by Lynne Shelby
‘Great,’ Alex said. ‘I’ll email them over to him before we go out.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Can you be ready to go into town by 9.00?’
My head was all over the place, but I gave myself a firm mental shake and managed to answer him coherently. ‘Alex! What are you insinuating? It’s only seven o’clock now. When have you ever known me to take two hours to get ready to leave the house?’
‘You’re right. That’s one of the things I like about living with you. You’ve never made me late for work by hogging the bathroom in the morning.’
I laughed. ‘I’ll see you at nine o’clock precisely.’
‘It’s a date.’
It isn’t a date, I thought, but I wish it was.
I went into my bedroom and surveyed myself critically in my full-length mirror. After a day spent negotiating the scrum of shoppers on Oxford Street, I wasn’t exactly looking my best. I only hoped that two hours was in fact enough time for me to transform myself into an elegant, classy, and at the same time highly desirable woman. The sort of woman that a ridiculously handsome French photographer would find irresistible.
Twenty-two
I lie on Alex’s bed in my spare room, naked, covered by a pink floral cotton sheet, my head resting on my arm, my fair hair fanned out behind me. Alex is standing beside me. He takes a photograph. Slowly, I push back the sheet so that he can see my breasts, and then my entire body. He lowers the camera, smiles, and strips off his clothes. Then he lies down beside me, and presses his toned, muscular, naked body against mine. Somewhere, a long way off, someone is shouting angrily in French …
I awoke to find myself in my own bed and alone. I knew I’d been dreaming, but I still half-expected to see Alex’s dark head lying next to mine on the pillow, and I felt very empty when I saw that he wasn’t there. The dream had seemed very real. Get over it, Anna, it was just a dream. I realised that I could still hear a male voice, although it was too far away for me to make out what was being said, and it soon stopped. Alex must have been speaking to someone on his phone.
I sat up, yawning, and stretching. The short black halter-neck dress that I’d worn the previous night was draped across the back of a chair. There had been an appreciative glint in Alex’s eyes when I’d appeared at nine o’clock wearing that dress, and his gaze had strayed to my legs before he’d told me that I looked great. I’d smiled and tossed my hair over my shoulder (Beth would have been proud of me), and told him that he looked great too. I almost said that the dark red colour of his shirt really suited him, but I thought that might be going a little too far.
‘So which club are we going to?’ I said.
‘I thought maybe somewhere a bit different?’
‘Different sounds good.’
‘The last time I worked with Lou, she was raving about a new salsa club that’s just opened round the back of Covent Garden.’
‘You never wrote to me that you can salsa.’
‘I can’t right now, but I fully intend to be an expert by the end of the night. So what do you think?’
‘What I think,’ I said, ‘is that the six weeks of ballroom dance lessons I took four years ago might be about to come in very useful.’
The salsa club was situated in one of those narrow pedestrian alleyways that run between Covent Garden’s main thoroughfares. We were welcomed at the entrance by a Hispanic man who told us, in heavily accented English, that the first hour of the night was tailored especially for beginners. Once we were inside, a rickety staircase took us down to a bar with a dance area, where couples of assorted ages were already moving to the music of guitars, piano, drums, and maracas. Alex and I hastened to join them. At the far end of the room, on a small round stage, a pair of professional salsa dancers demonstrated the basic steps, which we and the other newcomers to the club copied with varying degrees of success. My limited experience of the waltz and the foxtrot (ballroom dancing had been a very short-lived enthusiasm of mine) wasn’t much help when it came to mastering the fast-paced footwork of salsa, but Alex had no trouble picking up the sequence of movements, and once I relaxed and let him lead, neither did I. We danced until the musicians took a break, and then we sat at the bar, drinking caipirinhas (I made sure I sat at an angle which gave him a good view of my cleavage), until the music started up again. We returned to the dance floor, where we were now joined by the more advanced dancers, the women rotating their hips impossibly fast, the men swinging the women in the air and bending them over backwards so that their heads almost touched the ground. The dance floor was crowded now and it grew very hot, the whole club seeming to vibrate with the salsa beat. With my hand in Alex’s, spinning away from him, spinning towards him, his arm sliding around my waist, our bodies moving to the sensual rhythms, I felt as though my blood was pulsing in time with the music. I yearned for Alex to kiss me, and to see where that kiss might lead us. I willed him to feel the same. But although we danced until well past midnight, as soon as we’d left the dance floor, he let go of my hand. His conversation on the way home was all about how much he liked salsa, that he was glad I’d enjoyed it too, and we should go back to the club before we forgot the steps we’d learned tonight. The only kiss I’d had from him was a brush of his lips on either side of my face as he wished me bonne nuit. I’d gone to bed wondering if he’d ever see me as someone other than a girl mate with whom he could have a good night out, if there was any chance that we might become a couple.
Perhaps I should just rip his shirt off like that model he brought home, I thought. I took a moment to picture Alex shirtless. These fantasies had to stop before I made a fool of myself. I got out of bed and hung up my dress inside my wardrobe. As I did so, I caught sight of the pad of notepaper that habitually sat on my dressing table. On impulse, I retrieved a pen from my bag, pulled on a jumper over my pyjamas sat down and began to write:
Cher Alex,
You and I have been friends for what seems like for ever. But now that you are in London, my feelings towards you have changed. When I look at you, I don’t see a friend who happens to be male, I see a good-looking guy who makes my heart beat faster.
There was a moment yesterday when I felt sure that you were about to kiss me, but I was wrong. Maybe you’ve never thought of me as a girl you might want to kiss.
If you’re not attracted to me, if you can only see me as a friend who happens to be female, that’s OK. I’ll understand. Just forget I ever wrote you this letter, and I’ll forget it too. And I’ll still count myself very fortunate to have your friendship.
Yours,
Anna
I read the letter through. I’d made my feelings towards Alex very clear, I thought, but I was far from certain if my words were enough to ensure our friendship would remain intact if those feelings weren’t reciprocated. I read the letter again, but I was still undecided as to whether or not I should slide it under Alex’s door. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that it was way past the time most people had breakfast, even on a Sunday. Folding the letter in half and putting it in a drawer, I headed off to the kitchen, and whatever repast I could scavenge from my kitchen cupboards before I went to the supermarket or did an on-line shop.
Looking along the hall and seeing that Alex’s door was partly open, I went to check if he wanted to join me for breakfast. Not bothering to knock, as I would have if the door had been closed, I walked straight into his room, but then I froze. Alex was sitting slumped at his desk in front of his laptop, his head in his hands. Pieces of his mobile phone lay scattered across the carpet.
‘Alex?’ I said.
Slowly he raised his head, and swung around in his chair to face me. I’d never seen him look so pale and drawn.
‘Anna,’ he said, lifting a hand as though to fend me off. ‘Anna, would you go – go away. Laissez-moi –’
‘Oh. OK.’ I felt as though I’d been slapped in the face, but I turned on my heel and took a step towards the door.
He said, ‘No, wait. Don’t go. I’m sorry.’
&nb
sp; I turned back to him.
‘I’ve done something stupid,’ he said.
‘Well, yes, you have.’ I picked up what was left of his phone, and put the various parts, the battery and the sim card, on his desk. ‘How did you come to drop it?’
‘I didn’t drop it, I threw it against the wall.’
‘That was very stupid.’
‘I wasn’t talking about the phone.’
‘What have you done? What’s wrong?’
He raked his hand through his hair. ‘I emailed that shot of you with the rose to my agent this morning. I was going through photos on my laptop, to see if there was anything else worth sending him, and I accidently clicked on an old file that contained pictures of Cécile.’
He angled his laptop so I could see the screen. It was filled by the monochrome image of a slender young woman wearing a black, long-sleeved top that hung loosely off one shoulder, and black leggings, sitting by a window, holding a glass of wine, one foot drawn up onto her chair. Her dark hair was shoulder length, with a heavy fringe that fell into her large, dark kohl-lined eyes, and her mouth was slightly open, the tip of her tongue just protruding from her lips. She wasn’t classically beautiful, but she was very striking. If she looked at a guy the way she was looking at the camera in that photograph, I imagined he’d be unlikely to look away.
‘I have so many photos of her –’ Alex brought up a slide show of images of Cécile, posed portraits interspersed with shots of her laughing, lying on the grass in what looked like a park, walking by a river that I presumed must be the Seine. He said, ‘I saw these photos, and I remembered when and where I’d taken each one, and how happy we’d been. And then, I called her. I’d got this idea in my head that it wasn’t too late for us, that if only I could talk to her, I could win her back … All that happened was that we ended up yelling at each other.’
I thought of the shouting that had dragged me out of my realistic and very pleasurable dream.
Alex said, ‘I told her that I still loved her, and I begged – I actually begged – her not to throw away what we’d had together, but she just laughed. She told me that she’d never loved me, that for months before we broke up, everything I did or said had annoyed her, and now she despised me. I said some things to her that I never thought I’d say to any woman …’ His voice trailed off.
I looked again at the photo of Cécile on Alex’s laptop, and thought, she looks lovely, no denying it, but she is not a nice girl. To put it mildly.
Alex said, ‘I never told you how Cécile broke up with me.’
‘Tell me now, if you want.’ I sat down on his bed.
‘She left me a voicemail: “I cannot keep it from you any longer. I’ve met someone, a man who I want to be with, and who wants to be with me.”’
‘Oh, Alex, that’s such a horrible way to end a relationship.’ At least I’d told Nick to his face.
‘I was on a shoot, so I’d switched off my phone. When I picked up her message after work, I didn’t try to call her back, but went straight round to her place and let myself in. She was there and so was René – the director of a play she’d appeared in a few months back – the guy she’s with now. When I walked in on them, he was massaging her bare feet. They looked so intimate.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘When I saw him touching her – I’m not proud of myself – I took a swing at him.’
‘You hit him!’
‘Not very hard,’ Alex said.
‘Did he hit you back?’
‘No, he ran and locked himself in the bathroom. And then Cécile started screaming at me to get out, and I kept asking her why she’d done this awful thing to me, how could she treat me this way, all the mindless clichés that everyone says when a partner cheats on them, and then, suddenly, I couldn’t bear to be in the same room as her. I left her still screeching, phoned a mate, and he took me to a bar and got me very drunk. A few days later, another friend of mine, an actor who worked with Cécile, told me that since the summer she’d been staying over at René’s apartment whenever I was away from Paris. I’d been feeling very down, but knowing that the woman I loved had been having sex with another man made me feel worse.’
I said, ‘Even knowing all that, you’re still in love with her? You still want her back?’
There was a long silence, and then Alex said. ‘Yes, I love her. Even knowing that she’s going to marry René, and there’s nothing I can do about it, I still love her. I thought I was getting over her, I’ve tried to move on, but I can’t seem to get her out of my head.’
She lied to him, she cheated on him for months, he moved to another country to get away from her – and still he said he loved her? I was at a loss to understand how a detestable creature like Cécile could inspire such depths of passion. Despite the pain he was in now, there was a part of me that envied Alex. I should have liked to have known what it was to love – and to be loved – with such intense, all-consuming emotion.
I said, ‘If you want to get over her, then phoning her and pleading with her to come back to you isn’t going to help you do that.’
‘I know. I won’t call her again. Mon Dieu, she made me so angry. At least I only trashed my phone. It would have been worse if I’d taken my rage out on my laptop.’
‘Or one of your cameras.’
Alex managed a wan smile. ‘I don’t think even Cécile could make me mad enough to destroy a camera.’ He reached for his keyboard. ‘I should never have looked at these photos. I’m going to delete the file. And then I’m going to delete every other photo of her that I have.’
‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’ I suspected that if he deleted all his photos of Cécile, he’d probably come to regret it, but I wasn’t about to suggest that he keep them. ‘I’m about to have breakfast – can I get you anything?’
‘No thanks,’ he said, ‘I’ve already eaten.’ He added, ‘This afternoon, I’ll have to go and buy myself a new mobile, but later, shall we go for a drink at the Red Lion?’
‘I think we should,’ I said, ‘It is our local, after all.’
Alex turned his attention to his computer screen. I went and stood behind him, putting my hands on his shoulders.
‘Try not to be sad,’ I said.
‘I’m not – most of the time – when I don’t think about Cécile. It was just seeing the photos unexpectedly, and then hearing her voice.’
I leant down and kissed the side of his face. ‘I’ll see you later, mon ami.’
I went back to my bedroom, tore the letter I’d written to him into small pieces, and threw it in the bin.
Twenty-three
I sat at my desk at Nova Graphics, my hands poised over my keyboard. At the other end of the studio, Alfie, his earphones clamped to his head, was singing tunelessly to a song that only he could hear. Another of the creatives told him to shut up, and when that had no effect, threw a scrunched-up piece of paper at him. Alfie took off his earphones, and looked around with a cheerful, lop-sided grin on his face. Failing to locate his assailant, he shrugged, replaced his earphones, and went back to work.
I completed the email I’d been writing before I’d been distracted by Alfie’s singing, and pressed send. My mind drifted to Alex, and the letter I’d written to him and then torn up. I thought, Alex has never shown any sign of being attracted to me, and if I tell him how I feel, I could ruin our friendship. I live in London, and come the summer, he’ll be living in Paris, so even if we did get together, there’s no future in it. And he’s still in love with Cécile. Having a casual hook-up with a guy who’s in love with another woman – really not my thing. Thank goodness I didn’t give him that letter.
I glanced at my watch. It was already mid-morning, and I’d got very little work done. I should start on my phone calls. Or I could fetch myself a coffee. I got up and went over to the drinks machine. Alfie, now minus his earphones, came and joined me.
‘You’re in a good mood today,’ I said.
‘Yes, I am,’ Alfie said. ‘Izzy and I finished t
he artwork for the prom at the weekend. I’ve just emailed it to you.’
‘That’s great, Alfie. Thank you. I’ll take a look as soon as I’m back at my desk.’ I picked up the plastic cup containing my morning cappuccino.
‘I’m happy with the artwork,’ Alfie said, ‘and I think your sister and her friends are going to like what Izzy and I have come up with – but that’s not why I’m in such a good mood.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I asked Izzy if she’d come out with me, and she said yes.’
‘Oh, I’m so pleased for you.’
‘Yeah. Actually, I wanted to ask your advice. As you’re a girl.’
I smiled. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I’ve booked us a table at one of those cinemas where you can have a meal while you watch the film. We’re seeing a rom com. Do you think that’s a good choice for a first date?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said.
‘I prefer a good horror film myself, but I thought … well, girls like all that romantic stuff.’
‘Izzy certainly does.’ He was taking Izzy to see a rom com? He must be really keen on her.Leaving Alfie by the coffee machine, I went back to my computer, clicked on the email he’d sent me, and downloaded the attached images. I looked at the posters and flyers with their background colours of pink, mauve, and pale blue, the black silhouettes of couples dancing, glitter balls and limos, and I thought, Vicky’s Committee are going to love these.
Izzy got up from her work station and came and leant against the front of my desk. ‘Alfie said he’d sent you the artwork for the prom – have you had a chance to look at it?’
‘I’m looking at it right now.’
‘What do you think of it?’
‘It’s great, Izzy. You and Alfie have done a brilliant job.’
‘It was Alfie who did most of it. I just made a few suggestions.’
‘Well, it’s terrific. Thank you so much.’
‘I saw you talking to Alfie just now – did he say anything about me?’
‘He mentioned something about you and him going out.’
