by S. E. Lynes
‘To you.’ He meets her eye and chinks his glass lightly against hers.
To you – who even says that? No one her age, that’s for sure. Her stomach heats. She suppresses a giggle. At the hit of the wine on her tongue, she closes her eyes. She doesn’t usually drink wine, or much at all really, but this is no cheap plonk.
‘It’s delicious,’ she says, licking her lips.
‘Yes, it’s not bad. I’ve been waiting to open this one for a long time.’
They leave that there.
He pulls a small plastic bag from his trouser pocket. In it are sweets – or pills, coloured pills. Oh my God, they are pills. He places the bag on the coffee table but says nothing. A year from now, when she thinks back to this evening, she will remember how nonchalantly he did this, as if it were perfectly normal to bring out a stash minutes after meeting someone. As it is, in the moment, she presses her lips tight and pulls her eyes away, back to his.
‘I can’t explain why,’ he is saying, throwing out his hands as he talks. ‘Call it superstition if you like, but you … this … us coming here like this … What I mean is, the way we just … took off like that.’ He laughs, shakes his head. ‘Look at me, I’m a wreck.’
She frowns, as if to give this her serious consideration when in reality she can’t think of a single thing to reply. He is not a superstitious man, she thinks. And he is definitely not a wreck. But isn’t this what she has wanted, to find a man who knows what he’s doing? And deeper still, there is the hope that this is more than sophistication, that he really has identified in her something special, something unique. She was worried that she’d let herself be led away too soon. Now she thinks it was the right move, that he finds her interesting as a result: daring, as free-spirited as a heroine in a black-and-white French film – Jeanne Moreau or Catherine Deneuve.
He runs his fingers through his hair. She makes herself hold his gaze, ignores the heat it triggers on her neck. He has crinkles at the edges of his eyes yet not one hint of grey. There’s no getting around it: he’s gorgeous.
‘I know you’re here in my house,’ he says. ‘I can see you. You’re right in front of me and you are … you are … I’m not objectifying you in any way but you’re really beautiful, and maybe that’s why I can’t believe you’ve come. I knew you would, from the moment you let me take that bloody awful wine from you, but at the same time I don’t know why and maybe that’s why I can’t believe it. Knowledge and disbelief, all bound up together. It’s … it’s … well, it’s worth celebrating.’
Her scalp tingles. Being permitted over the threshold of his private realm – and God knows, this house is like a kingdom – feels like a privilege reserved only for those whose behaviour is exemplary, like the time she was invited to the head teacher’s office to be congratulated on a Shakespeare essay she wrote in sixth form.
‘I feel the same.’ It seems like the right thing to say.
‘You do?’ He appears to sigh with relief. ‘Well, that’s … that’s everything, isn’t it?’
She wants him to take her face in his hands. She wants him to bring her lips to his right now, but at the same time she wants to delay the moment. Her chest hurts.
But Peter doesn’t kiss her. Instead, he stands up and heads towards the record player. A moment later and he’s put a match to the kindling, slid a disc whispering from its sleeve and, with the precision of a surgeon, lowered the needle to the black vinyl. And now they are listening to what sounds like old jazz.
‘Miles Davis,’ he says in answer to her unspoken question, crouching by the fire and reaching for the tongs. He checks his watch and, carefully, places a log on the burning pile.
‘We had an open fire when I was little,’ she says.
‘And where was that?’
‘Yorkshire. I grew up on a farm. There was no mantelpiece; it was just, like, a square cut out of the wall.’
‘Yorkshire,’ he says. ‘I thought I detected a slight accent.’
She giggles. ‘That’s nowt. Should ’ear us when I go ’ome.’
‘Very good.’ He laughs and places another log in the fire. An orange glow is establishing itself at the base. Another log and he stands and chafes his hands together before returning to join her on the sofa.
‘Your house is so lovely,’ she says. Lovely? That was lame.
‘It’s too big, really, for one.’ He drains his glass, tops it up, offers her more. She lets him pour another splash; he stops when she raises her hand, which she finds respectful.
He reaches for the bag of pills and takes one out. ‘Shall we indulge, as it’s a special occasion?’
Indulge. It’s the first time he’s sounded old. But he’s probably being ironic. Yes, ironic, definitely.
‘Are they …’ she says. ‘Are they drugs?’
He grins and shakes his head, affectionately, as a parent might. ‘Come on, you’re what? Twenty?’
‘Twenty-one.’ Now she sounds older than she is.
‘And you’re telling me you don’t do a little dab from time to time?’
She shakes her head.
‘Not even at festivals?’
‘I don’t go to festivals. They’re too expensive.’
‘Clubbing, then?’
‘I don’t like clubs. I get claustrophobic.’
He raises his eyebrows in genuine surprise. ‘So you don’t do drugs at all?’
Again she shakes her head. ‘I don’t really drink much either, to be honest. Sorry.’
‘I thought everyone your age did MDMA. I was with this girl, about ten years ago now, and she loved festivals and everything that went with that. I was like you, I never indulged, but trust me, this stuff is the secret the government don’t want you to know about. All the feel-good, none of the hangover.’
She shrugs, tries to create the impression of an ambivalence she doesn’t feel. She has always felt at odds with people her own age, for as long as she can remember. Only in her studies and her close friendships has she ever felt truly comfortable. Now, here she is, on the periphery once again. She expected to feel many things with Peter, but peer pressure was not one of them.
‘I didn’t go to a very good school,’ she says, with no idea why. ‘What I mean is, I had to work, like, pretty hard to get away. I mean, get my A levels. Only three of us went to uni.’ She sounds defensive, worries he’ll think she’s chippy. His own background is clearly so much wealthier than hers. ‘Some of my friends do Ecstasy,’ she says. ‘E. That’s what it is, right?’
He nods.
‘I know it’s supposed to make you feel euphoric,’ she adds, not wanting to appear naïve. ‘And loved up, et cetera, but when my friends do it, they’re actually quite boring. And then they, like, talk about having done it and when they’re going to do it again, and that’s even more boring. And a bit like clubbing, I never really saw the point. Plus, I’ve always been afraid of … I mean, I like to feel safe. And I guess they’re not legal, are they, and so they’re not, you know, regulated. And people have died. You hear about people dying. I mean, what if you get a bad batch, or whatever?’
He breaks one in half. ‘You sound like a worried mummy, Samantha. Can I call you Sam?’
She shrugs. ‘Pete?’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘No, that sounds wrong. You’re not a Pete.’
He appears not to have heard. He is holding up a pill. ‘Aren’t you curious? You strike me as someone with an enquiring mind.’
She hears herself inhale sharply.
‘Trust me, you’re completely safe. How about we take half each? You’ll like it, I promise. There’s no way you can overdose on a half.’ He places the tiny orange crescent in her hand. ‘Neither of us knew this would happen tonight, did we? We’re riding the wave. We’re going with the flow. And something made you get into my car, even though you would never usually do that kind of thing, am I correct?’
She nods.
‘What you need is a safe risk. A risk-assessed risk. That’s what this is, trust me.’
‘Of course you would. I’m no monster, I assure you.’
Of course he’s not a monster. He’s too beautiful. But actually, she wonders then if she would sense it. She thinks she would. She’s pretty sure. But he’s right that she’s acted outside of herself, and now here she is, with a man she has only observed from a distance. Admired. But he is vouched for. And he did open the wine in front of her.
‘Ready?’ he says.
Not really, she thinks. But he has built up such a fascinating idea of her, and she doesn’t want to disappoint him. She’ll pretend, tuck the pill up by her gum, take it out when he looks away and shove it in her pocket or something.
She takes a deep breath. ‘All right.’
Three
Eyes locked, they press their hands to their mouths. She takes a sip of wine and throws back her head, pretends to swallow. But the half pill dissolves so quickly and a bitter taste spreads over her tongue. Oh, it’s so disgusting. It’s rank. There’s no way she can keep it in her mouth, no way she can dig it out without making a fool of herself. She takes another slug of wine, washes it down, away, but a horrible hairspray taste persists. He only sighs and drinks a little more too. He doesn’t comment on what they’ve just done, as if it’s irrelevant, no biggie. She tries not to worry about the pill and focuses on him. He is talking to her, quite naturally, about his doctorate on Caravaggio – he tells her the title but it is full of academic jargon and she cannot hold it in her head.
‘That’s why my book is called simply Caravaggio.’ He smiles and she wonders if he can tell that her mind is blown, despite her efforts to appear admiring, impressed but no more – not amazed to near breathlessness. He has written an actual book. That book on the shelf is by him. Oh my God, he is so accomplished; it’s too much. What is she? Nothing, that’s what, nothing at all in comparison. The best she can hope for right now is not to appear like a child.
‘Do you have any, like, old paintings in the house?’ She winces at the use of ‘like’, how stupid it sounds now, here, with him. And ‘old paintings’? He’ll think she’s an idiot. And he’d be right. She sips her wine. Actually, she’s pretty thirsty. She should ask for some water. She will. In a minute. And her phone.
‘There’s some less contemporary stuff upstairs,’ he’s saying. ‘Downstairs, I prefer more modern work.’ He nods at the ink drawing of the trumpet player. ‘I dabble a bit. The odd sketch.’
‘You did that?’
Bloody hell. He’s so talented, as well as beautiful. Wait till she tells Marcia.
‘It’s really good,’ she says. That’s right, Samantha, hit him with that impressive vocabulary of yours.
But he’s pointing at his drawing, his eyes half closed as if he’s trying to remember something. It’s possible he didn’t hear her pithy appraisal of his work.
‘I sketched that dude at Ronnie Scott’s,’ he says. ‘It’s a famous jazz bar in Soho. We went past it earlier. Do you know it?’
As if. She shakes her head, though she’s secretly cringing at the word dude, grateful for it – no one gets everything right, not even him, and for the first time, she feels a small advantage in being younger.
‘I’ll take you there,’ he adds.
The words hang. She is glad of the low lamplight, knows from the heat in her face that she is blushing. I’ll take you there. Because he can. Because it is nothing to him. Because he is effortless. Even the way he sits on the sofa is easy, one knee tucked into the crook of his arm, the way he seems to command his glass into his hand like a lightsaber, the delicate but firm way he sets it down again. She has met people like him, other lecturers, but she has never been this close to someone of his … learnedness, or calibre, or whatever it is. Until this moment, she’s only spoken one to one with lecturers in their book-lined offices, observed from a distance the specific weight of seriousness they all seem to carry so lightly within themselves. They have been other to her, these people, a separate breed. Peter is a part of that world, one she cannot imagine herself ever belonging to. Yet she doesn’t really belong in the sweat-drizzled walls of student social life either.
And she no longer belongs back home – not now.
They talk about travel – he has travelled extensively in Europe and the Far East. Of course he has.
‘What about you?’ he asks.
‘Erm, well, we went on a family holiday to a campsite in Brittany once. It was a year before my dad left.’ She did not intend to say it, but out it has come.
Wordlessly, Peter gets up to tend to the fire, to change the record, which has reached the end with a thm, thm, thm. He turns the disc over in his clean, deft hands before pushing it snugly over the spindle and lowering the needle to a click of static.
‘Your father left?’
‘He … he …’
‘You don’t have to talk about it.’ He is beside her on the sofa, topping up her glass.
She drinks; the wine is so rich, almost too rich for her. He pours some more for himself. He is facing her, intent, earnest, fascinated.
‘So you live with your mother?’
‘Yes. Well, no. I live in London, but when I’m home, I go to my mum’s flat.’ The fire is warm, the music quiet. It is so lovely to be listened to, to be looked at like that.
‘My dad had an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl,’ she says into the soft cradle of his attention. ‘She was five years older than me at the time. She was at my school. There was only one school in the village. We found out that he’d gone bankrupt. It was kind of his reaction to that. My mum thinks, anyway. We had to sell our house. The farm.’ She sounds like an automaton, she thinks, spouting out data.
He leans forward, and before she realises what he’s doing, he has laid the flat of his hand on her cheek with such tenderness she feels her eyes prickle. His first touch. A moment and he takes his hand away.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.
‘It is what it is.’ She turns her gaze towards the fire. In the grate, flames lick the wood, curl up the chimney. She doesn’t tell him the rest: that a couple of years later, she lost her virginity one dark night behind the school building to a boy she didn’t even like, both of them off their faces on cheap vodka; that she slept with several more boys after that when she was barely of legal age, thinking herself a feminist, in charge of her body and her desires; that only later did she realise that this was her acting out after the heartbreak and humiliation caused by her father, that ultimately it was a punishment against herself, a form of self-harm. She never went in for the whole arm-cutting thing like some of the other girls.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, after a moment. ‘Not very cheery.’
He shakes his head, but fondly. He looks proud of her, or something. ‘So where do you want to go on your travels?’
‘I’m going to go around Europe with my flatmate,’ she tells him, ‘once we graduate.’
‘Well, you have to go to Italy. I’ll give you a list of places you must not miss.’
He asks her if she likes London, and she tells him the city is too loud and dense with people for her, even now. But that she couldn’t go back to the farm, even if they still had it, or to the village. It strikes her that Richmond is the perfect place, though she doesn’t say this out loud. There is plenty of green here, yet it is not the country; plenty of shops, yet not the town. She could live here.
‘So, what will you do after uni?’ he asks.
She shrugs. ‘I’d like to teach, maybe use writing in some sort of therapeutic capacity, you know, to help people? I write poetry, so maybe one day I’ll get a collection
published. That’s a ridiculous fantasy, obviously.’
‘I bet your poetry’s brilliant,’ he says. ‘And we all need fantasies, don’t we? I went through a phase of socialist song-writing, angry young man stuff, back in the day. And I know what you mean about cities. They’re noisy, dirty places. People are rude. But one day I’ll show you Rome.’ He takes her hand in his. His second touch. It doesn’t feel like a move. If anything, it’s affectionate, nothing more, and the loosest knot of disappointment lodges in her belly.
‘Ah, Sam,’ he almost whispers. ‘I can show you so much.’
Her eyelids are heavy. He fills his own glass but not hers. The bottle empties.
‘It’s weird,’ he says from somewhere far away. ‘I feel like I know you. Or knew you once.’
She doesn’t have a clue what time it is, but she’s drifting. He is talking, then not. He plays a record by Massive Attack, another jazz one she misses the name of. He is so nice. Gentle. Kind.
The music plays: classical now, has been for a while. The fire is an orange glow in her peripheral vision, a caress of warmth on her left side. They are listening to Bach now, or was that the last one? She knows no one who listens to Bach. She knows no one who lives in a house like this, with a wine cellar with dust on the bottles. No one who would say that her poetry was wonderful. Her whole life seems trivial; it has fluttered up in smoke. She strains to keep her eyes open, but the sofa is pulling her down. He said half a pill was safe, so it can’t be that, although she’s not used to it. And it’s not the wine; she’s drunk no more than two glasses, although those bowl goblets can be deceptive. So maybe the wine, actually, a bit, and maybe the drugs, a bit.
And something else, something deeper. He is kinder than she thought he’d be. Empathic. Safe. Or perhaps she is drugged on the effect she can see she has on him, the way his eyes slope at the edges when he looks at her. She never called Marcy, but it’s OK, it’s all right. He is safe. He is lying top-to-tail with her, his bare feet tucked against her side. She has no memory of him taking off his socks, herself taking off her boots, nor snuggling up together in this childlike way. Her eyelids close against the last image of him draining his glass. He said he wanted to find out about her, and that’s literally all he’s done. There will be no inexpert lunging, no wet mouth, no limbs trapped at awkward angles against the sofa cushions. She will not have to blurt her excuses and scuttle out of a bedroom that smells of trainers and socks and worse. Peter’s house smells clean – scented, even. Peter is a man of culture. Peter is a man of the world.
