Hold on. Phone. The screen stills.
Phone. His wife? He was in a hotel room in Dublin. It overlooked the water, he had told her. You would love it. What was she meant to say to that? Then bring me next time? Too demanding. I’m sure I would? Sounded almost sarcastic. Yes, she had replied, finally, and let out a long, unheard sigh.
It’s all her own fault, her friends tell her. Unusually for her, Ellie Haworth can’t disagree.
She had met him at a book festival in Suffolk, sent to interview this thriller writer who had made a fortune after he had given up on moreliterary offerings. His name is John Armor, his hero, Dan Hobson, an almost cartoonish amalgam of old-fashioned masculine traits. She had interviewed him over lunch, expecting a rather chippy defense of the genre, perhaps a few moans about the publishing industry—she always found writers rather wearying to interview. She had expected someone paunchy, middle-aged, puddingy after years of being deskbound. But the tall, tanned man who rose to shake her hand had been lean and freckly, resembling a weathered South African farmer. He was funny, charming, self-deprecating, and attentive. He had turned the interview on her, asking her questions about herself, then told her his theories on the origin of language and how he believed communication was morphing into something dangerously flaccid and ugly.
When the coffee arrived, she realized she hadn’t put pen to notepad for almost forty minutes.
“Don’t you love the sound of them, though?” she’d said, as they left the restaurant and headed back toward the literary festival. It was late in the year and the winter sun had dipped below the low buildings of the quieting high street. She had drunk too much, had reached the point at which her mouth would race off defiantly before she had worked out what she should say. She hadn’t wanted to leave the restaurant.
“Which ones?”
“Spanish. Mostly Italian. I’m sure it’s why I love Italian opera, and I can’t stand the German ones. All those hard, guttural noises.” He had considered this, and his silence unnerved her. She began to stutter: “I know it’s terribly unfashionable, but I love Puccini. I love that high emotion. I love the curling r, the staccato of the words . . .” She tailed away as she heard how ridiculously pretentious she sounded.
He paused in a doorway, gazed briefly up the road behind them, then turned back to her. “I don’t like opera.” He had stared at her directly as he said it. As if it was a challenge. She felt something give, deep in the pit of her stomach. Oh, God, she thought.
“Ellie,” he said, after they had stood there for almost a minute. It was the first time he had called her by name. “Ellie, I have to pick up something from my hotel before I go back to the festival. Would you like to come with me?”
Even before he shut the bedroom door behind them, they were on each other, bodies pressed together, mouths devouring, locked together as their hands performed the urgent, frantic choreography of undressing.
Afterward she would look back on her behavior and marvel as if at some kind of aberration seen from afar. In the hundreds of times she had replayed it, she had rubbed away the significance, the overwhelming emotion, and was left only with details. Her underwear, everyday, inappropriate, flung across a trouser press; the way they had giggled insanely on the floor afterward underneath the multipatterned synthetic hotel quilt; how he had cheerfully, and with inappropriate charm, handed back his key to the receptionist later that afternoon.
He had called two days later, as the euphoric shock of that day was segueing into something more disappointing.
“You know I’m married,” he said. “You read my cuttings.”
I’ve Googled every last reference to you, she told him silently.
“I’ve never been . . . unfaithful before. I still can’t quite articulate what happened.”
“I blame the quiche,” she quipped, wincing.
“You do something to me, Ellie Haworth. I haven’t written a word in forty-eight hours.” He paused. “You make me forget what I want to say.”
Then I’m doomed, she thought, because as soon as she had felt his weight against her, his mouth on hers, she had known—despite everything she had ever said to her friends about married men, everything she had ever believed—that she required only the faintest acknowledgment from him of what had happened for her to be lost.
A year on, she still hadn’t begun to look for a way out.
He comes back online almost forty-five minutes later. In this time she has left her computer, fixed herself another drink, wandered the flat aimlessly, peering at her skin in a bathroom mirror, then gathering up stray socks and hurling them into the laundry basket. She hears the ping of a message and hurls herself into her chair.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to be so long. Hope to speak tomorrow.
No mobile-phone calls, he had said. Mobile bills were itemized.
Are you in hotel now? she types rapidly. I could call you in your room. The spoken word was a luxury, a rare opportunity. God, but she just needed to hear his voice.
Got to go to a dinner, gorgeous. Sorry—behind already. Later x.
And he is gone.
She stares at the empty screen. He will be striding off through the hotel foyer now, charming the reception staff, climbing into whatever car the festival has organized for him. Tonight he will give a clever off-the-cuff speech over dinner and then be his usual bemused, slightly wistful self to those lucky enough to sit at his table. He will be out there, living his life to the full, when she seems to have put hers perennially on hold.
What the hell is she doing?
“What the hell am I doing?” she says aloud, hitting the off button. She shouts her frustration at the bedroom ceiling, flops down on her vast, empty bed. She can’t call her friends: they’ve endured these conversations too many times, and she can guess what their response will be—what it can only be. The irony is, if it had been any of them, she would have said exactly the same thing.
She sits on the sofa, flicks on the television. Finally, glancing at the pile of papers at her side, she hauls them on to her lap, cursing Melissa. A miscellaneous pile, the librarian had said, cuttings that bore no date and had no obvious category—“I haven’t got time to go through them all. We’re turning up so many piles like this.” He was the only librarian under fifty down there. She wondered, fleetingly, why she’d never noticed him before.
“See if there’s anything that’s of use to you.” He had leaned forward conspiratorially. “Throw away whatever you don’t want, but don’t say anything to the boss. We’re at the stage now when we can’t afford to go through every last bit of paper.”