One Day, Page 22

  CHAPTER TEN

  Carpe Diem

  MONDAY 15 JULY 1996

  Leytonstone and Walthamstow

  Emma Morley lies on her back on the floor of the headmaster’s office, with her dress rucked up around her waist and exhales slowly through her mouth.

  ‘Oh, and by the way. Year Nine need new copies of Cider With Rosie.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ says the headmaster, buttoning up his shirt.

  ‘So while you’ve got me here on your carpet, is there anything else you’d like to discuss? Budget issues, Ofsted inspection? Anything you want to go over again?’

  ‘I’d like to go over you again,’ he says, laying down again and nuzzling her neck. It’s the kind of meaningless innuendo that Mr Godalming – Phil – specialises in.

  ‘What does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything.’ She tuts and shrugs him away and wonders why sex, even when enjoyable, leaves her so ill-tempered. They lie still for a moment. It’s six-thirty in the evening at the end of term and Cromwell Road Comprehensive has the eerie quiet of a school after hours. The cleaners have been round, the office door is closed and locked from the inside, but still she feels uneasy and anxious. Isn’t there meant to be some sort of afterglow, some sense of communion or well-being? For the last nine months she has been making love on institutional carpet, plastic chairs and laminated tables. Ever considerate of his staff, Phil has taken the foam cushion from the office armchair and it now rests beneath her hips, but even so she would one day like to have sex on furniture that doesn’t stack.

  ‘You know what?’ says the headmaster.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think you’re sensational,’ and he squeezes her breast for emphasis. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you for six weeks.’

  ‘At least it’ll give your carpet burn a chance to heal.’

  ‘Six whole weeks without you.’ His beard is scratching at her neck. ‘I’ll go crazy with desire—’

  ‘Well you’ve always got Mrs Godalming to fall back on,’ she says, hearing her own voice, sour and mean. She sits and pulls her dress down over her knees. ‘And anyway, I thought the long holidays were one of the perks of teaching. That’s what you told me. When I first applied . . .’

  Hurt, he looks up at her from the carpet. ‘Don’t be like this, Em.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The woman-scorned act.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I don’t like it anymore than you do.’

  ‘Except I think you do.’

  ‘No I don’t. Let’s not spoil it, eh?’ He places one hand on her back, as if consoling her. ‘This is our last time ’til September.’

  ‘Alright, I said sorry, okay?’ To mark a change in subject, she twists at the waist and kisses him, and is about to pull away when he places one hand on the nape of her neck and kisses her again with a gentle scouring action.

  ‘Christ, I’m going to miss you.’

  ‘You know what I think you should do?’ she says, her mouth on his. ‘It’s quite radical.’

  He looks at her anxiously. ‘Go on . . .’

  ‘This summer, soon as term’s over . . .’

  ‘Tell me.’

  She places one finger on his chin. ‘I think you should shave this off.’

  He goes to sit. ‘No way!’

  ‘All this time and I don’t know what you actually look like!’

  ‘This IS what I look like!’

  ‘But your face, your actual face. You might even be quite handsome.’ She puts her hand on his forearm, and pulls him back down. ‘Who’s behind the mask? Let me in, Phil. Let me know the real you.’

  They laugh for a while, comfortable again. ‘You’d be disappointed,’ he says, rubbing it like a favoured pet. ‘Anyway, it’s either this or shave three times a day. I used to shave in the morning but I looked like a burglar by lunch time. So I thought I’d let it grow, let it be my trademark.’

  ‘Oh, a trademark.’

  ‘It’s informal. The kids like it. Makes me look anti-authority.’

  Emma laughs again. ‘It’s not 1973, Phil. A beard means something different these days.’

  He shrugs defensively. ‘Fiona likes it. Says I have a weak chin otherwise.’ A silence follows, as it always does when his wife is mentioned. To lighten things he says, self-deprecatingly: ‘Of course you know the kids all call me The Beard.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware of that, no.’ Phil laughs and Emma smiles. ‘And anyway it’s not The Beard, it’s just Beard. No definite article, Monkey Boy.’

  He sits suddenly, frowning sternly. ‘Monkey Boy?’

  ‘That’s what they call you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The kids.’

  ‘Monkey Boy?’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Oops. Sorry.’

  He flops back down on the floor, sulky and hurt. ‘Can’t believe they call me Monkey Boy!’

  ‘Only in fun,’ she says, soothingly. ‘It’s affectionate.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound very affectionate.’ He rubs his chin, as if comforting a pet. ‘It’s because I’ve got too much testosterone, that’s all.’ The use of the word ‘testosterone’ is enough to perk him up, and he pulls Emma back towards the floor and kisses her once more. He tastes of staffroom coffee and the bottle of white wine he keeps in his filing cabinet.

  ‘I’ll get a rash,’ she says.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So people’ll know.’

  ‘Everyone’s gone home.’ His hand is on her thigh when the phone rings on the desk and he recoils as if bitten. He staggers to his feet.

  ‘Leave it!’ groans Emma.

  ‘I can’t leave it!’ He’s dragging on his trousers, as if talking to Fiona whilst naked from the waist down would be a betrayal too far, as if he’s terrified of sounding in some way bare-legged.

  ‘Hi, there! Hello, love! Yes, I know! Just walking out the door . . .’ Domestic issues are debated – pasta or stir-fry, TV or a DVD – and Emma distracts herself from her lover’s home life by retrieving her rolled-up underwear from beneath the desk where it lies with the paper-clips and pen tops. Dressing, she crosses to the window. There’s dust on the blades of the venetian blinds, outside a pink light hits the science block, and suddenly Emma wishes that she were in a park or on a beach or a European city square somewhere, just anywhere but here in this airless institutional room with a married man. How does it happen that you wake up one day, find yourself in your thirties and someone’s mistress? The word is repulsive, servile and she would rather not have it present in her mind, but can come up with no other. She is the boss’s mistress and the best that can be said of the circumstances is that at least there are no children involved.

  The affair – another awful word – began the previous September, after the disastrous holiday in Corfu, the engagement ring in the calamari. ‘I think we want different things’ was the best that she could come up with, and the rest of the long, long fortnight passed in a haze of sunburn and sulking, self-pity and anxiety about whether the jewellers would take the ring back. Nothing in the world could be more melancholy than that unwanted engagement ring. It sat in the suitcase in their hotel room, emanating sadness like radiation.

  She returned from the holiday looking brown and unhappy. Her mother, who knew about the proposal, who had practically bought her own dress for the wedding, raged and moaned at Emma for weeks until she began to question her rejection of the offer. But saying yes would feel like caving in, and Emma knew from novels that you should never cave in to marriage.

  The affair had settled it. During a routine meeting she had burst into tears in Phil’s office, and he had crossed from behind the desk, put his arm round her, and pressed his mouth to the top of her head, almost as if to say ‘at last’. After work, he took her to this place he’d heard of, a gastropub, where you could get a pint but the food was great too. They had rib-eye steaks and goat’s cheese salad, and as their knee
s made contact beneath the big wooden table she had let it all flood out. After the second bottle of wine, it was all just a formality; the hug that became a kiss in the taxi home, the brown internal envelope in her pigeon hole (about last night, can’t stop thinking about you, felt this way for years, we need to talk, when can we talk?).

  Everything Emma knew about adultery had come from TV dramas of the Seventies. She associated it with Cinzano and Triumph TR7s and cheese and wine parties, thought of it as something the middle-aged did, the middle classes mainly; golf, yachts, adultery. Now that she was actually involved in an affair – its paraphernalia of secret looks, hands held under tables, fondles in the stationery cupboard – she was surprised at how familiar it all was, and what a potent emotion lust could be, when combined with guilt and self-loathing.

  One night, after sex on the set of her Christmas production of Grease, he had solemnly handed her a gift-wrapped box.

  ‘It’s a mobile phone!’

  ‘In case I need to hear your voice.’

  Sitting on the bonnet of the Greased Lightning, she stared at the box and sighed. ‘Well I suppose it was bound to happen eventually.’

  ‘What’s up? Don’t you like it?’

  ‘No, it’s great.’ She smiled, remembering. ‘I just lost a bet with someone, that’s all.’

  Sometimes, walking and talking on a clear autumn evening in a secret part of Hackney Marshes, or giggling at the school carol service, drunk on mulled wine with their hips touching – sometimes she thought she was in love with Phillip Godalming. He was a good, principled, passionate teacher, if a little pompous sometimes. He had nice eyes, he could be funny. For the first time in her life she was the subject of an almost obsessive sexual infatuation. Of course, at forty-four he was far too old and his body, beneath the pelt, had that slipped doughy quality, but he was an earnest and intense lover, sometimes a little too intense for her liking; a face-puller, a talker. She found it hard to believe that the same man who stood in assembly to talk about the charity fun run would use that kind of language. Sometimes she wanted to break off during sex and say ‘Mr Godalming – you swore!’

  But nine months have passed now, the excitement has faded and she finds it harder to understand why she’s here, loitering in a school corridor on a beautiful summer’s evening. She should be with friends, or with a lover whom she’s proud of and can mention in front of other people. Sulky with guilt and embarrassment, she waits outside the boys’ loos while Phil washes himself with institutional soap. His Deputy Head of English and Theatre Studies and his mistress. Oh good God.

  ‘All done!’ he says, stepping out. He takes her hand in his, still damp from the washbasin, dropping it discreetly as they step out into the open air. He locks the main door, sets the alarm, and they walk to his car in the evening light, a professional distance apart, his leather briefcase occasionally banging the back of her shin.

  ‘I’d drive you to the tube, but—’

  ‘—best be on the safe side.’

  They walk a little further.

  ‘Four more days to go!’ he says jauntily, to fill the silence.

  ‘Where are you off to again?’ she asks, even though she knows.

  ‘Corsica. Walking. Fiona loves to walk. Walking, walking, walking, always walking. She’s like Gandhi. Then in the evening, off come the walking boots, out like a light . . .’

  ‘Phil, please – don’t.’

  ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ To change the subject, he asks, ‘How about you?’

  ‘Might see family in Yorkshire. Staying here, working mostly.’

  ‘Working?’

  ‘You know. Writing.’

  ‘Ah, the writing.’ Like everyone, he says it as if he doesn’t believe her. ‘It’s not about you and me, is it? This famous book?’

  ‘No it’s not.’ They’re at his car now, and she is keen to be gone. ‘And anyway, I don’t know if you and me are all that interesting.’

  He’s leaning against his blue Ford Sierra, gearing up for the big farewell, and now she has spoilt it. He frowns, bottom lip showing pink through his beard. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, just . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Phil, this, us. It doesn’t make me happy.’

  ‘You’re unhappy?’

  ‘Well, it’s not ideal is it? Once a week on an institutional carpet.’

  ‘You seemed pretty happy to me.’

  ‘I don’t mean satisfied. Good God, it’s not about sex, it’s the . . . circumstances.’

  ‘Well it makes me happy—’

  ‘Does it? Does it really though?’

  ‘As I recall it used to make you happy too.’

  ‘Excited I suppose, for a while.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Emma!’ He glares down at her as if she has been caught smoking in the girls’ loos. ‘I’ve got to go now! Why bring this up just as I’ve got to go?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘I mean for fuck’s sake, Emma!’

  ‘Hey! Don’t talk to me like that!’

  ‘I’m not, I just, I’m just . . . Let’s just get through the summer holiday, shall we? And then we’ll work out what to do.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do, is there? We either stop or we carry on, and I don’t think we should carry on . . .’

  He lowers his voice. ‘There is something else we can do . . . I can do.’ He looks around, then when he’s sure it’s safe he takes her hand. ‘I could tell her this summer.’

  ‘I don’t want you to tell her, Phil . . .’

  ‘While we’re away, or before even, next week . . .’

  ‘I don’t want you to tell her. There’s no point . . .’

  ‘Isn’t there?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Because I think there is, I think there might be.’

  ‘Fine! Let’s talk next term, let’s, I don’t know – pencil-in a meeting.’

  Heartened, he licks his lips, and checks once more for onlookers. ‘I love you, Emma Morley.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ she sighs. ‘Not really.’

  He tilts his chin down, as if peering at her over imaginary glasses. ‘I think that’s for me to decide, don’t you?’ She hates that headmasterly look and tone of voice. She wants to kick him in the shins.

  ‘You had better go,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll miss you, Em—’

  ‘Have a nice holiday, if we don’t talk—’

  ‘You’ve no idea how much I’ll miss you—’

  ‘Corsica, lovely—’

  ‘Every day—’

  ‘See you then, bye—’

  ‘Here . . .’ Raising his briefcase, using it a shield, he kisses her. Very discreet, she thinks, standing impassively. He opens the car door and steps in. A navy blue Sierra, a proper headmaster’s car, its glove compartment packed with Ordnance Survey maps. ‘Still can’t believe they call me Monkey Boy . . .’ he mumbles, shaking his head.

  She stands for a moment in the empty car park and watches him drive off. Thirty years old, barely in love with a married man, but at least there are no kids involved.

  Twenty minutes later, she stands beneath the window of the long, low red-brick building that contains her flat, and notices a light on in the living room. Ian is back.

  She contemplates walking off and hiding in the pub, or perhaps going round to see friends for the evening, but she knows that Ian will just sit in that armchair with the light off and wait, like an assassin. She takes a deep breath, and looks for her keys.

  The flat seems much bigger since Ian moved out. Stripped of the video box-sets, the chargers and adapters and cables, the vinyl in gatefold sleeves, it feels as if it has been recently burgled, and once again Emma is reminded of how little she has to show for the last eight years. She can hear a rustling from the bedroom. She puts down her bag and walks quietly towards the door.

  The contents of the chest of drawers are scattered on the floor: letters, bank statem
ents, torn paper wallets of photographs and negatives. She stands silent and unobserved in the doorway and watches Ian for a moment, snorting with the effort of reaching deep into the back of the drawer. He wears unlaced trainers, track-suit bottoms, an un-ironed shirt. It’s an outfit that has been carefully put together to suggest maximum emotional disarray. He is dressed to upset.

  ‘What are you doing, Ian?’

  He is startled, but only for a moment, after which he glares back indignantly, a self-righteous burglar. ‘You’re home late,’ he says, accusingly.

  ‘What’s that got to do with you?’

  ‘Just curious as to your whereabouts, that’s all.’

  ‘I had rehearsals. Ian, I thought we agreed you can’t just drop in like this.’

  ‘Why, got someone with you, have you?’

  ‘Ian, I am so not in the mood for this . . .’ She puts down her bag, takes off her coat. ‘If you’re looking for a diary or something, you’re wasting your time. I haven’t kept a diary for years . . .’

  ‘As a matter of fact I’m just getting my stuff. It is my stuff, you know, I do own it.’

  ‘You’ve got all your stuff.’

  ‘My passport. I don’t have my passport!’

  ‘Well I can tell you right now, it’s not in my underwear drawer.’ He is improvising of course. She knows that he has his passport, he just wanted to poke through her belongings and show her that he’s not okay. ‘Why do you need your passport? Are you going somewhere? Emigrating maybe?’

  ‘Oh you’d love that, wouldn’t you?’ he sneers.

  ‘Well I wouldn’t mind,’ she says, stepping over the mess and sitting on the bed.

  He adopts a gumshoe voice. ‘Well, tough shit, sweetheart, ’cause I ain’t going nowhere.’ As a jilted lover, Ian has found a commitment and aggression that he never possessed as a stand-up comedian, and he is certainly putting on quite a show tonight. ‘Couldn’t afford to anyway.’

  She feels like heckling him. ‘I take it you’re not doing a lot of stand-up comedy at the moment, then, Ian?’

  ‘What do you think, sweetheart?’ he says, putting his arms out to the side, indicating the stubble, the unwashed hair, the sallow skin; his look-what-you’ve-done-to-me look. Ian is making a spectacle of his self-pity, a one-man-show of loneliness and rejection that he’s been working up for the last six months and, tonight at least, Emma has no time for it.