Sword Stone Table

by Sword Stone Table- Old Legends, New Voices (retail) (epub)

  “It was like I wasn’t there,” Elaine says. Her head aches. “At the cinema, at the pub. It was all inside jokes and chucking money around and…and touching. They’re very touchy, all three of them.”

  “Shit,” Anisha says. “Well, you’ve got to kiss a few frogs, as my mum would say. On to the next, yeah?”

  “Er. Well.” Elaine drains her glass and avoids Anisha’s eyes. “I’ve got another date with him this weekend.”

  * * *

  —

  It becomes as regular as the visits to the coffee shop and the dreams. At least once a week, and sometimes twice, Elaine and Lance go out. And every single date is utterly miserable.

  Oh, he’s chivalrous. He holds doors, pulls out chairs, carries an umbrella over Elaine’s head when it rains like she’s on a red carpet and he’s her bodyguard. Once they came to a puddle at a curb too wide for her to step over and he literally carried her across like he was forging a river, and for a moment Elaine felt like all her blood had turned to champagne.

  But on the dates themselves he mostly seems like he’d rather be anywhere else. The only one he seemed to enjoy was the first, with Arthur and Gwen along. Without them, he faffs about on his phone or stares out the window or picks listlessly at his food but insists he’s enjoying it.

  When she talks, he nods in the right places but offers nothing in return. She has no idea if he’s actually heard a single word.

  When he talks, it’s almost always about Arthur. Arthur is so funny. Arthur is so generous. Arthur is good enough at football to play for a professional league. Arthur has rescued three stray dogs in the last year alone. Arthur has made Lance feel totally at home in a foreign country ever since they met at university.

  He never mentions Gwen.

  There’s always a point, usually during the main course or the second drink, when Elaine swears she’s done with this. At best, being alone with Lance is like being alone with herself, but sadder. At worst, it starts to feel like he actively hates her. And why keep seeing someone who hates her, no matter what Tennyson said in his stupid poem?

  But then he’ll walk her home and kiss her on the doorstep before he goes, one strong hand in her hair and the other on her waist. If there’s a feeling of obligation to it that she can’t quite imagine away, well, it’s no competition to the softness of his lips or the glitter of the streetlamp in his dark eyes. If he seems unhappy, well, the story they’re acting out is a tragedy. That isn’t his fault.

  It’s still a beautiful story.

  * * *

  —

  She dreams that she’s showing Lance the Holy Grail. She wakes weeping. She can’t remember what it looked like.

  * * *

  —

  Lance invites her to Arthur’s birthday party as his plus-one. It’s going to be a big do, apparently, the kind that actually involves plus-ones. Arthur’s got loads of friends, a whole crew of lads who follows him around, and it’s all Elaine can do not to guess their names out loud.

  Gwen is in charge, so it’s at a really posh restaurant, which isn’t surprising. They’re all really posh, much more so than Elaine. Gwen in particular has always come off like she’s about to tell a story about her and Kate Middleton at finishing school. Elaine doesn’t want to overcompensate so she wears a cotton sundress and finds herself in a sea of people in cocktail attire. She never seems to get it right with Lance.

  They’ve rented out the private party room of the restaurant, and there’s an open bar, so everyone’s already drunk by the time she and Lance get there. Lance steers her through the crowd with a gentle hand on her back that makes her feel both protected and thrillingly off-balance all at once. She loves the shape of her name in his accent as he introduces her to a handful of people—Percy, Gareth, Tristan. They’re all about eight feet tall and model handsome, because of course they are.

  (There are almost no other women. Lance points out Arthur’s sister from a distance but doesn’t introduce her, and from her time on Wikipedia, Elaine knows enough to be grateful.)

  Lance steps away to get Elaine a drink and strands her with someone named Kay who she ends up having to listen to for twenty minutes whilst he attempts to explain what sounds like a very complicated familial relationship to Arthur. Mildly desperate, Elaine makes an excuse and goes looking for Lance. She finds him having a whispered argument with Gwen by the loos.

  “…not the time for this, Lance!” Gwen snaps.

  “It is never the time for this,” Lance says bitterly. “You are always putting it off. Putting me off.”

  “You say that like you have any better answers than I do,” Gwen says. “You want me to be the one to choose, but that’s just because you can’t do it yourself.”

  “He’s my best friend!”

  “Oh, yes, just mates, that’s what you are.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” Lance asks. “That is all he wants to be.”

  Gwen snorts.

  “And it doesn’t change you and me. How I feel about—”

  Suddenly Elaine can’t bear to hear another word. “Lance!” she says, and they both jump. “Oh, hi, Gwen. Lance, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Will you come with me to get a drink?”

  Lance and Gwen exchange glances. They are both very red. “Uh, yes, okay,” Lance says, and lets her tow him away.

  They weave their way through the room to the bar. Lance gives Elaine a bemused look when she pretty much chugs her vodka tonic before they can even step away.

  “I’m really thirsty,” she says, a little sheepishly. The truth is she’s too sober for everything happening in this room tonight. She turns to the bartender. “Another?”

  They’re halfway through the third course—there are seven—when some loud Australian bloke at the other end of the table named Mel or something like that mutters a comment about Gwen. Elaine doesn’t catch all of it, but the phrase “frigid bitch by day, utter slag by night” is clearly audible.

  As is the phrase “with his own best friend.”

  Lance knocks a drink into Elaine’s lap as he surges out of his chair to demand that Mel repeat himself.

  “Lance, don’t,” Gwen says, reaching for his arm. Elaine’s hands are too full of napkin to do the same on his other side.

  Arthur spreads his hands placatingly. “Hey, we’re all friends here, right? It’s fine.”

  “He said something about Gwen,” Lance says, jaw tight, eyes flashing. No one is sober.

  “Don’t,” Gwen repeats.

  “If I did, it’s not your business,” Mel says, and then smirks. “Or is it?”

  Lance hurls himself at Mel. Gwen screams and Elaine squawks and it takes Arthur and three of his enormous friends to pull Lance and Mel apart. Gareth and Percy haul Mel off to the gents’ to calm down and deal with his bloody nose. Arthur and Lance and Gwen are all shouting at one another.

  “What were you thinking?” Arthur demands. “This is my birthday! Why are you fighting my guests?”

  “Why aren’t you?” Lance shouts back. “You heard what he said about her!”

  “Then I will deal with it, not you!”

  “Excuse me, I’m right here,” Gwen snaps. “I can handle a drunken knob just fine, thanks.”

  “Good, because apparently Arthur is going to let you,” Lance says.

  “Don’t shout at Arthur, this isn’t his fault!”

  “Well, whose fault is it? Who invited bloody Mel?”

  “Stop shouting, both of you!”

  Elaine flees to the bar.

  Ten minutes later Lance and Arthur are still hollering at each other, Lance so drunk and angry he’s slipping into French. Gwen has disappeared. Elaine feels absolutely wretched and decides that calling an Uber might be the better part of valor tonight, but she needs a wee first.

  She finds Gwen in the ladies�
��, crying into her hands. Elaine freezes in the doorway and contemplates bolting.

  Then she sighs, pulls a handful of tissues from the box on the counter, and offers them to Gwen. “All right?” she asks.

  Gwen looks up at her blearily. She even cries beautifully when she’s drunk, naturally. “Thanks,” she says, and takes the tissues.

  Elaine uses a stall for its appointed purpose, washes her hands, and then pauses again. The loo is posh enough to have a couch in it, which is where Gwen is sat, still sobbing. Elaine sighs again, internally this time, and then sits down next to Gwen.

  “I just wanted to give Arthur a nice birthday,” Gwen says, as if picking up a conversation they hadn’t been having. They’re both drunk enough to forget they aren’t really friends. “I love him so much.”

  “I know,” Elaine says, and she means it. That’s the part that makes it so fucked-up. It’s painfully obvious that Gwen and Lance love Arthur desperately. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have a problem.

  “Lance shouldn’t have hit Mel,” Gwen says.

  “You were never going to stop him,” Elaine says.

  “I know. Fucking Lance. I swear he thinks he’s a knight on a white charger.”

  “Black,” Elaine says. Lance would never ride a white horse.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Gwen swipes at her face. “Arthur doesn’t even get angry, is the thing, not really. He just looks like…like when your dog realizes you’ve taken it to the vet and it can’t believe you’ve betrayed it like that.” She blows her nose—finally, an ugly sound. “He’s just so fucking good. How is anyone supposed to be with someone so good?”

  “Is that why you and Lance—” Elaine starts to say before realizing there’s no way she can get away with finishing that sentence.

  Gwen seems to realize who she’s talking to for the first time. Her face softens. “He really likes you, you know,” she says. “Lance.”

  “Yeah?” Elaine asks, feeling tears pricking at her own eyes. “It doesn’t feel like it most of the time.”

  Gwen’s face softens even more, and Elaine realizes with a feeling of sudden resentment that she likes Gwen. It’s infuriating. She should at least get to feel indignantly self-righteous about her.

  “Lance is…not always good about showing things,” Gwen says. “He holds a lot back. And he…I mean…well, there’s Arthur.”

  “Yeah.” I’m not going to cry, Elaine thinks. I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry.

  No, she’s not going to cry, she realizes suddenly. She’s going to throw up. She’s had too much to drink.

  Gwen holds her hair back.

  * * *

  —

  Lance and Arthur don’t speak for a week after the party. Lance calls Elaine daily and then is all but silent on the other end of the line, moody and uncommunicative. Elaine answers anyway.

  She’s drinking more than she ever used to before. She gets sick three times in one week. Her hair is brittle, and her eyes have permanent circles under them.

  “I don’t think this guy is good for you,” Anisha says one Saturday morning. They were supposed to go shopping, but Elaine’s too hungover to move from the sofa. “I love you, but you’re a fucking wreck.”

  “It’s not him,” Elaine mumbles into a cushion. “It’s this whole thing with Arthur and Gwen.”

  “I don’t think you can say ‘it’s not him’ when he’s fucking his best friend’s girlfriend. His best friend who he’s maybe probably in love with. Like, that really sounds like it is him.”

  “None of them want to hurt each other,” Elaine says. She’s so tired.

  “I don’t give a shit if they hurt each other,” Anisha says. “They’re hurting you.”

  “They can’t help it.”

  “If you start talking about how they’re mythological figures again I’m going to dump my coffee on your head.”

  Elaine forces herself to roll onto her back so she can look at Anisha, even though her head pounds at the movement. “I’m still having the dreams.”

  “You’re having weird dreams because you’re fucking drunk all the time.”

  But Elaine isn’t listening. “It’s the greatest story we have,” she says. “It’s lasted over a thousand years. And I get to be part of it.”

  “Yeah, the sad forgotten part who dies. Isn’t that what you said?”

  Elaine closes her eyes. She can see her boat, filled with flowers. She can see the pennants of Camelot fluttering in the wind. She can see the tournaments, the jousting, the glory of it all. Somewhere, just out of the corner of her eye, somewhere burned into the back of her mind, she’s even seen the Holy Grail. She’s not a religious person, never has been, but that’s special.

  She’d paint it, if she’d ever learnt to paint.

  “Does it matter?” she asks. “Wouldn’t it be better to be a small part of such a big story than not to be in it at all?”

  “You’re not a story! You’re a person!” Anisha says, throwing up her hands.

  Elaine rolls over again. “I’m going to take a nap.”

  * * *

  —

  Lance and Arthur make up. Lance gets more cheerful, and so do Arthur and Gwen, when Elaine sees them.

  Elaine gets worse.

  She’s started picking at her nails; it’s a rare day that her cuticles don’t bleed. She messes up orders at work. She feels on the verge of crying all the time.

  She dreams that she’s holding a baby, pink and sleepy, the sweetest baby in the world.

  “My little Galahad,” she whispers to him, touching his soft cheek with a finger and trying not to feel guilty. Lance will have to love her now, won’t he?

  When she’s awake, she knows he will never love her. He’s given his heart to not just one but two people already. He doesn’t have room for a third.

  But does it matter if Sir Lancelot can’t love her, as long as she gets to love Sir Lancelot?

  * * *

  —

  It’s Elaine’s birthday now. At a pub, because she’s not posh, and besides, she wanted to keep it small: just Anisha and Rosina, a couple of friends from uni, Lance. Somehow, inevitably, Arthur and Gwen got invited, too. She can’t find it in her heart to begrudge their presence, not really. She likes them, is the miserable truth.

  Her friends are all clearly captivated by Arthur, because of course they are. They’re British. It’s practically the law.

  Lance and Gwen disappear somewhere between the third and fourth round of drinks. Elaine waits for them to come back, sick and distracted. They don’t.

  Arthur is oblivious, blissfully trusting, and Elaine suddenly wants to slap him. Instead she goes looking for Lance and Gwen outside.

  They’re not hard to find, standing just outside the pub door whilst Lance smokes a cigarette. They’re standing close, but they’re not doing anything. They’re never doing anything.

  Still, the guilty way they jump apart is enough.

  “It’s my birthday,” Elaine says.

  “We were just talking,” Lance says. He won’t meet her eyes.

  “Okay,” Elaine says, but it isn’t. It’s never been okay. It’s never going to be okay, because Lance loves Gwen and Lance loves Arthur but Lance doesn’t love her and never, ever will.

  “I’m going home,” she says.

  “Elaine, no, please, let’s go back inside,” Lance says.

  “We could go somewhere else,” Gwen suggests. “Do you want cake? We could try to find—”

  “I want to go home,” she says, cutting Gwen off. “By myself.”

  And she walks away—from Lance, from Gwen, from the whole bloody mess of it.

  It’s a cold and misty night, not the kind at all pleasant to stand outside and smoke in unless you have an ulterior motive
, and they’re not really at all close to Elaine’s flat. Lance, chivalrous as he is, follows her for a couple of blocks.

  “At least let me call a cab for you,” he says. “It is too far to walk.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Elaine.” There’s still something in the way he says her name that makes her knees want to go weak. She doesn’t let them. “Elaine, I am sorry.”

  She stops at that and turns to face him. “What are you sorry for?”

  It’s a question that could have a hundred answers, and for a moment she thinks he’ll actually give her one. His lips part, and she waits for something, anything honest to fall from them.

  But he doesn’t say anything. Just looks at her with dark, helpless eyes, waiting for her to save him.

  “Good night, Lance,” she says, and starts walking again. This time he doesn’t follow her.

  It’s a cold night for this time of year, and the mist quickly turns to rain. Headlights and streetlamps scatter blurry neon blossoms across the damp pavement, shimmering in the growing puddles. She walks and walks as her hair straggles into her eyes and her party shoes rub blisters into her heels, and she doesn’t care. This was always how the story ended: Elaine, losing. Elaine, alone. Elaine, in the water, surrounded by flowers.

  She is Elaine of Astolat. Sir Lancelot rode into battle wearing her token, and she died of unrequited love for him.

  She is Elaine of Corbenic. She tricked Sir Lancelot into fathering Sir Galahad on her and saved him from madness by bringing him to the Holy Grail. And he still left her in the end.

  She is a minor figure in a grand tragedy, and her fate was written centuries before she was born. It doesn’t end happily, not for any of them, and there’s nothing she can do about it.

  And then she stops suddenly, heedless of the rain soaking through her clothes and puddling in her shoes.

  “No,” she says. “Fuck that.”

  Maybe she was Elaine of Astolat, or Corbenic, or Shalott—or any of the others, Garlot or Listenoise or whoever.