She blew out her cheeks a few times, then she said, ‘I’ll make a call.’
She took a small Bluetooth headset from the breast pocket of her jacket and crossed to the other side of the street. I stood, watching her from the threshold. Children shouted in back yards, and the traffic on the main road was loud, but I could hear most of what she said. She reported the conversation we had had, in the words that I had used. She spoke of my concern for my son. She kept looking across at me as she spoke, one hand on her briefcase, the other on her headset.
‘Mr Mercer thinks … Mr Mercer feels … Mr Mercer suggests.’ If she was irritated with me she didn’t let it show. Her words made me sound reasonable and adult, and I was grateful to her.
I smiled at her; she smiled weakly back.
‘Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning,’ she said when she had crossed back over. ‘Best I could do. Ensure you’re in, please.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Sorry to waste your time. But he’s only eleven.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do understand.’
‘I don’t have much to say anyway. Max has told you pretty much everything.’
Millicent woke at six and gently extricated herself from Max. We ate linguine in front of the television. Millicent sat on the sofa with Max’s legs in her lap, balancing the plate in one hand, her white shirt flecked red-orange from the sauce. I sat on the floor, my back to the sofa, with Millicent’s legs on each side of me.
Max hardly stirred. At nine I carried him up to bed.
That first night the sex was drunken and good-natured. Millicent allowed me to believe I had charmed her into bed.
Later we had sat side by side and eaten breakfast at an all-night café in Holborn. I was surprised to find she was nervous. She spilled orange juice in my lap, was mortified, apologised like an English girl. I offered her my last cigarette – she’d long since finished her own pack – and she gulped the smoke down with obvious relief, her spine lengthening, her shoulders descending, balance and poise returning to her body. She took another of her double drags and handed the cigarette back to me. She liked me, I realised, and I liked her. Even when sober. So I told her.
‘Why? What do you like about me?’
Why did I like her? I knew next to nothing about her, had told her next to nothing about myself. But something had made me say it.
‘You’re good at smoking. You slept with me on the second date. You have slightly inverted nipples. And you’re foreign. What’s not to like?’
‘Don’t try to charm your way past the question, Alex.’
‘OK. Sorry.’
‘Do you? Like me? I kind of need to know.’
‘Yes, I like you.’
On the fourth day she flew back to the States without much explanation. She came back ten days later. She had broken up with her boyfriend. Moved out of their rented apartment. Sold her things and come to Europe.
‘Your boyfriend? Your apartment?’
‘It wasn’t working out.’
A bolter, friends said. Watch yourself. But I was younger then, and I was flattered by the impulsiveness of her choices. The girl I met in the pub.
When I asked her where her luggage was, she pointed at her bag. She had taken a courier flight from LAX. One large leather handbag. She really had sold everything. She had a week’s worth of underwear. Two t-shirts. Two skirts. One pair of trousers. She had £1,500 in cash. She would work, she said. You can’t, I said, you need a permit.
‘About that,’ she said. ‘I had a couple of thoughts.’
So we entered lightly into marriage; so, at least, it seemed to me then.
I lay still in our tiny double bed, listening. I had a memory of her sliding from the bed at first light, of her whispering something to me, tender and loving.
Birds and traffic. A family shouting on a back patio. And computer keys.
I got up and pulled on a clean pair of pants. Max’s door was open, his room empty. I opened the door to Millicent’s office. A desk, a chair, a computer and Millicent in her kimono dressing gown. A spare bedroom without room for a bed. Millicent didn’t look round.
‘That bad?’ I said.
‘What?’ she said, typing, her fingers floating elegantly across the keys, fast and precise. Her feet twitched reflexively.
‘You’re typing with your feet. You’re nervous. What are you worrying about?’
She turned, gave me a look of mock irritation, then turned back to her screen.
‘I’m preparing a little. For this evening.’
‘I thought it was unscripted.’
‘It pretty much is.’
‘Looks scripted to me, Millicent.’
‘So kill me, I’m nervous,’ she said. ‘Also, a guy with a drill just fitted a lock to the neighbour’s front door. Which is more than a little disconcerting. Why would they feel the need to do that, Alex?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He just … I can’t believe he just … went like that.’ Her eyes clouded, and for a moment I wondered if she was going to cry.
‘London,’ I said.
‘Maybe so,’ she said. ‘Yeah. Maybe it’s London.’ She sighed. Then she drew herself together again and the sadness was gone. ‘How many words is two hours, Alex?’
‘Three words a second,’ I said. ‘Makes 180 words a minute, 10,800 words an hour. Call it 21,000 words. Minus commercial breaks, which are about a quarter of the programme. So 15,000 words.’
‘Huh,’ she said. ‘That is a lot of words.’
‘It isn’t,’ I said. ‘Not really. Where’s Max?’
‘He fixed his own breakfast and went to school.’
‘He seem OK to you?’
‘So far. And yeah, I’m watching him for signs.’
She went back to typing. My wife at her desk.
I tried to distract her by cupping her breasts in my hands. She looked up at me and smiled, continued typing while she held my gaze.
‘How do you do that?’ I said. ‘Without looking?’
‘Neat, huh?’ she said, and turned back to the screen, carried on typing. I kept my hands on her breasts.
‘It’s a conversation,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to prepare. They ring, they tell you their problem, you answer their questions.’
‘So I’m talking, what, half the time?’
‘Less,’ I said.
‘So, that’s what, 6,000 words?’
‘Forget the word count, Millicent. You can’t script this. And you can’t write 6,000 words in a day.’
‘I never did this before, and I am super-nervous. Also, it’s forbidden to swear. And to smoke in the studio.’
‘You’re allowed to be nervous. You won’t swear. People will call. The station will filter out the hostile callers. You will help people who need help. The station will pay