Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  About the most exciting thing to happen at Eve’s wedding – that is, if she ever had one – would be if her dad got out his guitar and played Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’. That would mean her dad, wild and crazy Jim, had had one too many and no one would wonder that he made a living as a pharmacist.

  Eve wasn’t short of money, but this was London and a good wedding was live theatre you were paid to watch with a lovely dinner on the side and a cheque in your pocket at completion. She was single and sharing a cosy, two-bedroom apartment in Notting Hill with a viola player. One pizza cost the same as a meal for four in Sydney, soap was expensive, rent despicable. The occasional weddings came in handy, and the money was so good it was hard to refuse.

  In November, just after Eve’s thirty-second birthday, when she had a small gathering of six friends for dinner at a South Indian restaurant in Brick Lane, she lugged Percy in the back seat of her old Ford Focus and set off up the M1 to play at a wedding at an estate near Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire. She loved that Sherwood Forest existed and imagined Robin Hood and Maid Marian jumping out from the canopy of trees and stealing her new mobile phone and Dime bar from the dash. She drove up from London with Elise, one of the quartet’s violinists. It was a beautiful wedding. The bride wore a simple bias-cut off-white wedding dress and carried a loose bunch of cream tulips. The groom eschewed black tie and wore a fitted suit and left the top button of his shirt undone. The air of tightness and formality and impending doom was missing from this wedding; there were even women wearing dresses that Eve had seen in the windows of some high-street shops. She spotted at least two.

  During a break after the speeches and before the distribution of cupcakes, Eve hurried back from the bathroom. Her long, plump, black taffeta skirt scraped along the stone floor. A small window carved into the side of the stone wall captured a thread of sunlight and then played with it, conjuring a fan of washed-out colour across Eve’s feet. She stopped to look down at the particles of dust playing in the shallow pool of violet and blue and crimson she was standing in. A totally disparate thought then entered her head: she needed to reapply some lipstick. She moved closer to the window; the light was now floating around her chest, and she looked in her clutch for her lipstick. As she clawed and scrambled, and tried hard to not look like a woman clawing and scrambling, her bracelet became caught on the leather bag, flicked off her wrist and flew across the hall.

  A wedding guest was coming towards her, absorbed in his own world of straightening out his cuffs, when his foot came down hard on her white-gold and emerald strand, a recent gift from her parents to mark, after years of study in London and Europe and freelancing for a handful of orchestras in England, her selection to play on staff in the orchestra at the Royal Opera. Hillary and Jim had driven to Sydney, walked into a jeweller’s they had read about in a magazine and spent more money on this one item, other than their car or house or the children’s education, than they had on anything else.

  Eve was not an emerald kind of girl, but that wasn’t the point. It was an unusually sentimental gift from her parents. When she had graduated from the Australian Conservatorium of Music, her present had been a Tontine pillow.

  As the man’s shoe flattened the delicate bracelet, Eve let out a gasp, inhaling the stream of sunlight and floating dust. She dropped her handbag, its contents spreading across the floor.

  ‘Oh, god, I’m sorry,’ the man said, jumping off Eve’s broken bracelet. He bent down and placed the twisted wreck between his fingers. ‘Shit, look what I’ve done.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Eve replied, crouching down in the middle of the walkway, desperately trying to gather the contents of her handbag. Her full skirt circled around her like black quicksand, her lithe body shooting out from it at an odd diagonal angle, strands of her hair missed in the up-do entangled in the bow of her halter-neck top. Purse, mobile, some receipts that should have been thrown away two years ago, a pen, sample bottle of perfume, three tampons, the lipstick. ‘It kind of flew over there,’ Eve said, willing the other guests to walk straight past.

  ‘Well, it must be valuable if it can fly.’ The handsome gentleman in black tie was now standing above her. He offered Eve his right hand and pulled her up off the floor. Her black skirt dropped below her, making one quick, stern sound, and, despite herself, Eve felt giddy.

  ‘I’m Richard Baker,’ the man said.

  ‘Eve Hardy.’

  ‘You play wonderfully, Eve.’

  ‘Thank you. It’s a lovely wedding.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ People kept walking by, and Richard nodded hello at various bodies coming towards them. ‘Do you do a lot of these?’ he asked.

  ‘Every now and then, not that many, just a few a year … It’s a lovely wedding,’ Eve said again, needing to go. ‘Nice to meet you.’ She turned around and walked up the hall, lifting and taking her taffeta skirt with her.

  When she arrived back at the quartet, Eve realised she had walked away from the man without her bracelet. She spotted him on a table in the middle of the room as the happy couple cut their pyramid of pink and blue iced cupcakes, but by the time she was able to finish up and go and ask him for the remnants of her bracelet he was gone. She called the bride the next morning and left a message on her voicemail asking her for the contact details of a man called Richard. Eve explained her missing bracelet, in as few words as possible so as not to ramble, just in case the bride thought she was being forward and the ‘help’ was trying to ask a handsome guest on a date. On Monday afternoon, when there was no reply from the bride, Eve asked Elise what she should do.

  ‘She’s probably on her honeymoon. She’ll call. Did he give you any clues where he worked?’

  ‘No, we hardly spoke. He looked successful, though.’

  ‘They all look successful in black tie.’

  ‘I meant he’s not a muso. He does something.’

  Eve always remembered that moment when they met. Sometimes at night, she went over it in her head just before she fell to sleep. She replayed it like a film, word for word, image by image, and drifted off with the feeling of being pulled to her feet by a man in a cobblestone manor hall.

  The next day, Eve stopped worrying about her bracelet. After a long and quite frankly fractious rehearsal for Rigoletto, Eve received a package at work with Richard’s business card. Richard had fixed her emerald bracelet. It looked like new. Richard Baker, CEO, Hades Technology Investment, 314 Berwick Street, Soho, W1F 8ST.

  Eve called Mr Baker on her mobile straight away. ‘Thank you. Most unnecessary, but very much appreciated. Can I please pay you for it?’ Eve asked formally. It seemed overly generous of him. Eve didn’t know what to think. Was it a thoughtful gesture from someone who didn’t have to worry about money, or was it too much?

  ‘Yes, you can. You can let me take you to dinner.’

  ‘I should be the one taking you to dinner,’ Eve replied.

  ‘I’ve already booked, so you’re my guest. I would love to go out to dinner with you, Eve Hardy.’

  Eve was taken back. He had played a completely open hand. She could have thwarted his plans, rejected his suggestion, found his confidence in already booking off-putting, but she didn’t. Richard took her address, gave her a time and date, politely informed her of the venue and said he looked forward to seeing her next Friday.

  Standing in the staff cafeteria at work, looking at various huddles in the midst of their break – some coming back from having a cigarette, some pushing around hot chips on their plates – one or two checking messages, somehow, it was done. She was going to dinner with Richard Baker.

  Eve had never heard of Succo in Knightsbridge. She asked around about what she should wear.

  ‘Eve, that’s serious,’ said Elise. ‘That’s the place to go. Didn’t you see Prince Harry coming out of there in the papers the other week?’

  Eve wasn’t like those women at the weddings. She never expected to be. When Eve was fourteen or fifteen and crying over her looks – she
was different, odd, taller, more angular, her nose was not small enough, her eyes not big enough, her skin not clear enough – her mother told her she would never be pretty.

  ‘You don’t want to be pretty, Evie. Pretty doesn’t last. But you are beautiful, and when you get older and all the pretty girls’ looks have faded, you will be growing more beautiful. Your kind of beauty takes time to grow into. It will come.’

  All Eve heard was that she wasn’t pretty. All she wanted to be was pretty like Rebecca Thornton.

  Now, spending too much time working out what to wear to Succo, Eve wondered why Richard had asked her. She studied her face in the mirror. Some women give up early on their dream of beauty. Some women clutch it to their sagging breast along with caviar creams, quarterly Botox jabs, weightless potions and a fuchsia pink lipstick they should have binned twenty years ago. Eve was a woman in the middle, who kept the dream close but convinced herself she was the one who controlled it. That is, until she caught her reflection in the window at the supermarket or saw the flicker in a stranger’s gaze, which moved from her face to the pretty twenty-two-year-old woman sitting beside her talking about how she’d heard the bacteria in these complimentary bowls of nuts could give you gastro.

  Maybe, she thought boldly, moving closer to the mirror, she was getting better with age. Or were other things becoming important, such as her talent? Was her talent making her beautiful? She felt beautiful when she played. She felt strong wrapping her arms around her cello, making it talk, making those sounds, sounds that no one could make but her. When she sat on the chair sometimes, with her legs apart, fiercely gripping the sides of her cello, she could feel the deep throb of the music enter her. It would move between the parted lips of her vagina and she would get wet and continue to play, sometimes with the whole orchestra pushing down on her. If she was home, she would check the blinds on the windows were pulled tight before she sat on her chair, and she would play whatever piece gripped her bones that day. She would take off her underpants and place them on the dining-room table. She would push up her skirt, unwind the metal stand, dig it into the carpet and clutch her cello between her thighs on her practice chair. She would play and play, head swaying, lips getting wet, thighs tightening, eyes searching for the music until the bow would drop from her hands. As the last bar played in her head, she would stick two fingers into her vagina and let her body fold around the cello, left hand tight around its neck, head bowed. And then she would come all over her practice chair. She was careful never to call her cello Percy after she shut the blinds.

  Eve had dated a handful of musicians and theatre workers, one lawyer and a very nice boy back in Australia who ran his own coffee business. In the days before Succo, she replayed Richard walking down that hallway, handsome and lean, straightening his cuffs, bending before her in black tie. She bought a new Chloé dress; she took her time in the bathroom poking and prodding her hair and face, probably applying too much eyeliner. She thought about her shoes, her handbag, her earrings. She looked at herself in the mirror. She wished she had a different nose and different chin.

  Richard commented on her hard work as soon as she opened her door.

  ‘You look stunning.’ There was no false coolness, no doubt, just surety. Eve wasn’t used to his certainty. It was a relief.

  He gave a quick peck on the cheek, admired her apartment, laughed at the quirky painting of a dog called Noreen wearing a multicoloured muu-muu, puffing on a long-stemmed cigarette, and they left.

  It didn’t take Richard long to introduce Eve as his girlfriend. Week six, at a cocktail party on a cold winter’s evening where Eve was being assessed by women who had an innate ability to concentrate on the small things: that she was wearing too much lip gloss, that the fabric on her dress didn’t cut on the bias well because there was five per cent too much synthetic in it, that she picked up her canapé and bit into it instead of swallowing the tiny morsel in one delicate go.

  ‘And this is my girlfriend, Eve Hardy.’

  Eve tried to make her smile turn into a ‘nice to meet you’ smile. He said girlfriend. She was the girlfriend of a man who knew what he wanted. A man who never settled for good enough.

  Two months later, in March, when her mum and dad and little brother came to visit Eve in London, she had to admit she was hoping for a chemist emergency and her parents would have to delay their trip – just to give her some more time to be with Richard. They were beginning to amass a handful of couple routines: breakfast at the same cafe on Sunday morning, walks early Monday to start off the week, calling each other after lunch every day to see what they were doing. She came first in Richard’s world, he made that very clear, and Eve still felt his eyes on her in a room, still blushed when he told her how beautiful she was as they locked the door behind them on the way to the movies, still felt her heart quicken when she saw his number come up on her phone.

  Her life as one half of a couple went on hold when her parents and brother arrived for their two-week holiday. They all crammed into her flat. Eve hadn’t stayed in it much for the past three months, and she had forgotten how many things didn’t work, didn’t fit, were cracking and peeling, and how she had to issue her guests with special instructions for taking showers, using the microwave, turning on the TV.

  ‘If you open the cupboard under the sink, you have to jiggle the handle to make it lock again. Otherwise, the door flaps open and the next person in the bathroom will bang their knees on it.’

  ‘When you turn on the hot water, it takes ages, but when it comes it will burn if you don’t mix it with the cold.’

  ‘Don’t use the back-left hotplate. It doesn’t work.’

  Eve’s flatmate was very understanding about the Australian family taking over the small two-bedroom apartment with their bags piled in corners and toothbrushes on the bathroom vanity and wet shirts strewn across radiators to dry.

  The holiday plan was simple. After a few days in London, where the schedule allowed Eve’s family to see her perform at work and meet Richard for dinner, Eve would take two weeks off to travel with them. She had spent the month beforehand organising a driving holiday through England around the Cotswolds and Lake District, to Oxford and Scotland, finishing off with a few nights in Paris. Nothing was far away here.

  Despite never having been thought of as the organised one in the family, Eve had a schedule, a list of attractions and good restaurants, and interesting facts on hand for the holiday. She thought she might have to fight her father to be the one in charge, but he was happy to be led. Everyone was happy to be led.

  By day four on the road, after she chose where they would stop for lunch again, the three of them irritated her. Whatever town they were in, restaurant, area, they just kept smiling wanly at her. All they did was follow her, wait for her, listen intently to her instructions in hotel lobbies with their luggage handles safely wrapped around ankles just in case they were jumped on and robbed by a marauding band of gypsies. She wanted to tell them to come up with one idea themselves, to stop talking so loudly, so nasally, when they were out in public. Instead, she would get up in the morning and recite the day’s itinerary to her family over milky tea and toast. She was the leader, and her family trailed behind her, walking into rooms behind her, standing in lines behind her, picking up an apple from a stand after she picked one up, copying her every move. The entitlement of followers was shameless.

  ‘Eve, you should have said something if it worried you so much,’ Richard said, scrolling down his emails on the dining-room table in his apartment the Sunday morning after they left.

  Eve was kicking herself for leaving half her make-up at her place. Again. She would have to make do with the dregs of make-up she had in her handbag. ‘You don’t get it. You just met them for dinner and went on with your life.’

  ‘It was a family holiday,’ Richard said, clicking on something. ‘They don’t want to hang out with the new boyfriend on a family holiday. Time for some family bonding. They had a good time, didn’t they?
That was what it was all about. Having a good time.’

  ‘I’ve told you, they were very impressed, thought you were Mr Bloody Perfect, couldn’t wait to get home and tell their friends they had been in a three-star Michelin restaurant in London.’ Eve paused and looked over Richard’s shoulder before adding, ‘Maybe your own family gets on your nerves too easily. I’m too hard on them. I suppose everyone’s too hard on their own family.’

  ‘Eve, some people don’t know what they want and they don’t know how to ask for it. That’s their issue. You can’t hold everyone up to the same standards as you have.’

  ‘It’s not about standards, it’s just about family getting on your nerves. That’s all.’

  Did Richard like her mum and dad? She assumed he did. She liked his parents. Well, she was always on her best behaviour around them. She had met them twice. They definitely had standards. When his father, Edward, showed her his large art collection, she pretended she had some kind of understanding of painting. People assumed if she could play a musical instrument so well, she could appraise art. Eve oohed and aahed and used a few words she had read somewhere in a Sunday magazine in relation to art. She didn’t have a clue what she was looking at, but Eve kept walking through the house saying admiring words to the walls as Edward nodded with his hands behind his back.

  The night Richard went out to dinner with her family, everyone chatted merrily, her dad told too many twenty-year-old stories about near-fatal mix-ups caused by doctors’ illegible handwriting on prescriptions, but otherwise all went well.

  ‘I’m just saying, why should I be responsible for them? Why couldn’t they organise themselves? Why did they have to look to me all the time? It was exhausting.’

  ‘Oh, Eve. What do you want me to say? That’s what happens when you grow up. You realise some people are just like that.’