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The Isley Brothers

‘You should practise what you preach,’ Alice tells Saul nonchalantly while they pore over contact sheets of a recent shoot with Kate Winslet for a forthcoming cover. She bends over the light box, giving a skilled twist to her hair and fixing it against her head with a Biro to keep it out of the way. She lowers her right eye to the loupe and deftly scans the shots. With a yellow chinagraph pencil, she marks off four or five frames, sits back satisfied and hands the loupe to Saul.

‘Can you just remind me what I’ve preached?’ Saul humours her while he inspects the contact sheets even faster than Alice, ultimately agreeing with her preliminary selection.

‘Well, the figures coming in for the last issue suggest it was our biggest seller yet,’ Alice informs him, while marking the chosen images of Miss Winslet to be cropped, ‘and I do believe it was your idea to call it the Romance Issue; that you coined the spine quote: “Warmth can be cool – rock on, Valentine”. In a nutshell, the slant on love and all its panoply was your call.’

‘Which you tried to overrule!’ Saul quips, with a raised eyebrow. ‘You thought the February issue should have a completely sarcastic and ironic take. Which it then transpired GQ and Arena and FHM all took. Boring.’

‘Anyway,’ says Alice, rather primly, ‘you should put your name to it.’

‘You’re not still on at me to join your sodding staff, are you?’ Saul sighs, surreptitiously trying to read one of Alice’s memos, albeit upside down.

‘Christ no, you’d cost me far too much in annual salary and perks now, Mr Mundy,’ Alice exclaims. She regards him contemplatively, her head tipped to one side, her hair starting to escape anarchically from her improvised Biro clasp. ‘I’m talking about taking your work home.’

‘If you are telling me to work from home, you’re hardly practising what you preach,’ Saul says. ‘You give Mark a hard time if he even skims through the Economist after seven p.m.’

‘Not in that respect, you noodle,’ Alice says affectionately, ‘I’m simply suggesting that you redirect a little of the focus you laid on romance for February’s Adam, to your home life.’

‘Alice,’ Saul says with exaggerated exasperation, ‘what the fuck are you going on about? You’re talking so cryptically I can’t work out if you’re telling me off, telling me to work less from your office or telling me to become a torch-bearer for Romance.’

‘Yes!’ Alice exclaims, triumphant, her hair in a sudden swoosh around her shoulders, the Biro on the floor. ‘Romantic hero! That’s precisely what I’m suggesting. With a capital R.’

Saul frowns and then regards Alice suspiciously. ‘Are you talking about Thea?’

‘Sort of,’ Alice confesses, ‘but if you tell her, I’ll bloody kill you and then I’ll sack you.’

‘If. I. Tell. Thea. What?’

‘It’s just I know that recently, privately, she’s been hoping for some declaration of intent,’ Alice shrugs, ‘and Saul, you’re bright enough to figure out what I’m on about.’

It was a freakishly balmy late February and Saul eschewed ordering a cab in favour of the bus but soon enough jumped from that at the lights to indulge in a long and cathartic walk home from his meeting with Alice. Figuring out what she was on about was alternately unnerving yet stirring. When the thinking became too onerous, he’d pop into a newsagent to check stock and positioning of the titles he worked for, on occasion phoning the publishers to report his findings. One shop still had their Valentine’s Day display up, but all the cards and trinkets were half price. Saul found himself browsing, tempted to buy a card – not because it was cheap but simply because it had a cheery photo of two amorous tortoises which he thought Thea would like. Actually, Saul had given her a large envelope filled with Loveheart sweets for Valentine’s Day, though he’d painstakingly removed any with inappropriate inscriptions like ‘Big Boy’ or ‘Hunky’. Saul put the rutting tortoises card back. He checked the magazine stock, repositioned Adam to the front of the rack, and walked on. He was a little troubled. Was Thea unhappy? But she hadn’t given him any cause to think so. He was gently perplexed. Had he ever given her reason not to trust him or believe in his commitment and affection for her? He was sure that he hadn’t. What he did acknowledge was that two years and three months into their relationship, he felt so completely comfortable with Thea being an integral part of his life that he really didn’t give the matter much thought any more.

Perhaps that was the crux of it; the rub for Thea that Alice alluded to. Though he always looked forward to being with her – and a night apart was rare now – just then he accepted that he never actually told her so. It didn’t occur to him to. Wouldn’t it seem contrived? And anyway, wasn’t the proof in the sweet pudding of their combined lives? He had as many clothes at her place as she had at his, their social circle was so fully integrated that he would need to concertedly recall whose friends were whose originally. Thea’s new Hoover was bought by Saul and he’d retiled her bathroom with as much pernickety pride as if it was his own. Often, she changed his linen as a matter of course, stocked his food cupboards and thought nothing of answering his phone, land line or mobile, if he was out of earshot. So many other signs illustrated a love so legible that surely it didn’t need to be spelt out too? Everyone knew Saul and Thea were a team. It was such an oft-pronounced phrase that it sounded as though they were no longer two distinct people; the ‘d’ was dropped and the words fused: Saulan-Thea. The balance between them was such that little rocked their proverbial boat. They got along too well for that, liked each other so much that they never found reason to disagree, or much point in arguing.

Do I take Thea for granted? Is that what Alice implied?

When Saul finally walked up Great Portland Street it was gone six o’clock. He’d been walking for three hours and his feet were sore, his mind still fugged. Was he doing something wrong or just not doing right enough? He meandered circuitously to his street. From the corner, he looked up and saw that his lights were on. He stood still for a while and regarded the run of his windows, stopping to thoroughly analyse what he normally gave no second thought to. Thea Jessica Luckmore, aged thirty-three, was up there. That was a fact. Five feet four inches high, around nine stones in weight, natural mousy hair, hazel eyes, slightly skew bottom teeth, impressive scars from a vicious dog, favourite colour turquoise, favourite book Black Beauty, all-time favourite song ‘Cygnet Committee’ by David Bowie, favourite film Jules et Jim, favourite animal tortoise. Supports Chelsea FC but prefers watching rugby. Electric toothbrushes make her gag. Drinks hot Marmite when she has a cold. Once performed a tap dance on Blue Peter. All facts he knew off by heart. At that very moment, she was in his flat. Probably watching the early-evening news or taking a shower. Or perhaps she was just sitting quietly letting the physical tensions she’d massaged from her clients all day ebb away from her. Saul walked a few paces closer but stopped again, looking up at his flat.

I don’t know what she’s doing up there, actually, but the fact is that I much prefer returning home to a flat full of Thea than one devoid of her. She is part of my world. She is synonymous with Home. She lights my life. She makes my space personal. She defines it.

He continued to loiter on the corner, engrossed in thoughts about light bulbs. They were on in his flat and, as if in a cartoon strip, Saul envisaged one suddenly sparking into light atop his head. As if he’d just had the best idea in the world. Like the answer to life itself had clicked on. How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one, actually – and I don’t think that’s very funny. How many Theas does it take to change a light bulb? None, actually. Saul had systematically gone through her flat just that weekend and replaced the lot.

February may have been unseasonably mild but Saul acknowledged it was downright deluded to have the Isley Brothers’ ‘Summer Breeze’ soaring through his mind. Over the years, when discussing his Desert Island Discs with friends or compiling his Top 8 by himself in the bath, it had been the only mainstay on his list. It was one of those songs that in his head he sang perfectly but out loud, when he so wanted to put the power into his voice that the song instilled in him, the result was discordant and cringeworthy. Just then, though, it wasn’t the summer breeze per se, nor the bizarre notion of having jasmine in one’s mind; it wasn’t the sweet and melodious tune nor the joyous vocals. For Saul, the immediate connection was with a man returning home; knowing from the mere hang of the curtains, from the little light shining in the window, that his love was there, with her arms reaching out to hold him, to make his world all right. More than all right. The blissful domesticity of it all. What more could a man want?

And I come home from a hard day’s work

And you’re waitin’ there

Not a care in the world

See the smile a-waitin’ in the kitchen

Food cookin’ and the plates for two

Feel the arms that reach out to hold me

In the evening when the day is through

Saul takes the stairs, two at a time, music filling his soul, mirroring his feelings, reverberating around his head, providing the answer. He bursts through the door and Thea looks up. There she is. There she is. Sitting on the sofa with her feet on the coffee table. Painting her toenails. Wearing a T-shirt of his, inside out. A mug and a screwed-up KitKat wrapper by the bottle of nail polish. The Simpsons on the television with the volume turned down. David Bloody Bloody Bowie on the stereo.

‘Hullo,’ she says, ‘I’m painting my toenails. It’s a freebie from Alice – it’s Chanel. I’ve cooked us something delicious. It’ll be ready in an hour. How was your day?’

Saul doesn’t know what to say because he hasn’t a clue where to start or how to say it. The Isley Brothers desert him. All he can do, just now, is nod and say hi, kiss the top of her head and kick himself, as he passes by on the way to the fridge for a beer.

‘Are you all right?’ Thea asked him, a couple of hours later. She regarded him with a softly suspicious expression.

‘Fine,’ Saul assured her. ‘God – why?’

‘I don’t know,’ Thea said lightly, ‘you’ve seemed a little pensive and you keep looking at me when you think I won’t notice. Makes me think I have a Biro mark on my chin or a stray bogey.’

Saul drew her against him, enfolding his arms around her, and gently placed his lips to her temple while they watched the nine o’clock news.

He slept fitfully that night. They’d had intercourse by frantic fucking rather than refined lovemaking more akin to his earlier mood. He should have been worn out after that, drained after all his thinking on top of a long walk home. But he’d drift off then wake up, every hour or so. At two a.m. he awoke to the Isley Brothers playing again and again in his head. Be quiet. At four a.m. he woke again because he could no longer hear the Isley Brothers, his heartbeat drowned it out. And Alice. Oh shut up, Alice. I can think for myself. By five a.m. Saul had reached a turning point.

I’m confident I haven’t done anything wrong – but perhaps, just perhaps, it really is time to do the right thing.

The notion made him feel exhilarated and terrified and like waking Thea right there and then. However, at some point, he must have slumped down into a soundless, dreamless sleep because when he woke with start at eight o’clock, he felt exhausted and fuggy and, as a consequence, non-communicative.

‘See you later, grumpy,’ Thea said, kissing his cheek as she left for work.

Shall I email her?

Ask her by text message?

But not over the phone.

Should I write a love letter or dictate a message to a florist and have it sent in someone else’s handwriting with a huge bouquet?

Shall I just stride into the Being Well, burst in on her and ask her outright?

Perhaps I should whisper it to her while we make love?

Or ask her nonchalantly after we’ve had sex?

I could do it over dinner – a ready-meal or after sausages at the Swallow or even a table at Sheekey’s?

I could call to her from my window when I see her approach.

Ought I to whisk her away and do it on some glorious bridge in Venice or Paris or Las Vegas even?

Blag an Aston Martin DB7, take her for a spin and then ask?

Should I run any of this past Alice?

Or Ian?

Should I let Barefaced Bloke do the talking for me in my piece this Sunday?

How about a singing telegram?

Balloons in a box?

Icing – literally – on a cake, spelling it out?

First thing in the morning? So how about tomorrow?

Last thing at night? What about tonight, then?

No time like the present? Then fuck it – why don’t I just jump on my scooter and nip up to Crouch End right now?

Serenade outside her Gothick tower?

Rapunzel, Rapunzel – I have something to say.

Did David Bowie say anything on the matter? Hang on, I’ll just do a Google search to find out.

But what will she say?

What will she say?

And will she say yes?