They took an hour, then Aoife just walked straight out with a plastic electric-blue ice pack held up snug to her jaw. When she came close up to me her face was so pale I detected freckles that I’d never seen before. Outside she looked around and said, ‘It isn’t broke but there might be little cracks, and my tooth isn’t loose. I want a cigarette.’

  ‘Were they suspicious?’

  ‘They kept saying it was odd I’d hit the table twice, once to knock the jaw and a bit on the side of the forehead here that’s going to bruise. I said I’d hit a shelf on the way down then hit the table but I don’t think they believed.’ Suddenly she started to cry. She glanced back nervously at the hospital. ‘I so wanted to do the photo shoot on Tuesday.’

  ‘I know you did. I know.’

  ‘That bastard. He’s such a bastard sometimes.’

  Back in the flat, Lou was playing it up, mucking around on the floor with Lily. He had righted the table, cleaned most of the destruction, and I could smell he’d put the oven back on again. The shattered coffee table was neatly stacked in pieces against the wall in a mockery of domesticity.

  I went to my room, lowered the camp bed from where it leaned against the wall and lay out on it for half an hour, listening for a fresh outbreak of hostilities but giving them private space to talk, until Aoife called me. I walked up to the front room.

  The illusion of the happy family disgusted me. The tablecloth had been pathetically restored, complete with wet soup stains; torn pages of Vogue layered beneath, so bottles of perfume and the lithe torsos of Parisian models showed through the wet cotton. Lily was back up in her high chair but seemed anxious – quietly turning her face from one of us to the other. Even she wasn’t fooled.

  At least Lou made no pretence when he uncorked the wine, swigged, then just passed the bottle round. Aoife smiled wanly and tried to pretend chewing wasn’t hurting her, but she only picked at some lean white chicken and cold broccoli. I made a point of being silent so there were huge gaps in their rags of conversation, interspersed with the sound of the television and Aoife delivering one liners, like, ‘I have to go back in a few days to the outpatients.’

  Then, ten minutes later, ‘I have to go back if I get bad headaches.’ She smiled at Lou as she said these things and I realised that, despite it all, she was pleased to now have a connection with the same local hospital that he did.

  Lou nodded compliantly. I had an urge to lean over and begin caressing Aoife’s breast, right in front of him. I knew what I was up to, with my broody silence, forcing his eyelashes to flicker away from me when he tried to meet my gaze. If I emphasised the degree of my outrage, it was only so that one day it might temper his fury and make him feel he deserved it, when he found out about Aoife and me.

  Towards the end of eating, the first bottle of wine was emptied and Lou sat at the table and uncorked the other. He passed the bottle round but Aoife shrugged again and said, ‘I was given painkillers.’ He nodded and immediately passed the bottle to me. I took it from his hand then drank from it.

  Aoife said, through her slightly puffy lip, which had altered her voice. ‘It was so mild out there today.’

  I said, ‘Yeah. Let’s talk about the weather; another lovely day at A&E, the Smiths’ second home.’

  The rest of the meal was conducted in silence.

  22

  Not a sound leaked from their bedroom that last night before Lou left us and when we rose to urge him off, before dawn, the side of Aoife’s face was a cautious blue. A black semicircle was manifest underneath her eye.

  The four of us were all crushed up together in the tight space of the hallway, against the coats by the front door. I was in bare feet, tugged-up jeans and T-shirt, and I nodded only a serious ‘Ciao’ to Lou. He didn’t put down his suitcase.

  Aoife was in those pyjamas again, holding up Lily in her left arm, but the baby was sleeping because it was so early, head flopping aside as Lou leaned in towards the child and kissed.

  He moved out his fingers and touched Aoife’s bruised face. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Immediately after the front door shut, Aoife carried Lily to the front-room window, ‘There goes Daddy, there goes bad Daddy,’ but the infant was asleep and refused to see her departing father, far below in the dark, lit by the lush then pale finery of a single train flash.

  I said softly, ‘Will I put the mortice lock on?’ Aoife carried Lily back down the corridor to her cot and called back a sharp ‘Yes.’

  I stepped into their bedroom. She was looking down at Lily, placed back asleep in the cot, then Aoife crossed to their bed beneath her photographs and she swept aside the sheets, the blankets and covers, and waved me to join her even though the child was there. I imagined I could feel the heat of the male body still in the sheets.

  ‘I don’t want you to have to look at my face,’ she muttered, as if to herself.

  Later she unambiguously said, ‘A bit harder.’

  ‘He’s a bastard,’ I said between my teeth.

  ‘No. He isn’t.’

  ‘Look what he did.’

  ‘I deserve it. For the loveliness of this.’ Aoife giggled strangely then she gasped air in a long calamitous groan.

  The phone went in the evening after Lily had been fed and fallen asleep in her buggy by the dining table. Aoife walked up the corridor, stepping into her tracksuit bottoms and draping the top round her shoulders. She answered the telephone in that cautious, scared voice she always used when she picked it up. I could tell by her tone it was Lou as I bunkered down in their bed, but in moments I was surprised by Aoife at the door, whispering across the darkness: ‘He needs to speak to you. Lily’s still fast asleep. That early start knackered her.’

  ‘Cunningham, boyo. How are my charges?’

  ‘Black and blue. And Worcestershire?’

  ‘A web of rural intrigue and cow dung. Bit of resistance at this end. A problem.’

  While I spoke to him, Aoife came in the front room and kneeled down to Lily, sleeping in her buggy, but then Aoife rose, crossed and pushed in hard against me. I played idly at her hair in the confidence of ownership as I listened to her husband’s voice down the phone. She let the tracksuit top fall, and she led my free hand to a breast. It only struck me just then: Aoife liked having two lovers, and why not?

  ‘A problem? What’s that? Have you gone twelve rounds with the governess?’

  There was a silence, then, to explain how much that silence had cost him, he clarified, ‘Got to make it quick. I’m in the call box down in the village – for want of a better noun. The people bloody stare at you from the houses – all three of them – when you use the phone box. An old dear in her cheese-making apron came out her hovel just now to tell me the number seven sometimes didn’t work on this phone.’

  I toyed with Aoife’s nipple like it was an insect.

  Lou’s voice in my ear was saying, ‘They’re probably still listening in at the local exchange round these parts so watch what you say. Look, I was told I was being paid eight hundred a month. And I am, but I’m not being paid till the end of next month and I can sit that out. The grub’s no great shakes but I’ll last, and the buggers are renovating the staff quarters so we’re bloody dossing in the empty student dorms just now. It’s like the Boy Scouts with verb conjugation.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘I’m on this induction but they’re trying to screw a fee out of me right now for the course.’

  ‘You have to pay for a teaching course in order to teach the course there?’

  ‘Exacta-bloody-mundo. A rip-off, but a fly move and I have to hand it to them. There’s a future in language schools, Cunningham.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Three hundred up front in cash. All the other bozos here have it. Now I’ve eighty here but I need two-twenty, pronto, and am I not correct in saying you have your canny Scot savings still in your old sock, from bloody Hanson and some of your giro scrapings?’ There was a pause down the line. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘What’s the alternative?’

  ‘There isn’t one. If I can’t pay, I’m gone. I’ll need to sneak out here at six in the morning and elope to London, then at least you and me’ll be back in The Bells by tomorrow night.’

  ‘Two hundred and twenty.’

  ‘I know, boyo.’ He sighed. ‘I’m really sorry but we’ll have five hundred cash, end of this month and five at the end of next as well.’

  ‘Hold on.’ I laid down the receiver and signalled Aoife to accompany me back to their bedroom. I grabbed her in my arms and whispered in her ear, ‘He needs two hundred and twenty quid, to pay for the teaching course. I knew the place would be a rip-off.’

  ‘Two hundred. Where from?’

  ‘I have it saved.’

  She quickly thought about this. ‘What if you don’t give it him?’ She still whispered and she coughed to clear her throat.

  ‘He’ll come back. Tomorrow.’ We looked at each other. ‘What’ll I do?’

  She looked at me. ‘Send him the money. Keep him away from us.’

  I nodded and returned to the telephone in the front room, ‘Okay, then.’

  Coldly, Lou stated, ‘Meeting of the Board of Governors, was that?’

  ‘I was checking what cash I had.’

  ‘It’ll need to be cash you send in the envelope, Cunningham. Disguise it well or the yokels here will tear it to pieces for pig trading and scrumpy. I already heard the postman took a shotgun to his wife, but she didn’t press charges.’

  ‘Sounds your kind of place. I’ll post it first class tomorrow, so should be with you the next day. Eeef’s got the school address. Here she is.’ I tried to take a respectful step back as I handed her the phone but Aoife startled me, taking the receiver yet grabbing my other arm and leaning in against me. Aoife’s hand slid down over my thigh, where it remained. I held my breath, fearful Lou would hear it.

  In her quiet voice, she tested, ‘Is that okay?’ She nodded at what it was Lou said next. ‘She’s sleeping in the buggy right next to me.’ She looked silently straight into my eyes and tightened her hand on my leg. I thought to myself right then that she was going to leave Lou and come away with me and there was going to be years of conflict over Lily. Aoife said, ‘She’s fine. Douglas took her to the park on his own this afternoon and the fresh air wears her out. I couldn’t go. Obviously.’ There was a pause as she listened to a question. ‘Still a little sore, Lou,’ she whispered.

  I heard his voice down the phone with a sudden edge of despair to it and my heart twisted for him. Did he secretly know I was extracting penance on his wife’s body, almost hourly? Each time I touched her skin with my fingers it would have scalded him.

  She took her eyes away from me and looked at her feet. She put her forehead down. ‘I love you too.’ Very slowly she replaced the phone and dropped her head on my shoulder. I couldn’t help squinting at the receiver, to make sure it had been correctly returned. I could see him, lifting the collar of his mac, glancing up at the night sky, shuffling like Tam o’ Shanter through the dark country miles.

  Then I put my lips to her collar bone and took her little silver crucifix upon my tongue. I tried to lift it onto the tip of her tongue and it did reach there but then I dropped to my knees and kissed around her belly so the muscles went into a block of tension while I slid my arms far round her tracksuit bottoms on the glassy skin of her ass. I looked up and I saw her push the crucifix out her mouth with her tongue and allow it to fall with a string of bright saliva, lit by the street light, and it stuck to her collar bone.

  I got her on the couch.

  She whispered, ‘Don’t wake Lily.’

  With her tracky bottoms gone, I kneeled where the shattered table once used to sit, my head between her thighs and her fingers in my hair. Her sound of final satisfaction was like an annoyed, dismissive grunt.

  Back in their bedroom, her fingers splayed out on the crochet colours when she was too tender. After an hour and more she said, ‘I’m hurting a little bit.’ The shining mucus was around both her vagina and her anus. Then we lay on our backs looking up at the Artex ceiling, just breathing, until she said, ‘Let’s have a bath together now. We never have.’

  The enamel was worn off the bottom of that old bath and you had to be cautious never to suddenly slide along it, or you inevitably skinned your ass; but it was large enough for two and for my upper torso to lean back, fitting between the taps.

  She said, ‘Lou never takes baths with me,’ as if this were a grave failing. ‘Poor you and Lou. You’re both married to the same bride now.’

  I nodded, ‘But only I know it.’

  She looked at me along the rising steam and the thin slick of suds and she took my cock in her hand, making it break surface, so she began moving her fist up and down – eyes intent. ‘I’m not so sure. Maybe Lou is sharing me?’ she said idly.

  I made a noise of dismissal but added, ‘So beautiful, you should be shared. But he’s destroying you and I want to build you up.’

  ‘We’ve Lily to bring up. He’s going to marry me in the church and he’ll get his way.’

  ‘Could we still not?’ I made a sound. ‘Both be your lovers? On different days or something?’

  ‘Or at the same time would be nice. One night maybe?’ she whispered.

  I nodded. I didn’t think I had any left inside me but a sperm dribble – as tiny and white as an infant’s new tooth, lifted out and melded down over her knuckles into the water, where the spineless ampoule of it meandered.

  Lily started wailing from her buggy and with a whooshing of water, Aoife stood and stepped carefully out. I could see the bruise on her pelvis now. Most of the left side of her face was full blue with a smoky edging, whilst below her eye looked like black pudding.

  The cash was posted, folded in foolscap to Lou, keeping him up there so his wife and I could keep going at each other in bed together. Aoife hid in the apartment all the time, letting her face heal while we made love. I wrote nothing and read nothing. I visited the Co-op for shopping, and took Lily in her buggy through Gunnersbury Park. I’d acquired a family overnight, by cutting out the middleman.

  Lou phoned nightly and she phoned back to his payphone in a hallway. He described – to us both – the school and the course, then the first teaching and his long conversations with the local priest: as if it were a novel, but some nights you could hear he was just too tired to talk for long.

  Aoife spoke to him patiently but it made no difference to his case at my end. She was no Penelope, unravelling the day’s weaving as she waited for her Odysseus. We moved around the flat naked, making love in rhythm to Lily’s sleep, and I could detect a quite precise relation between Aoife’s ardour and her degree of daily disaffection with Lou. Like on the day she had to wrap her face in a scarf, wear sunglasses and go to the dentist for a check-up. Those were generous days for me.

  One evening on the telephone to him I’d carefully asked when Lily would see him next and he’d revealed, ‘Forty days and forty nights, boyo. It’s all I deserve.’

  I nodded admiringly and also delighted. I suppose I tried to convince myself he knew about Aoife and me. Since that would justify it.

  23

  Weeks into our sky-set idyll, the telephone rang and I picked up.

  ‘Sausage. I’ve been ever so busy. At Mass Lou’s gran told me he’s somewhere up north, teaching, and you and Eeef are all alone. Two poor sausages. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Hi, Abby.’

  Aoife looked over at me – alarmed – pointed to her jaw and shook her head.

  ‘Yeah. He found this teaching job that pays well and he’s away for a few weeks. We’re just lying low. I’m writing.’

  There was a silence, slightly paranoid with perhaps the implication I had murdered Aoife and concealed her body. Abby demanded, ‘And how is Eeef?’

  ‘She’s good, she’s good, I’ll go get her.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll need to come round with a bottle of wine. How about tonight?’

  I turned to look at Aoife. ‘A bottle tonight?’

  Aoife shook her head and buried her face in her hands.

  ‘Well we haven’t been out in ages. Maybe we should meet somewhere for a beer. Sometime?’

  Bluntly, Abby enquired, ‘Me and you?’

  ‘Well, all of us, and we can see if Flo or Granny Smith’ll take Lily.’

  Aoife shook her head but I waved her down with my hand. ‘Here’s Aoife.’

  She took the phone with a cheery, ‘Hi. No. He’s been up there a few weeks. No. It’s very good money. I’m a bit tired. Why don’t you and Douglas go out and I’ll tag along another night? Yes.’ She giggled. ‘Okay, then. Oh yes. He’ll remember it from the wedding.’

  They gabbed on for ages and after she got off the phone, I said, ‘You’ve set me up. The last thing I want is to go out drinking with Abby.’

  ‘But we can’t let her see me with my face like this. It’s impossible.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘She knows everything about make-up so she’ll be able to tell if I try to conceal it.’

  ‘I know. But she’s a bit of a man-eater.’

  Aoife just laughed. ‘You know the pub in Ealing where we were on the wedding day? You’ve to meet her there at seven.’

  ‘But Eeef. She’s—’

  ‘Do you think she’s out to eat you?’

  ‘I’m not trying to flatter myself. She’s just a lioness. She can’t help it.’

  Aoife laughed, threw herself down on the sofa and put a thoughtful finger to her lip. ‘Do you really think she’s after you?’

  ‘Lou was trying to match us up.’

  ‘Lou can’t match anything. Even us. I mean me and him, not you and I. You and I are matched.’