The Seduction Read online

  Beth’s phone was dangerous treasure in her hand. Tamara B: You there?! Delete.

  ‘Darl—’ she said to Sol in rushed words that collided with a cough, ‘your back’s hurting?’

  ‘Only a little,’ he said, not looking up.

  What are you doing? she tried to text with her thumbs under the windowsill, but she hit the wrong keys. The ducks paddled idly, a tourist boat chattering past, the Mary-Lou absent in the face of the Saturday police, and the spring crowds choked the bridge.

  What am I dot giving?!! Tamara texted, and lifted a hand. If I can’t see you, I have to come and see you.

  Forbidden?

  Fuck Ann Penrose.

  ‘You are a texter,’ said Sol.

  ‘A bad habit.’

  Can we see each other? I couldn’t stay away any more. It’s been so so long. Please please delete, texted Tamara.

  How? Yes. Where? texted Beth, and walked away from the window. Sol caught her eye.

  ‘Sorry, it’s rude,’ said Beth.

  ‘Hey, girls,’ said Sol, ‘if we don’t push off now, we’re going to miss a table at this Bar – Flamenco? Hasta la Vista? … Cinco de Mayo?’

  ‘Bar Arriba,’ muttered Fern, undoing a plait.

  ‘You seem more cheerful,’ he said to Beth.

  ‘My period pain’s gone,’ she said blithely, the ease of lying followed by a flash of remorse.

  ‘Apologies for your wimmin’s suffering,’ he said with a straight face, and beat his chest. She laughed. She began to brush her hair.

  She looked at the silly Barbapapas calendar on the wall that Ellie had given her.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said in a blurt that turned into another cough.

  He looked at her with his steady brown gaze. She swallowed.

  ‘I mean I—’ She smiled. ‘Need to do a bit of work. Can I meet you in a bit?

  He got out his phone, paused and made a note, as she had subconsciously known he would. Fern steadily ignored Beth.

  ‘Your choice,’ said Sol, and she caught a glimpse only of his expression.

  ***

  Looking back later, this was still a time of comparative stability, or so it seemed, when the family was in the house, and Beth was working well at last, even Lizzie temporarily subdued; but her daughter no longer spoke to her, and the house was straw and she didn’t know it. All she knew was that her life was infused with magic.

  Tamara glittered. In the few snatched encounters Beth now had with her between frequent texts, she shone with more spirit than Beth had ever seen in that consulting room. They would meet by the canal in hidden moments among spring’s growth, the green bursting, the horse-chestnut blossoms and baby mallards, and walk, and talk, and still Tamara didn’t kiss her and, for all Tamara’s words, Beth would doubt anew what she had once imagined that evening in Moro so long before. Then Tamara would disappear for days into the constraints of her professional world with its boundaries before re-emerging, and in those times, the urgency of their communications was like nothing Beth had experienced. And still the sunny vista was touched with hell when Tamara didn’t answer her messages and Beth, sensing impending rejection, worked hard, with little peaks of panic, at becoming a more appealing version of herself. She started to read basic psychology guides. She reshaped her eyebrows. She memorised subjects for conversation. And then Tamara would redirect the beam of her attention, and somehow Beth was the most interesting person she had ever met. Intoxication rendered everything outside its orbit dull.

  And there was Sol beside her, a different breed. Cats and dogs. Earth and air.

  ‘I’m thinking we should maybe go to Newport the moment Fern quits school?’ he said.

  Beth glanced at her diary, racing through possible work reasons to stay in London longer.

  ‘You are so distracted,’ said Sol again.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ said Beth, and she smiled at him and kissed him.

  Lately they had lacked even the conventions of romance, subsiding instead into a routine of practicalities, debates about when to leave for the annual trip to Sol’s mother in Rhode Island; questions about each other’s day, well-worn resentments and predictabilities, the domestic and the transactional dipping, on very rare occasions, into nostalgia for the beginning of love. Beth went through the motions of discussing the American trip, during which they usually took turns working, Sol flying to different jobs, while Fern was at her happiest disappearing with a crowd of cousins.

  Sol was his grumpy, hardworking, kind self, behind a coating of privacy, and he and Beth drifted through days, bobbing against each other with an unease that, from past experience, would develop either into a row or a period of deeper intimacy. They were not good at distance.

  Sex barely occurred. For the first time, Sol would not or could not, and when she finally tried, he was limp, as he rarely ever had been.

  Friction turned to blankness that allowed Beth space in which to dream, only background worries regarding Sol niggling at her in her relief that he no longer questioned her.

  ‘Mum,’ said Fern after school one day, resting her head against Beth so Beth jolted at the first communication for weeks. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello!’ She put her arm round Fern, tentatively.

  ‘Do you really want to go to Newport?’

  ‘Of course—’ Her voice wobbled. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Well why haven’t you booked the tickets?’

  ‘We will! Let me discuss with Dad.’

  Tamara rose up with her smile, and Beth spoke with a speeded tone that overlaid the image, Sol coming in.

  ‘I like this,’ said Sol, nodding at an unfinished painting Beth had propped on the table to study in different lights. The river was a flow of gulls, and hair floated among the birds, and she couldn’t help it, couldn’t help delineating each sodden strand. Was guilt edging at the darkness? A thought hit her. Tamara slotted over the top.

  ‘Thank you.’

  They prepared supper, talking of a new commission of Sol’s, the sky luminous with a fading brightness that made sunshine of the kitchen, and as Beth was fetching plates with one hand and stirring salad with the other, Tamara B appeared on her phone. She crouched over it. She glanced at Sol, and left the room. Beneath a confusion of voices she heard a suppressed sob.

  She walked out of the kitchen to the yard.

  ‘I need to see you. Angus is a madman.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He’s shouting at me … He’s being cruel. Really – heartless. I don’t know why. He won’t even go and get my medicine.’

  ‘You’re ill?’

  ‘I seem to have come down with something – nothing bad. Throat again. It’s usually tonsillitis.’ She dropped her voice, so Beth strained to hear her, a chaffinch loud from the gutter high up. ‘He’s shouting at me. I’m afraid of what he might—’

  ‘Put him on,’ said Beth.

  ‘No! Of course I can’t do that.’

  ‘Then I’m coming straight down to you,’ she said. ‘Just wait there.’

  She ran back into the kitchen, where Sol had laid the plates out on the table and turned the radio on to catch the headlines.

  ‘I—’ said Beth, flustered. The lying had developed a diseased smoothness. ‘I need to go and see Ellie.’

  ‘Do you? It’s dinner.’

  She pulled on a jacket and grabbed her bag as she talked. She had taken to keeping make-up in her bag in case of such events, as she had done in her teens.

  ‘Have you booked the tickets now?’ said Fern without looking up.

  Beth paused. She glanced at Sol. He shrugged.

  ‘We will! Don’t worry.’

  She tried to kiss Fern goodbye. Fern jerked her head away. Beth hesitated and scanned a scene frozen in awful knowledge: House of Cardigans.

  ‘I need to go—’ she said, scrabbling. ‘Ellie’s got a problem.’

  Her spine stiffened.

  Fern lifted her head and stared at Beth with the unblinking gaze she used
for their Outstaring competitions, in which she habitually triumphed. It was the first time she had looked directly at her in weeks.

  Beth gave an awkward smile. She turned.

  Fern was emptying out her bulging pencil case.

  ‘I love you both,’ said Beth, but they were already busy.

  ***

  She tumbled out of Kennington tube and squeezed along the passage, now unruly with honeysuckle and jasmine that pressed its green-white scent on her, the flowers bright in the falling light. She knocked on the door to Tamara’s consulting room before remembering that this was not where she entered any more; and she retraced her steps. Beth heard Tamara’s voice laughing at her, eyes among the leaves, splash of skin. She didn’t look ill.

  ‘Are you still my patient?’ she said, pulling Beth into a wild hug.

  ‘I wish I was,’ said Beth without meaning to.

  ‘Do you? No, no, too restrictive. We’re past that now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she said, then coughed as she led Beth into the hall. ‘Meet Angus.’

  ‘I want to sort out this dickhead for you.’

  ‘Oh no, really not. I love your occasional vulgar expressions. Angus’s as gentle as a sheep! No, that’s not right, is it? A lamb. He always is—’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘Oh, it was not very much, really,’ she said, and she gave Beth a graze of a kiss on the lips. ‘Sorry. I got overdramatic. Here he is.’

  Beth stared, the shock of the brush of Tamara’s lips still on hers, as the husband shambled into the hall, carrying a shopping basket of a feminine design that gave him the air of an old European man. He looked somewhat surprised to see her there. He was, oddly, halfway as Beth had imagined him, with his faded fairness and his glasses, his style redolent of the architect he was not.

  She hesitated, then returned his handshake with a stony expression.

  ‘This is Angus. Beth, who is a famous artist.’

  Beth turned away. ‘I’m not. Are you all right now?’ she said to Tamara.

  Tamara smiled. ‘Oh yes, Angus decided he wouldn’t get me my painkillers as some kind of protest. Apparently I was behaving badly.’

  ‘I’ll go and get them for you,’ said Beth. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Oh no, no, thank you, you’re kind,’ she said, the voice wrapping her so that again the tone came before the words. ‘Angus will go for me now; there are several other things I want.’

  ‘I have my list,’ he said, peering down at a column of handwriting whose familiarity to Beth lent it a bloom of intimacy in the hall, memories of the unknowable Dr Bywater’s signature on NHS letters. The husband was tall and broad but uncertain, stooping in the hallway of a house whose proportions were too small for him, only the length of the blond-grey hair straggling down one side of a square face defying Beth’s preconceived image. She could see the remains of moderately good looks that would have once appealed.

  ‘What kind of an artist?’ he said. ‘It’s Tamara who is our curator. Collector, I should say. The family expert.’ He smiled at her.

  ‘Roughly – urban landscape. Symbolic landscapes.’

  ‘Ah! Abstract or figurative?’

  ‘Neither, exactly.’

  ‘Oh, silly, real artists won’t categorise themselves like that,’ said Tamara. ‘Come and have tea, Beth.’

  Angus looked at Tamara, but she had turned. She and Beth passed the rooms stuffed with paintings and quirky antiques that contained very little sign of children. He followed them down to the kitchen, stooping and turning intermittently to Tamara, as though waiting for her approval.

  Tamara looked at him, saying nothing.

  ‘Yes,’ he said after a beat. ‘I must go to the chemist.’ He glanced at her between sentences.

  ‘La Martorana …’ said Beth, examining a photo on the fridge.

  ‘Yes, we have Palermo plans for a late-summer holiday,’ he said, glancing at Tamara, who merely smiled into the distance without looking at him. ‘Mar has friends there,’ he said, brightening. ‘But we’re thinking about Edinburgh at Easter. If that’s what you’d still like?’

  ‘Darling,’ she said, turning abruptly and running her nails down his sleeve, the action brushing Beth with a flare of jealousy. ‘Late-night opening hours aren’t forever. I need my …’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. And the foundation. Is it shade One or Two?’

  ‘Two for summer.’

  ‘You know this stuff—’ Beth began, dampening laughter.

  ‘Oh, he’s marvellously practical.’

  ‘She’s got a big conference coming up,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that’s why there’s been a bit of stress.’

  ‘I went slightly diva,’ said Tamara, turning to Beth, ‘but Angus has yet to apologise, so I’m still sulking.’

  He looked at her in tense amusement.

  ‘If he thinks that is bad behaviour, I have more I can offer,’ she said, and he kept his gaze on her, palpably animated.

  She took cups from the dishwasher while he hesitated, but she kept her back to him, then he squeezed and stooped his way up the staircase with his wife’s fabric-lined basket.

  Tamara asked Beth a string of questions about her day, what she had done, who she had seen, how she was, what her family was doing. ‘Thank you for coming to my rescue,’ she said.

  ‘It seems I didn’t need to.’

  ‘I’m always happy to be rescued.’ She sighed. ‘He’s an amiable enough companion, but …’ She found saucers, took down a Japanese teapot, a tarnished silver strainer, small items, as delicate as those she carried around with her. She held the teapot absently. She touched her neck. ‘He doesn’t exactly light my fire.’

  Tamara began rearranging a kitchen shelf, tea seemingly neglected.

  ‘Maybe we’ve just been together too long,’ she said, filled the kettle and forgot to put it on. ‘The classic attrition. He’s a great father. There’s nothing wrong with him, exactly. I sound quite terrible, don’t I? Hard. I do love him. I respect him. But …’ Her face stilled. ‘Beth, I’ve got to this age and … I’m stifled. Restricted, bored.’

  Beth laughed a little, nodded. ‘Marriage can be boring,’ she said, betrayal shaming her. ‘Bloody boring,’ she said, compounding it. Bitch, she thought.

  Tamara turned to her with a laugh. ‘Sol’s not, though, is he?’ She suddenly put her hands on Beth’s shoulders.

  There was a silence.

  ‘No,’ said Beth, gripping her thumb and middle finger together as she spoke. She pressed the kettle switch.

  Tamara’s face was blank. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ She busied herself without looking at Beth so that Beth could watch the fall of her hair as she moved, and the caught, or possibly imagined, scent of her fed an image of kissing her that was growing in her mind.

  Taxi engines grumbled on the street above the basement that contained just the two of them, silver evening light penetrating its area, youths shouting. Where were Tamara’s children? Beth looked around for photos of them on the fridge or on shelves but she could find only one school portrait in which they were much younger. She stared in search of Tamara’s genes.

  ‘This isn’t full living, is it?’ said Tamara finally, and at last she turned to Beth, but she appeared, Beth thought, almost off-kilter, a fragility to her that was disquieting. And then a punch of desire, stronger than anything she had experienced for so many years, hit her.

  ‘Poor you,’ said Beth pathetically. ‘But it’s clear he’s crazy about you.’ She heard her own student-like awkwardness as she fawned through the silence.

  Tamara shrugged.

  Beth rammed at her creative powers, inventing new angles for entertainment, aware that she was now boring Tamara as much as her husband did, the result a kind of cheeky flattery that was connected with the youthful artistic persona with which she had somehow been invested; yet still Tamara’s attention was elsewhere, unengaged by a personality that couldn’t equal hers.

>   The imagined kiss with this woman, terrifying yet longed for, ballooned in front of Beth, until it was all she could think about, swaying towards it in her mind as though on a diving board, poised for the moment where courage propelled the undoable. She made herself think of Sol, Fern, her life at home. She gazed through the kitchen, the kiss temporarily deflated.

  Beth spoke. Tamara didn’t answer.

  The thought of the kiss sliced through Beth’s mind again. She hesitated, seeing the choreography in a series of jerky images.

  There was a knock at the front door. ‘Oh,’ Tamara sighed.

  Beth cursed audibly, Tamara raising one eyebrow, and she pressed herself against the washing machine.

  ‘Who is it?’ she said as Tamara reappeared alone.

  ‘Oh, just Duncan. My neighbour.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I never made the tea, did I?’ she said vaguely. ‘Upstairs fixing the lights.’

  ‘Why?’ said Beth, no aspect of Tamara too small to collect. ‘I mean—’

  Tamara paused, mystification apparent.

  ‘The – lengthy therapy-based biographical ban makes me inordinately curious,’ said Beth in a rehearsed rush. ‘I wasn’t even allowed to know—’

  ‘He does things,’ said Tamara across Beth. ‘He’s good with fixing all sorts of things. It’s very kind of him.’

  ‘How often does he come round?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Beth. Most weeks, after work. He seems to like to.’

  Beth started to laugh. ‘So you have a tame neighbour as your unpaid odd-job man, while your husband trots out to buy your make-up?’

  ‘Oh, Beth, you are bad,’ said Tamara, turning fully for the first time, eyes looking straight into her.

  Beth breathed out too loudly, then attempted to convert her exhalation into a cough.

  ‘I know that sound,’ said Tamara.

  ‘How?’ said Beth abruptly.

  ‘I’ve heard it in my time.’ Tamara smiled, not looking at her, and put her hands behind Beth’s neck. There was a series of hoots outside, doors slammed. ‘Oh, Beth. But we can only play.’

  ‘The dragon Ann Penrose—’

  ‘Ann – oh. I’m not afraid of her any more.’

  ‘Really?’