‘How’s the oeuvre?’ he said.
It was the phrase Alice often used.
‘Coming along,’ I said.
‘Don’t be modest.’ Alice broke off from laying the table to wrap her arms around me – rather as she had hugged Frank earlier. I smelt beer on her breath. ‘He’s been writing in the London Library every day and it’s really coming together. His agent has a lot of interest already.’
I smiled. Tina said how clever I was. Alice released me and Andrew started talking about a committee meeting that was imminent – a special fund for ‘review and investigation’.
I looked out of the window. The teenage girls, Phoebe and Daisy, were sitting on garden chairs, just outside the kitchen door. The way Andrew’s daughter was sitting, her legs crossed, her elbow resting on her knee, suggested a French insouciance. She had an edgy, petulant air that reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who. The loose wool jumper she was wearing had fallen off her shoulder, revealing a turquoise bra strap and a pale triangle of skin – a particularly sexy combination.
The food arrived and we sat down at the table. I was next to Louis, who in my opinion was Alice’s least attractive child – a large boy with a face full of acne. He was causing her a lot of trouble. The headmaster from his school had been on the phone a couple of times. Bullying issues. I wasn’t going to waste my time with him so I talked across the table to Tina, asking after the wool shop. ‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘Whole new shipment of alpaca delivered on Friday!’ She glanced at Andrew. ‘Big important stuff!’
It upsets me when women do that – put themselves down. Men like Andrew encourage it. I remembered his patronising laugh when he brought up ‘her little business’ in the bookshop.
‘I’m so impressed by anyone who sets up on their own like that,’ I said. ‘I hope you’re proud of her, Andrew?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
He began to dominate the meal. His father had dementia and had recently been admitted to a residential home. His mother, who had suffered health problems of her own, was not coping. It was terribly unfair. There had been a lot of tragedy in her life. Alice took Andrew’s hand and kept hold of it. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘Horrid,’ I agreed.
Daisy was dipping her finger in the little plastic pot of mint raita, then dabbing the speckled yoghurt on to her tongue.
I realised then who she reminded me of.
‘Gosh, you look like Florrie,’ I said. She could have been Andrew’s sister right there in front of me.
She looked up, still licking her finger again. ‘People say that, yes.’
Everyone else had gone quiet. Had I been indelicate, interrupting Andrew?
‘Sorry,’ I said, and made a gesture for him to continue.
Alice looked at me and then back to him. ‘Perhaps your mother’d like to come out this summer?’ she said. ‘Yvonne and Karl are insisting on staying at the hotel, so we’ve got room. Would that do her good?’
Her tone was cool – it was obviously not a proper offer – but it did its job, from my point of view, by turning the conversation to Greece.
‘Do Yvonne and Karl come every year?’ I asked.
‘No. They came once or twice at the beginning. But this year it’s the tenth anniversary of Jasmine’s disappearance so they’re making a special trip.’
‘As a sort of pilgrimage?’
‘Kind of.’
She was looking at me, and I smiled back expectantly. ‘How nice,’ I said. I’d finished my plate of lamb saag and had polished off a couple of Beck’s. I leant back in my chair. This is my moment, I thought. She will invite me again – publicly. It was the logical conclusion to the evening. Maybe she had even asked the others over this evening for that reason. Whether I accepted, of course, was still up to me. But the offer, and all that it promised, was about to be laid open for my consideration.
‘This year,’ Phoebe said, ‘I’m getting a proper tan.’
‘If it’s our last time ever we must hire kayaks!’ Frank said.
‘Too right!’ Tina laughed.
‘Unless we have another invasion of the jellyfish,’ Phoebe added.
‘Oh gawd,’ Andrew yelped. ‘I’m not peeing on anyone’s sting no matter how much they beg me.’
‘I can’t wait for that delicious baklava they served last year at Giorgio’s,’ Tina said.
‘Nico’s,’ Alice said.
‘Was it?’
‘No, Giorgio’s,’ Andrew said. ‘You were too pissed to notice.’
They all laughed.
‘This year,’ someone said, ‘we must swim out to Serena’s rock.’ Whether this was the rock’s real name, or a reference to a funny story involving a person called Serena, I didn’t know because nobody filled me in. I sat there, like a lemon from the tree in the Pyros house garden, like a ‘saganaki prawn’ (Tina: ‘I can’t wait – washed down with a carafe of that delicious local rosé’).
‘It all sounds wonderful,’ I said, in the next lull.
Andrew looked at me, a smirk on his face. Alice laid her arm along the back of his chair.
‘Coffee?’ she said, after a few minutes.
‘How about you boys go to the park for a kickabout?’ Tina said then.
The boys pushed their chairs back and stood up.
Phoebe said loudly, her tone unreadable: ‘Paul – what about you? You fancy a kickabout?’
I was taken aback. What was she suggesting? That I was on a level with the teenage louts rather than the adults?
Alice said, ‘I’m not sure Paul is a kickabout kind of a man.’
Louis said: ‘He’s more of a layabout kind of a man.’
I noticed Andrew laugh. I had the ingenuity to leap up and lunge at Louis. ‘Ha ha, very funny,’ I said, getting his Neanderthal head in a head-lock, and jabbing at him, as if we were the greatest of friends, as if it were a tease between chums. He pulled away and, as he climbed the stairs, I saw him rub his lower arm. Dickhead.
I waited a few moments until I heard the front door close, and then I went upstairs to use the bathroom.
There was a bottle of wine on the table in the hall, which I felt like smashing, there, on the chequerboard Victorian tiles. Instead, I picked up a small package that sat next to it – a gift wrapped in tissue paper. It felt like a bar of soap. My tweed coat was hanging, among a lot of other coats, on a row of over-laden hooks and I slipped it into the inside pocket. I doubted Alice had even registered its arrival. I’d give it to my mother.
I turned. Tina was standing at the top of the basement stairs. Had she seen me? No, she was smiling, but as if she didn’t want to be, and she was making a nervous action with her hands, splicing her fingers together and then pulling them apart, sharp cutting movements.
She said: ‘Are you serious about Alice? I’m sorry I have to ask.’
I let a beat pass. ‘Of course.’
‘It’s just you won’t hurt her, will you?’
I managed to restrain myself. ‘Of course not.’
She took a step forward and grabbed my sleeve. ‘I know you’re not the sort of man who usually . . . well, perhaps not what she needs. But . . . we . . . whatever happens, however it pans out, just don’t do any damage, will you?’
I made a small bow. My teeth were gritted, but I hid them with a smile. ‘My intentions, I assure you, madam, are entirely honourable.’
She looked at me for a long moment and then, as if she were satisfied with what she saw, said: ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. Andrew worries, that’s all. She deserves to be happy.’
‘And so do you,’ I said pointedly.
I smiled as pleasantly as I could and walked past her to the bathroom, hoping I’d unsettled her.
How dare she, or Andrew, make judgements about what kind of a man I was, or wasn’t? It was none of their business what I did. I had no intention of hurting Alice, and even if I had, she’d be fine. She was the one with the house, the friends, the money
. I was the one who had nothing. I sulked for the rest of the evening, and, in the flurry of my own self-righteous indignation, managed to bury the thought that Tina might be right.
Chapter Six
Greece, after that, was all I could think about. It nagged away at me like a toothache.
I lay in my single bed at my mother’s house and churned with resentment.
I listened to the kid playing in the next door garden, the thock-thock of wet Swingball on plastic bat, the yapping of a Yorkshire terrier two doors down, my mother’s radio, Simon Mayo, up loud, and thought about ten years before. A package deal with a girl called Saffron. A cheap flat on the main drag, a hotspot of nightclubs (Let Zeus blow your mind) and pool-bars and Irish pubs; lights flashing neon outside the window, a smell of fried fish and diesel, mopeds screaming.
We bought tickets for a boat trip and I remembered the rough grip on your forearm as the captain helped you in, the tip and swell of the deck, the push of people, knees and foreheads, and sunburnt cleavage. The cold green bottle jolting against my lips, and the music, ‘Zorba the Greek’, loud and jangly and scratchy, that we took out of town with us, and onto the sea, the rising bouzouki, and the water, away from the scum of touristville, an extraordinary aquamarine blue: patches of clarity, between the dark rocks, moments when you could see down twenty feet to white sand, small fish flashing. And teenage girls in bikinis, and the nail-varnish-remover tang of retsina at the back of my throat.
The bad afternoon, the one I had tried to forget, came in fragments – drink and an argument, Saffron’s hand in the air, a bottle at my head, the naked limbs of another woman.
I opened my eyes and the room closed in on me: a box of Mansize Kleenex my mother had left helpfully on the bedside table, the three framed photographs of ‘Old Sheen’, nailed slightly too high on the wall, the small useless wrought-iron fireplace, painted gloss white, the spider plant in its grate.
Why shouldn’t I be part of Alice’s plans? Why shouldn’t I go to Pyros? I was her boyfriend now. Wasn’t it my due?
At Michael’s for Sunday lunch, I could talk of nothing else.
‘I can’t believe you want to go,’ Michael said. He had cooked roast chicken with all the trimmings in his Sunday uniform of sweat pants and slippers and was now picking at the bits in the pan. ‘You don’t like holidays, and you don’t like leaving London.’
‘I could do with a break. It’s been a tough winter. And now living with my mum. A small sojourn would suit me down to the ground.’
Ann, a solid, plain woman who was deputy head in a secondary school, said: ‘It’s a family holiday. By definition kids will be involved.’ She gestured to the garden where hers were fighting for possession of a plastic tractor. ‘Family life: isn’t it your idea of hell?’
‘They’re not small kids,’ I said. ‘They’re teenagers. Three boys, two girls – both seventeen.’
Michael stopped picking at the Pyrex and gave me a look.
‘They’ll be wearing bikinis,’ I added.
He grinned, and then looked at his wife, sheepish. She showed her irritation by getting to her feet, doing up the top button of her jeans which she had undone while we were eating. ‘Your pride’s dented,’ she said, filling the dishwasher. ‘You only want to be invited so you can turn it down.’
‘It’s the affront of having been invited once. She hasn’t repeated the invitation since we slept together. I don’t understand it. I thought sex was something I was quite good at.’
Michael gave me an indulgent look. ‘Come to Wales with us,’ he said. ‘The twins would love to share a tent with Uncle Paul.’ It was a fiction we all indulged that I was a favourite with their boys. ‘I know camping’s not quite your thing, but in my experience Greek accommodation can be pretty basic too. I’m talking about loos.’
‘Knowing Alice,’ I said, ‘it’ll be luxurious.’
‘So, Paul Morris,’ Michael said. ‘What first attracted you to multi-millionaire Alice – what’s her surname?’
For a moment I couldn’t remember, then it came to me. ‘Mackenzie.’
I saw him and Ann exchange a glance – almost pitying.
‘Maybe she doesn’t realise you want to come,’ Ann said. ‘I love you, Paul. You know I do.’ (I didn’t actually. She had always seemed uniquely impervious to my charms.) ‘But you aren’t exactly a big one for commitment.’
‘She’s too old for you!’ Michael said, standing up and wrapping his arms around his wife. He buried his chin in her hair. ‘Forget it! Find another young floozy to entertain us with.’
I shut up after that, piqued at being misunderstood, at being patronised. Maybe I had long played up the part of the roué, but I still felt cross, indignant, as if they weren’t taking me seriously, and left their house early.
In case Ann was right, I made it my mission to make it clear I wanted to come. I dropped endless hints. We had drinks one wet night at a trendy bar in Brixton. Swags of blossom lay sodden on the pavement. A tarpaulin over the entrance sagged and dripped. ‘British weather,’ I said, as we shrugged off our coats. ‘Don’t you just hate it? If we could depend on a month of sun – two weeks, even – we’d be a happier nation.’
‘Vitamin D,’ Alice said.
I put on a self-pitying voice. ‘You’re lucky. You’ve got Greece. I don’t know how I’ll bear it.’
No dice. ‘Poor you,’ she said.
I met her for a coffee in Covent Garden the following Saturday. She had been shopping for Phoebe’s birthday present and began pulling out items for my inspection – itsy bitsy pieces of fabric – a frilly top and a short denim skirt, a pair of gold-studded corduroy shorts, a tiny orange vest, and then, pièce de résistance: a bikini! The bikini was green, with yellow palm trees and pink umbrellas slashed across the pattern; 1950s in style, with a halter-neck and well-upholstered cups. Not sexy enough for my taste.
‘Very nice,’ I said, sounding out my appreciation. ‘For you?’
She slapped my hand. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘For Phoebe to take to Pyros?’
‘Yup. Holiday gear masquerading as birthday presents. I’m shameless.’
I stared into her eyes. ‘So who is going this year?’
‘Yvonne and Karl will be staying in a hotel, so in the house it’s just us lot.’
‘Just you lot,’ I repeated.
‘We’ll have so much clearing up to do.’ The waitress, a sweet little thing in a black miniskirt, shimmied over and Alice paid the bill. ‘Do you want to come back to Clapham for lunch?’ she said. She narrowed her eyes suggestively.
‘I’m on a roll, work-wise,’ I said coldly, and shoved off pretty sharpish. I regretted it later. I bought a sandwich in Subway at Victoria instead. Pathetic.
I had ground to make up after that. It does no good to be petulant. I needed to increase the attack, and lighten it at the same time. An idea came to me a couple of days later. My mother had brought my bin bags down out of the attic and left them on the bedroom floor. I rummaged through until, tangled up in a stolen hotel towel, I found the purple T-shirt I had brought back from Elconda. ‘Let Zeus blow your mind’ it read in jagged black lettering.
I wore it under my jumper the next time I was at Alice’s house. We were upstairs in her bedroom, and I did a slow striptease, disco-dancing while I undressed, until I was just in the Zeus T-shirt and my boxers. ‘Let me blow your mind,’ I said, pressing her up against the dressing table.
‘Stop it, stop it!’ she said. ‘I hate that T-shirt. It reminds me of that night. You were so drunk, you were so . . . awful.’
I continued to gyrate. ‘God, you’d look damn good in a bikini,’ I told her, my hands running up and down her body. ‘That’s all I’m after.’
‘Oh Paul, behave,’ she said.
It wasn’t until the first week of June that I had a breakthrough. Michael had passed on a couple of free theatre tickets he couldn’t use. The play, a political satire set in the former Yugoslavia, was at the Natio
nal on the Southbank and I arranged to meet Alice there straight from work.
She was edgy and distracted. One of her clients was up for deportation, and she was on her phone when I arrived. It wasn’t until the interval that she got the call she’d been waiting for. We were sitting at the bottom of a small flight of steps between levels. I was scooping at a honeycomb ice cream, using the tiny plastic shovel provided, waiting for her to finish. I kept having to jerk my shoulder out of the way to let people pass.
She hung up and sighed heavily. ‘No joy,’ she said.
‘Poor old Alice,’ I said. ‘You really need a rest.’
‘I’m not the one who needs pity.’
‘Not long until your holiday now.’ I was hot in my jacket. I remember thinking I should have left it on the seat. ‘Maybe you’ll be able to forget about it for a bit.’
‘I won’t be able to forget about anything,’ she said. She’d been flicking through the programme, and she pointed at a photograph of the lead actor. ‘I knew I recognised him. He’s in Casualty.’
‘A drama I have never watched, and never intend to.’
‘Too lowbrow for you of course.’ Her voice was dark and heavy. ‘Paul Morris stooping to Casualty: as if!’ She cast the programme to one side. ‘Sorry. I’m tired. No. I’ll have too much to do. U-Haul are coming in September for the furniture, but there are clothes in wardrobes, food in cupboards to be cleared – for ten years we’ve just chucked stuff in.’ She sighed. ‘I could just leave everything for them to deal with – they’re bulldozing the land; they could just bulldoze the house with it. But . . . well, terribly British of me to think I need to tidy. Oh God, and there’s Hermes to sort too.’
‘Hermes?’
‘An old pick-up truck that came with the place. Hermes, the God of speed – ironic obviously. It hasn’t worked for years. I could sell it if I could get it going.’
The bell went for the second act. It was all or nothing. I felt vertiginous. ‘What you need,’ I said, ‘is a professional mechanic.’
Lie With Me Page 6
