Perhaps she shouldn’t have gone. Perhaps what Kate should have done, for the sake of her mental health—and this goes for me, too—was to pull away and distance herself from Lana and Jason. But Kate couldn’t do that. She loved them too much to give either of them up. That’s the truth.
And after Lana married Jason, Kate tried to bury her feelings for Jason and put the past behind her.
Whether she succeeded is open to question.
10
I may as well come clean. I had known about Kate and Jason’s affair for quite some time.
I discovered it by chance. It was a Thursday afternoon. I happened to be in Soho, for—well, let’s call it an appointment—and I was a little early. So, I thought I’d pop into a pub for a quick drink.
As I turned onto Greek Street, guess who I saw, emerging from the Coach & Horses?
Kate was exiting the pub, looking rather furtive, glancing from left to right.
I was about to call out her name—when Jason emerged, just behind her; with that same sheepish look.
I watched them from across the street. They could have seen me, either of them—if they had looked up. But they didn’t. They kept their heads low, parting without a word to each other. They hurried off in opposite directions.
Hello, I thought. What’s going on here?
What odd behavior. Not to mention informative. It told me something I hadn’t known before: that Jason and Kate were meeting independently of Lana.
Did Lana know about this? I wondered. I made a mental note to ponder this further—and think how I might best use it to my advantage.
I hadn’t given up hope, you see. I still loved Lana. I still believed that, one day, we would be married. There was no question about that in my mind. Obviously she was now married to Jason—which made things trickier—but my goal, as Mr. Levy would say, remained the same.
When Lana and Jason got married, I assumed—like everyone else—it wouldn’t last. I thought after a few months of being married to a bore like Jason, Lana would come to her senses. She would wake up to what a terrible mistake she had made—and she would see me there, waiting for her. Compared to Jason, I’d appear as suave and sophisticated as Cary Grant in an old movie—reclining against a piano, cigarette in one hand, martini in the other, witty, self-effacing, warm, lovable—and, just like Cary, I’d get the girl in the end.
But to my astonishment, their marriage endured. Month after month, year upon year. It was torture for me. No doubt it was Lana’s sheer loveliness that kept it going. Jason would have tried a saint’s patience; and Lana was clearly something more than a saint. A martyr, perhaps?
Therefore, as far as I was concerned, this surprise encounter with Kate and Jason in Soho was nothing short of a divine intervention.
I had to make the most of it.
* * *
I decided it would be a good idea if I started following Kate.
Which makes it sound more cloak-and-dagger than it was. You didn’t need to be George Smiley to spy on Kate Crosby. She wasn’t inconspicuous; you didn’t lose her in a crowd—whereas I always melt into the background.
Kate was appearing in a successful revival of Rattigan’s Deep Blue Sea, which had transferred to the Prince Edward Theatre in Soho. So it was just a matter of lurking across the street from the stage door, watching from the shadows; waiting for the play to finish, and Kate to emerge and sign autographs for the crowd of fans.
Then, when Kate left and made her way along the street, I followed.
I didn’t have to follow far—just from stage door to pub door. Kate walked around the corner and slipped in through the side door of—yes, you guessed it—the Coach & Horses. Peering through one of the pub’s narrow windows, I saw Jason waiting for her at a corner table, with a couple of drinks. Kate greeted him with a long kiss.
I was shocked. Not so much by the revelation that they were lovers—which, to be frank, had a kind of sordid inevitability to it—but by their total, unbelievable lack of discretion. They were all over each other that night—drunker and messier as the evening wore on. They were so oblivious of their surroundings, I felt secure enough to leave the window and venture inside the pub.
I sat at the other end of the bar, ordered a vodka tonic, and watched the proceedings from there. Appropriately enough, some old dear was sitting at the upright piano, belting out the chorus of “If Love Were All” by No?l Coward: “I believe the more you love a man, The more you give your trust The more you’re bound to lose.”
When they finally left the pub, I followed. I watched them kissing in an alley for a moment.