Hugo had it in mind to suggest they go somewhere, once lockdown ended and they were free to travel again. He didn’t want to be in London anymore. He didn’t want to be anywhere that was a vestige of his life before he’d caught the virus. He hated Chelsea. He hated Amory’s townhouse off the King’s Road, even though he loved Georgian architecture and knew he’d never be able to afford anything halfway similar on his own measly salary, inheritance or no inheritance. He hated the way he felt when their taxi dropped them off and Amory had left him to it to pay the driver as she hurried inside claiming she had a headache and needed to lie down before the caterers arrived. Hugo suspected she was suffering the residual effects of a hangover, but he didn’t like to ask. He’d smelt it on her in the taxi on the drive back from hospital. The fact that Amory liked her tipple wasn’t unknown to Hugo, but he’d hoped – illogically he supposed – that she’d put her drinking on hiatus and pay more attention to her health in a kind of solidarity with him while he’d been on death’s door. Of course he’d been disabused of this notion the moment he saw her in the reception area, the bags under her eyes hidden beneath her trademark oversized Chanel sunglasses, the reek of cigarette smoke barely concealed behind the scent of her Creed perfume.
But he vowed not to judge. His hospitalization had been a form of separation. He didn’t know what she’d gotten up to those hopeless weeks of lockdown or what the toll of it might have been on her. Hugo had wanted to ask but he knew within seconds of seeing her for the first time in six weeks that her guard was up, and it was evident that whatever he might do or say would have the opposite of its intended effect. It was best not to say anything, not while Amory was in her present mood. The fact of that evening’s festivities angered him, but again, he felt it best to bear it in silence rather than aggravate any unspoken wounds. Amory was her own person. Once again, as per usual, Hugo felt like an appendage.
Still, he thought. A change of scene might make a world of difference. Perhaps Amory wasn’t so far off the mark by being so intent on a destination wedding. He’d been resistant to it prior to his illness. He’d done everything he could to forestall having to settle on a location and arrange travel plans, much to Amory’s chagrin and the health of their relationship. But now, six long and traumatic weeks later, Hugo considered the idea in a fresh light. He wasn’t sure about the wedding part or of paying for hundreds of guests to fly to the far corners of the earth for what really in his mind would just be one extended and expensive Instagram story. Wouldn’t it better to just slip off on their own, without their usual entourage? They could find some justice of the peace somewhere or a local priest to hurry through the formalities in some remote and idyllic Tuscan village where they could enjoy the first weeks of married life in the delight of their own company. It would be like a renewal, a rebirth even, a baptism into the New Normal, whatever that New Normal transpired to be.
The more Hugo pondered this, the more enthusiastic he became. And the more enthusiastic he became, the more desperate he was to tell Amory he’d had a change of heart…sort of. It couldn’t wait. He had to tell her now so he could start the booking process and not even wait until travel and quarantine restrictions had been officially lifted. Hugo felt as though the future and health of their relationship was in the balance, and only rapid action on an escape from the UK, a complete separation from their pre-lockdown lives, would prevent them from drowning in the cesspit of their routine.
Her bedroom door was already shut when he’d finished paying the driver and had bounded up the steps to the entrance of the townhouse, forgetting in his enthusiasm that his lungs weren’t one hundred percent back to normal, the reminder of which left him sweating and gasping for breath after he’d pushed open the door.
“Amory?” He knocked on the door once before entering. She was draped across the width of the bed, her bare feet dangling over the side of the bed closest to the door, her head hidden from view on the other. Hugo knew better than to disturb her when she was reclined like this, but he was so gripped by this newfound excitement he couldn’t wait another minute to tell her. “Amory, I’ve had an idea.”
She didn’t respond, unless one counted the groan that emanated from the other side of the bed, muffled he soon saw behind a Liberty scarf she’d wrapped around the lower half of her face just below the Chanel sunglasses which she hadn’t bothered to take off. On any other woman, Hugo thought, the look would have been ridiculous but somehow Amory managed to pull it off and he couldn’t help but feel a trace of admiration for her, pride even. It confused him.
He balanced himself precariously on the edge of the bed near her feet.
“Amory, listen. I’ve been thinking.”
“Not now, Hugo. Please.”
“About the destination wedding. I’ve had a bit of a rethink.”
He paused, waited for even the faintest glimmer of interest, a reaction of any sort. He held his breath, what little breath still remained after his exertions, but Amory appeared unmoved. He didn’t think she was asleep and he knew she’d heard him, but he was unsure what to do.
“I think we should do it,” he said. He made a move to touch her foot but she must have been watching him through the dark of her sunglasses because she darted her foot away before his hand made contact. He flinched as though he’d been slapped. “Did you hear me, Amory?” he persisted nonetheless. “I think we should do it. We should go somewhere and get married. Maybe not Bora Bora like we’d talked about, but somewhere perhaps a little more realistic. How about France? Once the restrictions have been lifted, of course.”
“Hmmf,” Amory said. At least he knew now that she’d heard him. He waited for her to say something more, even if it were just to tell him that she wasn’t interested, that she’d changed her mind, or that perhaps they should wait and not rush into anything while he was still in the recovery process. Any of those responses would have seemed reasonable to Hugo and he’d have dealt with them accordingly. But the silence struck him as willful, disrespectful even. It made him not like her again. And Hugo didn’t like not liking Amory. Not really. It made him not like himself, and he disliked not liking himself even more.
“Anyway it was just a thought,” he said, reluctantly pushing himself up off the bed and going to the door, proverbial dick in hand. “We don’t have to make any decisions now. Maybe it’s too early anyway. I mean, we don’t know how long this lockdown is going to last, do we? It could be weeks. Or months. God forbid, it could be years. Maybe we just need to…to learn how to live again with each other. And I’m not fully back up to snuff yet and traveling anywhere right now is probably the worst thing I could do. But think about it anyway, will you? Amory? Please?”
Amory rolled over onto her stomach with a dismissive groan, or at least to Hugo it seemed its intent was dismissive. He clutched the door handle and realized he was actually sweating and wondered whether he’d been released from hospital too soon. They’d feared a shortage of beds. He turned to look at her one last time before going out and leaving her to her repose. He wondered whether there was something more to be said. He wondered whether she was expecting him to ask if she was all right or whether she wanted him to bring her anything, some tea or a coffee or something.
Amory could be awfully obtuse in her communication. Hugo often found it difficult to know what she was thinking or feeling from one moment to the next, and oftentimes it seemed she was so changeable that he wondered whether she herself even knew what would give her pleasure or when she wanted to be left alone. He supposed it must have been hard on her, these past six weeks, with him in hospital and her locked away in their townhouse all on her own. Well, at least he assumed she had been on her own. Again, it was damned difficult to know with Amory. Hugo wanted to trust her. He was, by instinct, a trusting person, perhaps to a flaw, but with Amory…with Amory, he found himself constantly wondering whether there was more to the story than what she chose to share with him. Or whether the story of her life that she shared with him was even the real story, was even her. After all these years, it bothered Hugo to no end that he still didn’t feel as though he really knew her, that there was so much that she kept from him, locked deep within herself. But at the same time, Hugo had never felt that it was his place to push. And, he supposed, there was also a part of him that didn’t want to know or perhaps – quite terribly – didn’t really care to know. Hugo didn’t know his true motivation. And again, he didn’t think to explore it much deeper than the surface irritation. What did that say of him? What did that say of their relationship, let alone the relationship that he had with himself. Hugo feared such exploration would open a Pandora’s Box and that he did know was something he was loath to ever do.
He left her in her bedroom, sprawled across the mattress in her Chanel sunglasses and improvised facemask. The fact that for all the years they’d lived together Amory had insisted on separate bedrooms was another aspect of their relationship that Hugo had long tried to overlook. At uni, she’d been particularly fond of Victorian novels. He had assumed their chaste sleeping arrangement was just an affectation held over from her obsession with Austen, Bronte and Trollope. But it had been ten years since uni and it irritated him now. The irritation festered as it became more and more internalized. He felt it was more than an affectation on Amory’s part and a deliberate slap in the face, a means to minimize and emasculate him, of somehow making him and his needs less than. As he stood immobile in the hallway between their respective rooms, Hugo was gripped by a spasm of violence that, if he’d allowed himself to give into it, would have propelled him back into Amory’s bedroom and God knows what would have happened then. But Hugo was still rational enough to catch himself before things got out of hand, before he free-fell into that point of no return. He wasn’t there. He wouldn’t let himself get there. He’d fight it with every last bit of strength he had remaining, whatever the virus hadn’t taken from him, because he wasn’t that guy. And even if he recognized that a certain penchant for violence was an embedded part of his nature, Hugo took that recognition as a positive sign that he had it firmly under control. He even liked to think that it made him seem more enlightened, more “woke” to the predilection of his own toxic masculinity. He took pride in it actually. It made him feel superior, to what or to whom he didn’t know, but what did it matter? He had his toxicity under control and that, in the long run, was really all that mattered. Wasn’t it?
His anger quickly and thoroughly repressed, Hugo decided to spend the rest of the afternoon in his own bedroom getting reacquainted with his things. He poured himself a whisky – against doctor’s orders but after six weeks of enforced sobriety, Hugo felt it was earned – and sat down on his bed. He was somewhat relieved to see that it was made up just as he had left it, the rigid lines and hard corners of his nautical-patterned bedding pleasingly intact, a legacy from boarding school. The fact of its immaculacy, Hugo felt, was testament to the fact that no one else had occupied his bed while he’d been away. He had a system and the system didn’t lie. He supposed he should have taken some satisfaction from this, but a kernel of suspicion had been planted and it now gnawed at the back of his consciousness. Something Amory had said in the taxi – or not said, perhaps more accurately – now gave Hugo cause for doubt. It was no longer enough that his linens seemed untouched. He had to look closer. He had to see for himself whether there were any traces of impropriety.
Hugo took the magnifying glass from his desk drawer. He pulled back the duvet and then the sheets. He held the glass up to his eye and bent low over the bed, inspecting every fiber for suspect hairs, telltale stains that had been hastily rubbed out but not eliminated, anything that might give his fear sustenance. Even so much as a hint was all he needed. He even smelled his pillowcases for the residual scent of a foreign body. But in the end, it was all for naught, just as Hugo had thought it would be. He had to be sure. He had to know for himself. As much as it pained him, he didn’t think he could trust Amory’s response were he to confront her with his suspicions, as ungrounded as he even suspected they were. Sitting there amidst the mess of his bed – which he would now have to make again because there was very little in the world that upset Hugo more than seeing an unmade bed in the middle of the afternoon – the thought occurred to him that if he really wanted reassurance of Amory’s fidelity, he could hire a private investigator. But the idea was so preposterous – let alone unaffordable – that he quickly squashed the notion and condemned it to the dustbin of the misguided, paranoid, and desperate. Not to mention stupid, bourgeois, and really rather petty. Hugo despised pettiness in other people. But he most especially despised it in himself, a trait to which he knew he was often prone, and one for which he couldn’t help but blame Amory and, by extension, the company she kept.
He glanced at his Apple watch. The dancing Mickey Mouse clock face tormented him because he couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it, or even how it had gotten there in the first place. He wanted to hurl it across the room and render it unusable, but he was too reliant on the step counter to keep in him motion throughout the day. The doctors had said he needed to keep fit as part of his recovery. Ten thousand steps or more a day, they had said, and Hugo had nodded and agreed quite wholeheartedly even as he mused over how the ten thousand steps a day count was utter bollocks made up by some Japanese scientists or whatever in the 1960s. But he wanted out of hospital. He wanted his old life back. He wanted to make up for six weeks’ lost time. And in less than six hours of his release – his liberation as it were – Hugo Champion sat in the midst of his rather wrecked bed with the once sharply pressed sheets all akimbo and a heap on the floor, and he wanted to scream and beat something because it had taken all of six minutes for him to realize that he’d been liberated into another kind of prison, a prison more confining than the virus at its worst and one to which there was no ventilator or drip or kind and heroic NHS staffer to check on him, to take care of him, to make sure that he was all right, that he survived.
But no, that had all been left behind. And the life that faced Hugo now was one he recognized, yet didn’t recognize at the same time, or rather, didn’t want to recognize. As he sat there on the bed staring at the dancing, taunting, jeering Mickey Mouse on his watch, Hugo felt as though he had entered into some sort of Charlie Brooker-inspired dystopia out of which there was no passage, no light at the end of the tunnel, no sanity. How was this possible? When had the world suddenly become so intolerable and alien? He wondered – hoped even – whether he was merely in the midst of one of his meds-induced dreams, yet knowing all the while that what he’d woken up into was in fact his new reality, his New Normal, whatever that meant. How had he gone from planning a wedding in Bora Bora that he didn’t really want to this? He didn’t even know if he still had a job. Prestige only carried one so far and his publisher had never been much driven by profit, getting by mostly on the legend of its name and an enviable backlist of classics. Hugo’s job had hardly been secure in the best of times. What did that mean for now? Surely, Amory would have told him if he’d been let go or – only slightly better – furloughed.
But it was still too soon. Hugo wasn’t ready to face the New Normal just yet. He needed time, a period of transition, a longer grace period in which to figure himself out. At the same time, however, he had a nagging suspicion that perhaps there wasn’t all that much to figure out and that whatever needed figuring had been figured in the taxi ride from hospital to townhouse. His consciousness just hadn’t quite caught up to his instinct yet and it was there, between sensing and being, that Hugo now rather inconveniently found himself.
He glanced at his watch again: ten past four. He couldn’t remember what time Amory had said their guests were arriving, or even whether she’d told him in the first place. He hoped she’d rally before too long. A houseful of her friends – rather acquaintances – wasn’t something he could have handled on his own even in the pre-virus phase of his life. And then it hit him – the irresponsibility of it, the sheer lack of thought or feeling for his own well-being, his protection even. And the more he fixated, the angrier Hugo became. He had half a mind to call the Met, to tell them that his fiancé was about to violate the lockdown. Or better yet, Hugo mused, he could wait until the soiree was in full swing and then it’d be a like a raid. But it just felt like too much effort, effort that Hugo thought would be put to better use pouring himself another whisky and getting quietly, blissfully, resentfully drunk in his room while the world outside continued along its downward spiral.
Resistance, Hugo decided, was futile…until it wasn’t.