Midnight is a Lonely Place. Barbara Erskine

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      ‘OK. If that’s the way you want it.’ He had turned away from her and sat, chin in hand, staring up at the horsemen from the Parthenon on the frieze on the wall above him, suddenly and shamefully near to tears. Correctly interpreting his rocklike stance the Japanese lady who had been preparing in her turn to rise and allow him to leave the table relaxed and took a large mouthful of sandwich.

      It was after eleven when he returned to the flat that evening.

      The front door led straight into the small sitting room where she was sitting reading, cosy in the warm light of the single table lamp. Outside she could hear the sleet hitting the window. The shoulders of Jon’s heavy jacket glistened and sparkled with unmelted ice. ‘Well, have you changed your mind?’ he asked.

      For a moment she was confused, still lost in the world of Lord Byron and his friends. Unwillingly she dragged herself back to the present. ‘No. I haven’t changed my mind.’

      ‘It’s not working, is it?’ He stood in front of the electric fire and began slowly to unwind his long scarf.

      ‘What isn’t working?’ She kept her eyes on the book before her. Her stomach had clenched uncomfortably at his tone and the print blurred into an indistinguishable black haze.

      ‘Us.’

      She looked up at last. ‘Because I won’t go to the States with you?’

      ‘That and other things. Kate, let’s face it. You’re too obsessed with your damn poet to have time for me. Look at you. Even now you can’t take your eyes off some bloody text or other.’ He swooped on her and grabbed it out of her hand. ‘See!’ He held it up triumphantly. ‘Victorian Poets!’ He hurled it down onto a chair. ‘He –’ by implication Kate gathered that ‘he’ meant Byron, ‘– comes between us all the time. You have no time for us; for our relationship, Kate.’

      ‘Jon –’

      She was stung by the injustice of the remark but he swept on. ‘No, hear me out. You’re completely obsessive. You have no time for me at all.’

      She leaped to her feet. It had taken her much of the afternoon to calm down after their exchange at the British Museum earlier. She had thought they could work things out amicably once he came home, once he had had time to think about the justice of everything she had said. ‘You … you say that, when all you ever talk about is your own work. Your friends, your parties, your TV interviews! You admitted that you only wanted me to go with you to the States as an appendage! The Jon Bevan literary circus. The wonderful, clever, stunning novelist and poet Jon Bevan and his cute girlfriend who writes such glitzy biographies – though heaven forbid that they should be taken as seriously as Jon’s oeuvre.’ Her hands had begun to shake as she realised the implications of what she was saying. She was condemning their relationship unequivocally to death. There would be no going back on this, no making up, no withdrawing of hurled insults. ‘You’re right, Jon, This relationship is not going to work. It’s over. Finished!’ Pushing past him, she flung out of the room.

      Their bedroom was very small. The double bed, pushed against the wall, left space for a desk – her desk. On it her laptop sat amongst piles of books and papers. Jon’s desk was in the sitting room she had just left. Jon’s sitting room. Jon’s flat. She stared round in despair. Then she reached for her coat. Throwing it on, she turned and ran to the front door.

      ‘Kate. Don’t be childish. We can work this out.’ Jon followed her. Suddenly he was terrified by what he had done. ‘For Christ’s sake, where are you going?’

      ‘Out.’ She was fumbling with the deadlock.

      ‘You can’t go out. It’s nearly midnight and it’s snowing.’ His anger had gone. He saw himself suddenly as she must see him – selfish, arrogant, thoughtless, cruel. ‘Kate, please –’ He stretched out a hand towards her.

      She did not answer. Slamming the door behind her she had run down the steps and out into the street.

       II

      She missed him.

      The flat was tidy, already empty though she was still there, and the days were ticking by. She had to find somewhere, somewhere she could afford, to live, to lick her wounded self esteem, to write.

      She tried to justify what had happened; to explain it to herself. He was right. It had not been working. There had been too much conflict, too much competition between them. And all the sacrifices had been hers: her time, her concentration, her money and her commitment.

      Well, now it was over. All her time, her concentration, her commitment could be focussed on one thing. One man. Byron. She stood, spreading honey on a slice of bread, watching the wholemeal crumbs disintegrate. Frowning, she tried to stick the crumbs back together. She couldn’t stay in London, that was obvious. Her money – the money she had leant him – had been her sole source of income. She had spent a morning scouring her bank statement and building society book, calculator in hand, trying to see how far she could make the last few hundred pounds stretch. Thank God she had had the sense to stick some of it into a tax fund which, even for Jon, she had not touched. Without that she would be in trouble indeed. It was all her fault. She was a sucker, a classic, besotted mug. She had no one to blame but herself. And Jon. She had tried calling him names. It helped, but always she came back to the empty space in her life and the fact that she missed him.

      But life had to go on, which was why, two days later, she found herself at Broadcasting House, where her old friend, Bill Norcross, ran one of the production departments.

      ‘So, is what I hear on the grapevine true? You and Jon are a couple no more. The beautiful Kate Kennedy has turned at bay and bitten the hand that fed her.’

      Bill leaned back in his chair and waved Kate into its twin, angled on the far side of his desk.

      Swallowing a retort Kate sat down, aware of his eyes sliding automatically from the top of her black leather boots to the line of her hem. Secure in the knowledge that her thighs were thickly and unglamorously shrouded in black woollen tights she crossed her legs, deliberately provocative. ‘He never fed me Bill. I paid my share,’ she said calmly.

      Bill grinned amiably. She was tall, like Jon, and with a similarity of build which had led many people to take them for brother and sister. Where on Jon the look was loose-limbed and laid back, on her it was elegant and graceful, an impression compounded by her long brown hair, tied loosely at the nape of her neck with a scarlet silk scarf, and by the slender fingers which at the moment dangled the pair of spectacles which she had put on to scrutinise Bill’s face and then removed as though a ten second scan was enough for a lifetime.

      ‘I need your help, Bill. I need somewhere to live for a bit.’ She paused and gave him a slow, reluctant smile. ‘I wondered if I could stay in your cottage.’

      Bill frowned. ‘My God! You must be desperate. Do you know where my cottage is?’

      She laughed. ‘It’s up in North Essex, isn’t it?’

      ‘It’s in the most beautiful corner of Essex, which is, to my mind, the most beautiful corner of England. But alas, at this time of year, it is also the most inaccessible and cold. I have only a minimum of so-called mod cons, the bedroom’s full of rubble, the roof leaks and СКАЧАТЬ