He sprang up and nodded towards the blanket. ‘I thought we could have you on this, on the floor in front of the settee - don’t worry, it’s only old paint splats - maybe semi-reclined. We’ll have to see how it works out. Yes? Shall I go and fetch some charcoal and paper while you get undressed? Would that be best for you?’
‘Pardon?’ I said, lowering the bottle from my lips. ‘You mean take all my clothes off?’
His face arranged itself into an expression of amused indulgence. He hooked a hank of hair behind his ear. ‘Well, of course,’ he said reasonably. ‘How else can I sketch you?’
Which was, I supposed, a not unreasonable point. After all, Botticelli hadn’t painted Venus in a tank top. And Renoir’s Nymph would have looked pretty stupid in a skirt. And, much more to the point, I supposed I had come here this evening with a definite clothes-off kind of activity in mind. But take my clothes off now? Just like that? Just whip off my knickers and sit on a dog blanket? It wasn’t even dark yet. And there weren’t any curtains. I processed all these bits of compelling and conflicting data while he looked on with the same indulgent smile.
‘Um, yes. I see,’ I said finally. ‘I suppose - I just hadn’t thought …’
He leant closer, and took the beer from my grasp. ‘“Love me”,’ he whispered again, playing the lip of the bottle against my shoulder with teeny tiny strokes,’ “as loves the mole his darkness. And the timid deer the tigress; hate and fear be your two loves. Love me -” ‘ his tongue was ferreting about in my ear now ‘ “- Love me, and lift your mask.’”
Bloody hell.
So (fairly inevitably, I guess) we did a bit of kissing and so on, and then he suggested it might be best if he popped off to get some paper and charcoal. He came back in with a roll of what looked like lining paper and an old ice-cream tub.
I had spread the blanket on the floor in front of the sofa, as directed, and had pulled it up so that it covered the front of the sofa as well. Then, feeling just about as stupid and undignified as it was strictly possible to feel when your whole body was throbbing with intense and unbidden sexual expectation (which, as it turned out, didn’t feel half as stupid and undignified as I’d thought it would), I had spread myself upon it, lying on my side, with my lower arm bent to support my head. I faffed about with my other limbs for two stressful minutes, before plumping eventually for a knee-over-groin look, plus arm-over-boobs touch and hand on the floor. In this way all that was visible, erotically speaking, were my toenails, which I had painted (oh, happy coincidence!) bright blue. I said nothing. Now arranged and comported, my sexual abandon completely abandoned me - I felt not so much ‘timid deer’ as ‘fat pig on stick’.
Stefan said nothing either. Some way short of nothing, in fact. I had hoped he’d breathe a little more poetry into my ear, but he didn’t. In fact he paid me no more attention for the ensuing five minutes than he would have if I’d been an assortment of apples arranged on a table in a Provençal gîte. Instead, he busied himself with rummaging in the ice-cream tub, picking out stubs of varying length and thickness and arranging them in a neat row on the table top. Then he went loping off to the corner of the room and pulled out a large piece of hardboard, to which he then attached a length of paper ripped from his roll, using the bulldog that was clipped to the top. Finally he sat down. Then peeled off his vest.
Which, though somewhat startling, was OK by me. Not only because his was a chest of such monumental, tongue-hanging-out, world-beating beauty, but also because it did level the playing-field somewhat. And didn’t Mo Mowlam’s husband always paint naked? Stefan’s torso was lean and quite perfect. Covered in dense curls from navel to neckline that crucifixed outwards across a tawny-gold chest. I lowered my gaze. Wow, I thought. Wow.
‘Smudges,’ he commented, flinging the vest floor-wards. The cut-offs, however, stayed firmly in place.
The silence continued while he made small adjustments to the paper and charcoal, testing the sticks on a scrap of grey card. Embarrassed as I was becoming with this bizarre communication dynamic, I was spared the stressful business of trying to make light conversational parries because he now seemed one step removed from me. As if suddenly inhabiting a private world of his own. I wondered if this was what set real artists apart from pretenders such as myself. This sense of disconnection, of absolute focus. He might have been an actor, reaching inside himself while preparing in the wings. Then he looked at me, with something approaching an ironic expression, and smiled broadly, eyes twinkling. He was so sweet.
‘OK?’ he said encouragingly. ‘Not cold or anything?’ He tilted his head. ‘Sure you’re comfortable like that?’
I wasn’t. But the prospect of rearranging any part of my wobbling anatomy was an infinitely less attractive option than blanket-burn and bedsores.
‘OK.’ I said. Various bits of me were blushing. ‘Under the circumstances, anyway.’
He disappeared behind his board for a moment, glanced up and over it, then put it down on the table again.
‘Do you mind,’ he asked, crossing the room and kneeling beside me, ‘if I make a couple of slight adjustments to your pose?’
Oh.
He took my free arm and laid it along the curve of my hip, then gently, wordlessly - as if sculpting spun sugar for a wedding confection - took the weight of my thigh and lifted it upwards and outwards, thus manoeuvring it into the sort of position that would have a gynaecologist poised for approach.
For one pulse of a heartbeat I was stricken with horror, while a light breeze fanned bits for which breezes were rare. Stefan pondered a moment while I studied my kneecap and tried hard to resist the instinct to start up an anxious dialogue with my pelvic floor. Sucking in your stomach was one thing, but …
‘There,’ he said, smiling and letting a languid finger trail its way along the inside of my thigh as he stood again. I was tingling from his touch now. ‘Better. Much better. Can you hold that, d’you think, Lu?’
I held it. For what seemed like a good half-hour I lay there. Staring into the middle distance while he scratched and scribbled and beavered at his board. I could see nothing below his eye-level, and nothing above his knees. His feet, firm on the floor in a pair of blue flip-flops, looked like the feet of an alabaster god on a plinth. His eyes flicked up and down, back and forth, from side to side. Occasionally a hand would appear above the hardboard, charcoal in fingers, making small measurements, judging. In the distance, a gull, a siren, some laughter, a soporific cocktail of early-evening noise.
Finally he stopped scribbling and sat back, wiping his hands on a bit of rag and pushing the picture away from him. Then he pulled it back against his chest and grinned at me over the top.
‘There,’ he said, placing the board on the table.
I sat up carefully. ‘All finished?’
He stood and stretched. Then he shook off the flip-flops, sloughed off the cut-offs - he was naked beneath them - and crossed the sun-dusted room in three purposeful strides.
‘Hardly,’ he said, sinking down slowly beside me. ‘I haven’t even begun to make love to you yet.’
Sunday 29 April
After I had recovered from the vague feeling of anxiety that had been dogging me all night - that the reason I was so keen on doing an art degree was no longer because I had any pretensions to artistic greatness, but because I had become completely infatuated with one of the tutors - I dragged myself from my bed and drove down to collect Leo from Del’s. And off we went again. Because Del could see it too.
‘You didn’t!’
‘I did.’
‘I can hardly believe it. How erotic. How lovely. How exceedingly romantic.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And did you shag him as well?’
‘Del!’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lu, don’t be such a drip. Anyway, I’ll take that as a yes. Is he any good?’
‘Del!’
‘At painting, you twit! As in with a brush?’ She waggled a finger in front of my face. ‘You, my dear sister, have a
one-track mind.’ She basked for a moment in the warmth of my blush. ‘So?’ she asked finally. ‘Is he any good? I’ve always rather fancied having someone artistic in the family. Anyway, are you going to stay for lunch or what? I have to count my potatoes. Which reminds me, next Saturday. Ben has got it into his head that he’s going to invite all his juniors round, so we’re having a bit of a party. Absolutely no barbecuing, and we’re not talking coulis or reductions or anything poncy like that, but I would really appreciate your sisterly support. And you can bring him. No, in fact, you have to bring him. Ben has this appallingly dreary new registrar and if you don’t bring Stefan he’ll monopolize you all evening, mark my words. And there’s only so much you can hear about his exploits with an endoscope without wanting to vomit, I can tell you.’
I tried to visualize my beautiful and sensitive Stefan immersed in the sort of physiologically explicit banter that passed for polite dinner-party conversation at my sister’s house, and couldn’t. Much as I wanted to take him out and parade him around the place, a part of me also wanted to keep him to myself - he was like a rare butterfly: a delicate, precious thing, easily damaged. I wasn’t sure how well he’d cope with the culture shock. Wasn’t sure that it just wouldn’t frighten him off. On the other hand I could simply refuse to go, which would solve the problem altogether. ‘Oh, you don’t need me here.’
‘I most emphatically do. Besides, you’ll enjoy yourself. And so, my dear, will he.’
8
Monday 30 April
Sure I will learn to love abstract art. It can’t be that difficult, surely? Surely the only obstacle between me and a true appreciation of the less readily accessible forms of artistic expression is a narrowness of imagination brought about by years of having to conjugate French verbs all day. And spending all the time that less frazzled people spend on spiritually enriching esoteric pursuits in going to Sainsbury’s and ironing and so on. And through not having devoted enough time to stopping and thinking and studying and considering. And will be the same with opera, for sure.
I know nothing about boilers either. This much is clear. Trouble is, I haven’t any sort of yen to know anything about boilers. Heating systems, for me, simply are. A man comes once a year to open the front of the one in the kitchen, take calls on his mobile from people called Bazzer and Dildo and drink cups of tea. Then he says, ‘Tickety-boo’, or something, snaps his case shut and leaves. And heat continues, constant and uncomplicated, in my life. Oh, and sometimes I bleed my radiators. Though I’m not even sure I have a complete grasp of radiator bleeding. Why do all mine have a poo-coloured stain under the little knob at the bottom?
But perhaps I’m being elitist. There are boilers and there are boilers. I wouldn’t want to make any assumptions about the lyrical qualities of commercial heating installations per se, and there is no doubt that artistic expression of a kind must inform boiler aesthetics. Mustn’t it? Joe Delaney certainly seems to like them. Mind you, I suspect he is a cultural desert.
The kind of builders JDL made it their business to know about were, it had to be said, clearly in an altogether different stratosphere from the average suburban Potterton. We were talking hospitals, council offices, eight-hundred-room hotels. We were talking constant heat and hot water on demand, health and safety at work, quality-control assurance, BS validation and (most probably) far-reaching networks of those scary metal tunnel systems that house aliens and radio-actively monsterized insects, and bad guys with flame-throwers and B-movie spies. I knew this because it said so in their glossy brochure, a copy of which Lily had thoughtfully sent me the week before I landed the spot at her desk.
When I was squinting at the spec sheet in front of me it was difficult therefore to know whether the bits I couldn’t get a handle on were merely gaps in my French or things of completely alien origin. Which word for gas valve? Gaz soupape or clapet? And was flue elbow really a conduite de coude? So engrossed was I in enlarging my combustion-based vocabulary that when the telephone rang I answered in French.
It was the proprietor of the garage in Swindon, calling to tie up the paperwork regarding what was left of my beloved car. He talked for some minutes about his holidays in Trouville, and confirmed that the insurance inspection had been made. And he wanted to know what to do with Joe’s laptop, which, though apparently not working, was still sitting on his desk.
Knowing little about computer hardware and its viability as a salvage item, I told him I would have to get back to him.
‘Oh, and by the way,’ I asked him, ‘did you have any luck finding the Pokémon cards?’
‘Do what, my love?’
‘I called the other day. To see if anyone had found my son’s Pokémon cards.’
There was a pause. Then, ‘Do what?’
‘My son’s Pokémon cards.’
There was another.
‘Hmm,’ he said finally. ‘Not sure I’m with you. What exactly are poky munk hards, when they’re at home, my love?’
‘No. Pokémon cards. Pok-é-mon. You must have heard of them. You know, the film. The computer game. The—’
‘So it’s a computer game I’m after, is it, then?’
‘No, no, just some cards. Like playing cards. They were in the glove compartment. Or maybe under the front seat. But somewhere. About thirty of them. In an elastic band. They belong to my son.’
‘Cards, then. Hold on a tick. Let me find a pen. P-o-k-é-m-o-n C-a-r-d-s. All right. Are you going to hold on?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’ll hold.’
‘Right-ho, then. Won’t be a tick.’
Iona rumbled past swinging a Matalan carrier. ‘Ah, you’re here,’ she announced, as if I might be in another office in a different part of Europe altogether. ‘Joe’s after you. On the phone. Needs a word, lovely. Quick as you like.’ She moved on down the corridor, humming ‘Sex Bomb’ to herself.
‘I won’t be a moment,’ I called after her. ‘I’m just on to the man at the garage about my car. He’s gone off to see if he can track down Leo’s Pokémon cards for him before it’s taken away for salvage.’
Her head reappeared around the door. ‘His what?’
‘His Pokémon cards. He—’
‘Poky what?’
‘Pokémon.’
‘Poke a what?’
‘Pokémon. It’s a game. And a film. And a—’ I shook my head. Was there really any point?
Hierarchies have always been a part of my life. In a large comprehensive school, there are hierarchies so complex and unfathomable that they could do with a National Curriculum all of their own. So, though I was almost as ignorant about office politics as I was about boilers, I had an inkling that there wasn’t actually a form of protocol that condoned the use of bellowing through an office partition wall as a method of fostering good employee relations.
This was, even so, now happening.
‘Lu!’
‘Just coming!’ I warbled back.
Unidentifiable Swindon-based rumblings and whirrings continued apace down the phone. I waited some more.
‘Lu! Are you coming?’
‘One minute!’
The rumbling stopped. Then a whine started up. Then a clatter, a thump and, finally, a voice: ‘Hello?’
‘I’m still here. Any luck?’
“Fraid not, my love. We’ve got some sort of power lead, a packet of Werther’s Originals, and a paperback. Let me see now, called Virtual Strangers. No poky-whatnots. He did check in the footwell.’
I made a mental note to mug the next Japanese toy wholesaler I clapped eyes on, then put down my pen and went into the other office. Joe was on the phone, which he now cupped in his hand. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, then carried on talking for two minutes. He put down the receiver and started scribbling on a pad.
‘Hello,’ I said sweetly. ‘You wanted to see me?’
He carried on writing for a good thirty seconds. Thirty point-making seconds, if I wasn’t mistaken.
‘Ah, Lu,’ he said, clicking his bal
lpoint. ‘Glad you could make it finally. Amiens. Thursday. Do you think you can do it?’
‘Amiens?’
‘Yes, Amiens.’
‘What - Amiens, France?’
He put the pen down. ‘Well, of course Amiens, France. What other Amiens would I be talking about? Luxotel, Amiens Nord, to be precise. I have to do a site survey and costing for the job there. Plus look at a timescale for the refit in Blois. We’d be back Friday evening. Can you do it or not?’
I gaped at him. ‘What - go to France?’ He nodded. ‘With you?’
He nodded again. ‘Of course. Assuming it’s OK with you. Is it OK with you?’
‘You want me to take you to France?’
He began to look pained. ‘Yes, Lu. I need you to take me to France. As in,’ he did a little one-handed steering-wheel mime, ‘you know, driving me there?’
‘What - drive you to France this Thursday?’
He ejected a nicotine chewing-gum from its blister pack and lobbed it into his mouth. Then chewed a bit and said, ‘As in the day that generally falls after Wednesday. Yes. Thought it would make a nice change for you. Wouldn’t it?’
‘Um, well … I suppose it—’
‘Great. So. I’ll need to book us rooms. And the Eurotunnel. Midday-ish, I thought. But as you’re here now, and as I have neither the time nor the inclination to sit and listen to them telling me how important my call is to them again,’ he tore a page from the pad on his desk, ‘you can get on with it instead, perhaps. Yes?’
‘But I can’t just swan off to France for the night. What about Leo?’
‘Ah. That’s a thought. Hmm. I know. Why don’t you bring him along?’
‘I can’t do that. What about school?’
He picked up the pen again. ‘Hadn’t thought of that.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t know. Can’t he stay at your sister’s or something?’
‘It’s hardly - well, I mean, she might have made plans. I can’t expect her to just—’
‘But she probably wouldn’t mind, would she? So why don’t you ask her?’
One Day, Someday Page 8
