‘Damn!’ I snatched my elbows off the table and tried to twist it to peer at the damp patch – which, if you’ve ever tried it, is an exercise in futility, and doesn’t make you any less damp.
Colin ran a finger over the shiny spot on the table. ‘Only water,’ he decreed, gallantly scrubbing dry the rest of the tabletop with his own napkin. ‘Now, what do you want to eat?’
I’m ashamed to admit that what with one thing and another (fisherman’s pie and chicken tikka masala), we never made it back to the topic of Colin’s occupation. It wasn’t just that I’m easily distractible – although I am – or that my previous attempts had been about as successful as trying to batter down a door with a feather duster. There were so many other things to talk about, from silly one-liners to world affairs to books we’d both read or hadn’t read but thought the other person should read. We were on to coffee before I could remember lifting a fork to eat my fisherman’s pie.
But, in the end, it was the inherent mundanity of the scene that made my earlier wild suppositions seem so impossible. There was something so warm and cosy and incredibly commonplace about everything, from the battered wood tables to the soggy cardboard beer mats to the frayed green wool of Colin’s sweater, which looked as though it had been washed, well, by a boy. He didn’t look like England’s next answer to James Bond. He looked like what he was: a thirty-something English landowner with laugh lines from squinting at the sun, a falling-down old house, and a splash of curry on his sleeve.
It probably had been the word ‘sties’ that I had heard. It was a bit like playing a game of Mad Libs, trying to reconstruct a sentence with words missing. I tried it out in my head. Joan had said, ‘I wouldn’t want my boyfriend gurgle gurgle gurgle sties.’ That could easily translate to, ‘I wouldn’t want my boyfriend playing with pig sties.’ Even if Colin didn’t have literal pig sties, that could be her way of casting scorn on him for giving up his big city job to take up land management, much the same way my mother liked to refer to several holdover hippie cousins of mine as ‘living in trees,’ although as far as I could tell (having never visited them), none of them actually lived in a tree house. It all made a lot more sense than ‘gurgle gurgle gurgle spies.’
Besides, if he really was a spy, how would Joan and Sally know? It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you rushed to tell the neighbours. Unless the whole village was in on it! And that really would be too, too absurd, like something out of The Avengers.I drank my coffee and pushed the whole topic out of my mind.
By the time dinner was over, spies, even of the historical variety, were the farthest thing from my mind. Breathless with cold and laughter, I hopped up and down while Colin opened the doors of the Range Rover. It all felt very normal and very domestic, driving home together along twisty country lanes in the dark, singing along to silly eighties music on the radio as Colin deliberately got the words wrong to some, and I – not so deliberately – got the words wrong to others. Who knew that the words to that Erasure song were really ‘I’m your lover, not your rival’ rather than ‘I’m your lover, not your Bible’? I thought my version made much more sense and told him so.
After he had checked the answering machine and locked the door and kicked the front hall rug back into place (it bunched when you walked on it) and all those other little just-getting home things that are three-quarters instinctive, we cracked open a bottle of cheap Italian red – real Italian red, brought back from his trip to visit his mother over New Year’s – and settled down in a room I hadn’t seen until then to cuddle up on the couch and watch silly movies.
For the first time since the bedroom debacle, I really felt as though I were home. Unlike the rest of the house, the room wasn’t a decaying example of late Victorian arts and crafts movement; it featured a squashy, comfy couch with a plaid afghan tossed over one side. There were still dog hairs clinging to the side of the couch, relics, Colin admitted, of an elderly family dog who had gone to his reward that past October.
‘Right before I met you,’ he said, gazing soulfully at me over his wine.
I clinked my glass with his. ‘I hope you’re not considering me as a replacement.’
He picked a strand of red hair off his shoulder. ‘You are shedding,’ he said, handing it back to me.
‘Um, thanks. But don’t expect me to play dead.’
In one corner of the room, an open cabinet – IKEA or the equivalent, at a guess – housed a large collection of videos, in battered cardboard holders. From the looks of it, they were a composite selection. I assumed Fiorile, the Italian art film, was Colin’s mother. The Godfather movies were definitely Colin. And Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pretty Woman, and everything ever done by Errol Flynn were undoubtedly the property of his sister, Serena. I wondered if she imagined herself as Maid Marian defending herself against Prince John’s tribunal in that amazing courtroom scene. It’s so much easier to live the lives we’d like for ourselves when they’re printed on celluloid in two-hour-long packages.
I did get Colin to agree to the movie of my choice but, try as I might, I couldn’t quite get him to see the finer points of the Errol Flynn Robin Hood.
As Robin flung open the doors of the Great Hall of Nottingham Castle, Colin made a snorting noise. ‘If I came home with a whole deer slung over my shoulders like that, what would you say?’
I didn’t even have to think about it. ‘Get that unhygienic thing out of the house!’ I snuggled deeper into the couch cushions. ‘But when Errol Flynn does it, it’s different.’
‘He’s dead, you know,’ said Colin darkly.
‘He was also gay. But who cares? He still looks splendid in tights.’
Colin made a grumbling noise that came out sounding somewhat like, ‘Yes, if you like effeminate men.’
I supposed I should have been relieved that he didn’t. I knew far too many men in college who liked Madonna, Errol Flynn, and Platonic aesthetics (not necessarily in that order). Let’s just say that they all came tumbling out of the closet sometime around junior year.
‘I took fencing, too,’ he said, watching critically as Errol Flynn – looking particularly dishy in his green tights, I might add – cut Prince John’s men to ribbons at triple normal speed.
‘Have some popcorn,’ I said, shoving the bowl at him.
‘Can I throw it at the screen?’
‘It’s your carpet.’
‘Hmm,’ said Colin, and put it in his mouth instead, by which I gathered that he enjoyed vacuuming about as much as I do.
All in all, it was a perfectly lovely evening. We fell asleep in a happy haze of red wine and extra-connubial canoodling, curled up against the cold beneath Colin’s utilitarian blue duvet. It may have been ugly, but it did know its business. For the first time since I’d come to England, I wasn’t cold. Having a boy in the bed is better than having one’s own space heater.
I was dreaming quite happily of Colin striding into the Great Hall of Nottingham Castle with a large pig thrown over his shoulders – ‘Back to the sties with you!’ shouted Prince John, banging his fist on the trestle board with rage – when the Sheriff set off the castle alarm, the portcullis came crashing down, and I was jolted brutally and finally out of sleep.
Half strangling myself in the covers as I flailed into wakefulness, I realised blearily that it wasn’t the castle alarm system after all, but the double ring peculiar to English phones. Someone was phoning.
I would have loved to have dropped whoever it was down the nearest oubliette, but since I’d been so nastily jarred out of my castle fantasy, there was no oubliette to be had. Just the phone, which kept ringing and ringing, pausing after each double ring as though gathering its breath. It showed no signs of stopping.
Like most men, Colin could probably have slept through the charge of the Light Brigade as they thundered right over his pillow. Since I was on the side with the phone, I groped sleepily for the receiver, picked it up upside down, and had to reverse it, getting slightly tangled in the cord in the process.
‘Hello?’ I murmured sleepily, before I had time to wonder whether I should really be picking up Colin’s phone in the middle of the night. What if it was a family emergency? I wouldn’t want his mother to think I was a loose woman.
Instead of saying ‘hello’ back – or ‘cheers’ or whatever – the person on the other end of the phone muttered something in a foreign language and the connection clicked off. I couldn’t recognise the language, but it definitely wasn’t a Romance language or one of the Nordic ones. Whatever it was, it involved a lot of slurring sounds.
In other words, it was clearly a wrong number.
Oh, well. At least it wasn’t Colin’s mother. Or his sister.
‘All righty, then.’ I put the phone back in its cradle, tugged some quilt away from Colin (Ha! He did hog the blankets), pulled my pillow over my head, and prepared to go back to sleep.
The phone instantly started ringing again.
This time it was I who muttered something uncomplimentary.
‘Hello?’ I snapped, picking up the phone. Didn’t he realise it was three in the morning?
It must not have been three in the morning wherever he was. I could hear the sound of traffic, horns blaring, people chattering, taxi drivers cursing. I might not have been able to identify the language, but taxi drivers cursing sounds the same the world over. Trust me, it’s true.
But the person on the other end of the phone didn’t say a word. ‘Hello?’ I repeated. Click went the phone.
‘Well, same to you,’ I said, and thrust the receiver down. I missed the cradle, of course. Not that the crazy mis-dialler on the other end could hear it. Now I was awake, awake and annoyed. Colin, of course, was still fast asleep. To add insult to injury, in those crucial two minutes he had managed to wrap himself mummy-like in those few feet of blanket I had so painstakingly extracted from him.
I resisted the ignoble urge to poke him in the ribs. I couldn’t find his ribs, anyway. They were too thickly wrapped in my side of the blanket.
Grumbling to myself, I half climbed, half rolled out of the bed, sliding until my feet touched the floor. Screw seductive, I was putting on my flannelest flannel. Colin had lost the right to skimpy nightwear when he had stolen my half of the blanket.
I stomped barefoot across the prickly old carpet towards the chest of drawers, my eyes by now having adjusted enough to the darkness to at least make out the shape of large pieces of furniture.
As I was passing Colin’s side of the bed, his night table began to shriek at me.
After I jumped half out of my skin, I realised that I hadn’t set off some sort of outré girlfriend alarm, it was just his cell phone, which he had forgotten to switch to silent when he went to bed. Admittedly, we both had our minds on other things at the time.
Being a meat-and-potatoes sort of bloke, Colin had never bothered to install one of the music ring-tones; instead, it was just your basic ring, shrill and insistent. If Colin’s phone had been one of those flip-top kinds, I would never have looked. It would have been tantamount to opening his mail. But there it was, just lying there, screen side up, all lit up by the call. It was practically thrusting itself in my face. What was I supposed to do, shut my eyes?
On the glowing screen, the country code read ‘971.’ I’ve always been more than a bit baffled by international dialling, but I knew enough to know that that was not the UK. It wasn’t America, either, or anywhere in Europe. Where in the hell was 971? Someplace where people might still be out on the street and taxis might still be driving, perhaps?
The ringing stopped abruptly. A few moments later, the phone gave a double beep, like an electronic belch, to signify that a message had been left.
I didn’t check the message, of course. The fact that I didn’t have Colin’s voice mail access code was entirely immaterial. Good relationships, as we all know, are based on trust.
Blah, blah, blah.
Trust and, in my case, a hearty dose of curiosity.
It couldn’t hurt to just find out what the country code was. After all, I was wide awake now (I hurled an accusatory glance at the lump on the bed happily wrapped in all the blankets and sleeping away), and scrolling through directory numbers could have a soporific effect. It would be like counting sheep without the sheep.
Colin had told me there was Internet access in his study. I could look it up there. And while I was at it, I could check my email. Yes, that was what I was doing, checking my email. Nobody was saying anything about snooping. If I had been home and wide-awake in the middle of the night, of course I would go check email. It was immaterial that the email happened to be in Colin’s study.
If I had ever learnt how, I probably would have been whistling with my hands stuck into my nonexistent pockets.
Oh, this was just silly! There was nothing wrong with going on a quick email check.
Pulling my thick old flannel nightgown over my head, I tiptoed out of the bedroom, pulling the door softly shut behind me.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Charlotte!’ In the mad crush of the Queen’s Drawing Room, Lady Uppington manoeuvred her hoops expertly around broad skirt and a protruding sword to embrace Charlotte. ‘Your grandmother told me you were at Court.’
Charlotte smiled shyly at her best friend’s mother. ‘I’m in waiting on the queen,’ she said unnecessarily.
The egret feathers in Lady Uppington’s hair wagged in sympathy. ‘I was, too, you know, oh, ages and ages ago. Being a maid of honour was quite different in those days, not like it is now. We all lived in the palace, with that dreadful old dragon of a Mrs Schwellenberg hounding us, just sniffing for the slightest whiff of impropriety. That’s why it was such a scandal when – well, never mind that.’ Lady Uppington waved away whatever she had been about to say with a dramatic sweep of her lace-edged fan. ‘The queen has been kind to you?’
‘Tremendously,’ Charlotte was able to say with complete sincerity. ‘And the king has been all that is kind. He – this will sound very silly, but it was the kindest thing.’
‘Yes?’ said Lady Uppington encouragingly, as she had when Charlotte and Henrietta were very little and the girls would run to her to show off their drawings.
‘I had my battered old copy of Volume I of Evelina with me. His Majesty caught sight of it and asked me if I knew that Miss Burney had been an old friend of theirs. We agreed for a bit on what a wonderful writer she was, and I thought that was all. But then the next day, when I arrived at the palace, there was a package waiting for me, and in it was a splendidly bound set of the books, all done up in morocco leather with my name tooled in gold on the front. It’s so fine that I’m half afraid to read it.’
Lady Uppington tilted her head reminiscently. ‘That is very like the king. He was always good at the small gestures of munificence.’
Charlotte clasped her hands together over her fan. ‘He’s given me leave to use his library at the Queen’s House whenever I like. It’s splendid. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books.’
Lady Uppington’s lips twitched. ‘Books always have been the surest way to Their Majesties’ hearts. So you’re happy, then?’
‘Ye-es,’ said Charlotte, hesitating only a bit. And she was happy, really she was. The queen asked only that she stand behind her at Assemblies and read to her from time to time; the king had made her up a book in his own private bindery and promised she should have all three volumes of Cecelia, too; and the Princess Mary had promised to teach her how to paint on velvet. It would all be quite perfect – if only Robert were there.
She had imagined his return a hundred times since that night at Girdings. He would come galloping down the alley to Girdings. Swinging off his horse, he would dash up the steps to the entrance. ‘Where is Lady Charlotte?’ he would demand of the first footman to open the door. ‘Gone to London, Your Grace,’ the footman would reply, looking neither right nor left. ‘To London!’ Robert would cry, with visions of rakes, rogues, and seducers wreaking havoc in his breast. Flinging h
imself right back onto his horse, he would ride ventre à terre to the capital, where he would charge into the Queen’s House, flinging lackeys right and left, and sweep Charlotte up into his manly arms.
Of course, that was only one version. Sometimes, Charlotte permitted him to change his linen before riding to London. Nor did he always storm the Palace. Sometimes, he would be waiting for her in the sitting room of Loring House, where she was staying with Henrietta. ‘Someone to see you,’ Henrietta would say, with that impish Henrietta glint in her eye. She would shove Charlotte into the sitting room, slam the door behind her, and there he would be – ready to sweep her into his manly arms. Many of the details of the daydream might change, but the manly arms bit was always the same.
It worried her, from time to time, that there had been no word from him. While the grand imaginings of his racing to her side were all very well, she would have been just as happy with a prosaic note, even if all it said was, ‘Held up on business, miss you, back soon. R.’ But there had been no note.
Of course, if he had sent her anything, it had probably gone to Girdings, where, for all she knew, it might be gathering dust on her dressing table because Grandmama hadn’t seen fit to send it on. One never could tell with Grandmama. For all that Robert came with both Girdings and one of the most coveted titles in the kingdom, it would be very like her to take it into her head that it would be a mesalliance (‘mesalliance’ being one of Grandmama’s very favourite terms, applied frequently to Charlotte’s parents). No one had ever gone into details over who Robert’s late mother had been, but it had been made quite clear that she was of a sort who Would Not Be Received.
Even so, the lack of a message did make Charlotte just a little bit squirmy. Penelope’s voice (it was always Penelope’s voice) came at her at odd moments, saying things like, ‘If he really loved you, would he have gone off like that?’ and, ‘He knows how to use a quill, Charlotte. He would if he wanted to.’ That last one was bona fide Penelope, voiced over tea just the other morning.