He took his first sip of the whisky Zac had poured him in the kitchen. Elizabeth, having cooked, was exempt, and Mark had said he would keep her entertained until they were done. The others were clearing the table and loading the dishwasher.
Mark oriented himself against the mantle shelf, giving himself a clear view of the doorway into the hall, which turned and led down to the kitchen extension, where they had eaten: he and Laura and Elizabeth and Zac, and these two other women, Genevieve and Nicci, friends of Elizabeth’s. She thumbed on through it, giving a little grunt of recognition, or surprise. Look.And she showed him the initials, penned into the top corner of the first page. She was coming back over to him, her music selection drifting now from the speakers. No overexcited tides, falling and rising, like the Thames. That was where the true loucheness of Paris lay, he thought, in the flatness of the river water and the quays that boarded it, so far from the sea.
He flicked the book open with his thumb – the page edges smudged with age – to reveal the second photo, inside, of a barge on the Seine. On the cover was a Doisneauesque couple kissing, or sort of kissing, on a railway platform. The book was Richard Ford’s Women with Men – the handsome Harvill Panther edition. It came free, almost with a pop, and the books alongside seemed to sigh into the space it left, their pages filling with air. He levered it out, enjoying the feeling of resistance it gave as it slid against those packed tight on either side. He cruised the shelves, running his fingers over the spines, before allowing them to settle on one, as if it random. In all of them, people having dinner parties, couples flirting, children soundly sleeping.Įlizabeth had gone to the stereo, with her husband’s iPhone, so he took himself in the other direction. The terrace, in Mark’s mind, extended away from them in both directions, like a paper chain of human figures joined at the hand and foot, a procession of paired mirror images.
The long wall opposite was thick with shelves, the books backing onto the no doubt equally well-stocked shelves of the house next door. The room was two rooms knocked together, running from white wooden slatted shutters at the front to a view of the lawn at the rear, scattered with toys. Mark followed her to the living room, drink in hand, eyes absolutely not on the compound curves of her back, waist and behind.
Author Bio JONATHAN GIBBS THE FABER BOOK OF ADULTERY
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