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Another photograph shows him aged twenty-five or so, with around twenty young girls, all in rather less elegant grey school uniforms and a mixed array of winter coats. He is standing in the middle, his arm around some of their shoulders. He is wearing a shirt, tie and V-neck sweater and he is grinning. The girls are laughing, a couple of them looking at Peter with the expression of goofy adoration she has seen him elicit so many times. The group stand in front of a cathedral she half recognises. On the back of the photograph, in a version of Peter’s handwriting, she reads:St Catherine’s trip, York, October 1999.
So he must have been around eighteen, nineteen. This must have been a training post or work experience. He looks older, probably because he is dressed in a shirt and tie, and surrounded by girls of around fourteen, fifteen. Perhaps he was a sixth-former and had volunteered to help on the outing.
She doesn’t, she realises, know much about that period of his life.
At the next photograph, she catches her breath. Peter, older in this shot – perhaps thirty, thirty-five? – with his arm around a beautiful woman. They are clearly a couple, though Samantha cannot pinpoint exactly how she knows this – something about the way the woman leans into him, the angle of her head tipped towards his – but they are together and she … she is—
‘Aisha,’ she hears herself say into the silence. ‘Aisha.’
Behind them are railings, a green city square. Gordon Square, she’s pretty sure, opposite the history of art department. The photograph is uneven at the bottom, where it has been trimmed with scissors. On the back, a pale brown scar of old glue. It was clearly in a frame. Possibly hung on a wall in this house …
She pinches the bridge of her nose, battling, battling to keep her breathing under control, to sit still, to not throw the photographs across the room. She cannot pull her gaze from the picture, from Aisha, the amusement in her eyes, the way her head tilts both towards Peter and back a little, as if this narrowing of eyes, this white and wide smile, is about to blow up, the eyes about to close, the mouth about to open fully, Aisha’s long, soft brown neck about to lengthen as her head falls back in helpless laughter.
Peter has always been open about having a past. Samantha has tried never to mention his ex-lovers, no matter how difficult she has found it sometimes. She has not wanted to appear younger than she is; his age, his knowledge, his status already make her feel all too often like a child. She has wanted to be an adult, like him. He has made it clear that to ask about his life before her is childish, beneath her, beneath both of them, though she cannot say how he has done this, cannot point to any actual words he has said. Somehow the topic has been off limits, almost a taboo. And he has never, ever mentioned an affair with a student.
Although Aisha was not a student, at least not one of his. She said she’d studied English literature, not art history. Samantha casts her mind back to the conversation with Aisha and Jenny over coffee. She thinks Aisha mentioned an ex-boyfriend, but she didn’t say he was a lecturer. But she, Samantha, definitely told them that she was living with a UCL lecturer and that they had a child together. Then there was that look that passed between Aisha and Jenny. It would have been natural at that point for Aisha to chip in that she’d once been with a lecturer, or was that a leap too far? Perhaps she meant to get to it but Samantha had to rush off and the moment never came.
A sick feeling starts in Samantha’s belly. It hardens, becomes a rock. She runs downstairs and retrieves the flash fiction from the folder, her eyes skimming across it.
…liked to dress well, she reads …made his girls laugh, made them think, made them want him.
Her hand flies to her forehead, runs through her hair. When she gets tohis lovely house on the hill with all the pictures on the walls, she stops, presses the sheet to her chest. The house on the hill with all the pictures on the walls. It is too on the nose. Whoever wrote it knows Peter. Whoever wrote it has been in this house.
…red, red wine, she reads in a half whisper in the dim kitchen. She thinks of the dusty bottle of Amarone, the shiny stripes as he cleaned it with a cloth that very first night.
I’ve been waiting to open this one for a long time, he had said.
Chose his girls like fruit, she reads on, punishing herself now,just as their colour changed, but still a bit green.That’s her; she can see that her colour has changed now, the green all but gone. Aisha would have been green still when they met.
His childhood never ends. Mine ended long ago.
It was Aisha who wrote this; Aisha, the friendliest of the students. Aisha who asked if Samantha wanted anything bringing from the canteen, if she wanted to come for coffee, Aisha who is always so keen to contribute in class, who lingers at the end as if she wants to chat or simply … connect. She knew Samantha was going to be the tutor and enrolled just so she could inflict some mental torture on her. She has been the sweetest but is in fact the deadliest, motivated by that particularly poisonous breed of jealousy: that of the jilted ex.
Seventeen
Samantha returns the photographs to the drawer, an awareness dawning as she does so of something new within herself, and within her relationship with her lover and the father of her child. It seems to her, putting these photographs back, arranging the drawer with everything exactly where it was before, that this is the behaviour of deceit but that this is how she must behave now, at least for the moment. Though isn’t this how she’s been behaving for a while, perhaps since she found the pills behind the sofa cushions, or maybe even before?
And that is how a hole opens up in the life of a couple, she thinks. Small acts of subterfuge. Tactics. It isn’t as if he has betrayed her. It isn’t as if he’s been having an affair, but something has been lost between them and she wonders if they will get it back.
Peter returns home late. Like last week, he smells of cigarettes and beer. She doesn’t question it, barely notices it, other than to remember that he mentioned he was meeting a PhD student and presuming that is what he has done. Nor does she remember in that moment the pills now disappeared from the back of the sofa. On her mind and on her lap are only the three pieces of creative writing she knows now were written and delivered with malicious intent, most probably by Peter’s ex-girlfriend, Samantha’s student, Aisha.
‘Peter,’ she says when he appears at the door of the living room.
‘One moment,’ he replies, and she listens to the fall of his shoes on the floorboards, hears him go whistling through to the kitchen – Rachmaninov, she recognises, Piano Concerto No. 2. A clank of glassware and she knows he will appear in a few moments with their customary evening glass of red. He never asks if she wants one. She wonders now if he ever has.
‘So,’ he says, joining her on the sofa and handing her a glass.
‘Peter, I’ve had another one of those pieces,’ she says.
‘What? Show me.’ He takes a large slug as she hands over the latest sheet.
She watches him, drinks her wine. Unusually for her, she finishes half the glass in one go. Just the taste of it helps, the trickle of heat in her throat.
Peter’s brow furrows. He stands up, wanders over to the record player, opens the lid. She is about to tell him not to put a record on, to focus on this, on her, when he appears to reconsider. He lowers the lid, returns to join her on the sofa. He drains his wine.
‘I think you should go and see Harry,’ he says.
Harry Boyd, the guy Peter persuaded to let Samantha cover the maternity leave. She ponders on it sometimes, this network of men pulling strings behind the scenes, as if the rest of them are puppets. But going to see Harry is not what she expected Peter to suggest. He has not reached the most obvious conclusion: that this must be an ex of his, bound for revenge. Or perhaps he has.
