by Alyson Rudd
‘Excellent plan,’ he said, thinking, well, this is all going smoothly only we have not even kissed properly yet; but he did not want to try it over a stew.
‘Is there an art gallery you’ve never been to?’ he said. ‘We could do the famous double whammy of new park, new museum.’
‘I can’t think. Give me a list.’
He took out his phone and sucked in through his teeth.
‘There’s lots of them,’ he said. ‘Tate Britain, Tate Modern, the Serpentine, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy—’
He was interrupted by a woman on an adjacent table.
‘I am so sorry to interrupt,’ she said, ‘but we have just come from Leighton House Museum. It’s five minutes or so from here and it would be a shame, if you are after art, not to go. We loved it.’
‘Amazing,’ said her friend. ‘A hidden treasure.’
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Ryan said, ‘Me neither,’ Sylvie said.
They left the women in a state of aesthetic martyrdom for having saved their souls from a slog to a big gallery when there had been a smaller, more intriguing one on their doorstep.
The main feature of Leighton House was the Arab Hall, covered in delicate, mostly blue, mosaics arranged around a small patch of water under a golden dome.
‘So peaceful,’ she said and they kissed, both understanding as it happened that such kisses are rare, that it was unplanned but inevitable, that it was amid beauty, that it was public and safe and that they would have looked a perfect sort of couple.
‘Was that your first kiss?’ asked a rosy-cheeked attendant.
They both laughed a little too loudly.
‘Was it that obvious?’ Ryan said.
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I collect them. We get quite a few in here.’
‘The First Kiss Collector,’ Sylvie said later. ‘If I was a teacher of English Language I would ask my students to write a story or a poem with that as the title.’
‘And all the boys would make it about snooker and all the girls would make it about Justin Bieber.’
‘That’s sexist,’ Sylvie said, ‘and I was thinking the students would be in sixth form and they would have chosen English and they would all write something moving or tender or sad.’
‘Hmm,’ Ryan said, ‘or it could be a thriller or a story about zombies.’
She punched him. ‘You are being deliberately blokey,’ she said. ‘I will always remember our first First Kiss Collector.’
‘I want to meet our first Second Kiss Collector,’ he said and she giggled and they kissed in front of a busy pub and then guessed that their Second Kiss Collector was the young bloke with the crazy-old-man beard.
‘Is it Appletini hour?’ he said. ‘Or we could catch a film, or do you need to get home?’
‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘if we reached the cinema and there was a film called The First Kiss Collector.’
‘I’d prefer The Third Kiss Collector,’ he said and a few minutes later she pinched his arm and asked him when he would stop counting.
‘I’m guessing after twenty, then it gets boring,’ he said so she pinched him again. As they walked, constantly nudging each other, Sylvie slowly became aware that she felt carefree, but only in the way someone on holiday from a tough job might be carefree. The job – the Underground – was still there in the background. She had been to the platform but the anticipated sense of an ending, of a job done, was missing. She was happy right now, but she was not liberated.
‘You’re ironing and you’re humming,’ Paul said. ‘That is not natural.’
‘Sylvie is cooking me a Friday-night dinner,’ Ryan said. ‘At her flat.’
‘But it’s Monday. Rein it in, mate, you’ll be yapping like a dog in heat by Friday.’
‘Lovely image, thank you, Paul.’
‘Oh, I’ve got the antidote: you can come to my open lecture on Thursday. Seeing how I’m delivering it a full ninety-second walk from your office I don’t see how you can avoid it.’
Paul’s lectures were legendary and usually involved members of the public with no expertise in genetics piling in and lending the whole event rock-star status.
‘I want a front-row seat with a piece of paper stuck on it saying “Reserved for R. Kennedy”.’
‘And Sylvie, don’t you want to impress her with the hottest ticket in town?’
Ryan sent her a message asking if a front-row seat at a genetic-solution-to-malaria lecture was worth her dashing away from her new job for, and to his surprise she said that it was.
The lecture theatre was jam-packed with undergraduates, postgraduates, lecturers, visiting lecturers and curious outsiders. An incognito TV producer was there too, to see whether Paul was the next smiling, screen-friendly and handsome scientist she had heard he could be.
There was a low hum peculiar to educational expectation. It was, Ryan thought, similar to the feel of a room just before a famous stand-up comedian entered it – except it was sober, contained the rustling of notepads and possessed a smugness that comes with knowing the world is about to become a better place.
Paul was not the least bit nervous. Had the hall been half empty he might have stammered and lost the desire to tell jokes and the ability to tell them well but a packed audience meant validation and that in turn boosted his conviction in the message. A packed audience meant they would get his jokes, they wanted to get his jokes and indeed would compete with each other to prove they understood the nuances contained in them, but Paul started with a knock-knock joke. It settled the room, forced them to interact and was, the TV producer noted, a success because of Paul’s timing.
‘Amos who?’ chanted the audience and they all began laughing as Paul looked at them as if to say, ‘You don’t actually need me to complete the joke, do you?’ But he did anyway with a wry smile that told of genius to come.
As he said, ‘A mosquito,’ Sylvie turned to Ryan in their front-row seats and whispered, ‘Do you write his jokes too?’
Ryan whispered back that of course he did and then the laughter ebbed so he and Sylvie and everyone else settled back for the ride. Ryan was unable to stop feeling smug that he had had a part in the blossoming of the wondrous, witty being by his side, and he settled back to pay rapt attention to his friend. There were no slides, no videos, just Paul and his science and his passion. The TV producer even shed a small tear of triumph as she pictured launching him on BBC primetime, while Sylvie wondered if he was already on TV because he looked familiar. Paul even received a standing ovation, which churned a portion of envy among some but few begrudged him his reception.
There was a small surge of bodies towards the stage. People were keen to either show off that they had understood the lecture or keen simply to shake Paul’s hand. The producer hung back, watching carefully in case he disappeared.
Sylvie surveyed the room and saw Naomi, who was stood next to Ed. She recognized them both instantly, noted their restrained intimacy.
‘There will be a sort of procession to a pub now,’ Ryan told her. ‘But we don’t have to go.’
‘Have you told people about me?’ she said, suddenly conscious of the fact that while she was comfortable with Ryan, and he with her, she might be considered a freak by others.
‘A bit,’ Ryan said, unsure if he should lie or not. ‘But it’s fine, all fine, you mustn’t worry. Trust me.’
She slipped her hand into his and he squeezed it then relaxed his grip as he spotted Naomi with Ed.
‘Look who I found,’ Naomi said and Sylvie held her breath, wondering if Ryan would be fooled.
‘Good to see you again, Ed. Are you joining us for a drink?’
Naomi chewed the inside of her cheek as Ed accepted, even though Ryan’s tone was guarded. Sylvie could not help thinking they would at least provide a distraction if she was to become the focus of attention.
Like the Pied Piper, Paul walked with his followers towards the pub. The producer decided to pounce before Paul began boozing. She introduced herself
firmly and not a little seductively, produced her card and then her phone and asked for his number. Those who had been in conversation with Paul at that moment stood back a little in deference, as if watching him turn water into wine, for he certainly took the producer’s intervention in his stride. With no trace of delight or mistrust or self-doubt he reeled off his number before asking if she was joining the pack in the pub. She smiled and said she would call him the next day and retreated smugly as Paul’s acolytes stared after her with barely disguised nosiness.
Naomi had been full of swagger earlier in the day. Hana was not her responsibility, she kept telling herself, but she was Ryan’s sister and Naomi was fonder of Ryan than she really knew.
‘Ed was desperate to meet Paul and see him in action,’ Naomi said weakly to Ryan, an element of guilt seeping, possibly imperceptibly, out of the pores of her skin.
This was not a lie. Ed’s involvement with Naomi had reignited his passion for research and underlined for him that his work had become a treadmill lacking vigour. But Ed had also seen Paul’s lecture as an opportunity for his and Naomi’s relationship to become something she no longer had to hide.
‘I also wanted to come along so I could ask Naomi out for a drink,’ he said. She groaned involuntarily. ‘And she said she would, although I’m hoping this isn’t it.’
‘It might be,’ she growled but Ryan misunderstood.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘people move on. It’s not as if Naomi is the reason you and Hana split up.’
‘There you go,’ Ed said. ‘No one’s embarrassed but you, Naomi.’
Sylvie noticed how Naomi glared back at him and how that glare softened to a knowing flirtation, but Ryan had turned to speak to a tall, willowy woman in her fifties who was wearing a long russet knitted skirt and matching jumper who would not have looked out of place in an Edward Hopper painting.
It meant Sylvie was left with only Ed and Naomi within easy earshot and, as the two women were stymied by their knowledge of the other, Ed was left to indulge in a soliloquy about how he was considering going back into education, inspired by Naomi’s hungry insects and Paul’s deadly ones, and then, realizing he had monopolized the space, he smiled at Sylvie.
‘You look like you dashed here straight from the office,’ he said.
There were plenty of lies involved but nothing too complicated. Sylvie had told the agency she had been diverted from work because her mother had been ill – but in remission now, thank you – and as she had an excellent reference from her previous employer, no one appeared all that bothered about her near-year-long absence from the job market. She was a temp, and no one cared too much about temps. By their very nature they would work in bursts and it saved a degree of awkwardness if, when the permanent member of staff returned, the temp had felt temporary.
The handover was smooth. Sylvie was covering for Clara, who was heavily pregnant in a jolly, rosebuds-on-her-smock sort of way, and the office was friendly enough but it had been hard to leave the Tube. Physically hard. The ride up the escalator had been a suction on her vital organs. She had reached street level at Moorgate and found it hard to breathe and when she returned to the Underground at 6 p.m. she felt not the spasm of guilt she anticipated but a deep sense of ugly bereavement.
The next day was worse, not better, and Sylvie was frightened by the compulsion – frightened that it was so visceral, that her ignoring of it caused her to feel hot and anxious and torn in two. Clara was leaving early on her last day in the office but before heading off to her afternoon-tea treat, she found time to tell Sylvie that she looked unwell and must leave early too.
When Thursday morning came, Sylvie dressed for the office but she trembled as she did so, partly out of self-loathing, and partly out of a prescience that her world was about to collapse just as she had been rebuilding it. She mouthed a mantra as she walked towards Eastcote station. Get to the office; meet Ryan after.
When the doors opened at Moorgate she remained seated. She was glued to the seat via a cord that ran from the nape of her neck. To struggle would make her conspicuous. She was by now feeling panicked, so she did not stand, she did not make a move towards the doors and, once they had closed, the air circulated again in the carriage and her ears felt as if they had emerged from being under water. At Liverpool Street she was able to seamlessly alight and change to the Central line. She was both relieved and disgusted with herself. She knew what her day held now. Stay below; meet Ryan after.
On the Friday, the day after Paul’s triumphant lecture, she cooked for her new boyfriend. He had disliked her high street so was pleasantly surprised by her home. Sylvie lived on the first floor of a pretty terraced house that had been converted into two flats with the owner occupying the ground floor and its garden. Sylvie opened the front door to him and then tapped on another front door to the left of it inside the narrow hall.
‘Trish, this is Ryan, Ryan this is technically my landlady but also my dear friend Trish, and I promised she could meet you.’
‘Sorry, Ryan,’ she said. ‘But I was insistent. And you have to come in and have a drink with me.’
They stayed for twenty-five minutes, mainly because Trish had put some crisps in a bowl and chilled some beers and wine and it seemed rude to cut the visit any shorter. If Trish knew about Sylvie’s strange year then she hid it well and the talk was mainly of Sylvie’s predecessors in the upstairs flat, one of whom had been a bigamist with a mail-order bride.
‘Presumably he thought it didn’t count, being mail order,’ Ryan said.
He had been valiant. It was not an enjoyable twenty-five minutes. Trish was intelligent enough and, as landladies went, from his past experience of the land of bedsits, clearly fair and quite possibly generous, but Ryan found it hard to look the woman in the eye. Her face was uneven and her skin blotchy. It was impossible to tell if she was forty-five or closer to sixty. She was quite clearly an alcoholic and yet Sylvie did not squirm when Trish opened what was undoubtedly an unnecessary second bottle as they were about to leave.
The woman was, he thought, in love with Sylvie. She gazed at her intently, nodded intently when Sylvie spoke. She stroked Sylvie’s arm and told Ryan to ‘just look at that hair’ three times. The subtext was not hard to fathom. Trish had been pretty once; there were photographs on her shelves to prove it. She had been a receptionist for a commercial radio station, married a presenter, given up work to have their child, been divorced by him for his new co-host, had turned bitterly to booze and then, somewhere along the way, she lost the bile but had been unable to shed the prop of alcohol. The child was there, in the photographs, but he guessed the daughter had little to do with her bloated mother these days and Sylvie was a substitute. It irked Ryan that Sylvie was so relaxed in that ground-floor flat while being stared at so hungrily, with such need. The room had stifled him. He could smell the vinegar of wine dregs mixed with the cheap scented candle being used to mask it. For a brief second he could see his mother sneering in distaste at the smell of ale in their home.
He wanted Sylvie to roll her eyes when Trish finally closed her door so they could climb the stairs but she merely murmured, ‘Poor Trish, such a nice woman,’ which left him feeling uncharitable. Even so, he refused to let the woman dominate any more of his evening so he pretended not to hear what Sylvie had said and instead found himself asking her if she always wore the same perfume and gurning at himself for being so uninteresting.
Sylvie had recreated the Moroccan chicken dish and he declared hers much the nicer, although he found it hard to digest because she did not seem to want to talk about her new job. He honestly was not at all sure he could handle it if she was back underground, except she confessed that she had never really left it after they had made love in a room that smelled of jasmine and on cream sheets that made Sylvie and her nearly red hair look like part of a Botticelli painting.
‘We’ll sort it,’ he said, but had not a clue how.
‘I won’t blame you if you want to bail; we can part as
friends,’ she said, not moving from the bed, and he shook his head. This was all too beautiful for the Tube to be allowed to spoil it.
‘It’s too late for friends,’ he said and lay back down, both enchanted and dispirited and then enchanted again as she shook her hair as if it was full of sugar shards that needed to be released before they could embrace once more, and he wondered how it was he could be so happy and so worried at the same time.
Hana was sat with her mother and grandfather. Both women were becoming frustrated with their lives. There was no carriage clock on the mantelpiece but both of them heard one ticking as Grandpa fell into a post-Battenberg doze, some of the pink sponge lodged in the folds of his lovingly hand-washed cardigan.
Grace was hesitant to ask her daughter about her holiday plans, any plans. Hana was bitter these days, snappy. Her pain with the sloth had been deeply felt but expressed quietly. Her disappointment in Ed was brittle and angry with a barely disguised layer of self-loathing, for she had adored him and he had not adored her. Grace could see that she adored him still.
Grace was annoyed too. She had nurtured her daughter back to emotional health after her divorce, made living with Grandpa seem like fun when it was very hard work. She had sheltered Hana from most of the trickier visits to the bathroom, the bathtimes, the pyjama struggles on his bad days. She had made it all about cake and TV and weekly outings to the pub. She had made sure she smiled when she would have preferred to scowl and swear; she had encouraged Hana to go out even though she missed her terribly when she did. Grace’s life had become Grandpa-centric just before Hana moved back in and the monotony and loneliness of it had been bearable because it was shared with someone she truly loved. Grace was fond of Joe’s father, he had suffered as she had suffered, and he had no one else but her to care if he ate enough parkin loaf, but he was not her father. She did not love him unconditionally.
It was duty and a shared awful sadness that kept him in the armchair in front of the shopping channel. It was duty and love that had given her the energy to rebuild Hana’s shattered confidence, encourage her to go walking, to find new friends. The discovery of Ed was a bonus and while a part of Grace feared Hana announcing she was leaving home again, mostly it was what she wanted for her daughter – even if the prospect of endless bouncy voices extolling the virtues of a knife sharpener or a yoga mat or a limited-edition charm bracelet filled her with hollow dread. And now she would have to start building Hana’s self-esteem again. But it was tougher this time, for some reason.
