“Thank you.”
“It shows that you were well brought up.”
“It does?”
“Oh yes! You’ve a lovely manner, very gentle and polite. I suppose you can play the piano?”
“Er, no, I can’t.” I wondered what had sparked the abrupt change of subject. I wanted to tell him that I could play the piano because I was desperate to please him, but at the same time too afraid to tell a barefaced lie, in case he suggested that we play a duet there and then.
“It’d be the fiddle then?”
“Er, no.”
“The tin whistle?”
“No.”
“In that case it must be the accordion?”
“No,” I said, wishing he would stop. What was all this about musical instruments?
“You don’t look like you’ve got the wrists to be a bodhrán player, but you must be one all the same.”
“No, I don’t play the bodhrán.”
What was he talking about?
“Well, Lucy Sullivan, you have me well and truly bet. I give up. So tell me, what is your instrument?”
“What instrument?”
“The one that you play?”
“But I don’t play an instrument!”
“What! But if you don’t play, then you’re surely a poet?”
“No,” I said shortly, and started thinking about how I could escape. It was too weird, even for me, and I had a very high weirdness threshold.
But, as if he had read my mind, he put his hand on my arm and suddenly became a lot more normal.
“Sorry, Lucy Sullivan,” he said, humbly. “I’m sorry. I’ve scared you, haven’t I?”
“A bit,” I admitted.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“That’s okay,” I smiled, relief filling me. I had no objection to people being quirky, slightly eccentric even, but when they started to display psychotic tendencies, I knew when to throw in the towel.
“It’s just that I had a great feed of class A drugs earlier this evening,” he continued, “and I’m not quite myself.”
“Oh,” I said faintly, not sure what to think now. So he took drugs? Did I have a problem with that? Well, not really, I supposed, so long as he wasn’t mainlining heroin. We were short of teaspoons in the flat as it was.
“What drugs do you take?” I asked tentatively, trying not to sound condemnatory.
“What have you got?” He laughed. Then he stopped abruptly, “I’m doing it again, aren’t I? I’m scaring you?”
“Weeell, you know…”
“Don’t worry, Lucy Sullivan. I’m partial to the odd mild hallucinogenic or mood-relaxant, nothing more. And in small quantities. And not very often. Hardly ever, really. Apart from pints. I have to admit to a fondness for a great feed of pints early and often.”
“Oh that’s all right,” I said. I had no problem with men who drank.
But, I wondered, if he was currently under the influence of some narcotic, did that mean that normally he didn’t tell stories and dream up things and was just as dull as everyone else? I desperately hoped not. It would be unbearably disappointing for this gorgeous, charming, unusual man to disappear along with the last traces of drugs from his bloodstream.
“Are you normally like this?” I asked cautiously. “You know, er, imagining things and telling stories and all that? Or is it just the drugs?”
He stared at me, his shiny curls falling into his eyes.
Why can’t I get my hair to shine like that, I wondered absently. I wonder what conditioner he uses.
“This is an important question, isn’t it, Lucy Sullivan?” he asked, still staring at me. “A lot depends on it.”
“I suppose,” I mumbled.
“But I’ve got to be honest with you, you know,” he said sternly. “I can’t just tell you what you want to hear, now can I?”
I wasn’t at all sure whether I agreed with that. In an unpredictable and unpleasant world it was both unusual and very pleasant to hear what I wanted to hear.
“I suppose.” I sighed.
“You won’t like what I’m going to tell you, but I’m morally bound to tell you anyway.”
“Fine,” I said sadly.
“I have no choice.” He touched my face gently.
“I know.”
“Oh!” He shouted suddenly and theatrically threw wide his arms. He attracted worried looks from all around the kitchen—people as far away as the back door turned to look. “‘O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!’ Wouldn’t you agree, Lucy Sullivan?”
“Yes.” I laughed. I couldn’t help it, he was just so crazy and funny.
“Can you weave, Lucy? No? Not much call for it these days. A dying art, a dying art. I’m no good at it myself—two left feet, that’s me. Now, to tell you the God’s honest truth, Lucy Sullivan…”
“I wish you would.”
“Here goes! I’m even worse when I’m in a drug-free zone. There! I’ve said it! I suppose you’ll be getting up and leaving me now?”
“Actually no.”
“But don’t you think I’m a lunatic and an embarrassment?”
“Yes.”
“You mean to tell me that lunatics and embarrassments are your particular bag, Lucy Sullivan?”
I had never really thought of it that way before but now that he had mentioned it…
“Yes,” I said.
Chapter 19
He took me by the hand and led me through the hall and I let myself be led. Where was he taking me, I wondered in excitement. I pushed past Daniel and he raised his eyebrows questioningly, then waggled his finger admonishingly, but I ignored him. He was a fine one to talk.
“Sit here, Lucy Sullivan.” Gus pointed at the bottom stair. “We can have a nice, quiet chat.”
That seemed to be very unlikely in view of the fact that there was more traffic up and down the stairs than there was up and down Oxford Street. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on upstairs—the usual, I suppose, drug taking, sex with your best friend’s boyfriend on your best friend’s coat and the like.
“Now, I’m sorry I scared you back there, Lucy, but I just
assumed that you had to be some kind of creative person,” Gus said when I was installed on the foot of the stairs.
“I’m a musician myself and music is something I feel very passionately about,” he went on. “And I sometimes forget that not everyone else feels the same way.”
“That’s fine,” I said, delighted. Not only was he not mad, but he was a musician, and my favourite men had always been musicians or writers or anything that involved the creative process and behaving like a tortured artist. I had never fallen in love with a man who had a real job and I hoped I never would. I couldn’t imagine anything duller than a man with a regular income, a man who was sensible with money, a man who knew how to live within his means. I found financial insecurity a great aphrodisiac. My mother and I disagreed rather violently on that point, but the difference was that she didn’t have a romantic bone in her body while I would be hard-pressed to find a portion of my skeleton that wasn’t. The radius, the ulna, the patella, the femur, the pelvic girdle (especially that!), the sternum, the humerus, the scapula—both of them in fact—sundry vertebrae, a wide selection of ribs, a whole plethora of metatarsals, nearly as many again metacarpals, the couple of tiny ones in my inner ear—you name it, they were romantic.
“So you’re a musician?” I asked with interest. Maybe that was why I felt I knew him—maybe I’d seen him or heard of him or seen a picture of him somewhere.
“I am.”
“Are you a famous musician?”
“Famous?”
“Yes, are you a household name?”
“Lucy Sullivan, I’m not a household name, not even in my own household.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve disappointed you now, haven’t I? We’ve only just
met and already we’re at a crisis. We’ll have to go for counseli
ng, Lucy. You stay here and I’ll go and find a phone book and look up the number.”
“No you won’t.” I laughed. “I’m not disappointed. I just felt like I knew you, but I didn’t know from where, and I thought that if you were famous, that might be how.”
“You mean we don’t know each other?” he asked, sounding shocked.
“I don’t think so,” I said, amused.
“We must,” he insisted. “At least in a previous existence, if not in this one.”
“That’s all very well,” I said thoughtfully. “But, even if we knew each other in a previous existence, who’s to say we liked each other then? I’ve always had a problem with that—just because people recognize each other from another life doesn’t mean they have to like each other, does it?”
“You’re absolutely right,” said Gus, gripping my hand tight. “I’ve always thought that too but you’re the first person I’ve met who’s ever agreed with me.”
“I mean, imagine if I had been your boss in another life—well you wouldn’t be too pleased to meet me again, would you?”
“No! Oh Christ, wouldn’t it be awful? Dying and traveling through space and time and getting born again and meeting the same terrible people that you met the last time around. Remember me from Ancient Egypt? Good, because you did a terrible job on that pyramid, so go back and do it again.”
“Exactly. Or what about, remember me? I was the lion that ate you when you were a Christian in Rome? Remember me now? Good, let’s get married.”
Gus laughed delightedly. “You’re wonderful. All the same, the two of us must have got along in whatever life we met in before now. I have a good feeling about you—you probably explained Pythagaros’s theorem when Pythagoras had run out of patience with me—he was a very short-tempered man, that fella—or lent me money at the turn of the century or something nice. Now is there any more of that Guinness?”
I sent Gus to the fridge and I sat on the stairs and waited. I was thrilled, delighted, bursting with happiness. What a lovely man. I was so glad I had come to the party—my blood ran cold at the thought that I could so easily not have come and then I’d never have met him. And maybe Mrs. Nolan had been right after all. Gus could be The One, the man I’d been waiting for.
Speaking of waiting, where the hell was he?
How long did it take to go to the fridge and steal the rest of Daniel’s Guinness?
Hadn’t he been gone forever? While I’d been sitting on the step with a dreamy, half-wit’s grin on my face, had he started chatting to some other young woman and forgotten all about me?
I started to get nervous.
How long could I wait before I started to look for him, I wondered? What could be considered a decent interval?
And wasn’t it a little early in the relationship—even for me—for him to start giving me the runaround?
My state of dreamy, happy introspection abruptly dispersed. I should have known that it was too good to be true. I became aware of the noise and the jostling of the other people around me—I had totally forgotten about them all while I’d been talking to Gus—and I wondered if they were all laughing at me? Had they seen Gus do this to thousands of women? Could they sense my fear?
But, no, here he was, looking a bit dishevelled.
“Lucy Sullivan,” he declared, sounding anxious and distracted. “I’m sorry I was gone for so long but I’ve been involved in a terrible fracas.”
“Oh God,” I laughed. “What happened?”
“When I got to the fridge, some man was trying to help himself to your friend Donal’s Guinness. ‘Unhand them,’ I shouted. ‘I won’t,’ says he. ‘You will,’ says I. ‘They’re mine,’ says he. ‘They’re not,’ says I. A tussle ensued, Lucy, where I sustained minor injuries, but the Guinness is safe now.”
“Is it?” I said, in surprise, because Gus had a bottle of red wine in his hand and there was no sign of Guinness anywhere.
“Yes, Lucy, I made the ultimate sacrifice and it’s safe now. No one else will try to steal it.”
“What’ve you done?”
“Done? But, I drank it, of course, Lucy. What else could I do?”
“Err…”
I looked over my shoulder nervously and, sure enough, through the bars of the banisters I could see Daniel making his way through the hall, his face like thunder.
“Lucy,” he shouted. “Some little bastard has stolen…”
He paused when he saw Gus.
“You!” he yelled.
Oh dear. Daniel and Gus had obviously met.
“Daniel, Gus. Gus, Daniel,” I said weakly.
“That’s him,” said Gus, in great annoyance. “That’s the light-fingered character who was stealing your friend’s Guinness.”
“I might have known,” said Daniel, shaking his head in resignation, ignoring Gus’s accusatory finger. “I just might have bloody well known. How do you pick them, Lucy? Just tell me how?”
“Oh go away, you sanctimonious pig,” I said, annoyed and embarrassed.
“Do you know this person?” Gus demanded of me. “I
don’t think he’s the type of person you should be friends with. You should have seen the way he…”
“I’m going,” said Daniel, “And I’m taking Karen’s bottle of wine with me.” And he whipped the bottle of wine out of Gus’s hand and disappeared back into the throng.
“Did you see that?” shouted Gus. “He’s done it again!”
I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help myself—I obviously wasn’t as sober as I had thought.
“Stop it,” I said, pulling Gus by the arm. “Sit down and behave.”
“Oh, sit down and behave is it?”
“Yes.”
“I see!”
There was a short pause while he looked down at me, a fierce frown on his handsome little face.
“Well, if you say so, Lucy Sullivan.”
“I say so.”
He meekly sat down beside me on the stairs, wearing an overdocile expression. We sat in silence for a few moments.
“Ah well,” he said, “it was worth a try.”
Chapter 20
Suddenly I had run out of things to say. I sat squashed up against him on the step, racking my brain for something to say.
“Well!” I said, too cheerfully and trying to hide my sudden shyness. What happens now, I wondered? Should
we say it had been nice meeting each other and easily slip away from each other, like ships leaving their mooring bays? I didn’t want that.
I decided to ask him a question—most people seemed to like talking about themselves.
“What age are you?”
“As old as the hills and as young as the morn, Lucy Sullivan.”
“Would you mind being a bit more specific?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Fine.”
“Well, nine hundred and twenty-four, actually.”
“Are you indeed?”
“And what age are you Lucy Sullivan?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Hmmm, I see. You realize that I’m old enough to be your father?”
“If you’re nine hundred and twenty-four, you’re old enough to be my grandfather.”
“Older, I’d say.”
“But you look really good for your age.”
“Clean living, Lucy Sullivan, that’s what I put it down to. That and the deal I did with the devil.”
“What was that?” I was loving this, I was having such a good time.
“I didn’t age for any of the nine hundred years that I was waiting for you but, if I ever put foot inside an office to do a real job, I’ll age instantly and die.”
“That’s funny,” I said, “because that’s exactly what happens to me every time I go to work, but I didn’t have to wait nine hundred years for it to happen.”
“You don’t work in an office, do you?” he asked in horror. “Oh my poor wee Lucy, this can’t be right. You shouldn’t have to work at all, you shoul
d spend your time lying on a silken bed in your golden dress, eating sweetmeats, surrounded by your admirers and your subjects.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said warmly, “except for the bit about the sweetmeats. Would you mind if I had chocolate instead?”
“Not at all,” he said expansively. “Chocolate it is. And speaking of a silken bed, would it be terribly forward of me if I asked if I could accompany you home tonight?”
I opened my mouth, feeling light-headed with alarm.
“Forgive me, Lucy Sullivan,” he said, gripping my arm, his face a picture of stricken shock. “I can’t believe I said that. Please, please, banish it from your mind, try to forget that I ever said it, that such a crass suggestion ever passed from my lips. May I be struck down! A bolt of lightning is too good for me, though.”
“It’s okay,” I said nicely, reassured by his mortification. If he was that embarrassed, then surely he didn’t make a habit of inviting himself home with women he’d just met?
“No, it’s not okay,” he said in alarm. “How could I have said something like that to a woman like you? I’m just going to walk away from you now and I want you to forget that you ever met me, it’s the least I can do. Goodbye, Lucy Sullivan.”
“No, don’t go,” I said, seized by alarm. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to sleep with him, but I certainly didn’t want him to go.
“You want me to stay, Lucy Sullivan?” he asked, an anxious look on his face.
“Yes!”
“Well, if you’re really sure…hold on here while I get my coat.”
“But…”
Oh God! I had wanted him to stay as in stay talking to me at the party, but he seemed to think that I had invited him to stay with me in the silken bed with the sweetmeats and I was too afraid to upset him by explaining the misunderstanding to him, so it looked as if I had an overnight guest.
He was back, a lot more promptly than the last time, trailing scarves and a coat and a sweater under his arm.
“I’m ready, Lucy Sullivan.”
I bet you are, I thought, swallowing with nerves.
“There’s only one thing, Lucy.”
What now?
“I’m not sure I have quite enough money to pay my full share of the taxi fare. Ladbroke Grove is a long way away, isn’t it?”