LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Does it matter? I like the way you look. I like your face. I like your body.’

      ‘That’s all there is to it? I’m some kind of sex object?’

      ‘Why not?’

      She looked at me with amusement as she did up the buttons I’d undone on her shirt. I got up off the couch.

      ‘I’ve got to go. Thanks for dinner. Shall I give you a call sometime during the week?’

      ‘Why not?’

      I kissed her on the forehead and she said: ‘Give my regards to Marianne.’ I could hear her switching the TV back on as I walked down the stairs to the main entrance.

      I got a cab home. It was Monday night and apart from a few other cabs there was hardly any traffic on the streets. London looked shabby and beautiful in its enormous emptiness, like a vast illuminated scrubland. I thought about Charlotte then I thought about Christian and his dead hedgehog. A childhood memory returned to me of a summer in the country. My cousin Peter had constructed a crossbow and we’d gone to the nearby woods and killed a rabbit – I can still recall its jerky, struggling death. I hadn’t thought about my childhood for a long time. I had the sensation it was something that had in fact happened to someone else, and not to me at all.

      The bedroom door was shut but the light was still on. I didn’t go in immediately, though. Instead I went to the little room we use as an office, on the other side of the house. We’ve got a filing cabinet in there, for documents to do with the house, tax returns, birth certificates, that kind of stuff. There are also files full of Marianne’s personal stuff, although I’d never looked at them before. That’s what I wanted to look at now. Seeing Christian had given me stupid ideas.

      Everything was arranged tidily: a file for old letters, a file for exhibition programmes, a file for this, a file for that. There were essays she’d written as a student in that typically rounded French handwriting. There were notebooks too, clearly labelled 1998, 1999, 2000, etc. They looked like diaries. I’d never known she’d kept a diary, never seen one about the house. I flicked through the one for last year. Some of the entries were in French, some in English, some a mix of the two. I read a few at random. Mostly they were about her work: ‘Big canvas. Thought I might move on to love but no it seems I’m stuck with this fear.’ There were notes about Jessica’s development: ‘Her linguistic skills different in French and English. English vocabulary wider but grasp of grammatical structure not as good as in French.’ I skimmed through to find any mention of me but in vain. I noticed that she’d marked every third or fourth entry with an asterisk. I wondered what that meant.