‘Crap.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Sewage.’
‘Pardon?’ (I knew this of course, but pretending not to meant he would tell me and I wanted to see how he’d do it.)
He laughed. ‘You don’t have to, you know. Not with me.’
‘What?’
‘Do the hostess act.’
Another deflation. I’d be a flattened bag soon.
He went on, ‘I’m an engineer. I design equipment that controls the flow of fluids. I specialise in the management of sewage. So you can say that what I do is crap.’
I laughed, knowing he expected me to.
‘Hilarious, isn’t it.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just—’
‘Don’t apologise. Everybody finds it funny. But think of it this way. I’ll never be out of work because whatever happens, while there are people there’ll be crap, and someone has to get rid of it or we’ll end up drowning in doo-doo.’
I notched up my laughter, playing up to him.
‘Furthermore,’ he continued deadpan, ‘there’s so much crap to control all over the world that while you’re laughing at me, I’m laughing all the way to the bank, which means I have the last laugh, and as you know, he who laughs last laughs longest. Besides, I thought you of all people would understand.’
‘Me? Why me?’
‘Well, your boyfriend – I take it William Blacklin is your boyfriend – or is that was? – and as his family specialises in the disposal of the dead, which is pretty much the same line of business as mine, I was sure you’d appreciate the social and economic benefits, not to mention the ecological value of my work. Did you know, for example, that the amount of methane gas produced by humans and other animals breaking wind contributes significantly to global warming? The world is dying of flatulence. Think of what would happen if we left our untreated crap lying about all over the planet. The gaseous result would become so explosive that one day someone would light a match and the world would disappear in one enormous megafart.’
I was genuinely unable to speak by now. It was the way he said it, which writing cannot convey.
That’s one reason why I started to like him.
‘My turn with the questions,’ Mr Malcolm said when I’d recovered. ‘If you dislike hostessing so much, why do it? Not just because your dad wants you to, I’m sure.’
‘He bribes me,’ I said, copying his style as you do when wanting to please. ‘I need the money.’
‘Ah, filthy lucre.’
‘You’re the one laughing all the way to the bank, Mr Malcolm, not me.’
‘But can’t he offer you something better than this?’
‘I’ve tried helping out in the shop but it doesn’t work. We get confused about whether I’m his daughter or an employee.’
‘And he expects more of you than other employees because you’re his daughter, and because you’re his daughter he treats you worse than he treats the others.’
‘Something like that.’
‘It was ever thus when you mix family with business. So why don’t you find a proper part-time job?’
‘I’ve tried.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘No tales out of school.’
‘How loyal you are.’
‘I quite like loyalty.’
He gave me an approving look that hyped me even more.
‘My lips are sealed. Honest.’
‘I worked in a craft shop for a while,’ I said, wanting to perform for him now. ‘But you don’t want to hear about that. Too boring.’
‘Try me.’
‘Really? You’re not just making party conversation?’
‘Which is not conversation at all, but blether. And yes, I really do want to.’
I looked at him hard to make sure. And felt he really did. Which was flattering, of course. He was also very handsome. Another reason I started to like him.
‘Well, one of Dad’s clients is a potter. Very arty. All beard and sandals and big hairy hands. He offered me a summer job last year as his “sales assistant” – that’s what he called it – in the little gallery he’d made in the front room of his studio. The gallery was very minimalist. You know the sort of thing. White walls, a few pine-wood shelves for the pottery, a bog-oak table in the centre with a vase of sunflowers on it, at which I had to sit waiting to serve customers. I had to wrap the pottery and take the money. The trouble was there were very few customers. The place was outside town and down a farm track. You really had to be mega-keen to come there at all. Sometimes people would wander in, peer at the pots, peer at the prices on little cards beside the pots, usually gasp at them, and wander out again, trying not to glance at me.
‘I sat there for three weeks and sold about five pots. If I read to pass the time, Mister Pottery complained that seeing me reading would put customers off. When I retorted that it was his prices that put off the very few people who came in, he told me to mind my own business, his pots sold like hot cakes in London and New York. He wouldn’t let me write either – same reason. When I said I could stop reading or writing as soon as anyone came in, so why shouldn’t I read or write when no one was there, he said he was paying me to be a sales assistant and look after his pottery, not to read and write. In desperation I started knitting. Don’t ask me why. He didn’t mind me doing this because, he said, it was “a craft appropriate to the ambiance of the gallery”. All I’ll say is that I was very good at dropping stitches. In two weeks I knitted a scarf three metres long, the main feature of which was its many holes because of the dropped stitches. I called it a ventilator.
‘At the end of the fourth week I went to Mister Pottery, presented my ventilator to him and said, “I’m sorry but I’m resigning as of today, I mean right now. I’ve contracted RBS and can’t go on working for you.” “RBS?” he barked (he always barked when he spoke, like an angry dog). “What’s RBS?” “Repetitive Boredom Syndrome,” I said, and left.
‘The end.’
Mr Malcolm listened with rewarding attention and was shaking with laughter when I finished, which pleased me a lot. No man had ever listened to me that well, not even Dad in his best mood. (Will had of course, but he was still a boy.) And this was another reason why I started to like him.
By now most people had left. Dad came up to us, saying he was sorry to break in, but it was closing time, and he hoped Mr Malcolm, whom he called Eddie, had enjoyed himself.
‘Very much,’ Mr Malcolm said, ‘thanks to your daughter.’
‘She is quite something,’ Dad said, ‘though I say so myself.’
I was annoyed with him, and with myself for blushing.
We stood up. Dad went off to supervise the clearing up. I walked Mr Malcolm to the door, doing my hostessly duty, or pretending that was why.
‘Seems to me,’ he said, ‘you’re not cut out for the service industries. Have you tried office work?’
‘What kind of office work?’
‘Any good with a computer? Word processing?’
‘Not bad.’
‘I need someone for Saturdays. Letters, keeping my diary up to date, booking hotels and air flights. That kind of thing. Fairly routine. But no public to deal with. The person who helped me at weekends has had to leave and I need someone straightaway. Interested?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not trained or anything.’
‘I’ll teach you. You’ll soon pick it up. I’m sure you can do it standing on your head. We could have a trial period of, say, three Saturdays. See how we get on. Standard office rates of pay. What about it?’
‘I’ll let you know, if that’s all right.’
‘I’ll call you.’
We said goodnight.
I thought his offer was only party talk and didn’t expect to hear from him again.
5
The following weekend I visited Will at his tree college, quickly arranged using Dad’s bribe and his help booking hotel and travel. We’d been separated for ten weeks. It felt like a li
fetime. He wasn’t as keen as I’d have liked. He said there was a test he had to do that would keep him busy most of the time. I said I didn’t care if I only saw him at night, I just had to see him because I was missing him so much. I had to reconnect with his body and hear his voice while holding him and looking at him. We’d become strangers, I said, if we were apart for much longer. Was that what he wanted? Of course not, he said, but wouldn’t it be better to wait until we could be together and on our own all the time. No, I said, it wouldn’t, because a better time was like tomorrow, it never came. I needed to see him desperately.
So he agreed. But I was miffed that he tried to put me off. Why, I asked myself, wasn’t he as keen to see me as I was to see him? Didn’t people who were really in love always want to see each other whenever they could? Was there someone else? I tried to lecture myself: Love depends on trust; jealousy is an ugly weakness; Will was always reserved about his feelings, and he was always rather one-track minded about his trees and his music and his work. It wasn’t that he didn’t love me or that there was someone else, it was just him, the way he was. But I’ve never liked being lectured to, even when I’m the lecturer, it makes me bad-tempered. So I was already in an antsy mood when I set off for my lovers’ tryst.
Because my father sometimes took me with him on his travel agent business when Doris couldn’t look after me, I grew up used to staying in hotels. I liked hotels, the good ones at least, and still do. They are enclosed worlds, with their own rules and customs, and there’s always something interesting going on. I learned from Dad how to handle the staff, how to be friendly with them but distant at the same time, so that I would be well looked after and get my way. I liked the privacy of my own room and bathroom, with the little goodies and gadgets to play with, and I liked the public areas where it was safe to roam on my own and spy on the guests. Dad always insisted that I behave with grown-up good manners, and because of that and because I was a girl and pretty enough, there was usually one of the male staff who took a fancy to me, and would indulge my curiosity and take me behind the scenes, which the public never see and would sometimes be shocked by if they did. Until one of my admirers, a young bell boy, decided he’d try his luck and indulge one of his own desires, and was caught by an alert manager before he could do any damage, which taught me the hard lesson that it’s a mistake to be too trusting, especially of your own ability to charm. So by the time I visited Will, my first time away on my own, I was an expert on hotels.
We’d arranged that Will would meet me at the hotel straight after work, which wouldn’t finish until dark. I arrived about seven, he not till exactly nine. I know because by then, having showered and prepared myself down to the last hair and nail with obsessive care as if for the prince of the universe himself, I was watching the clock while pacing my room in a stew of expectation, anticipation, anxiety, irritation and longing, impatiently waiting for the moment when I opened the door and he came in. That moment of seeing your lover again afresh, the eyes, the face, the body, that moment of coming together again with the pined-for shape and weight pressed against you, that moment of renewing the familiar smell and touch, the sound of his voice and then at last the reconnection of lips and tongue and mouth, that moment is a prism that separates the colours of passion.
That moment that night Will smelt of new cut wood and rich sweat and fresh air, and all I could say between the crowds of kisses was his name. I felt him swell against me, and his hands pulling me to him. ‘Should shower,’ he said and I said, ‘No no, I want you just as you are now, Will, now.’
And it was like coming home after a long lonely unhappy journey. I always felt this, every time, no matter how short our separation. Another definition of love: being at home. But he was not quite the same. His body was tougher. His hands were harder and rough and there was grime under his torn fingernails. Even his voice had deepened. I couldn’t help wondering whether he thought I was different too. I felt I was the same boring teenage girl and was sure he would be disappointed.
Our love-making was different too. We’d changed from playing an open easy major key to a more wary minor key. There was nostalgia in it. We weren’t making love in the straightforward way we used to, when we thought only of the pleasure we were giving each other at that moment. Now we were making love as if remembering those earlier forgetful simpler times. Our bodies were asking questions but we were avoiding them. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked once when coming up for air. ‘Yes,’ Will said. ‘You?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. And we hid ourselves in each other again.
Lovers have a repertoire of love-making. When they meet after a long separation, they play all of it, every piece. It’s like a rehearsal to make sure they both still know the score. And perhaps to find out if either of them has played away from home and learned new music. Even a small change of fingering can tell whatever the other needs to know. Will and I were like that. And though we had changed the key, we played just as we had learned how to play together. There was nothing new. Which was reassuring, and yet somehow disappointing too.
When we had played all we knew and repeated some of our favourites and were satisfied, we fell asleep.
I was woken by the clattering noise of shouting men who were picking up the hotel’s rubbish with a rowdy truck. In the veiled light of dawn I saw Will sitting on the bed, gazing at me. Had he been there long? I felt he had. Our eyes met. But neither of us moved, not even to smile a greeting. Then, as if overcome by some unbearable thought or feeling, he stooped down and began to cover me with kisses, ravenous kisses, a little frightening because they were almost violent. He had never done this before. Nothing so urgent and animal. For the first time ever he wasn’t thinking about what he was doing, but just doing it. I tried to take his head and hold it to me, but he pushed my hands away and pinned them down with his own, and continued devouring me with kisses everywhere, his unshaven face rasping my skin. It was exciting to be wanted so much. When he had kissed me all over again and again he took hold of my head and urged it down, wanting my mouth between his legs, and said almost desperately, ‘Take me. Please take me.’ And I did, and he came very quickly and a lot, and I swallowed it, which I had never done before and would have been appalled, disgusted even to think of, and was surprised by him wanting it and my doing it, and was even more surprised by how much I liked it and how much, how very much I wanted him inside me like that.
Such discoveries about yourself are unsettling when they well up for the first time, unexpectedly, without preparation or instruction or knowing you want them. You seem to be a stranger to yourself, someone you can hardly recognise.
Afterwards we clung to each other like children, both of us trembling because of the confusing, unfamiliar mix of feelings which at the same time excited us.
‘I’m sorry,’ Will said.
‘Don’t be.’
‘I shouldn’t have.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘It just—’
‘Shush! You needed it. Me too, but I didn’t know. I never thought. But it was good. Please, Will. Amazing. I’m glad.’
‘Honest?’
‘I liked it. Always ask. Whenever.’
‘Why was it so good?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It felt like … A privilege.’
‘That’s it. Yes. A privilege.’
‘You doing it for me, I mean.’
‘For me too. You wanting me to do it.’
‘How weird!’
‘How strange!’
‘I wish I understood. I hate not understanding.’
‘I know. But you will. One day. When we’ve done it some more.’
‘I’m so ignorant.’
‘No, you’re not. Only in your mind. We both are. But our bodies know. We have to trust them, Will. Don’t you agree? Sometimes, anyway. I’m glad we did just now.’
I wish the rest of the weekend could have been like that.
6
Next morning Will left obscenely early. Tree peo
ple seem to live by the sun, dawn to dusk. I went back to sleep.
Dad had chosen well. The hotel was a converted mansion with its own extensive grounds in the country a few miles from Will’s college. I planned to get up late, luxuriate in the bathroom, have a lazy brunch, and spend the rest of the day reading and writing and exploring the grounds. They even had bicycles for guests to use, and as I prefer cycling to running, I thought, if the weather was right, I’d tour the local lanes to tone me up for my activities with Will that night.
I was still in bed when Will phoned. He’d talked to his tutor, who’d invited me to join him that afternoon to watch the students being tested for the skills they’d learned in rescue and first aid, a required part of their course. If I’d like that, Will would pick me up about one. Maybe I sensed it might not be a good thing to do, because I dithered. Not at all the enthusiastic visiting girlfriend. What did he think? I asked. Did he want me to come? Wouldn’t I be in the way? I didn’t have the right clothes for rough stuff. What would the others think of his girlfriend watching them being tested? Wouldn’t they be vexed or put off? It was up to me, Will said, but yes, he’d like me to be there, no I wouldn’t be in the way, the tutor was a good guy, he’d look after me, it didn’t matter about my clothes, he could borrow some gear for me because there was always plenty spare, no one would mind me watching, in fact it would make them all try harder. So I said yes.
I knew as soon as I arrived that I should have said no. Groups of people who live and work together become very close-knit, especially when they live away from other people and their work is physical and potentially dangerous. Customs grow, and habits, and private in-jokes and jargon. They get to know the details of each other’s everyday lives, their secrets and personal quirks, their strengths and weaknesses. Which binds them together almost as closely as the intimacy of two lovers who are so totally entwined that any guest feels shut out, however much the lovers try to make the visitor welcome. Which is what happened to me that day. The worst of it being that I felt excluded from Will himself.
The college was housed in an old country estate. All the students, about a hundred of them, were studying trees and their management. They were organised into small teams. Will’s seemed to do everything together, in their spare time as well as at work. There were six of them, four boys and two girls. I say boys, but two were in their twenties, having tried other occupations before deciding to be tree men. Will and the other boy, Sam, were straight from school. So were the girls. One of them, Emma, was tall and athletic and cheery and boy-tough. The other, Hannah, was slight and very clever and self-confident. She wanted to be a university expert on the history and ecology of trees and was taking a year out before beginning her studies so that she could learn the practical skills that would be useful to her. I saw straight away that she and Will got on.