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Aisha nods, glossy tears brimming on her lower lids. Samantha pulls her into her arms and mutters into her hair, ‘Just stop trying to help. You’re lovely but you’re making a real mess of it.’
Aisha laughs. They pull apart. Aisha wipes her face with the back of her hand.
Samantha digs in her bag.
‘Here,’ she says. ‘Mums always carry tissues.’
The rain resumes, quickens. It’s still a good fifteen-minute walk, so Samantha orders an Uber. Peter is, if nothing else, generous with money. More than generous – flash, in Samantha’s eyes, growing up as she did in more modest circumstances, even before the bankruptcy. In the cab, she takes Aisha’s hand and holds it. Aisha is still a little fragile. Odd that she should be more upset than Samantha when it is the singed scraps of Samantha’s burning humiliation that float now in the air.
But Samantha is filled not with embarrassment, not with shame or tears, but with a kind of preternatural cool, as if she is able to look down upon herself and direct her own speech and action as she used to control her dolls as a child. She wonders with this same detached calm exactly where and how Peter has seduced or will seduce this new woman. Thisgirl– that fleeting expression of delight so like her own not so long ago, back when she herself was still a green fruit, caught in Peter’s dazzling light. He can’t bring whoever she is back to the house, not anymore. He can’t play out the firework display of all that he owns and does and is. He wouldn’t deign or risk her student accommodation – assuming she’s a student. The back seat of the Porsche, forget it.
A hotel, then. How lovely.
She settles back in her seat. Outside, drops of rain fall against the taxi window. Peter appears in her mind’s eye. He is walking towards her. He smiles and holds out his hands, but as he does so, he collapses into columns of numbers that stream down against a dark sky. It is code. A kind of computer code.
A soft laugh escapes her.
‘What’s so funny?’ Aisha asks.
‘I just had a thought and I was like, oh my God, that is so original, but then I realised it was actually a scene fromThe Matrix. You know, when Keanu Reeves realises that the baddie is just a computer program?’
‘I haven’t seen it, sorry.’
‘Ah. Well, it’s an old film, I suppose, but anyway the baddie seems real, but he’s just a program. Or something like that. That’s not the point. The point is that even though everything is moving super-fast, Keanu Reeves suddenly sees exactly what this guy is, and from that moment he’s able not only to fight him but to anticipate what he’ll do next. So from that point on, he has the edge.’
‘What does that even mean?’
‘It means …’ Samantha looks out onto the rain-drenched streets. ‘It means it’s time to act.’
Thirty-Four
Peter arrives home after she does. She lies in bed, listening to his bathroom rituals. He doesn’t shower, but when he gets into bed, she smells fresh soap and almost smiles to herself. A lovely hotel shower before leaving the poor cow who currently thinks she is his special one and only. She levels her breathing. He lays a hand on her shoulder, apparently thinks twice, lies back. A few minutes later she hears the low nasal inhalations she has come to recognise as Peter’s peaceful slumber.
She rolls over, pushes her fingers through his chest hair, wonders vaguely if he dyes this too and if so, how; whether he uses a toothbrush or cotton buds or what.
‘Peter,’ she whispers. ‘Peter, wake up.’
He jolts, grunts. ‘What’s the matter?’
She kisses his neck, reaches into his boxer shorts.
‘That question you’re always asking me.’ She tightens her grip, feels him harden. ‘I want you to ask me again. Ask me now.’
‘Huh?’ He is still groggy, confused.
‘Ask me.’ She bites his earlobe, moves over him, sits astride. Slowly she lowers herself onto him, pulls her nightshirt up over her head.
He groans, lays his hands on her hips.
‘Ask me.’ She moves, feels her own excitement grow. This night is full of contradictions – coolness in the fire of humiliation, helpless laughter in the midst of despair, and now, let’s hope, a whopping orgasm brought about by pure, undiluted hate.
‘Sam.’ He grips her waist, sits up, clings to her. It is over in seconds, for both of them. She rolls off him, rests her head against his shoulder.
‘Ask me,’ she whispers.
He props himself up on one elbow and draws his forefinger up her belly.
‘Samantha Frayn, excellent woman,’ he says in his low, calm voice. ‘Will you marry me?’
