In Bed With Lord Byron by Deborah Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

Godiva mints, and a pile of well-thumbed paperbacks: Brontë and Hardy and Eliot and Ovid and Byron.
    Tonight, however, I couldn’t bring myself to eat or read. My body felt dead, my eyes tired, my heart shrivelled. I lay under the covers and realised I had forgotten to clean my teeth, but
the thought of getting up seemed exhausting. I lay in the dark, curtains billowing, watching the night shift through different shades of black. I had forgotten my hot-water bottle, and cold started
to crawl over me, but my emotions were so abstract that I found the pain – teeth chattering, and goose pimples and, finally, violent shivering – satisfying.
    I tossed and turned until one o’clock and then finally fell asleep.
    I dreamt about Anthony. I dreamt that he proposed to me, only he had lost the ring and it was all my fault, and however hard we looked it couldn’t be found. I woke up
crying, and wept into my pillow until the cotton was saturated with salt.
What have I done?
I sobbed.
What have I done?
Longing filled me until I felt sick. I reached out, hand
pressed on to the receiver, dying to call him and tell him it was all a mistake. But then I remembered him saying, ‘It just seems like we’ve reached a natural conclusion . . .’
For another hour I took our relationship apart ruthlessly. How long had he been planning to dump me? When had been the exact point when he had thought, this is enough, Lucy no longer delights me,
she repels me? Had he been seeing another woman? The more I searched through our relationship, the more I unpicked it, the more panicked I became. As I held up each patchwork square, the cloth
seemed to dissolve in my hands; butterfly memories of love and delight curled up their wings and wriggled back into their chrysalises, sticky and dull and asleep. Had he ever loved me? Did love
even really exist? I felt as though my heart had aged ten years in ten minutes and turned to dust.
    At around three o’clock the phone rang.
    ‘Hello?’ I said in a neutral voice, heart hammering.
    ‘Hi, it’s me.’
    ‘Hi.’
    ‘I can’t sleep.’
    ‘Neither can I.’
    A beat. We hung in the darkness, breathless, waiting. Finally I gave in.
    ‘Are you reading?’ I said.
    ‘No, I’m eating toast with marmite and jam. What are you doing?’
    ‘I’m reading
Wuthering Heights
. I’ve just got to the bit where Cathy’s dying.’
    ‘Lucy . . .’ he began, a catch in his voice.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I guess we should sleep,’ he said at last.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I’m glad we . . . said what we said. It’s good, it’s for the best.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘So.’
    ‘Good night.’
    ‘Night.’
    I put the phone down and curled up in bed, hugging Lyra to my chest. I felt as though a poisoned arrow was slowly stabbing in and out of my heart, a pain too excruciating for tears.
    I tried to play a game where I listed all the things I didn’t like about him. I remembered the time I’d asked him, ‘If you could sleep with any woman in the world who would you
choose?’ and he’d said, 1) Catherine Zeta Jones, 2) Liz Hurley and 3) Jordan. Choice number 3 had nearly precipitated our break-up there and then (despite his protests,
‘It’s a fantasy game, Lucy, not real life!’). But no matter how much I told myself that I didn’t like him, all I could think of was how I much I liked him and that night,
when I played the going-to-bed game myself, for the first time in a long time, Anthony won.
    I barely slept another wink, and the next morning I went to work and got fired.
    v) Wormholes
    But let’s rewind time a little bit.
    Before I managed to get fired, the day didn’t begin too badly. I felt like absolute shit as I slunk into the office, but for once I was only three minutes late. And to my relief I
didn’t get shouted at, because Dr Merrick was out. She had left a bundle of papers and a dictaphone on my desk, with a yellow Post-it that informed me she would be back just before lunch so
could I have the letters