The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018. Elizabeth Day

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СКАЧАТЬ realise we had Emmeline sodding Pankhurst sitting here. So who would you suggest, then?’

      ‘Anne Tyler, Joan Didion, Donna Tartt,’ Lucy said without looking up. ‘And that’s just for starters. That’s if you even agree with the fundamental premise of there being something that is “The Great American Novel”. Which I don’t, by the way.’

      Ian chortled. ‘Thanks, Luce. Remind me, what did you study at Bristol again?’

      ‘English,’ she mumbled. ‘And it was Durham.’

      ‘Thought so.’

      ‘I actually think it’s a good idea,’ I said, surprising myself at the sound of my own voice. ‘We should include some women.’

      Lucy grinned. Her glasses had slid down her nose and she pushed them back up with a single nail-chewed forefinger and I noticed, as she did so, that her hand was shaking.

      ‘Thanks, Martin,’ she said and she looked at me with shining eyes.

      The more I got to know her after that, the more I was charmed in spite of myself. She was so respectful, so admiring of me, so fundamentally grateful that I would pay her any attention. And I, in turn, found her intelligent and interesting company. She knew a lot.

      We started taking lunch together. At first, it was just a hurried sandwich in the staff canteen but soon we graduated to the restaurant across the road from the office where we sat in wooden booths and drank wine from a magnum that the waiter would mark off at the end of the meal, charging us according to how many inches we had drunk. It was only a matter of time before lunch turned into an after-work drink in the pub – me: a pint of Guinness; Lucy: a gin and tonic. (I never liked Guinness. I only drank it when I was trying to give the impression of blokeishness.) After six months, we were having dinner. We both had a penchant for Persian food and would seek out the best places for a night-time meal of aubergine stew and lamb with barberries at the wrong end of Kensington.

      And then she kissed me and I didn’t know how to say no. It was on the pavement outside a brightly painted eatery called Tas or Yaz or Fez or something similar. We were standing under a streetlamp, dank drizzle coating our faces like wet muslin and I found myself looking at her face, at the speckles of moisture on her unfashionably large glasses, at the discreet jiggle of extra flesh just underneath her chin, at the double freckle on the lobe of one ear so that it looked as if she had got them pierced even though she was one of the few women of my acquaintance who hadn’t.

      ‘Too scared of infection,’ she had said, explaining it to me once. ‘Too scared of everything.’

      She isn’t stupid, Lucy.

      It was as I was looking at her that Lucy’s expression changed. Her eyes – brown, lively – acquired a liquid quality, as though their brownness could seep out if left unguarded. I realised, too late, that what I was seeing in those darkened pupils, was lust. She leaned in, clasping her hands behind my neck and I succumbed because it was easier than anything else. And would it do so very much harm?

      Her lips were soft and doughy. The kiss became moister and more enthused. I could hear a faint moaning sound coming from Lucy’s throat and then I pulled away, hands on her shoulders, a firm, paternal, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’

      She looked at me sadly.

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘I … well, look …’

      ‘We get on well, don’t we? I mean, I like you.’ A meaningful little lacuna. ‘I really like you. Can’t we just … see where it goes? I’m lonely. I know you’re lonely …’ This came as news to me. The truth was, I did feel alone but I thought I had masked it sufficiently well from prying eyes in the office. At that stage, Ben was getting more serious with Serena and I was increasingly at a loose end in the evenings. Whereas, previously, the two of us had frequently gone drinking in Soho, starting off in a private members’ club before graduating to dinner at Quo Vadis and a nightcap at the Atlantic, these days Ben was more likely to stay in cooking pasta and watching films with Serena. He had asked me to find my own place so that she could move into the mews house I had shared with him since we graduated.

      ‘Time to grow up, mate,’ he had said, slapping me on the back. Touch came so easily to Ben. It was something I both hated and loved about him.

      So perhaps I was particularly vulnerable to attention when Lucy came along. I realise now that is not an excuse.

      I walked her home that evening. She lived in a surprisingly nice flat off the North End Road. I say surprisingly because I had assumed, from the dowdiness of her clothing and her penchant for buying men’s jackets from charity shops, that money was tight. It turned out I was wrong about that. Lucy’s parents were quite well off, in a hearty, middle-class kind of way. They had sent their children to private school and lived in a red-brick farmhouse in Gloucestershire. At Christmas-time, they attended the carol concert at Tewkesbury Cathedral.

      I deposited her at the door.

      ‘Come up,’ Lucy said, tugging at the sleeve of my coat.

      I shook my head, feigning regret.

      ‘No,’ I said, trailing my fingers down her cheek. ‘That wouldn’t be right. Next time.’

      I kissed the top of her head, inhaling Timotei and light sweat, and walked away, raising one arm aloft as I went.

      ‘See you tomorrow,’ she called out to my retreating form.

      For whatever reason, the evening with Lucy had left me experiencing an uncomfortable surge of different emotions. I thought of my mother, of the way she looked at me when I told her, when I was back from school one Easter holiday, that she shouldn’t say ‘settee’ but ‘sofa’ and that the way she pronounced ‘cinema’ without elongating the final ‘a’ was embarrassing.

      I found myself walking towards Brompton Cemetery and although it was late and I knew the main gates would be closed, I also knew from previous visits that there was a point in the wall on the Lillie Road where the stones had come loose and you could crawl through quite easily on your hands and knees.

      This I did, the palms of my hands gathering up bits of twig and pine cone and leaving a latticed indentation of dirt across my skin. I stood, brushing myself clean. A piece of lichen had lodged itself in my hair. I shook it out.

      The cemetery stood in the gloom of night, half lit here and there by a weak streetlamp. Gravestones and silhouetted stone angels loomed out of the shadows. Some notable historical figures were buried nearby although I’d never tried to seek out their graves. My favourite gravestone (if one can have such a thing) was to mark the passing of a young man called Horace Brass who died at the age of sixteen in 1910. His name was carved in looped art nouveau cursive.

      I started walking towards it, hands in my pockets. A man fell into step beside me. I glanced to one side and saw that, no, this was not a man but a boy. A teenage boy, like Horace Brass, pale and thin as a silver birch. He had greasy hair and spots around his mouth.

      ‘Looking for company?’ he said.

      ‘No,’ I said too loudly. ‘No I don’t … I mean, I’m not.’

      A fizz of anger in my solar plexus. I doubled up my pace and walked swiftly back the way I had come.

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