Little Bee

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “God, I shouldn’t have said that. I got carried away, I don’t even know you, I’m so sorry. You look really hurt.”

“Maybe I’m just doing vulnerable.”

Lawrence drew in his elbows—drew in all of himself in fact, so that he appeared to withdraw into his body on the royal-blue upholstery of his swivel chair. He paused, and tapped out a line on his computer. The keyboard was a cheap one, the kind where the keys have a high travel and they squeak on the downstroke. He sat there so long without moving that I went behind his desk and looked over his shoulder to see what he had written.

You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen_

That was the unfinished sentence that stood, without resolution or caveat, on his computer screen. The cursor blinked at the end of the line. From outside in the street, police sirens screamed in and out of phase. He turned to me. The bearings squealed in his chair.

“So tell me something,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Is it your husband who makes you unhappy?”

“What? You don’t know anything about my husband.”

“It was one of the first things you said to me. About your husband and his opinions. Why would you mention him to me at all?”

“The subject came up.”

“The subject of your husband? You brought it up.”

I stopped, with my mouth open, trying to remember why he was wrong. Lawrence smiled, bitterly but without malice.

“I think it’s because you’re not very happy either,” he said.

I moved quickly out from behind his desk—my turn to blush now—and I went over to the window. I rolled my head on the cool glass and looked down at the ordinary life in the street. Lawrence came to stand beside me.

“So,” he said. “Now it’s me who’s sorry. I suppose you’ll tell me I should leave the close observation to you journalists.”

I smiled, despite myself. “What was that line you were in the middle of writing?” I said.

“You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen…I don’t know, I’m going to say, still to be seen what great fruits your work will bear, or still to be seen what the successes of your hard work will be. Something open-ended like that.”

“Or you could just leave it how it is,” I said.

“It isn’t finished,” said Lawrence.

“But it’s rather good,” I said. “It’s got us this far, hasn’t it?”

The cursor blinked and my lips parted and we kissed and kissed and kissed. I clung to him and whispered in his ear. Afterward I retrieved my knickers from the gray carpet tiles, and pulled them on under my skirt. I smoothed down my blouse, and Lawrence sat back at his desk.

I looked through the window at a different world from the one I had left out there.

“I’ve never done that before,” I said.

“No, you haven’t,” said Lawrence. “I’d have remembered.”

He stared at the screen for a full minute with the unfinished line on it and then, with my lipstick still on his lips, smashed down a full stop. You tried your utmost and it has still to be seen. Twenty minutes later, the letter was transcribed to Braille and put in the post. Lawrence’s colleagues hadn’t cared enough to proofread it.

Andrew called. My mobile went in Lawrence’s office and I will never forget the first thing Andrew said: This is fuckin fantastic, Sarah. This story is going to be full-on for weeks. They’ve commissioned me to write an extended feature on the home secretary’s downfall. This is pay dirt, Sarah. They’ve given me a team of researchers. But I’m going to be in the office all hours on this one. You’ll be all right looking after Charlie, won’t you?

I switched off the phone, very gently. It was simpler than announcing to Andrew the change in our way of life. It was easier than explaining to him: our marriage has just been mortally wounded, quite by accident, by a gang of bullies picking on a blind man.

I put down the phone and I looked at Lawrence. “I’d really like to see you again,” I said.