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Thea and Sally’s Six O’Clock

Thea didn’t cancel her Pilates class that evening though her head throbbed and she was utterly exhausted from her unbelievable day. However, she knew she was best off devoting an hour to shutting out all that tormented her; indulging in an hour tuning into her own body; centring herself, focusing on breathing, concentrating on all she really was – a skeleton swathed in muscles, joints and ligaments, assembled intricately but logically. She wouldn’t be able to think about Peter or Gabriel and what had almost happened, she could forget all about Saul and what had happened. Respite, even for just an hour, was what she craved.

Alice wasn’t at Pilates though she’d confirmed their session over lunch. Ultimately, Thea was slightly relieved – she actually didn’t want to receive Alice’s kindly glances and supportive squeezes and concerned whispers for her welfare. Thea didn’t want to workshop her problems and woes over chips and wine after the class. She certainly didn’t want to reveal to Alice her bizarre behaviour that afternoon. Thea just wanted to think about her body, about inhaling and exhaling, about maintaining neutral. It was nice, though, to see Sally, and Thea eagerly accepted an invitation to a light supper at the Stonehills’. It would be good to be in Sally’s company, she theorized, to have no reason or recourse to talk about ‘it’. It would be constructive to simply chat, to natter on topics other than how prostitution and her future seemed inextricably bound. Sally’s invite was also a good reason not to go home and have to think about packing and it provided a bona-fide excuse not to see Saul for another night at least. Ultimately, Thea rationalized that to be surrounded by the Stonehills’ perfect domesticity would be comforting and affirming.

In Highgate, Sally could harp on all she liked about sleepless nights, the sorry state of her sex life, the demise of her social life and language skills, and the destruction of her clothes by baby puke. However, for Thea, the scent pervading the Stonehill house was uplifting and restorative. Drying laundry. Baby shampoo. Flowers from husband to wife. Home pride. Everything smelt so warm and clean and cosy and complete and grown up. It was a fragrance Thea acknowledged she had always wanted in her life. Just then, she wished she could bottle it. Just in case.

Don’t let Sally see me sad. Stop it, Thea, get a grip.

‘I wonder where Alice was today?’ Sally said, passing Thea tomatoes to slice while she spread oven chips on a baking tray.

Thea shrugged. ‘She said she was coming when I saw her at lunch.’

‘Have you two buried the hatchet, kissed and made up then?’ Sally probed.

‘God, yes,’ Thea said, busying herself with tearing basil into slivers.

‘You’re like an old married couple, you two,’ Sally laughed, trying to shave parmesan with a potato peeler. ‘Talking of marriage, how’s Saul? Richard’s playing squash with him tonight. He’ll be back home soon – he’ll give you a lift home, if you like. Providing he managed to stick to just the one post-match pint, of course.’

The door-to-door distance from the Stonehills’ house in Highgate to Thea’s flat in Crouch End was less than a mile and a half. Just long enough, Richard would have thought, for a quick chat about how the purchase of the new flat was progressing.

‘Can I ask you something, Richard?’

‘Sure,’ he said, presuming his professional capacity as an architect was required.

‘Have you ever paid for it?’ Thea asked him outright.

‘Me?’ Richard asked. ‘No – we tend to use each other in our company.’

Thea’s mind-set was so rigid that momentarily she didn’t realize Richard had not grasped her question and she fleetingly imagined a bacchanalian orgy of architects. ‘No,’ she corrected, ‘not architect stuff. Sex. Have you ever paid for sex?’

Richard stared in amazement, wondering if he’d just heard right. Fortuitously, the traffic lights between Archway Road and Shepherd’s Hill turned red. Thea repeated the question. ‘No,’ he replied decisively, ‘I haven’t. But I do know plenty of blokes who have.’

‘Who have?’ Thea dissected his answer. ‘Or who do?’

‘Christ, Thea!’ Richard laughed with a fleeting frown. ‘What’s this all about?’

‘A client of mine,’ Thea moulded the truth credibly with cleverly employed ambiguity, ‘had the wrong idea about me.’

This seemed plausible to Richard so he continued. ‘I know blokes who have paid for it just the once, Thea, but I also know guys who use prostitutes regularly,’ he said. ‘You’d be surprised.’

‘Why?’ Thea asked.

‘Why do they do it, or why would you be surprised?’ Richard countered. Thea, though, just stared at him, simultaneously dreading details but desiring to know more. ‘You’d be surprised how many blokes do. Professional guys like me, really,’ Richard elaborated, ‘with all the same privileges – a good wage, a gorgeous wife, a fabulous home, great kids.’

‘Why?’ Thea asked again.

‘I suppose,’ Richard considered, ‘simply because they can. It’s a “bloke thing”, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’ Thea asked, forlornly.

‘It’s bizarre and contradictory,’ Richard mused, ‘but a man’s sex drive is infinitely complex by virtue of the fact that it’s so primal and base.’

‘Virtue?’ Thea balked. ‘Vice – virtuous?’

‘I mean – and this is in strictest confidence – there’s a bloke in the office, my age, my position. He has a charmed life – great marriage to a gorgeous, fun woman. Anyway, occasionally he fancies a shag in the way I might fancy a sandwich. Morality and risk don’t cross his mind. It’s a physical requirement. He finds himself hungry and he nips out of the office and satisfies it.’

‘Say his wife finds out?’ Thea posed, hating this colleague of Richard’s intensely.

‘She never will,’ Richard shrugged, ‘unless she puts a private detective on him. But she never would because their relationship is great – you could say, guys who use prostitutes are committing the slightest and most negligible form of infidelity because emotional betrayal doesn’t come into it.’

‘But say she did find out,’ Thea pressed, ‘this chap’s gorgeous fun wife?’

Richard was adamant. ‘She wouldn’t – you have no idea how easy and discreet it is.’

‘Then how do you know he does it,’ Thea countered, ‘if it’s so easy and discreet?’

The lights turned green. Richard drove across Archway Road and pulled in along Shepherd’s Hill, by the library, under the gentle orange glow of a waning street lamp.

‘This might sound shocking,’ he said, ‘but one afternoon he basically offered me a recommendation.’

‘What?’ Thea exclaimed.

‘He recommended the services of this new girl he’d just seen.’

‘For fuck’s sake!’ Thea objected, gripped by a violent loathing for this colleague. ‘What – like telling you Pret a Manger have a great new sandwich you should try?’

Richard laughed. ‘Exactly like that,’ he said, ‘but in my case, it was like telling this chap thanks, but I don’t eat red meat.’

‘Fucking bastard!’ Thea spat. Richard had never heard her swear, let alone imagined she could be anything other than sweet, temperate Thea.

‘This colleague of mine is a really nice bloke,’ Richard felt compelled to defend him. He drove on. ‘You’d like him. That’s the irony.’

‘Promise me it’s not you?’ Thea said with steel in her voice and thunder in her eyes.

Richard glanced at her before indicating right and dipping down the long sweep of Stanhope Road. ‘Christ, of course it’s not me,’ he said, obviously offended, ‘it’s never been me. It’s simply not me – I just don’t fancy it. Not during periods when I’ve been single. Not after nights out with the lads. Not when I’ve been far away from home.’

‘Promise me,’ Thea warned him.

‘Thea!’ Richard protested, regarding her quizzically. ‘What’s your problem?’

‘It was unbelievably upsetting,’ she declared, leaving the car, not checking the passenger door was shut properly, forgetting to thank Richard for the ride.

Thea savours a Lewis Carroll Moment in her hallway, encircled by closed doors. She can’t decide where she wants to be, so she sits down where she is, for a long while, until she’s quite calmed down. She stays where she is, takes her mobile phone and thinks about calling Alice to tell her what Richard has said. It’s strange, what she heard from Richard is ultimately more illuminating than it is shocking. And though the details are deplorable, fundamentally it has been helpful.

I almost feel I now have reasons to forgive Saul; the information by which I can understand him a little better. Facts that should lessen the revulsion and shock of it all. Plausible explanations that could appease my turmoil. Perhaps I should be relieved, perhaps I should try and philosophize that actually it has nothing to do with me – he’s just being a bloke. Maybe I should believe that his emotional fidelity to me is sacred to him. That everything really can be quite all right.

‘But if Richard Stonehill can choose not to use hookers,’ Thea shouts, ‘why can’t Saul?’