‘– and not what you’re expected to say. And when you speak, even when you’re just being funny, there’s some heat in it, some passion. You’re passionate. I like that. Very much.’
He paused. I glanced at him.
The doubt that vulnerability unleashes.
‘And,’ he said, smiling, ‘you do something with your eyes when you’re being very serious, a sort of sideways look through your glasses, squinting a bit, very sharp, checking the other person out. Like you’ve just looked at me.’
I faced him squarely. ‘And it turns you on.’
‘Very sexy.’
‘Then I’ll ration you. No more than two a day. Wouldn’t want to give you heart failure.’
‘Non non, mademoiselle. There’s much more risk of you losing your head.’
‘A heart for a head. I’d come off best.’
‘You think so?’
‘In my opinion. But honestly now, no blague. You weren’t plotting to have me when you offered me the job?’
‘Not at all, dear heart. I needed somebody to help out in the office on Saturdays, you were available, I thought you’d be fun, but no, I wasn’t plotting to have you.’
‘Not consciously maybe. But subconsciously?’
‘Perhaps. Who knows what brews in the deepest caverns of his mind? How can you know till it becomes conscious?’
‘But it did, didn’t it? Confess. When?’
‘The day we surveyed Conduit Fifty-three.’
Conduit Fifty-three was a sewer. The kind that’s a tunnel big enough to walk in – well, big enough for me; Edward had to keep his head down. I spent half the day plodging through crap.
I’d been working six weeks for him by then, it was two days before my seventeenth birthday and a couple of weeks before the start of the Christmas holidays, when Will would be home. The job was easy, letter-writing and filing, making phone calls, running errands, sending out invoices – that kind of routine stuff. Edward worked hard, we chatted during lunch, which we always ate in the office – sandwiches or salad that Edward sent me out to buy, too boring on their own so I got into the habit of picking out something extra. He enjoyed that – Cordelia’s Treat he called it. He was easy to work for and had done and said nothing in the slightest inappropriate. He was good-looking. I’d thought about him, the way you do in teenage. I’d wondered what he was like in bed, but nothing serious, no fantasies. Anyway, he was married and he and his wife Valerie (who hadn’t put in an appearance) had two children, David, aged nine, and Linda, aged seven. What attracted me most was his self-assurance, his confidence, what he, being a Francophile and rather proud of his fluency in French, would have called his savoir-faire.
The day before Conduit Fifty-three Edward rang to say he wouldn’t be in the office tomorrow, there was an urgent problem he had to do something about and needed my help with a difficult client. He knew from Dad’s party how good I was at ‘disarming the machismo’ of men like that, and he wondered if I’d go with him and keep the client happy while he, Edward, sized up the problem? It would take all day, a couple of hours each way by car, a posh lunch with the client, and – here he paused – a walk in a sewer – ‘kitted up in protective gear, of course, and breathing apparatus if you want it’. Would I go?
Why did I say yes almost without hesitation? One reason: that fatal feminine instinct, the desire to please the man, the boss, the alpha male. He’d asked me to do this shitty job because he needed me and must have thought I could do it. But wanting to please Edward wasn’t the only reason. What I was aware of was that I wanted to test myself. Could I walk in a sewer and not puke and not let myself down? Julie had once said, when we were discussing things we didn’t like doing and I’d said how I hated going to the dentist’s, that she never minded having a tooth drilled when she was upset because it was such a different kind of pain from emotional pain that it gave her some welcome relief. Maybe plodging through crap and not puking while keeping a grotty man happy and helping Edward, apart from the change of a day away from home and being paid for it, would provide a welcome relief from my yearning for Will, and if I performed well and learned something (sewers, after all, being vital to our daily welfare, we ought to know how they work) I’d be pleased with myself, which would boost my damaged self-esteem and make me feel better anyway.
Which it did. The more so because the walk in the sewer was both worse and more interesting than I’d expected. Even though kitted out in all-over protective gear, I still felt my body was being sullied. Out of pride and against Edward’s advice I’d refused to wear breathing apparatus because neither he nor the client did (anything you can do I can do) and at first I regretted it, almost throwing up on my first intake of the foul air. But I made myself endure by force of will and by breathing, as Edward told me to do, through my mouth, not my nose, and surprisingly I got used to the smell quite quickly. But the rats we encountered were a different matter. They made my flesh crawl, and on their first appearance trotting along as if they owned the place and without any regard for us mere humans I made an instinctive grab at Edward’s arm.
At that moment, had Mr Client1 not been with us I might have caved in, turned tail and scarpered from the free-range rodentry. But with him yomping along behind me I couldn’t let myself or Edward down and he saw me clutch at Edward’s arm. ‘Hang onto me, sweetie,’ he crooned. ‘I’ll save you from the beasties.’ There was nothing I wanted less than to hang on to this sample of male arrogance, and being addressed as ‘sweetie’ put the resolve I needed into my backbone. Edward gave me a complicit look, I recovered my composure and we plodded on.
The incident also seemed to spark in me a bout of naughtiness. This took the form of extracting the urine from Mr Client without his catching on. One example comes to mind. To understand the joke – if it can be so honoured – I must tell you that I’d noticed floating in the sewerine stream a surprising number of used condoms, so many in fact that I began to wonder whether the entire population of the city above our heads was bonking every minute of the day, pausing only to catch their breath and dispose of their protective sheaths after each ejaculation. Neither of the men remarked on this, having, I suppose, seen it all before. Familiarity causes blindness. And so I poked at one or two of the passing prophylactics with my walking stick (necessary equipment on expeditions through sewage to help avoid slipping and falling into the gungy flow) and sang out as I did so in my most naïve girly tones, ‘Look at all these balloons. What a lot of parties people must be having today.’
Edward, walking in front of me, clutched at himself, as if suddenly afflicted with a cramp in the stomach. Mr Client, splashing along behind me, let out a hearty guffaw.
‘What,’ I continued, ‘can the occasion be? Is there a festival of some kind and we are missing the fun?’
‘If there is,’ boomed out Mr Client, and he did possess what is sometimes called a stentorian voice, otherwise known as a loud mouth, ‘if there is, dear girl, it must be the festival of the golden rivets.’
Very droll!
‘Really?’ said I, flashing him a wide-eyed rearward glance and flicking the beam from the light attached to my helmet in his eyes, temporarily mazing him so that he stumbled and almost fell. ‘Really? I’ve never heard of that.’
‘You must allow me,’ he boomed, having recovered his footing, unfortunately without taking a header into the swill, ‘to add to your knowledge of the world by showing you my own golden rivet and demonstrating its use.’
‘How kind you are,’ I said, with coy innocence.
‘It would be my pleasure, I assure you, sweetheart.’
‘But I think,’ I added in dulcet tones, ‘that Edward said we must get back home as soon as we’ve finished the survey. What a pity!’
‘Another time, sweetie. Any time, in fact.’
And he patted me on the bum.
You turd! I thought. You should be extinct. You should be flushed down the pan with the other stinking detritus.
‘So it wa
s in the sewer that you took a fancy to me as well?’ I said to Edward.
‘Not in the sewer, no. And not as well, if you mean the way the client fancied you.’
‘Where, then, and how?’
‘On the way home. We stopped at the view point. Remember?’
‘I remember.’
‘We’d had a rotten time. You were in a foul mood, saying nothing.’
‘I’d hated it. Not the sewer, which was bad enough, but that man. And I wasn’t pleased with you for using me like that.’
‘We needed a breather to clear the stench from our noses. As soon as we stopped you got out of the car and walked up the road.’
‘I wanted to get away from you. Wanted to be on my own.’
‘I know. I knew. There was a gate into the field.’
‘I climbed onto it and sat on the top bar.’
‘You tucked your feet under the bar below to stop yourself falling off. I remember that very clearly, your feet in their blue shoes tucked under the bar.’
‘It was a gorgeous view and a lovely evening. Mist filled the bottom of the valley.’
‘Cold. A frost.’
‘I liked that. I felt the cold was scouring me clean inside and out. I’d had a headache when I got out of the car. It cleared up in a few minutes.’
‘And that was when it happened.’
‘Why then?’
‘You’d been so terrific, so unfazed by the sewer, so stalwart. You’d never flinched.’
‘The rats?’
‘Everybody flinches at the rats the first time. Apart from the rats, you took it all—’
‘Like a man!’
‘That’s not what I was going to say.’
‘But it’s what you meant.’
‘Have it your own way. I just mean you were terrific.’
‘Especially with that man.’
‘Especially with him, yes. And I admired you for it and was so grateful and did start to feel guilty.’
‘Good. I’m glad to hear it.’
‘When we stopped I was going to thank you for what you’d done and tell you how much I admired the way you’d handled yourself, and kept your cool with the client, and been so – well – so mature.’
‘For one so young.’
‘Yes, okay, for one so young. But you were out of the car and off up the road before I could open my mouth. And then you climbed onto the gate and sat there, gazing at the view, and there was just something about the look of you, the shape of you, the posture of your body, the set of your head, the way you spread your arms to hold onto the gate, and your feet in the blue shoes tucked under the bar that – well – just made me want you.’
‘But not like that man wanted me.’
‘No, not like that, not for raw sex.’
‘What then? I want to know precisely.’
‘Hard to explain. Something – tender. Wanting you because of what you’d been that day. What you were in yourself. What you are. It came over me suddenly, at that moment as I watched you. Just swept over me. Wanting you. You know what I mean? Has it ever happened to you?’
It had, I knew. With Will. I knew that moment when you look at someone and whatever you’ve thought or felt about them before suddenly comes together, as if magnetised, into one combined overwhelming sensation. As Edward told me about the moment when he ‘saw’ me and wanted me, I remembered the moment I ‘saw’ Will the day we practised the Schumann Romance and the sun shone through the window and spotlighted him playing his oboe, totally absorbed in the music, and I was overwhelmed and wanted him not just for sex but for himself, because of what he was. A moment I treasured and remembered vividly (still treasure and remember vividly). I didn’t think of it then but think of it now as the moment when you see into someone’s soul and recognise what they are and what they mean to you.
But I didn’t say this to Edward. I didn’t want to bring Will into the conversation. He meant too much to me and the thought that I’d lost him still hurt too much.
Instead, I said, ‘But you didn’t try anything. Not then.’
‘I couldn’t allow myself to.’
‘Because?’
‘I was married, you were only sixteen—’
‘Seventeen. Two days before.’
‘And I was thirty-nine.’
‘Twenty-two degrees of separation.’
‘Old enough to be your father.’
‘You still are.’
‘I know.’
‘But?’
‘Yes. But!’
‘When did the but butt in?’
‘You know the answer to that.’
‘But I want you to tell me.’
‘You’re playing with me, you tease! You want me to rehearse it for your solipsistic pleasure.’
‘Yes. You know how egocentric teenagers are. So go on, indulge me. Or I shall refuse you any more of my feminine favours. Right now,’ I said, getting off the bed and reaching for my clothes.
‘Pax, pax! Come back. I give in.’
‘Go on, then,’ I said, returning.
‘The day after your seventeenth birthday.’
9
Will’s present for my seventeenth birthday was a Nine Men’s Morris board. Remember the ancient game, which he drew on the seat in the arboretum and made us play that day at the beginning of our friendship? He had made the board out of a piece of wood he’d cut from a tree when being taught ‘tree surgery’. The ‘men’ were pegs made from shaved twigs and coloured according to their team: red for one, green for the other. They slotted into holes drilled into the board.
Dad gave me a bottle of expensive scent of the heady kind that draws attention to anyone who wears it along with an expensive box of make-up, both of which I guessed he’d bought at a duty free shop at an airport on one of his foreign trips, and a cheque attached to a picture postcard of Rome, where he’d been recently, on which he’d written, ‘For books or clothes or whatever. I never know what to give you these days.’
Doris gave me two piano scores, the complete Sonatas by Bartók and the Nocturnes by John Field. Her card said, ‘I think you’re ready for these,’ and had a picture of forget-me-nots on it.
What Julie gave me I’ll tell you later.
Edward sent me a necklace made of white gold, framing lozenges of thinly cut stones in many different subtle colours. It seemed chunky and yet was delicate, primitive and yet elegant. The moment I put it on and every time I wore it I felt – what? – I want to say charmed, but that’s too banal – I mean I felt I was charmed and could cast spells and do magic – no, that’s silly – and yet not silly – I felt sexy in a powerful way – but that’s over-blown – certainly I felt grown up and confident. That’s it, I suppose, the most important thing: it made me feel confident and grown-up. And it came over me then, the first time I put it on, that that was how I always felt when I was with Edward: confident and grown up and, yes, sexy. And I enjoyed the feeling. I wanted to feel like that. He never treated me like a teenager or an inferior or as anything but an equal.
The necklace came with a note which said, ‘Please accept this for your birthday and as a thank-you for your work in the office and especially for your help last Saturday with a denizen of the underworld. (If it isn’t to your taste, I’ll change it for something you prefer.)’
As I took it out of its box and held it up for them to see, Dad and Doris exchanged raised eyebrows.
‘Isn’t that a bit over the top?’ Dad said.
‘Why?’ I said, but I knew what he was insinuating. ‘I think it’s very generous.’
‘Your father means,’ Doris said, oozing patience, ‘it’s a tad personal. An expensive necklace isn’t exactly what you’d expect an employer to give a part-timer who’s only worked for him for a few weeks.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said, determined to be contrary. ‘If he wants to. He can afford it. He’s only showing his appreciation. What’s wrong with that?’
‘A young female member of staff,’ Dad
said.
‘So?’ I said, the tetch-quotient and temperature rising between us.
‘It’s not appropriate,’ Dad said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of giving such a thing to any of my staff, not even to Pat, and she’s worked for me for ten years.’
‘Well,’ said I, riding my high horse now, ‘at least he thought about it and didn’t fob me off with a boring cheque and a couple of prepacked items hawked out of a dump-bin at a duty-free shop on his way through an airport.’
‘That,’ said Doris ablaze, ‘is quite enough of that!’
‘I haven’t got started yet,’ said I, fuelling the flames. ‘And I don’t see what it’s got to do with you anyway, Aunty.’
Dad made for the drinks cupboard.
‘Now you listen to me, young lady,’ Doris said, squaring up. ‘I don’t know what’s come over you lately. We’ve always got on well, you and me. You were always a pleasure to be with. I was proud of you. But you’ve changed. I know you didn’t like your father and me getting married. And I know you’re upset about Will going away to college. But none of that explains the way you’ve been treating us recently. The rude things you’ve said and your arrogant behaviour. I’m fed up of excusing it as teenage growing pains. I’ve had enough with growing pains, thank you. You’re seventeen now, you’ve had an easy life, we do all we can for you, you’ve nothing whatever to complain about. But you’re always criticising, always looking down your nose at us. Not that we see much of you these days. You’re never here. You’re always closeted with your precious Ms Martin. And now you’ve added Edward Malcolm to your clique. So what is it? Aren’t we good enough for you any more? Well, I don’t know about your father, but I’m not going to tolerate another minute of your disgusting behaviour. I’m not going to stand around and listen to you slagging us off, even if it is your birthday. So until you’re ready to behave like a civilised human being I’d rather not hear another word from you. Good night!’
And off she went, slamming the door behind her and stomping up the stairs.
I was mortified. Poleaxed. Lordy, lordy, what on earth was she talking about? Whatever had I done? I’d only defended myself against insinuations, against interference with my friends, my life. I’d hardly said anything rude. Had I?