Homesick Read online

  “Yes, Clare. A long time ago, we were … friends.”

  No, no. I do not want to know about a long time ago. “Ah,” I say. Is it one of those times when I can say, Everyone died, you know?

  “I was at Teddy Hall with—”

  “Yes.” He was at the same college as Rob. That’s all. Someone will have told him already, which is why he has been hesitant. I must remember to take for granted people’s need to inform.

  “You were at?”

  “Somerville.”

  “Yes. That’s right. I remember. I remember you well.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” I say, and I’m trying not to be angsty or rude, but am I? I question whether I really know what I’m trying for. Everything is out of my hands, everything is inevitably lost in that mist of death, that thing they call bereavement, where people are secretly alive and you hear children’s voices in the house when you wake, you hear their laughter. Decisions are over there. The way you decide to say something, the way you play with words, or your glass or your hair or the way your toes shift or the way you fuck Bunny, it’s all decided in that moment, that moment before you quite wake up, where you see the bulk next to you, and you put your hand on Bunny’s back and think it’s Rob—but, silly, Rob never stayed in bed longer than you, so who is this, and you open your eyes, and beautiful Bunny face is there, his eyes shut like a child’s, like a daughter’s—all over there, the way you choose to smile.

  “I’m Gwyn. I was Andy’s friend.” Andy was our best man. I remember Gwyn and Andy, likely lads, lots of girlfriends, taking the piss out of Rob because he loved me and I loved him and we didn’t hide being in love but adored each other and spent days in bed worshipping each other.

  “Oh, Gwyn. I remember now.” And I do remember now, which is a shame, because I might cry, and I never cry. I never cry in front of people I work with. I never cry at all, hardly, except maybe with Bunny, and even then it’s when I’m half asleep, so it’s my brain doing it. Brave face, brave face, I say. Say the thing you say. “You know everyone died,” I say.

  Strangely, he pulls his shoulders back. He stands up taller. “Yes.” He smiles. “I know.” He sips at his glass, and I sip at mine. He moves sideways and stands next to me to let a waiter pass. I like this man a little, because he stands shoulder to shoulder with me yet says nothing, as if we are facing off against the world, just for these few minutes. “I was watching you,” he says.

  “Yes, I saw you watching me. Was it because you remembered me?”

  “Yes. But something more,” he says, and we are separated by a party of girls conga-ing toward the dance floor. The room is darkening, and the disco lights begin their sweeping search. He comes back. “Something more.” He smiles.

  We’re at this thing, you see, and he tells me of me. He says: “D’you remember that summer ball when Rob was in halls and the rest of us weren’t? D’you remember that way we used to all say we need a sitting-out room, where we leave our coats and where we can come back if we need to sit down or take a girl? And Rob said we could use his room?”

  “Were Rob and I together—”

  “Oh, yes. Of course. Of course …,” he says, and he puts his drink down, guides my elbow so we stand nearer the door to the garden. It is quieter, although the bar is here, but only quiet voices. Bunny is forgotten. I don’t want Bunny, I don’t know Bunny. I want this voice; I want Gwyn to keep talking. “Do you remember Andy and I came first, and you were getting changed. You were in an emerald green dress, and Andy said you looked like a leprechaun?”

  I laugh. “Bloody Andy.”

  “Bloody Andy,” he agrees, and I see he is weighing words, balancing one against the other.

  “What?” I say.

  “Bloody Andy. You looked just near enough to fucking perfect anyone has ever looked, before or since.” I am silenced. He is silent.

  “Gwyn,” I say. He smiles. I try to change the subject. “Are you married?”

  He laughs. “No, this isn’t one of those ‘I fell in love with you and have been hunting you down ever since and here you are’ stories.” And I laugh now. “But I did fall in love. In Oxford, everyone was in love with everyone else. We were all in love with each other, so I thought it no different. Oh, what the hell. It’s only when I saw you, just now, that I realised that actually, well, you—in that dress—that that could have been one of those times … you know—those times.” And when he says it like that, I lean to him, as if he had dragged me there. I lean my chest onto his and I kiss him. He is surprised. He doesn’t back away, and his kiss back is clumsy and mistaken.

  “I’m sorry, but I haven’t known—I mean, I haven’t felt,” I say, and he takes my elbow again and we are in the garden. It is a clear night, cold, moonless, black. He takes his jacket off. “Little Gwyn,” I say.

  “Little?” He is incredulous. “I’m six foot,” he says, his Welsh accent only now coming through.

  “Yes, but the other Gwyn was a prop forward or something, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.” We sit on a bench, and he puts the jacket around me. “How are you?” he asks.

  “What, now? Or generally?”

  “Whichever.”

  “Oh. I don’t really answer that, usually. Only if my therapist asks. Let’s see. I’m … starved,” I say, and I mean it. He goes to stand.

  “I’ll get you something,” he says.

  “No, I mean: I feel hungry for everything. Life. Love. Sex. I’m desperate for sex.”

  “But—what about …”

  “Bunny? Yes, we have sex, but I mean, I want to have sex in my head, the way it was when I was married for twenty years—that sex. Are you married? Do you know what I mean?”

  “No. I’m not married. Never wanted to be. I live alone. I have girlfriends. I remember my parents locking the door on Saturday afternoons. Every Saturday afternoon. I always wondered what that must have been like.”

  “It’s comfort and joy.”

  We sit there for an hour or more, talking and not talking, and then his hand is on my thigh. I think, I like his hand on my thigh. Perhaps it will go higher. And it does, and he takes my hand and puts it onto his crotch, the hardness there, and in the dark, Gwyn could be Rob, and yes, in the dark, we put the jacket down and I lift my skirts, and in the dark, my face changes, because in the dark, there is the love, in my head, there is Rob and Gwyn mixed together, and my face smiles as he kisses my breasts, and my face smiles as he comes.

  We’re at this thing, I think. We’re here, and we’ve fucked, and I feel the wetness, take his handkerchief to wipe it away, and I hear Bunny calling, and my hair is down.

  “Do you remember,” he says, “the day after the ball?”

  “No,” I say. But suddenly I do.

  After the ball, a June day slipped through our window—

  Bunny shouts, “Clare!”

  And the windows were wide open, and I woke to the noises of scaffolding thrown down, the packing-away of a marquee. Rob lying next to me in his single bed. We took our clothes off? No, we lay down on the bed, tired and drunk, and pulled the leftover coats over us, but as the sun had invaded the high ceiling, we had warmed and toasted, and I had pushed the coats from me and woken muzzily into sunshine on my face, on my neck, on my breasts. I woke, and now I remember—

  “Oh, Clare,” Bunny says as he sees Gwyn. And I hold him closer, our diagonal bodies pull toward each other to deflect him—

  I woke and Gwyn was there, and I lay next to Rob, naked, and he stood there.

  “I’ve come for my coat,” he said.

  “OK,” I said, and lay still, then reached down to pull my dress back up.

  “Don’t,” he whispered. I was embarrassed, ashamed. “Go away, Gwyn,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Rob was drunk, heavily asleep. Gwyn did not leave but looked at me still.

  “Do you remember what I said?” Gwyn asks.

  He stepped closer. “Clare,” he whispered.

  “You
said, ‘I think I’m in love with you,’ ” and I feel Gwyn’s smile in the dark against my shoulder.

  “Do you remember what you said?”

  “No,” I say, because I don’t want to remember.

  “You said, ‘In a different life, Gwyn,’ ” and I pull myself away.

  That June day I was angry: I hated his eyes, hated that he had eaten me with those eyes. But when the thing starts to break up, we go home together. In the morning I wake to an empty bed—but he is there, watching, waiting, and I scoop him back: I hold him, for the comfort, for the joy.

  At the Barn Dance

  They had been sitting outside as the sky began to rest down on the crowd, its colours descending from pinks and peaches to every hue of blue and navy, like a dancer’s tiered skirt. The trees thrust upward as if to guard them from the inevitable night. The hall, overly lit by garish oranges that did not try to mimic the day but produced their own unique blend of the present and fashion, became the focal point for the two hundred people milling about the barbecue and salads. The woman sitting next to Preethi spoke.

  “But it’s a lovely name, it sounds like ‘Pretty,’ ” and she patted Preethi’s hand. Preethi had heard this summation of her name many times before, yet she smiled, laughed a little, even: the woman meant well, and what was that, a small politeness to an old woman?

  Preethi said, “I didn’t catch your name?” and the woman shook her head, as if shaking off the question and the need to answer. The music had begun to play, and a few of the younger secretaries whooped and laughed.

  “Imagine,” said the woman, watching them, “never having to rush home because children need to be picked up from school or dinner needs to be made? Can you remember a time when you stayed late at work because you wanted to and then went off to the pub?”

  Preethi could remember it, in London, a long time ago. She looked at the girls in their tiny skirts and boots and cowboy hats, and she smiled wryly. They are half my age, she thought. They are getting drunk and acting stupid the way I did the year they were born.

  A man’s voice echoed out to them from the hall.

  “This caller is very good. I’ve been to a wedding where they played. Exhausting!” The woman laughed, her eyes turned up to the sky wearily.

  Preethi stood. She would find Simon. He had promised not to leave her alone: she knew few people from his workplace, and although they were all pleasant, friendly people, she felt her status as an outsider. No one knew her. They knew the image she presented them on these occasions: this early summer barn dance or a Christmas ball, where she ladled on the diamonds and the kohl, rubbed her teeth nervously with a tissue for fear of lipstick smiles. She was not effete or fragrant. She did not groom as other wives did. Preethi was rough and ready, calloused hands from her garden, earth staining her palms the colour of the rest of her skin.

  The previous Christmas, Simon’s PA, Emma, stared at Preethi’s hands, with the fingernails uneven and unpainted, and she was ashamed. Simon teased her on the way home, and in the dark she said coldly that he should stop. He took her literally and stopped the car.

  “It isn’t important,” he said. “She’s not important.”

  “But it is,” Preethi grumbled, not knowing why. She was never the first to point out her colour to anyone, never the one to shout “racism” like it was a trigger to be pulled. She just felt it, the burden of Emma’s stare. As Simon started the car she looked down at her hands in the dark, and even there, in her lap, they were the wrong colour, like an admonishment.

  “She makes me feel I’m not good enough for you,” she said finally.

  “Well you are, and she’s a bitch,” he said, pulling onto the dual carriageway. In the yellow blinks of fast motorway lamps, Preethi and Simon’s colours equalised to beige.

  “Si!” a girl screeched as Preethi walked into the hall. Simon did not turn from the person he was speaking to but saw Preethi and raised his eyebrows. She knew he was annoyed. In the taxi on the way here, he had prudishly wished that the young ones would not get so drunk. At Christmas, some of the women had had to be carried into the coach.

  “Si! Come and dance!” the girl shouted again. Simon did not look round, just waved his hand in the direction of the voice. Preethi looked toward the girl. She had no idea who she was. Why did she call Simon “Si”? Could there be an intimacy that Simon had hidden from her? He spoke very little of the office and the people there. And yet she knew in her heart there was no one for Simon but her. She knew it. Ridiculous! How could she know it? We are all in the business of creating illusions, aren’t we? Even the people we have slept next to for twenty-five years get up, go out, and become something we have no understanding of.

  Simon beckoned to her. “Darling, this is Tony Stroud. Tony, this is my wife, Preethi.”

  “Delighted,” the man slurred. He was already extremely drunk.

  She smiled into his eyes as the caller said, “This is the Carolina quickstep!” and the accordion, suddenly loud now that she was inside, blasted through her as she stepped toward Tony.

  “Are you having a nice time?”

  He did not hear, and put his hand to his ear. Simon had moved away from them both, toward his senior-management men in the corner. She slipped to the side of Tony, and as she did, she noticed he seemed tremulous, and she put her hand lightly on his back and guided him away from the dancers, who had formed two circles and were walking in a large formation, their hands linked crosswise with their partners, women in the inner circle, men in the outer.

  What am I to do now, she thought. She looked about and saw Emma standing nearby, a fixed grin on her face. Preethi smiled at her, but Emma looked through her, turning away. Next to her, his back turned, was a man Preethi knew. Preethi realised suddenly who he was: Prince Myshkin—Freddie. She could not countenance his presence, understand even. She circled the hall, stood at the farthest point away from him.

  She watched Emma watch the younger girls striding through the arches made by the lead dancers, swirling their hips. Preethi let her eyes film over, and she heard the music and saw the dancers as if they were a murky dream. The colours were the blacks and greys and blues of denim, and what she wanted to see was the rainbow colours of fairies, washed through with rain. She turned away from the dance and walked outside again. She remembered Emma’s flawlessly made-up face at Christmas and how, when she talked to Simon, her small tongue poked through her teeth, so that the tip rested on her lower lip, and Preethi had to look away from the feeling of seeing something intimate.

  Simon liked Emma, she thought. Preethi imagined them in congruence, floating in a balance of sex, a salsa of lovemaking. She imagined his too-large feet and dark-haired legs supporting a laughing Emma, her head thrown back, the tip of her childish tongue peeping through her lips, and Preethi shuddered: in its truth, this tip became pornographic, dreadful, and she stood in the dark and watched them, Simon and Emma, watched their eyes meet. She smiled. She laughed at the ridiculousness of it. The music of the last dance ended, and people whooped and some laughed, and everyone clapped, outside and in. As she turned to walk out of the hall more side doors were thrust open, and she glimpsed Emma walking away with Gary, her boyfriend, his kind face leaning into hers, his hand placed loosely around her shoulders. Once, Simon held Preethi in the same way, his arm about her shoulders, no space between them, as if the curves of their sides had melted.

  She walked toward Freddie. It was an impulse, but she walked to his side and said, “Hello, Freddie.”

  “Hello.” He squinted down to her. He had not recognised her.

  “It’s me, Preethi,” she said. And still, she thought, he does not know me. But he did.

  “I was going to marry you,” he said, laughing.

  “And I you,” she said. It wasn’t true, but no matter.

  They moved out into the darkness, onto the grass. Others stood around, and a few had blankets on which men lay sideways and girls daintily tucked their legs under bottoms and giggled. Fre
ddie indicated chairs in a pool of shadow.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Let’s not do that whole ‘so how many children do you have’ thing.”

  “Why not? How many do you have?”

  “Two. Boy and a girl. But they’re ancient now. All grown up.”

  “Really? You don’t look old enough. I have a daughter—she lives in Australia. It was an accident … well, not an accident. But something that happened at university. She’s nearly twenty-five,” he said.

  “Gosh.”

  “Yes.”

  They looked around as laughter erupted from under the trees. It was finally night.

  “So, what are you doing here?” They both spoke at once.

  Laughing, Preethi said, “I’m married to Simon.” She pointed in the direction of the hall.

  “I’m just my sister’s date. I’m visiting—Mum’s got Alzheimer’s, and …”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and already she was imagining the life she would have had. “Where do you live, what do you do?”

  “I’m a travel writer. I don’t really live anywhere—I just move from one place to the next.…”

  “Gosh,” she said again.

  “And you?”

  “I’m a journalist,” she said, but she did not mention that it was on a local paper, trudging to magistrates’ courts and answering phone calls from anguished old ladies. Her children had been her life. Her children and Simon.

  “Well! Look at us. Using words to earn our daily crust, just as we said we would.”

  “Well, it’s hardly Dostoyevskian.”

  They paused to look toward the noise of the party. The music began again.

  “Are you dancing?”

  “No, absolutely not,” she said, waving both hands at him. “Don’t ask, don’t drag me up. I won’t go.”

  “No fear of that. I don’t dance either. So we’re a pair.”

  And now a leisurely silence. He tapped his thigh in time to the music.

  “I wish,” he said.

  “What?”