Glover’s Mistake
From a rising young novelist comes an artful meditation on love and life in contemporary London.When David Pinner introduces his former teacher, the American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, he unwittingly sets in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt and heartbreak. As David plays reluctant witness (and more) to James and Ruth's escalating love affair, he must come to terms with his own blighted emotional life.Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, in the sleek galleries and posh restaurants of a Britannia resurgent with cultural and economic power, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel vividly portrays three people whose world gradually fractures along the fault lines of desire, truth and jealousy. With wit and compassion, Laird explores the very nature of contemporary romance, among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness.
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Glover’s Mistake
Nick Laird
To EJ
Table of Contents
A red jewel sparkled in her navel
A series of short rises and swinging stops
At the kitchen table he’d turned a page of Time Out and there was her face. He’d been so shocked that he’d started to laugh. She was still beautiful—though squinting slightly as if she’d just removed a pair of glasses. Did she need glasses now too? He snipped out the inch-long update with nail scissors, folded it and filed it in his wallet. The exhibition, ‘Us and the US’, featured several British and American female artists, and it opened in three days.
When he reached the drinks table and lifted a plastic tumbler of wine, he noticed, with unexpected anger, how the suits had real champagne glasses. Money grants its owners a kind of armour, and this crowd shone with it. They were delighted and loud, and somewhere among them was Ruth. He headed towards her work and hovered.
There.
She did look good; older, of course, and the hair now unnaturally blonde. Her nose was still a little pointed, oddly fleshless, and its bridge as straight and thin as the ridge of a sand dune; one lit slope, the other shaded. A tall man in a chalk-stripe suit held forth as she twisted the stem of her empty glass between forefinger and thumb. Her unhappy glance slid round the group. As one of the men whispered into her ear she turned away, and her eyes had the same cast as in the lecture hall, when she would gaze longingly over the heads of the students towards the exit.
‘Hello, oh excuse me, I’m sorry, Ruth, hi.’
David used one elbow to open a gap between the speaker and Ruth, and then slotted himself neatly into it.
‘Hello.’ The voice was lower than David would have guessed but instantly familiar. She still dressed in black but the materials had been upgraded. A pilous cashmere wrap, a fitted silk blouse.
‘You taught me at Goldsmiths, a long time ago now.’ He was staring too intently and looked down at her glass.
‘Oh, sorry. Of course, yes. What’s your name again?’
She presented her hand and David shook it firmly. He said there was no reason she’d remember him, but she repeated the name, making an American performance of the syllables: Dav-id Pin-ner. The three men had regrouped, and Chalk-stripe was still mid-anecdote. Ruth touched David’s hand for the second time.
‘Shall we find a drink?’
The queue was five-deep around the table. David knew he should stand in line for both of them, letting Ruth wait at some distance from the ungentle shoving, but to do so would be to lose her immediately to some suit or fan or journalist. Then Ruth stopped a waitress walking past, a black girl with a lip ring carrying a tray of prawns on Communion wafers.
‘Can I be really brazen and ask you for some wine? Would that be okay?’
She appraised them: David left her unconvinced, but Ruth, five foot five of effortless poise, carried them both easily. The wealthy expect and expect, and are not disappointed. When the waitress smiled in confirmation, her lip ring tightened disagreeably against her lower lip and David had to look away.
‘If you just let me get rid of these…’
He was nervous, and kept pushing prawn hors d’oeuvres into his mouth before the present incumbents were swallowed. Ruth picked a white thread from her shawl and said, ‘But what do you do now? Oh, I’ve lost your name again. I’m just terrible with names. I forget my daughter’s sometimes.’
David, chewing furiously, pointed at his mouth.
‘Of course…God, Goldsmiths.’
She said it dramatically, naming a battle they’d together fought in. After swallowing, David repeated his name and said he was a writer. This was not particularly true, at least not outside his private feeling.
‘Huh. So I managed to put you off art. Or maybe you write about it? Is this research?’
David thought she was very gently making fun of him. ‘No, I teach mainly, though I have reviewed—’
She shifted register and dipped her head towards him. ‘Look, I’m sorry for sweeping you off back there. The baby brother of my ex-husband had decided to explain to me how exactly I’d fucked up his life.’
‘God, I’m sure you could do without that.’
The immediacy, the easy intimacy, was surprising, and it had startled him to hear himself repeating God in the same dramatic way she’d said it. Did she mean she’d fucked up the ex-husband’s life or the ex-husband’s brother’s? He could imagine how she might unmoor a man’s existence.
