Читать книгу Left of the Bang - Claire Lowdon - Страница 11

The history teacher was called Callum Dempster. He and Tamsin met in the canteen of St Timothy’s, the East London comprehensive where Callum was deputy head of humanities. Newly graduated from the Royal College, Tamsin was playing keyboard in an Arts Council-funded workshop designed to introduce children from disadvantaged backgrounds to classical music. Callum was embarrassed that he’d never heard of her famous father; she was delighted.

After five years at Cambridge, one year in Berlin and nearly a decade in London, Callum’s Glaswegian accent was as strong as it had been when he left home. He hadn’t consciously held on to it, but he’d never tried to lose it, either: in his experience, it had always been a social advantage. At Cambridge, many of his privately educated peers felt reassured by his background. If someone like Callum could make it from a high rise on the banks of the Clyde to rooms in King’s, then the system wasn’t entirely unfair. He also added colour. Making assumptions based chiefly on Trainspotting, people would talk to him about drugs – only to learn that he didn’t even smoke. But a paracriminal prestige had clung to him anyway. Callum was tough, Callum was authentic, Callum was somehow more real than anyone who came from Wiltshire or Surrey or Hampstead.

Tamsin was a member of the Socialist Workers Party – something Callum teased her about so mercilessly that, six months into their relationship, she stopped going to the meetings. But she still read the email newsletters, and Callum still represented, for her, a vague yet unequivocally positive concept she called ‘the Real World’.

So she was disappointed when he landed his dream job: teaching Classics at a prep school near Chalfont St Peter, about an hour’s fast cycle ride outside London.

‘I don’t understand why you don’t want to make a difference. Those children at your school, what’s going to happen to them if people like you give up on them?’ She was washing up, something she only did when she was angry.

Callum explained, patiently, that he wasn’t making a difference at St Timothy’s, he was just marking time. ‘And anyhow, Tam, even if I could make a difference, it would never be big enough to justify how shite the job is. I’m not interested in crowd control. I’m interested in teaching. I’m not being defeatist here, I’m being realistic. And honest. I want to enjoy my life.’

The job at the prep school, Denham Hall, provided him with small classes of well-behaved children and a salary that meant he could finally put down a deposit on a flat. In the long holidays, he had time to start writing a book he’d been thinking about since his Masters: a study of the culture of combat in Roman society, and its impact on modern conceptions of warfare.

Once again, his accent came in handy. It was as classless at Denham Hall as it had been at St Timothy’s. In both schools, it won him unworked-for respect.

* * *

Callum’s Cambridge friends had long since abandoned their Braudel and taken jobs as bankers, lawyers, management consultants. All of them were home-owners; and, with a few exceptions (Will Heatherington, devoted playboy; Colin Warner, probably gay; Leo Goulding, fledging neurosurgeon and workaholic), all of them were married.

And then Leo got engaged, to a pretty, plump anaesthetist called Bex. They celebrated with drinks at their new house in Herne Hill. Tamsin went to the party with Callum, a little reluctantly. She was eight years younger than him and she found his clever, older friends intimidating.

She also resented the ridiculous fancy dress that Callum’s friends found so amusing. It seemed absurd that all these intelligent people, now mostly in their thirties, should want to make themselves foolish in this way. Tonight’s theme was A&E: many guests had simply come in lab coats or pilfered scrubs, but there were also plenty of full-blown head wounds, pregnancies, crutches and stethoscopes. The room was decorated with crepe bandages and surgical masks. Even the playpen set up in the corner for the few couples who already had babies had been draped with a Red Cross flag. Tamsin had let Callum stick a plaster on her cheek, but that was as far as she was prepared to go.

‘No no no that’s precisely the problem. The privileging of a university degree over all other forms of higher education,’ said a short girl wearing a tight white tank top covered in fake blood. Tamsin had met her several times before but she couldn’t remember her name. ‘If that doesn’t encourage elitism, then…’

Leo, their host, shook his head impatiently. ‘I just don’t think we can begin to understand what the world might look like to someone without certain basic advantages. And I’m not just talking financially.’

Tamsin had been stuck in this conversation for over twenty minutes and she was bored. Neither the girl, whom she didn’t like, nor Leo, whom she did, had thought to ask her opinion at any point. She went to drink her wine but her glass was empty. Callum was nowhere to be seen.

‘Tamsin Jarvis! Looking as ravishing as ever!’

Will Heatherington inserted himself between the girl and Tamsin and deposited a loud kiss on each of Tamsin’s cheeks. He was one of Callum’s closest friends; for three years at Cambridge, they had been on the university water polo team together.

For once, Tamsin was pleased to see Will. She actually knew him independently of Callum: his family had lived near hers in Holland Park, and Tamsin had encountered Will at intervals throughout her childhood, mostly at their parents’ parties. She remembered him as a boisterous teenager, teasing her unkindly about her skinny legs. Now thirty-two, Will was good-looking in the most obvious way: tall, with naturally olive skin, glossy dark blond hair, Bambi eyes and strong cheekbones. He could have been a mid-nineties boy-band pin-up. Only the full mouth was out of register. There was a hint of the predator about his pout, a complacency that was somehow aggressively expectant.

‘Tamsin, you’re dry, we can’t have that.’ Will produced a bottle of champagne and started to fill her glass. These days he was scrupulously polite to Tamsin; but there was always something in his tone that gave her the impression he was secretly laughing at her. ‘Hope you don’t mind, Leo, I invited some reinforcements for later. Including two hot lesbians,’ he went on, turning to the girl in the blood-stained tank top.

‘I’m not gay any more,’ she said.

Will grinned and ruffled her carefully styled hair, which was already sparked with grey at the sides. ‘I’ll believe that when I see it, darling.’

‘Reinforcements, yes, that’s fine,’ said Leo, detaching himself from the little group. ‘Sorry – got to go rescue Bex – she’s been cornered by those orthopods she was too nice not to invite—’

‘Sooooo,’ said Will, resting one forearm on Tamsin’s shoulder and the other on the un-lesbian lesbian’s, as if they were all jolly chums. ‘Isn’t this nice? Leo and Bex, the beating of two tender hearts as one, the unimpeded marriage of true minds, etcetera, etcetera?’

‘Mmmm,’ said Tamsin, who never quite knew how to respond to Will’s florid speaking style.

‘Talking of true love,’ he went on, ‘has my secretary managed to keep her paws off your boyfriend?’

‘Leah’s not your secretary,’ Tamsin replied evenly. She was remembering why she disliked Will so much.

‘Leah?’ asked the un-lesbian, suddenly interested. ‘As in Jonno-and-Baz-in-one-weekend Leah?’

‘The same.’ Will bowed his head.

‘Has she been trying it on with Callum?’ the girl asked Tamsin. She looked amused.

‘No, she’s just his flatmate.’

‘What, like they live together?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

The girl raised one dark eyebrow. ‘And how do you feel about that?’

Leah was a PR officer at Will’s law firm, referred to by Will either as his secretary or ‘our resident serial shagger’. But despite the girl’s reputation, Tamsin didn’t feel threatened. In fact, Tamsin never felt threatened by anyone where Callum was concerned: he adored her, and she knew it. Now, though, under the pressure of scrutiny, Tamsin found herself incapable of communicating this conviction. She took an overlarge gulp of champagne and blinked to clear the tears that the fizz brought to her eyes.

‘Leah’s cool, we don’t see that much of her, but she seems cool,’ she heard herself say, lamely. The un-lesbian stared at her for a moment, then turned back to Will.

‘I heard she fucked Charlie Huffman.’

Tamsin held out her empty glass for more champagne. She was, if possible, having even less fun than she’d anticipated.

Callum, on the other hand, had been having a wonderful evening. He was not generally prone to sentiment, but tonight, fondly, tipsily, surely, he felt everyone he loved in the world was here, in this room. There was little Jake Simonson, excitedly telling everyone about his first architectural commission. There were Victor and Caitlin, a serious, hard-working pair of actuaries, deeply bronzed and full of stories from the year-long trip to India that everyone thought they’d never make; Zander Pownall, messing about in the playpen with his two-year-old son, no trace of the long depression he’d suffered in his mid-twenties; Antoine Namani, another neurosurgeon, making everyone laugh with his medically inflected rap (‘I’m malignant, you’re benign, when I lay down a rhyme, I metastasise straight into yo’ spine’). And, of course, Tamsin, his Tamsin, beautiful tonight in a long wrap skirt tied high at the waist, her sulkiness visible only to him – which in itself felt like something precious. It was, thought Callum fuzzily, a roomful of happy endings.

Fetching a fresh beer from the drinks table, Callum noticed a tall man he’d never met before, dressed in a vamped-up nurse’s outfit: tiny white skirt, choppy blonde wig, lumpily stuffed fake breasts. Under a grainy layer of foundation, the ghosts of several large freckles were visible. It was easily the most outrageous costume of the evening. When Callum complimented him on it, the man thanked him by lifting up the skirt to display a pair of women’s knickers, his penis squashed obscenely behind the sheer fabric.

‘Practically standard issue these days,’ the nurse-man said cheerfully. ‘No self-respecting officer seen dead at a party without see-through panties.’

‘You’re in the army?’ Callum was immediately interested.

‘Yes, sir. Just finished at Sandhurst,’ said the man with irrepressible pride. He tugged off the wig, revealing a full head of closely-cropped black hair, which he proceeded to scratch with the innocent abandon of a dog shaking itself after a swim.

‘And how did you find Sandhurst?’

‘Still recovering from the final exercise. It was a total CF.’

‘Is that the ten-day one? Diamond Victory?’

‘Dynamic Victory. It’s a beast.’ The boy looked impressed. ‘How do you know that?’

Callum smiled, pleased with the compliment. ‘I’m writing a book, a sort of military history thing … Sorry – what’s a “CF”?’

‘CF, charlie foxtrot – means “cluster fuck”, basically a major beasting. Also a verb, as in, I got cluster-fucked. Which you do, at Sandhurst. That’s the whole point.’

The two men laughed and clinked beer bottles properly this time, acknowledging their approval of one another.

‘Is it true that you lot are using “muggle” for “civilian” now?’

They were fifteen minutes into a discussion on military slang when Callum noticed Tamsin watching them from across the room with an uninterpretable expression on her face. Callum waved her over, eager to show off his new find.

‘Here, Tam, come on, I want you to meet—’

‘Chris.’ Tamsin said the name at the same time as Callum. ‘It is Chris, isn’t it?’

‘Have we…?’ The boy was embarrassed. Then his soft mouth pulled tight in an enormous grin. ‘My god – it’s Tamsin!’

‘Do you know each other?’ Callum asked, unnecessarily.

‘I can’t believe you recognised me under all this shit!’ Chris was still grinning broadly. ‘How do you guys—’

‘Callum’s my boyfriend.’ As if to illustrate this, Tamsin kissed Callum on the cheek. There was a longish pause. ‘So … what are you up to these days, Chris?’

‘Well, actually, I’m in the army—’ Chris began, but he was interrupted by a violent thump on his shoulder. Leo’s brother Edwin, a small, smooth-faced man with thick dark eyebrows, had come to claim his friend.

‘Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve been waiting for this bastard to come and do shots with us for over half an hour.’

‘Great to meet you.’ Chris shook Callum’s hand vigorously. ‘And – and to see you too, Tamsin,’ he added, looking slightly confused.

‘Right fucker, your first one’s a triple,’ said Edwin, as he marched Chris over to their friends.

‘Where do you know him from?’ Callum asked Tamsin.

She looked vague. ‘Ages ago. I don’t know him at all, really.’ Tamsin’s unusually large eyelids gave her face a sleepy, sensual expression. When she had been drinking it sometimes seemed to Callum as if it cost her a physical effort to keep her eyes from closing altogether.

‘Callum, you dirty great faggot, where have you been all my life?’ It was Will again, pulling Callum into a back-slapping hug. Tamsin made a face at Callum over Will’s shoulder, but allowed herself to be led off to meet Will’s ‘reinforcements’, who were busy re-stocking the drinks table with stronger stuff. The playpen was being packed away.

* * *

Tamsin woke from a dream about Bolognese sauce to the smell of Bolognese sauce. Then she remembered it was Sunday, and the smell modulated to bacon. She squinted at the other side of the bed. Callum was already up. Hoping to defer her hangover for another five minutes, she pulled the duvet over her head and settled back down into the pillow.

The flush of the toilet woke her again. Tamsin came out from under the duvet and the smell adjusted itself for a third and final time. The door to the little en suite bathroom was ajar.

‘Callum. God. You could at least shut the door,’ she croaked.

Callum emerged from the bathroom with an apologetic grin. He opened the window, filling the room with the fumes of the Edgware Road and the sickly strawberry scent from the shisha bar on the ground floor.

‘Shit, I feel rough.’ Tamsin pressed three fingers to each temple and glared up at Callum. ‘Why aren’t you in more pain?’

Callum sat down on the bed. ‘Because I wasn’t half as full of it as you were, you nugget.’ He leaned in for a kiss, but Tamsin clamped her lips shut.

‘Mm-mmm.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t taste good. And I’m not kissing you while this room still stinks. En suite. Jesus. Maybe the least romantic proposition ever.’

‘All right, all right,’ he laughed, running a hand over his khaki-coloured hair, which immediately sprang back to attention. ‘I’ll get us some coffee.’

Callum came back with coffee, toast and yesterday’s newspapers, the cutlery jittering on the tray as he bent to settle it in Tamsin’s lap. He perched on the windowsill with his own mug, watching Tamsin through steam lit white by the morning sun. Her loose cotton vest sagged in the middle and he could see the two parallel lines marking the start of her breasts. In the beginning, Tamsin had been embarrassed by her breasts, which were full and heavy and sat low on her chest. It had taken Callum a long time to get her to sleep without her bra on, and even longer to persuade her to stand up naked in front of him. Her left breast was noticeably larger than her right, something she hated and he adored.

‘You perving?’ asked Tamsin, without looking up from her paper.

‘Who, me? Never.’

There was a longish silence. Then Callum said, ‘Chris seems like a nice guy.’ The words had a slightly processed, unnatural timbre. This was because Callum had been preparing to say them ever since Tamsin woke up.

‘Mmm?’ Tamsin glanced up distractedly. ‘Oh yeah. Yeah, he does.’

‘How did you say you knew him?’

‘I didn’t say, did I?’ Now Tamsin put the paper down, frowning slightly. ‘I don’t remember if I said. I don’t think I did.’ She paused. ‘It was my first year at College. He was going out with a friend of mine for a bit. So I saw him a couple of times, through her. Then they broke up and I didn’t see him again. Until last night.’

Tamsin was surprised by both the lie and the facility with which she’d invented it.

‘Which friend?’ Callum wanted to know.

‘Girl called Kitty,’ Tamsin said. ‘Don’t think you ever met her.’

‘You didn’t know him biblically?’

‘What?’

‘Did you – sorry.’ Callum winced at his own question.

‘Christ, Callum!’ Tamsin shook her head in exasperation. ‘No. No I did not sleep with him.’

‘Okay. Sorry. Tam, I’m sorry. I just wondered. I don’t know why.’ Smiling sheepishly, Callum padded over to the bed and got in beside Tamsin.

‘Am I allowed to kiss you yet?’ he asked.

Tamsin put two fingers to his lips. ‘Only if you promise to stop being an idiot,’ she said, looking stern. ‘And be gentle, okay? My head hurts.’

Callum made a little growling noise and pretended to bite her fingers. Then he kissed her, very softly, on the upper lip. The blue-and-green-checked duvet had slipped halfway down the bed. Callum tugged it up over their shoulders and drew Tamsin towards him for a hug, tucking her head under his chin. Her hair smelled of Herbal Essences shampoo and Marlboro Lights.

‘I love you,’ Tamsin said to Callum’s collarbone. ‘I love you and I really should get up. I’m so behind with my practice it’s not even funny.’ She yawned and stretched, then drew in for another kiss. ‘Right. That’s it. I’m up.’

Callum lay with his hands behind his head and watched her dress. Halfway through the process – pale yellow cotton bra and faded jeans, no T-shirt – she went into the bathroom to clean her teeth and came back with a thick white blob of moisturiser above each corner of her upper lip. This was a preventative measure, talisman against the two deep lines flanking her father’s mouth. He watched her twisting the dome of her deodorant into her armpits. As she waited for it to dry, she held her arms away from her sides in a slightly simian pose. Callum knew all of this by heart and he loved it.

* * *

On the way from Callum’s flat to the bus stop, Tamsin stopped between the Halal Fish’n’Chip shop and the Discount Drug Co. She wanted to undo it all, to go back and tell Callum the truth about Chris. She had never lied to him about anything like this before, and she wasn’t entirely sure why she had now.

But then, she thought, she had never told anyone about what happened – or rather, what didn’t happen – on the tube that day. At first, the enormity of her parents’ break-up had simply displaced everything around it. Later, when she remembered the incident, she felt no compulsion to turn it into an anecdote. As a little girl, one of Tamsin’s greatest pleasures was to eat an apple and throw away the core, in the knowledge that she was the first and last human being ever to set eyes on the sleek mahogany pips at its centre. A similar impulse had governed her silence on the subject of Chris and the suitcase. The story formed a secret fold in the fabric of her life, and it seemed that to talk about it would be to spoil it, somehow.

Tamsin had been staring unseeingly into the window of the Discount Drug Co. – which, inexplicably, sold nothing even remotely pharmaceutical, just fake Gucci handbags and Louis Vuitton luggage sets. The salesman saw her looking and came to the door. ‘You want real leather, I give you good price.’

Tamsin shook her head and moved away. She couldn’t confess to Callum now. The fact that she’d lied in the first place would only create grounds for suspicion when really, she knew, there were none.

On the bus, the Edgware Road moved past jerkily, in instalments. Starbucks, M&S, Tesco Metro, traffic lights. Four newsagents all offering money transfer and mobile phone unlocking. More traffic lights. The man sitting in front of her got off at Paddington. Tamsin watched him down the street, thinking that his short, tight Afro had looked like a black version of one of those green kitchen scourers. She wondered whether it felt anything like a scourer, then wondered if that was a terrible thing to wonder. She realised that she’d never touched a black person’s hair and the thought suddenly seemed very shameful to her.

This was the sort of thing that bothered Tamsin. It also bothered her that she was twenty-five and still living with her mother in Notting Hill. Notting Hill itself bothered her. Taking the bus, she saw the Burberry hijabs and oil-black puffa jackets steadily giving way to faded denim and Havaiana flip flops. And then, when she got off, the walk down from the relative buzz of Pembridge Road into the hush of the side streets with their milk-white villas and dense green gardens. In central London, quiet like this has a direct correlation with money.

Quietest of all was Ashcombe Mews, where Tamsin lived with Roz, and, some of the time, her younger sister Serena (Beanie). Tamsin unlocked the door of Number 8 and stepped from the sunny street into the dark hallway. When her mother bought the house five years ago with the money from the divorce settlement, she had immediately painted all of the ground-floor rooms a rich midnight blue. She also coloured her long, naturally white-blonde hair black with a home-dye kit from Boots. Colour therapy, she had snapped at anyone who dared to wonder why. Then the dye grew out, leaving a ragged chevron of blonde and grey down the middle of her head. Smoking in dark glasses, Roz had looked like Ozzy Osbourne.

All this was before she discovered her new vocation. It was her friend Meredith Sykes (fifty-four, twice divorced, CEO of a successful lingerie chain) who first came up with the idea of the lectures. Initially, Roz was unconvinced. Her experience of heartbreak seemed too private to be of interest to anyone else. ‘But these are powerful universal tropes you’ve tapped into,’ Meredith had urged. ‘What you did to Bertrand – people dream about that sort of stuff all the time, but you actually went ahead and did it. Of course people will want to hear about it.’

She was right. Within a year, Roz was giving several talks a month on the healing properties of revenge. The audiences were small and exclusive: she advertised solely through word of mouth, and charged a considerable amount for her time. Roz found she liked the work. It went some way to filling the gap that singing had left in her life. She was still performing, after all, and she was still very good at it: her audiences loved her for the way she tempered the rhetoric of empowerment with just the right amount of self-irony. Grateful clients would send her photographs and even videos of their own acts of retribution, which Roz incorporated into her PowerPoint slideshow. She was especially popular with divorce parties.

These days Roz’s hair was still black, but she had it done professionally now, by Errol at Matthew Hershington’s in Maida Vale. Every three weeks, Errol ‘curated’ her hair (his word) into an inky bob shaped steeply at the back. Tamsin had been the one to encourage these visits in the first place (‘You need to start looking after yourself, Mummy, spend some time on you for a change’), but she didn’t like the cut. It was too severe. Her mother’s neck was unforgivingly exposed, rigged with tendons that longer hair had kept hidden. She looked harder, as well as older.

But Roz was not quite the indomitable ideal she endorsed in her lectures. Her anger, unlike Tamsin’s, contained impurities. It kept reverting back to a baser metal: sadness.

Today Tamsin found her mother hunched over her laptop, engrossed in a website with a familiar mid-blue banner at the top of the page.

‘Facebook? Mummy, what are you doing on there? Please don’t tell me you’ve signed up, it’s really naff when older people—’

‘It’s fine, I’m using a different name, she doesn’t even know I’m looking.’ Roz spoke quickly, with a low intensity to her voice that Tamsin dreaded.

‘Who doesn’t know you’re looking?’ Tamsin asked, although there could be only one answer.

‘Tammy, look, it’s her page. I can see everything about her – all her photos, all the stupid things she posts on her board—’

‘Wall,’ Tamsin murmured, bending forward so that she could see over her mother’s shoulder.

‘God, but she’s a shameless self-promoter,’ Roz went on. ‘Every bloody concert … here, listen to this: “Glyndebourne rehearsals start tomorrow, so excited! Adès might just be my number one all-time hero, can’t believe I get to work with him!” Who cares? Why does she think anyone’s interested in her stupid little life?’

‘Okay, that’s enough. Let me have it.’ Tamsin put out a hand for the laptop.

Roz hesitated, momentarily defiant; but then her shoulders sagged in defeat and she relinquished the laptop meekly. She applied her index fingers to the corners of her eyes to stop two tears that were forming there. ‘I just don’t understand how he can bear to be with someone like that. Why her? Why her?’

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Tamsin, grimly, ‘is why you’re still asking yourself these pointless questions. No, really, I don’t get it. How can you still be giving headspace to someone who treated you so badly? Think about it, Roz’ – Tamsin reserved her mother’s name for moments like this – ‘it just doesn’t make any sense, does it? Well, does it?’

They had arrived, with practised speed, at an old impasse in an old argument. Roz shrugged helplessly. She couldn’t explain why she still thought about Bertrand so much. Her daughter’s fierce logic left no room for the fact that he was there in her dreams every other night, being kind.

Tamsin raked her shoulder-length hair away from her face with her fingertips and held it scrunched at the back of her head. ‘Sometimes it’s almost as if you’ve forgotten what he did,’ she said, sitting down heavily on the sofa next to Roz.

These were the opening lines of a story they both knew very well indeed, a story that began with the basic facts of Bertrand’s betrayal and ended, by way of a list (not comprehensive) of the lies he had told, with a series of exhortations to emotional strength and independence. The trajectory of her mother’s response – from silent tears through increasingly resolute sniffs to the desired declarations of outrage and contempt – was as familiar to Tamsin as the story itself.

‘Shall I tell you something, Tamsin? I’m glad that what happened happened. I really am. To think that I lived with a monster like that for so many years with no idea of his capacity for cruelty—’

When the initial fervour of her renewed indignation had subsided, Roz gripped her daughter tightly around the waist and leaned her head sideways onto Tamsin’s shoulder.

‘What would I do without you.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Mmmm.’ Tamsin’s features contracted briefly in a frown her mother couldn’t see. Then she stood up and smiled brightly at Roz. ‘Right. Cup of tea and a cigarette?’

Serena was in the kitchen, eating a bowl of artisan ravioli.

‘That stuff’s expensive, you know,’ Tamsin told her sister as she filled the kettle. ‘You’re not meant to eat it like it’s cereal.’

‘So?’ said Serena through a mouthful of the pasta. ‘It’s not like you paid for it.’

Serena was wearing nothing but a navy-blue polo shirt belonging to an old boyfriend. On her tiny frame, it functioned as a dress: the sleeves reached past her elbows, the hem skimmed her pinkish knees. Like Roz, Serena was just five foot two. She had fine silvery-blonde hair, which she wore pinned up high in a smooth, glossy twist. Her top two front teeth protruded very slightly, resting behind her lower lip and pushing it forward into a permanent pout. All of this – the hair, the teeth, the twenty-three inch waist – was Roz’s. Roz was privately ashamed of how much more strongly she felt the genetic allegiance between herself and her younger daughter. But again and again, she found herself both comforted and moved by the perpetual surprise of this everyday miracle.

Tamsin pushed a cup of tea towards Roz, who was holding her mobile phone away from her at arm’s length like a hand mirror in order to read a text message. Her glasses were on the counter, within easy reach. Tamsin bit back her irritation at this and turned it instead on Serena.

‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ she wanted to know. Serena, who had none of Tamsin’s scruples about accepting Bertrand’s money, shared a town house in Clapham with three girlfriends. Generally, she only came home if she wanted Roz to look after her in the run-up to a big concert.

‘Nice to see you too. I had my driving test yesterday, didn’t I? And before you ask’ – Serena got up and scraped the last two ravioli into the bin – ‘I didn’t pass.’

‘Bad luck.’ Tamsin spoke without a trace of sympathy. ‘What happened?’

‘I ran over a squirrel.’

Tamsin laughed and some tea exploded out through her nose. She wiped her dripping face on her sleeve, still sniggering.

‘It’s not funny.’ Serena looked upset.

‘It is if you have a sense of humour.’

‘I don’t have time for this.’ Serena stalked across the reclaimed flagstones towards the door. ‘I’ve got to practise.’

Tamsin slumped into the chair where her sister had been sitting. In a vase at the centre of the table, six dying tulips formed a histrionic tableau, their heads hanging heavily from the s-bends of their stems. A few petals, faded from red to a weak tea brown, were stuck to the tabletop. From the music room came the sound of Serena warming up her reed in fast, staccato bursts.

Roz tucked her mobile phone into the pocket of her tight black jeans and sat down at the table next to Tamsin. ‘You could try to be a bit nicer to Beanie, Tam. She’s very disappointed. She really needed to pass that test.’

‘No, she didn’t. She lives in London. There are buses and tubes and pavements. She doesn’t need to drive.’

Tamsin was aware that this was the conversational equivalent of picking a newly formed scab, but she said it anyway. She scraped at one of the decomposing tulip petals with her thumbnail as she waited for the reply she didn’t want to hear.

‘Bean’s got a lot of touring coming up this summer. You know that.’ Her mother’s voice was maddeningly gentle. ‘Having a car would make her life a lot easier.’

‘Sure. Like it’s not easy enough already,’ said Tamsin, moving her hand out of reach of a solicitous pat.

‘Tammy. Look at me.’ Roz pulled her chair closer to the table. She felt slightly awkward, as she often did when called on to play mother to her eldest daughter. ‘It is easier for her. You know it’s a specialism, she’s a rare commodity. You’re one of an overwhelming majority. It was always going to be harder for you.’

This was an excuse that had long since lost its power to comfort Tamsin, even though, outwardly, it still made sense. Serena was a baroque musician; she played the recorder and the oboe d’amore. In the tiny, closed world of Early Music, she was a big talent. It was statistically much more difficult to make it as a concert pianist – as Tamsin was trying to do.

The real reason Tamsin wasn’t making it, wasn’t ever going to make it, was that although she was very good indeed, very good indeed wasn’t quite good enough. Serena was more than good enough. She was indisputably the better musician. Roz’s attempts to prevent this unacknow-ledged fact from coming between her two daughters were proving ineffective. Tamsin’s envy, once furtive and self-censoring, no longer bothered to conceal itself. Increasingly, Serena felt the weight of this envy and resented it. It was boring for her to have to downplay her successes the whole time. She was sick of being sensitive.

Tamsin rubbed a bit of petal between her thumb and middle finger and flicked it sulkily across the table. ‘I don’t care if she’s got a concert, she can’t have the music room all day. I do have work to do too, you know.’ She pushed her chair back from the table with some force and stood up, annoyed by her own petulance yet unable to move away from it.

‘Tammy—’

But her daughter was already gone. The kitchen door swung slowly shut behind her, muting the sound of Serena’s playing.

* * *

Two pints of Foster’s, a gin and tonic, the best part of a bottle of wine, a bottle of Beck’s, a triple shot of tequila, some more wine, a Jägerbomb, a pint of Stella and a good deal of whisky: it is hardly surprising that the following morning, Chris Kimura remembered very little about his encounter with Tamsin and Callum. In fact, he didn’t remember it at all until he was on the train back to Bulford. Chris had spent the night at Edwin’s house in Islington, waking early to the aftertaste of the raw onion garnish on one of Pitta the Great’s finest doner kebabs. In the bathroom he vomited deliberately and efficiently. Fragments of the night before presented themselves to him as he showered, in no particular order: a taxi ride, a fight outside the kebab shop, Edwin trying to convince everyone to go to Spearmint Rhino, some girls on a bus. Brushing his teeth for the second time, Chris discovered a sadness in himself. He lowered the toothbrush and frowned at his foamy-mouthed reflection for a few moments, trying to locate the origin of this feeling. He spat, rinsed, brushed his teeth again. The onion prevailed.

No one else was up, so Chris let himself out as quietly as he could. He searched his iPod for a song to match the sadness, settling on ‘The Boxer’ by Simon and Garfunkel, from his playlist ‘Bluemood 3’. Despite the title, it was not at all unusual for Chris to listen to this playlist when he was feeling perfectly happy. Chris’s favourite songs dealt exclusively with heartbreak and loneliness and futility and loss. Although he had no personal experience of these conditions, the music people wrote about them seemed to him not only the most beautiful, but also the most vital and profound. Learning the piano as a child, he had been fascinated by the minor scales, by the way two simple semitone shifts suffused the dumb bright landscape of the major with a mysterious sorrow. He would practise his minor arpeggios very slowly with his right foot jammed down hard on the sustaining pedal, relishing the sweet ache that swelled at his sternum as the palimpsest of notes gathered and built. Now, at twenty-five, Chris never felt more alive than when a Chopin nocturne or a Coldplay ballad kindled this same unparsable tightness in his chest, full of heft and feeling, signifying something.

As the train was pulling out of Waterloo, he remembered talking to an affable man with a Scottish accent, and, much more clearly, that this man was the boyfriend of Tamsin. Tamsin. He hadn’t recognised her at first. His instinctive reaction, last night and again now, was one of disappointment bordering on distaste. The Tamsin of his memory was otherwordly, sylphlike, radiantly blonde. Now that ideal had been declared invalid by this older girl with darker, coarser hair and large breasts that seemed to pull her shoulders round and down in sad submission to gravity. The lodestar he’d been fixed on for seven years had turned out to be a microlight.

As soon as Chris articulated these thoughts he felt ashamed of them. Then it occurred to him that Tamsin was no longer a girl but a Woman; and, having fitted a word to her new state, Chris found his old admiration returning with fresh force. A Woman. Of course that was what she was. He felt a buzz of contempt for his younger self, obsessing over a teenage girl, unequal, till now, to the fuller, sweeter reality of Woman.

Oddly enough, the fact of her boyfriend concerned him less than the difference in her appearance had done. Chris was so accustomed to the idea of not having Tamsin that her unavailability felt somehow expected. Besides, the boyfriend’s presence left him in a position that he immediately appreciated as both noble and poignant. The third Schubert Impromptu came on his headphones, then Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’. By the end of ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by the Verve, Chris was resolved: the only decent thing to do was nothing. He wouldn’t ask Edwin for Tamsin’s number. He would make no attempt to find her on Facebook. He would make the sacrifice, he thought, smiling a bittersweet smile at his own benevolence. He would leave their happiness untainted.

When his phone bleeped with a text message inviting him for supper next weekend, it took him several minutes to work out who ‘Callum’ was.

* * *

Callum genuinely did want to see Chris again. The guy was smart, and he had plenty to say about the army. Mostly, though, the invitation was a gesture of goodwill towards Tamsin – to show he was sorry for being so suspicious, to prove that he had set aside his insecurity about Chris.

Jealousy is never rational; it zooms in, it enlarges, it distorts. In Callum’s case, it focused solely on men that Tamsin had slept with. Occasionally this annoyed Tamsin. She found herself wanting to reason with him, to point out that the men she hadn’t slept with – the what-ifs – were surely far more of a threat to him that the ones she had tried and rejected.

This, however, would have been cruel, and she knew it. When it came to Callum and sex, any sort of challenge was liable to be read as an attack.

There had been just one, ostensibly definitive discussion between the two of them on the subject of Callum’s penis. A bold move on Callum’s part, this conversation had taken place nearly three years ago, before they had ever even slept together.

It was their fourth date and they were walking along Grand Union Canal after a chilly picnic lunch on Primrose Hill. Inside a plum-coloured houseboat with apricot detailing, someone was frying onions.

Callum kicked a beech mast. It skittered along the path then dropped, almost noiselessly, into the canal. ‘There’s something you should know about me.’

‘MI6?’ Tamsin had joked, laughing at his sudden seriousness. She tried to imitate his accent. ‘The neem’s Deimpster, Cahllum Deimpster.’

‘It’s about sex.’ Callum was straight-faced.

For a terrible moment, Tamsin wanted to giggle. She blew her nose instead. When she looked at Callum again, the urge had passed. ‘Go on,’ she said, doing her best to sound soberly mature.

‘Well – it’s difficult for me. I mean really difficult. Please’ – he stopped her question with a look – ‘hear me out, okay?’

He assured her that there would be sex, just not much of the traditional penetrative kind. His fingers and tongue, he said with a wry smile, were used to compensating for his incompetent penis. ‘And it isn’t totally defunct. It works maybe forty per cent of the time. Okay, maybe more like thirty. If only I’d kept the receipt for the damn thing.’

Tamsin understood that he was making a joke, but she couldn’t laugh at the bitterness in his voice. Instead, she squeezed his hand and said, gently, ‘Doesn’t it depend a bit on who you’re with? I mean, if you feel comfortable…’ Already she was thinking that she would be the one to make the difference.

‘Yes, actually.’ Callum let out a dry chuckle. ‘The more I care about a girl, the less likely it is to work. In fact, you can take it as a definite compliment if my penis hates you.’

Tamsin looked around; there was no one in sight apart from a lone dog-walker, over a hundred yards ahead of them and safely out of earshot. ‘So … can you … masturbate?’ she asked, bringing out the last word with difficulty. Although she had slept with several people, this was the first time she had talked directly about sex with a man.

Callum nodded. ‘That’s never been an issue.’

A duck laughed in the distance.

‘And can I – can I do that to you?’

‘Perhaps. You can try.’ He frowned. ‘Look, it’s the same deal. Sometimes it works. Mostly it doesn’t.’

Then he had explained that his problem didn’t entail infertility. He wanted her to have all the facts so that she could make an informed decision. ‘I’m not asking for any guarantee of commitment or anything like that.’ Callum coughed to clear the formality from his voice. ‘I just didn’t want you to find out and be shocked. And you see, the thing is, my last—’ He stopped. He’d promised himself that he wasn’t going to go into specifics. ‘Some women have been cool with it, but others haven’t. It’s boring for both of us if you have to make excuses later on to spare my feelings. If you’re just not up for it, say now and I’ll understand.’ He sounded almost angry and he couldn’t meet her eyes.

Tamsin was moved by his vulnerability. ‘Oh, Callum, don’t be ridiculous. Of course, of course I don’t mind. Of course it’s not a problem.’

(And anyway: what else could she say?)

They had stopped under a bridge, its damp bricks padded with the bright olive velvet of moss. Callum cupped Tamsin’s face in his hands. It was a long kiss, fuelled by their relief at reaching the end of a difficult discussion.

* * *

Callum was one of those men who cook competitively, with loud remarks about ‘plating up’ and the joys of offal. He bought his olive oil in huge square cans and shopped in Borough Market at least once a fortnight. This evening he was doing one of his staple dinner party menus: scallops on a minted pea puree followed by slow-cooked rabbit ragout, with panacotta (dead simple, actually) for dessert. When the buzzer buzzed, he was up to his elbows in rabbit, picking through the mess of meat to check for the smaller bones.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Tamsin quickly, even though Callum was already wiping his hands clean.

Tamsin had managed to keep her face neutral when Callum told her he’d invited Chris round for supper. Really, she was terrified – terrified that Chris might recount, as an amusing anecdote, the real story of how they met, and expose her version of their history for a fiction. She needed to tell him not to tell – but she had no idea how to communicate this with Callum in the room. Now she hurried over to answer the door, half-hoping to whisper a warning to Chris before he entered the flat.

‘Hi, hello,’ said Chris, stepping towards her. He paused, moved his head from left to right like a tennis player waiting to return a serve, coughed twice, then thrust out his hand.

‘Hi,’ said Tamsin, as they shook. She felt afresh the strangeness of seeing this figure from the almost-forgotten past. Without the makeup and the nurse’s outfit, he looked much more like the boy she remembered, although he was older now, with a man’s broader frame and a strong neck thickened by exercise. There was something unnatural about his physique, as if his muscles had been inflated very suddenly: Clark Kent transformed into Superman. His T-shirt had clearly been bought for a scrawnier version of himself.

Impossible, she realised, to say anything to Chris now. ‘It’s, er, nice to see you,’ she told him. ‘Again.’

Chris nodded fervently. ‘I know, it’s so weird, it’s one of the strangest things that’s ever—’

‘Come on through, come on through,’ she said loudly, desperate to prevent his sentence from heading any further in that particular direction.

‘Chris, hi, good to see you again, mate.’ Callum waved to them from the little open kitchen, jovial but distracted. ‘Tam, I can’t find the bloody mint leaves. They’re not in the fridge, they should be in the fridge.’

Tamsin stepped over to the fridge and produced the packet of mint, eyebrows arched.

‘God, I hate it when you do that,’ said Callum, coming up behind her and putting his arms round her waist.

Tamsin twisted round in his arms so that she was facing him. ‘It’s because your peripheral vision’s no good.’ Her tone was pertly flirtatious. ‘Men didn’t need it, you see, when they were chasing woolly mammoths.’

Usually, Callum had scant patience with Tamsin’s penchant for evolutionary psychology. But right now they were performing, as couples do in company, a pat double act. Callum tucked his hands up under his armpits and capered like an ape until Tamsin pretended to cuff him round the head.

‘Right,’ he said, turning to Chris. ‘Enough of all that. Let me get you a drink.’

This little routine wasn’t wasted on Chris. He had accepted Callum’s invitation out of a sense of kismet: because he barely remembered giving Callum his number, the text message seemed, somehow, to be a call to destiny, a prompt it would be foolish to ignore. His initial resolution to leave Tamsin and Callum in peace had dissolved in a froth of conjecture (was she unhappy with Callum? was Callum unhappy with her? how had she felt, meeting him again after all those years?). Now he was here and he could see the situation for what it was – domestic bliss – his role was very clear. There were no decisions to make, no moral dilemmas to brood over. He would talk to Callum, eat his supper, adore Tamsin from afar, then go back to barracks life.

What he hadn’t bargained on was liking Callum quite as much as he did. Chris would meet his few non-army friends at the weekends for sixteen hours of expensive hedonism before crawling back to Bulford. In contrast, Callum and his compact little flat were, as Chris pronounced loudly over pudding, ‘the peak of civilisation’. It was all wonderful: Callum’s cooking, the canvas photo prints of Moroccan souks and Scottish islands (all Callum’s own work), the complete set of Loeb classics on the homemade bookshelves, the electric drum kit in the corner of the room on which Callum let him mess about and finally, after much protesting, demonstrated a short but breathtaking burst of eight against nine.

‘Our Callum’s something of a Renaissance man,’ Tamsin remarked, drollery a poor mask for her pride.

Best of all, Callum appeared to be fascinated by Chris. He asked question after question about the army, and actually took out a small notebook when they got started on the history of the machine gun.

‘Can you believe it? Gatling, the guy who was basically responsible for the machine gun mark two – after the Maxim, that is – genuinely thought he was saving lives. One soldier kills a hundred times more people, so you need a hundred times less soldiers. I mean, go figure.’

Tamsin watched them as they talked, feeling relieved that they had not, so far, approached the question of her history with Chris. Yet she was also feeling curiously excluded. She had been dreading conversation about Afghanistan or Iraq, two subjects on which she felt herself to be embarrassingly under-informed. But neither Chris nor Callum seemed interested in what she thought.

‘You think of bullets, you think of bangs, right?’ Chris was saying. ‘’S’nothing like that at all. More of a whipcrack sound, a sort of stinging, high-pitched whine, peeow, peeeow.’

He had his head dipped low as if he were actually in a trench, sheltering from rifle fire. Callum was leaning back in his chair, legs crossed at the ankle and hands behind his head, nodding slowly with an expression of shrewd attention on his face.

Finally, Callum left to go to the toilet and Tamsin took her chance.

‘Listen,’ she said, keeping her voice low. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound too crazy, but I haven’t actually told Callum that whole thing about how we met. It just seemed … I told him you used to date a friend of mine, years ago, and that I met you once or twice through her. Shit, this does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’

But to her surprise, Chris was immediately compliant, even grateful, for this alternative version of events. He didn’t appear to think it was odd that she hadn’t told Callum the real story of how they knew one another.

‘God no, of course, that’s much better,’ he said. ‘We met through your friend, perfect. Thanks. Seriously, thanks.’ He sounded relieved.

(Chris was embarrassed: by what he now perceived as unforgivable cowardice that day on the tube. It didn’t look too hot for Second Lieutenant Kimura to be running away from a suitcase. Tamsin’s lie allowed him to save face. Was she just as ashamed, he wondered? Or was it something else she was hiding from Callum? Even as he rejected this interpretation as absurd, he found himself feeling faintly, pleasantly hopeful.)

They finished the meal with port and Stilton. It had been a boozy evening. Halfway through his second glass of port, Chris became almost tearful.

‘People, they ask me, they ask me all the time why I joined the army. I wish I could show them this, all this.’ He flung his arms open to indicate the room. ‘This is my answer. People like you two, all this decency, and culture – this is exactly what I’m fighting for. We’re fighting the bastards who’ll throw acid in the eyes of schoolgirls so that this, this paradise – because, for all its faults, the UK really is paradise – this paradise that allows people like you guys to just be, to do your thing…’ He raised his glass in a reverent toast. ‘I wish you all the best. I really do.’

Callum reached over to plunge the coffee, hiding a smile at the younger man’s emotion.

Later, at the door, Chris kissed Tamsin on both cheeks, then pulled Callum into a backslapping hug. ‘Great evening. Pukka scran.’

Callum laughed. ‘Pleasure. Like I say, you’re welcome any time.’

A door banged somewhere in the flat, making them all start. A moment later, a girl in a pure white towelling dressing gown and fluffy blue slippers appeared in the kitchen and shuffled over to the sink. Long dark hair obscured her face.

‘Leah, I’m so sorry – I didn’t realise you were here, you should have come out – you could have joined us—’ Callum was embarrassed.

Leah produced an apple from the pocket of her dressing gown. ‘S’okay, I was sleeping.’ She squeezed a generous blob of Fairy Liquid into her palm and began to wash the apple under the tap.

Chris looked at Tamsin, who crossed her eyes and grinned at him. He stifled an urge to laugh. Leah squirted another dose of Fairy Liquid onto her apple. When she put the bottle back down on the kitchen counter, two tiny oily bubbles puffed out, twinkled, burst. They were all watching her.

Callum stepped awkwardly towards her. ‘Erm, Chris, this is Leah, my flatmate, Leah, this is Chris, a friend.’

Leah took a clean tea towel from a drawer and dried her apple on it. At last she turned to face them.

‘Hello, Chris. Hi, Tamsin.’

She was very beautiful. Her glossy hair hung from a neat centre parting, two straight sheets of onyx that reflected the kitchen lights. Apart from one flat, irregularly shaped mole on her right cheek, her biscuit-coloured skin was blemish-free.

‘Uh, hi,’ said Chris. ‘Actually, I’m just going, but, er, nice to meet you.’

Leah smiled unconvincingly and bit into her apple.