Voyeur

The best place to watch a party from is the back stairs. Nobody important ever uses them, and the people who do are carrying trays, so they don’t look at you, and if they do look at you they look away again fast, which is what they’re paid for.

The Lindqvists’ back stairs go up from behind the kitchen to the second floor, and halfway up there’s a little landing and a door into the bathroom that everybody uses when the downstairs one has a queue. The lock on that door has been broken since I was about eighteen. I know because I was the one who broke it, at Lulu Lindqvist’s twenty-first, trying to get in to see whether her brother was really doing what everyone said he was doing in there with one of his friends’ mothers. He was. The door has never shut properly since, it swings back an inch or two whatever you do to it, and the Lindqvists have never fixed it, because the Lindqvists never fix anything. They have the kind of money where you let things go. Their sofas are split on the arms and their dogs sleep on the beds, and everybody says how relaxed they are, and how unpretentious, which is what people say when a house smells of dog.

So that’s where we were, Clem and me, on the third step down from the landing, at about midnight, when the car park man went in with the girl in the orange dress.

I want to be clear that I hadn’t planned it. I just know where to sit.

He was somewhere in his sixties. I’d seen him earlier by the fireplace, talking at a woman with a lot of turquoise jewellery, and I’d asked Hugo who he was and Hugo said, “Car parks.”

“Which car parks?”

“All of them, I think,” Hugo said. “Like, the ones under things.” And then he went off to find a drink, because Hugo can only hold one piece of information at a time and he likes to put it down somewhere safe before he picks up another one.

He had the kind of face that has been expensive for a long time without ever being good. A big, soft, pink face, with very small, very blue eyes in it, and the skin round his jaw had that slightly polished look that means somebody has been at it with a laser, not a knife. His suit was good. His shoes were very good, black, plain, the kind you have made, and I remember being impressed by the shoes, because usually a man like that ruins it at the feet. He hadn’t. He’d ruined it at the face instead.

The girl was about my age, maybe a year older. Veneers, top and bottom, very white, very even, a shade too big for her mouth, so that when she smiled it looked like her teeth were arriving slightly before the rest of her. The orange dress was trying very hard. It was the right length and the right shop and absolutely the wrong orange, the orange of a lifejacket. Her hair was beautiful, I’ll give her that. Long and dark and heavy and real. Her shoes were new. You can always tell, they walk differently.

They didn’t see us. People going into a bathroom at a party never look up the stairs, only down, to see if anyone’s coming after them.

The door swung back its inch. Then another inch, because he’d leant on it.

“Oh God,” said Clem, into my shoulder.

“Shh.”

The Lindqvists’ second-floor bathroom is the worst room I have ever been in, and I have been in a lot of rooms. It’s all pink marble, a pink like cooked ham, with a sunken bath you have to step down into and gold taps in the shape of swans. The water comes out of the swans’ mouths. When you turn the hot one on, the swan coughs. There’s a mirror over the whole of one wall, in sections, with gold veins running through the glass, so that whatever you look at in that bathroom you see eight of it, slightly wrong.

So we saw eight of them.

He put her up on the edge of the basin unit, which is marble too, and must have been freezing, because she made a noise like ooh that wasn’t a sexy noise, it was a cold-bottom noise. Then he started kissing her neck, slowly and seriously, like a man going through paperwork, and his hands went up under the orange dress at the back, and you could see in the mirror him finding the zip and not being able to undo it, and her reaching round behind herself to help him, and him batting her hand away, and in the end she did it anyway while he was busy with her ear.

The dress came down to her waist. She wasn’t wearing anything under it. They’d been done, of course, but well, quite small, not those ones that sit on top of you like a pair of upturned bowls. He made a noise at them like a man being brought his pudding.

Clem’s hand was flat on the middle of my back. It had been there the whole time. She says it’s to stop me falling. I have never fallen down any stairs in my life.

What I always find interesting is the bit where people have to deal with their clothes. Films cut that bit out, which is why films are boring. He had to undo his belt, and the belt was one of those ones with a heavy buckle, and the buckle swung down and clanked against the cupboard under the basin, and they both looked at it. Then his trousers went down round his ankles, and he didn’t step out of them, he just left them there, puddled round his beautiful shoes, so that for the rest of it he was hobbled, like a horse in a field.

And he was wearing sock suspenders.

I hadn’t seen sock suspenders on anyone under eighty. They were black, with little silver clips, and between the tops of his socks and the hem of his shirt there was this stretch of thigh, white, almost blue, with hardly any hair on it, the thigh of a man who has been sitting down for forty years. I had to put my face in Clem’s hair for a second.

“Don’t,” Clem whispered. “They’ll hear.”

They wouldn’t have. He was breathing like someone blowing up a lilo.

He was quite small. I don’t say that to be cruel, it’s just a fact. She hitched herself forward on the marble and wrapped her legs round him, and her new shoes stuck out behind him on either side, very pointed, very patent, and in the mirror there were sixteen of them. He went at it in a short, busy, determined way, as if he was trying to push something heavy up a hill. She had her head back against the gold-veined mirror and her eyes open, looking at the ceiling. There’s a cornice up there with plaster grapes on it. I think she was looking at the grapes.

Her face was the interesting thing. She was making the right noises, quite well, oh and yes and so on, not too loud, but her face had nothing to do with the noises. Her face was doing sums. I’ve seen that face a lot. It’s the face of a girl wondering whether he’s going to remember her name in the morning, and whether he’s going to put her in a taxi or a car, because those are two different evenings.

“She’s not even enjoying it,” Clem breathed.

“Of course she is,” I said. “Look at her.”

Clem didn’t look. Clem was looking at me. Her face was right there, about two inches away, looking at the side of my face, which was a total waste, because I was the least interesting thing on those stairs.

“You’re missing it,” I said.

“I’m not missing anything,” said Clem.

The end was the best part. It always is, with men, because it’s the only moment when they’re not in charge of their faces. Some men look surprised. Some look sad, which is weird. The car park man’s face went very red and then very still, and his mouth came open in a perfect square, like a letterbox, and his eyes went up and to the side, and he looked exactly, I mean exactly, like a man trying to remember a phone number. He held it there for about five seconds. Then he said, “Gah,” just once, quite loud. Then he put his forehead down on her collarbone and stayed there.

She patted him on the back. Twice. Like you’d pat someone at a funeral.

I had to go. I took Clem’s hand and we went down the stairs very fast and very quietly, me in front, and I was laughing so much I had to hold on to a coat stand.

“Gah,” I said. “Gah.”

“You’re horrible,” said Clem, but she was laughing too, with her hand over her mouth, the way she’s laughed since we were little, as if she isn’t sure she’s allowed.

⁂

People ask me sometimes why I like watching. Not many people. But when they do ask I always tell them the truth, which is that it’s the most honest thing there is. Everybody at a party is pretending. Everyone’s doing their face and holding their stomach in and saying how amazing the house is. Then they go into a bathroom and take their clothes off and you see what they’re actually like. You see who’s kind and who’s greedy and who’s lazy and who’s showing off. You see the sock suspenders.

That’s what I think, anyway. Clem read English and History of Art at a university with terrible bathrooms, and she’s got a view on everything.

⁂

Clem was wearing my old blue dress that night, the long one with the thin straps that I’d worn to something the summer before and then gone off. She’d had it taken in, because Clem is smaller than me everywhere, she always has been. It looked quite good on her. Better than it had looked on me, actually, which was annoying, because it’s the kind of blue that needs dark hair and I’d been blonde that summer and looked like a swimming pool. Someone had done the taking-in well, too, small even stitches you’d never see, and when I said so Clem said her mum had done it, back in the winter, before her hands got funny.

Clem calls me Bunny. Nobody else is allowed to, and nobody else does, because it’s the stupidest name in the world for a grown woman. It’s from when we were five. The night Clem first came to live in our house, she cried and cried, in the little room off the nursery that had been an ironing room before, because her granny had died and she didn’t know anyone and her mum was busy putting me to bed. I could hear her through the wall. So I got up and went in and gave her my rabbit. He was called Bunny, which tells you how imaginative I was at five. He was grey and had a pink silk lining in his ears and I’d had him since I was born. I put him in her bed and went back to mine. And in the morning, when she came down to breakfast, she called me Bunny instead of him, and it stuck.

I’ve always been generous with my things. I think it’s because I’ve always had a lot of them.

⁂

When we came back into the main room, the party had got to the stage where the lights are too bright for it. The Lindqvists’ drawing room is long and yellow, with two fireplaces and a lot of paintings of horses, and by midnight there’s always someone asleep on the window seat with their shoes off and someone else crying in the corner by the piano. That night the someone crying was Pippa Lowther, who cries at every party, it’s practically her thing, and the someone asleep was a man I didn’t know with a moustache, which is a choice.

Hugo found me straight away, because Hugo always finds me straight away, he’s like one of those dogs that gets let off the lead and runs off into the woods and you think he’s gone for ever and then he’s back by your knee, panting, with something disgusting in his mouth.

“Where’d you go?”

“Clem and I were watching the car park man.”

“Watching him what?”

I told him.

“No way,” said Hugo. He’s very handsome, Hugo. It’s the main thing about him. Thick fair hair and a square jaw and the kind of shoulders you get from rowing, which he did at school and then didn’t do any more but the shoulders stayed, as if they hadn’t been told. His eyes are very blue and quite far apart and have absolutely nothing going on behind them, which in a man that handsome is honestly a relief, because the clever handsome ones are exhausting. “Sock suspenders?”

“Black ones. With clips.”

“Like, for his socks?”

“That’s what sock suspenders are for, Hugo.”

“Mental,” said Hugo, happily.

That was when Max came over.

I knew who he was, obviously. He was one of Daddy’s people, from the money side, and I’d heard his name said in that particular tone men use about another man who has a lot more money than you’d think from his house. Daddy had something with him, a fund or a thing, I don’t know. Daddy has things with lots of people.

He was tall, and not young, mid-forties, maybe a bit more, but in the way some men are when they’re more attractive than they were at twenty-five because their faces have finally caught up with their shoulders. Grey at the sides and dark on top, cut short, very well. A tan that wasn’t from a bed and wasn’t from a weekend either, the kind you only get from having a boat. A navy suit and no tie and a white shirt open at the neck, and the shirt was so good that it didn’t look like anything at all, which is the whole point of a shirt like that. And the shoes, brown, suede, with that soft look that means they cost a fortune and he’d worn them in the rain anyway, because he could.

He had a way of standing close to you without touching you that I liked immediately.

“Hugo,” he said, as if they were old friends, which they weren’t, and shook Hugo’s hand, and then he turned to me and took my hand too, but he didn’t shake it, he turned it over and kissed the back of it, which nobody does, and from anyone else it would have been the most embarrassing thing in the world, but he did it without any fuss, the way you’d pick a hair off someone’s jacket.

“You’re Tony’s girl.”

“I’m my own girl,” I said, which is what I always say, because people always say that.

“You were on the back stairs,” he said. “I saw you go up. And come down. You were laughing so much you had to hold on to the coat stand. What was so funny?”

So I told him.

I don’t know why I told him, exactly, except that he’d asked, and he was looking at me as if he really wanted to know, which most men don’t, most men ask you a question so that they can answer it themselves.

I told him about the swan taps and the sock suspenders. I did the face. I did “Gah.”

He laughed so much he had to put his drink down.

He has a wonderful laugh, Max. It’s a low, pleased sort of laugh, mostly in his chest, and it makes you feel as if you’ve given him something he’d been wanting and couldn’t buy.

“Gerald Stannard,” he said, when he’d finished. “Oh, that’s perfect. That is perfect. I’ve been trying to get him to sell me a site in the east for three years. Sock suspenders.” He looked at me in a new way, an interested way, up and down but not like a man looking at your body, more like a man looking at a painting he hadn’t noticed was there. “Do you do that a lot?”

“Do what?”

“Watch.”

“Whenever I can,” I said. “It’s the most honest thing there is.”

He thought about that. “Is it,” he said. Not like a question.

“You can tell everything about a person from how they have sex.”

“Can you,” said Max. “Well. You’re trouble, aren’t you.” And then, as if he’d decided something, “Trouble.” And he’s called me that ever since.

He looked past me then. “And who’s your friend? The one in the blue.”

Clem had gone over to the window seat to put a cushion under the head of the man with the moustache, because his neck was at a funny angle. That’s Clem all over. She’ll go round a party at one in the morning straightening people.

“That’s Clem,” I said. “She’s mine.”

“Is she,” said Max. “Does she watch too?”

“Clem doesn’t really watch. She just comes along.”

“Ah,” said Max, and smiled at Clem’s back, and turned to bring his wife over, because she was standing behind him, and she’d been standing behind him the whole time, which I hadn’t noticed, which shows you how much attention Max takes up when he’s talking to you.

Inês was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in real life.

I’m not someone who says that. I’ve grown up around beautiful women, and most of them have had a bit of help, and I can always tell exactly where, and I’ll tell you if you ask. Inês hadn’t had any help at all, not anywhere, which at twenty-eight is just showing off. She was very tall, nearly as tall as Max, and very thin, but not the sad kind of thin, the expensive kind, long arms and long hands and a long neck and a small head on top of it all with the hair pulled straight back, black, so glossy it looked wet. Dyed, I’d have said, but very well. Brown skin with a sort of gold under it, absolutely even, not one mark. Cheekbones you could have opened a letter with. Her mouth was very wide and very still. Her dress was black, very simple, very short, and on anyone else it would have been nothing, and on her it looked like a decision.

She was wearing a man’s watch. Gold, quite big, on a gold bracelet, loose on that thin wrist, so that it slid up and down when she moved her arm. And she kept turning it. The whole time we were talking, she kept putting her other hand on it and turning it round and round on her wrist. I remember thinking it was the most elegant nervous habit I’d ever seen, and that I’d try it. I did try it, actually, the next week, with Daddy’s old one. It doesn’t work unless you’ve got the wrists.

“Inês, this is Tony’s daughter. The trouble one.”

“Hello,” said Inês.

That was all she said. Hello. She didn’t smile. She looked at me with these enormous dark eyes, and then she looked at Hugo, and then she looked over at Clem by the window seat, and then she looked at the floor.

Max put his hand on the back of her neck. Just rested it there, under her hair, the whole of his hand. And she went very still, the way a cat goes still when you pick it up by the scruff, all at once, everything stopping. Which is how you know a woman is really comfortable with a man.

“We’re going,” Max said. “We’ve got the boy’s thing in the morning. It’s been a joy.” He said it to me. “A real joy, Trouble. Come and see us. Come to the coast. Tony knows where we are.”

“I’d love that.”

“I know you would,” said Max.

And they went, through the long yellow room, people moving out of his way without seeming to know they were doing it, his hand still on the back of her neck. She didn’t look back. Her watch caught the light, once, by the door.

“She’s so cold,” I said to Hugo. “Isn’t she cold? She didn’t smile once.”

“She’s fit, though,” said Hugo, which was, for Hugo, a very complete thought.

⁂

Clem left before one. She came and found me and said she had to go because she was going to see her mum early, before the bus.

“Why are you getting a bus?”

“Because that’s how you get there.”

“Get a car.”

“Bunny.”

“I’ll get you a car.”

“It’s fine,” Clem said. “I like the bus. I read on the bus.” And she kissed me on the cheek, the way she does, quickly, and then she put her hand on my cheek where she’d kissed it, which she also does, she’s done it for ever, as if she’s sticking it down. “Don’t go home with the car park man.”

“He’s taken.”

“Don’t go home with anyone,” said Clem. “Go home with Hugo.” And she went, in my blue dress, with her coat over her arm, because it was May and she said it was warm enough without, and it was, just.

Her mum has got something with her legs. That’s all I knew. She kept falling over, at home and in the street, and Clem said it wasn’t funny, and it isn’t, obviously, but Rosa always was clumsy. She broke about a million of Mummy’s glasses when we were small. Every time she picked up a tray you held your breath. Rosa was our nanny from when I was two until I was eleven, and she lived with us all that time, and Clem did too from five, when the granny she’d been living with died, and that’s how Clem and I grew up together, practically sisters, except that she was much better at school and I was much better at everything else. When I went away to school Daddy sent Clem to the same one, so I’d have someone, which was sweet of him, and paid for it, which was sweeter, and when Mummy and Daddy split up Rosa stayed with Mummy until I was eleven and then went off to do something else, and Daddy kept paying for Clem, because by then it would have been weird not to.

So Clem’s always been there. She’s always been mine.

⁂

Hugo took me home. To his, not mine, because his is nearer and his sheets are better, his mother sends them from somewhere, heavy linen that gets softer every time it’s washed. Hugo’s flat is all brown leather and photographs of Hugo doing sports, and the bathroom is fine, nothing special, a big shower and a lot of his products lined up on a glass shelf in order of height, which I find quite touching, as if the bottles might misbehave otherwise.

He knows what I like. Hugo is not clever, but he’s not stupid about the things he’s interested in, and I’m one of the things he’s interested in. He took his clothes off in front of the long mirror in his bedroom, slowly, the way he knows I like, watching himself, and I sat on the edge of the bed and watched him watching himself. He does have a lovely body. It’s very simple, like a drawing of a man. And then he came over and did all the things he does, which are fine, and at the end he sneezed.

Not really. But that’s what his face does.

Afterwards I said I’d like to watch him with someone else one day, just to see, and he said, “Like who?” and then went straight to sleep, the way he does, on his front, with one arm hanging off the bed, and I lay there in his good sheets and thought about Inês turning and turning her watch, and Max saying Is it, not like a question.

I thought it had been one of the best parties of the year. It had, actually. It was the last good one before everyone went away for the summer, and the summer that year was the one I turned twenty-one, at the house, back when the pool still had the old tiles.