The Execution

The gallery was already starting to fill up as I got there. Marianne had brought Jessica along as well, because Jane’s away and Marianne’s fussy about other babysitters. Jessica was in an unmanageable state of excitement and was shouting and pulling at the dresses and trouser legs of the people who’d already arrived. She’s going through a really hyperactive phase at the moment. I was wondering what to do with her when all of a sudden she sat down, curled up, and went straight to sleep, in the middle of the gallery space, right under everyone’s feet. I tried to wake her up and get her to come with me but she wouldn’t – you can’t wake a child that wants to sleep. But she couldn’t stay there so I picked her up, took her into the office, and laid her down on the couch. She curled up again then started snoring, very gently. I sat down beside her for a moment and put my arm across her. Messily stacked up against the office walls were paintings, twenty or thirty of them. Opposite the couch was an enormous piece of slate which must have weighed a ton. On it had been painted a picture of a naked woman, in a primitive style. She was asleep on the ground.

I went back into the gallery and had a beer, then another. After an hour or so the place started to get pretty crowded and it was getting difficult to move around. I lost track of Marianne, and for a while I just stood in a corner and watched the other people. Broadly speaking they divided into two categories. There were older, conservatively elegant white couples or single men, who stood around talking in slightly tired voices, drinking white wine and generally not smoking. Then there was a younger crowd in their twenties who drank beer and smoked and were louder. Some of these were artists, some were students, others were friends of Marianne and a few were all three. I knew only one or two of them – I keep clear of that side of Marianne’s life – but they all seemed to know each other. Fragments of conversation strayed my way … to my left, a couple discussed a mutual acquaintance, dumped by her husband for a younger woman. She was in hospital now after a last-ditch facelift gone wrong. To my right, I heard someone remark of one of Marianne’s larger works: ‘There’s something very extreme about it.’ I glanced over to the painting in question. It was very colourful. I couldn’t see what was extreme about it but I wondered nonetheless if the person had a point. It’s not something Marianne and I ever talk about.

A woman in her early thirties came up to me: ‘Remember me?’ I said no, I’m sorry I don’t. ‘You don’t remember a big argument about South Africa at a dinner party? Ages ago, at Nick Tate’s place.’ Then I remembered. Her name’s Charlotte Fisher. She’s South African and she used to go out with Nick. She’s quite pushy and good-looking in an American sitcom kind of way. I remembered the dinner party – it was a long time ago, maybe even before Marianne. She’d taken violent exception to some comment of mine. She’d launched into a great polemic about how her mother’s maid back in Johannesburg was like part of the family and if she wasn’t working for them she’d be on the streets and her children wouldn’t have enough to eat. And how could I possibly know what it’s like when I’d never been to South Africa, how did I dare comment?

I didn’t particularly want to talk to her but since it didn’t look like I had an option I asked her what she was up to nowadays. She said she’d gone back to South Africa for a while, but had recently come back to set up her own PR business, promoting artists. She dropped a few names of artists she’d recently signed up, including one I’d vaguely heard of, a German woman who’s been getting a lot of publicity lately for her blown-up photos of dead people. I said I thought the photos were pretty sensationalist. That’s more or less the point, replied Charlotte. We chatted and jousted about that for a while. I looked around for Marianne, but she seemed to be involved in a very earnest conversation with a middle-aged man. So Charlotte and I continued drinking and talking. She asked me how I met Marianne and I told her about the beach in Portugal. Then she asked me about Marianne’s work. French artists are very in vogue at the moment, she said. She seemed very interested in Marianne.

I asked if she was still with Nick. She laughed sourly: ‘God no, we split up a couple of years ago.’ She didn’t seem embarrassed I’d asked though, just as she hadn’t been embarrassed that I’d initially forgotten who she was. Then she recounted the story of her break-up – telling it as if it were a funny joke, with climaxes, anticlimaxes and a punch line. She’d gone home late one evening, when Nick thought she was out of town, and she’d literally found him in bed with another woman. She immediately moved out – it was Nick’s house after all. She thought she’d get over the relationship quickly but found herself doing obsessive things like taking time off work to spy on Nick. To make matters worse, the other woman had moved straight in with Nick. So she decided that what she really wanted was revenge. But it had to be the right kind: ‘Nasty, but not too nasty’. Eventually she hit upon the solution. One day she happened on a newspaper article about a private detective who used call-girls to entrap wayward husbands. So she went to see him, posing as a worried wife, and ended up paying him a lot of money to get a call-girl to entice Nick up to a hotel room. The whole encounter was captured on video, which she then sent to Nick’s new girlfriend. Later she’d found out through a mutual friend that the couple had split up not long after.

‘And you didn’t feel guilty about it afterwards?’

‘Well, he might have lost his girlfriend, but at least I gave him a good time!’

I laughed for quite a while. We laughed together. I was reasonably drunk by this stage. There were a lot of people in the gallery and we had to stand very close to each other with our shoulders almost touching. I wondered whether the story Charlotte had just told me was true or whether it was a sort of party piece. In the end I decided it didn’t matter much. She was wearing a black dress made of a light gauze-like material, and I noticed that her breasts were almost visible beneath it. As I looked up from her décolleté I caught her eyes. She smiled at me and said nothing.

We continued talking for another ten minutes and then finally she spotted someone else she knew and drifted off. I thought of catching up with Marianne and looked about for her, but she was still talking to the middle-aged man. I watched them for a moment. The man seemed somehow out of place at a gallery opening. He looked more earnest than elegant. He and Marianne seemed to be staring at each other quite intensely as they spoke, and at one moment I thought I saw the man’s hand slip down and gently brush Marianne’s buttocks. I might have been wrong, of course, or maybe in the crush his hand had been pushed that way. It annoyed me anyway.

Then at some point, fairly late on in the evening I think, when quite a few people had already left, Jessica came out. She looked terrified. I supposed that she’d simply woken up disorientated, not recognising where she was, and that’s what had frightened her. She ran up to me immediately, which was strange, because normally if anything’s the matter she goes straight to Marianne and not me. Anyway she hugged my legs and I picked her up and asked her what was wrong.

‘Daddy, there’s a dead lady in the other room.’

‘Don’t be silly, of course there isn’t!’

But she just kept on repeating: ‘Yes there is, there’s a dead lady in the other room.’

Eventually I said: ‘Well, let’s go and have a look then,’ but she buried her head in my shoulder and started to whimper. Just then I spotted Marianne: she was talking to somebody else now and her eyes were sort of glazed over which meant she was drunk and happy. I offloaded Jessica onto her because I wanted to go and have a look in the office. What I thought might have happened was that perhaps some woman had drunk too much and had crawled off to the office and fallen asleep on the floor.

But there was no one in the office. Jessica must have been making it all up after all. She makes things up sometimes, as a way of attracting attention. Kids do. Nonetheless, something about this ‘dead lady’ business disturbed me, and I sat down on the couch for a few minutes. That was when I noticed the huge slate slab again, with the picture of the sleeping woman painted on it. It’s what must have frightened her. I felt momentarily relieved, but still perplexed.

It had seemed a little odd to hear Jessica say the word ‘dead’. In fact I’d never heard her say it before. I wondered what exactly she’d meant by it. Maybe she meant the same as sleeping. Then again, that didn’t seem to be the case, because she’d seen Marianne asleep often enough, and that didn’t scare her. I sat on the couch for about ten minutes, thinking about that. Then my mind switched to Jarawa and the campaign: there was his appeal to plan and I started thinking through the details. We needed someone else to liaise with people on the ground, now that Christian was out of action.

For some reason I’d closed the door to the office. Now it opened. It was Charlotte, the South African woman. She’d been looking for me to say goodbye. Well here I am, I said, and got up off the couch. She was quite red-faced. She said she was glad to have bumped into me again and maybe we could have lunch sometime – maybe she, Marianne and I could all get together. I said I’d like that and got out one of the cards I’d just had printed up, while she rummaged about in her handbag for one of hers. I leaned down to kiss her goodbye, because she’s quite a bit shorter than me. Then I put my hand round her waist and she put hers under my shirt and we started kissing again. We stayed like that for a moment, then we sort of collapsed onto the couch and she slipped her arms out of her dress and we continued to kiss. She was stretched out on top of me, I could feel her breathing and trembling. The rumbling noise from the gallery came and went in waves, punctuated by bursts of laughter. The door was open now and there was a real danger of someone coming in – in a way that merely heightened the sense of pleasure. I hooked my arms round her but she seemed to be in her own world and quite unaware of anything, almost unaware of me as well.

Then at one point I heard a male voice, I don’t know whose, and it seemed almost next to me, quite separate from the indistinct hum of conversation from beyond the door. It was enough to snap me out of my mesmeric state. I sat up abruptly, put one hand over Charlotte’s mouth, the other over her breasts – I don’t know why – and looked around. But there was no one there; the voice must have been some kind of acoustic trick. Charlotte smiled at me and started kissing me again. She wanted to have sex right there in the office but I said no, we couldn’t. I said I’d give her a ring tomorrow though, if she wanted, and she nodded as I helped her put her bra and dress back on. She got a little mirror out of her bag and mouthed: ‘Oh God.’ It was true her make-up was a bit of a mess now. Instead of fixing it up though, she just wiped it all off with a tissue. Then she wiped the lipstick off my lips and cheeks with another tissue and that felt intimate, more so than our kisses. She reapplied her lipstick, combed her hair back into place, and asked me: ‘Do I look all right?’ I said she looked great. I meant it, because she’d been wearing too much make-up before and somehow looked more real now. She looked quite a bit like Susan Tedeschi, it occurred to me. Physically they’re the same type, in any case. They have the same long, streaky blonde hair, the same high forehead, they’re the same height. This disturbed me for a moment or two, but I dismissed it easily enough.

Charlotte left. I went out into the gallery about five minutes later. The crowd of people had thinned out considerably. I looked about for Jessica. She’d climbed out of Marianne’s arms and had captured the attention of a young woman in a smart emerald dress. The woman had crouched down to her level, and Jessica was carefully explaining something to her. Then the woman laughed, and Jessica giggled as well. The strange terror had gone from her face.

We ended up taking a cab home around eleven, since we were both too drunk to drive – although I might have driven anyway, if we hadn’t had Jessica with us. Marianne was flushed with excitement, because the evening had gone really well and she’d sold nine paintings, which is the most she’s ever sold. In the cab, I surprised myself by saying: ‘Who was that guy you were talking to? The middle-aged looking guy. You talked to him for ages.’ I hadn’t realised I was so annoyed by that. ‘Oh him,’ she said, ‘I think he’s a don or a professor or something. He’s just moved to London.’ I said: ‘He certainly seemed very interested in you. I saw him rub against you in a pretty indiscreet way.’ Marianne replied: ‘Really? I don’t think so. He’s more the gentleman type.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say on the matter, so I let it drop. Marianne hadn’t seemed to notice my annoyance; her exuberance bubbled over into a stream of talk and gossip.

We got home and while I was putting Jessica to bed, Marianne poured herself a glass of wine, although she was pretty drunk already. She got some cheese and salad stuff out of the fridge for us as well, because we hadn’t had dinner but it was too late to cook now. Then when we’d finished eating, she took off all her clothes and started wandering about the house with her glass of wine, vaguely tidying up, reading bits of newspaper or letters that were lying about, readying herself for bed, taking make-up off, humming, all at the same time. She quite often goes through this routine when she’s drunk. I watched her as she wandered about. I found her beautiful and told her so. She smiled with pleasure and went into the bedroom, while I turned on the TV and watched mindless pop videos. I could hear Jessica talking in her sleep but she seemed quite calm, for a change – lately she’s been assailed by a dream monster most nights. Then finally I went to bed. Marianne was awake and started massaging my back. She was still drunk and excited by the evening’s success and wanted to make love. But I didn’t feel like it for some reason. Jarawa and Jessica’s dead lady kept wandering in and out of my thoughts, which were gradually, seamlessly metamorphosing into dreams.

Then just before I definitively drifted off to sleep, Marianne said something. It sounded important but I didn’t hear what it was, so with a tremendous effort I turned round and asked her. She said: ‘I’m pregnant again.’ I said I was glad and put my arm round her. I could smell the wine on her breath. We haven’t been trying to have another child, we’ve been using condoms. But I’m pretty sure I know when she conceived. There was one time not so long ago when we were making love and the condom broke. It’s happened once or twice before and I’ve always stopped and put another one on. But this one time I didn’t – I don’t know why. Anyway, Marianne said she’d had a blood test last week and then on Thursday she’d found out she was pregnant. I asked her why she hadn’t told me then, but she said she’d wanted to wait until after the opening. I couldn’t see what that had to do with anything, but it didn’t really matter.

III (#ulink_0f13cc7d-84eb-50b5-b7d6-2c29f4f428c6)

I spent an hour or two in the library yesterday morning, going through the Jarawa clippings. At the same time I was making notes on my laptop, organising details from the news articles into a life story – almost as if I were writing an obituary. After I’d finished, I looked through what I’d written. His childhood, the Sorbonne scholarship, the volumes of poetry, the 1968 events, the political career, the UN posting, the business empire … a feeling of boredom set in as I scrolled down. Then after a while I realised it wasn’t so much boredom but frustration.

I looked at the exploded image of my face reflected in the cellophane cover of a book the librarian had got out for me. It was a compilation of profiles of African writers, published by some Canadian university. I turned to the interview with Jarawa, largely a self-serving mix of anecdotes about his early struggles. They struck a more personal note than anything in the newspaper clippings, though. There was even an apocryphal-sounding nativity story – his birth had been a difficult one and his father had supposedly remarked to the midwife: ‘If it’s a choice between the mother and child, save the mother.’ That was what a malevolent uncle had told Jarawa when he was five or six. It had marked him for life and had underpinned his determination to succeed, he said.

Another of these anecdotes caught my eye. It was about a poem Jarawa had written in the sixties. The subject is a kid with Down’s syndrome. He’d lived in the village where Jarawa had grown up. He wasn’t allowed to come out of the house. So his whole world was the house to the garden wall. Years later Jarawa returned to his native village for a visit, and he happened to see this kid. Jarawa had grown from a child to an adult, but the kid still looked exactly the same. Jarawa had travelled around Europe and yet this kid’s world was still the same house and garden.

This story reminded me of something but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. As I photocopied the pages I wondered for the first time whether I would ever get to meet Jarawa.

When I got back to my office I checked my voice mail. There was a long, garbled message from Christian – he didn’t say who he was but I recognised the slightly whining quality of his voice immediately. He sounded distraught and repeated several times that he had to talk to me about something, that it was urgent. After that there was a pause of about a minute or so and I could hear him breathing unevenly into the receiver. Finally he said he’d never forget what I’d done for him the day his wife died and then hung up. I’d been meaning to ring Christian to see how he was but what with all the work on the Jarawa campaign I hadn’t got round to it. He’s on compassionate leave and no one’s replacing him so the Jarawa team’s just me, Jo and a few volunteers. I have to admit that I prefer it that way because to be frank I hadn’t been looking forward to working with Christian.

I listened to the message again. I knew I should ring him back now but somehow I just didn’t feel in the mood for it. So I called Marianne instead to see if she wanted to meet for lunch, but she wasn’t at the gallery. She wasn’t at home either. Then flipping idly through my Filofax I noticed the card Charlotte Fisher had given me at the gallery. I’d forgotten about her. I’d forgotten that I’d said I’d call. The phone rang for ages and just as I was about to hang up she finally answered: ‘Oh hi it’s you – I didn’t think I’d hear from you again.’

‘Why not? I said I’d call.’

We small-talked our way cautiously around each other then finally she said she was going home to cook some pasta, why didn’t I come round? I replied: ‘It’s such a nice day though, why don’t we go for a picnic instead?’ It’s true that it was a nice day, but I also wanted to be on neutral ground – I wasn’t yet sure what exactly I wanted from Charlotte.

Outside it was warm, peculiarly warm for London for this time of the year. A lot of pubs and cafés had put chairs on the pavement, dance music blared out from the open doors of clothes shops and hairdressers. People were hanging about on street corners, talking and flirting – everyone was dressed for summer and there was a sort of sexual buzz in the air. As I walked up Camden High Street to Charlotte’s flat that curious sense of well-being began to surge through me again. It was like a feeling of infinite possibilities, maybe even immortality.

Charlotte had had her hair cut into a summery-looking bob and was wearing an orange cotton dress that really showed off her legs, which were lightly tanned. I’d forgotten how good-looking she was and complimented her on her appearance. I kept looking at her as we walked down the street – I could see she was getting a lot of pleasure out of my reaction to her and I knew she was still interested in me.

We bought some picnic stuff from Safeway and went to Regent’s Park. For a while we ate in silence, watching the joggers – middle-aged men with tortured faces – and the mothers and au pairs with their babies. Then after a few minutes Charlotte put me through a kind of interrogation. First she wanted to know how many times I’d been unfaithful to Marianne. Only once, I replied, a few years ago, before Jessica was born. As I said the word ‘born’, I remembered how Marianne had told me the other day that she was pregnant again. I’ve been so busy that we’ve barely talked about it since and it hasn’t really sunk in – it struck me now that having a second child would in some ways mean an even more radical change than having the first: a couple with a child is still a couple with a child, but two children means a proper family.

Charlotte asked me lots of questions about my infidelity. But it was so long ago and had been so brief that I could hardly remember anything about it. She was Australian – she’d had that Australian habit of ending sentences on a rising note. She was about nineteen or twenty and on her year out from college, doing a stint in London at Bryant Allen. We’d slept together a few times in her cramped South Kensington bedsit which she shared with another Australian girl, who was sent to stay on a friend’s floor while I was there.

Charlotte wanted to know whether Marianne had ever found out about the ‘affair’. I said I didn’t think so. She asked if I thought Marianne would have left me if she’d found out and I answered, ‘How would I know?’ But didn’t you feel guilty, she pursued. I said no. Why not, she asked, didn’t I have any obligations towards Marianne, didn’t I want to make her happy?

I thought about that for a moment. Finally I answered that yes, certainly I have obligations, certainly I want to make Marianne happy, and that means that if I’m unfaithful I should keep it separate from our life together.

‘In other words, if you lie about it, it’s all right.’

Again I thought.

‘No, because if she ever confronted me outright, I’d tell her the truth.’

She was about to interrupt me but I wanted to pursue my line of reasoning. I told her it’s more subtle than that. Marianne essentially knows who I am, she probably realises I’m capable of infidelity but in the end she doesn’t want to know the details, because as long as it’s an abstract and not a concrete reality, she doesn’t really care one way or the other. Charlotte said she didn’t believe that. She said she didn’t believe there was a woman in the world who didn’t care one way or the other. And she said she didn’t believe either that deep down everyone knows what their partners are really like. She, for one, had never suspected that Nick was being unfaithful.

I didn’t answer her. Then after a pause she said she didn’t quite know what to make of me, but I was probably some kind of bastard. She said it half-jokingly, half-seriously. We both laughed and after that we didn’t talk any more. We looked at each other quite intensely and I noticed that her eyes were purple-blue, like a bruise. We kissed. The lunch had made me drowsy and I lay down on the grass. The sun slid behind a streak of clouds, but it was still warm … I stared up into the sky and thought I could make out the shadow of the moon, then I closed my eyes. Charlotte was resting her head against my chest. The weight of it had the effect of making me aware of my own breathing. I felt the air enter my lungs. I put my arm round Charlotte and could feel her chest rise up and down as well. I was so relaxed and it felt so good to have Charlotte’s head against my chest that for a bizarre moment I felt I almost loved her.

I walked Charlotte back to her flat, and while we walked she asked me a lot of questions about Marianne and her painting. She wanted to know how she was represented and did I think she might be interested in signing up for a better financial package. The trouble with a lot of the more thoughtful artists, she said, was that they were so show-orientated they tended to miss ‘the bigger picture’. They didn’t understand the need to ‘cultivate themselves more generally in the media’. I said I didn’t know, but Marianne seemed quite happy with Joseph Kimberly. He’s a charming man, of course, but totally incompetent, said Charlotte.

Outside her door we kissed for a while, clumsily. Eventually Charlotte asked me in and got a bottle of champagne out of the fridge. We didn’t drink it though, because we started kissing again then went to the bedroom and undressed each other. We lay down on the bed and Charlotte ran her fingers across my shoulders. Your body’s so nice and taut, she said, how do you keep it like that? I stay in shape, I said, I swim, I play squash. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark like some seedy boudoir. For a long time we made love in silence, then at some point I said wait a second, I’ve got a condom. But Charlotte said no, let’s not bother with that.

Afterwards we dozed for half an hour then Charlotte got up and went into the sitting room. I could hear her speaking to someone on the phone but couldn’t make out what she was saying. The tone sounded intimate though. I heard her go into the bathroom and I opened my eyes and looked around the room. It was a mess of clothes and open drawers, with various pots, lotions and lipsticks lying on every available surface. It was the exact opposite of our bedroom back at home – Marianne has a mania for tidiness. In amongst the heap of clothes on the floor I noticed a discarded pair of men’s underpants that were not my own. It annoyed me. Not because Charlotte had a lover, but because she couldn’t be bothered to take the most elementary steps to hide the fact.

Charlotte came back with two glasses of champagne but I didn’t really feel like drinking. I watched her with curiosity as she walked about, sipped the champagne, brushed her hair out of her eyes with her hand. The way she did these things was so different to Marianne. Charlotte said: Why are you looking at me like that? Like what, I asked. Like your eyes are following my every movement. I said I like the way you move. Well don’t look at me like that, she replied, it makes me feel self-conscious. It gives me the creeps. OK, I murmured, and I closed my eyes. I could feel her getting back into bed and we made love again, then dozed a little more in each other’s arms. Eventually I got up though. I had to get back to work.

I bought the Guardian to read on the tube as I travelled back into the West End. They’d put Jarawa on the bottom of the front page. The headline read: AFRICAN WRITER AND DIPLOMAT RECEIVES DEATH SENTENCE. Inside, there was more coverage and a potted biography as well, with the usual stuff about his political career and the books he’d written. A right-wing Cambridge professor was quoted as saying he considered Jarawa’s poetry ‘dreadful doggerel’, rated only because of the colour of the author’s skin.

A photo of Jarawa accompanied the article. I’d already seen it that morning, while going through the clippings. It must be over thirty years old, taken when he was a student in France. He looks quite striking with his extremely dark skin and fine bone structure, like a Nubian. He’s posed very stiffly and he’s wearing a three-piece suit which makes him look more like a thirties poet than a sixties student. There’s an intense expression on his face. It’s as if he were furious about something. I also noticed a watch chain dangling from his waistcoat pocket – a dandyish touch that sat strangely with his fearsome face.

When I’d left for lunch it had been strangely quiet at work; now it was bustling with people. I went back to my office and wrote out the protest letter for the ambassador, the one all the academics are signing. As I was picking up a copy from the printer to fax to the signatories for approval, I bumped into Jo and congratulated her on the Guardian spread. She sort of grunted in reply and refused to meet my eyes. I said: ‘What’s up with you?’ but she just walked off. I followed her down the corridor and caught up with her: ‘Listen, if I’ve done something to offend you we may as well have it out now rather than later.’

‘Well where the hell do you think everyone was this morning?’