Mad About the Boy

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘Why?’ asked Spider.

  ‘Because I want to speak to him,’ I said.

  ‘Well, he’s not here,’ said Spider, with his customary charm. ‘He might be tomorrow. I dunno. If I do happen to see him, who shall I say was looking for him?’

  ‘Antonia,’ I said in a very small voice.

  I saw him scribble it on a piece of paper and then he went back to his racing form. He was a total farthog, I decided.

  James wasn’t there the next night either and I was starting to get frantic. I just wanted to sort it out with him and have a proper chance to apologize. Now I realized just how nuts it was that I had never persuaded him to give me his phone number. He had my numbers and my address, so why had I thought it was all right for it all to be so lopsided? I rang directory enquiries to find out if they had a number for J. McLoughlin – but they had over a hundred listings for that name and as I didn’t know the suburb, let alone the street, they couldn’t help.

  The third night I stayed away from Muscle City, because I couldn’t stand another disappointment and another smirk from Spider, who seemed to be a permanent fixture behind the desk, where I had become so used to sitting myself. But on the fourth night James was there.

  I ran up to the desk like an eager dog, probably with my tongue hanging out. I saw a sad smile flick across his face when he first saw me, but as I got up close, he resumed the cool countenance he had been wearing when he drove off after the family dinner.

  There was no bending over the computer to whisper tender greetings to me, he treated me just like another Muscle City regular. Farthog Spider was sitting beside him, I noticed, his feet up on the counter.

  ‘Hello, Antonia,’ said James, with no emotion in his voice. ‘Good to see you.’

  He handed back my card and made no move away from the reception desk. In normal circumstances, with Spider there to cover him, he would have had me up the stairs and pants off by now. I didn’t know what to do with myself. My eyes started to sting with tears. I saw him notice and sigh.

  ‘I’ll come over and see you later on the machines,’ he said. ‘Go on, get on with it. And no slacking.’ He smiled faintly, but it was all I could do not to break down as I got onto the treadmill.

  Could one dinner really have done this much damage? I asked myself, desperately. I forced myself to carry on trudging and tried to do his special breathing to calm myself. It worked to an extent, but I plodded through my weights routine like a condemned woman, glancing at the desk as often as I felt I could.

  James wasn’t there most of the time, just farty Spider, so why wasn’t he with me? All kinds of crazy thoughts invaded my brain. Maybe he was upstairs wildly bonking someone else. Maybe I was just one in a series of desperate lonely women he shagged at the gym. Maybe I was one of those delusional, sexually frustrated bunny boilers and had imagined the whole thing.

  When I was just about finished on the last machine and beginning to feel hysterical, he suddenly appeared and sat down on the metal crossbar by my head. No kiss, just his face near mine, where it was so familiar. Tears immediately filled my eyes again.

  ‘I’m so sorry, James,’ I said. ‘That dinner was a nightmare. I never dreamed any of them would behave like that. I think I just underestimated how complicated the situation is with Hugo. I should never have inflicted him upon you.’

  ‘It’s OK, Antonia,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t your fault. It was just fucked up from the moment I arrived.’

  He patted my hand. I had longed for his touch, but this patting was worse than no contact. It was so asexual. It was like something he would do to reassure his grandmother. I started to feel cross. So the evening had been a disaster – but did that have to mean it was all over between us? It certainly wasn’t all over for me. I decided to be brutally honest. It seemed I had nothing to lose.

  ‘James,’ I said, ‘I know you must be offended, but it was only one evening – are you going to let that change everything? I don’t think we should give up something so special, just because my ex-husband was rude to you.’

  James rolled his eyes and sighed with exasperation.

  ‘If only that was all it was,’ he said. ‘Don’t you get it, Antonia? I’m crazy about you. I think about you all the time, but that night proved something that I have long suspected about us.’

  ‘What?’ I asked, reverting to Piglet mode.

  ‘We come from different worlds, Antonia. You’re a silvertail, you live in some kind of silver-plated world – sorry, solid sterling – that I don’t understand and don’t belong in. I’m just a gym junkie jerk, from a steel town, obsessed with martial arts and with controlling my life, so I don’t end up like my dad. Dead at fifty.’

  He put his head back and sighed deeply. I could see he was in serious distress. I longed to run my tongue along his throat.

  ‘Look,’ he continued, ‘we have something great between us – but it only works in here, because it’s nowhere land, and in the middle of the bloody night it might as well be never-never land. It’s not real life. It wasn’t real life at the King George either. That night was amazing, like being in a movie. It was, as they say, “unreal”, which means it is not reality. And when you try to mix reality into something like this, it just disappears.’

  He snapped his fingers.

  Now I was fighting tears very hard. I just blinked at him.

  ‘I didn’t know you at that dinner, Antonia,’ he said, squeezing my hand with something that felt much more like his usual touch and frowning. ‘I looked at you and I thought, this is the woman I love, but she’s got a weird mask on and I don’t know her.’

  I was still fighting off the sobs. He’d never told me he loved me before and now he was telling me and it all seemed to be over.

  ‘Do you know what I did after that dinner?’ he continued.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I went and got shitfaced. I have hardly drunk for over ten years and I left Q Bar off my face at 4 a.m. That’s how upset I was.’

  ‘Spider said you were drunk when you left that Tarzan message,’ I said, completely irrelevantly.

  ‘Uh?’ said James. ‘Oh, that. I was putting it on, so he wouldn’t know it was me.’ He shook his head in confusion. ‘What are we talking about that for?’

  ‘I think I was trying to distract you,’ I said, as the first tear escaped and rolled down my cheeks. Then they wouldn’t stop rolling. I buried my face in my hands.

  ‘Oh, don’t cry, Antonia,’ said James, pulling my hands away from my face and wiping away the tears. ‘Please don’t cry. I can’t stand it. I never wanted to hurt you, but that dinner was such a reality shock. That’s why I didn’t want to come to it. Why didn’t you listen to me? I knew it would be like that. I’ve met your poofta uncle in here before. He’s a funny old bloke, I like him, but I knew what it would be like at your place from meeting him. All bloody silver spoons and bollocks. Your world is not my world – don’t you get that?’

  ‘Maybe it was just the wrong thing for us to do first,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should try something else, like just going to a movie, or out to dinner …’

  He thumped the padded seat of the machine so hard, I nearly fell off it. He looked absolutely furious.

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ he said. ‘I’m a peasant to you lot. Don’t you remember – I shovel.’

  I felt sick. He hadn’t missed any of the ghastly nuances of that wretched dinner. He glared at me for a moment, then he threw his glasses on the floor and put his face into his hands, rubbing his eye sockets hard with his palms. When he took his hands away I could see there were tears in his eyes.

  ‘The last thing I want to do is to hurt you, Antonia,’ he said. ‘But if we carry on the way we have, I don’t know where it will end, because it can’t go anywhere but here.’

  He sighed a wobbly sigh. I started crying again. I knew what he was going to say.

  ‘I’m not going to see you for a while, Antonia. It will be better for us both. I’ll take a b
reak from the desk, to give us a chance to get over it, and when I come back, we can just be friends like we used to be. OK?’

  ‘No. It is not OK,’ I said, my voice rising hysterically.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I’ve made up my mind.’

  He bent down to pick up his specs and I thought for a moment he was going to kiss me. But he straightened up, looked at me for a moment and then just walked away. I started to get up to run after him, but something stopped me. I knew if he’d made his mind up I couldn’t change it. If a man with his sex drive could be voluntarily celibate for two years, which is what he’d told me, I knew he could steel himself against any entreaties I could make. I knew I had to walk away like he just had – and could only hope I would come up with a brilliant idea of how to bring him back.

  I took some deep breaths, gathered up my things and launched myself towards the exit, feeling like the life was draining out of my body with every step. At least James wasn’t there to see me go. He’d disappeared again. Spider Spewface was in situ, of course, and I studiedly ignored him. But as I pushed through the turnstile he leaned over and put his hand on my arm.

  ‘Don’t worry, darlin’,’ he said, in his gruff voice. ‘He’ll come round. The silly bugger likes you too much to let you go for good. I’ve never seen him so daft about a sheila. Trust your old mate Spider on that.’

  And he winked at me like a kindly uncle. I was so surprised I made it all the way home without crying.

  When I got into bed, however, I couldn’t stop crying. I just couldn’t believe James would let one bad evening destroy the beautiful thing we had between us. If this was dating, I thought, I understood why my sisters complained about it so much.

  I had wondered occasionally if it had all been too good too soon to be true with James and now my worst doubts were confirmed. I was doomed to rattle from one failed relationship to another for years, as Rebecca and Sarah seemed to. In between fits of sobbing, I slept restlessly and had a lot of bad dreams.

  At about 10 a.m., when I would normally have been getting up, there was a knock on the door and Percy came in carrying a tray.

  ‘I’ve brought you breakfast,’ he said, putting the tray on the bed and pulling a chair over. He’d brought me a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, one of his beautiful fruit salads, like a Matisse on a plate, and a big pot of Earl Grey. There was a cup of green tea for himself.

  ‘It’s a peace offering,’ he said, taking in my red eyes. ‘I’m so sorry about the other night, Antonia. We all behaved appallingly. I hope it hasn’t spoiled things between you and James.’ He paused. ‘But I fear it has.’

  He squeezed my hand and tears began rolling down my cheeks again.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘You were crying when I arrived in Sydney and now you’re crying again and I do feel to blame. I should have read Hugo the riot act before James got here that night, but I was so excited about it all I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought everything had worked out like a lovely Doris Day film. I watch too many musicals. I’m afraid I was a bit unrealistic.’

  ‘So was I,’ I said, wiping my eyes.

  ‘Is it really hopeless?’ he asked, looking sincerely concerned.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Utterly hopeless. James says it will never work because we come from different worlds.’ I laughed bitterly. ‘He told me I was a “silvertail”. It’s ironic, isn’t it? I spent the first five years of my relationship with Hugo fretting that I wasn’t posh enough for the Heaveringhams and now James says it won’t work between us, because I’m too posh for him.’

  Percy looked as grave as I had ever seen him.

  ‘So what are you planning to do?’ he asked me. ‘Never go back to the gym and just let him go?’

  ‘What choice do I have?’ I wailed. ‘He’s told me it won’t work and he’s made his mind up. He has fearsome self-discipline, you know. If he’s decided he’s going to live without me, he will. He’s dedicated most of his life to overcoming the limitations of physical pain and human weakness, through strength of mind, so this will be just another challenge for him. He’s probably hanging upside down in a tree as we speak.’

  ‘Don’t tell, Tom,’ said Percy, his twinkle returning. ‘He’ll try it.’

  I smiled weakly and poked my fruit around with a fork. I didn’t feel remotely like eating. Percy sat and nursed his tea, gazing into the distance.

  ‘I don’t think you should just let him go,’ he said finally.

  ‘Well, good for you,’ I said, irritated. ‘How exactly am I supposed to not do that?’

  ‘Go back to the gym, find him and convince him.’

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Percy held up his hand to stop me.

  ‘I saw the way he looked at you, Antonia,’ he said. ‘He’s besotted with you – as he damned well should be – but it was a lovely thing to behold. Give him a few days to miss you and then go back and claim him. I think he will want you to, deep inside. Whatever he’s running away from with all this kung fu nonsense, I’m sure he wants to be persuaded out of it, at heart.’

  He might have a point, I thought. Percy’s psychological analyses were usually so spot on, it might be worth a try. He’d given me a tiny grain of hope to hold on to. I might actually be able to get up and get dressed, I thought.

  Picking up a bit of papaya with my fingers, I looked fondly at my dear old pal, Hugo’s mad uncle. What an amazing person he was. He’d had an extraordinary life from the moment he was born and he’d made it even more so, through sheer force of personality. I’d always thought he was like some kind of real-life Zelig, as he always seemed to have been in the key place at the key moment, with the key people.

  He was always coming out with things like: ‘When I was at the Actors’ Studio … When I was studying mime with Lindsay Kemp … When I was hanging out with Brian Jones … When I was with Cecil at Broadchalke … When I lived in Topanga Canyon, next door to Joni Mitchell … When I was in the ashram with John and Yoko … When I was in Marrakesh with Talitha … When I was on Mustique with Margaret and Tony …’

  At first, I’d thought he must be bullshitting, but Hugo had assured me he wasn’t. He’d been staying with us in London once and in the same week he’d had a postcard from Nan Kempner and a call from Giorgio Armani’s assistant, inviting him to his private island for a summer break, so I had realized it was all true.

  People just loved his company – but why wouldn’t they? I did – and, as he explained to me, once you had proved yourself to be a trustworthy friend to one famous person and were declared ‘good value’, you got to know them all.

  When I’d known him about a year – and he had been fantastically kind to me at several terrifying Heaveringham events – I felt bold enough to ask him how he lived. I knew enough about the family finances to guess he wouldn’t have an enormous private income. He said his secret was not being burdened with possessions or a home of his own.

  ‘I’m a professional guest,’ he’d told me. ‘It’s what I do. I know when to arrive – and much more importantly, I know when to leave. And I’m constantly entertaining while I’m there. Very wealthy people are usually very bored. They love clowns like me who distract them from thinking about their guilt at being loaded.’

  ‘But how do you know how not to outstay your welcome?’ I’d asked him. I was a very nervous house guest myself, usually getting up at the crack of dawn in case my hosts had early breakfast and too frightened to have a bath in case of using too much hot water.

  ‘Staying with people is an art form,’ Percy had told me. ‘And quite complex. First you must never appear needy. I have just enough dough for clothes and air fares and day-to-day guest expenses, such as dinners out, theatre tickets, lavish flowers, the latest books and other charming and amusing gifts for my hosts – and their pets. Very important, the pets. Every now and again I make a bit extra on the horses, which comes in handy.

  ‘Secondly, you have to know when to come forward and dazzle the company and
when to retreat. Sometimes you have to make yourself scarce and if the exchequer doesn’t run to an evening out, you can disappear, quiet as a mouse, into your room. I always travel with a water-heating element, my Swiss Army knife and my hip flask, so I can have quite a little picnic in my room with no one knowing.

  ‘Then you get dressed and slip out at about 10.45 p.m, smoke a few ciggies round the corner, and come straight back in to amuse your hosts with anecdotes about your hilarious evening out and the ghastly drinks party with no food. Even the most steely hostess is usually inspired to whip you up an omelette. Or to ask cook to.’

  Percy claimed that – along with yoga – his very particular lifestyle was the secret to his extraordinary insight into human character.

  ‘I don’t have any possessions,’ he’d told me. ‘Apart from a few clothes and I don’t hold on to them for long. Possessions clog the mind, dull your perception and limit your life. The only thing I would be sad to lose is my address book.’

  But it had occurred to me that, while he had legions of devoted friends, Percy never seemed to have any long-term romantic relationships. I had wanted to ask him about it for years, but sensed a veil of privacy over the subject, which had stopped me. But now, I thought, was the moment I could bring it up.

  He was still gazing vacantly ahead, lost in thought, his teacup loose in his hand. I waved a piece of mango under his nose to get his attention.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Perce?’ I said.

  He nodded, snapping back to consciousness.

  ‘Of course, darling girl, anything.’

  ‘You’ve given me such good advice about my romance,’ I said. ‘Yet you never seem to have any love affairs yourself. Do you think they clog the mind as well, like possessions? Is that why?’

  He looked back at me with a strangely blank expression, then he started whisking up the tray and teacups.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, briskly. ‘Far too constricting, get in the way terribly. Drive you mad. I’m going out for a walk, see you later.’