“Well, how much money do you have?”
He pulled a handful of change out of his pocket. “Let me see, four pounds…five pounds…no, sorry, they’re pesetas. Five pesetas, a dime, a miraculous medal and seven, eight, nine, eleven pence!”
“Come on.” I laughed. After all, what had I expected? I couldn’t wish for a penniless musician and then complain when he didn’t have any money.
“I’ll treat you right, Lucy, just as soon as I get my big break.”
Chapter 21
A long time later we arrived at Ladbroke Grove. Gus and I held hands in the taxi but we hadn’t kissed yet. It was only a matter of time and I felt very nervous about it. An excited sort of nervous.
Gus insisted on chatting with the taxi driver, asking him all kinds of annoying questions—who was the most famous person he’d ever had in his cab, who was the least famous person he’d ever had in his cab, that kind of thing—and only stopped when the taxi driver screeched to a halt somewhere around Fulham and, in a volley of short, brusque, Anglo-Saxon words, conveyed to us that if Gus didn’t shut up we could both get out and make our own travel arrangements for the rest of the way.
The planets were not aligned in my house of taxi drivers that evening.
“My seals are lipped,” shouted Gus and we spent the rest of the journey whispering and nudging each other and giggling like schoolchildren, speculating on why the taxi driver was so bad-tempered.
I paid for the taxi and Gus absolutely insisted that I take his handful of foreign change.
“But I don’t want it,” I said.
“Take it, Lucy,” he insisted. “I’ve got my pride, you know,” he added with more than a hint of irony.
“Well, okay.” I smiled, happy to humour him. “But I don’t want your miraculous medal, I’ve got thousands of my own, thanks all the same.”
“I bet your mother gave them to you.”
“But of course.”
“Yes, Irish mothers are like a bottomless pit of miraculous medals. They always have one hidden somewhere. And do you find that she’s always forcing things on you?”
“How d’you mean?”
Gus prodded me in my side with his finger, as I tried to open the front door, “Will you have a cup of tea? Yes, you will. Give her a whole pot, it’ll warm her up.”
He thumped up the stairs calling after me, “Will you have a slice of bread, go on, you’ll have the entire loaf. Have a ten-pound bag of potatoes, have an eight-course
banquet, go on, sure, you need fattening up. I know you’ve just had your dinner, but another can’t hurt.”
I couldn’t help laughing, even though I was worried that the other residents of the building would complain about being awakened at two in the morning by a drunken Irishman insisting that they would like a haunch of beef.
“Go ahead,” he shouted. “I’ll even cook it for you.”
“Shush,” I said, giggling.
“Sorry,” he stage whispered. “But will you?” he said, pulling on my coat sleeve.
“Will I what?”
“Will you eat an entire pig?”
“No!”
“But we’ll only be throwing it away if you don’t eat it. And we killed it specially for you.”
“Stop it.”
“Well, you’ll at least have a drop of holy water and a miraculous medal, won’t you?”
“Okay, just to please you.”
We got into the flat and I suggested tea, but Gus wasn’t interested in tea.
“I’m really tired, Lucy,” he said. “Will we go to bed?”
Oh God! I knew what that meant.
There was so much to worry about, not least the question of contraception and Gus didn’t strike me as being in any kind of condition to care about such matters. Or even for them to occur to him. Perhaps he was a more responsible citizen when he wasn’t drunk—although I wouldn’t have counted on it—so it looked as though it was up to me to be the sensible, careful party. Not that I minded—I preferred men who erred on the side of wildness rather than caution.
“How about it, Lucy?” He smiled at me.
“Sure!” I said, trying to sound bright, breezy, unconcerned, like a woman in control. Then I thought that perhaps I had sounded too eager and while I didn’t want him to realize that I was a bag of nerves, neither did I want him to think that I was desperate to go to bed with him.
“Er, come on,” I muttered, hoping my tone was striking a neutral middle ground.
I realized that I hadn’t been entirely wise. I had invited a complete stranger, a complete male stranger, a very strange stranger, into my empty apartment. If I ended up raped and robbed and murdered, then I would only have myself to blame. Although Gus wasn’t acting like he had rape and pillage on his mind. He was too busy dancing around my bedroom opening drawers, reading my credit card bills and admiring my fixtures and fittings.
“A real fireplace!” he shouted. “Lucy Sullivan, you realize what this means?”
“What does it mean?”
“It means that we must pull up our chairs and sit in the flickering firelight and tell stories.”
“Yes, but you see, we don’t actually use the fireplace, because the chimney needs to be…”
But I’d lost him because he opened my wardrobe and was flicking through the hangers.
“Aha! A rough-hewn cloak,” he said, pulling out an old coat of mine, a long velvet one with a hood. “What do you think?”
He tried it on (and, in fairness, that was all he seemed to be interested in trying on), pulled up the hood and stood in front of the mirror swishing it around.
“Beautiful,” I laughed. “It’s you.”
He looked a bit like an elf, but quite a sexy elf.
“You’re laughing at me, Lucy Sullivan.”
“I’m not.”
And I wasn’t because I thought he was gorgeous. I was
delighted with his enthusiasm, the way he found everything interesting, his unusual way of looking at things. There’s no other word for it—I was enchanted.
I was also very relieved that he was playing dressing-up instead of trying to get me into bed. I did find him attractive—very attractive—but it seemed a little bit soon to be hopping into bed with him. But I had, after all, said that he could come home with me and I felt that in that case etiquette dictated that I couldn’t really not go to bed with him.
In theory, I knew that it was my right not to go to bed with anyone I didn’t want to, and to change my mind at any stage in the proceedings, but the reality was that I would be far too embarrassed to say no.
I suppose I felt that after he had come all this way it would be inhospitable to send him away empty-handed. It went back to my childhood, where generosity to our visitors mattered above all else, where it didn’t matter if we had to do without dinner so long as the guests were fed.
I also felt that Gus and I were somehow meant to be together and that was very seductive. Not only would it be unforgivably rude to refuse to sleep with him, but it would be actively flying in the face of fate, calling the wrath of the gods to be delivered down on top of me. It was a great relief to think that, actually, because it took all the “Will I, won’t I?” out of it. I had no choice. I had to sleep with him. No agonizing, everything was nice and simple.
All the same, I was still nervous. I suppose the gods can’t think of everything.
I sat on my bed and fiddled with my earrings, while Gus roamed around the room, picking things up, putting them down, and making all kinds of comments.
“Nice books, Lucy. Apart from all this California stuff,” he muttered, reading the back of Who Gets the Car
in the Dysfunctional Family of the Nineties. I was glad to see that, while Gus was slightly eccentric, he wasn’t totally neurotic.
I put my earrings back on so that I could take them off again. I had always found that wearing jewelry was a good idea in a seduction-type situation because, while it gave me the appearance of taking things
off and made me seem as if I was a good sport and game for anything, in actuality the other person was down to his undergarments long before I ever was, giving me the chance to back out or change my mind without exposing, among other things, my own hand.
I learned that trick the summer I was fifteen and Ann Garrett and Fiona Hart and I used to play strip poker with some of the boys from our road. Ann and Fiona both had bosoms and in a summer that was awash with sexual undertones and overtones—none of them emanating to or from me, I have to say—they were dying to be forced into a situation where they had to display themselves. I had no bosoms, and even though I was delighted to feel that I had friends, I would rather have died than sit in the field behind the shops on a balmy summer evening in my undershirt and panties with Derek Wheatley and Gordon Wheatley and Joe Newey and Paul Stapleton.
So I solved the problem by wearing as much jewelry and accessories as I could lay my hands on. My ears weren’t pierced—I didn’t get that done until I was twenty-three—so I had to wear clip-on earrings, which stopped the circulation and turned my earlobes into two throbbing red balls of agony, but it was a small price to pay. (Although it was always a relief to lose the first couple of hands of poker.) And I smuggled out and wore my mother’s cameo ring that she kept wrapped in tissue paper in a box in the bottom of her wardrobe and only wore herself on her wedding anniversary and her birthday. It was far too big for me and I lived in terror of losing it. And with three pink plastic bracelets and my Confirmation cross and chain, I made sure that I never had to take off more than my socks and sandals. But just to be on the safe side I wore three pairs of socks.
Curiously enough, Ann and Fiona never wore any jewelry.
And they seemed to be no good at the game either, throwing away aces and kings like they were going out of fashion and in what seemed like no time at all, they were down to their bras and panties, giggling and saying how embarrassed they were and sitting up straight with their stomachs in and their shoulders back and their chests thrust out. While I remained fully clothed, with just a neat little pile of pink bracelets and earrings on the grass beside me.
It was odd. I hardly ever won at anything but I somehow nearly always managed to win at strip poker. But the oddest thing of all was that none of the other players acted very impressed. It took me several years to realize that they hadn’t been, as I so smugly thought, sore losers.
I was a very naïve teenager.
I went on taking my earrings on and off while Gus familiarized himself with the contents of my bedroom.
“I’ll just have a little lie-down, Lucy, if that’s okay.”
“Fine.”
“Do you mind if I take my boots off?”
“Er, no, not at all.” I had been expecting him to take off a lot more than his boots. If he just took off his boots I’d be getting away lightly.
He lay down on the bed beside me.
“This is nice,” he said, holding my hand.
“Mmmm,” I murmured. It was nice.
“D’you know something, Lucy Sull…?”
“What?”
He said nothing.
“What?” I said again, turning to look at him.
But he was asleep. Stretched out on my bed, still in his jeans and shirt. He looked so sweet, his eyelashes black and spiky, throwing shadows onto his face, faint stubble on his jaw and chin, his mouth smiling slightly.
I stared down at him.
That’s what I want, I thought. He’s the one.
Chapter 22
I tugged the duvet out from under him and covered him with it, which made me feel very caring and tender. I pushed back a lock of hair from his forehead just to enhance the feeling. Was it all right to let him sleep fully clothed, I wondered? Well, it would have to be because I wasn’t going to undress him. I certainly had no intention of rummaging around in his undergarments and taking covert looks and sneak previews.
Then feeling a bit, well, at loose ends, I suppose, I got ready for bed. I put on my pyjamas—I was pretty sure that Gus wasn’t a sexy negligée type of man, which was good because I didn’t have a sexy negligée. Gus was probably more likely to be frightened by a sexy negligée than turned on by it. Although, then again, you never know…
And I brushed my teeth. Of course I brushed my teeth. I brushed them so much my gums were raw. I knew that brushing my teeth was the single most important thing I had to do when sharing my bed with an unfamiliar man. Magazines and past experience could not stress just how important it was. It was a bit sad to think that a man who liked you enough to have sex with you in the night would make a break for the door if your breath was less than fragrant the following morning, but that, unfortunately, was the way things were. Being sad about it wouldn’t change it.
And instead of removing my makeup, I put on lots more. I wanted to look lovely in the morning when Gus woke up and I figured that my extra makeup would compensate for his sobriety, even it out, if you like. Then I climbed into bed beside him. He looked so cute asleep.
I lay staring into the darkness, thinking about everything that had happened that evening and, call it excitement or anticipation or disappointment or even relief, but I couldn’t sleep.
After a while I heard the front door and then I heard Karen and Charlotte and someone with a man’s voice talking and tea being made and murmured conversation and muffled laughs. It was a lot more peaceful than the previous night—no Sound of Music, no falling furniture, no raucous screeches of laughter.
After what seemed like hours more of lying in the dark I decided to get up again and see what was going on out in the apartment. I was feeling a bit left out of things. But that was nothing new. I inched out of bed carefully, not wanting to disturb Gus, and tiptoed out of my room and, as I backed out into the hall, quietly closing my bedroom door, I bumped into something big and dark that wasn’t usually positioned just outside my room.
I jumped a mile!
“Jesus!” I exclaimed.
“Lucy,” said a man’s voice. The thing put its hands on my shoulders.
“Daniel!” I sputtered, as I turned around. “What the hell are you doing? You scared the life out of me, you idiot!”
Instead of being apologetic, Daniel found this hilarious. He collapsed into convulsions.
“Hello, Lucy,” he wheezed, barely able to speak he was laughing so much. “What a lovely welcome you always give me. I thought you’d be halfway to Moscow by now.”
“What were you doing lurking in the dark outside my door?” I demanded.
Daniel leaned against the wall, still laughing. “The look on your face,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “I wish you could have seen it.”
I was shaken and annoyed and I didn’t think anything was funny, so I punched Daniel in the arm.
“Ouch,” he said, still laughing, holding his arm where I’d hit him, “you’re dangerous.”
Before I could hit him again, Karen arrived in the hall and suddenly it all became clear. She gave me a meaningful wink and said, “I invited Daniel back. Nothing to do with you, don’t worry.”
Hats off to Karen. I was impressed. Very impressed. It seemed as if she had made definite progress on her Daniel project.
“I was just about to leave, actually,” said Daniel. “But seeing as you’re up I think I’ll stay a bit longer.”
We trooped into the front room, me feeling a bit awkward about Daniel catching me in my blue pyjamas, where Charlotte was stretched out on the sofa, looking blissfully happy. The room bore signs of recent tea drinking.
“Lucy,” said Charlotte in delight. “Wonderful! You’re
up. Come over here and sit beside me.” She sat up and patted the place beside her on the sofa and I snuggled up next to her, modestly pulling my legs under me. I had chipped nail polish on my toes and a blister on my instep and I didn’t want Daniel to see.
“Any tea left?” I asked.
“Lots,” said Charlotte.
“I’ll get you a cup,” said Daniel
, making for the kitchen. He was back in a moment and poured tea into a mug and added milk and two spoons of sugar and stirred it and handed it to me.
“Thanks. You have your uses sometimes.”
He stood beside the sofa, looming over me.
“Oh, take off your coat,” I said in exasperation. “You look like an undertaker.”
“I like this coat.”
“And sit down. You’re blocking out the light.”
“Sorry.”
Daniel sat on the armchair nearest me and then Karen sat on the floor leaning her head on the arm-rest of his chair. Her eyes were shining and she looked all dreamy and romantic. I was, in all honesty, shocked.
She was behaving so out of character. Karen always played damn near impossible to get. She tied men into knots of uncertainty, turned many a well-balanced guy into Insecurity in a Suit. She was always a bit, I suppose, hard, and now she looked soft and pretty and sweet.
Well, well, well.
“I met a guy,” Charlotte announced.
“So did I,” I said gleefully.
So had Karen, but perhaps this wasn’t quite the right time for her to talk about it.
“We know,” said Charlotte. “Karen’s been listening at your door, trying to see if you were going at it with him.”
“You blabbermouthed—” said Karen in a fury.
“Oh shush,” I said. “Don’t fight. I want to hear all about Charlotte’s guy.”
“No, I want to hear all about yours,” said Charlotte.
“No, you first.”
“No, you.”
Karen affected a bored, grown-up face, but she only did that for Daniel’s benefit, to make him think that she didn’t do silly, girly things like indulge in gossip. But that was all right—we had all done the same when the guy we were crazy about was present. No one was more culpable than I was. It was just a ploy and as soon as she was sure that Daniel was interested, Karen could be herself again.
“Please, Lucy, you go first,” intervened Daniel.
Karen looked surprised and then she said, “Yes, come on Lucy. Stop being so coy.”