The Square by Rosie Millard Page B

dangerous, but then danger is part of the allure.
    “Is it the whole allure?” says Jay, lazily tracing his finger down her back. It is mottled and livid with red scratches.
    She shivers with pleasure, rolls over and looks up at him.
    “Of course not.”
    At Jane’s house, Roberta is teaching Belle on the lovely Blüthner. But Jane doesn’t know this, because she and Jay have stopped meeting in each other’s houses. After the near miss in the hall, she has insisted on meeting for sex in hotels.
    But it must be done in the proper, acknowledged way. Hotels. This is how the adulterous act. Booking a day room in a hotel. Several days beforehand. You can’t just turn up and ask for a room, it must be done in advance. Otherwise you might be mistaken for a prostitute. You have to ring up a day or two beforehand and say, with great authority,
    ‘I need a day room. I am travelling in from London, and I need to rest for a while.’ After you have done this once, you then just ring up the same hotel and say, with the same authority,
    ‘A day room, please.’
    Does the hotel suspect? Probably. The hotel acknowledges she needs a day room. Jane pretends the hotel believes this need. The appurtenance of propriety to the necessity of the day room is crucial.
    Although today, she acknowledged, was a bit more complicated than most. She had forgotten that George was going to be off on an Inset Day. She remembered, with a swoop of guilt laced with love, laced with guilt again, how he used to call them Insect Days. When she had found out that this term’s Insect/Inset Day clashed with the day she had pre-booked in the hotel, her day, the day for her and Jay, she had toyed with the idea of cancelling, but knew deep down that she would be unable to. She couldn’t bear to cancel her assignment for sex.
    George would be alright on his own in the house for a few hours, she reasoned. He could be upstairs, playing with his Lego. Wasn’t that alright? She needed to see Jay. Needed to be with him, alone. Wasn’t it alright to put her needs, for once, above those of everyone else in the house? The pull of the appointment was greater than the presence of her own child.
    She is addicted to her affair. She finds the falseness, the invented drama, and most of all the forbidden nature of it utterly intoxicating.
    Running through town towards the day room, she prefers not to, doesn’t even need to think about why she is doing it. She is not going to think about George, left alone in the house. She is not going to analyse why she is running across town.
    She knows the reasons better than she knows her own body. Having an affair is not part of the story, of her life story. It is frowned upon and disallowed. But it’s happening. She can’t help it. At these moments of transgression, even though she cannot admit to anyone, sometimes even to herself that she is doing it, even though the whole thing is but a dramatic image of a partnership, in spite of this all she feels alive, that she is really living. It is a paradox, she thinks. She doesn’t want to really acknowledge she is doing it, but the fact of doing it makes her feel more real than everyday life with Patrick.
    Sometimes a man will wolf whistle at her. She will turn and smile at him. You don’t know where I am going, she thinks. Or maybe he does. Perhaps he’s whistling because of unseen pheremones, or hormones, or whatever they are. When she is heading towards Jay she feels as if there’s a great big neon sign above her head reading I Am About To Have Spectacular Sex.
    La la la. Ha ha ha. As she crosses the road in front of Argos, she imagines the meeting in the hotel lobby, the kissing in the hotel lift, the running along the hotel corridor towards the hotel bedroom, the tearing of each other’s clothes. The direct physicality, no prologue. She’s not even there but she is already starting to sweat with excitement, envisaging the discarded clothes, how they heap up, the shoes, kicked