The Third Woman. Mark Burnell

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       Day One

      When she opened her eyes, the face beside her was a surprise. She’d expected to be alone in the bedroom of her crumbling apartment off boulevard Anspach. Instead, she found herself in a room with curtains, not shutters, a room overlooking avenue Louise, not rue Saint-Géry.

      Brussels, twenty-to-seven on a bitter January morning. Outside, a tram grumbled on the street below. She’d always liked the sound of trams. Next to her, Roland was still asleep, half his head lost in the quicksand of a pillow. Stephanie pulled on his blue silk dressing-gown, which was too big for her, and rolled up the sleeves. In the kitchen, she poured water into the kettle and switched it on.

      Gradually, she recalled a day that had started in Asia. She’d called Roland from the airport at Frankfurt while waiting for her connection to Brussels and again when she’d touched down at Zaventem. Earlier, in Turkmenbashi and then on the Lufthansa flight back from Ashgabat, she’d been aware of the familiar sensation; the seep of corruption that always followed the adrenaline rush. She’d needed Roland because she couldn’t be alone.

      His bathroom belonged in a hotel; heated marble floor, marble sink, fluffy white towels folded over a ladder of hot chrome rails, a soap dish full of Molton Brown miniatures. Typical, really; a bathroom at home to remind him of the hotels he used abroad. Still, lack of imagination in a man was not always a disadvantage.

      She showered for five minutes. Stepping on to the white bath-mat in front of the mirror, Stephanie saw Petra Reuter looking back at her. Her other self, the differences between them at that moment counting for nothing, though the body they shared now belonged more to Petra than Stephanie. In that sense, it was a barometer of identity. Where Petra favoured muscular definition, Stephanie slipped happily into softness.

      She ran a hand over the stone ripple of her abdomen and looked into a pair of hard, dark eyes. Only her mouth appeared warm and inviting; there was nothing she could do about those generous lips. The rest of her looked cold and mean. When she was in this mood, even the slight bump on her nose – courtesy of two separate breaks – looked large and ugly. Worse was the cosmetic bullet-wound through her left shoulder. In forty-eight hours, beneath an Indian Ocean sun, Stephanie knew she’d despise it; Petra’s badge of honour was a reminder of the life she couldn’t escape.

      She dressed in the crumpled clothes she’d scooped off Roland’s sitting-room floor; dark grey combat trousers with a neon-pink stripe down each leg, two T-shirts beneath a Donna Karan jersey and a pair of Caterpillar boots.

      Towelling long, dark hair she returned to the kitchen, made coffee, then took two mugs to the bedroom, setting one on Roland’s bedside table. He began to stir. She drew the curtains. On avenue Louise, the first hint of rush-hour, headlights slicing through drizzle.

      From behind her came a muffled murmur. ‘Marianne.’

      Stephanie turned round. ‘You look a little … crumpled.’

      Roland grinned, pleased at the description, then propped himself up on an elbow and patted the mattress. ‘Come back to bed.’

      ‘I’ve got to go.’

      ‘So have I. Now come back to bed.’

      ‘Exactly what kind of investment bank do you work for?’

      ‘The kind that understands a good worker is a happy worker.’

      The candle of temptation flickered briefly. Generally, the more attractive the man the more cautious Stephanie was. In her experience, good-looking men tended to make lazy lovers. Not Roland, though.

      ‘Last night,’ he said, reaching for the mug, ‘that was really something.’

      If only you knew.

      A surgical procedure to cut away tension. That was what it had been. There, on the floor of the entrance hall, tenderness cast aside as roughly as their clothes. Around nine, they’d gone out to eat at Mont Liban, a Lebanese place on rue Blanche, a couple of minutes’ walk away. By the time they’d returned to his apartment, her desire had been back, less frantic but just as insistent. Which was how her clothes had ended up on his sitting-room floor.

      Strange to think of it now, like an out-of-body experience. Roland was staring at her through the steam rising from his coffee, his disappointment evident.

      ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

      ‘That I went to bed with one person and woke up with another.’

      Stephanie said, ‘I know the feeling.’

      It’s no longer raining when I step on to avenue Louise. Winter blows shivers through the puddles and snaps twigs from the naked plane trees. Ahead, the rooftop Nikon and Maxell signs are backlit by a cavalry charge of dark cloud.

      Brussels; bitter, grey, wet. And perfect.

      This city at the heart of the European Union is an ideal home for me. It’s a city of bureaucrats. In other words, a city of transient people who shy from the spotlight and never have to account for their actions. People like me.

      In some respects, the city is an airport hub. When I’m here, there’s always the feeling that I’m passing through. That I’m a stranger in transit, even in my own bed.

      I had a proper home once. It didn’t belong to me – it belonged to the man I loved – but it was mine nevertheless. It was the only place I’ve ever been able to be myself. And yet he never knew my name or what I did.

      With hindsight, civilian domesticity – Petra’s professional life running in parallel to Stephanie’s private life – was an experiment that failed. I took every precaution to keep the two separate, to protect one from the other. But that’s the truth about lies: you start with a small one, then need a larger one to conceal it. In the end, they swamp you. Which is exactly what happened. One life infected the other and was then itself contaminated. The consequences were predictable: I hurt the ones I loved the most.

      These days I no longer delude myself. That’s why I live in Brussels but spend so little time here. It’s why I was in Turkmenistan the day before yesterday and why Eddie Sullivan’s obituary is in the papers today. It’s why I see Roland in the way that I do and it’s why he calls me Marianne.

      He became my lover in the same way that Brussels became my home; by chance and as a matter of temporary convenience. Random seat assignments put us together. We met on a train, which seems appropriate; sensory dislocation at two hundred miles an hour. All very contemporary, all very efficient. There is no possibility that I will ever give anything of my soul to him. For the moment, however, like the city itself, he serves a transitory purpose.

      Rue Saint-Géry, the walls smeared with graffiti, the pavements with dog-shit. Home was a filthy five-storey wedge-shaped building with rotten French windows that opened СКАЧАТЬ