take it, I could not tell if it was of any value, but I couldn’t bear to leave her house with nothing.

The watch was in a drawer, inside a box, beneath some paperwork and a tangle of chains and necklaces.

She might wonder if it was me, when she notices.

She might even report it to the police. And if she does?

So what? André doesn’t even have a surname, let alone any other form of identification.

And how would she explain my presence in her home?

A fifty-three-year-old man of no fixed abode.

A man who, if traced by the police, would simply tell them what he was—a male sex worker for whose services she had been paying for over fifteen years.

And what would her precious children think of that?

I pull the watch out of my pocket once I am in my car and examine it. It’s a Cartier. Then I put the car into drive and head for a village along the coast from here called the Riviera.

Nina Swann wears utility-style jeans, quirky knitwear, and oversized reading glasses.

Her hair is dyed an improbable shade of dark mahogany with a blunt fringe and she drives an electric car.

She is, I should mention, very beautiful, but really not my type.

Too tall. Too angular. Too tomboyish, almost. And I have aways preferred blondes.

Every Tuesday and Thursday from twelve until five, she goes to work at an upmarket fruit-and-vegetable importer in Dover where she sits at the reception desk in their rough-hewn, bare-brick warehouse. At three o’clock on these days, she goes to the café next door for an afternoon snack.

I am sitting across from her in that café right now, wearing Jessie’s dead husband’s Cartier watch and scrolling through my phone.

Nina orders a green tea and a muffin to take away.

She is chatty with the young man behind the counter and has a slightly flat northern tone to her voice, one I recognize as being from the east of the North, not the west, from where I come.

Maybe Harrogate? Beverley? I wonder how she ended up down here with a short man from Wanstead.

I wonder how they met. I wonder what it was about him that appealed to her.

A bit of rough, maybe? Or maybe Paddy Swann is somehow, in a way that is impossible for me to register, sexy?

He wasn’t rich when they met, that came later, so he must have been doing something, consciously or not, to make himself appear desirable.

I wonder what Nina Swann would make of me.

I feel physically at least we would make a better fit.

Though possibly not stylistically. I am more traditional than she is.

She wouldn’t like my sports jacket. She probably wouldn’t like my immaculate pale green polo shirt either.

But would she like me? My height? My presence?

My beauty? For a moment, I want her to look at me so that I can see how she reacts, but then I remember that I don’t want her to notice me, not yet.

So I move my gaze away from her and back to the screen of my phone, where I google the value of a Cartier watch the same style and model as the one on my wrist and discover that it is worth only ￡800.

When I look up again, Nina Swann has taken her green tea and her muffin and headed into work.