The Return Page 10
She hesitated.
‘Come on, Maggie. Let’s go . . .’ Sonia threw her arm around Maggie and guided her smartly away and up the street. For once, she felt that Maggie should be wary of the indiscriminate forwardness of the Spanish male.
Both women needed to sleep. Back at the hotel they undressed and climbed into their beds. Being in Spain was like being on a night shift, reflected Sonia as she set the alarm for eleven p.m. It was their last evening in Granada and they had no desire to miss it.
On the dance floor that night Sonia felt the air beneath her feet. It was as though they did not touch the ground. Everything she had learned that week fell into place. Some part of her had always struggled with the notion that the woman was meant to be in an entirely responsive role. But tonight the paradox made sense to her: being passive did not mean being subservient. Her power lay in how well she chose to respond. There was no subservience involved. It was subtle, and for a moment she thought of James and imagined how impossible he would find it to understand.
All night, she was whisked, whirled and wound like a spring. At four in the morning, she could finally dance no longer, but as she thanked her last partner her face beamed with pleasure. She had neither trodden on his feet, nor tripped him up, and she was dizzy with exhilaration.
It had not been such a satisfying evening for Maggie. Paco had not appeared and for the first time in a few days, she returned to the hotel with Sonia.
The streets were still full of life when they emerged from the nightclub, couples coiled together in doorways and youths engaged in furtive exchanges of drugs and money. Almost overpowered by cheap brandy, Maggie leaned heavily on her friend; as they staggered along the cobbled streets it took every ounce of Sonia’s strength to hold her friend upright. She was considerably smaller than Maggie and several times they both nearly lost their balance. Sonia was reminded, once again, of their teenage years and how little distance they seemed to have come.
She managed to get her friend into bed, tucked the sheets firmly around her and set a glass of water on her bedside table. Maggie would wake up with a raging thirst.
The following morning, a thick head was the least of Maggie’s troubles. She was inconsolable that Paco had turned out to be as unreliable as any other man she had ever met.
‘But you were going home today anyway,’ Sonia tried to reason with her.
‘That’s not really the point,’ said Maggie nasally. ‘He never said goodbye.’
On the journey to the airport, Maggie was silent, partly stupefied by the miniatures from the minibar that she had consumed in place of a more substantial breakfast. Sonia tried to lift her out of her despair.
‘You really haven’t changed since we were sixteen!’ she teased gently.
‘I know.’ Maggie wept quietly into a sodden tissue and continued to stare out of the car window. Occasionally she made a kind of drowning noise as she gulped down her sobs.
Sonia rested her hand on her friend’s arm as a gesture of comfort and she reflected on the irony of a supposedly cheerful birthday celebration that had begun with her own tears and ended with Maggie’s. Perhaps women were hard-wired to weep.
The taxi travelled at terrifying speed along the motorway, dodging in and out between cars and huge pantechnicons that transported the products of Spain’s now rich, poly-tunnelled farmland towards the markets of northern Europe. Both women were silent for the next half-hour, and eventually Maggie’s outburst of grief and self-pity began to subside. She had exhausted herself.
‘I should stop myself getting carried away,’ she said eventually, tears welling up again in her eyes, ‘but I’m not sure I can.’
‘It’s hard,’ said Sonia comfortingly. ‘It’s so very hard.’
Their charter flight to Stansted was delayed by four hours, and by the time they landed and crossed London, it had gone eight o’clock in the evening. They shared a taxi from Liverpool Street to Clapham and before it dropped Maggie off, the women gave each other the warmest embrace.
‘Take care, Maggie,’ called Sonia out of the window.
‘And you. I’ll ring you.’
As the cab moved off, Sonia glanced out of the rear window and saw Maggie fishing in her bag for a key. Litter and leaves swirled together in the gutters. Two figures in hooded jackets loitered close by. The dimly lit Clapham street seemed nothing but forlorn.
Though it was only a further five minutes in the cab, Sonia’s neat street, with its clipped hedging, perfect tessellated paths and polished door furniture was a world away from Maggie’s where every house had a row of bells and a front garden crowded with bins.
Despite Maggie’s misery, which she knew from experience would probably not last for ever, Sonia was determined to hold on to the sense of wellbeing that these past few days had given her. She rang the gleaming doorbell, but no one came, which struck her as odd since James’s car was parked outside.After waiting a few more seconds, still expecting to see his shadowy outline appear behind the stained-glass panes, she began to rummage for her key.
Once inside, she dumped her bags on the hall floor and pushed the door shut with her foot. Amplified by the harsh acoustics of the hallway’s high ceiling and polished tiles, the sound of it slamming shut was like the crack of pistol fire. She winced. It was a noise that James hated.
‘Hello,’ she called out. ‘I’m back.’
Sonia could see through a crack in the door that James was in an armchair in the sitting room. He waited until she entered before answering.
‘Hi,’ he grunted as though she had just returned from work, rather than almost a whole week away.
The coolness of his tone suggested that he was not really interested in an answer.The flat monosyllable conveyed no enthusiasm and nothing was going to be added. She echoed his tone with her own crotchet-beat response.
‘Hi.’ And then with some hesitation: ‘How have things been here?’
‘Fine, thanks. Just fine.’
The newspaper, which had briefly been lowered, now moved up in front of him again like a sash window. Sonia could just see the top of his head and the shine of his just-beginning-to-be-bald pate.
The staccato delivery of James’s last words carried more a hint of irritation, and the pages of his newspaper made a snapping sound as he pulled them straight and resumed his perusal of the previous day’s share movements. Sonia turned to leave the room, desperately in need of something to quench her thirst, and heard James’s sarcastic tone of voice calling out to her retreating back: ‘Don’t worry too much about dinner. I had a big lunch.’
The words brought Sonia’s spirits crashing down hard. She was reminded of the feelings of despair that she had experienced in the hotel room only four days earlier. Granada already felt a million miles away.
I wasn’t going to worry actually, she thought as she retreated to the kitchen. ‘OK then,’ were the words that came out. ‘I’ll see what I can knock up.’
James had evidently eaten out every night while she was away. Nothing in the fridge had been used up; the cheese was mouldy and the tomatoes bearded. At the back was some smoked salmon just past its sell-by date, which she was sure would not poison him, and a couple of free-range eggs. Enough to make a meal, of sorts.
As Sonia stood in her kitchen, which squeaked with antibacterial cleanliness, the sterility of the environment crawled over her like a damp sheet. An empty glass stood next to the sink, the ring of water around it the sole blot on the otherwise perfect landscape of the work surface. The oak kitchen cabinets with their glass insets were some kind of attempt to emulate an old cottage style, but these units would not weather with age. They would never even acquire a little characterful dust in the corners of the mouldings, such was the scrutiny of the cleaner’s lightly dampened jiffy cloth.
It was James’s house when they married, and somehow she still thought of it that way. It had already been gutted and decorated before she arrived and there had never been any question that anything should be modifie
d to her taste.
At that moment James appeared, casting a cursory glance at the ingredients that sat on the kitchen worktop.
‘I’ve had second thoughts,’ he said. ‘I’m going to turn in. Got an early meeting. ’Night.’
Before Sonia had had the opportunity to respond, James had gone upstairs. She ran the tap until it turned icy cold and filled her glass, drinking the water in one long draught until her head tipped back and her face was turned upwards to the ceiling. One of the spotlights had gone. The little black hole in the ceiling held her attention for a moment.
Once, her interest in the minutiae of her home would have driven her immediately to the cupboard under the stairs and the dead bulb would have been prised from its cavity and a new one put in. Not now. It no longer seemed to matter.
She had sometimes stood in this kitchen and asked herself the one question that really mattered: ‘Is this really it?’ She was less certain than ever before that it was.
James’s coolness towards Sonia continued. He worked late at the office and so did she, catching up on various crises that had brewed in her absence.
Almost a week passed before they sat down and had a meal together, and when they did, conversation was stilted. What could they talk about? Sonia knew James would not want a detailed description of her time in Granada, and would certainly not want to hear that Maggie had fallen in love.
Conversation was kept very general until, halfway through a second bottle of wine, James said, ‘I picked up one of your books while you were away.’
‘Did you?’ replied Sonia, rather surprised. ‘Which one?’
‘The End of the Affair,’ stated James bluntly.‘By Graham someone.’
‘Greene,’ said Sonia. ‘We went to see the film, don’t you remember?’
James grunted.
‘Did you like it?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t read it. Well, not all of it, anyway.’
‘But you started it?’
‘I just read the underlinings. They were quite interesting.’
Sonia had never managed to drop her schoolgirl habit of making copious marks and notes in her books.
‘They told me a lot about you.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ Sonia was mildly affronted that her textual markings had been studied by James.There was something mildly prurient about it. ‘Why didn’t you read the whole book?’
‘Because I just wanted to read the bits that you’d highlighted. It seemed faster.’
James’s tone was aggressive, and Sonia knew that they were heading for a fight. The half-dozen glasses of wine that he had drunk that evening were merely topping him up after a boozy lunch, and Sonia sensed that there was no avoiding a confrontation. Her heart thumped. James’s lips looked purple, as if bruised with claret, and for the first time she noticed how stained his teeth were, as though he had been eating blackberries.
‘It made me wonder whether you’ve been having an affair yourself. You certainly seemed very interested in the way that woman, Sarah Miles, did things.’
‘James! That’s outrageous! On the basis of a few underlined passages in a book?’
‘Yes, it would help to explain why you steal off for your so-called “dancing class” each week and where you were last week!’
‘I was with Maggie in Spain - for her thirty-fifth birthday!’ protested Sonia.
‘Oh, I know you were in sunny Spain,’ he said sarcastically. ‘You’ve had a postcard from some greasy dago.’
At this point James rose, staggered over to the kitchen dresser where they always left that day’s post, and picked up a postcard. It was of the Alhambra.
‘Dear Sonia,’ he read aloud, ‘I enjoyed our talks. If you ever come to Granada again, come and see me. Miguel.’
The postcard had been addressed to the hotel and forwarded to Sonia. It was a sweet gesture from an old man and she wondered how he had known her name.
James held out the postcard to Sonia as though it was burning his fingertips and she took it from him.
‘I imagine it’s from the waiter I talked to a few times,’ she said. ‘His name must have been Miguel.’
‘I suppose it must,’ snorted James with derision.
‘I went to his café every morning. He told me a bit about Granada’s history,’ said Sonia defensively.
‘I see,’ said James, leaning back in his chair and emptying the last of the bottle into his glass. ‘A waiter,’ he added derisively.
‘Surely you don’t have a problem with that. He was ancient, James!’
‘You expect me to believe that? You really expect me to believe that? For God’s sake, Sonia, I’m not an idiot.’
He leaned towards her now and shouted this last comment into her face. She felt a droplet of red-wine spittle land on her mouth and was repulsed. Sonia did not want this argument, but she did want the last word.
‘I’m not sure about that,’ she said as she turned on her heel, leaving the room and the debris of their dinner still on the table.
She slept in the spare room that night and the ones that followed. As usual James left for work at the crack of dawn and returned when she had gone to bed. It was strange, Sonia realised, how easy it was to live in the same house as someone and never see him, and she wondered how long they could keep this up.
Even if some kind of confrontation had been inevitable, she would never have imagined that a slightly limping, elderly man, who lived a thousand miles away, would be the catalyst.That much had surprised her.
Chapter Nine
THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY, Sonia went back to her dance class in Clapham. She had spoken to Maggie a couple of times since their trip and had assumed that she would see her friend there.
After the scale of the Granada dance school, with its half a dozen studios and a hallway adorned with memorabilia, the south London venue seemed insignificant. The defining characteristics, though, were common to both establishments. They had a strong smell of dampness and a rundown air but, in spite of these, a vibrancy that seduced most people who came through their doors. The people who ran both these dance schools had more pressing concerns than repainting the walls and mending broken light fittings. Dance was always at the forefront of their minds.
Sonia was mildly surprised when her friend did not turn up but soon became absorbed in the lesson. After the intensity of the previous week, her dancing was noticeably improved and at the end of the class, Juan Carlos told her she was too good to stay with the beginners.Would she like to join the Intermediate Class?
‘I would love to,’ she replied. ‘When is it?’
‘Every Friday at eight,’ he answered.
Excited and flattered as she was, she did realise that this could be the final straw for James. She swallowed hard and nodded.
‘See you on Friday then,’ said the dance teacher, smiling at her.
Sonia and James had not spoken for some days now. She was not naïve enough to expect an apology from him, especially as he still believed that the sender of the postcard was some kind of holiday romance, but she had desperately hoped for a thaw in the atmosphere. His attitude of stubborn self-righteousness and refusal to see any other position than his own was nothing new, but in the past she would always have made a movement towards rapprochement. She knew that marriage was about compromise but she was angry to be disbelieved and this anger in her gave her a new strength to contemplate, for the first time, the possibility of being without this man who had dominated her for the past seven years.
She knew that going to dance classes on Friday nights would do little towards appeasement. Friday was the focal point of their social life, when James would not be rising at the crack of dawn the following morning and no one would yet have gone away for the weekend. It was the night when dinner parties took place, though at this moment it was hard to imagine that they could ever act out the charade of being a happily married couple, eating off other people’s best china and chattering about the price of property in SW12.
Sonia rang Maggie the next day.
‘Why weren’t you at the class last night?’ she demanded.
‘I’ll tell you later if you meet me for a drink,’ she replied enigmatically. ‘The Grapes at eight thirty?’
Maggie had only one thing she wanted to talk about that evening and Sonia guessed what it was going to be the moment she came through the door that evening. She radiated contentment. The last time she had seen her friend, her eyes had been swollen with tears. Tonight they shone with excitement.
‘So, what’s happened?’ Sonia asked expectantly.
She had already bought a bottle of wine and now poured a glass for Maggie, who picked it up and clinked it against Sonia’s.