‘Shall we leave now?’ he asked.
Outside, the cold air hit me in the face. My tiny party dress also exposed a length of bare leg and my coat didn’t cover much more.
Peter wrapped a protective arm round my shoulders.
‘It isn’t far to my car.’
I couldn’t even remember whether I had come in my car, let alone where I might have parked it. That was how I was in those days.
Peter’s turned out to be low, two-seater, quite old and with an interior of creased leather and glowing wood. I learned later that it was a Jaguar XK140. He always loved old cars and kept a series of them on which he bestowed almost as much affection as he did on me. He took me that night to a French restaurant in Notting Hill, old-fashioned but good, and made me eat whitebait and steak. I drew the line at pudding, although he wanted to order one for me. I hadn’t eaten a pudding or a slice of cake since I was fifteen.
Over the first course I confessed what I believed it was only fair for him to know from the beginning. If, in fact, there was actually going to be anything further, if this start didn’t turn out also to be the ending. There had been a few evenings of that sort, lately.
‘I am afraid that I am mad. Known fact. Crazy. Completely barking.’
He chewed his food, reflecting briefly on this idiotic announcement.
‘I think I will be the judge of that,’ Peter Stafford answered.
I ate as much as I could of my steak and vegetables, without making much of a dent in the portion, and all the time I could think of nothing but how soon we might be able to go to bed together. When he was finally convinced that I wasn’t going to eat tarte Tatin or chocolate soufflé, Peter shepherded me back to the Jaguar and drove me to his flat in Bayswater.
We kissed for the first time under the overhead light in the hallway. In his sitting room, standing beside the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, I reached around to the zip on the back of my dress and undid it. Slowly, I let the folds drop to the carpet. I was naked underneath except for my pants. He covered my breasts with his hands.
I kicked off one high-heeled shoe and then the other. Barefoot, I was closer to his height. He took my hand and led me into his bedroom, and closed the door behind us.
When he took off the last garment he knelt over me and looked.
‘Oh God, oh God,’ he breathed. After a beat of fear I realised that it was in pleasure and admiration, not dismay. I put my arms round his neck and pulled him down on top of me.
When we made love, Peter Stafford made me feel three-dimensional.
I forgot the jut of my hips and my overlong and protuberant spinal column, and the dull grate of bone. In his arms I became languorous and creamy and fat.
Afterwards he held me against him, warming me with his solid flesh.
‘Cary, Cary. Be still,’ he ordered and I knew that he didn’t mean just now, under the crisp covers of his bed, but in my life. No more spinning around and gobbling pills. No more talking nonsense or drinking or dementia.
‘I asked Cecil to bring me over to you,’ he said. Cecil was the photographer’s agent. ‘I didn’t think you would even speak to me, but I made him do it just the same.’
‘I would have come to you, if you hadn’t.’ Maybe I would have done, too.
That was a Thursday evening. I had a job the next day, but I called in sick. It was the first time I had ever done such a thing and my booker was astonished. Peter called his office too. We stayed in bed for the whole of Friday and for the weekend that followed it, except for when we got up to forage for something to eat and drink. I padded around wearing one of his shirts because I had nothing with me but my party dress and we fed each other cold chicken legs or buttered toast.
‘Good,’ he approved.
Another time when we were quietly lying together and watching raindrops on the window glass he asked, ‘Why did you say you were mad? Except for the job you do and the people you do it with you seem exceptionally sane to me.’
I fended him off. ‘No real reason. Drink, nerves, babble. Or I suppose that if someone were to look at you and then at me, they might put you in the sane category and me in the other. Just as a matter of relativity.’
‘Because of the way we look, relatively?’
Without his glasses Peter’s eyes were soft, with creases at the corners. His forehead and the faint lines hooking together his mouth and nose and the curve of his lips were already dear to me. I touched them, stroking the skin with the flat of my thumbs.
‘No. Nothing to do with that. It’s history.’
‘What history?’
‘Tell me yours first.’
He held me so that my chin rested in the hollow of his shoulder. I closed my eyes and listened while he described his childhood. He was the middle one of three boys, children of a City solicitor and a career mother. They lived in a good house in Hampshire and the brothers played cricket in the garden and sailed dinghies, and went to a suitable public school and then on to appropriate universities.
‘Not very interesting, you see,’ Peter said.
‘It is to me. Where are your brothers now?’
He told me that they were both lawyers and both married, and made a joke about it being such a conservative family that his own minute deviations from this norm were regarded as acts of rebellion.
‘No wife, you mean?’
‘No law, no wife. But I have had a couple of girlfriends. I’m quite normal, you know.’
I did know already, but I wanted to know more about his background because he was so safe and rational, the living equivalent of the scent of clean laundry. Everything about Peter Stafford, past and present, was a magnet to me.
Probably after that we started to make love again and so his original question to me was forgotten. I avoided talking about my own history that time, although eventually, of course, I did confess it to him.
In any case, within three months Peter and I were married.
He asked me once or twice if I had seen our new neighbour again, and I told him no. Then I met Lisa parking her car as I was coming back from a walk in Hyde Park. We talked for a minute or two, and on impulse I asked her if she would like to come and have dinner with us the following week. To my surprise she accepted. She was lonelier than I had calculated and Baz had not yet been replaced.
Lisa rang the doorbell late, well after all the other guests had arrived. Peter answered the door and I heard him introducing himself and then Lisa’s laughing response before he shepherd her into the drawing room. She was wearing a short, slippery red dress with a little pink cardigan shrugged over it, and red suede shoes. Our guests collectively sat upright, our old friends Clive and Sally Marr and Mark and Gerard from upstairs, and the visiting American woman associate of Peter’s, and the young portrait painter and his girlfriend whom I had invited in an attempt to span the age gap between Lisa and the rest of us. Her arrival was like a shaft of daylight coming into the nighttime gathering.
I saw her looking around at the room that was identical in shape and size, and yet so different from hers.
‘Your flat is very smart,’ she said, after we had greeted each other.
‘Is it?’
‘Definitely.’
I introduced her to the others and as she moved around I saw that what she brought with her wasn’t exactly light, but warmth. Aside from her youth and her prettiness, she had genuine heat that thawed the formality of the occasion. Clive Marr unwound his long arms and legs from their self-protective embrace and shook her hand, and Jessy the American woman smilingly made room for her on the sofa. I hitched my black