“Nice for you.” She pulls her legs back. “Where are you going?”
“Barbados.”
“Barbados.” She can’t help the surprise in her voice. Barbados. Not camping in Brittany. Not some distant cousin’s cottage in rain-soaked Devon. Barbados doesn’t suggest the drudgery of a family holiday. It suggests luxury, white sand, a wife in a bikini. Barbados suggests a treat, a destination that implies their marriage is still of value. It suggests they might have sex.
“I don’t suppose there will be Internet access, and the phone will be difficult. Just so you know.”
“Radio silence.”
“Something like that.”
She doesn’t know what to say. She feels quietly furious with him, while conscious that she has no right to be. What has he ever promised her, after all?
“Still. There’s no such thing as a holiday with small children,” he says, taking a swig of his drink. “Just a change of venue.”
“Really?”
“You wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff you have to cart around. Bloody prams, high chairs, nappies . . .”
“I wouldn’t know.”
They sit in silence until the wine arrives. He pours her a glass, hands it to her. The silence expands, becomes overwhelming, catastrophic.
“I can’t help the fact that I’m married, Ellie,” he says eventually. “I’m sorry if it hurts you, but I can’t not go on holiday because—”
“—it makes me jealous,” she finishes. She hates the way it makes her sound. Hates herself for sitting there like some sulking teenager. But she’s still absorbing the significance of Barbados, the knowledge that for two weeks she will be trying not to imagine him making love to his wife.
This is where I should walk away, she tells herself, picking up her glass. This is where any sensible person pulls together the remnants of their self-respect, announces that they deserve more, and walks off to find someone who can give them a whole self, not snatched lunchtimes and haunted, empty evenings.
“Do you still want me to come back to yours?”
He is watching her carefully, his whole face an apology, etched with the understanding of what he’s doing to her. This man. This minefield. “Yes,” she says.
There is a hierarchy in newspaper offices, and librarians are somewhere near the bottom. Not quite as low as canteen staff or security guards, but nowhere near the columnists, editors, and reporters who compose the action section, the face of the publication. They are support staff, invisible, undervalued, there to do the bidding of those who are more important. But no one seems to have explained this to the man in the long-sleeved T-shirt. “We’re not taking requests today.” He points up at a handwritten notice taped to what had been the counter.
Sorry—no access to archive until Monday.
Most requests can be answered online—pls try their first, and x3223 in an emergency.
When she looks up again, he’s gone.
She might have been offended, but she’s still thinking about John, the way he shook his head as he pulled his shirt back over his head an hour previously. “Wow,” he had said, tucking the tail into his waistband. “I’ve never had angry sex before.”
“Don’t knock it,” she had replied, made flippant by temporary release. She was lying on top of the duvet, staring out through the skylight at the gray October clouds. “It’s better than angry no-sex.”
“I liked it.” He had leaned over and kissed her. “I quite like the idea of you using me. A mere vehicle for your pleasure.”
She had thrown a pillow at him. He had been wearing that look, his face somehow softened, the look he’d worn when he was still locked into her. The look he’d worn when he was hers.
“Do you think it would be easier if the sex wasn’t so good?” she asked, pushing her hair out of her eyes.
“Yes. And no.”
Because you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the sex?
She had pushed herself upright, suddenly awkward. “Right,” she had said briskly. She had kissed his cheek, and then, for good measure, his ear. “I need to get to the office. Lock the door on your way out.” She padded into the bathroom.
Conscious of his surprise, she had closed the door behind her and turned on the cold tap so that it gushed noisily down the plughole. She perched on the rim of the bath and listened to him walking through to the living room, perhaps to get his shoes, then the footfall outside the door.
“Ellie? Ellie?”
She didn’t respond.
“Ellie, I’m going now.”
She waited.
“I’ll speak to you soon, gorgeous.” He rapped twice on the door, and then he was gone.
She had sat there for almost ten minutes after she’d heard the front door slam.
The man reappears as she’s about to leave. He’s carrying two teetering boxes of files and is about to push open a door with his rear and disappear again. “Still here?”
“You’ve spelt ‘there’ wrong.” She points at the notice.
He glances at it. “Just can’t get the staff these days, can you?” He turns toward the door.
“Don’t go! Please!” She leans over the counter, brandishes the folder he’d given her. “I need to look at some of your 1960s newspapers. And I wanted to ask you something. Can you remember where you found that stuff you gave me?”
“Roughly. Why?”
“I . . . There was something in it. A letter. I thought it might make a good feature if I could flesh it out a little.”
He shakes his head. “Can’t do it now. Sorry—we’re flat out with the move.”
“Please, please, please! I need to get something together by the end of the weekend. I know you’re really busy, but I only need you to show me. I’ll do the rest.”
He has untidy hair, and his long-sleeved T-shirt is tracked with dust. An unlikely librarian—he looks as if he should be surfing on books, rather than stacking them.
He blows out his cheeks, dumps the box on the end of the counter. “Okay. What kind of letter?”
“It’s this.” She pulls the envelope out of her pocket.
“Not a lot to go on,” he says, glancing at it. “A PO box and an initial.”
He’s curt. She wishes she hadn’t made that crack about the spelling. “I know. I just thought if you had any more in there, I might be able to—”