Exposure Page 11

  Luke was astonished it didn't upset her. She contrived to ignore it and drew him over to ooh and aah at improbable diamonds, like a child at a fireworks display, or to gaze at comparatively cheap shoes and handbags, which he bought for her in relief.

  In a bookshop one afternoon, she flicked through a collection of photographs of all her favourite actresses—Hepburn, Monroe, Grace Kelly. Her face was quiet with admiration, tenderly at peace in her dreams. He watched her lovingly. This was being in love, he said to himself. Not that he had doubted it for one second. After all, what else could it be?

  He was moved by everything she did. From excitement to sadness to peace: all in the course of one afternoon, one meal. She had broadened the spectrum of his emotions and afterwards she kept him hurrying constantly from one end to the other, as if she wanted to keep the blood in his cheeks.

  Just then he wanted to kiss her and he wanted to stand back and look. Delicious agony! He turned the pages of a book of aerial photographs of the earth—mountains, seas, deserts—and felt no shred of desire to glance down. What did these miracles matter beside Arianne in a slouchy blue T-shirt, which flaunted the chilli-red strap of her bra?

  Suddenly a movement caught his eye. Behind a set of shelves a man in a long grey coat was scrutinizing her through a gap in the books, his hand moving frantically inside his trousers. Luke stared in horror. Suddenly, more than anything, he wanted her not to see this abomination. It was essential that she did not know this was happening. He stood in front of the bookshelf and said, 'Let me buy it for you, Arianne?'

  She gazed up as if he had woken her. 'What?'

  'The book.'

  'The book?'

  'Yes—come on, sleepy. Let's get it. I want to buy it for you.'

  He tried to take it out of her hands and move towards the cash desk, but she held him still. She laughed as she surveyed the forest of shopping-bags around her feet and threw her arms round him saying no one had ever been so kind to her before. They bought her nothing but underwear, she said: knickers, bras, suspender belts—things for them, not really for her. But he was different. Why was he different? She was not good enough for him, she said. She seemed close to tears.

  And all he wanted was for her not to see the man in the grey coat. He was wild with it. He spun her round—and she hopped on her good leg as if they were dancing—towards the cash desk. He returned a false, tense smile to her laughing face and wondered why he was quite so afraid. Did he think he was preserving her innocence? She had, after all, proved to be aware of what men kept in their trousers. Or was there some risk to himself? Was it the intrusion he hated, the sense of another man scrawling graffiti where he was writing all he knew about love?

  'Come on, let's get this book and get out of here,' he said, his heart racing, his cheeks hot with panic. She closed her eyes for a second, then put out her hand and followed him.

  When they got home, she studied the book for hours, showing him the pictures and calling out as he cooked supper about how beautiful the clothes were. She told him stories about her mother. They were all anecdotes about admirers and the presents they had given her; they sounded implausible, like the product of her mother's misty nostalgia and vanity. But Arianne told them with the childhood faith that had first carried them into her consciousness. Her eyes widened and moved quickly around the room as she spoke. There had been pearl necklaces, diamond bracelets, roses, sonnets—one with the phrase 'AMOR VINCIT OMNIO' diagonally in both directions! Once there had been a magnum of champagne and two dozen lilies left modestly on the doorstep, only to be taken away by the dustman. That was funny!

  Oh, it had all been a buttoning and unbuttoning of white kid ball gloves, the way Arianne told it. She sighed and laughed. 'And sometimes they played hands of poker or roulette to see who would be allowed to ask her to dance. You can't imagine that now, can you? Not these days. The clubs we go to. The way men are.'

  'She sounds amazing,' Luke said, stroking her hair.

  'Oh, she was so beautiful.'

  'Like you, then.'

  She looked insulted.' God, no. Much more beautiful than I am. I'm just nothing. She was the most beautiful woman my father ever saw, let alone met. He still says so.'

  Luke almost said, 'But your father was unfaithful to her from the start,' because this was something Arianne had told him with tears in her eyes, something she said she could 'never forget'. She had gripped his arm when she told him as if she wanted him never to forget it either—and he half wondered if she expected him to apologize in some way.

  Her father had been serially and humiliatingly unfaithful to her mother. Arianne had watched him seduce other men's wives at their Christmas parties, she had walked in on him once, with a half-naked red-headed girl, in her own bedroom. And, from the age of five, she had knowingly observed her mother's attempts to laugh off the other women, to ignore the brazen telephone calls in the night. Mrs Tate was widely thought to be a model of restraint, but Arianne had twice come home from ballet to find her mother unconscious. She telephoned for the ambulance with the empty pill bottle in her hand.

  Of course, her father had been sorry for all the mess. Max Tate had been so desperately sorry that he had had little kiddy-sized evening dresses made to appeal to his daughter's developing tastes. Rolling his fond eyes, he allowed her to try out his girlfriend's makeup, then whisked her off for dinner and champagne, calling her 'my darling', indulging her sweet, seven-year-old's fantasy that they were husband and wife.

  Luke wondered how she had suddenly forgotten all this horror. It seemed that the beautiful stories could be separated from the ugly ones in her imagination. It would have felt sacrilegious to force them together but, even so, he found that he wanted to—desperately. He was afraid of the distant, half-ecstatic look in her eyes, of the sheer fantasy in which she could plainly exist. He had an urge to shake her out of it with rough facts, because this was another means by which she got away, leaving him alone with his fear that she might get bored of him. But he felt so tenderly for her that all he could do was stroke her hair and her neck and let her talk.

  That evening she did not appear to want to have sex with him. She put her head on his shoulder and tucked her legs up under her sweater. They drank a bottle of Chianti and made a dent in the lasagne Rosalind had taught him to make and which he always forgot was designed to serve six. Then Arianne said she was tired. She usually slept naked but that night she put on one of his shirts when she went to bed. When she fell asleep, she was holding the fluffy rabbit and he felt almost brutal, dangerous and hairy, getting in and lying beside her. Ought he to sleep on the sofa? She was so tired and she had recently complained that he snored. Again, his heart ached with a protectiveness he did not know how to express; he tried to, awkwardly, stroking her face and knocking a glass off the bedside table with his elbow. Thankfully she was too deeply asleep to be disturbed.

  After all that, it came as quite a surprise that she woke him at six the next morning by unbuttoning her shirt, climbing on top of him and whispering ferociously in his ear. She bit his neck so hard that she made a ring of purple bruises. She unhinged the headboard from the wall.

  Chapter 6

  Luke was finding it more and more difficult to persuade himself to go to work. He called in and tested Sebastian's non-hierarchical compassion. He used an impressionistic excuse he had once heard Adrian Sand call on: he said he had 'issues at home' and he might just use the laptop if that was all right.

  'Of course it's all right,' Sebastian said. 'It's not like you're one of our dossers and skivers, Luke. I hope it all gets sorted quickly, mate.'

  Meaning to be honest, Luke switched on the laptop, bracing his hangover against the sunrise graphics, the euphoric trill—then he went back to bed, to warm pastures of Arianne.

  Love seemed to Luke to be a decadent kind of resignation. He saw no reason to go out into the world any more. Having abandoned every other important aspect of his life—work, friends, family—he found he had never been h
appier. And yet, at times, he would catch sight of his placidly grinning face in a mirror and be struck by a rising panic: surely there was something he ought to be doing. Arianne would get bored of his grin, wouldn't she? Would she? What did she expect from him?

  He glanced at her through the kitchen doorway where she stood nonchalantly in a devastating litde pink bra and a pair of his boxer shorts, trying to open a bottle of Coke. She struggled for a moment and then she hurled the bottle violently into the bin—as if to punish it.

  Of course she would get bored of his stupid grin! It was a sickening inevitability. Surely there was something the man was meant to do so the woman didn't get bored.

  He wished there was some act of heroism he could perform. Flickering in his mind was the iconography of all the Hollywood films he had ever seen: the men who threw themselves in front and took the bullet, the men who leapt out of helicopters to rescue the weak from the icy sea.

  But all he could do was carry her up and down the stairs and, after a while, Arianne seemed unimpressed. He really couldn't blame her. She lay back in his arms, requiring this gesture at the very least, her eyes skipping over the wallpaper as they moved.

  One evening he watched her putting on her makeup, sipping from a glass of wine he held for her, telling him something spiteful and funny about one of the girls in her drama class. He was not really hearing what she said. In a riot of pride and fear of losing her, he was thinking Arianne was the girl he would always have dreamt of—if only he had been blessed with the imagination. But she was an idea too amazing for the scope of his expectations. He watched her dab rouge on her cheeks and draw neat black lines beneath her eyes. He found himself terrifyingly, deliriously unable to predict her next move.

  His relationship with Lucy had made him unhappy precisely because it had made him powerful. He had hated his capacity to devastate her hopes with a casual word. Strangely, her vulnerability came to seem ruthless because it caused him to feel so much guilt. She built intricate symbolism round the things she asked of him, investing some stupid party or lunch arrangement with all of her hopes: they were like glass cathedrals.

  He and Lucy had gruelling diary sessions together.

  'Oh, OK. No, that's fine. Well, are you free for lunch on the twenty-seventh, then? It's Mummy's birthday, Luke. They're doing a lunch in the country. I mean, Hannah and Sam are going, and Jane and Benjy...' (Men who were going to marry you went to your mother's birthday lunch. Men who really loved you did not put their work before an important family occasion. He watched her thinking it out. And he thought she was right. He resented her—at times he hated her—for being right. Was the casualness in his voice designed to impose a sense of proportion, or to knock her out with just how far she was from winning?)

  'Oh, Luce, I can't. I've got to work. There's the—er—the big presentation that Monday.' And then he would have to watch the glass cathedral shatter behind her eyes, to see the disappointment twitching across her mouth.

  'Oh, yes, of course. I must have forgotten,' she said. She wrote, 'L—PRESENTATION!!!' in rather manic capitals across the whole of Monday—as if it would be her sole preoccupation that day.

  His ego might have been flattered by the control he had over her. Friends said as much with envy. But he hated it. Power only appeals to those who feel healthier, safer, for denying others their humanity. Having grown up with two parents who had done all they could to make their good marriage and the decency of their friends seem like an inalienable right, Luke had a lot of faith in the natural justice of the world. Not in Africa, perhaps, no: obviously he saw that in hot, war-torn places things were different, but here, in England, people were essentially lucky and good and he trusted them. He was conscious only of a fear of loneliness, rather than the more distorting fear of betrayal.

  Consequently love had always sounded to him like a semi-religious experience, a displacement of the ego, an absorption into another. In other words, love was the exact opposite of the power he had over Lucy. All he wanted was to get closer—always closer—to Arianne. He could not bear to lose her for even a second to any of her modes of escape.

  By the end of the month, Luke felt his arrival at work noted in a way it never had been before. He saw the way ambitious younger colleagues looked up, then quickly down again as he rushed in late, saying, 'Sorry, guys,' aware that he smelt of cigarettes and that he had toothpaste at the corner of his mouth.

  He began to eat lunch at his desk to show dedication. Twelve thirty came and, very conspicuously, he didn't move. The others all got up, of course, but he merely clickety-clicked his mouse and called out, 'Have fun, you lot,' to the frivolous young. He felt like an idiot behaving this way. Eating at your desk was miserable and he spilt soy sauce right into his keyboard where it congealed into a tar-like substance, which, it occurred to him, also looked disturbingly like dried blood.

  During one of these desk-lunches, his assistant, Jenny, came over and told him, with a mixture of concern and spite, that his absences had been mentioned in a board meeting. Perversely, faced with fact rather than paranoid fantasy, he found it hard to care. He offered her a California roll.

  'Oooh, yummy, thanks. So, what's going on?' she said. He grinned at her and she shook her head. 'Oh dear. I hope it's legal.' She put the roll into her mouth. 'They're good, these. You go to that posh place on the corner, don't you? How the other half live.'

  She looked plump and forgiving in her straining pink shirt, the black trousers taut round her crossed legs. He appreciated her gentle mockery—mostly because he was beginning to feel afraid that he was losing control of his job and her winking and smiling somehow domesticated this fear. He wanted to think of a reason to ask her to stay, to eat her lunch at the desk with him, be an ally against the younger faces, who were all plainly wondering if Arianne was going to leave him. (No, that wasn't it. They knew nothing about Arianne, for God's sake. He had to get a grip.)

  But it turned out that Jenny had her own work to get on with. She slid off the desk with a tight scrape of the lining of her trousers against her tights. 'Righty-ho. Shall I print off that file Damian Green sent or shall I just email?'

  Her sudden professionalism hurt his feelings. 'Oh. Um—just zap it out. I've got a copy. Yes, do that. Thanks.' He wanted her to ask him again if everything was OK, because just then he would have liked to tell her all about Arianne. He would have liked to go out for coffee with smiling, plump Jenny and tell her about his intense fear of losing his girlfriend. He would have liked to hear her smiling, plump interpretation of it all. Was it normal, the panic he felt when Arianne looked away, out of a window or deep into her glass? Was it standard, during supper, to feel you were plummeting down a lift-shaft?

  A few nights before, in one of her desperate moods, Arianne had said, 'I have to get my fucking life together, Luke. I need some stability. I have to set up some things I can believe in. You know? Why is it so fucking hard?'

  She hurled a hairbrush against the wall and it bounced back on to the floor and skidded towards them on its bristles. They watched it slow down and stop.

  'Hey, you've got me, Arianne. I'm stable, aren't I? I love you.' He tried to undo the shirt she was putting on and she slapped away his hand.

  'I'm being serious, Luke. I mean real stability— money, career.' She sighed deeply and slugged back her wine.

  Luke thought how much he would have liked to see Jenny's face listening, nodding, the shiny pink lips pressed together in sympathy. Could he look pitiful and regain her attention? He watched her walking away across the open-plan office, the whistling prairie. Was it normal, this desire to ask everyone what they thought of the most private details of his life? Perhaps he should call his mother, he thought. He looked at his phone to see if Arianne had sent a text message. She had not.

  Why? Why had she not sent a text message? Just three weeks ago she had sent him one or two an hour.

  He tried to control his breathing and opened an email from Lindsey Wicks at Calmaderm.

&nb
sp; Without discussing it, Arianne and Luke began to see friends together, rather than spending all their time alone. Luke thought the stimulation would do her good. In fact, he found it did him good, too. One night, at a dinner party at Ludo's flat, he was happily surprised to see Jessica, who had recently been working all hours on some kind of a film and was known to refuse all invitations if she had a job.

  At the start of the evening, looking disappointed, Ludo had told Luke that Jessica couldn't make it because of work. But at around ten thirty she called and said she had finished early and were there any leftovers? Ludo told her to come quickly because the tiramisu looked positively X-rated. It turned out she was already on the doorstep with a bottle of wine.

  It was typical of her. She was ravenously hungry and she happily ate the tepid remains of the couscous and two helpings of tiramisu and Luke spent the rest of the evening catching up with her. She was co-producing a documentary and the things she told him about the filming genuinely fascinated him. Luke loved taking photographs and had once dreamt of doing a course, but it had not been something he felt he could mention to anyone. He had taken a lot of photographs during his gap-year, and he still did whenever he went on holiday, but it was a peculiar fact that he had never taken any in England. Not a single shot. Somehow, in his own country, he was always conscious of the judgement of his father or his sister—and he felt sure that even his mother would think photographs were just a big nothing in comparison to oil painting. And, anyway, he knew perfectly well that he wasn't creative. He was an account manager.

  He and Jessica had a natural, easy friendship and, for a few moments, he was consciously glad to be free of the obligation to please Arianne. He felt himself relax and simply enjoy another person's company. Talking to Jessica was like crossing the equator to a temperate climate.