Every time the happily married woman went away she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man. That weekend she was determined to find out. It was December; she felt a curtain closing on another year. She wanted to do this before she got too old. She was sure she would be disappointed.
On Friday evening, she took the train into the city, sat reading in a first-class carriage. The crime novel didn’t hold her interest; she could already predict the ending. She stared out beyond the window. A few lighted houses, fiery points, flashed past her in the darkness. She had left a dish of macaroni cheese out for the kids, brought her husband’s suits back from the cleaners. She’d told him she was going shopping for Christmas. He’d no reason not to trust her.
When she reached the city she took a taxi to the hotel. They gave her a small, white room with a view of Vicar’s Close, one of the oldest streets in England, a row of stone houses with tall, granite chimneys where the clergy lived. She sat at the hotel bar that night nursing a tequila and lime, but there was nothing doing. Old men were reading newspapers, business was slow, but she didn’t mind; she needed a good night’s sleep. She fell into her rented bed, into a dreamless sleep, and woke to the sound of bells ringing in the cathedral.
On Saturday she walked to the shopping centre. Families were out, pushing buggies through the morning crowd, a thick stream of people flowing through glass automatic doors. She bought unusual gifts for her children, things she thought they wouldn’t predict. She bought an electric razor for her eldest son – he was getting to that age – an atlas for the girl, and for her husband an expensive gold watch with a plain, white face.
She dressed up in the afternoon, put on a short plumcoloured dress, high heels, her darkest lipstick, and walked back into town. A jukebox song, ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’, lured her into a pub, a converted prison with barred windows and a low, beamed ceiling. Fruit machines blinked in one corner and just as she sat on a bar stool a little battalion of coins fell into a shoot. On the next stool sat a guy in a leather jacket that looked like he should have given it to Oxfam years ago.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen you before.’ He had a red complexion, a gold chain dangling inside a Hawaiian print shirt, mud-coloured hair. His glass was almost empty.
‘What’s that you’re drinking?’ she said.
He turned out to be a real talker, told her his life story, how he worked nights at the old folks’ home. How he lived alone, was an orphan, had no relations except a distant cousin he’d never met. There were no rings on his fingers.
‘I’m the loneliest man in the world,’ he said. ‘How about you?’ ‘I’m married.’ She said it before she knew what she was saying.
He laughed. ‘Play pool with me.’ ‘I don’t know how.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘I’ll teach you. You’ll be potting that black before you know it.’ He put coins into a slot and pulled something and a little landslide of balls knuckled down into a black hole under the table.
‘Stripes and solids,’ he said, chalking up the cue. ‘You’re one or the other. I’ll break.’
He taught her to lean down low and sight the ball, to watch the cue ball when she took the shot, but he didn’t let her win one game. When she went into the ladies’ room, she was drunk. She couldn’t find the end of the toilet paper. She leaned her forehead against the cool of the mirror. She couldn’t remember ever being drunk like this. They finished off their drinks and went outside. The air spiked her lungs. Clouds smashed into each other in the sky. She hung her head back to look at them. She wished the world could turn into a fabulous, outrageous red to match her mood.
‘Let’s walk,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you the tour.’