She nodded. She couldn't seem to stop herself smiling at me. The demon of a woman's smile: they smile too much. I tried to sound casual. "You know what? I fancy the wild boar and apple."
"Me too. And oysters."
When she said "oysters," she looked up at me from the menu, briefly, as if it were a code word. Behind my pretended fascination with the menu I was observing her minutely. I just didn't want her to know it. Demons, you see, are clever. They flash in and out. They don't enter someone and take up residence. Like a bird on a wire they startle quickly. Then they re-alight. They may be there for months. Or just a few seconds.
Over the years I have become expert at looking for the signatures of the demonic presence. You might see it in the drumming of fingers on the table; or in what looks like a casual self-preening gesture; but mostly it is available in the face. There it is, sometimes in a moment of increased mobility in the features. Loaded into a tic of the eyelid, maybe. A flaring of the nostrils. But mostly it's in the eyes.
Of course, it is easy to mistake any normal activity deep in the folds of the human face as a sign that a demon has taken up residence. But over the years you can become quite expert. In her case it was like a sudden match-flare behind the eyes: not a reddening or hot embers or anything so unsubtle, but a honey-coloured brief flare, the combustible elements of which could easily be separated out as: empathy, pity, hunger.
It was all happening too fast. I was going to have to put her off, and I thought that in order to do so I would maybe that night tell her everything. All of it.
"I was nearly late myself tonight," I said after placing our order with the waiter.
Two men were drinking morosely in the corner. They had no interest in each other's company, and the fuckers couldn't take their eyes off her. It insulted me. I wanted to get up and tell them to pull themselves together, but she didn't even seem to spot it. Could she really be so unconscious of the effect she was having on men? At last I turned and gave one of them a very cold stare. He looked away guiltily.
"Why was that?" she asked. "Why were you almost late?"
"My daughter and her boyfriend. They're down from university, staying with my wife, though it's not working out."
"What's your daughter's name?"
"Sarah. She's dragged her boyfriend along with her, too, and they've upset the ex-wife's bloke."
"Ex-wife. Last time you said 'wife.'"
"Ex-wife. Yes, the ex-wife's bloke."
"The cake man?"
"Yeh, old cake-hole. They're both at Warwick University. Where did you say you went to university?"
"I didn't."
"Didn't say, or didn't go?"
"Didn't go."
"Really? I'd have sworn you did. You would have had me fooled."
"Why would I want to fool you about that?" This came out rather sharply. Then she softened it to, "No, only the University of Life."
"Ah, that superior institution. I think you've been an attentive scholar."
It was the wrong note. She said, "That sounds just a tiny bit patronising."
"Does it? I'm sorry!" I was sorry, too. I'd been paying too much attention to the movement of shadows and the tiny indicators flitting across her face, looking for demon-sign, and I hadn't been careful enough with my words.
"Just a bit. Over and over in my life I've run into men and women who are less intelligent than me but more highly educated. Educated people wear their qualifications like a club tie; it's pretty obvious if you're the only person at the table who doesn't have one. It used to bother me; then I found out how easy it was to learn the codes, the language."
"What I meant was, you seem as sharp as anyone else I know."
"Shall I tell you about some of the subjects in which I've graduated? You might not believe me. I have a doctorate in depravity. How does that sound to you, William? A PhD in addiction and recovery. Trained in the fellowship of the gold-diggers, and the liggers, and the dancers and the hangers-on—"
"Whoa! Slow down!" There was something wrong here. I was the one determined to find a way of putting her off, but here she seemed to be hell-bent on playing the same game. "What are you saying?"
"I want you to know where I've been. What I am."
I know that,
I thought.
I know all about it.
That feeling as if I'd known her for years. That odd impression of waking up in the middle of a novel, as if you share a history or a back-story that hasn't been fully revealed to you. Like reincarnation.
But these were dangerous thoughts. I was already folding her into my destiny. It also confirmed for me that the demon inside her was making me think that I was falling in love with her, which could not be allowed to happen. But it was my own voice speaking in the lover's whisper, saying exactly what I didn't want to say or hear. "It's odd. I feel as if I've known you for years." I almost bit my tongue off, because it sounded exactly like the kind of thing that weak and wretched lovers say.
"You have known me for years."
I came to my senses. "What?"
She shook her head. "What I mean is," she said, "I feel exactly the same way."
But I had the feeling she was retreating, like someone who goes to make a chess move and then thinks better of it before taking their fingers off the piece. We exchanged the mildest of all smiles. Her hand rested on the table and I wanted to reach out to stroke, with the lightest touch of my finger, the vein on her wrist. I had no doubt that I could make a shiver run up her arm. But instead I retracted my hand, perhaps too suddenly.
Like most men I have made advances in my life, skilful and clumsy, artful and inept. But I'd never had such a terrifying compulsion to stroke a vein on the inside of a woman's wrist. It was proof that my senses weren't jaded. It also told me that my feelings were insanely out of control.
The food arrived. I ordered another bottle of wine. I know I was taking it at a clip. Maybe I thought I could pour wine on the demon; that it would become sleepy and passive. I refilled her glass and said, "You know, there are some men in this bar who can't take their eyes off you."
"You mean there are other people in this bar?"
She made me laugh. We were falling down a tunnel, a rabbit-hole, and again it was all happening faster than I had suspected it would. I wanted to tell her that it was no good, that she was inhabited by a demon and that I was onto her and that it couldn't go anywhere. I even thought about addressing the demon directly, through her, as it were. "How are the oysters?" is what I said instead.
"Good! Here, try one." She tipped the contents of the shell into my mouth. "Why did you get married? Was it love?"
"Partly. But I was also hiding, I think. My years immediately after college were a little crazy. I think I was a sort of casualty. Got married as part of that."
"Funny. I did the same."
"You've been married, too? What was your craziness?"
"Oh no. You haven't told me yours."
I set down my knife and pinched the flap of skin between my eyebrows. I wondered how much of it I might tell her, and how much I would be able to leave out.
Term ended and I was glad to leave college, to put some distance between myself, Fraser and the events of the last few weeks. My parents were divorced and as usual I was faced with the choice of staying with my father in Daventry, who didn't want me there, or my mother in Rugby, who wanted me there too much. At Dad's there would be no conversation and no food in the house; at Mum's there would be lashings of home cooking but all of it spoiled by interminable questions about where I did my laundry and at which supermarket I did my shopping. Answering any of these questions generated five more, and each of those five generated five further questions. I see now that my mother's fraught wittering was a kind of illness but at the time it just made me want to go out and find a kitten and drown it.
Mother and I ate Christmas dinner together. We each had a table cracker and we pulled them in turn. A blue paper hat tumbled out mine and an orange hat plopped on the table from hers. Not putting them on seemed more of a desperate statement than wearing them, so we did.
"What does your motto say?"
I fumbled for the curled scrap of paper. Printed in green ink so faded I could hardly make it out and so banal I could hardly bare to repeat it, mine read: "
A day without a smile is a day wasted.
"
"There you are, then," said my mother.
"What?" I said, cross and nonplussed at the same time. "What?"
But she didn't answer me, pretending to be intent on hacking a leg from the small cockerel crowning the table.
After that we settled down on the sofa. Mother liked to watch the Queen's Speech on TV, and at least it shut her up for a short while. After it was through she sniffed, as if she were a connoisseur of the Queen's speeches and said, "Not so good this year." Then she quizzed me about which brand of washing powder I tended to go for.
I think I lasted until the Boxing Day TV special before I called Mandy and begged her to let me come and spend the rest of the holiday with her in Yorkshire. She got her parents to agree to me staying, on the understanding that I would sleep on their sofa-bed and not in Mandy's bedroom; whereas I would willingly have slept on a razor blade in the coal shed had that been all that was offered.
Mandy and I spent the holidays holding hands and walking the beautiful freezing Yorkshire moors under sensational stainless-steel skies. The wind swirled and twisted and tormented hosts of roosting rooks, blasting them from the trees like scraps of black paper. We hiked to pubs along wet, leafy lanes, and under the flaking, inspirational light I slowly felt my head clearing.
When I was alone with Mandy I felt safe and far away from Fraser and all notion of harmful demons. She was happy, too. Without knowing anything about the events of recent days she'd felt she was losing me, that I'd been drifting away from her. Here, under the blustering skies and tumultuous clouds, we climbed inside a protective bubble of intimacy. We were Heathcliff and Catherine but with nothing to take us away from each other.
One night I got so drunk I felt myself dissolving under Mandy's gaze and I asked her to marry me. She said yes, and I was ecstatically happy. The walk home took hours because we kept stopping to soul-kiss. I felt as if the dramatic rolling landscape either side of the road was filling me up.
But the next day we both pretended it hadn't happened.
Okay, so we were drunk, and maybe that made it not count. But neither of us broached the subject or even dismissed it as a bit of tipsy foolishness. Neither of us said, "
Hey, were we so drunk that . . . "
Instead we engaged, without a word, in a conspiracy to pretend that it was never said.
To this day I don't understand why.
It's not as if I forgot what had been said. And though I never asked Mandy, I'll stake my life that she didn't forget either. Because that moment of tipsy foolishness or whatever it was always stood between us. Yes, like a demon, if you like. It was as if we'd made something, hatched something, breathed life into something; and although we'd tried to abandon it, it followed us and made any hope of a future together impossible. We travelled back to Derby together and she returned to her shared digs and I went back to the Lodge.
Back at college, the buzz was all about a girl called Sharon Bennett who had gone to Australia for the Christmas vacation. Australia, that is, via Columbia after swallowing six condoms stuffed with cocaine, and with a further dozen secreted in her vagina. Her arrest had made the national news.
The story was all the more acute for me because not only was she another former girlfriend, she was also one of the five girls in the photographs in the attic. I could quite believe it of her: she was a space cadet, a serious recreational drug user. Her catchphrase was
down the hatch
and I couldn't keep up with her. All the same, it was a dismaying story.
In the Students' Union bar I was about to order a pint of bitter for myself and a vodka and coke for Mandy when a girl in an army combat jacket and a pink scarf reached out her arm and gently fingered my lapel. "Have you heard about Rachel?"
Rachel Reid was another of the girls in the collection of five. The girl in the combat jacket was her room-mate.
"No, what about her?"
"She died over Christmas."
"What?"
"It was a potholing accident."
"Potholing?"
Rachel had been an enthusiastic caver and climber. She'd initiated me into the potholing game. After joining the caving club, I'd spent two Saturday afternoons worming around cold, wet passages underground before calculating that it wasn't a game I particularly enjoyed.
Rachel and another caver had been trapped underground by a flash flood that had inundated a cavern in the Derbyshire Peak District. They'd been brought out dead. The girl couldn't tell me much more than that. She was herself still stunned by the news and her way of dealing with it was to tell everyone who'd known Rachel.
Mandy brought me out of my paralysis by taking the glass of vodka from me. She squeezed my hand. "Wasn't she another ex of yours?"
"You know perfectly well she was."
"You're a curse," said Mandy. "Come on, let's find a seat."
I didn't think I was a curse. I thought it was all just a rather unpleasant chain of disasters that had befallen three of the girls in the photographs. The other two—Mandy beside me, and Lin cheerfully pulling pints and dispensing cut-price vodkas at the bar—seemed in good enough sort.
My initial response was to find Fraser and tell him what I'd heard. But in fact I'd already determined not to have much to do with him at all. I had just two terms left to go before emerging with my degree. I planned to divide those few months between catching up on my studies in time for the final exams and getting Mandy naked as often as she would let me.
I rationalized it all thus:
One: Sandie had a nut allergy, and a careless caterer had failed to label the sandwiches. As Fraser said, it's not unheard of.